Sara Imari Walker

Muddled volume that lacks an overall definition of what 'information' actually is. Certain essays claim information to be physical, other not so. I must admit I haven't read all the essays, but I gave up after I read the introduction, the first essay, and six more that interested me the most first. I'm not saying there is nothing of worth here, but overall, it reeks of physical antireductionism.

The first essay 'The "hard problem" of Life' by Walker and Davies can't seem to come to grips with the hard reality of causality and the mystery surrounding the origin of our universe. They basically state that because things are too complex and will never be fully grasped, reductionism as a principle can't be true. As a solution, they propose another mystery, some as yet unnamed & undescribed 'new principle' or new set of natural laws that have to do with information, and which amounts to a variation of vitalism.

It also can't come to grips with the fact that our current physical laws are temporal, and possibly subject to change. They might not have existed as they do now before the Big Bang, or during the very first moments of our universe, so why insist that this is just a fringe opinion?

Lots of stuff is posed as 'established', but upon closer inspection hardly anything is. Just some examples:
- "In the case of consciousness, it seems evident that certain aspects will ultimately defy reductionist explanation, the most important being the phenomenon of qualia - (...)"
- "Our phenomenal experiences are the only aspect of consciousness that appears as though they cannot, even in principle, be reduced to known physical principles."
- "A real living system is neither deterministic nor closed, so an attempt to attribute life and mind to special initial conditions would necessarily involve fixing the entire cosmological initial state to arbitrarily high precision, even supposing it were classical." [This is especially baffling as the authors admit that defining life is hard, and they do not provide a definition of life.]

I also found anthropomorphic talk (biological cells are "autonomous agents"), and too much computer analogies (always a tell of muddled thinking, as if the stuff happening in cells is something more than just chemistry).

Basically a set of essentialist thinking. Consider this quote:
"Even if we do succeed in eventually uncovering a complete mechanistic understanding of the wiring and firing of every neuron in our brain, it might tell us nothing about thoughts, feelings, and what it is like to experience something."

Well, uncovering the complete mechanistic understanding of a certain chemical reaction also tells us nothing about what that reaction experiences. Or uncovering the complete mechanistic blueprint of an iPhone also tells us nothing about what it is like to be an iPhone. It is not because consciousness is a hard problem, that reductionism/mechanism is to be discarded.

Doesn't seem to grasp the chemistry of the cell, even though they admit it is highly complex:

"An example from genomics is an experiment performed at the Craig Venter Institute, where the genome from one species was transplanted to another and "booted up" to convert the host species to the foreign DNA's phenotype - quite literally reprogramming one species into another. Here it seems clear that it is the information content of the genome - the sequence of bits - and not the chemical nature of DNA as such that is (at least in part) "calling the shots.""

My questions are these: are these so called 'bits' anything else than molecules in their environmental context? Is the physical process happening with these molecules anything else than biochemistry? What is this "(at least in part)" piece in the quote? What do they actually mean? The authors reduce questions such as mine to "promissory reductionism" because they say "there is no realistic prospect of ever attaining such a complete material narrative". So when I insist that there is probably (very likely) a material narrative (based on the tremendous descriptive & predictive scientific successes in cell biology, chemistry, physics of the last century) that such is in principle wrong because we as humans aren't smart enough to provide that narrative fully; 100%??

The baffling nature of Walker & Davies reasoning is to be seen in this final quote:

"Expressed more succinctly, if one insists on attributing the pathway from mundane chemistry to life as the outcome of fixed dynamical laws, then (our analysis suggests) those laws must be selected with extraordinary care and precision, which is tantamount to intelligent design: it states that "life" is "written into" the laws of physics ab initio. There is no evidence at all that the actual known laws of physics possess this almost miraculous property. The way to escape from this conundrum - that "you can't get anywhere from here" is clear: we must abandon the notion of fixed laws when it comes to living and conscious systems."

Because our existence is hard to grasp/miraculous, other laws than the ones we know now must be in play? So, non-fixed laws would somehow be non-miraculous? Might it just be possible that extreme coincidence is a factor? No evidence? It's like on Wren's tomb: Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice. Granted, physics hasn't come up with a unified theory yet, but that doesn't mean we should resort to vitalism or discard currently fixed laws or mechanism out of hand. What is a fixed dynamical law by the way? Is it non-dynamical because it is fixed?

And moreover: what ‘laws’ are they talking about? Physical & chemical laws? Because it is clear that biology has no fixed laws – aside the principle of evolution – so if they are talking about biological laws, the last part of statement would amount to stating the obvious and arguing against something hardly any serious biologist argues.

I would advice the authors of the book to read Jan Spitzer's 2021s 'How Molecular Forces and Rotating Planets Create Life: The Emergence and Evolution of Prokaryotic Cellsmy link text' for a better grasp of chemistry and the origin of life question, Alex Rosenberg's 2006s 'Darwinian Reductionism' for a better grasp of reductionism and the reason why laws (except evolution) are absent in biology and Russell Powells 2020s 'Contigency and Convergence: Towards A Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind' for a better grasp of evolution and astrobiological notions of consciousness and life. As for agency & vitalism, there's the 2010 essay 'The Lucration Swerve' by Anthony Cashmore.

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