Chemistry Is Weird Brain Chemistry Is Weirder

Chemistry is really weird in the event that you stop and think about it. The basics from the ground up, those fundamental constituents, protons, neutrons and electrons, have the properties of charge, mass and spin and presumably exist in a good state at STP (standard temperature and pressure) or elsewhere. In other words, they have none of the properties, aside from mass, associated with any of the properties linked to the chemical elements (like being apart from a good, 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 not sure spin is a property which might be added or subtracted.

If it could be so arranged, but we'll make it so since this can be 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 color be? What would it not taste like? What would it not smell like? What would it not feel like? They are unanswered and probably unanswerable questions.

But assemble these fundamentals in a variety of combinations and all of a sudden you do get all the elements with their associated colours and tastes and so on. That is clearly a bit weird to begin with.

How many atoms of gold (for instance but any other element would do) need to get together or be assembled before you have the properties of gold? It surely 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 produce water that is wet and liquid at STP. Silicon is a solid at STP and Carbon is a solid at STP, and Oxygen is a gas at STP, but SKIN TIGHTENING AND is a gas at STP whereas Silicon Dioxide (sand) is 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, that is a solid shiny metal at STP, and volatile enough in a way that if you swallow any you will really do yourself a very serious mischief. However, Sodium Chloride is just pure table salt and a compound your system requires to survive and thrive!

Carbon is not a poison, Oxygen you can 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 will be straightforward, but chemistry can act in rather weird, even unpredictable ways. I mean, if you have an atom of Sodium and an atom of Chlorine, you get a straight-forward molecule of table salt (salty). For those who have two atoms of Hydrogen and something atom of Oxygen you get, in a straightforward fashion, a molecule of water at STP (wet). Combine Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen in a certain 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.

Just how do the properties of saltiness, wetness, sweetness, greenness, arise from those constituents that don't have 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 a lot of fundamental of most issues - what is reality?

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

Let's re-ask the question: How do properties (like charge, spin, mass or presumably being either a solid liquid or gas based on how you vary temperature and pressure) that matter (just like the fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms/elements, in turn 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 while the fundamental particles, the atoms/elements and molecules/compounds have specific properties, composites like humans usually do not. The human body for example is collectively a solid, a liquid and a gas. Actually I don't even tend to think of the 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 that your body plays host to. But that's an aside.

Speaking of the human body, the body (including the brain and then the mind) is one huge chemical processing factory. What goes into is not exactly like what comes out!

When it comes to the most of one's bodily bits and pieces, your system chemistry is pretty damn deterministic. You breathe in Oxygen and out will 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 anticipate 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 amount of expectation that the results of those tests will exhibit enough absolute certainty for the physician to then follow-up on, and you may 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 mind 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. Your 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 in turn triggers off a complete potful of internal responses, all triggered subsequently by the human brain chemistry. The chain reaction might start by all of a sudden feeling hungry (desire) then remembering (memory) that frozen chicken you have in the freezer and how it's been quite a while since 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 then you obtain an inspiration (creative thought) to stuff the chicken as you'll a turkey and forgo the Colonel's secret recipe, even though you get all teary-eyed (emotions) once you recall how your significant other proposed for you at your local KFC outlet following senior prom: all that from what's simply chemicals doing their chemical thing.

In the event that you recall something (as per the above example), presumably matter and energy are interacting since there's no such thing as a free lunch. You don't get something, in cases like this memory recall, for nothing - at no cost to you. But how can chemistry result in memory? Chemicals are products. Chemical reactions (those matter-energy interactions) produce new chemical products. Does that produce 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 personal computer - but instead physics (energy expenditure moving electrons around, etc.) Anyway, laptops (up to now anyway) don't possess those other nebulous human (and animal) traits like emotion, desire, morality, and creativity that 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 cannot accept the proposition that a molecule (however complex) can equal a memory or be considered 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 types of molecules available. It would appear that there has to be more to memory and creativity than just chemistry - it could appear so, but is it so?

How is it that you could 'train' the human brain chemistry to wake you up at a certain time - no alarm clock - also it doesn't matter what time you went to sleep and how many hours of sleep you truly had? How is it your brain chemistry likes one piece of music however, 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 type of animal - the list is endless. How do your brain chemistry remember X 1 day, but not the very next day? Presumably that creative thought you'd today might have been thought of yesterday but wasn't - same brain, same chemistry (apparently), different results. How does your chemistry-driven feelings for your better half change as time passes? How come the human brain chemistry can lead to 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 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.

Science librarian; retired.