Notes

Chemistry Is Weird, Brain Chemistry Is Weirder
Chemistry is really weird if you stop and think about it. The basics from the bottom up, those fundamental constituents, protons, neutrons and electrons, have the properties of charge, mass and spin and presumably exist in a solid state at STP (standard temperature and pressure) or otherwise. In other words, they will have none of the properties, aside from mass, associated with the properties linked to the chemical elements (like being other than a solid, liquid or gas at STP (standard temperature and pressure); having colour;

Given those elementary particles, if you start to pile them up, well charge plus charge equals a larger or lesser overall charge; mass plus mass equals more mass; spin plus spin - well I'm uncertain spin is a property that may be added or subtracted.

If maybe it's so arranged, but we'll ensure it is so since this is a thought experiment, a baseball-sized collection of electrons or neutrons or protons at STP would obviously have mass, and a lot of electric charge regarding protons and electrons. But what would the color be? What would it not taste like? What would it smell like? What would it not feel like? They are unanswered and probably unanswerable questions.

But assemble these fundamentals in various combinations and all of a sudden you do get all the elements making use of their associated colours and tastes and so forth. That's a bit weird to begin with.

Just how many atoms of gold (for example but any element would do) need to get together or be assembled before you have the properties of gold? It really has to be more than one atom worth surely.

But even weirder is when you start to combine the many elements with associated properties into molecules which have properties totally unlike the parent elements. You have hydrogen and oxygen as dry gases at STP that make water which is wet and liquid at STP. Silicon is a solid at STP and Carbon is a solid at STP, and Oxygen is really a gas at STP, but SKIN TIGHTENING AND is really a gas at STP whereas Silicon Dioxide (sand) is really a solid at STP, yet Carbon and Silicon are like mother and daughter with regards to similarity. Then you have Chlorine, a poisonous yellow gas at STP, and Sodium, which is a solid shiny metal at STP, and volatile enough in a way that if you swallow any you will really do yourself an extremely serious mischief. However, Sodium Chloride is merely pure table salt and a compound the body requires to survive and thrive!

Carbon is not a poison, Oxygen you can breathe, but you'd die in a pure Carbon Dioxide environment, as well as in a pure Carbon Monoxide environment.

All of chemistry is deterministic and predictable, both inorganic and organic, with the apparent exception of brain chemistry, which I'll reach shortly.

You'd think chemistry would be straightforward, but chemistry can act in rather weird, even unpredictable ways. After all, assuming you have an atom of Sodium and an atom of Chlorine, you obtain a straight-forward molecule of table salt (salty). For those who have two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen you obtain, in an easy fashion, a molecule of water at STP (wet). Combine Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen in a particular way and you get sugar (sweet). Another arrangement can provide you chlorophyll (green).

Now how is this weird? Well, the essential constituents, protons, electrons and neutrons aren't salty, wet, sweet or green. Sodium and Chlorine atoms aren't salty; table salt is salty. Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren't wet at STP; water is wet at STP. Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms aren't sweet; sugar is sweet. The constituent atoms comprising the chlorophyll molecule (Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Magnesium) aren't green; chlorophyll is green.

Just how do the properties of saltiness, wetness, sweetness, greenness, arise from those constituents that don't possess those properties? It's not quite as strange as getting something from the ground upwards or something happening for no reason at all, but still IMHO something's screwy somewhere. And enigmas like all of these lead back to that a lot of fundamental of all issues - what's reality?

Or take another case - Carbon. You'd think Carbon is Carbon is Carbon, but no. Carbon could be charcoal or coal; Carbon can be graphite; Carbon could be a diamond. The many properties of the substances, all just Carbon, drastically differ. Chemistry is definitely weird.

Let's re-ask the question: Just how do properties (like charge, spin, mass or presumably being either a solid liquid or gas depending on how you vary temperature and pressure) that matter (just like the fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms/elements, subsequently the inspiration of molecules/compounds) has, morph into properties that only some forms of matter have, like sweetness, transparentness, hardness, colour, malleability, etc. or properties drastically not the same as their constituents - like two gases creating a liquid.

I'll just note here that as the fundamental particles, the atoms/elements and molecules/compounds have specific properties, composites like humans do not. The human body for instance is collectively a good, a liquid and a gas. Actually I don't even have a tendency to think of the human body as an organism but rather a colony composed of billions of micro-organisms, both the cells that produce you up as well as those other microbes your body plays host to. But that's an aside.

Speaking of the body, the body (like the brain and then the mind) is one huge chemical processing factory. What goes in is not the same as what comes out!

With regards to the most of your bodily equipment, the body chemistry is pretty damn deterministic. You breathe Oxygen and out will come Carbon Dioxide. In the event that you eat X today, your digestive juices process it just as as once you ate X the week before. You expect your liver chemistry to detoxify those beers you had with the boys yesterday evening. If you take medication, whether it's prescription or self prescribed, you depend on the fact that X + Y = Z yesterday, today and tomorrow. If your physician prescribes various blood and/or urine tests, there's an exceptionally high degree of expectation that the results of those tests will exhibit enough absolute certainty for the doctor to then follow-up on, and you may trust that follow-up.

The brain is just a soup vat of chemicals, organic chemicals and bio-chemicals, but chemicals all the same. Therefore anything and everything rooted within the confines of the brain is rooted in chemistry.

But it is completely amazing what chemistry can accomplish when it's part and parcel of one's brain chemistry. Things don't appear quite as deterministic then. The human brain chemistry holds sway over your sensory inputs, memory, desires, emotions, creativity, etc. and we know that those types of attributes in humans can be pretty unpredictable.

Still, perhaps one afternoon you smell (sensory input) your next door neighbour's southern fried chicken cooking which in turn triggers off a whole potful of internal responses, all triggered subsequently by the human brain chemistry. The chain reaction might start off by all of a sudden feeling hungry (desire) then remembering (memory) that frozen chicken you have in the freezer and how it has been quite a while since you had an excellent finger-lickin' chicken dinner but you'll need to pop into the corner store to get some of these 57 herbs and spices. But you obtain an inspiration (creative thought) to stuff the chicken as you would a turkey and forgo the Colonel's secret recipe, while you get all teary-eyed (emotions) when you recall how your spouse proposed for you at your local KFC outlet following a senior prom: all that from what's basically just chemicals doing their chemical thing.

In the event that you recall something (according to the aforementioned example), presumably matter and energy are interacting since there is no such thing as a free lunch. You do not get something, in this case memory recall, for nothing - at no cost to you. But how can chemistry bring about memory? Chemicals are products. Chemical reactions (those matter-energy interactions) produce new chemical products. Does that produce memory something (and ditto all those other nebulous mental 'products' like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity)? Computer memory recall isn't chemistry needless to say - there aren't any chemical reactions going on in your PC - but instead physics (energy expenditure moving electrons around, etc.) Anyway, laptops (up to now anyway) don't have those other nebulous human (and animal) traits like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity which are presumably chemistry driven. But there is more to the anomalies of brain chemistry that just equating a memory or creativity with a chemical, if in fact the two could be equated at all.

Actually I can't accept the proposition that a molecule (however complex) can equal a memory or be a new creative idea. There must be trillions and trillions of unique memories and creative thoughts (that probably become memories) stored within the brains of the collective of human and animal societies, yet that number would vastly outnumber the possible combos of forms of molecules available. Any difficulty . there has to be more to memory and creativity than simply chemistry - it could appear so, but is it so?

How is it that you can 'train' the human brain chemistry to wake you up at a certain time - no alarm clock - also it doesn't matter what time you visited sleep and just how many hours of sleep you truly had? How is it that your brain chemistry likes one little bit of music but not another piece, or the best way to turnoff liking a particular piece of music that was previously your favourite, or kind of food, or kind of animal - the list is endless. How can the human brain chemistry remember X 1 day, but not the very next day? Presumably that creative thought you had today might have been thought of yesterday but wasn't - same brain, same chemistry (apparently), different results. So how exactly does your chemistry-driven feelings for your better half change over time? How come the human brain chemistry can result in sexual arousal from viewing one image but not from another image? And it's really not just human brain chemistry either. Given seemingly identical circumstances, my cats will not of necessity perform identical actions. I'm sure there is a logical chemically driven deterministic explanation, except that it's all so complex and interwoven that it gives more the looks of indeterminacy and free will. If 99.99% of chemistry is deterministic, I'm sure brain chemistry will prove to be also.

Science librarian; retired.
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