All Things Are Full of Gods, page 41
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, that annoying little imp again. Perhaps Dennett is right: yes, you have a soul, but it’s composed of millions of little robots. [Another sigh:] Look, neither of us is a cutting-edge molecular or evolutionary biologist. Again, I concede that the origins of life remain, as yet, shrouded in abysmal mystery. I recognize also that scientists who suggest otherwise are talking nonsense. I admit also that natural selection isn’t the mechanism of life’s origin, simply because natural selection can operate only upon lineages of already living, replicating, mutable organisms. All right. But, once the threshold was crossed, we can surely assume there followed a kind of steady exponential increase in information-capacity over succeeding generations of life.
PSYCHE: We can assume, can we? Can we assume also the emergence of intentional systems from non-intentional chemistry, and on an order of coordinated complexity that seems to have required cognitive systems within cognitive systems all the way down to the most basic level of life’s hierarchical structure? I don’t know, I admit, but what I do know is that “systems biology” presents us with a kind of organization that incorporates a semeiotic level of operation even in our cells, as well as in the organism as a whole. The actual details of life’s origination are a matter of indifference to my argument anyway, since whatever they were, I would still insist that they must fit within a set of rational relations that includes a kind of formal and final causality at the very beginning, or else the potentials for what came after would also be absent. If life is the result, life was always already a causal presence in the structure of matter. Come hell or high water, however, the point on which I remain obdurate is this: life exhibits intentionality in every observable dimension; it moves toward that realm of values Ruyer described, and persists in its movement on account of that intentionality rather than on account of any physical law we can formulate or imagine. And, for the last time I hope, I insist that strong emergence is an absurd idea; hence this intentionality must be coterminous with a disposition always already present in all material existence, and this disposition must be anything but a non-intentional indeterminacy. That’s why I’m also slightly wary of the metaphor of the “flow” of information: I understand it, of course, but I also fear it might make it sound as if we’re talking about yet another physical force, like heat energy flowing across temperature gradients, rather than about the communication of an abstract content that needs to be actively interpreted and translated into physical expressions. The Game of Life, for instance, largely lacks that indispensable semeiotic—that strangely hermeneutical—level.
We needn’t quibble over figures of speech, though. The true issue is that we’re not really talking about physical laws at all, are we? The realm of molecules and the realm of information are as discrete as Ruyer’s realms of matter and of values. At least, the laws of physics as we know them concern actual quantifications of mass and energy, motion and force, impetus and resistance, as well as fields and particles and waves and probabilities and such—in short, structural and dynamical descriptions. Where the presumed laws of information are concerned, we’re talking about something more original still, a larger general logic that perhaps comprises the laws of physics in itself; in that context, physics is a set of specific rules governing a single, somewhat basic, somewhat subordinate causal axis within a greater rational totality. It seems obvious that “information”—or, as I prefer to say, form—doesn’t merely impose an order that ultimately eventuates in intentional systems; of its nature, it’s intentional all the way down, as it couldn’t possibly exist except as shaped by final causality, both empirical and transcendental. Information isn’t merely mindlike; it subsists only in mind.
HEPHAISTOS: Weren’t you the one who chided Integrated Information Theory for conflating objective and subjective information?
PSYCHE: Oh, I was talking about the difference between data and the knowledge of that data. Here we’re talking about the rational structure of nature in mental terms because they seem to fit. But pay attention: so much of this conversation entirely omits the essential issue. You mentioned Shannon’s information theory, for instance; and what interests me about that is its purely quantitative nature. It’s all about calculating information transmission in terms of binary bits; it says absolutely nothing about the contents—the semantics—of information: that hermeneutical level of organizing meaning that in fact has no physical existence at all, and yet is the very essence of, say, code. That the transmission of information can be quantified in bits is a very useful piece of knowledge; that information can be conveyed symbolically as intentional content, however, wholly on the hermeneutical plane of reality, is the great mystery that indicates the mental ground of physical reality. Believe me, Phaesty, I’m all too happy to see information as something fundamental, precisely because information functions in nature as encoded. Materialism is scarcely a possible view of reality even if intentional content in a hermeneutical space is understood solely as some sort of late evolutionary emanation of a late evolutionary development such as the human brain. But, if code is to be found at every level of life . . .
HEPHAISTOS: That, I suppose, is what we mean when we speak of finding new fundamental laws of physics that will incorporate information-theory into our understanding of nature. Not that I myself feel any tremendous enthusiasm for such language, but it might please you to know that Davies does at the last suggest that the emergence of life and perhaps of mind may turn out to be etched into the very lawfulness of nature.
PSYCHE: And what’s that other than final causality? Once more, though, the language of emergence is too vague. The only conclusion to draw, if his line of thinking is coherent, is that what he’s talking about comes down to forms and purposes, and that life and mind aren’t merely written into the cosmic rules; in a sense, they write those rules. So, do we really require new laws of physics to account for the activity of Maxwell’s demons in the fabric of living nature? Or should we be seeking new metaphysical laws, at a level more fundamental than the physical—laws, I suspect, that will really be only very old laws of form and finality rediscovered, which themselves may presume the reality of something that looks very like infinite mind?
HEPHAISTOS: [With a melancholy smile:] Quite. Look, before we plunge into the mind of God, perhaps we could turn back and peer down one last time into the depths of life itself—not abstract information, but concrete, material life—because I’m not as yet convinced that we can’t get where we’re going without resorting either to a tale of strong emergence or to your mystical theology of nature as divine spirit disporting itself in material forms.
V
Metabolism and Mind
HEPHAISTOS: I’m somewhat out of my native element here, I confess. I’m not even certain how sympathetic I am to some of what I’m about to say; but let’s leave no avenues unexplored. So, yes, let’s say there must be some real inseparability of organic life from mental agency; let’s say that mechanism is an inadequate model for understanding either. Moreover, let’s concede that the principles that allow for life to arise are already resident in all physical reality and already compose part of its lawful structure. Organic life is then, as you’ve said, much the same mystery as mind, and it’s there we should look, perhaps, to understand how the mental is produced by the material, or how the material is always invested with the mental—or whatever happens to be the case. You mentioned Hans Jonas earlier, and he certainly believed that the transition from the inorganic to the organic in cosmic history was actuated by a tendency or disposition in the depths of being toward modes of freedom, and that hence mind is prefigured in organic existence as such.15 But does that place mind at the beginning or at the end of the tale? What if, in fact, the laws of organic life could be shown to be purely structural amplifications of the laws of physics, and the laws of mental agency purely structural amplifications of the laws of life, all building upon inherent physical principles that are disposed toward life and mind but still nevertheless prior to both? Do you know the work of the philosopher Evan Thompson?
PSYCHE: I do.
HERMES: I don’t.
EROS: Nor do I.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, he follows Jonas in insisting that mind is lifelike and life mindlike. He’s also very much in the school of thinkers like Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and depends substantially on their account of life as “autopoiesis”—self-making—and on an “enactive” account of how organisms generate themselves and their own cognitive domains, and he tends to see the inwardness of mind as having a demonstrable continuity with the origin of life in metabolic structures, since such structures necessarily create interior environments for themselves to be maintained, contained within selectively permeable barriers, and sustained by the constant conversion of matter into energy.
HERMES: That sounds more like an analogy than a continuity to me, and one with a fairly wide disjunctive interval between its terms. Metabolism and mind are both “interior” phenomena, I suppose, but in only the most remotely analogous ways.
HEPHAISTOS: [Sighing:] Do try to curb your impatience. I’m a god lame and halt, so batten down the wings of those sandals I fashioned for you so many ages ago and plod along with me for a mile or two. All mental agency has a special kind of interiority—as the three of you have so passionately insisted—and interiority is also necessary to the unity of a living system. Yes, this inwardness may ultimately involve something like what you call subjectivity and intentionality, but perhaps it’s more originally the result of this basic organic urge toward persistence through continuous becoming. Perhaps that need to persist is a source in organisms at once of an inchoate self-vigilance and also of a dawning awareness of the surrounding world. Perhaps that basic volition toward freedom and continued existence, written as it is into the structure of life and requiring the physical interiority of a homeostatic organic system, simply becomes increasingly transparent to itself over the ages as an interplay of agency and patiency, constantly evolving toward conscious intentionality and subjectivity.
HERMES: Attractive language, but are we back then to emergent subjectivity—emergent mind and intention?
HEPHAISTOS: Not as previously discussed, it seems to me. At least, we’re not talking about the emergence of mind from mechanistic material forces. This really is more on the order of seeing subjectivity as arising from a basic impulse already in nature, expressed in organic principles that aren’t mechanistic but genuinely inherently intentional, or at least predisposed toward intentionality, and that therefore invest living systems with a kind of basic cognitive grammar that distinguishes them for themselves from their environments. Let’s grant a point the three of you have made: that organisms differ from machines in part because the former aren’t mere stable, equilibrious, composite structures through which energy is converted into work; they’re themselves constant flows of energy and matter, inhering in their own unity solely as interactive, integrated, dynamic systems, maintaining themselves precisely by surrendering and reconstituting their material structures in every moment. They endure not as static objects, but as elaborate adaptable causal hierarchies—as forms at once requiring matter but also prevailing over mere material composition. In this sense, life is at once free and dependent, and metabolism is a constantly internally readjusted negotiation with a changing material environment, requiring various kinds of regulative “decisions,” as it were. As life advances, more and more mastering the conditions of its surroundings, so does the motility and efficiency of its structures, and so too does the range of both its freedom and its “inwardness”—for instance, by the development of nervous systems. Primitive appetition becomes real desire, seeking satisfaction and working toward purposes ever more clearly discerned. This allows for organisms to create and maintain their own cognitive domains, their own self-directed grasp of the world under aspects of “meaning.” Perhaps, beginning from sheer metabolism, organic life—by coming progressively to discriminate what in its environment is relevant to its own persistence and what isn’t, and by learning more and more surely to pursue the former, and by acquiring ever more refined skills and an ever deeper practical savoir-faire through embodied, sensorimotor engagements with that environment—discovers what has meaning for it in its quest to persist and so creates its own sphere of values and of normativity. In fact—and I say this with neither pleasure nor repugnance—Thompson is quite happy to speak of an immanent purposiveness embodied in living things, and in two senses: first in autopoiesis, understood as a teleological urge toward self-production, and second in “sense-making” through the encounter of that activity of self-production with an environment to which it must adapt through cognitive operations.16
HERMES: Life creates its own sphere of values? Of meanings? I’m not sure I’m following. Wouldn’t that make life a kind of causa sui? Do you believe that the initial urge toward persistence somehow precedes the ends that elicit it out of simple matter? I mean, where does that urge come from in the first place? Doesn’t the will to persist exist as always already oriented toward persistence as a desirable end? Why create a sphere of values at all if not already under the sway of more original values, prompting the will to persist and evolve? Why, too, do those first stirrings in the direction of metabolism lead to ever more intricate strategies of homeostasis rather than simply exhausting their local stores of energy and relapsing into equilibrium, like whirlpools relapsing into the waves? Why acquire a nervous system to aid in the Promethean effort of resisting equilibrium rather than succumb to the peaceful satiety of entropy and death? I mean, to wax a bit Freudian, why does eros continue to strive against thanatos if as yet it has no erotic object? I simply don’t see how intentionality can arise from anything other than intentionality.
PSYCHE: I tend to agree. I have to ask, where does this immanent purposiveness supposedly make its debut in the plot? I can’t help but note how quickly the story you’re telling mysteriously dances right across what to me still look like qualitative abysses. You speak of material disequilibrium becoming metabolism, and then of metabolism as discriminating and making choices, and then of life generating values and meanings, and only then of the appearance of what we think of as fully active mind. But this is all backwards, surely. Hermes is right. What you mean by “values” are desirable ends within the environment, and those are desirable only in light of a prior disposition to persistence, which is itself evidence of a prior disposition toward transcendental values, which in its turn is evidence of something like mind at work in nature.
HEPHAISTOS: Who’s dancing across abysses now?
PSYCHE: Direction is all. What from below are untraversable abysses are, from above, merely junctures where ladders must be let down.
HEPHAISTOS: Ladders go both ways, you know. Look, let me go some distance with Thompson before you judge. He agrees with you, after all, that there must be some deep continuity between life and mind, and that the latter is present wherever the former is to be found. He also thinks that mind in its highest developments is an enriched expression of the same formal and organizing principles that are life’s basic properties. Every living thing, he believes, is a form of autonomous self-organization constantly engaging the outer world in a cognitive mode, and so organism as such already has a kind of “mental” constitution. Here he relies, for his enactive approach to mind in nature, on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the ways in which living bodies are embedded in the world and negotiate it by comportment—by corporeal behaviors—at many different levels of complexity; and this constant negotiation of new conditions necessarily requires an ever more sophisticated internal relation to an external milieu—a proper environment or region of habitation, that is. Even inorganic processes are structured unities, but as matter becomes life and finally mind individuality progressively emerges within the hierarchy of functions, and human consciousness emerges as a very particular form or structure of dynamic comportment or behavior in relation to its milieu.
PSYCHE: No.
HEPHAISTOS: No? That’s it?
PSYCHE: Yes, that’s it: No. I mean, I find such ideas attractive, but insufficient. Consciousness isn’t just a form of behavior or comportment, for reasons we’ve discussed at length—unity of apprehension, intentionality, irreducible subjectivity, qualitative experience, and all those other aspects of mental agency that won’t suffer reduction to any composite physical system and that exceed mere mechanical function. Neither, for the same reasons, does consciousness arise from behavior, though it makes certain kinds of behavior possible; life does indeed depend upon consciousness in order to comport itself in its world as a living system rather than as a machine; but consciousness is more than mere comportment or cognition. It’s also and from the very first an interiority of a very different kind, much of which has no simple behavioral function at all, and so it can’t be explained as the effect of behavioral necessities. That would be a tale of strong emergence yet again. It would also be an exquisite specimen of the cui bono fallacy: the body’s cognitive needs might be supplied by conscious mind, but they hardly explain how the fullness of consciousness is possible to begin with.
HEPHAISTOS: You know, I’m trying to extend a frail but earnest rameau d’olivier here; we’re both trying to narrow the explanatory gap between the material and the mental, after all, and to do so by way of the structures and processes of life. I wish to do so from below, you from above, but maybe we’ll discover that below and above are somehow one. Can we at least see whether the ladder I’d like to raise up can reach as high as the one you want to let down?
