Notes

Chemistry Is Weird, Brain Chemistry Is Weirder
Chemistry is actually 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 elsewhere. In other words, they will have none of the properties, apart from mass, associated with the properties linked to the chemical elements (like being other than a good, liquid or gas at STP (standard temperature and pressure); having colour;

Given those elementary particles, in the event that you start to pile them up, well charge plus charge equals a greater or lesser overall charge; mass plus mass equals more mass; spin plus spin - well I'm not sure spin is really a property that could be added or subtracted.

If maybe it's so arranged, but we'll make it so since this is a thought experiment, a baseball-sized assortment of electrons or neutrons or protons at STP would obviously have mass, and lots of electric charge in the case of protons and electrons. But what would the colour be? What would it not taste like? What would it smell like? What would it not feel like? These 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 is clearly a bit weird to begin with.

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 several atom worth surely.

But even weirder is when you begin to combine the various elements with associated properties into molecules that have properties totally unlike the parent elements. You have hydrogen and oxygen as dry gases at STP that produce water that is wet and liquid at STP. Silicon is really 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 a solid at STP, yet Carbon and Silicon are like mother and daughter when it comes to similarity. Then you have Chlorine, a poisonous yellow gas at STP, and Sodium, that is a solid shiny metal at STP, and volatile enough such that in the event that you swallow any you'll really do yourself a very 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 it is possible to breathe, but you'd die in a pure SKIN TIGHTENING AND environment, or even 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, if you have an atom of Sodium and an atom of Chlorine, you obtain a straight-forward molecule of table salt (salty). When you have two atoms of Hydrogen and something 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 give you chlorophyll (green).

Now how is this weird? Well, the basic 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.

So how do the properties of saltiness, wetness, sweetness, greenness, arise from those constituents that don't possess those properties? It isn't 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 these all lead back to that most fundamental of most issues - what's reality?

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

Let's re-ask the question: Just how do properties (like charge, spin, mass or presumably being the solid liquid or gas depending on the way you vary temperature and pressure) that all matter (like the fundamental particles, the inspiration of atoms/elements, in turn the building blocks of molecules/compounds) has, morph into properties that only some kinds of matter have, like sweetness, transparentness, hardness, colour, malleability, etc. or properties drastically different from their constituents - like two gases making a liquid.

I'll just note here that while the fundamental particles, the atoms/elements and molecules/compounds have specific properties, composites like humans usually 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 our body as an organism but rather a colony composed of billions of micro-organisms, both cells that produce you up in addition to all those other microbes that your body plays host to. But that's an aside.

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

In terms of the most of one's bodily equipment, your body chemistry is pretty damn deterministic. You breathe in Oxygen and out should come Carbon Dioxide. In the event that you eat X today, your digestive juices process it just as as when 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 count on the fact that X + Y = Z yesterday, today and tomorrow. If your physician prescribes various blood and/or urine tests, there's an extremely high amount of expectation that the results of those tests will exhibit enough absolute certainty for the physician to then follow-up on, and you will have confidence in that follow-up.

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

But it is absolutely amazing what chemistry can accomplish when it is 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 sorts of attributes in humans could be pretty unpredictable.

Still, perhaps one afternoon you smell (sensory input) your next door neighbour's southern fried chicken cooking which then triggers off a complete potful of internal responses, all triggered subsequently by your 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 because you had an excellent finger-lickin' chicken dinner but you will need to pop into the corner store to pick up some of these 57 herbs and spices. But you get an inspiration (creative thought) to stuff the chicken as you'll a turkey and forgo the Colonel's secret recipe, while you get all teary-eyed (emotions) once you recall how your significant other proposed to you at your neighborhood KFC outlet following a senior prom: all that from what's simply chemicals doing their chemical thing.

If you recall something (according to the above example), presumably matter and energy are interacting since there's no such thing as a free of charge lunch. You don't get something, in cases like this memory recall, for nothing - at no cost to you. But how do chemistry bring about memory? Chemicals are products. Chemical reactions (those matter-energy interactions) produce new chemical products. Does that make memory something (and ditto those other nebulous mental 'products' like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity)? Computer memory recall isn't chemistry of course - 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's more to the anomalies of brain chemistry that just equating a memory or creativity with a chemical, if actually 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 considered a new creative idea. There has to 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. It would appear that there needs to be more to memory and creativity than just chemistry - it would appear so, but is it so?

How is it that you may 'train' the human brain chemistry to wake you up at a certain time - no noisy alarms - and it doesn't matter what time you went to sleep and how many hours of sleep you truly had? How could it be that your brain chemistry likes one little bit of music however, not another piece, or ways 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 one day, but not the very next day? Presumably that creative thought you'd today might have been considered yesterday but wasn't - same brain, same chemistry (apparently), different results. How does your chemistry-driven feelings for your better half change over time? How come your brain chemistry can lead to sexual arousal from viewing one image however, not from another image? And it's really not just human brain chemistry either. Given seemingly identical circumstances, my cats will not necessarily perform identical actions. I'm sure you will find a logical chemically driven deterministic explanation, except that it is all so complex and interwoven that it gives more the appearance of indeterminacy and free will. If 99.99% of chemistry is deterministic, I'm sure brain chemistry will end up being also.

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