I Think Therefore I Think
I can remember the first time I was really upset that someone unknown to me died. I was probably about 13. It was a fictional character who lived in a fictional town invented by James Mitchener. The book, The Source, was trying to create a timeline of civilization in the Middle East. What really astonished me was that the more I thought about it, nothing had to be real except my comprehension of the story. My mental reaction was all that mattered. I even chuckled when I learned about Descartes — he could have easily been in someone else’s dream.
I am formally trained as a computer engineer but my real interest in life has been trying to prove that I have free will. I worked in the Pentagon for IBM in the 70s on large water-cooled systems that filled huge rooms with the same computing power as the laptop I am now using. As systems became smaller and cheaper, I found that much of what I was doing in hardware could be done much faster and simpler with software. For example, I was able to develop a remote microscope slide mover using an off-the-shelf actuators controller through a web-based program in less than a week.
When I was forty with young kids, I thought about what wisdom I had to give them. Since I don’t think we have free will, I feel we are guided only by our current knowledge, emotions, hunger status, and circumstances. Recall any choice you regret making and then reset your life to just before that decision; there is nothing that will allow you to change your mind. This makes our mind nothing more than a computer. The key to making “good” decisions, therefore, is to learn as much as you can, control your emotions and keep out of hazardous places. That is the “good life” philosophy in one sentence.
This computer-like response makes me think that God may be more like Data from Star Trek than the God Charlton Heston talked to in The Ten Commandments. Especially after Data learns to laugh because God definitely has a sense of humor. I will try to make the case that the first “biological” unit was a computer – a mechanical mind.
Laws of Physics and Chemistry
There is a universe. It is a combination of elements, compounds, and myriad forms of energy. There are very rigid rules for how matter and energy behave. We are not even close to knowing those exact rules, but scientists and philosophers make guesses based on observations and increasingly delicate instrumentation. I once asked Brian Greene, at a String theory – Wikipedia lecture, what controlled the strings? The thousand-foot stare followed by, he could tell me but “I wouldn’t understand”. Sub-atomic particles combine into fixed elements with distinct characteristics with remarkable diversity. Just ask the people that have been trying to extract three protons from lead to make gold.
So let us begin with the Universe as it existed around 4,000,000,000 years ago. A lot of heat, light, explosive volcanos, earthquakes … but no biological entities. Just one example of how much power exists within individual atoms, if you inject 8 million electron volts into a uranium atom, you get 200 million electron volts out. By contrast, most chemical oxidation reactions (such as burning coal or TNT) release at most a few eV per event. So, nuclear fuel contains at least ten million times more usable energy per unit mass than chemical fuel. By the way, the discoverer of nuclear fission? A Jewish woman Lise Meitner – Wikipedia.
Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive Logic
In addition to the natural laws, there exist rules for relationships between propositions. These laws exist independent of biology.
I repeat – There is no need for any type of biological entity for logical conclusions to be made. Nature is quite capable of creating mechanisms that can evaluate conditions and take deliberate actions based on those conditions and the desired result.
Deductive reasoning determines whether the truth of a conclusion can be determined for that rule, based solely on the truth of the premises. Example: “When it rains, things outside get wet. The grass is outside, therefore: when it rains, the grass gets wet.” Mathematical logic and philosophical logic are commonly associated with this type of reasoning.
Inductive reasoning attempts to support a determination of the rule. It hypothesizes a rule after numerous examples are taken to be a conclusion that follows from a precondition in terms of such a rule. Example: “The grass got wet numerous times when it rained, therefore: the grass always gets wet when it rains.” This type of reasoning is commonly associated with generalization from empirical evidence. While they may be persuasive, these arguments are not deductively valid: see the problem of induction.
Abductive reasoning, sometimes called inference to the best explanation, selects a cogent set of preconditions. Given a true conclusion and a rule, it attempts to select some possible premises that, if true also, can support the conclusion, though not uniquely. Example: “When it rains, the grass gets wet. The grass is wet. Therefore, it might have rained.” This kind of reasoning can be used to develop a hypothesis, which in turn can be tested by additional reasoning or data. Diagnosticians, detectives, and scientists often use this type of reasoning.
Building Biology from the Ground Up
I will now try to create a thinking being without biology. I have separated the tasks into posts that readers can comment upon. Each of these posts would happen in the order given, but as a later task creates opportunities, earlier tasks would be updated, possibly over a period of several billion years
