Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

594 Pages·2011·4.16 MB·English

by  Terrence W. Deacon

ALSO BY TERRENCE W. DEACON

The Symbolic Species
Incomplete
Nature

How Mind
Emerged from Matter

Terrence W. Deacon

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York • London
To my parents, Bill and JoAnne Deacon (and “the Pirates”)
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
0
ABSENCE
The missing cipher
What matters?
Calculating with absence
A Zeno’s paradox of the mind
“As simple as possible, but not too simple”
1
(W)HOLES
A stone’s throw
What’s missing?
Denying the magic
Telos ex machina
Ex nihilo nihil fit
When less is more
2
HOMUNCULI
The little man in my head
Homuncular representations
The vessel of teleology
Hiding final cause
Gods of the gaps
Preformation and epigenesis
Mentalese
Mind all the way down?
3
GOLEMS
Elimination schemes
Heads of the Hydra
Dead truth
The ghost in the computer
The ballad of Deep Blue
4
TELEONOMY
Back to the future
The Law of Effect
Pseudopurpose
Blood, brains, and silicon
Fractions of life
The road not taken
5
EMERGENCE
Novelty
The evolution of emergence
Reductionism
The emergentists
A house of cards?
Complexity and “chaos”
Processes and parts
6
CONSTRAINT
Habits
Redundancy
More similar = less different
Concrete abstraction
Nothing is irreducible
7
HOMEODYNAMICS
Why things change
A brief history of energy
Falling and forcing
Reframing thermodynamics
A formal cause of efficient causes?
8
MORPHODYNAMICS
Order from disorder
Self-simplification
Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics
Rayleigh-Bénard convection: A case study
The diversity of morphodynamic processes
The exception that proves the rule
9
TELEODYNAMICS
A common dynamical thread
Linked origins
Compounded asymmetries
Self-reproducing mechanisms
What is life?
Frankencells
10
AUTOGENESIS
The threshold of function
Autocatalysis
Containment
Synergy
Autogens
Autogenic evolution
The ratchet of life
The emergence of teleodynamics
11
WORK
Forced to change
Effort
Against spontaneity
Transformation
Morphodynamic work
Teleodynamic work
Emergent causal powers
12
INFORMATION
Missing the difference
Omissions, expectations, and absences
Two entropies
Information and reference
It takes work
Taming the demon
13
SIGNIFICANCE
Aboutness matters
Beyond cybernetics
Working it out
Interpretation
Noise versus error
Darwinian information
From noise to signal
Information emerging
Representation
14
EVOLUTION
Natural elimination
“Life’s several powers”
Abiogenesis
The replicator’s new clothes
Autogenic interpretation
Energetics to genetics
Falling into complexity
15
SELF
Starting small
Individuation
Selves made of selves
Neuronal self
Self-differentiation
The locus of agency
Evolution’s answer to nominalism
The extentionless cogito
16
SENTIENCE
Missing the forest for the trees
Sentience versus intelligence
The complement to computation
Computing with meat
From organism to brain
17
CONSCIOUSNESS
The hierarchy of sentience
Emotion and energy
The thermodynamics of thought
Whence suffering?
Being here
Conclusion of the beginning
EPILOGUE
Nothing matters
The calculus of intentionality
Value
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
f any of us can claim to see the world from a new vantage point it is because, as
Isaac Newton once remarked, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. This is
beyond question in my case, since each of the many threads that form the fabric
of the theory presented in this book trace their origin to the life works of some of
the greatest minds in history. But much more than this, it is often the case that it
takes the convergence of like minds stubbornly questioning even the least
dubious of our collective assumptions to shed the blinders that limit a particular
conceptual paradigm. This is also true here. Few of the novel ideas explored here
emerged from my personal reflections fully formed, and few even exhibited the
rough-hewn form described in this book. These embryonic ideas were lucky to
have been nourished by the truly dedicated and unselfish labors of a handful of
brilliant, insightful, and questioning colleagues, who gathered in my living room,
week after week, year after year, to question the assumptions, brainstorm about
the right term for a new idea, or just struggle to grasp a concept that at every turn
seemed to slip through our grasp. We were dubbed “Terry and the Pirates” (after
the title of a postwar comic strip) because of our intense intellectual camaraderie
and paradigm-challenging enterprise. This continuous thread of conversation has
persisted over the course of nearly a decade and has helped to turn what was
once nearly inconceivable into something merely counterintuitive.
The original Pirates include (in alphabetical order) Tyrone Cashman, Jamie
Haag, Julie Hui, Eduardo Kohn, Jay Ogilvy, and Jeremy Sherman, with Ursula
Goodenough and Michael Silberstein playing the role of periodic drop-ins from
across the country. Most recently Alok Srivastava, Hajime Yamauchi, Drew
Halley, and Dillon Niederhut have joined, as Jamie and Eduardo moved away to
careers elsewhere in the country. Most have read through major portions of this
manuscript and have offered useful comments and editorial feedback. Portions of
the chapter on “Self” were re-edited from a paper co-written with Jay Ogilvy and
Jamie Haag, and fragments of a number of chapters were influenced by papers
co-authored either with Tyrone Cashman or with Jeremy Sherman. The close
involvement of these many colleagues was demonstrated also in the long days