21st Century scientific mysteries. Lesson 100

A mystery is any result which our current level of knowledge cannot explain -- the cause of the result is unknown, but performing certain actions can scientifically determine that certain proscribed results will occur.

Thus far we have established that there are atoms made up of subatomic particles, elements which consist of a single type of atoms, and compounds (molecules) such as water that exist because we "glued together" certain types of atoms by sharing their electrons. These molecules combine in certain ways to form, simply described, animals, vegetables and minerals as well as things that are perhaps less than alive such as viruses and prions. This leaves several unanswered questions.

First, what is life? Is it an emergent property of a certain combination of elements or matter? Or, is life something separate from matter which can manifest itself in our four dimensional space by using matter, which is inherently inert? In other words, is my personality, my thought process, my mind, separate and distinct from my body? Is my body merely a biological mechanism that my mind is capable of inhabiting?

Second, we know that there is something which we have classified as quasi-life, incapable of supporting itself without another living being his presence. We know there was life which exists, consumes matter and energy and produces matter and energy. What we don't know is whether there is a form of life beyond what we have described, of which the highest form we can envision, is human life.

Let us conduct some thought experiments, as Albert Einstein called them. Let us expand our thought process to consider some older alternatives.

Thought experiment number 1. Body and mind unified. In this first experiment, we envision a living entity, let's say a person. That person is a living organism. It has a brain. All thought, all emotions, all feeling, occurs within the brain through its neural connections. Unless a thought is written on paper, told to another person, recorded on video, or saved for posterity by some other extra biological means, the thought exists only in the brain. An unrecorded thoughts ceases to exist when the engine, the person, ceases to be alive. The notion of passing knowledge from one person to another, across time and space, where the timeframe is longer than a human life span, is implausible. For example, if someone in ancient Egypt had a thought, it would be impossible, unless that thought were recorded somewhere, to transmit the install to another, modern day person, or to handle that modern day person perceive that thought that was in the mind of the ancient Egyptian. When the Egyptian dies, his thoughts, his knowledge, dies with him. In this model, unless an idea is transmitted to another person through the senses of sight, sound, taste, touch or smell, either directly (from person to person) or indirectly (a diary, let's say) the knowledge is lost.

Some things in this model of existence are clearly impossible. For example, speaking in tongues by a person never exposed to the language/tongue is clearly impossible. To sit in New York, and, in the mind, perceive a scene or action in, let's say for argument's sake, London, is clearly impossible. Those who think they experience such things are either delusional or misguided.

Thought experiment number 2. Body and mind separate. This situation presents us with some interesting opportunities and explanations of things which may have, and I stress the word may because we are unable to test them at this time, occur in the real world.

Test case A. There is anecdotal evidence that people have been known to speak in foreign languages to which, according to anyone's knowledge or recollection, they have never been exposed. The speaker, in such situations, may or may not understand the message. This is most typically associated with a religious experience, where it is called speaking in tongues. However, in rare circumstances, this phenomenon has been observed in secular settings. In many cases, this has been attributed to a reincarnations experience. The scientific explanation is still a mystery.


Test case B. A person, sitting in a laboratory in Houston, accurately describes a number of cards dealt by an astronaut in space, whizzing around the globe. The number of correct "guesses" by the person locked up in Houston far exceeds the number of correct guesses that would be due to statistical probability. Other people are asked at the same time, to randomly select the same number of cards in the same period of time and end up with a far lower number of correct answers, well within the range of statistical probability.

These two anecdotes are merely a couple of stories culled from countless stories of events that cannot, by today's technological standards, be explained. However, as scientist and science-fiction writer, Arthur C. Clark once wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Are these stories examples of sufficiently advanced technology or sufficiently advanced biological and physical processes which we cannot currently explain, such that they appear to be magical? We, as a Western society, are highly reluctant to accept things that defy logical and rational explanation, within our defined boundaries of logical and rational.

Test case C. Many insurance companies, which operate within stringent mathematical, actuarial data, now routinely pay for hypnosis and acupuncture to solve a variety of behavioral problems, most notably, smoking cessation, for which it has been observed to be quite successful. There is more scientific study of the processes related to hypnosis than the processes related to acupuncture. But there is no doubt that when Anton Mesmer first began hypnotizing people, and the biological and neurological processes were not at all understood, hypnosis, as recently as the early to mid 20th century, appeared to be magical. Today, more of the processes of hypnosis are better, if not completely, understood. It is an accepted scientific fact in the medical, and other scientific communities, that hypnosis for smoking cessation and a variety of other mental and physical conditions is an accepted therapy.

Acupuncture is today, where hypnosis was in the prior century. Acupuncturists believe that the insertion of needles at certain points on the human body, with or without electrical stimulation, redirects the body's internal energy fields, resulting in a change in mental and/or physical processes. Current allopathic (M.D.) and osteopathic (D. O.) Medicine currently have no explanation whatsoever for why acupuncture works. There are no observable biological processes that emits energies that can be routinely measured in any meaningful way. What makes acupuncture work? Are there energies and processes which we as humans have not learned to observe? Is it really our own belief in the process that causes us to heal or influence ourselves?


Immortality 90

Think about it. Certain living things seem to be immortal. It also seems as though the simple learn the life for, the longer it can live. Think about the amoeba or the euglena (another one celled creature). They multiply through cell division -- mitosis. A cell reaches a certain point in size or age, and then splits into two cells. Those two cells reach a certain point in age or time, and split into two more cells each. This process continues indefinitely. When you see an amoeba under a microscope in a drop of pond water, that amoeba is the product of countless cell divisions over the course of millennia. When you see a sponge on the seafloor, it is the product of budding, a sexual reproduction. It is an extension of some animal which has lived for centuries, even millennia. It is as though the human could cut off an arm and growing a new person from that arm, while at the same time we growing the arm on the original person! Is the second person who grew from a cut off arm a new to person, or an extension of the same person?

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZ1nweotz-8MZGNiNHB6YzhfNjJkN3IzOXJkeA&hl=en