All Things Are Full of Gods, page 42
PSYCHE: I’m sorry to have interrupted.
HEPHAISTOS: Where was I? Oh, yes, Merleau-Ponty by way of Thompson. Let’s start with a very basic physical form: a bubble. It’s an invariant topological pattern, a structural stability fixed by its relation to external conditions as a qualitative discontinuity in the material substrate. The most primitive forms of organic life are, in a sense, just such discontinuities at a more durable and sophisticated level of interior maintenance. They’re metabolic structures that fabricate their own material constitutions from their environments. Living cells are thus constantly dynamically producing themselves by the continual transformation of their own material constituents as they regulate the flow of energy through and around themselves. But this very process reciprocally obliges them to orient themselves toward their environments, so as to translate their external material situations into their own proper milieux of action; and, unlike inanimate structures, organisms have a large variety of means for modifying those milieux. In all of this, as I’ve said, life’s world becomes a cognitive domain of meanings to be interpreted, evaluated, judged, and used. Consciousness is born here, not as an interior processing of stimulus into response, but as an always wholly engaged structure of comportment with the world, through perceptual and sensorimotor attunement. It’s a constant dialectic between an organism’s behavior and its environment. By the time life achieves the level of human awareness, those conscious forms and structures of behavior have become for the most part entirely subsumed into a symbolic economy, oriented toward objects to be used according to meanings conferred on them by cultural practice, and in awareness of and attunement with the intentions of others; and this sort of behavior enacts a new kind of milieu, one that allows human beings to perceive the objects of their world not just as fixed occasions of work but as projects of innovation and transformation that exceed the merely practical. But, in every case, there’s a continuity in the logic of form and structure, one that can ultimately integrate the seemingly irreconcilably diverse orders of matter, life, and mind while still accounting for the originality and uniqueness of each.
EROS: Forgive me, but I seem to have missed a step or two along the way. Can we really move that easily from metabolism to consciousness and then to symbolic thought?
HEPHAISTOS: I’m not so sure “easily” is the right word, but at least we can say it’s possible to do so without courting the contradictions that you lot perceive in the Cartesian and mechanistically monistic pictures of things. That should blunt some of your more sharply serrated objections to a naturalist account of mind. Thompson isn’t trying to make consciousness or mental agency vanish into function, as Dennett is. His analysis may not entirely close the conceptual gap between life and mind, but it may well reduce it to something much more like a difference in degree rather than kind. It may also go some way toward abolishing the Cartesian partition between body and “soul.” Building on his phenomenological account of life, he goes on to argue for two complementary claims: The first is that living nature isn’t pure exteriority of the sort that a strictly objectivist biology or physics might adequately describe, but rather possesses a real interiority and thus always already resembles mind. The second is that mind isn’t pure interiority of the sort that a strictly subjectivist or internalist narrative might adequately capture, but is rather a form or structure of engagement with the world and thus always already resembles life. From Merleau-Ponty and, through him, Husserl, Thompson also borrows the distinction between the body considered as a living material thing—Körper—and the body considered as a “lived” experiential presence in the world—Leib—and argues that the difference between them is nothing like the difference between truly discontinuous realms and certainly entails nothing so intractable as the “hard problem” of consciousness. There’s a real continuity here, he claims, because the lived body is a dynamic condition of the living body. The explanatory gap has now narrowed, because there’s no need to explain mind in nature in either purely subjectivist or purely objectivist terms.
PSYCHE: Attractive but, alas, it is not so.
HEPHAISTOS: O, my prophetic soul, how did I know you’d say so? Please, explain why.
PSYCHE: What can I say? I can’t help but suspect that, in this case, the notion of an original latency of life and mind in matter has been introduced into the story simply to avoid rather than resolve the logical contradictions inherent in the idea of strong emergence while still allowing that a kind of physical impulse or law in the structure of nature dictates the ultimate appearance of organisms and conscious selves. It still looks sufficiently unbalanced to me that it could be taken as meaning that organic life is a purely structural amplification of the laws of physics, and mental agency a purely structural amplification of the laws of life thus generated. In fact, it still looks too functionalist to me in seeming to suggest that consciousness arises from cognition—that the semantics of thought, that is, arises from the syntax of physical comportments. So, for me, this approach still doesn’t really get past the problems bedeviling the mechanical account of things; it just suppresses them, and in the process introduces new problems all its own.
To begin with, I still object that all of this gives us a vastly inadequate account of what conscious mental agency is and does. It’s simply false to say that consciousness is a form of comportment or behavior, or to claim that consciousness need not always involve any dimension of absolute interiority. We know that it does. Moreover, the language of comportment simply doesn’t get us any nearer that simple “I think” that remains the necessary and necessarily immaterial ground of conscious experience, or any nearer to subjectivity as self-sustaining self-reflection, or any nearer to the absolute unity of conscious apprehension; neither does it illuminate all the ways in which consciousness clearly exceeds or stands apart from any engagement with the world or any kind of comportment within a milieu. None of that’s going to be sufficiently explained by a phenomenology of physical behaviors, no matter how “enactive.” Listen, I know Thompson’s work, and I have a high opinion both of his aims and of many of his arguments, but I regard his project as in some ways a noble failure. His story never really overcomes any of the explanatory gaps—or, rather, abysses—that he sets out to bridge, because he’s still proceeding in only one direction: from below to above. Despite his benign intentions, all the problems we encountered in physicalist reductionism we find still intransigently in place in his arguments—strong emergentism, behaviorism, functionalism, metaphorical inflation, the seeding of terms like “meaning” at junctures of his narrative where they have no business appearing so that they can seem to arise naturally later in the tale, our redoubtable old friends the cui bono and pleonastic fallacies, and so forth—albeit all of them artfully, if innocently, dissembled.
Frankly, moreover, he doesn’t adequately appreciate the nature of the “hard problem” of consciousness. This is clear, for example, from how he responds to the notion of philosophical “zombies.” He treats it as if it were a proposal regarding a real metaphysical or practical possibility, and seeks to refute it by noting how many corporeal sensorimotor functions require proprioceptive self-scrutiny and kinaesthetic bodily awareness, and by pointing out that perception and kinaesthesia are intimately bound together—all of which is true, of course, but also quite irrelevant. There are three errors here. The first, again, is the cui bono fallacy: Thompson often speaks as if the necessity of consciousness for certain psychophysical functions, if one could prove it, would be enough to account for the evolution of consciousness. But the same old issue remains in place: yes, it’s evolutionarily beneficial, but how is it physically possible? He also appears not to grasp that the idea of philosophical zombies is meant only as a “conceivability” argument, demonstrating that cognitive functions and consciousness are two conceptually and logically distinct topics. Whether such zombies are a real possibility or not, under any physical or natural laws we know or could imagine, has no bearing on whether a system endowed with what appear to be cognitive functions, be it ever so sophisticated, is possessed of consciousness as a logical necessity. It may very well be true—I believe it is—that intrinsic cognitive powers are impossible without consciousness, but the nature and “laws” of mental agency aren’t deducible from the laws of coordinated behavior; they can be known only from within. And this yields his third and most problematic error: he conflates functional cognition and consciousness, as though the latter were simply entailed in the former. Yes, indeed, we find our way in our physical milieux by way of a cognitive system that’s embraced within subjective self-reflective awareness; but that too doesn’t establish causal or logical necessity. A zombie or an automaton with an exquisitely engineered proprioceptive apparatus might very well be able to comport itself in its milieu just as well as conscious beings do in theirs. The mystery of mind occupies a system-level higher than that of “comportment.”
Something similar must be said of Thompson’s attempt to supplant the Cartesian gulf between body and soul with the seemingly much narrower gap between phenomenological specifications of the body as either living or lived—either Körper or Leib—which, to be honest, gives us absolutely nothing new except a divertingly different way of describing a correlation that hasn’t been any better explained. Here Thompson is using the word “body” in a hazily and, to my mind, spuriously univocal way, which makes it look like a useful intermediary concept poised between objective physical presence in the world and subjective experience; but this is a rhetorical illusion, made no more cogent by the suggestive proximity to one another of the present and past participles of the verb “to live.” It brings us not an inch nearer to uniting organic life to thought, or to spanning the gulf between the objective and subjective, or between the body as a material system of behavioral functions and mind as irreducibly unified, conscious intentionality—the gulf, that is, between the “eye” and the “witness.” We’re still merely talking about a system of stimulus and response on the one hand and consciousness as such on the other, and absolutely no causal or logical narrative has appeared to narrow the distance between them. To be honest, the very distinction between the living and the lived bodies is no better than the same old intractable Cartesian distinction between body and mind; it’s just phrased more attractively. Once again, direction is all. Much of Thompson’s project, precisely because it’s an attempt yet again to ground the mental in the physical rather than the reverse, founders on all the same causal aporias that plague the mechanistic model. It repeatedly skips over what look like logical saltations in the evolutionary narrative it offers: from stable thermodynamic structures to enclosed metabolic systems, from metabolism to self-perpetuating homeostasis, from homeostasis to cognitive systems, from cognitive organism to conscious mind, from metabolic discriminations to “meanings.” That may not be his intention, but what he leaves unsaid is significant.
HEPHAISTOS: For someone who professes admiration for his project, you seem to have little to say in its favor.
PSYCHE: Oh, but I do very much admire his acuity in seeing that there’s a deep continuity between life and mind, and especially that there’s an “enactive”—which is to say, intentional—logic to life’s unity and persistence and evolution. I even admire his descriptions of the successive episodes of life’s ascent . . . well, I’d say, ascent into ever greater consciousness. And I vigorously applaud his willingness to speak of purposiveness in living systems, as far as it goes. But I still think his attempts to describe that continuity come down to something merely geometrical—structural, that is—and even then his account of that structural continuity dissolves into mere metaphor. As Hermes noted, to speak of the physical, spatial, functional “interiority” of a metabolizing organism with a selectively permeable boundary as though that were somehow evolutionarily continuous with the subjective, experiential, intentional, non-spatial “interiority” of conscious mind is simply to have mistaken pure metaphor for concrete description. And to speak of mind as only an enriched example of the formal or organizational principles of life, and not also as an original source of those principles, is to misrepresent a tale of strong emergence for one of merely structural emergence, and so to get the connection backwards. Though the mechanistic language has been expurgated from this version of the story, it’s still to this point an account of the impossible: mind arising from the mindless.
If, however, he were to reverse the causal narrative—or, at any rate, complement it with a top-down account of those relations—those abysses might well close of their own accord. Matter intends life, life intends mind, which is to say that life and mind are final causes belonging to the structure of all reality from the first. But this also means that mind informs life, life informs matter; life is always already mind, rising into fuller consciousness as it’s formed from above, and matter is always already life, rising into fuller complexity and vitality and autonomy as it’s formed from above. And the interiority of organism proceeds from mind, not the reverse. As Ruyer noted, organic intentionality is the creator rather than the result of bodily neurology, as I think Thompson would agree. So too, it seems obvious, mental interiority is the source and rationale, rather than merely the result, of metabolism. After all, what would it really mean to say, as Thompson does, that the embodied dynamism of organic life’s sensorimotor negotiation with an environment allows the brain to organize itself as a response to external perturbations? Or to say that “meaning” arises from self-organizing sensorimotor activity? Or to attribute to “autopoietic” systems with semipermeable and reparable boundaries an inwardness that’s a kind of “self-awareness” and the precursor of subjectivity?17 In truth, it means very little by itself. What he calls “autopoiesis” could better be described as efficient causality set in action by an end beyond itself; we might do better, then, to call it “entelechy” or just “teleology,” and in a somewhat more radical sense than he is willing to speak of teleology. Nothing actually simply creates itself—especially not through the coordinated intentional sophistication we find at every level of life’s systems—except to the degree that it’s guided by some kind of antecedent finality. Every finite project of intention—even just sheer persistence through homeostatic self-maintenance—is intended for the sake of something more fundamentally desirable, such as continued existence: life, that is, as a value situated in what Ruyer correctly characterizes as a transcendental realm of values. Self-creation is a meaningful notion only in regard to what already transcends the “self.”
So, yes, I admire Thompson for recognizing the non-mechanistic and mindlike nature of life; I regret only that he tells the story in only one direction, from past to future but not also from end to origin, and so renders some of its most crucial episodes incoherent.
HEPHAISTOS: [After several moments of silent thought:] I’m not entirely sure you’re being fair. I mean, this basic predisposition toward mind and life in the depths of being that Thompson presumes seems formidably—even distastefully—teleological from my perspective; or, at least, it seems open to an ever more clearly developing teleological dynamism over the course of evolutionary history. If you want the story to be told in such a way that the fullness of mind absolutely must come first, and must then merely express its transcendent fullness in the drama of evolution, imposing formal structure according to real mental finality—well, then, you’re proposing a metaphysical supplement to the tale that I would obviously find objectionable, I admit, and so we’ll never reach a common understanding. But it still seems to me that Thompson’s picture is a powerful alternative to attempts to describe life and mind in mechanistic terms, and that it doesn’t oblige us to abandon responsible naturalist restraint in our proposals. Nor is he alone in venturing such ideas. There’s also Terrence Deacon, of course.
HERMES: Who?
PSYCHE: Oh, Phaesty, he repeats the same errors, but without the philosophical sophistication Thompson brings to the topic.
HERMES: Could one of you elucidate?
PSYCHE: [With a small sigh:] Shall I, Phaesty, for brevity’s sake?
HEPHAISTOS: Please.
VI
Homeostasis and Intentionality
PSYCHE: Deacon isn’t a philosopher—he’s a neuroscientist and biological anthropologist—so perhaps some of the philosophical shortcomings of his work can be excused; but his project too often contains a great deal more bombast than substance. It follows the pattern we’ve already seen today in others: Beginning from stable, inanimate, self-sustaining systems like whirlpools or convection currents, which naturally arise from entropic but disequilibrious states, his story moves through autocatalytic molecules to molecular compounds, and to metabolizing cells with semipermeable barriers, and to replicating cells, and to organisms, and ultimately to mental agency. It is, again, a narrative of structural emergence, moving from non-living to living systems, and from there to conscious living systems, and doing so in good part by way of misrepresenting equivocal uses of the word “self” for univocities: that is, supposedly, physical self-maintenance, organic self-coherence, the self-relevant dynamisms of persisting systems, and so forth, generate over time a kind of basic “biological selfhood”; this, then, becomes increasingly a capacity for self-representation, as well as for an interior representation of the environment, until at last the process has yielded the inner self of conscious mind, navigating a landscape of meanings . . .
HEPHAISTOS: You’re omitting quite a lot.
PSYCHE: [Sighing again:] Very well. Deacon starts from a description of simple physical patterns within local systems of thermodynamic disequilibrium, within which he draws a distinction between “orthograde” internal changes, which spontaneously seek to eliminate asymmetries, and “contragrade” changes occasioned by external perturbations, which instead increase complexity. Contragrade changes are brought about when a given system’s orthograde changes interact with those of another system, an eventuality that drives one system or both into a more asymmetric state, requiring higher flows of energy. These accidental displacements away from equilibrium are the origin of a “dynamical depth” in physical processes that ultimately leads to life, self, sentience, subjectivity . . .
