Speculation on Junk DNA

[Michael McMahon]

(This is an extract from a piece I wrote elsewhere. I only intended to write an improvised paragraph but more ideas kept coming to me. I didn’t research anything. Could someone tell if anything I said makes genetic sense or if it’s wrong!?)

As I said before nonphysical doesn’t mean nonlogical. If something was spiritually created that doesn’t translate to “anything goes”. It doesn’t mean that it was created by a particular God at a specific time for this stated prophetic reason. Nonphysical doesn’t mean nonobjective and subjective either. Much like the existence of eternal hell for nonbelievers can still be defeated solely on logical grounds of disproportionality without even having to rely on materialistic arguments, the same would hold true for other nonphysical issues. So nonphysical claims would require probabilistic evidence and logical deductions of some kind which can in theory be open to philosophical rebuttal. So I don’t think the concept of impersonal or spiritual intelligence is completely out of bounds. I’m not endorsing anything in specific and I know the issue is fraught with controversy and theistic bias. I’m not an expert in this area. All I’m saying is that it might turn out that there was slight mystery in how it all began; be it the origin of life or the Big Bang...

Non-human species are not rational and introspective. At best some species show limited self-awareness like being able to identify themselves in a mirror. So a sentient lion can be motivated to survive by the hedonistic impulses of eating tasty zebras and reproduction even though it’s non-rational. But some species are not only non-rational but also lack both self-interest and consciousness. When you’re in an endless forest it can feel spiritual in the way the trees are neither dead like a rock or alive like an animal; as if they were created like an art piece. A tree or an insect is a biological entity but it’s inert and can hardly be said to be motivated by its own survival. It only survives because of its hardwired genetic instructions. So that begs the question of what motivated the genes? To say that the genes want to survive because any genetic blueprint that didn’t want to survive was simply killed off seems circular and far-removed from technological modelling. We’d never say an airplane was built that way because all other designs crashed the plane. Think of an insect’s exoskeleton or the outer bark of a tree: any internal organ change would require simultaneous changes in the outer layers to accommodate a change in size. Animal organs are so complex that minor alterations would likely need a cascade of changes in its interdependent systems...

No I’m not saying that evolution is wrong or that survival of the fittest isn’t involved; but maybe there’s mysterious ingredients and extra processes that we’re not familiar with. People can change their own physique through mental effort like dieting and exertion so for all we know there could even be an element of self-design where the changing mental attributes of an animal had a trickledown effect over the millennia on its nervous system and physical structure. If a cheetah knew it must get faster to chase down more agile prey, could that subconscious information eventually affect the genetics of its offspring? If our conscious mind can somehow move our body then the same would be true in a residual way for a non-rational mind. In a metaphorical way they’d have created themselves out of the endless abyss of existence. For instance it’s not inconceivable that their nervous system could subconsciously simulate desired movements which could affect their future progeny. Hypothetically that specific process wouldn’t be externally designed by random mutation or God but their own self-design.

I’m not sure how a holistic theory could be tested; unless there were genes that somehow worked by suppressing previous genes in order to limit the complexity. Or else if there were genes that functioned like digital tracers that mimic the outpouring of conscious information at certain bodily locations and in doing so continuously tracks the growth of the organism. The genes would be like multidimensional shapes or geometrical coordinates that can open or close. They’d selectively release and close off growth and supplies of information. Therefore if the genes continuously modified the expanding growth of an animal that might imply the genes have more information than the initial blueprint would imply. Although I’m unsure what a biological version of a status report back to the genes to give updates on the development would look like. Another way to put it is where the genes had some self-awareness of spatial volume and the passage of time which would allow it to alter the gene activation in response to the environment. Are the specific genes being used wholly determined from the outset of the organisms creation or is there any display of feedback while the work is in progress to vary the genes that are employed? For instance the map of the Empire State building that shows all of it’s rooms, structure and content will be immense because of the sheer size of the building. But the instruction manual that shows the stages of how to build each section of the empire state building should be exponentially larger than that final map we just mentioned. After all it’s harder to construct something than it is to observe the finished piece. So if the genes only had slightly more information than the final phenotype that would again be an indicator of hidden simulated information.

I’ll give a warning to say I haven’t fully investigated the above statements and my intuitions might be wrong. I’m not a geneticist so I wouldn’t know where you’d have to look. I understand there’s aspects we don’t fully understand yet like epigenetics and mysterious junk DNA. Is junk DNA chaotic, unintelligible rubbish or primordial rough work that’s so complicated we can’t understand it.

 

When I said the endless abyss of existence I perhaps meant it in the notion of an infinite absurdity.

[Michael McMahon]

If panpsychist notions that every photon has an infinitesimal trace of consciousness are correct then it'd follow that trees and plants also have a momentary, trace-level experience of ethereal time. Did an omniscient God create insects? Or were they created only out of the chaos of physical processes and natural selection? Or else were they created independently by the quantum randomness and incomprehensible infinitude of time? If there's debate that quantum mechanics is involved in consciousness or the brain then quantum mechanics could also apply to evolution. If the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics is correct and everything that can happen does happen an infinite number of times then there's a timeline in the multiverse with the mind of a fish or the concentration of an eagle! Animal minds in the multiverse!

[Michael McMahon]

Intelligent Design: Crash Course Philosophy #11

 

Could group evolution answer some of the arguments posed by intelligent design? Something can be intentionally designed by animal subconsciousness like a bird's nest or a spider's web without it necessarily being intelligently designed by a single anthropomorphic God. Evolution assumes animal time-perception and unconsciousness to be nonfunctional, redundant and purely physical. Animals are non-rational but they can still identify patterns. Animals are in constant biological communication with other animals through micro-organisms and ingesting the genetic material of their prey. They're also capable of visually perceiving and mimicking the behaviour of other species like a parrot simulating a human voice.

 

Talking Parrot

 

"The decision-making process is similar in the two cases, with individual bees playing the same role as monkey neurons. Many other examples of distributed information processing—group minds—could be cited for the eusocial insects. Even more exciting, group minds are probably not restricted to the eusocial insects."

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/evolution-for-the-good-of-the-group 

 

"Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that can occur with some diseases when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity." Wiki

 

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

 

"symbiosis: interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both."