>>But far more importantly, we must expose the absurdity in the phrase,
>>"genetic engineering." Organisms are not machines.
>
>But organisms can be engineered. I read something very recently about how
>tampering with sheep genes can lead them to produce spider silk in the
>sheep's milk. This might not be engineering the entire organism, but it is
>a kind of engineering. Modify the genes of an organism to obtain a desired
>characteristic or ability. Isn't that engineering?
Not if you obtain the result through a method which is entirely alien to engineering.
Engineering is essentially applied mathematics. It involves the manipulation of passive components which have very predictable patterns of chemical "behavior" over time. It's all very precise and orderly. Genetic manipulation, however, is mostly intuitive and trial-and-error. Not surprisingly, it's more like gardening or herding or even sex. When you're dealing with something that's alive-- that's got its own will-- you're not going to have a lot of success with equations and slide rules. It's a different kind of "chemistry" altogether. If people commonly spoke of "engineering" orgasms, then I would accept the notion of engineering organisms.
>Organisms _are_ machines. They may not be mass produced on an assembly
>line (at least not yet), but I don't see why you can't describe organisms
>as machines. To take humans as an example, you can even identify the
>various pieces which keep us working - we have pumps (the heart), filters
>(the kidneys), actuators (muscles), etc.
Of course organisms utilize mechanisms, both chemical and physical. Organisms will take advantage of anything that presents itself in their internal and external environments. But this doesn't mean they are essentially machines. If they were machines, we should be able to see how they work from top to bottom. We ought to be able to see how it is that an embryo is converted into an adult. Where's the chain of mechanisms that transforms cells into bodies? What tells a rabbit embryo to become a rabbit and a chicken embryo to become a chicken? We don't know. It used to be thought that genes encode the relevant information, but this idea turns out to be implausible. Now it's thought that the process is determined through the interaction of genes and master proteins. According to Enrico Coen, a mainstream molecular biologist, this process is inherently unmechanistic. He thinks the relevant macromolecules are literally creative-- in the same sense that humans are creative! That this could be posited by a serious researcher just goes to show how desperate the situation is becoming. The obvious solution-- though unacceptable to materialists-- is that species-memory, which guides the developing organism, is not "encoded" in matter. (That is, mind is not a function of matter.)
Where is the information storage in the brain to account for personal memory? Where is the image-machine to account for vision? Where are the calculations being carried out which enable us to move about in our environments? Is the brain so stupid that-- like a goddamn computer-- it has to perform thousands of incredibly complex equations just to enable you to walk down a hallway without bumping into a wall? The idea that organisms are machines is merely assumed. It's assumed that there cannot be anything real which isn't reducible to matter. But is this really a sound assumption?
Matter is weird. We know this from experiments in quantum physics. For instance, when electrons are beamed onto a screen with two tiny slits, what you get on the other side of the screen is not two electron beams, as you would expect, but an interference pattern which corresponds precisely to the effect of two sets of ripples (as in a pond) passing through each other. It happens even in the time-frame within which a single electron passes through the screen. The unavoidable implication is that each electron in the beam simultaneously passes through both slits. It can do this, because it's a wave, rather than a particle, at the moment it goes through. It's a wave only at the exact moment it passes through the slits and a particle at all other times. The wave-particle relation is also revealed when we put an electron in a box from which escape is physically impossible. Now, we can't say at any given time where the electron is located. We can only calculate the probability. This probability can be expressed according to a wave. However, as the electron bounces around in the box, its probability wave-- being impervious to matter-- begins to seap out of the box. Once the probability wave is more outside the box than in, sure enough the electron will be found to have escaped the box.
Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle is not about the mind. It's not that we can't figure out the location of a particle once we've got its velocity. It's that the electron literally has no particular location at a given velocity (and no particular velocity at a given location). This is not a law of perception. It's a law of physics. What we normally imagine to be a property of mind-- undefinability-- turns out to be the defining essence of matter. It appears that the substance of matter is mind. So, why assume that the mind must be reducible to the brain, or that species-memory is reducible to genes? Clearly, there is no scientific basis for this assumption. Nor is there any rational basis for "materialistic" philosophy in general, as if there were a definitive "entity"-- as separate from mind-- called "matter."
Ted