Such mentalistic notions as “belief”, “hope”, “guilt”, “envy”, and so on arose many eons before any human dreamt of trying to ground them as recurrent, recognizable patterns in some physical substrate (the living brain, seen at some fine-grained level). This tendency to proceed slowly from intuitive understanding at a high level to scientific understanding at a low level is reminiscent of the fact that the abstract notion of a
And then, miraculously, it turned out that the chemistry of these four molecules was in a certain sense incidental — what mattered most of all when one thought about heredity was their newly revealed
At the heart of these information-manipulating processes lay a high abstraction called the “genetic code”, which mapped every possible three-nucleotide “word” (or “codon”), of which there are sixty-four, to one of twenty different molecules belonging to a totally unrelated chemical family (the amino acids). In other words, a profound understanding of genes and heredity was possible only if one was intimately familiar with a high-level meaning-mediating mapping. This should sound familiar.
Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs
If you wish to understand what goes on in a biological cell, you have to learn to think on this new informational level. Physics alone, although theoretically sufficient, just won’t cut it in terms of feasibility. Obviously the elementary particles take care of themselves, not caring at all about the informational levels of biomolecules (let alone about human perceptual categories or abstract beliefs or “I”-ness or patriotism or the burning desire, on the part of a particular large agglomeration of biomolecules, to compose a set of twenty-four preludes and fugues). Out of all these elementary particles doing their microscopic things, there emerge the macroscopic events that befall a bio-creature.
However, as I pointed out before, if you choose to focus on the particle level, then you cannot draw neat boundary lines separating an entity such as a cell or a hog from the rest of the world in which it resides. Notions like “cell” or “hog” aren’t relevant at that far lower level. The laws of particle physics don’t respect such notions as “hog”, “cell”, “gene”, or “genetic code”, or even the notion of “amino acid”. The laws of particle physics involve only particles, and larger macroscopic boundaries drawn for the convenience of thinking beings are no more relevant to them than votingprecinct boundaries are to butterflies. Electrons, photons, neutrinos, and so forth zip across such artificial boundaries without the least compunction.
If you go the particles route, then you are committed to doing so whole hog, which unfortunately means going way beyond the hog. It entails taking into account all the particles in all the members of the hog’s family, all the particles in the barn it lives in, in the mud it wallows in, in the farmer who feeds it, in the atmosphere it breathes, in the raindrops that fall on it, in the cumulo-nimbus clouds from which those drops fall, in the thunderclaps that make the hog’s eardrums reverberate, in the whole of the earth, in the whole of the sun, in the cosmic background radiation pervading the entire universe and stretching back in time to the Big Bang, and on and on. This is far too large a task for finite folks like us, and so we have to settle for a compromise, which is to look at things at a less inclusive, less detailed level, but (fortunately for us) a more insight-providing level, namely the informational level.