I'm going to add some additional reply to this thread, even though all the participants are not engaging with it.
But the reality is that nobody can explain how any chemical could do these things, even at a conceptual level! That is the point! Their actions seemingly go beyond the capabilities of Matter/Energy.
There is no a priori gaurantees to us that processes in nature should be conceptual-izable for human minds. By the mid 1940s, it was apparent that there are optimization problems whose solutions cannot be found on paper. These optimization/planning problems involve things as provincial as how much land a farmer should allocate to various crops, given the probability of seasonal climate. Mathematicians knew that the solution to such problems actually lies in 9-dimensional spaces. In fact, any real-world , "interesting" problems will go to much higher dimensions like 50 dimensions or more. No human will ever do this on paper armed with a hand calculator. These optimization problems can only be automated by computers. In the 1940s these sorts of discussions were practically "futurism" at the time, since computers were only owned by military departments and took up an entire room.
This is one of many examples where human conceptualization fails, because the human mind has no intuition of what is happening in 50-dimensional spaces. I would say most people can't conceptualize spaces above about 5 dimensions.

The animation above shows 3-dimensional "shadows" of a 4-dimensional cube.
Vis-a-vis laterlsuz's demands that biochemistry in cells must proceed by a manner that is "conceptual" in, otherwise we "must" face the possibility that matter and energy contain an ephemeral Control component : I will point at the best example I know of. Protein folding.
Protein FoldingA ribosome will translate a messenger RNA to a protein stand of amino acids, and at some particular point along the process, the ribosome will be activated to cut off the growing amino strand and let it flow freely in the cytoplasm.

What happens next is the strand of amino acids will fold up like origami paper into a final molecular shape. The process of amino acid chain --> to ---> protein is called protein folding.
The chain of amino acids will fold according to a collection of forces that include,
- electrostatic
- magnetic
- thermodynamic
- quantum mechanical
The cluster of various forces operating on the chain cannot be visualized, nor conceptualized by the human mind. Protein folding is not only something which must be automated by computers, but supercomputers are employed to do this calculation.
https://embnet.vital-it.ch/MD_tutorial/pages/MD.Part1.htmlOkay so now that we have the above material "under our belts" as it were. Let me turn to what laterlsuz is demanding that I do.
But the reality is that nobody can explain how any chemical could do these things, even at a conceptual level! That is the point! Their actions seemingly go beyond the capabilities of Matter/Energy.
as homologous re-combination, do genuinely seem to analyse a problem, search out relevant factors, and then determine and implement a complex solution out of a myriad of possible options.
{snip}
in a manner that to all intents and purposes analyses and then resolves complex issues. These are the ones which illustrate true control.
{snip}
the damaged DNA are re-built by copying the template, until they reach a point when the original breaks could be connected perfectly - without any additions or omissions in the amino acid sequence.... not one. The alignment in itself would cause any human to apply considerable logic, while the knowledge of when to stop and which strands of the DNA should be re-connected are potentially even more testing to our brains, let alone an unthinking chemical which can only attach to one of the 4 strands.
At a legal level, what is being demanded here is that I produce a conceptual description of homologous recombination to laterlsuz, in a way which she finds personally satisfying. And if I do not produce this conceptualization, then I am "forced" in some way to revise the laws of physics that operate on matter and energy. That is the challenge. That is the gauntlet thrown on the table.
My first response is that there is no a priori gaurantee that a physical description be conceptualizable by human minds. To my understanding, there are no forces or energies operating in Molecular Dynamics simulations that are in violation of the laws of physics.
(I cannot state this with any confidence, as I have never written the sourcecode for one of them. )My direct response to this exact -->
That is the point! Their actions seemingly go beyond the capabilities of Matter/Energy.Their actions
do not go beyond the capabilities of Matter/Energy. Their actions go beyond human conceptualization.
TelosA similar argument is that the processes of protein folding appear to be preparing the protein for a function much farther downstream in its lifespan, and even very much farther away from where the protein is originally created. Many of these proteins are eventually delivered to a different place in the body altogether by riding on red blood cells. How could the ribosome located at this part of the body "know" that it should prepare a protein for its use at its future delivery site?
That looks like purpose... that looks like teleology. In academic contexts, the professors refer to this as "telos" particularly those who ascribe to panpsychism.
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/telos/v-1I am certainly open to such arguments, particularly since philosophers tend to speak of things in terms of principles, rather than in physical detail. Example would be referring to "the spirit of the Law" without making any claim about the existence of spirits and ghosts (that you could hold seances with or what have you.)
A curmudgeon could say
"The spirit of the Law doesn't exist because spirits don't exist." Such a curmudgeon is missing the point or committing a category error.
This is an interesting direction to go in, but I worry it exceeds the scope of this thread.