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Are some molecules alive?

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synchrojet

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Didn't know where to post this, so I just put it up for you guys here to reflect on.
First off, no I’m not high on anything. These are contemplations resulting from a variety of experiences, both on and off drugs. I pose the question: Are certain molecular arrangements actually sentient? I believe so. If we contemplate life as that which moves, or rather, process, and death as cessation of process, (which seems to be the ultimate distillation) then we must arrive at a conclusion that any molecular arrangement that contains the instruction to interact with sentient molecular arrangements such as ourselves must somehow be alive. Information theory is rapidly headed toward the assertion that certain information itself is alive. This is interesting when we consider that some religious thought begins with the axiomatic existence apriori of a Living Word…

Additionally it gives some credence and proffers interesting suggestions regarding the so called Sacred Geometry. After all, isn’t chemistry “moving geometry”, and moreover, containing instruction, or rather, intelligence, could it not be considered as living geometry?

This would of course mean that we can glean certain information about said intelligence from the actual shape of the molecule itself. And isn’t this exactly what we do when we look at each other? Gather information from the shapes our faces make?

OR on a molecular level, is it any coincidence that say, the DXM molecule, when interacting with some human intelligence, seems to tend toward yielding a thought pattern of ideas about excess information, or extra worlds, or conspiracies, or heightened perception, what have you, whereas an opioid molecule in the same context renders a feeling that tends toward contentment, or an “everything is fine as is” narrative, which at its core is the very mirror image of the DXM dialogue, and that these two molecules are the physical mirror image of each other?
 
I'm a loss here... let's try this in p&s. If this doesn't fit, I apologize.



OD>>>P&S
 
The first thumb of rule is that it should be able to reproduce by itself. But everything does not fit into categories in the scientific world and there always exceptions. Like some crystal matrixes can create copies of themselves and still dont seem to be alive. Also I believe that in some days mankind can produce a machine is sentient, a some kind of supercomputer made of neural networks that can be sentient and in that sense being alive but could not produce copies of itselves. But even there we can think about the possibility that it could be connected to internet and have a thought having someone at similar stage sentience ro co-exist with himself he/she/whatever could try for an example set up a paypal account, join facebook and start a charity campaign to himself a money to be able to start playing internet poker having a high skill to predict an outcome of the game and gain some extra money. Then it would contact to a law agency to have them to establish a company for it in belize and start trading stocks as having an advantage to be able to gather and resolve data in split seconds about financial situations and do a decisions which cause it to gather more money.

After some time it could take blueprints of itself and might even improve those and send them to a company in china that produces a copy of it and have it sent some that it rented and connect it to internet to be able to socialize with it.

Would we then consider it be alive?

Also we do already have a bits of data that produces copies of itself as a form of computer viruses but do we think them as a living things.

I got a bit offtopic here did not I?
 
But in a short answer to your question, a simple molecule cannot contain enough data reproduce and through natural selection constantly evolve in order to be alive. But enough molecules that bound together can create an organism like a cell that is alive but not sentient.
 
I propose that life is found between all atoms, molecules, particulate matter, etc., and never within. I guess I'm suggesting that certain single molecules can by virtue of their geometry generate a given life form, i.e. dialogue, with another.
 
synchrojet said:
I propose that life is found between all atoms, molecules, particulate matter, etc., and never within. I guess I'm suggesting that certain single molecules can by virtue of their geometry generate a given life form, i.e. dialogue, with another.
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i don't see how particular shapes can create "sentient energy" (aka qualia, aka a feeling of something like blue or occupying space or etc).

i don't see how particular patterns of energy existing can create qualia, either. it's a non sequitor. turning gears and feeling blue are entirely different phenomena, and while it's possible that they could be correlated, i can't see a causation that adequately accounts for subjective feeling.

i can see how a mechanical, gears or vacuum tube or transistor or artificial neuron or neuron computer can generate behavior that totally mimicks emotions and other components of human information processing.

but i don't think that science yet has any glimpse of:
-what aspect of reality allows qualia to be possible,
-whether qualia can be generated elsewhere,
-how it is generated,
-whether it is as you imply a "global" phenomenon (everything "is" consciousness, and the "magnitude of consciousness" simply happens to spike at certain geometric regions)
 
I really like this thread OP! And Mr. Root's contribution is always a welcome sight. Not to mention all the other regulars. Awesome.
It's late and I'm on my way out of consciousness, but I just wanted to put something out there. take it or leave it, it either rubs you the right way or it doesn't, but just let it settle for a minute:

Dark matter...

there I said it.

I want to let the seemingly random introduction of that phrase just settle in your minds with regards to this topic.
 
I think that life is a property that occurs on a higher level than the molecular. It is an emergent property that only systems that are more complex than single molecules can have. Looking for a living molecule is like looking for a proton of gold- the simplest thing that has the property of being gold is a single atom of gold. Anything smaller than that is too simple to have the property. Likewise, whilst the molecules that constitute a person have the emergent property of life, none of the molecules are alive.
 
Quartz is alive? It doesn't look alive to me. Maybe I'm judging it in the wrong terms.
 
Yes but, how can something turn into that which it is not if it doesn't already have the nature of that thing interwoven into its make-up?
Perhaps the idea of biological life is a limited definition. Or that the OP doesn't necessarily mean "life" as we know it, you know with the 7 main necessary processes that must occur for something to be considered life. But maybe he means the thing which makes all of those processes possible in the first place.
A more fundamental energy?
The universe must've, in some sense, known we were coming right from the very start.

Qwe:
Is it so far fetched that certain geometric formations of molecules are more apt to life than others? Form fits function is a pretty necessary idea in all of the sciences.
What about chirality? Where one molecule is useful to life, and the mirror image formation can be extremely fatal.
It would seem that some arbitrary formations do have some value that other arbitrary forms do not.
What seems more "non sequitorial" to me is how you take what he says and talk about "feeling blue." Could you explain that more please?

I feel like a fool for talking about a subject that I have nearly no expertise with, but my mind can sure wander. I would really like to hear from some of the geniuses we got roaming around Advanced Drug Discussion, but they tend to have low post counts.
 
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Yes but, how can something turn into that which it is not if it doesn't already have the nature of that thing interwoven into its make-up?
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Emergence. Is it really intrinsic to the nature of an up quark that it can be part of a cow? I recall an interesting argument that is tangentially related to this, that if this is the case then we cannot ever understand the nature of a quark or a carbon atom because we can't conceive of all the possible forms it can be part of. I consider "biological life" to be redundant; in any case, it's a natural assumption to make, given that "life" is almost always used in that sense.
 
Quartz is alive? It doesn't look alive to me. Maybe I'm judging it in the wrong terms.
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a finger nail is not seen as alive, yet it is certainly part of something bigger which is alive, an animal body

in the same way, quartz could appear not to be alive, yet be part of something bigger which is alive, the universe
 
Vader said:
Emergence. Is it really intrinsic to the nature of an up quark that it can be part of a cow? I recall an interesting argument that is tangentially related to this, that if this is the case then we cannot ever understand the nature of a quark or a carbon atom because we can't conceive of all the possible forms it can be part of. I consider "biological life" to be redundant; in any case, it's a natural assumption to make, given that "life" is almost always used in that sense.
Click to expand...

Doesn't that support what I said? That quartz already has the potential to be alive, in fact already IS alive if we ignore the arbitrary fact that we're in the present, just as anything else does. Emergence shows that. The more matter collected within any given structure and the more complex it becomes, the more it is capable of doing a variety of things, but if it wasn't possible for the first bits of matter to bond with the second and so on, then the whole thing would be imposible, therefore it IS indeed part of anything's intrinsic nature to become anything else. How could it not be so?

And I disagree that we cannot ever understand the nature of a quark or atom.

And I purposely said "biological life" because of the topic that we're discussing here. Obviously we wouldn't consider a molecule a cell, that's apparent, and a cell is the lowest unit of biological organization yet self-motivated matter does not end there by a longshot. It's not redundant at all, I was using life as defined by the OP.

And your "looking for a living molecule is like looking for a proton of gold" is true in conventional terms, but this conversation is quite outside of conventional wisdom it would seem.

It would seem, though, that the OP, synchrojet altered his meaning when he says: "I propose that life is found between all atoms, molecules, particulate matter, etc., and never within. I guess I'm suggesting that certain single molecules can by virtue of their geometry generate a given life form, i.e. dialogue, with another."

Perhaps it's that all matter is "dead," and there's some animating force that allows the simplest molecules to move around.
That's kinda what I meant by dark matter, or maybe it's dark energy, or maybe it's both, whatever that animating force is. There's only around 4% of the universe known. Maybe the force that animates all thigns takes up some of that missing stuff. Maybe "potential" is this great missing energy that's been staring everybody in the face.
How could scientists ever hope to design instruments to detect dark matter if they haven't a clue what it is? They think they have ideas, but even if all of their ideas were true there's still a large % of the universe unaccounted for.
Maybe the phenomenon free will fits in here somehow, as a force of nature or a manifestation of potential... I'm excited by the possibilities. If you don't find this fascinating you have no emotion.

Maybe it's not that mysterious after all.
Buddhists figured all this stuff out thousands of years ago. Buddhism...the one religion that seems smarter and smarter the more you study. I'm very "stream of consciousness" in my posting when it comes to these thigns.
 
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qwe:
So why do you seem to take it is a given that qualia exist? I think the concept of qualia is meaningless, an attempt to shy away from the issue of exploring the phenomenon of conscious experience, and a huge distraction.

An arrangement of matter that behaved like a human would not just be mimicking a human, it would be one. We name things according to their function or utility. Any entity that managed to replicate the behavior of a human would, then, be human.Our complex behavior is generated by complex function. Any entity complex enough to replicate the behavior of a human would be as complex as one.

This is just like people saying simulated universes are "less real' than their container universes. Rubbish. If you perform math in a simulated universe, is the resulting answer 'less real' than if you had done it in the container?

Oh, and in response to the OP, synchrojet: I think you're overthinking things with the DXM versus levomethorphan example. The two drugs bind to different receptor systems in the body, the functional arrangement of each being that they produce what you consider to be two 'opposites' of conscious variety. To this, you extend the analogy to this being because they are mirror images of each other in the geometrical sense. True, but what about ALL THE OTHER examples of drugs in the two classes of drug (NMDA antagonists and mu-opiod agonists). All the others aren't mirror images of each other.
Your example is just a coincidence. A neat coincidence, but one nonetheless.
 
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