What are your favourite simple things that science just cannot explain?

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Despite the objections of some philosophers, it seems patently obvious that it's easy to conceive of this complex bunch of chemical processes we call life as occurring "in the dark," free of conscious experience, and there's apparently no way for natural selection to ever favor creatures that happen to have this inner eye. Free will faces a similar problem since natural selection should be indifferent to whether an action has occurred freely or not. Whether you killed and ate the deer because you decided to or because you were somehow compelled makes no functional difference. For these inner phenomena, the only available conclusion to be made seems to be that "we just have them," which of course is not an explanation at all.

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Exactly my thoughts.

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Regarding brain function, a blog that I loosely follow recently had a guest post on a promising new method/technology for studying brains at the neuronal level. Seems relevant:
http://ionian-enchantment.blogspot.c...e-through.html

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I heard about that about a year ago in the Scientific American. They're thinking about using optical cables to study neural networks in situ; there are also membrane proteins which release light when stimulated electrically.

Interestingly that guy is doing the exact same doctorate (computational neuroscience at Edinburgh) that I'm hoping to do. It's pretty much the best there is.

Yawning isn't just for flushing the lungs of CO2, it's also for sucking colder air up into the sinus cavity to meet the blood/brain barrier and cool your frontal lobes.

Top of the list would be consciousness, although I'd say we'll have a handle on that in the next 50 years as we get closer to creating a real AI.

Laughter, dreaming, morality - there are evolutionary bases for all these.

A lot of these questions seem simple on the surface, but I wonder how simple they really are. I'll bet they mostly have fairly simple functional answers, but to be fully explained I bet would be very, very complex. You could probably just keep asking questions about them and going back further and further into the complexities of the function of nature. You speak of consciousness, you must understand how it works, how the brain works, how the molecules of the brain interact and why they interact that way. To understand that, you must understand why the atoms of the molecules cause them to behave like they do. To understand that, you must understand the subatomic particles, etc. To understand fully where the sock goes and why it went there, you have to understand the dynamics of the sock, the specific properties of the material it's made of and every material it comes into contact with including your own self; You'd have to likewise understand your own behavior, then, and subsequently all the mind and molecule stuff I just said. It makes you wonder; Could, theoretically, the entire function of the history of all nature and the universe be inferred from a single missing sock?

Fuck all this "consciousness and free will" stuff. I want to know about INSTINCT.

How does a mother bird know to guard her eggs? How do animals know how to have sex? All that stuff. How?

For those that played the first Assassins Creed, they had a good theory. Ancestors memories being transfered to the next generation. All that shit. Thoughts? Explanations?

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Originally Posted by Half/Dreaming

Fuck all this "consciousness and free will" stuff. I want to know about INSTINCT.

How does a mother bird know to guard her eggs? How do animals know how to have sex? All that stuff. How?

For those that played the first Assassins Creed, they had a good theory. Ancestors memories being transfered to the next generation. All that shit. Thoughts? Explanations?

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Look at it this way: Mother birds that were less inclined to guard their eggs had them eaten by predatory species, hence they didnt have as many children, and their lines died out. Mother birds that had genes which coded for more maternal nurturing behaviour towards eggs would ensure their eggs survived maturation, so their offspring would live, passing on the genes for being more maternal to their own eggs.

Same goes for sex. Those that don't want to have sex, don't have sex and don't pass on their genes. Those that do, do. And sex is the ultimate pleasure vs pain reward system in nature. We do it because it feels good.

Assassins Creed is fiction. Your ancestors memories are not coded in your DNA.

Why I'm here. *woot*

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Originally Posted by Alextanium

Look at it this way: Mother birds that were less inclined to guard their eggs had them eaten by predatory species, hence they didnt have as many children, and their lines died out. Mother birds that had genes which coded for more maternal nurturing behaviour towards eggs would ensure their eggs survived maturation, so their offspring would live, passing on the genes for being more maternal to their own eggs.

Same goes for sex. Those that don't want to have sex, don't have sex and don't pass on their genes. Those that do, do. And sex is the ultimate pleasure vs pain reward system in nature. We do it because it feels good.

Assassins Creed is fiction. Your ancestors memories are not coded in your DNA.

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Dude...i think you misunderstood me.

I know about natural selection. The best fit animals live. Its not that hard of a concept to grasp.

The part im asking about is the "coded genes" you were talking about. How does it work? How does a gene tell a bird to make a nest? How does a bird know how and why to build a nest, with no prior experience?

I don't see how genes which happen to code for instinctual behavior should be any more or less baffling than genes which code for any other feature. Behavior is biologically based just like everything else, so genes that subtly affect brain chemistry will have behavioral consequences. Coding for a specific, precise behavior isn't any more wondrous than coding for the specific, precise shape of one's ears, intestinal track, or whatever. (Although you could say, and I would agree, that both are pretty extraordinary.)

DuB, I don't think he is questioning how it comes about, I think he is questioning the actual mechanism that leads from amino acids to complex behavior. I think you might agree that this is at least a little more mysterious than a shape arising from a code.

No, I wouldn't agree.

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Originally Posted by DuB

No, I wouldn't agree.

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Then maybe you could point us in the direction of some research that correlates instinctual behavior to certain gene combinations?

Here are some good places for you to start:
Wiki entry on behavioral genetics
Institute for Behavioral Genetics

Alright. Thats what I figured you'd do. Behavioral genetics is much more complicated than the genetics of physical attributes. We have been able to splice genes that alter the animal's appearance but we have not been able to decide behavior based on gene splicing.

More complicated? Maybe mathematically. (Some pretty hardcore statistics get thrown around by those guys.) But it's the same basic process. It's no more "mysterious" than the genetics of eye color, it just takes longer. It's only mysterious to the extent that behavior itself is mysterious--which it undoubtedly is. If behavior is what you guys are talking about, then say behavior, not the genetics underlying instinctual behavior, because that's just genetics.

I'm just going to have to continue to disagree with you. The behavior is complex, no doubt about it. But the specific combinations of genes that control specific behaviors are more varied than the specific combinations of genes that control specific physical attributes. That is pretty much the definition of 'more complex'. Not only that, but there is a much larger argument for the role that 'nurture' plays in behavior than there is for physical attributes. Physical attributes are affected by the environment in early development, but are pretty much set beyond that, whereas behavior is altered pretty significantly by environment throughout development and into adult life.

The variance in relationships between gene combinations and behavior and the shifting role of environment are mathematical problems, not conceptual ones, and as I admitted earlier, no one's denying that behavioral genetics is more mathematically complex than other fields of genetics. But the point is that both can be explained using the same set of scientific tools. You're not going to find any behavioral geneticists who think that the genes they study are any more mysterious than the genes that other geneticists study, because they're not.

I can't think of anything simple that isn't just as easily explained...

But consciousness is definitely my favorite concept that we haven't fully grasped yet.

Jfk

Why dogs kill themselves by jumping off the overtoun bridge in Scotland. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtoun_Bridge

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Originally Posted by Vampyre

Why dogs kill themselves by jumping off the overtoun bridge in Scotland. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtoun_Bridge

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Hahaha that's kind of morbidly hilarious.

A lot of the traits that we see in humans are also seen in some aspect in various other animals on the planet, so why aren't there any other known species with a spoken language?

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Originally Posted by Sandform

A lot of the traits that we see in humans are also seen in some aspect in various other animals on the planet, so why aren't there any other known species with a spoken language?

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Other animals have "spoken languages". Maybe not as complex as ours, but still generally the same thing

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Originally Posted by no-Name

Magnets, yo

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Seconded, crazy buggars.

and Dyatlov's Pass, but that's probably not simple...

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Originally Posted by Half/Dreaming

Other animals have "spoken languages". Maybe not as complex as ours, but still generally the same thing

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Which ones? I've never heard of non instinctual sounds being used by other animals as words.

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Originally Posted by Sandform

Which ones? I've never heard of non instinctual sounds being used by other animals as words.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)