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GotSteel

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Emotions are an integral part of the human experience. They don't appear to have a physical presence but their operations can be traced physically sometimes. Their effects are sometimes measurable while the cause remains invisible and intangible.

What? I'm under the impression that we have a pretty decent idea of where emotions are coming from.

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VincentML
You make an excellent case for the strong impact of emotions on human behavior. And Nietzsche made the case that life should be lived with passion, or one should have a passionate core. And if you wish to somehow elevate emotion over reason, I have no problem with your doing so. I will grant that emotion may be more primitive and/or precede reason in development. But consciousness is not necessarily a pre-requisite for reasoning either. Quite likely a lot of subconscious activity underlying both. Whatever their quantitative or qualitative differences both arise from the same physical structures interacting with both internal and social environment. So, I am not persuaded that Materialist explanations fail or that we need look beyond our physiology. To do so diminishes the wonder and excitement of human life.

I would suggest that a linguistic component is hidden within your argument. I see therein the memes that commonly color our perceptions of both of these brain activities. Emotions are “powerful” and often “uncontrollable” whereas logic is “cold” and “calculating.” So, the former merits special status while the latter seems to be more clearly a brain function. I am not persuaded to assign emotion any extra-material status.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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GotSteel

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Emotions are an integral part of the human experience. They don't appear to have a physical presence but their operations can be traced physically sometimes. Their effects are sometimes measurable while the cause remains invisible and intangible.

What? I'm under the impression that we have a pretty decent idea of where emotions are coming from.

I do hope you aren't asserting the origins of (say) love, or the need to love and be loved are located in the limbic system.

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What could be more supernatural than the proposition that bringing the right ingredients into close proximity under the right circumstances will cause dead matter to become "alive."

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I am not asserting that this ‘something extra’ definitely exists as per the model of emotions. I am certainly not attributing “supernatural” aspects to it. I am suggesting that this might be a useful way of imagining this ‘something extra’ and how it could manifest itself in the human experience,

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What's "obvious" is the fact that you are the one promoting the supernatural claim here, namely, that dead matter can become "alive." The processes involved and how long it takes are irrelevant. What you are proposing is magic.

If we accept that there really are such things as "living beings" then, simply as a matter of reason and logic, either there is a flaw in your assumptions about the nature of mass/energy or there is more involved than you acknowledge.

Either way, you're sitting on a broom.

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ORIGINAL: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/tpna/
A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life.

Called tPNA, short for thioester peptide nucleic acids, the molecules spontaneously mimic the shape of DNA and RNA when mixed together. Left on their own, they gather in shape-shifting strands that morph into stable configurations.

The molecules haven’t yet achieved self-replication, the ultimate benchmark of life, but they hint at it. Best of all, their activities require no enzymes — molecules that facilitate chemical reactions, but didn’t yet exist in the primordial world modeled by scientists seeking insight into life’s murky origins.

“There have been many test tube experiments of evolving chemical sequences, but there hasn’t been a system that on its own can form under enzyme-free conditions,” said Reza Ghadiri, a Scripps Research Institute biochemist. “We satisfy some of the requirements of the long-term goal of having a purely chemical system that is capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.”

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

you bring nothing but unsubstantiated speculation to the table... gussied up tree spirit worship, although you pretend it is physics

More ridicule, and another misrepresentation of fact. I haven't said a word about physics.

Mea culpa. In checking myself, I see that I did use the word "physics" in a couple of posts. However, I have never claimed that the findings of physics support any kind of "spirit worship" (flora, fauna, or otherwise).

K.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
That logic and reason alone will not deliver a complete answer. This is not a personal insight, but an application of the absolute limits that apply all knowledges generated by using those marvellous analytical tools - if in doubt, ponder the implications of Godel’s Theorem.

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ORIGINAL: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/godels-theorem.html
There are two very common but fallacious conclusions people make from this, and an immense number of uncommon but equally fallacious errors I shan't bother with. The first is that Gödel's theorem imposes some some of profound limitation on knowledge, science, mathematics. Now, as to science, this ignores in the first place that Gödel's theorem applies to deduction from axioms, a useful and important sort of reasoning, but one so far from being our only source of knowledge it's not even funny. It's not even a very common mode of reasoning in the sciences, though there are axiomatic formulations of some parts of physics. Even within this comparatively small circle, we have at most established that there are some propositions about numbers which we can't prove formally. As Hintikka says, "Gödel's incompleteness result does not touch directly on the most important sense of completeness and incompleteness, namely, descriptive completeness and incompleteness," the sense in which an axiom systems describes a given field. In particular, the result "casts absolutely no shadow on the notion of truth. All that it says is that the whole set of arithmetical truths cannot be listed, one by one, by a Turing machine." Equivalently, there is no algorithm which can decide the truth of all arithmetical propositions. And that is all.

This brings us to the other, and possibly even more common fallacy, that Gödel's theorem says artificial intelligence is impossible, or that machines cannot think. The argument, so far as there is one, usually runs as follows. Axiomatic systems are equivalent to abstract computers, to Turing machines, of which our computers are (approximate) realizations. (True.) Since there are true propositions which cannot be deduced by interesting axiomatic systems, there are results which cannot be obtained by computers, either. (True.) But we can obtain those results, so our thinking cannot be adequately represented by a computer, or an axiomatic system. Therefore, we are not computational machines, and none of them could be as intelligent as we are; quod erat demonstrandum. This would actually be a valid demonstration, were only the pentultimate sentence true; but no one has ever presented any evidence that it is true, only vigorous hand-waving and the occasional heartfelt assertion.

Gödel's result is of course quite interesting, if you're doing mathematical logic, and it even has some importance for that odd little specialization of logic, the theory of computation. (It is intimately related to the halting problem, for instance.) It also makes a fine piece of general mathematical culture; but it doesn't shake the foundations of the house of intellect, or exalt us above all else that greps.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
In a sense, it's a bit like trying to convey the sense of music through words - a pretty difficult undertaking that will at best always fall short of the goal.