The creative power

Hoseki Shinichi Hisamatsu writes in Die Fülle des Nichts / The Plenitude of Nothing / Η πληρότητα του μηδενός, p. 52:

If one says that man is separate from the living beings in that he can create tools, he emphasizes the creative element as a main feature of man. From the very beginning human culture is based on the creative power of man, and this creative force is developing with the progress of mankind in a degree that almost knows no boundaries. The progress of science itself since the last century is proof enough for its extent. The creative power of man must be called gigantic, and yet from another point of view is fairly insignificant. While a person can gain from plant fibers, manufacture them into yarn and thread and make clothes from them, he cannot create plants. He does not succeed to produce even a unicellular micro-organism. Moreover if it is about the whole creation, he must admit his complete inability. Man can only transform one thing to another, but he can not create anything original. Whatever he may produce, it always contains a core, which he is unable to create. So man's creative force can not be originally absolute. In Christianity God's creative force is regarded as absolute. So it is said that God had made the heaven and earth, plants and people and the whole world out of nothing. Before God's creation there was nothing; and only what is created out of nothing can be called real creation.

Hisamatsu's words are valid even in the light of this latest breakthrough. In the same magazine, in a column titled "Synthetic Biology Breakthrough: Your Questions Answered", Mark Bedau, a philosopher and scientist at Reed College in Portland,Oregon, and editor of the scientific journal "Artificial Life", writes:

There are a couple of reasons why this achievement should not be called the creation of “new” life. First, the form of life that was created was not new. What was essentially done was the re-creation of an existing bacterial form of life, except that it was given a prosthetic genome (synthesized in the laboratory), and except that the genome was put into the cytoplasm of a slightly different species.

...

Now, even if the synthetic genome was substantially different from any existing form of life, one might still object to calling this the creation of new life, because the synthetic cell was made by modifying an existing form of life. Almost all of the material in the synthetic cell comes from a previously existing form of life; only the genome is synthesized. In this respect, one might say that a synthetic cell qualifies as “new” life only if the whole cell is synthesized. A handful of research teams around the globe are working on trying to create fully synthetic cells (sometimes called “protocells") using materials obtained solely from a chemical supply company. Even a living protocell would still not qualify as creation from nothing, of course, since it would be created from pre-existing materials.

The last phrase is in accord with what we read in Hisamatsu:

... only what is created out of nothing can be called real creation.

Now, concerning the notion of creation as something coming out of nothing, the Presocratic Parmenides says (VIII, 7-8):

Nor will I allow you to say nor yet to conceive that it was out of what is not; for it is neither sayable nor conceivable

Science regards this impossibility as a challenge, ignoring that it is running upon a wall. (This point has been elaborated by Hanspeter Padrutt in his book Und sie bewegt sich doch nicht.)

What Craig Venter postulates as a "giant philosophical change" is, in this view, a huge bubble.

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What is life?

This question, written on the backboard, was our introduction in Biology in the high school. What I did not see at that time was that the question itself belongs to life, but pretends that it is moving outside life and seeks to explore it. Biology, the logos about bios=life, can never question its own foundation. It is like an animal chasing its own tail.

Heidegger, Wissenschaft und Besinnung [Science and Contemplation], 59f:

Die Physik kann als Physik über die Physik keine Aussagen machen. Alle Aussagen der Physik sprechen physikalisch. Die Physik selbst ist kein möglicher Gegenstand eines physikalischen Experimentes. Dasselbe gilt von der Philologie. Als Theorie der Sprache und Literatur ist sie niemals ein möglicher Gegenstand philologischer Betrachtung. Das Gesagte gilt für jede Wissen­schaft.

Indessen könnte sich ein Einwand melden. Die Historie hat als Wissenschaft gleich allen übrigen Wissenschaften eine Geschichte.

Also kann die Geschichtswissenschaft sich selber im Sinne ihrer Thematik und Methode betrachten. Gewiß. Durch solche Betrachtung erfaßt die Historie die Geschichte der Wissenschaft, die sie ist. Allein, die Historie erfaßt dadurch niemals ihr Wesen als Historie, d.h. als Wissenschaft. Will man über die Mathematik als Theorie etwas aussagen, dann muß man das Gegenstandsgebiet der Mathematik und ihre Vorstellungsweise verlassen. Man kann nie durch eine mathematische Berechnung ausmachen, was die Mathematik selbst ist. Es bleibt dabei: die Wissenschaften sind außerstande, mit den Mitteln ihrer Theorie und durch die Verfahrensweisen der Theorie jemals sich selber als Wissenschaften vorzustellen.

Wenn der Wissenschaft versagt bleibt, überhaupt auf das eige­ne Wesen wissenschaftlich einzugehen, dann vermögen es die Wissenschaften vollends nicht, auf das in ihrem Wesen waltende Unumgängliche zuzugehen.

So zeigt sich etwas Erregendes. Das in den Wissenschaften jeweils Unumgängliche: die Natur, der Mensch, die Geschichte, die Sprache, ist als dieses Unumgängliche für die Wissenschaften und durch sie unzugänglich.

Heidegger calls the wall, upon which science is running, das unzugänglich Unumgängliche, the inaccessible-inevitable. According to Heidegger it is not nothing, but points to the essence of science, which is accessible to another mode of thinking than the scientific one.

If the essence of science lied in creation, that would be for Parmenides nonsense, because science, when it seeks to create, tries to bring forth something "out of what is not". But this is "neither sayable nor conceivable".

In this direction moves Wittgenstein: For him the question "What is life?" would be a pseudo-question.

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Wittgenstein

The Venter group put in the DNA they constructed watermarks, "to absolutely make clear that the DNA was synthetic". There they engraved the names of "46 different authors and key contributors to getting the project to this stage", their website address and, as they "tried to deal with both the philosophical and the technical side", three "philosophical" remarks. It is interesting that in contrast to the technical side, which is an original work, the philosophical remarks are all quotes. In Craig Venter's words:

So the first is, "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life." It's a James Joyce quote. The second quotation is, "See things, not as they are, but as they might be." So it's a quote from the "American Prometheus" book on Robert Oppenheimer. And the last one is a Richard Feynman quote. "What I cannot build, I cannot understand."

Maybe the first two owe their validity to the last one: I understand what I can build. Building can have two aspects at least: It is a figure of creation, which I have already indicated. Building is also a paradigm for procedure, and "life" is understood accordingly as a process. Wittgenstein's note in Philosophical Investigations, &308 applies not only to mental processes, but to scientific thinking in general:

How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states ... arise? - The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them - we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)

I recall the first quotation: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph..." It ends triumphal! Is it an end? No. The words of Jennifer Doudna, biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, are only representative of a common finding among scientists:

It seems like we're climbing a mountain that keeps getting higher and higher, ... The more we know, the more we realize there is to know

Why that? Wittgenstein has put it this way: The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. The notion of things having the nature of processes is a belief. Science is progressing following just a belief. Facts do not confirm this belief. Science moves on blindly believing that at the end final answers will be achieved. Trust in science has the trait of a delusion, meaning of not taking reality into full account, drifting away from reality. It is formulated as a credo in the second quotation: "See things, not as they are, but as they might be." The more one keeps moving under its guidance, the more one gets trapped in an in-pass. The bubble will sometime burst.

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The scientific delusion

Once the greek poet Giorgos Seferis made a statement referring to the greek dictatorship. His words are valid for the scientific delusion, too:

The beginning may seem easy, yet tragedy waits at the end inescapably. This end's drama is torturing us, consciously or unconsciously, as in Aischylo's old choirs.

Wittgenstein:

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.