So synthesizing a genome/protein/enzyme, regardless of its synthetic or natural applications, is an issue of chemical synthesis (albeit a chemical utilized by life) or something else?
Well, right, by definition. (However, be careful with nomenclature here - synthesis here refers to ANY creation of proteins/enzymes, not just manmade ones.)
See them successfully deal with their addiction when they can perceive "what their addicted self looks like"? Or see them unsuccessfully deal with it when they cannot perceive "what their non-addicted self looks like"? More times than I care to remember, unfortunately. Given the blatant duality of life and death, that's clearly not the case. If you have to rely on dissemblance to float your definition of consciousness, you are relying on something factitious at the onset. What an absurd question. The fact that he does it for his comrades (and not his enemies) establishes his self interest. To say someone is acting with "self interest" doesn't necessarily hold the same connotations as being "selfish", even though they both contain the word "self". Only if they, like you, are relying on a miserly definition of self interest. If you want to introduce unanimous disagreement however, try talking about robots equipped with " suicide protocols " to jump on grenades competing for the same medals of honour doted out on their conscious counterparts. I mean after all, a dissemblance of consciousness based on the performanceof protocols is non-different from the consciousness it uses for source material, right? No, but unless that somehow offers another angle on understanding why the successful roll out of complete driverless assistance for aircraft occurred about seventy years ago (while the same feat for cars is still, in the present day, ironing out the technical details), I fail to see the relevance. Both in and outside the law courts, no doubt.
Hence (regardless of whether one thinks its appropriate to add or drop a "bio" in regards to chemical synthesis), there's a big distinction between the synthesis of life and the ?bio?\synthesis of chemicals life utilizes.
"Try", being the operative word. It's at the point of "should" you are introducing all sorts of magical thinking. Science operates with observation, replication, etc. Politics operates with words like "should". Nature is certainly under no constraints to operate within the parameters afforded by limited human intelligence. As such, science is also certainly under no obligation to fulfill your political requirements. Science starts to rapidly lose it's credibility when it moves outside of fields od demonstration, repeatability, peer review, etc. The fact that the highest scientific award, the Nobel Prize, is awarded to discoveries and not ideas illustrates this clearly. Johannes Fibiger and the controversy he introduced to shoring up what constitutes valid scientific progress illustrates this nicely. If even establishing what particular findings demonstrate doesn't always persist under scientific scrutiny, what to speak of cerebral narratives devoid of any demonstratable reference beyond the political determination of will that we "should" be able to perform what nature is doing already?
In principle it isn't. To add the term "bio" only means those chemicals which are used by living organisms on earth. There are probably some 6000 different chemicals, but humans use only some 500 specific chemicals such as carbon and hydrogen (the most abundant elements in the universe) of these. Those are what we call bio-chemicals because they are suited for the organization of living things as we know them. In different environmental conditions other chemicals may well be suitable also, but on earth our bio-chemicals are just the right type for our environment. But living things around Black smokers organize their bio-chemicals in a completely different way than surface animals.
I'm not sure the distinction is required. If something has the property of dualism, how do you propose to determine that the dualism does or does not arise from the substance? If for all intents and purposes, the phenomena cannot be worked with in the field reduced by physics, what would be the purpose in saying it is ultimately beyond or within physics? Or do you think the ecclesiastical monopoly of militant physicists works by the addage of "If you are not for us, you are against us."? A world of phenomena that is not reducible to an understanding of the machinations of matter. IOW having an understanding of the world with vast epistemological holes (especially at the point of introducing "life" to the equation) is exactly what you would expect in a world built on a dualistic foundation ..... and, lo and behold, that is what we have. This is why I am asking, "what evidence of a dualistic world would you expect to see crop up in the world of physics?". Obviously as far as physics goes, an absence is as close as you could expect to get in physics. It is self evident. Given that property dualism includes a host of opposing views in the (vain?) effort to constrain the duality to property, one has to ask what you are hoping to achieve by alluding to a term that provides anything less than disagreement and controversy. If property dualism has its breeches stretched to incorporate panpsychism (ie turning everything on its tables, viewing matter as an emergent property from consciousness) , it poses an image more questionable than the bulbous wardrobe of a homeless alcoholic nonchalantly browsing the shelves of a liquor store. I posted a vid earlier from a lecture presentation about advancements in the field of fatigue management in athletes. He talks about how adherance to a reductionist view of fatigue was producing inferior results, and how moving into a dualistic model secured not only better results but results that were deemed impossible by reductionist understandings (such as long distance swimming in arctic waters in speedos). Now you can don your hockey mask as you philophically duke it out and argue whether its emergent, ephiphenomenal, or panphyscist, or even substance dualism, but that is beside the point. There is a whole realm of science that is quite comfortable to make progress without drafting a necessary political allegiance to material monism every step of the way.
Only in their "living" state. Granted dead bacteria also produce chemicals, but that arrangement isn't reproduction. Assuming you are not part of the anti-vaccine crew, you shouldn't have problems with this. On the contrary, all and every obsersavation on the limitations of the subject says otherwise. Granted there are chemical requirements for reproduction to take place, but it would probably be more accurate to label them under environmental science. You can have the most ideal environment for reproduction, but if it is sans-host, the census data will be non-existent.
Which would be the only state in which a human would synthesize such chemicals as well. By definition, it does not. You can't "observe" a contradiction in terms. It doesn't matter how you label this or that subcategory of chemical synthesis or its prerequisites.
Which would be fine .... if you weren't also proposing that your favoured model for discerning evidence on the subject necessarily excludes all others ... I guess the scientific community is fortunate that your opinions are thoroughly disregarded.
Yes. Being alive seems to be a prime requirement for being a functional parent of offspring. If parents are observed in all and every case to give rise to their offspring (so much so, that if we see a giraffe, we don't think it was born from an elephant), one has to wonder who is bringing forth a contradiction for observation. Lol It certainly does, as whole nations of lonely bachelors on friday nights will attest to, despite their netflix subscriptions.
This is your reply to my .... What would evidence of the "non-physical" in the physical look like? . I can't see the relevance.
So, in your professional opinion, are you synthesizing life or synthesizing the chemicals that life utilizes?
Well, compared to the possible chemical reactions having occurred during some 14 billion years at a universal scale, all we can do in our little laboratories is "try" to duplicate some of them, don't you agree?
What is "life" ? That is the dumbed down definition of "life", no more no less. Life is a result, not a causal force.
Reproduction is exclusively performed under the banner of chemical "bio"synthesis Other forms of chemical synthesis may or may not warrant the prefix. Given that the chemicals require the appropriate host to further anything in the direction of reproduction, its more about the essential quality of the host rather than what the chemicals "may or may not know "(which is a strange usage of language). For instance, if you (as a male) were forcibly plunged naked in to a bathtub full of human semen, amongst your concerns (both immediate and long term) falling pregnant would not be one of them. If you look at an elephant/bacteria and consider it as having taken birth from anything other than a parent elephant/bacteria, I guess the first step would be demonstrating reproduction occuring outside the of parent/offspring reproductive mechanisms. Despite bountiful pontifications, dollars and internet correspondence spent in this regard, the verdict hasn't changed. It gets back to the basis on what extraordinary claims require in the evidence department.
As I mentioned, this is the platform where science starts to rapidly lose credibility. When you have to start introducing superlatives to remain credible, you are not talking science.
If one's prefered system of analysis cannot locate the causal force, what on earth can they work with but the results! (With the added bonus of introducing superlatives to knit a narrative to compensate for one's lack of knowledge)
