All Things Are Full of Gods, page 40
EROS: I confess that I’m having some difficulty in understanding how one would characterize information as a causal force. I mean, I assume this isn’t formal causality in the classical sense.
HEPHAISTOS: I hope not; but, as I say, I’m not quite sure what I think of this. Davies borrows Clerk Maxwell’s thought experiment about a little demon who contrives a method for defeating entropy. As you may recall, Maxwell’s “demon”—like Laplace’s—is a superlatively percipient little imp who inhabits the microscopic realm and knows the position and speed of every particle to be found there. He, however, unlike Laplace’s demon, isn’t interested in reconstructing the physical history of the universe or in foretelling its future from the current dispositions of its atoms; rather, his particular concern is to defeat the second law of thermodynamics. To this end, he creates an enclosed cell full of gas and divides it into two chambers by an impenetrable partition, in which he then installs a small, frictionlessly gated aperture just large enough to admit a single molecule at a time, from either side to the other; this he uses to segregate faster from more slowly moving molecules so that the two chambers come to have distinctly different temperatures, which allows for a motor of sorts to be run off the resulting heat gradient. Thus chaotic molecular motion is transformed into orderly mechanical motion, et voilà, entropy is not only held at bay, but converted into purposeful work at no thermodynamic cost. All that’s required, if this is right, is possession of the pertinent information and the means of exploiting it. Davies also, incidentally, calls on Claude Shannon’s mathematical formula for quantifying information, which appears to be more or less the inverse of the formula for entropy.13
PSYCHE: One would think that that’s practically a tautology. If information’s the reduction of uncertainty . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Only once the connection has been made. Anyway, perhaps the explanation of life lies latent in this understanding of information, even if that understanding at present is a little nebulous. Organic nature is thronged with little Maxwell’s demons, it seems, legions of exquisitely orchestrated systems within systems, guiding the flow of information through ever more sophisticated systems for reducing uncertainty or “noise,” often built by way of intentional adaptation and innovation, and all of them perhaps acting in obedience to physical laws that we haven’t as yet discovered.
EROS: I’m still finding it difficult to understand how information here is a causal force that “flows.”
HEPHAISTOS: Really? You know that information exists only as something transmitted—something that can be shared and passed on, that is—and that can be installed in code and then extricated from that code again. If I send you a written invitation to tea and you understand the words on the paper and do indeed come, then that “flow” of information has created an ordered set of actions, using the structures previously established for sending messages.
HERMES: But then the sort of causality you’re talking about there isn’t simply physical, is it? It’s the causality of intentional content, which I seem to recall is the very problem you’re trying to get around. Surely we shouldn’t conflate the transmission of syntactic sequences in Shannon’s “bits,” which reduce uncertainty quantitatively, with something like an actual force working upon physical structures, especially if the causal level of that information is semantic. The physical medium employed for that invitation to tea is calculable, but it’s the meaning shared between intending intellects that has determinate consequences. So, all right, information flows, in the metaphorical sense that it’s imparted and it develops; but, at least at the level of that content, it’s not a physical flow. Its power of causation is entirely dependent on a prior intentional structure—information must definitely mean something and have a purposive shape—but also on a reciprocal intentional power that can interpret that intentional content . . . that hermeneutical content . . . which doesn’t exist at the physical level, even though it guides physical events. Is there anything left of your metaphysical naturalism at that point?
HEPHAISTOS: I myself have doubts on that score. I’m not absolutely convinced that this way of seeing the matter gets us where I’d like us to go, but I’m willing to ponder the matter. What if information is part of the basic causal architectonics of the cosmos, creating structures by which it then communicates itself in ever more elaborate expressions and interrelations, so that it can generate yet newer structural occasions for its expression? And what if it creates those structures by way of a basic physical lawfulness—the rules of the game, as it were? Not long ago, Psyche mentioned John Conway’s computer simulation the “Game of Life.” Are you familiar with it?
EROS: If it has anything to do with a computer, you can take it for granted that I’m not.
HEPHAISTOS: You Luddite, you. All right, then. Davies, in fact, mentions it. It’s not really a simulation of life or certainly of organic systems; but it’s a very good simulation of self-creating systems based on a fairly primitive mathematical model of “cellular automata”—the cells in question here not being of the biological variety, but only regular enclosed spaces. Anyway, it’s all so simple it seems trivial, and yet it produces surprising results—results that demonstrate how a few simple rules imposed within a domain of otherwise indeterminate activity can quickly induce the development of staggering complexity, including largely autonomous self-generating patterns that defy mathematical prediction. Basically, start with a simple regular grid in two dimensions, contained within a virtual space with boundaries, in which a few squares—cells, that is—have been filled in, randomly but contiguously; then impose some simple rules dictating how other patterns will be produced from this initial configuration in successive iterations of the grid. Conway called cells that had been filled in “live” and vacant cells “dead” and chose four rules to govern their pullulations: a live cell with fewer than two live cells adjacent to it dies off in the next generation (as if from underpopulation); a live cell with two or three live neighbor cells lives on; but any live cell with more than three neighbors dies (as if from overpopulation); and any dead cell with three live neighbors comes to life in the next generation (as if through reproduction). Simple in principle, but with such very elaborate results as that initial information flows through the generations: emergent patterns of ever greater coherence and complexity, some of which are evanescent but some of which become peculiarly durable and persistent, generating other and more diverse effects while, as it were, preserving themselves, almost like evolving organisms. And, with a few adjustments of the rules, it’s also possible to create patterns that replicate themselves after several millions of iterations . . .
PSYCHE: Repeat, not replicate.
HEPHAISTOS: A fine distinction.
PSYCHE: Hardly. Cellular automata may repeat certain configurations or even series of configurations, but they do so in much the way that crystalline morphogenesis repeats over time, and even then they do so without the actual structural continuity of real crystals. Patterns of contiguous squares aren’t integrated organisms, and they produce not progeny, but only mechanical sequels. Mere formal sequences aren’t actual systemic inheritances. I’m familiar with cellular automata and I confess that, for all their suggestiveness regarding the mathematics of information complexity, I find nothing very interesting in them with regard to questions of evolution. I think we can all guess that a set of rules imposed on simple shapes within a strictly quarantined space will produce patterns; and, if those rules sufficiently constrain the results through their precision, and if there are no other levels or sources of causal influence, and if the whole process is preserved by its rules from entropic dissipation or noise, then quite a pageant can follow. But certainly we aren’t talking about anything very much like a growing, changing, open organic system reproducing itself through, in part, transcribed codes. Yes, information yields informed results, and even unpredictable and immensely complex results. But we could have learned as much from playing chess.
HEPHAISTOS: Isn’t that rather the point? That informational constraints of a fairly minimal kind can evolve into ever more sophisticated vehicles for the transmission and extension of information?
PSYCHE: Oh, I’m not denying that, I’m just trying to draw a few necessary distinctions. I’m quite drawn to information theory in principle. But how much as yet does any of this tell us about life, other than that we can trivially affix terms like “evolution” and “reproduction” both to structural amplifications of geometric patterns of contiguous squares in a controlled, unchanging virtual space and also to actual adaptive and replicating organisms in constantly changing environments, sustaining themselves metabolically and reproducing their own ontogenies in subsequent generations of distinct organisms? The actual analogy, though, is less than tenuous. Again, I can’t see anything in cellular automata more interesting than the geometries of growing crystals. Organisms are open systems that exist far from equilibrium, constantly internally converting materials into energy metabolically in dynamic relation to their environments. Crystals are largely inert as far as structural potential goes, in a state very near equilibrium indeed. And infinitely more inert than crystals are patterns of squares on a grid, not integrated with one another internally but merely juxtaposed to one another extrinsically by artificial protocols in a sterile stochastic arena with a bounded topology. That’s a model not so much of life as of metastasis. Yes, fractals are fascinating; the Mandelbrot set is positively gorgeous; neither is rich in semantic information.
HEPHAISTOS: Ah, but so what? These programs merely show—in a very simple way, I acknowledge—that information, as it were, metabolizes chance into order, and ever greater order in many cases.
PSYCHE: Life metabolizes disorder into order and pays the cost of the exchange back to disorder; but there’s neither chance nor disorder in the virtual environment of the game. And enchanting geometrical symmetries are very different from the coordinated asymmetries of a truly disequilibrious organic system. Cellular automata in general, no matter how cunningly encoded, are simply poor analogies to organisms, or to cells, or for that matter to populations or gene frequencies or evolution or reproduction . . . basically, to life in any of its real dimensions. You might as well liken life to the patterns that emerge in a kaleidoscope. The cells of an organism’s body can edit their own genomes to adapt to sudden changes in environment, and can employ survival strategies acquired over generations of somatic and epigenetic development. The “live cells” in the Game of Life are impelled heedlessly and irresistibly from one accidental configuration to another, producing regularities that better approximate the banal harmonies of entropic equilibrium and repose than they do the homeostatic hierarchies of organisms, which really look quite unlike regular repeating geometrical patterns. Where this all does become interesting, however, is in the game’s very limitations; there, perhaps, it really does imitate life. Davies gets this right. One can’t help but note that in these simulations order comes from order; information that always already exists at the level of the rules of the game provides the inflexible constraints that allow the game to be played. Otherwise nothing. Once one recognizes that strong emergence is a meaningless idea, and that the top-down causal functions of organisms can’t be understood as emergent in the “strong” sense, one realizes that that very order or cause must be present from the start, perhaps at once latently, as a disposition or potency in matter awaiting actuation by a higher causality—a top-down causality written into nature—and also perennially, in a realm of form. That’s what I find fascinating about information theory: that it places information—or, as I would prefer to say, form and finality—at the origin. That’s what I also find baffling about your invocation of information theory, since it seems very unlike the . . . well, the mechanistic materialism that you seemed to be espousing when this debate began. As Hermes and my dear husband have both already noted, in the case of life you’re talking about causality at the level of intentional communication by one agency, received at the level of intentional hermeneutics by another agency.
HEPHAISTOS: I’m committed only to a metaphysically naturalist approach to reality; on the specific details of nature’s laws and leniencies I have an open mind. Davies admits that everything he proposes may require the formulation of new laws of physics. Well, my basic tendency remains reductionist, but I’m perfectly willing to believe that the rules underlying physical reality admit of a number of simple principles of order that could be described as “informatic” (to use the sort of guild jargon that so offends our good Hermes here) and that these simple principles generate complexities far beyond what mere mechanistic mass and momentum could accomplish.
PSYCHE: And there’s what I cordially dislike about cellular automata and similar programs. We’re definitely talking about the primordial structure of reality, but most definitely not about only a few simple principles. A primitive simulation like the Game of Life can produce the impression that, in the case of complex systems, we’re dealing with rules so minimal that they’re practically indistinguishable from a few additional physical constraints, rather than—as must be the case—a truly elaborate, creatively open, and genuinely intentional rational grammar of development, far exceeding mere physical limit-conditions. The logic of the game on the screen is no more one of development than one of inertia, really. Consider, by contrast, the constitution of terrestrial life at even the most basic chemical level: it requires the coordinated activity of two disparate kinds of molecules, nucleic acids—RNA and DNA, that is—and proteins, and neither those molecules nor those proteins have any contribution to make to organic life without each other. More to the point, the intricate coordination between them doesn’t merely give rise to the logic of organism; it’s apparently always already determined by that logic. Think of nucleic acids as the syntax and proteins as the semantics of life, and think of organism as something like the realm of symbolic thought in which those intricate evolutions of meaning occur.
HEPHAISTOS: If you keep pressing that metaphor, it’s going to snap in half.
PSYCHE: On the contrary, it’s utterly infrangible. It becomes all the more pertinent, moreover, as we scale the hierarchical tiers of organisms, and consider how RNA polymerase transcribes DNA sequences into RNA, or how DNA polymerase sustains and repairs DNA, or how polymerase processes replicate DNA for the sake of mitosis, or how the cell reads out and interprets the information in DNA, and how the body rewrites the genome when it must, and passes on morphogenetic information epigenetically . . . or . . . well, I could go on for hours. . . . There’s the great paradox: life is language, and language is mind, and mind is life . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Oh please. . . . [Shaking his head wearily:] No one, god or mortal, knows how life began, but the universe is large and even the most improbable of events have space in which to occur. Maybe there was that “RNA world” that some theorists like to talk about, which forged a kind of bridge between molecular proliferation and actual transmission of coded instructions for proteins, and between life’s necessary chemical catalysis and the storing of genetic information. Who can say? Arguments from incredulity aren’t solvent.
PSYCHE: I disagree: arguments from warranted incredulity are. Naturally, scientists will continue to search for as simple and parsimonious a set of principles as possible to explain the evolutionary transition from mere chemistry to self-moved life, and will want to reduce the threshold between the two to one as inconspicuous and as free from obstacles as possible. But, quite apart from the fragility and mutability of large RNA molecules, or RNA’s instability outside of organic cells, or RNA’s limited catalytic potentials, or the consideration that RNA is so very complex as a molecule that it seems unlikely to have preceded organic systems, or the reality that RNA’s self-replication is a form of structural amplification analogous to crystalline morphogenesis rather than progenitive encoding, and so forth and so on . . . ah, well, one is left with much the same curious situation: RNA and the proteins necessary for reading anything coded into RNA require one another; so surely the wedding-dance of RNA and the ribosome is determined by an organic logic that precedes both. Really, perhaps all the “RNA world” hypothesis does for us is suggest an earlier platform for organic life; the origin of life’s “code” and epigenetic systems remains an untouched mystery. I suspect the theory only pushes the question back to some still earlier period of some other kind of replicating molecule.14
You know, if you think about it, one might reasonably suppose that, if life and mind really were the emergent results of composite forces, and if their relation to their ingredient parts were purely mereological, then the special qualities distinguishing them from the non-living and non-mental material order would appear only at the highest supervenient system-levels of organisms, as the final result of the accumulated totality of their subvenient causal tiers. And yet we find quite the opposite to be the case. We find instead principles of unified agency, seemingly intentional powers of adaptation to new circumstances, ingenuity, the conatus essendi, and all sorts of elaborate coordinations of discrete processes within every organic cell comprising a chromosome. This seems to be a fairly vast problem for both the reductionist and the emergentist pictures of things. For the former, to what is one reducing an organism in seeking to explain away the uniqueness of life or mind, if even that organism’s tissues and nerves and biochemical constituents are already composed of cognitive systems within cognitive systems? For the latter, from what are the novel properties of life and mind supposedly emergent if so many of the elementary functions of the organism are already fully invested with those properties? To posit a transition from the purely mechanical level of nature to that of life and mind—or the “appearance” of life and mind—so very near the threshold between physics and chemistry, or between basic chemistry and the most rudimentary organic compounds, defies the very logic of either approach to the question. It’s perhaps no great surprise that the accelerating advances in cell biology and molecular biology over the past few decades have prompted philosophers and scientists alike to begin to take forms of panpsychism seriously. One could, perhaps, suppose that the entirety of the organism as a system, in its integrated totality, imposes discrete cognitive functions on lower levels within the system, as an apparently emergent structure of top-down agency; but what would this mean other than that within each organism there’s some sort of primordial, unified, organizing principle of order and form and intelligence—in other words, a soul?
HEPHAISTOS: I hope not; but, as I say, I’m not quite sure what I think of this. Davies borrows Clerk Maxwell’s thought experiment about a little demon who contrives a method for defeating entropy. As you may recall, Maxwell’s “demon”—like Laplace’s—is a superlatively percipient little imp who inhabits the microscopic realm and knows the position and speed of every particle to be found there. He, however, unlike Laplace’s demon, isn’t interested in reconstructing the physical history of the universe or in foretelling its future from the current dispositions of its atoms; rather, his particular concern is to defeat the second law of thermodynamics. To this end, he creates an enclosed cell full of gas and divides it into two chambers by an impenetrable partition, in which he then installs a small, frictionlessly gated aperture just large enough to admit a single molecule at a time, from either side to the other; this he uses to segregate faster from more slowly moving molecules so that the two chambers come to have distinctly different temperatures, which allows for a motor of sorts to be run off the resulting heat gradient. Thus chaotic molecular motion is transformed into orderly mechanical motion, et voilà, entropy is not only held at bay, but converted into purposeful work at no thermodynamic cost. All that’s required, if this is right, is possession of the pertinent information and the means of exploiting it. Davies also, incidentally, calls on Claude Shannon’s mathematical formula for quantifying information, which appears to be more or less the inverse of the formula for entropy.13
PSYCHE: One would think that that’s practically a tautology. If information’s the reduction of uncertainty . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Only once the connection has been made. Anyway, perhaps the explanation of life lies latent in this understanding of information, even if that understanding at present is a little nebulous. Organic nature is thronged with little Maxwell’s demons, it seems, legions of exquisitely orchestrated systems within systems, guiding the flow of information through ever more sophisticated systems for reducing uncertainty or “noise,” often built by way of intentional adaptation and innovation, and all of them perhaps acting in obedience to physical laws that we haven’t as yet discovered.
EROS: I’m still finding it difficult to understand how information here is a causal force that “flows.”
HEPHAISTOS: Really? You know that information exists only as something transmitted—something that can be shared and passed on, that is—and that can be installed in code and then extricated from that code again. If I send you a written invitation to tea and you understand the words on the paper and do indeed come, then that “flow” of information has created an ordered set of actions, using the structures previously established for sending messages.
HERMES: But then the sort of causality you’re talking about there isn’t simply physical, is it? It’s the causality of intentional content, which I seem to recall is the very problem you’re trying to get around. Surely we shouldn’t conflate the transmission of syntactic sequences in Shannon’s “bits,” which reduce uncertainty quantitatively, with something like an actual force working upon physical structures, especially if the causal level of that information is semantic. The physical medium employed for that invitation to tea is calculable, but it’s the meaning shared between intending intellects that has determinate consequences. So, all right, information flows, in the metaphorical sense that it’s imparted and it develops; but, at least at the level of that content, it’s not a physical flow. Its power of causation is entirely dependent on a prior intentional structure—information must definitely mean something and have a purposive shape—but also on a reciprocal intentional power that can interpret that intentional content . . . that hermeneutical content . . . which doesn’t exist at the physical level, even though it guides physical events. Is there anything left of your metaphysical naturalism at that point?
HEPHAISTOS: I myself have doubts on that score. I’m not absolutely convinced that this way of seeing the matter gets us where I’d like us to go, but I’m willing to ponder the matter. What if information is part of the basic causal architectonics of the cosmos, creating structures by which it then communicates itself in ever more elaborate expressions and interrelations, so that it can generate yet newer structural occasions for its expression? And what if it creates those structures by way of a basic physical lawfulness—the rules of the game, as it were? Not long ago, Psyche mentioned John Conway’s computer simulation the “Game of Life.” Are you familiar with it?
EROS: If it has anything to do with a computer, you can take it for granted that I’m not.
HEPHAISTOS: You Luddite, you. All right, then. Davies, in fact, mentions it. It’s not really a simulation of life or certainly of organic systems; but it’s a very good simulation of self-creating systems based on a fairly primitive mathematical model of “cellular automata”—the cells in question here not being of the biological variety, but only regular enclosed spaces. Anyway, it’s all so simple it seems trivial, and yet it produces surprising results—results that demonstrate how a few simple rules imposed within a domain of otherwise indeterminate activity can quickly induce the development of staggering complexity, including largely autonomous self-generating patterns that defy mathematical prediction. Basically, start with a simple regular grid in two dimensions, contained within a virtual space with boundaries, in which a few squares—cells, that is—have been filled in, randomly but contiguously; then impose some simple rules dictating how other patterns will be produced from this initial configuration in successive iterations of the grid. Conway called cells that had been filled in “live” and vacant cells “dead” and chose four rules to govern their pullulations: a live cell with fewer than two live cells adjacent to it dies off in the next generation (as if from underpopulation); a live cell with two or three live neighbor cells lives on; but any live cell with more than three neighbors dies (as if from overpopulation); and any dead cell with three live neighbors comes to life in the next generation (as if through reproduction). Simple in principle, but with such very elaborate results as that initial information flows through the generations: emergent patterns of ever greater coherence and complexity, some of which are evanescent but some of which become peculiarly durable and persistent, generating other and more diverse effects while, as it were, preserving themselves, almost like evolving organisms. And, with a few adjustments of the rules, it’s also possible to create patterns that replicate themselves after several millions of iterations . . .
PSYCHE: Repeat, not replicate.
HEPHAISTOS: A fine distinction.
PSYCHE: Hardly. Cellular automata may repeat certain configurations or even series of configurations, but they do so in much the way that crystalline morphogenesis repeats over time, and even then they do so without the actual structural continuity of real crystals. Patterns of contiguous squares aren’t integrated organisms, and they produce not progeny, but only mechanical sequels. Mere formal sequences aren’t actual systemic inheritances. I’m familiar with cellular automata and I confess that, for all their suggestiveness regarding the mathematics of information complexity, I find nothing very interesting in them with regard to questions of evolution. I think we can all guess that a set of rules imposed on simple shapes within a strictly quarantined space will produce patterns; and, if those rules sufficiently constrain the results through their precision, and if there are no other levels or sources of causal influence, and if the whole process is preserved by its rules from entropic dissipation or noise, then quite a pageant can follow. But certainly we aren’t talking about anything very much like a growing, changing, open organic system reproducing itself through, in part, transcribed codes. Yes, information yields informed results, and even unpredictable and immensely complex results. But we could have learned as much from playing chess.
HEPHAISTOS: Isn’t that rather the point? That informational constraints of a fairly minimal kind can evolve into ever more sophisticated vehicles for the transmission and extension of information?
PSYCHE: Oh, I’m not denying that, I’m just trying to draw a few necessary distinctions. I’m quite drawn to information theory in principle. But how much as yet does any of this tell us about life, other than that we can trivially affix terms like “evolution” and “reproduction” both to structural amplifications of geometric patterns of contiguous squares in a controlled, unchanging virtual space and also to actual adaptive and replicating organisms in constantly changing environments, sustaining themselves metabolically and reproducing their own ontogenies in subsequent generations of distinct organisms? The actual analogy, though, is less than tenuous. Again, I can’t see anything in cellular automata more interesting than the geometries of growing crystals. Organisms are open systems that exist far from equilibrium, constantly internally converting materials into energy metabolically in dynamic relation to their environments. Crystals are largely inert as far as structural potential goes, in a state very near equilibrium indeed. And infinitely more inert than crystals are patterns of squares on a grid, not integrated with one another internally but merely juxtaposed to one another extrinsically by artificial protocols in a sterile stochastic arena with a bounded topology. That’s a model not so much of life as of metastasis. Yes, fractals are fascinating; the Mandelbrot set is positively gorgeous; neither is rich in semantic information.
HEPHAISTOS: Ah, but so what? These programs merely show—in a very simple way, I acknowledge—that information, as it were, metabolizes chance into order, and ever greater order in many cases.
PSYCHE: Life metabolizes disorder into order and pays the cost of the exchange back to disorder; but there’s neither chance nor disorder in the virtual environment of the game. And enchanting geometrical symmetries are very different from the coordinated asymmetries of a truly disequilibrious organic system. Cellular automata in general, no matter how cunningly encoded, are simply poor analogies to organisms, or to cells, or for that matter to populations or gene frequencies or evolution or reproduction . . . basically, to life in any of its real dimensions. You might as well liken life to the patterns that emerge in a kaleidoscope. The cells of an organism’s body can edit their own genomes to adapt to sudden changes in environment, and can employ survival strategies acquired over generations of somatic and epigenetic development. The “live cells” in the Game of Life are impelled heedlessly and irresistibly from one accidental configuration to another, producing regularities that better approximate the banal harmonies of entropic equilibrium and repose than they do the homeostatic hierarchies of organisms, which really look quite unlike regular repeating geometrical patterns. Where this all does become interesting, however, is in the game’s very limitations; there, perhaps, it really does imitate life. Davies gets this right. One can’t help but note that in these simulations order comes from order; information that always already exists at the level of the rules of the game provides the inflexible constraints that allow the game to be played. Otherwise nothing. Once one recognizes that strong emergence is a meaningless idea, and that the top-down causal functions of organisms can’t be understood as emergent in the “strong” sense, one realizes that that very order or cause must be present from the start, perhaps at once latently, as a disposition or potency in matter awaiting actuation by a higher causality—a top-down causality written into nature—and also perennially, in a realm of form. That’s what I find fascinating about information theory: that it places information—or, as I would prefer to say, form and finality—at the origin. That’s what I also find baffling about your invocation of information theory, since it seems very unlike the . . . well, the mechanistic materialism that you seemed to be espousing when this debate began. As Hermes and my dear husband have both already noted, in the case of life you’re talking about causality at the level of intentional communication by one agency, received at the level of intentional hermeneutics by another agency.
HEPHAISTOS: I’m committed only to a metaphysically naturalist approach to reality; on the specific details of nature’s laws and leniencies I have an open mind. Davies admits that everything he proposes may require the formulation of new laws of physics. Well, my basic tendency remains reductionist, but I’m perfectly willing to believe that the rules underlying physical reality admit of a number of simple principles of order that could be described as “informatic” (to use the sort of guild jargon that so offends our good Hermes here) and that these simple principles generate complexities far beyond what mere mechanistic mass and momentum could accomplish.
PSYCHE: And there’s what I cordially dislike about cellular automata and similar programs. We’re definitely talking about the primordial structure of reality, but most definitely not about only a few simple principles. A primitive simulation like the Game of Life can produce the impression that, in the case of complex systems, we’re dealing with rules so minimal that they’re practically indistinguishable from a few additional physical constraints, rather than—as must be the case—a truly elaborate, creatively open, and genuinely intentional rational grammar of development, far exceeding mere physical limit-conditions. The logic of the game on the screen is no more one of development than one of inertia, really. Consider, by contrast, the constitution of terrestrial life at even the most basic chemical level: it requires the coordinated activity of two disparate kinds of molecules, nucleic acids—RNA and DNA, that is—and proteins, and neither those molecules nor those proteins have any contribution to make to organic life without each other. More to the point, the intricate coordination between them doesn’t merely give rise to the logic of organism; it’s apparently always already determined by that logic. Think of nucleic acids as the syntax and proteins as the semantics of life, and think of organism as something like the realm of symbolic thought in which those intricate evolutions of meaning occur.
HEPHAISTOS: If you keep pressing that metaphor, it’s going to snap in half.
PSYCHE: On the contrary, it’s utterly infrangible. It becomes all the more pertinent, moreover, as we scale the hierarchical tiers of organisms, and consider how RNA polymerase transcribes DNA sequences into RNA, or how DNA polymerase sustains and repairs DNA, or how polymerase processes replicate DNA for the sake of mitosis, or how the cell reads out and interprets the information in DNA, and how the body rewrites the genome when it must, and passes on morphogenetic information epigenetically . . . or . . . well, I could go on for hours. . . . There’s the great paradox: life is language, and language is mind, and mind is life . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Oh please. . . . [Shaking his head wearily:] No one, god or mortal, knows how life began, but the universe is large and even the most improbable of events have space in which to occur. Maybe there was that “RNA world” that some theorists like to talk about, which forged a kind of bridge between molecular proliferation and actual transmission of coded instructions for proteins, and between life’s necessary chemical catalysis and the storing of genetic information. Who can say? Arguments from incredulity aren’t solvent.
PSYCHE: I disagree: arguments from warranted incredulity are. Naturally, scientists will continue to search for as simple and parsimonious a set of principles as possible to explain the evolutionary transition from mere chemistry to self-moved life, and will want to reduce the threshold between the two to one as inconspicuous and as free from obstacles as possible. But, quite apart from the fragility and mutability of large RNA molecules, or RNA’s instability outside of organic cells, or RNA’s limited catalytic potentials, or the consideration that RNA is so very complex as a molecule that it seems unlikely to have preceded organic systems, or the reality that RNA’s self-replication is a form of structural amplification analogous to crystalline morphogenesis rather than progenitive encoding, and so forth and so on . . . ah, well, one is left with much the same curious situation: RNA and the proteins necessary for reading anything coded into RNA require one another; so surely the wedding-dance of RNA and the ribosome is determined by an organic logic that precedes both. Really, perhaps all the “RNA world” hypothesis does for us is suggest an earlier platform for organic life; the origin of life’s “code” and epigenetic systems remains an untouched mystery. I suspect the theory only pushes the question back to some still earlier period of some other kind of replicating molecule.14
You know, if you think about it, one might reasonably suppose that, if life and mind really were the emergent results of composite forces, and if their relation to their ingredient parts were purely mereological, then the special qualities distinguishing them from the non-living and non-mental material order would appear only at the highest supervenient system-levels of organisms, as the final result of the accumulated totality of their subvenient causal tiers. And yet we find quite the opposite to be the case. We find instead principles of unified agency, seemingly intentional powers of adaptation to new circumstances, ingenuity, the conatus essendi, and all sorts of elaborate coordinations of discrete processes within every organic cell comprising a chromosome. This seems to be a fairly vast problem for both the reductionist and the emergentist pictures of things. For the former, to what is one reducing an organism in seeking to explain away the uniqueness of life or mind, if even that organism’s tissues and nerves and biochemical constituents are already composed of cognitive systems within cognitive systems? For the latter, from what are the novel properties of life and mind supposedly emergent if so many of the elementary functions of the organism are already fully invested with those properties? To posit a transition from the purely mechanical level of nature to that of life and mind—or the “appearance” of life and mind—so very near the threshold between physics and chemistry, or between basic chemistry and the most rudimentary organic compounds, defies the very logic of either approach to the question. It’s perhaps no great surprise that the accelerating advances in cell biology and molecular biology over the past few decades have prompted philosophers and scientists alike to begin to take forms of panpsychism seriously. One could, perhaps, suppose that the entirety of the organism as a system, in its integrated totality, imposes discrete cognitive functions on lower levels within the system, as an apparently emergent structure of top-down agency; but what would this mean other than that within each organism there’s some sort of primordial, unified, organizing principle of order and form and intelligence—in other words, a soul?
