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Topic: Towards a Science of Consciousness 2004: Thoughts, summaries, and criticism
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Janitor@MIT
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posted 28. April 2004 11:40
I am looking at Chalmers’ http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html and I think the “hard problem” is being gloriously mischaracterized. The hard problem is not the “subjectivity” of experience. The hard problem is the sharing and testing of experience. However “hard” subjective experience may be, it’s the “miniscule problem” in comparison to the problem of sharing experience. But we have effectively solved that problem by testing experience—can experience be effectively communicated and is it liable to test? In particular, test by “Third Party” arbitration. Ironically it is one of those much abused “zombies” who does the arbitrating, but we usually refer to her respectfully as “Mother Nature.”
It is just so elementary to science that it is easy to overlook or forget, but you can’t hope to solve a problem until you can first correctly solve the problem of problem formulation. (Now that’s a “hard problem”!)
Then again, maybe I’m just not seeing (subjectively) what the real problem is.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 29. April 2004 01:51
I agree that the first person/third person problem is "hard" (at least to philosophers), but I don't believe that that's typically referred to as the hard problem of consciousness, since the 1st/3rd problem remains a problem regardless of your stance on consciousness. Then again, perhaps different groups have different terminology.
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Once one has this physico-cum- functional account, consciousness never needs to be mentioned, any more than it needs to be brought into a discussion of gas kinetics. If it doesn't need to be mentioned in the causal account provided by neural mechanisms, then it is either "identical" with neural processes mind/brain identity or it is epiphenomenal, i.e. a caused phenomenon that cannot cause anything in which case we cannot have actually ever have talked about it or be discussing it now.
What? How does that last "i.e." hold? Air pressure most certainly causes my car's tires to hold their shape. That I can also describe it as gas molecules bombarding the walls of the tire does not mean that pressure does not cause anything. Rather, the gas molecule bombardment is what pressure is. It is how pressure causes things to happen.
Likewise, a mechanistic description of consciousness wouldn't say that consciousness doesn't cause anything--it would say how consciousness causes things.
Now, one might object: but if my consciousness is a combination of causation and stochastic processes (quantum mechanics), then it isn't really mine! It's out of my control! But if this description of the process is accurate, the objection is silly. For that assemblage of matter that channels causation and is affected stochastically is you, and you absolutely have control over the world inasmuch as the world would proceed differently were you not there, and it is only by virtue of the processes in you that a variety of things happen. There's a fondness, I suppose, for the idea that we might each be some sort of "prime mover unmoved", but then again, most of us haven't any difficulty accepting our bodies as our own, and yet we did not consciously choose every little detail of our composition without any impact from an outside source.
(I may or may not have addressed the paragraph following the quoted one by what I said above. I think probably not, but I'm nonetheless going to hold off because if the first point is at issue, there isn't much point talking about the second, since it will probably come down to being unable to find a prime mover unmoved.)
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She would not know, on the basis of perfected neuroscience that she lacks the "instinctive understanding that comes from low level experience" without in fact having some reference to such low level experience to start with. Nothing in the neuromechanics yields any "experiences" those are brought to the explanation, not derived from the neuromechanical explanation. Experiences do not have the transitivity of scientific explanations.
In making this statement, E&M has already assumed the failure of the project to understand consciousness and experience at the neurobiological level. It is true that we cannot yet relate experience and neuromechanics directly. But this is exactly what is at issue in the discussion! We can't assume it's impossible or the discussion is over before it has started. (We can, of course, try to give reasons why it is impossible, but the above is simply assertion.)
(In fact, in a later paragraph, E&M seems to admit that under certain conditions Mary actually might know she was missing something, and possibly what it was. I'm just looking for more justification than a "serious doubt".)
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I happen to agree that the physically unrealizable stipulation of "physically identical" humans entails that both are conscious, if either is, but that is not a demonstration that consciousness is a consequence of the physical description.
This is, I fully admit, a thought-experiment, and is unlikely to be attainable in practice. If one could create an item B that is physically identical to an item A, and have both share a property P, then certainly this is a demonstration that P is a consequence of the physical composition of A and B.
But suppose that this does not also hold for any physical description of A. This would mean that there is some item C that has a different physical composition than A, yet this difference cannot be described. B and C are both copies, yet differ in some essential-to-P component.
What is the nature of this component that differs between C and B and cannot be described? In what sense is it physical?
[ 29. April 2004, 01:54: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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E&M
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posted 29. April 2004 07:58
Rex Kerr: quote:
I agree that the first person/third person problem is "hard" (at least to philosophers), but I don't believe that that's typically referred to as the hard problem of consciousness, since the 1st/3rd problem remains a problem regardless of your stance on consciousness. Then again, perhaps different groups have different terminology.
The “Hard Problem” formulation is due to Chalmers, because there was a widespread feeling of a gulf between physical and functional description, however detailed, and ‘phenomenal feel’, a gulf that the analytic community of which Chalmers is a card carrying member, had historically expended a good deal of effort to suppress. It is, as it mostly always is in philosophy, a battle of intuitions. I agree however that 1/3 rd person and subjective in general is larger and more demanding in scope than the qualitative phenomenal emphasis of the hard problem formulation. I think this concentration rooted mainly in the peculiarities of the history of Anglophone philosophy.
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What? How does that last "i.e." hold? Air pressure most certainly causes my car's tires to hold their shape. That I can also describe it as gas molecules bombarding the walls of the tire does not mean that pressure does not cause anything. Rather, the gas molecule bombardment is what pressure is. It is how pressure causes things to happen.
Likewise, a mechanistic description of consciousness wouldn't say that consciousness doesn't cause anything--it would say how consciousness causes things.
Pressure is a collective variable of the more detailed molecular motions, a statistical moment representing averages over space and time of momentum transfer of collisions, real for an actual wall, or virtual for a “boundary”. It is directly definable from the underlying motions or in fact just the density and velocity distribution function. It is nomologically linked to, (in virtue of being defined explicitly in terms of) the underlying kinetic phenomena and accordingly remains at the same logical level.
The question is how is one to define consciousness or subjective experience in the mind brain case in a manner such that similarly transparent nomological links (rather than just correlations) with experience adduced by other means is attained.
Lets assume, hypothetically, that we have achieved a refined neuro-physical account of causal interactions and complex dynamical evolution in the brain and body and further that this somehow cashes out in terms of detailed behavioral predictions. These latter would presumably extend to verbal and gestural reports of states of consciousness i.e. a particular form of behavior. (How otherwise can we know what the subject experienced?). This certainly amounts to a very intricate causal theory of behavior. I think this is the kind of development toward which you gesturing. Yet this description never departs from the physical level either i.e. neuro-mechanics to vocalizations, so we still have to believe the reports.
How are we to assess the prognosis for this scenario? There remains the question of whether the interrogative resources necessary for this account to go through are as a matter of fact nomically consistent with the known physical theories grounding the enterprise. Even granting such consistency would such measurements remain purely probative rather than becoming constitutive of the phenomena elicited and thus render predictive consequences ambiguous. Quantum mechanics if nothing else would appear very unfriendly to such an enterprise, particularly as any such attempted account looks to threaten a regress to ever widening contexts, both physical and experiential.
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Now, one might object: but if my consciousness is a combination of causation and stochastic processes (quantum mechanics), then it isn't really mine! It's out of my control! But if this description of the process is accurate, the objection is silly. For that assemblage of matter that channels causation and is affected stochastically is you, and you absolutely have control over the world inasmuch as the world would proceed differently were you not there, and it is only by virtue of the processes in you that a variety of things happen. There's a fondness, I suppose, for the idea that we might each be some sort of "prime mover unmoved", but then again, most of us haven't any difficulty accepting our bodies as our own, and yet we did not consciously choose every little detail of our composition without any impact from an outside source.
I think this is a combination of an effectively mind/brain identity view and a compatibilist notion of free will and action. It is a respectable position and I happen to share some of it sentiments, including especially that we have every right to claim our causal processes as our own, rather than just viewing ourselves as puppets of a demiurgical mechanical “fate”. I would add this however. The question of quantum mechanics is not simply or even in my view primarily adequately addressed by simply including a stochastic element in an otherwise classical picture. Its relevance, which clearly extends explicitly to the biomolecular level if not beyond, hinges upon making available constituents whose condition and thus causal properties are not definable without measurement i.e. without reference to the context of their operation. I think this characteristic is what enables the creation and propagation of mechanistically constrained but not mechanistically decidable situations through the extensive hierarchical structure of biological cognizing systems. This circumstance permits the high level initiation and termination of classically describable causal sequences and enables the organism to self transform on the basis of selectable subsets of its antecedent determinants. Rather than having a prime mover unmoved we would view our decision as codetermined in the act.
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In making this statement, E&M has already assumed the failure of the project to understand consciousness and experience at the neurobiological level. It is true that we cannot yet relate experience and neuromechanics directly. But this is exactly what is at issue in the discussion! We can't assume it's impossible or the discussion is over before it has started. (We can, of course, try to give reasons why it is impossible, but the above is simply assertion.)
(In fact, in a later paragraph, E&M seems to admit that under certain conditions Mary actually might know she was missing something, and possibly what it was. I'm just looking for more justification than a "serious doubt".)
I have no problem admitting that she knows, perhaps partly in the light of neuro-mechanics that she herself has missed something, the question is how to get to the “possibly what it is” part. I can say that I, for one, have missed “what it is like” to be a mother, and can do so confidently without neuromechanical insight. The issue is what in “what she has missed” does the neuro-mechanical account supply that the usual verbal account doesn’t. How much does benefiting from that account need to be supplemented by, and interpreted in the light of, other immediate forms of experience to count as telling her more about what exactly it is that she has missed than what she would otherwise know. I don’t see how the “model” answers this question. Does the model contain within itself a full neuro-mechanical description of some bounded set of experiences minimally required to understand and interpret the model? What scientific theory has ever done this? How is this mechanical theory of the phenomenal nature of unexpected experience supposed to work?
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This is, I fully admit, a thought-experiment, and is unlikely to be attainable in practice. If one could create an item B that is physically identical to an item A, and have both share a property P, then certainly this is a demonstration that P is a consequence of the physical composition of A and B.
But suppose that this does not also hold for any physical description of A. This would mean that there is some item C that has a different physical composition than A, yet this difference cannot be described. B and C are both copies, yet differ in some essential-to-P component.
What is the nature of this component that differs between C and B and cannot be described? In what sense is it physical?
I think that even if there is a nonphysical component that we must allow that a properly stated criterion of physical identity should be admitted. For physical purposes the main if not only theory we should need is electrodynamics. If there is a nonphysical factor it must eventually manifest itself in the motion of charged bodies to make a difference to behavior and what can be said about consciousness. But electrodynamic fields are mental constructs introduced to explain the difference between inertial and actual trajectories of such bodies anyway. In the end only the particle motions need be accounted for. Thus identity of these should suffice under any scenario.
[ 29. April 2004, 17:29: Message edited by: E&M ]
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zenheadache
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posted 29. April 2004 19:31
The so called "problem of consciousness" is amusing. There is no problem of consciousness. The problem is that a bunch of neuroscientists are sitting around with a square peg, a round hole, and they are trying like angry monkeys to make the two fit. Occassionally, they might jam the peg half way in the hole and begin congratulating each other on having "solved the problem."
The real question is not how can we account for the experience of the color red. That is merely one hair on the balls of a bull.
The reason that we talk about mind, about consciousness is that it refuses to shut up and go away. We have these things called dreams that tell us important things we need to know about ourselves. And as if that weren't enough, sometimes our dreams are precognitive. Sometimes our dreams actually predict events that occur in the "real" world with astonishing accuracy.
There is the documented case of a man who dreamed of an airplane crash for 10 nights in a row, the same dream each night. He was so distraught that he alerted the FAA, which interviewed him, although they could of course take no action on a dream, and he could not see the plane number in his dream. His dream contained these elements: it was an American Airlines flight. He heard a probem in the engines shortly after takeoff. The plane dove to the right shortly after takeoff and crashed. The interview he gave is a matter of record, since the story was shortly published by the local newspaper. The day AFTER he gave his interview, American Airlines flight 191 took off from O'Hare, banked to the right shortly after takeoff, and crashed, killing every passenger on board.
Like it or not, the evidence is there. Things like this happen, and we are going to have to deal with these things now or later. Like it or not.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know...this is anecdotal evidence, right?
Well, so were meteorites at one time, and those who saw them were ridiculed by those who did not.
Hmmm, could it be that the model of brain as generator of consciousness is all wrong? Could it be that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, like a radio? And that "we" are merely the signal perceiving itself?
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Claire
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posted 29. April 2004 23:58
Liike the thread and topic and it relationship to complexity etc..
Will be back.
Claire
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Rex Kerr
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posted 02. May 2004 06:56
E&M writes:
quote:
The question is how is one to define consciousness or subjective experience in the mind brain case in a manner such that similarly transparent nomological links (rather than just correlations) with experience adduced by other means is attained.
But I think you answer the question in the paragraph following this one. When you get to the bottom, you postulate a scenario in which, essentially, we know what consciousness in another person is. That is, we can describe it in terms of other physical laws.
This leaves only the first-person/third-person problem: it seems logically possible that they could all have consciousness that works that way and results in their reporting such-and-so, and I also seem to work that way, and yet I have consciousness and they do not.
And that problem I don't think is one that neuroscience can solve. It seems to be an inherent limitation of self-aware non-omnisicent systems.
I agree with the concerns about the difficult of ever reaching this point in practice. The point is, though, that there exists a possible (and not terribly difficult to understand) scenario in which consciousness could be fully addressed (save for 1st/3rd person stuff) by neuroscience. Therefore, the hard problem is not philosophically hard, because we've already done the philosophy and it wasn't so bad, was it? At least not compared to how hard the neuroscience is going to be....
Of course, that doesn't mean that consciousness necessarily is physical, but merely that it can be, and that we have little choice but to wait for neuroscience to say yea or nay or we-can't-tell.
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Rather than having a prime mover unmoved we would view our decision as codetermined in the act.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable view.
quote:
Does the model contain within itself a full neuro-mechanical description of some bounded set of experiences minimally required to understand and interpret the model? What scientific theory has ever done this? How is this mechanical theory of the phenomenal nature of unexpected experience supposed to work?
Yes, it should contain a set of those experiences. And no, no scientific theory has ever done that before. For obvious reasons: the only scientific theories that could would be theories of mind, and we don't have them yet (at this level of detail). The theory would presumably be in terms of inputs and outputs and internal states. You might not attain a state without the right input, but the theory could tell you that you were missing something, and could give you clues about the nature of it whether or not you had anyone else around who was actually experiencing it and reporting things that you had not and could not experience yourself.
Again, it's entirely possible that the technical barriers to getting to this level of understanding will be insurmountable. But it is not logically impossible.
Zen mentioned something about dreams, and admitted that his story was an anecdote. To advance from merely having beliefs that dreams are telling us something important (rather than being a regenerative internal neurobiological phenomenon) to having solid evidence for it, we'd need to have a much more controlled system than, say, people randomly phoning the FAA when they dream about airplanes crashing. It's just too hard to tell what is an expected level of coincindence and what is remarkable and in need of explanation. I've had odd things like that happen myself (well, not with crashing planes!), but on careful examination of the frequency of various events, I tend to end up concluding that no, everyone on the road is not trying to kill me today--it's just that by chance, once or twice a year or so I'll have three sorta-alarming events occur on the road (even when I'm not tired/distracted/otherwise causing it myself). It's really easy to not do the analysis (or do it wrong), and have a belief that something is going on when, in all likelihood, if nothing were going on, one would observe the same thing.
Edited a sentence in the paragraph to Zen that was particularly unclear.
[ 02. May 2004, 16:09: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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zenheadache
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posted 03. May 2004 00:59
I think what Rex is talking about, i.e., that things are made strange by our focusing on them, happens all the time, but it is quite distinct from really unusual events, where multiple features are accurately predicted.
I'll have more to post on this later.
For now, however, the meaning of dreams, quite apart from possible precognitive incidents, are important in our own lives more directly. They do, in fact, tell us something important we need to know.
In my own life, for example, I recall a dream I had a long time ago while having some minor personal issues. I had dreamt that demons inhabited my body, and that they left my body to "stretch" at night while I slept, and I knew in the dream that if I could ever wake up while they were out of my body, that they would never be able to get back in.
This was an extraordinary dream because its symbolism was quite clear to me. The demons represented my problems, and of course, only by becoming conscious of them could I ever be free of their influence in my life. The dream facilitated the overcoming of these problems, and for that reason it was very important.
Now how does the undeniably and irreducibly mental world of ordinary everyday dream experience fit in the world of neuroscience?
Reducing the dream world to neurochemistry reduces the dream world to non existence. Subjectivity cannot be explained in terms of anything else, without remainder, even if there is a neurochemical basis of it all.
I do think Chalmers is right. Mind is fundamental, not reducible. And that would explain a lot of strange things, including perhaps, how life could evolve so quickly here, and no doubt, around countless other stars throughout the universe.
[ 03. May 2004, 01:00: Message edited by: zenheadache ]
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Moderator
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posted 03. May 2004 06:24
Zenheadache,
You're preoccupation with dreams is only superficially related to this thread and is threatening to hijack the discussion. Please stop such discussions.
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RBH
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posted 04. May 2004 16:38
I think this is appropriate to this thread's topic. Here is the most thorough-going computational/physicalist example I can find in the current cognitive science literature. From the "two-paragraph summary" quote:
Baum proposes that underlying mind is a complex but compact program that corresponds to the underlying structure of the world. He argues further that the mind is essentially programmed by DNA. We learn more rapidly than computer scientists have so far been able to explain because the DNA code has programmed the mind to deal only with meaningful possibilities. Thus the mind understands by exploiting semantics, or meaning, for the purposes of computation; constraints are built in so that although there are myriad possibilities, only a few make sense. Evolution discovered corresponding subroutines or shortcuts to speed up its processes and to construct creatures whose survival depends on making the right choice quickly. Baum argues that the structure and nature of thought, meaning, sensation, and consciousness therefore arise naturally from the evolution of programs that exploit the compact structure of the world.
The author originally trained (Ph.D.) in quantum physics and later shifted to cognitive science.
RBH
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zenheadache
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posted 04. May 2004 20:44
Unless I am mistaken, the thread is about the Hard Problem. My use of the dream is an example of the Hard problem we are discussing here. They are part of the reason why the Hard Problem is so hard.
***
It may be, as Micah suggests, that philosophers have done a horrible job of explaining the hard problem to scientists. But I think that might in part be because there are some philosophers of mind who do not understand what the hard problem is either. I can find no other explanation for why such a theory as ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM could ever gain a following, for example, unless those who propose it simply do not understand the nature of the problem.
Which is understandable. One of the problems with the Hard Problem is that its even hard to explain what the problem is to those who don't "get it.” And it is made even harder to get because some have a vested interest in not getting it. I think an ignorance of the Hard Problem has lead to blustering overconfidence on the part of AI researchers, for instance, who insist that we shall someday be able to download or upload our minds onto computer chips and “live” forever.
I have an analogy that I think can help facilitate apprehension of the problem, which I think brings into contrast a difficult to grasp distinction that fuels nonsense like EM. And when I call EM "nonsense" I am not using that word pejoratively, but clinically. EM is junk philosophy. EM is one of the worst theories ever to have been thunk, and towards those who have become stuck to it we owe our sympathy.
Now to the analogy.
I assume that everyone reading this owns a DVD player and a few DVDs. If not, I assume that everyone reading this has at least seen a DVD, and perhaps held one in his hands.
All of us have probably wondered at one time or another how DVDs work.
How DVDs work is interesting. Basically, the shiny silver disk contains a very long series of 1's and 0's which are read by a laser beam, and integrated into images on a TV which you watch as "The Movie." The entire movie is integrated by a long series of 1’s and 0’s in various combinations.
If the mind, if consciousness were a kind of movie—and I want to EMPATICALLY STRESS that I am NOT equating mind with movie—then what the Eliminative Materialist would argue is that there is no entertainment, and we all ought to stop pretending that there is, that there is only a bunch of 1’s and 0’s read by a laser beam and projected on a screen.
Of course, the claim is absurd. It is self evidently false. It is as arguable as the sum of 2+2.
If we try to reductively explain the movie as a series of 1’s and 0’s pitted in the surface of a DVD which are read by laser and transformed into images on a monitor, then we should say there is nothing left over for the movie to be. This would be the position of the EM, who wishes to explain consciousness by doing away with it.
That is clearly not the case. It may well be that the movie is produced in the explained manner, but the movie is not reducible to the processes which explain it, because the movie is entertainment, and its purpose as entertainment is the only reason why a particular technological system of DVDs, DVD players, and monitors, each with their own intricate technologies, has come to be at all. The purpose of all that technology is to produce a brief span of entertainment, which is not explainable in terms of the mechanics alone. In other words, even though we can explain how an image on a screen comes from 1’s and 0’s on a DVD, it does not tell us why the outcome of this whole process is entertainment.
In the same way, explaining all the physical processes of the brain does not help us to understand why something called subjective experience follows from those processes. I have dreams, sometimes spectacularly vivid in imagery and action and emotion. But this action and imagery and emotion of the dream is nowhere to be found in the brain. It can only be understood from the subjective level of experiencing it, much like a movie cannot be understood by reading 1’s and 0’s in various combinations, but can only be understood by watching it.
So the EM has got it all backwards. The mind is not “really” the neurophysical processes of the brain at all. The mind is really the subjective experience itself. It is irreducible and cannot be understood in any other terms.
The same problem of trying to account for entertainment through 1’s, 0’s, laser beams, and monitors follows one in trying to account for subjectivity through observable physical processes.
In the analogy, entertainment represents subjective experience, and the mechanical processes of the movie represents the mechanical and/or quantum processes of the brain. In addition, entertainment is a good example to use because it is inexplicable both by the mechanical processes of the movie and the mechanical processes of the brain. Entertainment is a subjective experience. All of the technology involved has come together in that particular form to humor us, or scare us, to make us cry or feel good. The purpose of it all is not found in the technology, but in our experience of the technology.
Like Chalmers, I think the model is wrong. The hard problem is only a problem because we keep trying to reduce consciousness to something it is not. If consciousness is fundamental, and cannot be explained away in terms of anything else, then of course its a hard problem; doing the impossible is always hard. When we fully accept this, the problem will go away, because it will go from “hard” to “impossible” and be abandoned afterwards.
Finally, note RBH's post on Baum's theory of consciousness. Baum completely skirts the Hard Problem.
[ 14. May 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: zenheadache ]
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zenheadache
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posted 04. May 2004 21:41
The following is from Baum's 7 paragraph explanation in RBH's link:
"Evolution produces the program of mind to make decisions favoring the interest of the genes. Creatures with such an internal agenda are naturally said to have will-- that is we think about such creatures and ourselves using a computational module attributing will to them."
Here Baum is actually equating WILL, i.e., DESIRE, i.e., WANTS with a computer type program, and this is supposed to be the current state of theory?
I challenge anyone to explain, including Baum himself, how emotions, as the subjects of experience, can be achieved by sheer computational power. You can sure make that case for logic, but how does that apply for emotion?
Sounds like magic to me.
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RBH
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posted 04. May 2004 22:25
I've ordered Baum's book. I'll let you know if he addresses emotional states.
RBH
[ 04. May 2004, 22:28: Message edited by: RBH ]
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zenheadache
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posted 04. May 2004 23:33
Again from Baum’s 7 paragraph synopsis;
“Qualia (the way experiences "feel" to us) have exactly the appropriate nature and meaning that evolution coded in the DNA so that the compact program behaves effectively. This picture thus explicitly and naturally answers "the hard problem" and says why conscious experience feels "like" something, even though it is nothing but execution of certain computer code. The execution of that computer code that we describe as qualia is like what it is like because it evolved to have certain meanings and thus must be programmed in such a way that it has certain qualities.”
I repeat my earlier contention that Baum is totally skirting the Hard Problem although he has himself convinced that he has answered it.
It sounds like Baum is saying that things have a certain feel because they are programmed to have a certain feel. It is like a creationist saying that daisies are white because God designed them to be white.
As such, this is not a coherent explanation. The problem is one which I have already addressed, I think, in my movie analogy. It is equal to saying that movies are entertainment because we have designed them to be entertainment. That is true, and it might explain the creation of movies, but it tells us nothing about entertainment at all. Therefore it’s not an explanation of entertainment, but a useless tautology. In the same way, simply asserting that things feel the way they do because they are programmed to feel that way does not explain the subjective feel of anything at all, nor does it establish that subjective feelings are the kinds of things that are programmable in DNA. This is the very question, transposed to genetics, with the same problem. We can go from asking how is it that experience arises from such and such brain states, to asking how is it that experience is encoded in DNA, and all we have done is simply transposed the question from one realm to another. We have not answered it by transposing it, because the same questions remain, shifted from one department of materialism to another, with the same trouble remaining.
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