All Things Are Full of Gods, page 37
For instance, it occurs to me that the most revealingly inept attempt at a demonstration of the gradualist view ever recorded has to be that computer program that Richard Dawkins devised many years ago, meant to show how a particular phrase with seemingly intelligible intentional content—in that case, Hamlet’s “Methinks it is like a weasel”—could be produced by a succession of supposedly random, non-intentional mutations starting from a mere assemblage of uncoordinated letters. That’s of course impossible, except perhaps as a random coalescence within an infinite series of iterations, which would dissolve again in an instant because it has no intrinsic principle of persistence—no actual semeiotic unity—that would prevent it from passing by like the shadow of a cloud—a weasel-shaped cloud, if you like. But, within the strictly quarantined virtual space of the program, Dawkins had written Hamlet’s phrase directly into the coding as a target to be reached, and had set in place a prospective protocol for retaining or eliminating mutations with respect to that target.
HERMES: So, essentially, he’d programmed the process with a final and a formal cause.
PSYCHE: Exactly. He was trying to show that a full semantics could emerge out of a bare syntax, so to speak, and yet he very nearly demonstrated the reverse: that a syntax has no actuality except as fashioned in the service of a prior semantics. All he’d accomplished was a primitive simulation of an Aristotelian picture of the genesis of intelligible order, not the emergence of order out of sheer “noise”—to use the “informatic” term. He’d induced a negentropic result out of an apparently entropic basis through the secret imposition of a prior negentropic grammar: formal constraints and a teleology, that is. It’s amusing, of course, but what’s genuinely fascinating about the experiment is that, had he intended it as a demonstration of something like an Aristotelian structure of causation, it could be accounted a rousing success, at least as providing a suggestive demonstration of how a fairly rapid and complex evolutionary process—which is more in keeping with the scientific discoveries of the last eight decades or so than is strict Neo-Darwinism—might be simulated by a governing intentional structure, without any need of direct interference in the discrete steps of the process. The same is true too of more sophisticated computer programs for generating, say, the patterns of spider webs—which still must start from a concept of what webs are and do—or programs for cellular automata such as John Conway’s “Game of Life”: all of them are set within sealed virtual environments and then governed by sets of already highly informed functions, and are invested with some general prior purpose for directing the progress of cumulative selection, all of which—just to note the obvious—must be imposed upon the computer’s operations by a programmer. Needless to say, the gigantic question of how life transcribes itself semeiotically in the genome and then, in the next phenotypic generation, reads itself out from the genome again is neatly avoided by a process that already possesses encoded information as its basis. All of which just goes to show that, where a great deal of “information” is set free within a controlled system, highly informed consequences follow. None of it, though, vindicates a gradualist picture of the origin or structure of life.
Something similar might be said, it seems to me, about attempts to create life from chemical scratch in laboratories—which, I confidently predict, will never come about. I can imagine, however—not foresee, but merely vaguely imagine, in an entirely fantastic key—a future biotic technology so advanced that scientists could take the basic genetic templates of living organisms as models and reconstruct them, and then maybe construct organic cells from basic chemical ingredients, and perhaps even somehow fabricate genomes from organic matter and so forth and so on, until they had built an organism. If they were to do so, however, that would give us no cause to believe that life could be the spontaneous effect of unstructured chemical reactions, merely occurring in a state “far from equilibrium”; we would still have only a demonstration of how formal and final causality produce integrated structures.
HEPHAISTOS: You’re not going to suggest we abandon the inductive method altogether and simply retreat to Aristotelian science again?
PSYCHE: Do pay attention, Phaesty. Pure induction may be the ideal of modern method, but the sciences can only ever approximate that ideal in practice. It’s more a governing piety than an exact discipline. I’ve also noted, however, that Aristotelian “aetiology” was never a physical science in the modern sense and shouldn’t be mistaken for one. So no, I want the sciences to use whatever methods are productive, but also to acknowledge that the method always constrains the results. The investigative practices of the early modern sciences, when they function solely as regulative instruments for isolating discrete areas of investigation from every larger interpretive context, definitely allow for an enormous range of discoveries and advances in predictive power on the parts of researchers. After all, Newtonian physics suffices for many calculations, even if it only approximates the accuracy of quantum calculations; so too the mechanical fiction can deliver useful results despite its inability accurately to reflect the laws of life. But this usefulness is entirely dependent on the humility, tentativeness, and ascetical narrowness with which, as a matter of simple practical necessity, those methods are applied. When they cease to be regarded as mere useful fictions, conveniently simplifying reality and authorizing only very limited conjectures, and are instead permitted to metastasize into a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality, they can yield nothing but ridiculous category errors. At that point, the sheer wanton grandness of the ambitions they prompt renders them impotent. The moral, I suppose, is that a local falsehood, prudently employed, can often grant us knowledge of certain universal truths, but that a universal falsehood can only blind us to all local truths. One can come to a better pragmatic understanding of this or that particular reality by treating it “as if” it were something else. But, when that “as if” becomes a general theoretical judgment about reality as a whole, all particular results become indifferent masks of a single speculative paradigm, and anything that might not naturally fit into the picture thus produced either becomes invisible or is distorted beyond recognition. It may be very helpful, for instance, to investigate specific organic functions found in nature as though they were mere machine functions; but if one forgets the difference between organisms and machines, then one has lost the ability properly to see the limits of one’s knowledge. And, without an appreciation of those limits, one can’t even know what it is that one truly knows. So all that I want the culture of the sciences to abandon is a metaphysical orthodoxy that’s certainly inadequate as a total model of the structure of life and consciousness. So long as those arid dogmas still subtly restrain the scientific imagination, certain empirical realities are likely to remain invisible and certain enlightening questions are likely to remain unasked. Happily, there are signs that a paradigm-shift may already be underway in the life-sciences.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, maybe, but let’s not exaggerate. I mean, do you truly believe we can discern real intentionality at every level of cosmic existence?
PSYCHE: I certainly think the life-sciences find it at every level of living things; and I think the capacity of material things for organism—for life and mind—is written into the very deepest structures of the physical order, if only because of my by now well-established aversion to all narratives of strong emergence. And then there are those elephants. . . .
HEPHAISTOS: [His brow furrowing:] Elephants?
II
Spirit in Nature
PSYCHE: You know, one thing that many religious and scientistic fundamentalists tend to have in common is a keen desire to place hard limits on the degree to which mind can be found in nature. The former, in order to preserve what they consider a proper sense of human exceptionalism, claim that most of the higher mental functions are unique to humankind among terrestrial organisms, and that reason, a rich emotional inner life, linguistic capacities, moral intuitions, culture, and countless other aspects of mental life belong solely to the “rational soul” infused only into homo sapiens. The latter also, however, so as to preserve what they regard as a proper sense of the mechanistic and mindless constitution of the physical order, claim that those same functions appeared only very late in evolutionary history and that they remain excruciatingly rare within the fabric of nature, and are perhaps for that reason uniquely human. And yet, when we look at the living world—animal and vegetal, at least, both at the level of the organism and at the level of its cellular processes—what we actually find look much more like differences of degree, varying intensities of reason and intention, as well as pervasive evidence of cognition and even of consciousness. I utterly despise the tendency to deny the plain evidence of an inner life in all organic beings, not just humans. In fact, let’s add it to my index of errors and call it the exceptionalist fallacy: that is, the notion that the question of mind concerns only humans and gods and angels and the like, but not other forms of life. The realm of the fully mental doesn’t vanish at the boundary between human and brute creation. As I’ve said, I’m no doctrinaire Aristotelian. I deny even that language is unique to humankind and “higher” beings. We know of many other terrestrial animals who clearly employ methods of reasoning, and even of abstract thought, and that communicate in a manner that only foolish prejudice prevents us from recognizing as in some sense linguistic and semeiotic; and we know that animals possess inner lives, emotions, susceptibility to pain and sorrow, pleasure and joy. The evidence of cognitive research among various species is incontestable. They’re capable of love or resentment too, as well as hope and despair. Did you know that parrots can be driven mad by grief at the death of a loved one? That dolphins can commit suicide?
HEPHAISTOS: Sadly, I did. I’m quite partial to both parrots and dolphins, as it happens.
PSYCHE: Which does you great credit. Both species also, apparently, can employ proper names for other persons—human, delphine, or psittacine. And . . . well, anyway, this notion of an impermeable partition between the supposedly uniquely rational powers of humankind and the supposedly irrational nature of all other animals is a coarse superstition, to which only the invincibly ignorant and morally obtuse still cling. Many an elephant is a far more rational agent than many a man. It’s also a false division that makes it all the harder to conceive of how mind and world are related to one another. The reality is ever so much more fascinating and beautiful: that mind pervades all things, and expresses itself in countless degrees and in endlessly differing but kindred modes, and that we all belong to a vast community of spiritual beings—some of whom are quadrupeds or are equipped with wings or fins or prehensile tails or tentacles.
Goodness, consider the extraordinary intellectual capacities of grey parrots, with their demonstrated ability to grasp abstract concepts, or of New Caledonian crows, with their skills at making tools and at solving complex puzzles with a great many successive steps. Magpies—like humans and other great apes, as well as dolphins and elephants—have no difficulty in recognizing their own reflections in mirrors. I can’t say how many species have been observed exhibiting cultural transmission of newly acquired skills or practices. As for language—well, I don’t want to argue definitions here, but I refuse to believe that the complex systems of communication and elaborate grammatical structures of, say, the songs of chickadees and of countless other birds don’t qualify as linguistic in principle . . . or the songs of whales, or the extraordinarily communicative sounds and gestures employed by prairie dogs, or the elaborate semaphoric choreography of bees . . . I mean, in the case of those dancing bees there’s certainly a semeiotic system at work: a syntax, a semantics, a clear distinction within each of the signs used between signifier and signified, semantic associations forged by structural rather than spatial proximity, as well as precise objects of reference. And, of course, there are animals capable of learning language from humans—Koko the gorilla’s two thousand or so hand-signs allowed for a huge range of expressions of emotions, desires, inner experiences, dreams, memories. And then, as I say, those elephants. . . . Consider the day in 2012 when Lawrence Anthony—you know, the “elephant whisperer”—died at his house on that huge South African game preserve—one that’s more than a day’s journey in size—and the herds of rogue elephants he had rescued and tended all arrived within a couple of hours to pay their respects . . . and to mourn, I suppose. They’d been away for well more than a year, many of them, and then there they all were. How did they know? What summoned them across all that wilderness to attend their dying friend? Perhaps a kind of telepathy? Then too, it seems that elephants communicate with one another over vast distances with the use of sounds well below the threshold of human—and perhaps divine—hearing. Even plants seem to respond intentionally to environmental signals, and to use such things as mycorrhizal networks and aerosolized chemicals to communicate warnings and other kinds of information to one another.3
And why should this be surprising? If anything, intentionality in nature seems to be more original than any of its organic expressions. As Raymond Ruyer once noted, an amoeba digests without a digestive tract and reacts to its environment without a nervous system.4 The reality of intentionality precedes even the physical organs we associate with stimulus and response. Nervous systems appeared in evolutionary history not as fortuitous vehicles for a new organic power; they were fashioned by a prior operative disposition, which summoned its own physical occasion into existence. Even the cells in the bodies of organisms are complex intentional systems—though we’ll get to that anon, so I’ll stop here. Suffice it to say, though, that when I speak of mental agency, I’m not talking simply about a human—or about a human, dæmonian, angelic, and divine—attribute, and I’m certainly not talking about something that’s susceptible of absolute divisions of kind. I’m talking about a pervasive reality of organic life, at every level.
HEPHAISTOS: It may surprise you that I happen to agree with at least part of what you say. I would go at least so far as to include all apparently spiritual beings, gods no less than human beings and corvids, in one and the same category: we’re all animals together.
PSYCHE: Yes, yes we are animals—animated beings—psychical beings—souls.
HEPHAISTOS: [With a laugh:] Curious. The same evidence that some might adduce as proof that mind is reducible to a mere animal capacity for processing stimuli you see as proving the presence of rational intending mind in all animals and at the ground of nature. I suppose it’s the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything.
PSYCHE: Direction is all, yes, but that doesn’t mean that all directions provide an equally unobstructed view. The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as formal and final causality on the whole material realm? I maintain that it’s the latter. But, since the seventeenth century at least, our general sense of where the partition between mind and everything else should naturally be situated has been at what we take to be the clear boundary between an immaterial “thinking substance”—a res cogitans, to use again the Cartesian language—and the whole world of “extended substance”—or res extensa—with all of biological reality situated on the latter side, as though it were nothing but a form of mechanism. If this is how we see things—that biology is just machinery—then it stands to reason that the physicalist reductionist will greet the discovery of certain higher mental functions within the animal or even vegetal realms as a demystification or naturalization of the mind. Conversely, modern religious persons who want to defend what they take to be human spiritual dignity against such demystification, but who themselves haven’t really escaped the Cartesian paradigm, will end up in some way reinforcing the division between biological and mental life, even if they do so under the cover of seemingly different metaphysical categories—borrowed from, say, Christian scholasticism or something of that sort.
I reject the whole picture. In the fashion of a far more ancient metaphysics, I place the primary conceptual partition not between mind and biology, but between life and non-life, and I understand the former as at once both rational form and organic vitality. I believe that nature is already mind, so I see the evidence of full mentality throughout the structure of organic life as a confirmation of the spiritual nature of all that lives. For me, both the mindlike structure of nature and the ubiquitous interiority of mind provide evidence of the presence of soul or mind, understood as a higher cause, in everything. And I have to say that in the life-sciences themselves there have long been powerful movements of rebellion against mechanism. Despite the redoubtable resistance of the old guard—the biological mechanists, the genetocentric Neo-Darwinian gradualists of the orthodox persuasion—there are many scientists now who’ve come to think that the structure of life is unintelligible except in terms of some kind of intentionality, intrinsic purposes, and even something like “spiritual” autonomy right within the most basic organic systems.
