Cis regulatory mechanisms, DNA, neurons and the brain's operation

For quite a while, scientists said that DNA functions as information. More recently, however, this claim has been marginalized. There are certainly patches of DNA that encode for protein molecules in a digital manner. In a manner that reminds me of the way a computer processes 1s and 0s, except, I guess, there are four basic bits of information rather than just two. That sounds like information to me. But more recently, scientists have been talking about patches of DNA consisting not of coding for proteins, but of instructions on how to combine the proteins coded for. The latter sort of DNA patches are call CIS regulatory mechanisms.

Okay, I have only a primitive grasp of all of this, but it seems to mee that the CIS regulatory areas are to protein coding patches like the ingredients of a cookbook recipe are to the instructions about whether to add those ingredients in a bowl or whether they should be chopped, julienned, boiled, baked or the like.

Furthermore, the cis regulatory areas cojoin with already constructed proteins, upon which they return to the nucleus to cut, splice and combine protein patches. Further-furthermore, the way they do this is a function NOT of the informational properties that one associates with the DNA in the protein-encoding patches: rather, the cis-regulatory genes pony up to aforementioned proteins to form a new complex molecue whose operation is a function of the physical rather than the information properties of the complex thus formed.

If my metaphor is more correct than not, then the following proposal comes to mind. If someone proposed a long time ago that 100% of the functional DNA works by coding directly for proteins, that person's thesis would count as having been falsified by the discovery of cis-regulatory regions. It was a testable hypothesis and upon being tested it was found to be false (or, if you prefer, it was marginalized by a new discovery).

What about the claim that neurons operate in a digital manner? What if some neurons sometimes do function in this way sometimes, but others do not? That is, what if the marginalization spoken of earlier were discovered to apply to neurons in the brain as well (as opposed to neurons in the gut, which guide digestion and are not yet associated with cognition)? This is a different sort of question, for cis-regulatory DNA areas were discovered, I believe, after it was determined that genes code for proteins. I am not aware of neurons' being shown to operate in an digital rather than analog manner.

Furthermore, there is nothing similar to the regulation of coding going on in brains, unless, I guess, one thinks of hormones as doing this. Come to think of it, there are different types of neurotransmitters that are transmitted and received by different gateways (my non-technical term for those thingies)-- that seems to amount to a difference that defies digitization. Hmmmn.

Back to the question of whether ANY neurons operate in a manner that could be characterized as information processing. Lots of folks talk as if it must obviously be so but I don't think any of them have even imagined a way of testing this assumption. But let's suppose that some neurons are shown to operate this way: granting this, might we still reasonably suspect that some other neurons do not? That is, might there be an analogy between neurons and genes: might there be neurons operating upon other neurons in a way that varies according to the physical rather than informational properties of the said neurons?

If it were discovered that some neurons operate in an "analog" rather than "digital" manner, then wouldn't that discovery undermine the claim that brains are digital computers? And wouldn't that undermining work conversely as well: wouldn't the claim that digital computers can think?

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ]. Aquinas thus holds that it was not all death that entered the world through man's sin, but human death.

The Human Question

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