Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

by Terrence W. Deacon

Overview

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties—such as mass, momentum, charge, and location—that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a "theory of everything" that does not leave it absurd that we exist.

Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.

The book's radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absenses—such stuff as dreams are made on—and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393080834
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/14/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	624
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Terrence W. Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Symbolic Species and Incomplete Nature, he lives near Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

0 Absence 1

The missing cipher 1

What matters? 3

Calculating with absence 8

A Zeno's paradox of the mind 11

"As simple as possible, but not too simple" 13

1 (W)Holes 18

A stone's throw 18

What's missing? 22

Denying the magic 31

Telos ex machina 34

Ex nihilo nihil fit 37

When less is more 42

2 Homunculi 46

The little man in my head 46

Homuncular representations 49

The vessel of teleology 56

Hiding final cause 59

Gods of the gaps 61

Preformation and epigenesis 64

Mentalese 69

Mind all the way down? 72

3 Golems 80

Elimination schemes 80

Heads of the Hydra 82

Dead truth 87

The ghost in the computer 93

The ballad of Deep Blue 97

4 Teleonomy 107

Back to the future 107

The Law of Effect 110

Pseudopurpose 114

Blood, brains, and silicon 124

Fractions of life 128

The road not taken 136

5 Emergence 143

Novelty 143

The evolution of emergence 146

Reductionism 152

The emergentists 154

A house of cards? 164

Complexity and "chaos" 169

Processes and parts 175

6 Constraint 182

Habits 182

Redundancy 187

More similar = less different 190

Concrete abstraction 197

Nothing is irreducible 203

7 Homeodynamics 206

Why things change 206

A brief history of energy 214

Falling and forcing 219

Reframing thermodynamics 227

A formal cause of efficient causes? 230

8 Morphodynamics 235

Order from disorder 235

Self-simplification 243

Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics 247

Rayleigh-Bénard convection: A case study 250

The diversity of morphodynamic processes 255

The exception that proves the rule 262

9 Teleodynamics 264

A common dynamical thread 264

Linked origins 271

Compounded asymmetries 274

Self-reproducing mechanisms 277

What is life? 281

Frankencells 283

10 Autogenesis 288

The threshold of function 288

Autocatalysis 292

Containment 295

Synergy 302

Autogens 305

Autogenic evolution 311

The ratchet of life 315

The emergence of teleodynamics 319

11 Work 326

Forced to change 326

Effort 328

Against spontaneity 332

Transformation 339

Morphodynamic work 346

Teleodynamic work 357

Emergent causal powers 364

12 Information 371

Missing the difference 371

Omissions, expectations, and absences 376

Two entropies 378

Information and reference 381

It takes work 386

Taming the demon 389

13 Significance 392

Aboutness matters 392

Beyond cybernetics 394

Working it out 397

Interpretation 399

Noise versus error 403

Darwinian information 407

From noise to signal 411

Information emerging 414

Representation 419

14 Evolution 421

Natural elimination 421

"Life's several powers" 426

Abiogenesis 430

The replicator's new clothes 434

Autogenic interpretation 442

Energetics to genetics 447

Falling into complexity 457

15 Self 463

Starting small 463

Individuation 468

Selves made of selves 470

Neuronal self 474

Self-differentiation 476

The locus of agency 479

Evolution's answer to nominalism 481

The extentionless cogito 483

16 Sentience 485

Missing the forest for the trees 485

Sentience versus intelligence 490

The complement to computation 494

Computing with meat 498

From organism to brain 504

17 Consciousness 508

The hierarchy of sentience 508

Emotion and energy 511

The thermodynamics of thought 517

Whence suffering? 524

Being here 532

Conclusion of the beginning 538

Epilogue 539

Nothing matters 539

The calculus of intentionality 541

Value 544

Glossary 547

Notes 555

References 569

Index 579

Editorial Reviews

In a tour de force encompassing biology, neurobiology, metaphysics, information theory, physics, and semiotics, Deacon, a neuroscientist and chair of anthropology at UC-Berkeley, attempts to resolve the issue of how life and mind arose from inanimate matter. As he did in his previous book, The Symbolic Species, Deacon asks a very big question and provides the framework for an answer. He argues persuasively that complexity can comfortably emerge as a higher order function from simplicity and extends this point to discuss how nonmaterial entities such as ideas and emotions can generate physical consequences. He believes that by bridging the divide between the material and the nonmaterial, a more robust understanding of the world will be developed and some of the largest shortcomings of science will be addressed. “It’s not just that we have failed to uncover the twists of physics and chemistry that set us apart from the non-living world. Our scientific theories have failed to explain what matters most to us: the place of meaning, purpose, and value in the physical world.” One caveat: although the topics covered by Deacon are important and fascinating, his language is so technical that the book is likely to be accessible only to experts. 12 illus. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Unprecedentedly comprehensive. . . . Imagine the consequences for science and society of having a physical explanation for functional, meaningful and conscious behavior no less scientific and accessible than our explanation for lightning. I believe Deacon provides just that."

Psychology Today

"This is a work of science and philosophy at the cutting edge of both that seeks to develop a complete theory of the world that includes humans, our minds and culture, embodied and emerging in nature."

Bruce H. Weber

"A profound shift in thinking that in magnitude can only be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein."

Robert E. Ulanowicz

"In his approach to the question of how sentience emerged from ‘dumb’ and ‘numb’ matter, Mr. Deacon mobilizes some radically new ideas."

Wall Street Journal

"Contains many rewarding thoughts about life and mind and their place in nature."

Nature

"A stunningly original, stunningly synoptic book. With Autogenesis, Significance, Sentience, seventeen insightful and integrated chapters turn our world upside down and finally, as in the Chinese proverb, lead us home again to a place we see anew. Few ask the important questions. Deacon is one of these."

Stuart Kauffman

"[Deacon] demonstrates how systems that are intrinsically incomplete happen to be alive and meaning-making. The crux of life—and meaning—is solved. It was worthwhile to wait for this book. The twenty-first century can now really start."

Kalevi Kull

Contains many rewarding thoughts about life and mind and their place in nature.-- "Nature"

In his approach to the question of how sentience emerged from 'dumb' and 'numb' matter, Mr. Deacon mobilizes some radically new ideas.-- "Wall Street Journal"

Unprecedentedly comprehensive. . . . Imagine the consequences for science and society of having a physical explanation for functional, meaningful and conscious behavior no less scientific and accessible than our explanation for lightning. I believe Deacon provides just that.-- "Psychology Today"

[Deacon] demonstrates how systems that are intrinsically incomplete happen to be alive and meaning-making. The crux of life--and meaning--is solved. It was worthwhile to wait for this book. The twenty-first century can now really start.--Kalevi Kull, professor, Department of Semiotics, Tartu University

This is a work of science and philosophy at the cutting edge of both that seeks to develop a complete theory of the world that includes humans, our minds and culture, embodied and emerging in nature.--Bruce H. Weber, coauthor of Darwinism Evolving

A profound shift in thinking that in magnitude can only be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein.--Robert E. Ulanowicz, author of A Third Window: Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin

A stunningly original, stunningly synoptic book. With Autogenesis, Significance, Sentience, seventeen insightful and integrated chapters turn our world upside down and finally, as in the Chinese proverb, lead us home again to a place we see anew. Few ask the important questions. Deacon is one of these.--Stuart Kauffman, author of Investigations

From the Publisher

"Contains many rewarding thoughts about life and mind and their place in nature."

Nature Lib

For all our emerging understanding of how the brain and body work, we still haven't grasped "what matters most to us: the place of meaning, purpose, and value in the physical world." Deacon (anthropology, Univ. of California, Berkeley; The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain) offers a new, multidisciplinary approach—combining neuroscience, general philosophy, the philosophy of science, semiotics, anthropology, and a humanist worldview—to explore rigorously how we create meaning and how mind emerged from matter. Deacon's dense and breathtaking study of the relationship between conscious experience and physical processes offers a new framework to examine how phenomena that are not physically extant (e.g., thoughts, ideas, meaning, an understanding of conscious experience) can and do impact physical processes and how physical processes transform into conscious experience. He has worked to make the book accessible to nonscientists and nonphilosophers and largely succeeds, though a dictionary and encyclopedia are helpful to have at hand. VERDICT Appealing to those who enjoy Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida as well as physical science and neuroscience buffs. Highly recommended.—Candice Kail, Columbia Univ. Libs., New York

Library Journal

Deacon (Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience/Univ. of California, Berkeley; The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, 1997) takes up the challenge of giving a physical, scientific basis for our perception of agency and selfhood.

With the development of fMRI and other scanning devices, scientists are able to correlate the activation areas of the brain to stimulus/response patterns involved in decision making, which precede conscious thought (the subject of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink).While Deacon has no answer to the conundrum of the disappearing "I"—the inability of scientists to discover a neurological foundation for our subjective perception of our own agency—he believes that one does exist but requires a revolutionary shift in the present scientific paradigm. The author offers a prospectus for such a scientific revolution—"the qualitative outlines of a future science that is subtle enough to include us"—that would encompass a neurological basis for the emergence of creativity. He develops insights from complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics at extreme conditions to address the fundamental question of how cellular life emerged from the physical substrata as a precondition for evolution. "Life and sentience are deeply interrelated," he writes. "Sentience is not just a product of biological evolution, but in many respects a micro-evolutionary process in action...the experience of being sentient is what it feels like to be evolution.

A dense but intriguing book that demands close reading; for dedicated readers, it's well worth the effort.

Kirkus Reviews