Now that it's got my attention, the problems of believing that thoughts are either encoded in proteins in our brains or that they are the product of such proteins forming some higher level structures, seem to multiply rather rapidly. Those problems would seem to not concern those who make those assertions, pretending what they are doing is science, they haven't seemed to take them into consideration very seriously. Which is, in itself, something that is rather scandalously shoddy, sciencewise. But, then, those who have issued promissory notes on the basis of natural selection have unbounded faith in the soundness of their standard of exchange in inverse proportion to their ability to produce an explanation of how it is related to their claims in reality instead of mere assertion. Intoning "natural selection" has made it something of a magic word, you don't really have to take any of the often difficult steps of observation, measurement and analysis that stands up to review, what science is supposed to be based on, you just have to say the phrase. If you short circuit the process by going from hypothesis to declaring, "natural selection" in lieu of actually doing the work, it works if you're allowed to get away with that. And it has been working for more than a century, especially when the assertion is around our thinking and consciousness.
One of the more obvious things about ideas is that they don't form fully blown, they develop as a process of our minds working them out, quite often consciously, as the result of conscious volition. That conscious volition, by the way, would have to be founded in the physical structures proposed to constitute all of our thoughts and the consciousness they are alleged to be based on. The objects of that volitional thinking would have to, somehow, precede their own motivations and creation.
If they are the product of our genes, the units of heredity, then that would mean that "idea proteins" would, necessarily, be being constantly produced that are specifically matched to the ideas in some unique way, so as to produce new ideas that hadn't previously existed in the brains of the people having those ideas. And each "step" in the development of what is considered a final idea is, in itself, an idea, which would, in itself, require its own specific chemical encoding. Those would have to relate, quite intimately, with, not only the final idea, but also each of the intervening ideas, good and bad, in the chain that produced them. Each would require its own protein encoding to produce that idea. Each would have to be related to each other but with constant variation. Since we can recall discarded ideas in that chain of thoughts, they must persist.
But you inherit specific genes that produce what they produce, that was determined prior to the the observations that motivated those new ideas. How would the DNA know how to produce the necessarily novel molecules that specifically matched, no, not just matched, but which would create ideas appropriate to those novel, never before encountered, motivating experiences? I don't think that DNA is capable of doing that, I don't think our entire genome, much smaller than was believed when these ideas about ideas were generated, is capable of doing that. With ideas, you are not talking about the mere unfolding of biological potentialities that developed through the history of our human and pre-human ancestors, you're talking about the development of ideas about things that are entirely novel, which, in many cases, don't exist in nature, ideas that are entirely unlike anything which has ever happened in human minds before. How would the DNA know how to produce the proteins needed for that? How would these newly born and always novel proteins know how to fold correctly to be biologically active in the brains that would have to deal with them in order for them to do anything?
And, now that we have gotten around to discussing that those imaginary proteins that the DNA is supposed to produce, let's do discuss that if you are going to talk about ideas as physical entities, of bio-chemistry, you really are talking about them as active in actual biological activity. In order for genes to develop the appropriate molecules specific to a thought, they would have to form before the idea that they were the physical embodiment of existed. Which is a neat trick, one which I doubt could be explained in terms of natural selection.
The experience of thinking isn't like an artisanal process that matches a produced object to the conception of it, thinking produces wildly varied thoughts that are part of the continuous experience of our consciousness. In reality, we aren't talking about discrete steps, we aren't talking about anything that can be turned into discrete entities or areas any more than we can the teaspoons of water flowing in a brook.
We pretend that the experience of thinking, consciousness is divisible into separate ideas, though how you separate an idea from its antecedents in the process of thinking them into existence or the interrelated ideas which, somehow, interact with an idea, modifying it with each new facet that interaction exposes. The real nature of ideas, of thoughts, of consciousness is undefinable and, I would suggest, unknowable in terms that could ever honestly be treated with science. Ideas aren't really links in a chain in which one follows the other, the process of coming up with ideas is unlike that or any other physical metaphor I've been able to recall or think up.
There is probably no object that is an "idea" that could correspond to a molecule of which it is the origin and within which it resides. And if you want to insist that, well, it might not be a molecule but a structure comprised of proteins, you have only multiplied the difficulties of how the body knew how to produce the appropriate building blocks that, somehow, appropriately formed into those structures. That is especially true if you want to pretend that they were the result of natural selection. Natural selection, in itself, is a metaphor, it isn't a fixed description of a physical law, though we are always pretending it is. It has undergone rather drastic modifications within its relatively brief period as the central dogma of evolutionary biology, none more drastic than it being fixed to the concrete units of inheritance that genes are so often considered to be. If there is anything that is probably reliable about it, it is that it will continue to undergo modifications, as, indeed, the idea of genetic inheritance has and will.
The effort to reduce the incredibly complex and largely unknown and largely unknowable "thing" we call evolution to the primitive notions about genes held decades ago even as the incredible complexity of genetic inheritance was becoming obvious, is already anachronistic. Everything is far more complicated than science can ever hope to even describe in the most general of terms. Evolution is certainly no one "thing". Yet that is what all of this reductionist effort rests on. It is a product of atheistic culture, of ideological desire for ideological supremacy, not of disinterested science. It is motivated by the same, primitive desire to kill off God by reducing consciousness and the experience of consciousness, thoughts, ideas, to the kinds of objects that can be explained by the materialists' God substitute through what it presents as a substitute for religion. And, as pointed out the other day, they can't demote the ideas they hope to debunk to mere chemicals without also demoting the science they claim to hold in such reverence when they do so. It is on that science, so damaged by their quest, that they base their quest. Its asserted reliability, essential to that effort, is hopelessly debunked by their effort.
I will note that none of this, none of this at all, looks remotely like random activity of molecules and atoms operating under the presumed laws of probability. Its character doesn't lead anywhere near the currently favored materialist explanation of everything, up to and including the multi-verses that such atheists invented for a similar purpose. I don't think there is any way to honestly present the thoughts of people through that kind of assertion. Intoning "probability" would also seem to be an acceptable means of inserting magic into alleged science these days.
These are just some thoughts I will throw out to motivate consideration and to, frankly, confound the materialists who have gotten away with peddling their line of bilge for far too long among the far too ignorant mid-brows in the media and in pop-culture. They talk nonsense and ignorant people, gulled by their habitual awe for anything called "science," are taken in by it. In the even more crude, even more anachronistic, even more unscientific application of such pseudo-science in politics, the inadequacy of those ideas, those notions, those habits of thought, become extremely dangerous.
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