Glen Reuschling writes:
I’ve taken the opportunity to read, then reread several times, your recent paper “Biology transcends the limits of computation” (2021). I’m confused. Wouldn’t a working solution to your prize challenge effectively disprove the assertion of the paper’s title?
So, inquiring minds want to know, are you offering the prize challenge because you don’t believe a solution is possible? In which case it represents a sort of put-up-or-shut-up challenge to your Neo-Darwinists critics.
Or do you in fact believe a solution is possible? In which case the prize should be taken as incentive for someone to commit their own creative energy working actively for a solution. Or is there third possibility I’m missing?
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Response: What a wonderful question. A working solution would disprove my paper IF that solution only uses known properties of physics and chemistry.
But I don’t believe our current, conventional understanding of physics and chemistry will ever solve origin of life or even account for the “aliveness” of life. We are missing something. Whatever this thing is, it is very fundamental. More fundamental than gravity.
If there are “undiscovered laws of physics,” in other words if consciousness is an emergent property of matter due to principles we don’t understand (NOW); or perhaps consciousness is a more primary entity that the cosmos itself is grounded in. And this, once understood, enables us to build systems that exhibit negentropy… that would both validate the paper AND solve the prize.
That is where I think the truth lies.
There are two ways to speak about ’emergent properties’: One is when we understand and observe them regularly (like cold air + water = snowflakes); the other is when we don’t, so we just utter the words “emergent property” as a fill-in for something we’ve never directly observed and don’t understand, i.e. “Life emerged from hot vents in the ocean.”
I do believe a solution is possible. And as my paper suggests, science has gotten cause and effect entirely backwards, so we have to take a very different, non-reductionist view of science in order to solve any of this. I offer several fruitful avenues of exploration here: https://evo2.org/ways-to-win/
Meanwhile the prize underscores the fact that we don’t have a clue where the genetic code came from; 95% of the literature is just-so stories.
Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
I posted before on an EVO 2.0 thread about how intelligence defines the origin of life, and the implication being that intelligence defines the very composition of the universe. Perry said “thank you for your contribution” about that and it was encouraging to hear. In particular, I cited a means by which intelligence takes its necessary and unquenchable incidence within what we find to be our reality: whether reality in physics or reality in biology, or in our daily society.
My own dramatic and only concern as regarding the telling forth of this civilization-defining thesis, is that I am a single voice of its incidence. The $10M prize, of course, is a first order resolution of such difficulty in telling forth life’s origin.
However, the $10M prize is tailored to … it knows not what. Were it just an information question, maybe simply code could do the trick. But the real question is, “What is the code’s information from?” So the code’s information has to be developed, first, then coded.
And the process of so doing, I have elaborated in the aforementioned thread post. But as for making it a scientific statement, I don’t have that capability to so define an experiment so it goes unmentioned.
Just as a discussion, though, the questions of: how is the universe fine-tuned as it is, and just how did prebiology become alive as cells and finally us, those questions are readily and unquenchably answered in my earlier post. Of course, that post finds extraordinary elaboration in further discussion.
It all boils down to, that since the answer is readily and actually available, but hidden in a thicket, someone could simply ask and thus find.
The gold standard of science is not peer review, it’s engineering: Can you built it and does it work?
Lots of people send us various philosophical treatises claiming to solve origin of life, the information problem or other related questions. It is not often that they conform to any of the prize specifications so unfortunately we can’t do anything with them.
I would be very interested in anything you have that is physically demonstrable.