Neuroscientists have failed miserably in trying to show or explain a neural basis for the human mind. But what about chemists? Their efforts to explain human mentality are just as fruitless as the efforts of neuroscientists. As Exhibit A to back up this claim, I refer you to a recent essay by emeritus chemistry professor Addy Pross, one entitled "The Chemical Roots of Consciousness." The essay by Pross fails completely to explain any such thing as a chemical basis for consciousness and mind. Pretty much all that Pross has to offer is a bag of fallacious tricks. Once you analyze which tricks were used, you may understand what a "there's no there there" situation we have, with nothing of any explanatory substance being offered, mainly just rhetorical sleight of hand.
Pross begins with a favorite trick of materialists when trying to explain minds. They have the big problem that there is nothing in the human brain or its chemistry that does anything to explain any of the main features or capabilities of the human mind. So what can you do when you're trying to show the human brain causes the human mind, but there's nothing in a brain that does anything to explain the main characteristics and capabilities of minds? You can try to change the subject into a discussion of something else. A great way to do that is to start talking about events that may have occurred eons ago. The advantage of that is that no one can ever disprove what you are claiming. So you can pretty much tell any kind of tall tales you want.
While taking this route, Pross states this:
"Evolution, as Darwin already sensed, is more about improving than inventing. Accordingly, the evolutionary process, from its outset, would have taken place along both physical and mental axes. The Chilean philosopher Humberto Maturana effectively made the same point with his comment some decades ago that ‘living as a process is a process of cognition’. Life’s mental aspect is as fundamental as its physical one. But if evolution started in chemistry, as argued above, it implies that the mental dimension would also have started in chemistry, say with minimal cognition"
No, according to the mainstream theory of evolution, life existed for billions of years before there was any cognition at all. Biologists do not maintain that evolution occurred along a "mental axis" from its beginning. They maintain that there was nothing like mind or consciousness for the first billions of years that life existed, on the grounds that during those billions of years there existed nothing but microbes. Pross has told us a groundless, silly story of microbes with minds, a story lacking any credibility.
Pross then proceeds to give us about four paragraphs discussing evolution, none of which has any relevance to explaining how there could be any such thing as a chemical basis for consciousness and minds. He then goes on to a ridiculous comparison, one comparing the bodies of organisms to water fountains. It's hard to think of a more ridiculous comparison. Human bodies are states of vast hierarchical organization. The water in water fountains has no organization at all. Very absurdly, Pross says, "Dynamically speaking, you have more in common with that water fountain than you might have thought!" Nonsense.
Pross tries to support this absurd claim by pointing out that the cells in human bodies are often replaced. It is true that structures in the human body such as cells and synapses are often replaced, with the turnover time varying very much from one type of structure to another. But such a reality does nothing to support any claim that the mind is the product of the brain. To the contrary, the claim that brains store memories is undermined and discredited by the reality of rapid protein turnover and the short lifetimes of synapses and dendritic spines. Someone in his seventies can remember very well the experiences he had and the things he learned sixty years ago, but that would not be possible if memories are stored in brains that have such rapid turnover of synapses, protein molecules and dendritic spines.
Perhaps realizing that his essay is mostly finished, and that he has done nothing to explain minds or consciousness, Pross boasts that he will do that, saying this:
"So let me now address the question at the heart of this essay: how, and why, did mind emerge from matter? Why consciousness? The answer to the ‘why’ question is relatively simple: nature, the ultimate technologist, ‘discovered’ that mind is functionally useful. Mind enables cognitive processes such as thinking, decision-making and memory. A mindful entity has survival advantages over a mindless one. Simply put, mind enhances persistence."
This is vacuous as an explanation. Saying "because it was useful" does nothing to explain how some hard-to-explain reality could have occurred in some way that should not have been possible. If you're wandering in the cold woods, and suddenly see that 100 fallen logs assemble themselves into a log cabin that makes a good place for you to spend the night, you do not explain such a marvel by saying it occurred "because it was useful."
We then have some groundless boasting by Pross, combined with a false definition. He states this:
"The ‘how’ question is the challenging one. A breakthrough event here was the novel preparation a little over a decade ago of a chemical DKS system, based on one of the most common reactions in organic chemistry. Such dynamic chemical systems were effectively unknown prior to that discovery. Indeed, in short order, many such chemical DKS systems were subsequently prepared. But what was striking about these unfamiliar chemical systems was that they exhibited unexpected life-like characteristics, in particular, rudimentary cognition. Cognition, a biological term, is traditionally defined as ‘the mechanisms by which living things acquire, process, store, and act on information from the environment’. Well, chemical DKS systems begin to do just that – they process, store, and act on information from the environment!"
The definition of "cognition" supplied is a false one. Here are some dictionary definitions of "cognition":
- "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." -- "Oxford Languages" definition that comes up first in a Google search for "definition of cognition"
- "cognitive mental processes" -- Merriam Webster dictionary
- "the use of conscious mental processes" -- Oxford Dictionary
- "the act or process of knowing; perception" -- Dictionary.com
- "the mental process involved in knowing, learning, and understanding things" -- Collins Dictionary
None of these definitions match the definition that Pross has given for cognition: "the mechanisms by which living things acquire, process, store, and act on information from the environment." That is not a correct definition of cognition. The use of give-you-the-wrong-ideas language by Pross continues, as he states this, talking about some mere chemical reaction:
"But the DKS system’s existential dependence on its environment has a surprising and unexpected consequence. It initiates a sense of ‘self’ for that system – there is ‘me’ and there’s the outside world on which ‘me’ depends."
This is baloney. Some mere chemical reaction would not have any kind of cognition, would not have any kind of sense of self, and would not have any sense of "me." The use of words in quotation marks in the quote above should alert you that you are being told something unbelievable. Similarly if someone says "the price for my 'car' is $2000," the use of the word "car" in quotation marks should alert you that you are being bamboozled. A search for the term "DKS system" on Google Scholar seems to indicate that no one is using such a term other than Pross and his co-authors.
There's nothing more of any substance in the article by Pross. Nothing has been done by him to show any chemical root of consciousness, nor has he done anything to show any relation between chemistry and mentality. His article has little more than tricks, digressions, groundless boasts, a false definition and untrue claims.
In general, chemists have very low credibility when they speak on grand questions of origins. We must rate them as having very low credibility about such topics because of the long history of chemists misleading us about origin-of-life research, claiming that they were making progress when no real progress was being made. Such misleading language occurred very massively between 1950 and 2024.
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How to Make It Sound Like You Understand Some
Great Origin Mystery Vastly Beyond Your Understanding,
a Mystery a Thousand Miles Over Your Head
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(1) Refer to the mystery using super-diminutive language,
which makes it sound a billion times simpler than it is.
(2) Refer to some obscure reality or speculation that almost no one understands very well.
(3) Claim that so obscure a reality or speculation "sheds light" or "helps clarify" or "helps demystify" the huge mystery you don't understand, and that you are therefore "beginning to understand" the mystery.
Example #1:
(1) Refer to the Big Bang origin of the universe, describing it using super-diminutive language as "just some density reduction," making it sound a billion times simpler.
(2) Mention the very obscure speculation of "cosmic inflation," a theory existing in hundreds of forms, a theory which almost no one understands very well.
(3) Claim that this "cosmic inflation" speculation "sheds light" on the origin of the universe, or "helps demystify" it or "helps clarify" it, and that you are therefore "beginning to understand" the mystery.
Example #2:
(1) Refer to the problem of how human minds and memory and human mental experiences and human mental capabilities arise, referring to this in super-diminutive language as a mere "problem of consciousness," which makes the problem sound a billion times simpler.
(2) Refer to some obscure little-understood physical reality such as "quantum entanglement" or maybe some little-understood chemistry speculation.
(3) Claim that whatever little-understood physical reality you have chosen "sheds light" on the origin of minds or "helps demystify" or "helps clarify" such origins.
Below is someone who might use such shady explanatory tactics:
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