What they thirsted after was a world of life and thought driven by a neatly controlling syntax that played itself out with something like cause - and -effect necessity. They imagined this causal necessity much as they imagined the external impact of particle upon particle, molecule upon molecule, where one thing “makes” another happen. And if this is how things work, then why should they worry about what the Book of Life might turn out to say when they could actually read it? Their confidence that they had wrested the textual secret of life from the cell’s nucleus even before they had a clue to its reading is the proof that they were not really thinking in textual terms. It wasn’t the still - unknown meaning of the text that excited them so much as their conviction that a cut - and - dried, mechanizable logic had been found for preserving certain “machine states” from one generation to the next.

The supposedly linear structure of letters, words, and sentences into which DNA has been decoded simply does not articulate a clean, unambiguous, command - and - control authority sitting atop a hierarchical chain of command. Only a misguided preoccupation with an imagined set of well-defined syntactical relationships could have led researchers to dismiss the greater part of DNA — nearly all of it, actually — as “junk DNA.” The junk didn’t seem to participate in the neat controlling sequences researchers were focused on, and so it seemed irrelevant. But more recently the erstwhile junk has been recognized as part of a “complex system of distributed regulation” in which “the spacing, the positioning, the separations and the proximities of different elements...appear to be of the essence” (Moss 2003, p. 191).

But even more devastating for the centralized command - and - control view has been the discovery of “epigenetic” processes. These yield hereditary changes that are not associated with structural changes in DNA at all. Rather, they arise from alterations in how the rest of the organism marks and employs its DNA. And beyond this, researchers have been exploring effects upon DNA from the larger environment. In a dramatic reversal of traditional doctrine, investigations of bacteria show that gene mutations can arise from — can even be guided by — environmental conditions in a non-random way. In sum, genes are no more the self-determining cause of everything else in the organism, than they are themselves the result of everything else.

Of course, we have seen that the equation of mechanical computation with mentality was based on the extraordinarily naïve assumption that machine logic is the essence of thinking and language. But if we can look past this reductionism, what we find is that geneticists have glimpsed more truth than they realize, and the reason for their confusion is that, due to their mechanistic compulsions, they cannot bring themselves to accept their own inchoate insight. If they have been driven to textual metaphors with such compelling, seemingly inescapable force, it is because these metaphors capture a truth of the matter. The creative processes within the organism are word-like processes. Something does speak through every part of the organism — and certainly through DNA along with all the rest. Geneticists are at least vaguely aware of this speaking — and of the unity of being it implies — and therefore they naturally resort to explanations that seem to invoke a being who speaks.

The problem is that their insistence upon textual mechanisms blinds them even to the most obvious aspects of language — aspects that prove crucial for understanding the organism. If I am speaking to you in a logically or grammatically proper fashion, then you can safely predict that my next sentence will respect the rules of logic and grammar. But this does not even come close to telling you what I will say. Really, it’s not a hard truth to see: neither grammatical nor logical rules determine the speech in which they are found. Rather, they only tell us something about how we speak.

Niels Bohr's arguments indicating the non-applicability of quantum methodology to the study of the ultimate details of life given in his book "Atomic physics and human knowledge" conflict with the commonly held opposite view. The bases for the usual beliefs are examined and shown to have little validity. Significant differences do exist between the living organism and the type of system studied successfully in the physics laboratory. Dealing with living organisms in quantum-mechanical terms with the same degree of rigour as is normal for non-living systems would seem not to be possible without considering also questions of the origins of life and of the universe.

...“there appears to be something hard-wired into humans that gives special attention to negative information.” There followed what is by now a characteristic note: “I think it’s evolutionary biology.”

Negative campaign advertisements are the least of it. There is, in addition, war and male aggression, the human sensitivity to beauty, gossip, a preference for suburban landscapes, love, altruism, marriage, jealousy, adultery, road rage, religious belief, fear of snakes, disgust, night sweats, infanticide, and the fact that parents are often fond of their children. The idea that human behavior is “the product of evolution,” as the Washington Post puts the matter, is now more than a theory: it is a popular conviction.

It is a conviction that reflects a modest consensus of opinion among otherwise disputatious philosophers and psychologists: Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, David Buss, Henry Plotkin, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Peter Gärdenfors, Gary Marcus. The consensus is constructed, as such things often are, on the basis of a great hope and a handful of similes. The great hope is that the human mind will in the end find an unobtrusive place in the larger world in which purely material causes chase purely material effects throughout the endless night. The similes are, in turn, designed to promote the hope.

This paper challenges David Chalmers’ proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the ‘easy’ ones and the ‘hard’ one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential ‘qualia’ resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby neglecting a vitally important insight of Kant. From a Kantian perspective, our capacity for conceptual thought is so inextricably bound up with our capacity for phenomenal consciousness that it is an illusion to imagine that there are any ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, resolvable within the computational or neural paradigms.

To begin with, Camus was humble about his unbelief, recalling Benjamin Constant's caution that there is something "worn out" about being too intensely against religion. Camus freely admitted that he didn't believe in God, but he chose to speak "in the name of an ignorance that tries to negate nothing." In other words, his own lack of faith did not presume that others must be wrong about theirs -- certainly not in a way that he could prove with certainty. For this reason, he resisted "atheism," adopting instead the mantle of the "unbeliever" (incroyant)

One need not be religious, nevertheless, to appreciate how religion contributed constructively to civilization and contemporary life. As a young university student in French-Algeria, Camus completed a thesis exploring the relationship between Neo-Platonic and Christian metaphysics. A central figure in this study was St. Augustine whom, as a fellow Algerian, Camus held a great affinity. According to biographer Herbert Lottman, St. Augustine was, for Camus, "the 'bishop' of North African writers, whether believers or non-believers. Camus saw in this saint the artist with all the strengths and weaknesses of the 'African' Camus felt himself to be." Camus was especially taken by Augustine's searching inquiry into the problem of evil. Contrary to new atheists like Hitchens -- who suggests that religion is the carrier of plague -- Camus recognized that evil is a human problem. As Dr. Rieux remarked in Camus's superb novel The Plague, "each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it." Camus, like Dr. Rieux, shared the same questions religious believers ask; he just couldn't accept their answers -- or their hope. He found consolation not in the faith of Job or the salvation of Christ but in Sisyphus: the prospect that, through rebellion and endurance, Sisyphus could be happy.

...American philosopher Daniel Dennett frames the problem quite lucidly. Take lobsters, he argues—they’re just robots. Lobsters can get by with no sense of self at all. You can’t ask what it’s like to be a lobster. It’s not like anything. They have nothing that even resembles consciousness; they’re machines. But if this is so, Dennett argues, then the same must be assumed all the way up the evolutionary scale of complexity...Dennett gets to humans...In Dennett’s formulation,

"Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots. Somehow, the trillions of robotic (and unconscious) cells that compose our bodies organize themselves into interacting systems that sustain the activities traditionally allocated to the soul, the ego or self. But since we have already granted that simple robots are unconscious (if toasters and thermostats and telephones are unconscious), why couldn’t teams of such robots do their fancier projects without having to compose me? If the immune system has a mind of its own, and the hand–eye coordination circuit that picks berries has a mind of its own, why bother making a super-mind to supervise all this?"

Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage. (If so, wouldn’t foxes also be conscious?) But the question grows more difficult by an order of magnitude when you ask how it happens—the “hard problem of consciousness,” as David Chalmers calls it. How do apparently robotic cells and systems combine in such a way as to have qualitative experiences: to feel dampness, savor wine, adore cumbia but be indifferent to salsa? Some scientists are honest enough to admit they don’t have the slightest idea how to account for experiences like these, and suspect they never will.​

Do Electron(s) Dance?

There is a way out of the dilemma, and the first step is to consider that our starting point could be wrong. Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures...But in fact, scientific observation has revealed that even lobsters engage in some forms of play—manipulating objects, for instance, possibly just for the pleasure of doing so. If that is the case, to call such creatures “robots” would be to shear the word “robot” of its meaning. Machines don’t just fool around. But if living creatures are not robots after all, many of these apparently thorny questions instantly dissolve away...