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Nonphysical.org
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The Issues
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Dedicated to a Revolution in Biological Theory What Holds Living Memory? Life's Mysterious Chronological Structures
Are plants and animals designed by the Creator? This question, the Reverend Paley posed in 1802, in his famous essay, "The Watchmaker." Suppose, Paley suggested, one found a pocket watch on the ground. Would one not immediately recognize that the watch had a designer, he asked? From it's complexity, one would immediately now that it was formed by the forces of the nonliving world. Likewise, Paley asked, is not life's fantastic complexity clear evidence of a Creator? "Absolutely not," conventional science quickly replies. Such complexity, scientists insist, is not evidence of the Creator's conscious intent. Instead, biological theory maintains that random variations to DNA, the alleged "design and operating system" of life, are culled by Darwin's natural selection to produce life's fantastic complexity and adaptability. It a purely material process driven only by the forces known to physics, they proclaim. To date, this debate has seen no resolution. But rather than focusing on the complex "structures" of life, suppose we consider the "motion" of living matter. What directs life's vast, "chronological" organization of forces, we should ask? Within the structures of plants and animals, the innumerable molecular processes operate with clock-like precision. Within a cell, vast currents of tiny molecules move through immense metabolic processes at rigid rates. Organized in both time and space, this vast network of tiny currents grow in complexity to form the organism's cells and myriad of tissues. Organs and physiologic system assemble in a rigid series of transitional steps. This chronological organization of molecular behaviors becomes the developed creature. Now at the level of the assembled animal, we again find life's mysterious chronological organization. Instinctive patterns of behavior guide each animal through its world and various stages of its life-cycle. And finally, in human memory, once more we find life's mysterious chronological organization of conscious experience arranged in time's linear sequence. What provides life's rigid organization through time and space? The material framework of modern biology cannot account for life's chronological dynamic at any level of organization. The problems is that life's chronological organization is not natural to the nonliving world. Outside the living organism, molecular processes naturally move to states of "timelessness," balance, randomness, and equilibrium. To sustain a rigid progression of events, matter requires a rigid structure. For example, a manmade clock requires a rigid physical structure to holds its gears and sustain a chronological progression of events. Loosen the rigidity of the clock's body, the gears quickly fall out of alignment with each other, and the clock stops ticking. Likewise, a computer requires a rigid structure to direct unruly electrical forces. Without structural rigidity to confine the forces of operation, the mechanisms of a machine do not sustain the chronological progression of events. The machine dies and enters eternal "timelessness." Yet, for an unexplained reason, the watery, fluid realm of the body operates like a giant clock of inordinate precision. Without an apparent rigid structure, cells never stop ticking. Within each cell at the molecular level, millions of molecular machines interact with the precision of tiny clock gears to drive the cell's immense network of metabolic processes. At the surface of cells, molecular portholes pull in torrents of randomly floating molecules. Now, within the cell, the random molecular motions of the external world now suddenly becomes highly organized. Trillions of tiny currents of molecular motion are organized in time and space. They interact to form the huge molecular gears that each contain thousands of individual atoms. Great series of these gears break food molecules into atoms and use captured energy to assemble new gears. Ever increasing, the currents of molecular motion build giant assemblies of molecular gears that expand by astronomic proportions to become the body's immense arrangement of tissues, organs, and systems. What, we must ask, organizes the random motion of the nonliving world into life's astronomic progression of events? In the instinctive behaviors of animals, again one observes a rigid chronology of behaviors. Like the replay of a four-dimensional movie, instinctive memory directs a species through each stage of its life cycle. Instinct provides an animal understanding of its environment and directs it to act within it. Without prior learning, a bird knows how fly, what to eat, the choice of mate, the architecture of its nest and how to fabricate it, how to feed its young, and when and where to migrate to a location thousands of miles away. Likewise a spider knows from birth the design of its web, the millions of sequential motor actions that construct it, how to trap insects, what is good to eat, how to mate, how to lay eggs, and so on to include every detail of its life cycle. Biologists adamantly assert that DNA carries this instinctive memory since instinct is inherited. But science offers no physical mechanism, however fanciful, to explain how DNA's inert strand of polymerized nucleotides might carry this fantastic newsreel of a creature's life. And further, science provides no adequate explanation for why instinctive memory is so similar to consciously acquired long-term memory. In total, science provides no clue as to how DNA might direct the astronomic chronology of molecular events that produces the cells, organs, and body of a creature endowed with its rich chronology of instinctive behaviors. These are profound questions that need to be fully acknowledged. Human memory is also a rigid chronological structure. Like a continuously rolling camera, everything the conscious mind perceives is recorded in a great newsreel of life. Decades of conscious events are rigidly ordered in the series in which they occurred. In recall, one knows if something happened five minutes, five years, or fifty years ago. What sustains this vast chronological organization? And even more baffling, how does memory provide the web of meaning to all the objects, events, thoughts, and words that is our reality? Neurophysiologists assert that the brain is so complex we cannot yet answer these questions. They express certainty that human memory resides somewhere within the brain's dense neural network. But all in all, science can provide no material mechanism of any sort by which the brain stores or accesses the great newsreel of life. Nothing in the properties of matter suggest how the brain's watery neurons might hold memory's permanence and chronological organization. Further, scientific theory flounders on how memory organizes the brain's sensory impulses into a composition of objects drenched in meaning, and how this perception directs the mind's choices, drives, and emotional states. Within life, frame by frame, the past unfolds to direct the present and determine the future. Life continuously imposes rigid, chronological patterns of motion upon the "timeless" anarchy and equilibrium of the nonliving world. Yet, science cannot begin to explain this fact. The physicist can easily explain why organized currents of molecular motion become disorganized and move to a state of equilibrium and "timelessness" (1). This occurs because disorder is a far more probable state of things. From the physicist's view and statistical principals, life's imposition of order upon the anarchy of the nonliving world is an astronomically improbable state of things. Biologists attempt to explain life within the confines of Isaac Newton's three-dimensional universe. However, modern physics has found it necessary to turn to higher dimensions to explain the behaviors of matter. And in every sense, life's material organization is a four-dimensional process. Be it the body's rigid chronology of molecular motions in each cell's metabolic systems or the human mind's organization of life's experience, we find that every aspect of life is linearly organized in time and space. Despite life's ever-shifting structures, modern science attempts to explain life simply in terms of a snap shot of its material structure confined to the here and now. Modern biology asserts that DNA strands are the "design and operating system" which directs life's fantastic unfolding of structures and behaviors. However, biologists cannot a supply a logical mechanism by which the molecular substance of genes actually directs life's grand, ever-flowing, four-dimensional movie. Existing theory provides no model by which DNA might direct each of the trillions upon trillions of molecular events that are chronological organized to create the body. Existing theory theory provides no material mechanism to explain an animal's complex chronology of instinctive behaviors. And similarly, existing theory provides no material mechanism by which the neural substance of the brain sustains memory's chronological organization of life' events. For many physicists, the profound revolution of modern physics has revealed a mystical view of reality that is not shared by the biological sciences. Today, physicists acknowledge that they cannot explain "time" or why it flows in one direction (2). The physicist's statistical laws that explain that the motions of the Universe allow material events to flow equally well in either direction. What then sustains life's steady progression of molecular motions into the future? Modern physicists suggest that only the presence of the conscious observer explains the arrow of time's flow (3). And outside our immediate conscious experience, physicists theorize that the entire history of the Universe still exists frozen in a great timescape of events called "block time." Certainly it is tempting to wonder if these radical theories might prove to be the source of life's mysterious chronological structures. But if so, scientists need to completely rethink our understanding of life, the limits of mind, and the nature of reality. In fairness to intellectual honesty, scientists should clearly acknowledge the limits of current biological theory. Foremost, current theory cannot explain life's mysterious chronological organization. The find an answer, it would seem that we need to turn to the theories of modern physics that extend into the higher dimensions of time and space. It is time for scientists to look for a truly unified theory of reality that embraces not only the higher dimension of the nonliving world, but the rich dimensions of life's structures, behaviors, mind, and memory. And in doing so, one readily encounters the nonphysical nature of the mind. Within this strange, vast dimension of universal consciousness, one comes to face the presence of Paley's Designer who directs the motion of living matter. A watch is constructed by the human mind's conscious assembly of the gears. In a similar manner, the greater dimension of Mind directs the motion of molecules through the series of steps that create life's mechanisms and direct their operation. The full argument is presented in The Vital Dimension.
References: (1) The father of modern chemistry, Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? (2) The eminent physicist, Richard Feynman. The Feynman Lectures of Physics. (3) The popular physics writer, Paul Davies, from The Scientific American. Full references are provided in The Vital Dimension.
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