About Biochemist Adrift
WHAT
Biochemist Adrift is a YouTube channel meshing science and Christianity. Discussions cover many involved scientific and theological concepts with the goal of keeping it lay-person friendly. You are encouraged to join in to share your thoughts and questions.
WHY
Church and secular fathers have skirmished over their differing worldviews since the Renaissance. Even today, the
leaders of both groups continue to disagree. They clarify their positions and grow more astute as they think through their arguments.
Unfortunately, little trickles down to their followers. The leaders teach “Beliefs 101” to their constituents, but few of them have the time or inclination to move to “Beliefs 102”, or beyond. They place their trust in the leader and follow with little education.
That is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, the chief and the tribe become more important to its members than their foundational beliefs and mission. If the leader travels an aberrant path, so follows the flock. Second, it baffles group members when they are challenged by other worldviews. A crisis arises when a Christian understands evolution or a scientist notices the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection.
Biochemist Adrift is presenting food for thought. Maybe with a few minutes of contemplation a day, you can feel secure in your faith. There are answers if you seek them.
WHO
Dr. Carl Clark is a retired biochemist
living in Augusta, Georgia, USA. He reads, writes and creates videos about science and Christianity. He also enjoys biking and playing golf with his wife.Carl received his PhD in biochemistry from Wayne State University. While employed for 15 years at Thermo-Fisher, he migrated from basic research to technology transfer. He subsequently used that skill as the director of technology transfer at the Medical College of Wisconsin for 5 years and Augusta University for 12 years.
Carl started attending a Baptist church with his parents in Michigan when less than a week old and grew up in that congregation. He went to Asbury University, a United Methodist school and is currently a member of a Church of God church.
WHERE
HOW
By the grace of God.
Mind Body Problem
The mind body problem deals with the relationship between the two and what makes you, YOU. Philosophers and scientists discuss whether neuron firing creates your thoughts or your thoughts cause neuron firing. Also they consider how consciousness arises out of molecules bouncing around in your head. Here we’ll look at an answer from the 10,000-foot level.
The Creator originally had an "ideal" plan for where He wanted Adam's ubits to go throughout his life. Remember, ubits are the energy states, motions, and information in all of Adam's molecular bits. Adam's mind was meant to simply ride along with those ubits and experience everything as it was perfectly charted out.
But Adam made a selfish "me-first" decision when he disobeyed God and exerted his own will instead. This affected all of his ubits, causing them to deviate from the otherwise perfect path they were on. Adam's ubits were not only altered internally but also interacted with environmental ebits (the energy states, movements, and information of all the molecular "environmental" bits around him). This threw a wrench into the Creator's master plan by introducing pain and suffering into the world.
Your ubits are constantly interfacing with your mind, providing mental inputs and receiving outputs. The inputs feed into your consciousness and allow your mind to ride along with the energy-bundled bits that make up your body. This is a mostly passive process where you simply observe what's happening as your body's ubits move through life.
Since your ubits contain the record of all your life experiences from the past and present, your mind can focus its attention on re-living past events or taking in immediate sensory experiences. For example, ubits that store old songs, stories, and memories from throughout your life can be reflected on and re-lived in your mind. Immediate experiences created by your current environmental interactions get fed into your consciousness through new ubit states. This real-time data comes from your five senses and gets presented at different intensity levels based on any perceived threats. A warm Caribbean breeze on your face is a much lower intensity input than the discomfort of stepping on sharp rocks.
Most of the time, your ubits are collecting and storing new experiential information as your consciousness passively rides along, observing the data stream. But your mind can also send outputs that alter the course of them.
These mental outputs can range from no effort at all to an extremely high level of concentration. When you're satisfied with how things are going, your mind just observes without changing anything. A medium level of mental effort goes into basic actions like walking, typing, or driving where you make small adjustments to keep your ubits on the intended path. But high-effort events like composing music or writing a book require an intense level of focus from your mind, dramatically reshaping the trajectories of your ubits.
The more effort and willpower you exert from your mind, the more you alter the future course of your ubits and life experiences compared to the path they were on. They aren't just lifeless computer bits – they respond to your conscious intentions and decisions.
The ubits themselves move and collide according to the Newtonian laws of physics, which determine their machine-like motions. But the quantum energy exchanges, or "photonic pulses”, between them are what allow your will and consciousness to reshape their future trajectories. By altering these energetic interactions between ubits, your mind is able to adjust and rewrite the physical path they were originally headed down.
So in a sense, your ubits start out on one predestined course based on Newtonian physics. But then your mind exerts its willpower, nudging them onto a new trajectory through subtle influences via photon exchanges on ubit energy states and momentum. With small mental outputs, your life stays roughly on the same path. But with greater exertion of effort, your mind can dramatically reroute the journey of your ubits and experiences in a whole new direction compared to their prior predetermined course.
It's an elegantly designed system where your mind has a limited but important level of control in reshaping the physical bit-like particles of your being. The interplay between your mind's intentions and willpower versus the deterministic motions of your bodily ubits creates a beautifully complex dance always unfolding into the future.
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