Abstract
A partial review of Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False is used to articulate some systems-theoretic ideas about the challenge of understanding subjective experience. The article accepts Nagel’s view that reductionist materialism fails as an approach to this challenge, but argues that seeking an explanation of mind based on emergence is more plausible than seeking one based on panpsychism, which Nagel favors. However, the article proposes something similar to Nagel’s neutral monism by positing a hierarchy of information processes that spans the domains of matter, life, and mind. As depicted in this hierarchy, subjective experience is emergent, but also continuous with informational phenomena at lower levels.
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Notes
The list of idealist philosophies is provided by Nagel. About the inclusion of logical positivism, Nagel says (p. 37) that the logical positivists “analyzed the physical world as a construction out of sense data.”
Materialism per se is not necessarily reductionist, and may be joined to an antireductionist or systems view that recognizes ontological stratification and emergence. This, for example, is the philosophical position of Mario Bunge (2010). One might say that materialism + reductionism = physicalism, the position that everything reduces to the realities described by physics. What Nagel means by materialism is really physicalism, even though he accords some epistemological autonomy to biology when he speaks of materialist neo-Darwinism. Nagel also uses “naturalism” or “scientific naturalism” as synonymous with materialist reductionism. This use of “naturalism” is not conventional, since naturalism is not normally regarded as the same as materialism. Naturalism allows certain nonmaterialist positions: it excludes supernaturalism, of course, but it does not exclude nontheistic idealism or neutral monism. Also, it does not exclude an emergence-based view that gives equal status to matter and information.
Saying that everything is both matter and mind differs from saying that underlying everything is a substrate that is neither matter nor mind, although Spinoza says both: underlying everything is substance, which is neutral but has attributes of both extension (matter) and thought (mind). Spinoza’s view can be considered a neutral monism and a panpsychism (Seager and Allen-Hermanson 2013). In this view, matter and mind do not interact, but are parallel alternative perspectives; the duality of attributes—there are more but we know only these two—is simply asserted. Dual attribute approaches deny that there is a hard problem of consciousness; like ordinary Cartesian dualism, they aren’t scientifically generative. Versions of neutral monism that identify experience as the underlying neutral substrate (see Note 6) also avoid the problem of explaining experience, since they take it as a primitive. For a survey of versions of neutral monism, and criticisms of them, see Stubenberg (2014).
See Note 7, which discusses Sayre’s ontology based in information theory, and the discussion below of Tonioni’s ideas about consciousness, which are also based in Shannon’s theory.
One can, however, imagine joining panpsychism with emergence, and the philosophy of Whitehead (1929) might be regarded as such a synthesis. Seager and Allen-Hermanson (2013) write, “[Whitehead’s] panpsychism arises from the idea that the elementary events that make up the world (which he called occasions) partake of mentality in some—often extremely attenuated—sense, metaphorically expressed in terms of the mentalistic notions of creativity, spontaneity and perception.” But Hartshorne (1972), writing about Whitehead’s philosophy, notes its “admission not merely of emergence, but of emergent or creative synthesis as the very principle of process and reality.” There is uncertainty about exactly what Whitehead means by the mentalist properties that he attributes to elementary events. If these are just informational, his account—written 20 years before Shannon’s theory—might be compatible with the position of this article. Whitehead was influenced by the work of Alexander (Haberman 2014).
In many versions of neutral monism, the neutral substrate is identified as “experience” per se, regarded as not being tied either to subject (ego) or to object (matter), or the substrate is identified as sense data which is closely related to experience but detached from an experiencer. For a review of various thinkers in this tradition, including Mach, James, and Russell, see Stubenberg (2014). Understandably, this view is often accused of being a disguised idealism, but, from the perspective of this article, a more pertinent objection is that it is precisely the fact of experience—the hard problem of consciousness—that lacks scientific explanation. Stubenberg recalls the wry advice of William James: “Whatever you are totally ignorant of assert to be the explanation of everything else.” James was referring to “soul,” but scientifically speaking, we are (nearly) totally ignorant about experience, so neutral monists who take experience as ontologically primitive are boldly following James’ recommendation. Yet, from an ordinary human vantage point, nothing is more familiar than experience. What one is “totally ignorant of” and what is fundamental depend on whether one’s standpoint is anthropocentric or world-centric. Proper science is world-centric. To take experience or sense data as ontologically primitive is to mistake epistemology for ontology.
A pan-informational neutral monism that might be regarded as a kind of panpsychism (Stubenberg 2014) was proposed by Sayre (1976), who writes, “an ontology of informational states is adequate for an explanation of the phenomena of mind, as distinct from an ontology of physical events.…It is a reasonable conjecture that an ontology of information is similarly basic to the physical sciences.” Sayre later notes, “The neutral monism I advocate holds that the fundamental principle to which both mind and matter are reducible is not a substance in any sense (Aristotelian, Cartesian, whatever), but is rather [a] structure of a sort that can only be represented mathematically. This structure is what information theorists…call ‘information.’” (Sayre quoted in Stubenberg 2014, pp. 13–14). Sayre is correct in arguing that information is relevant to both matter and mind, but informational ideas are currently insufficient for explaining experience. However, Tonioni’s (2008) theory, discussed below, is precisely an attempt to use these ideas to approach such an explanation.
If Alexander truly regarded high-level properties as ontologically primitive, yet also as not supplementing fundamental interactions, one is permitted to doubt the coherence of his position.
These considerations are operationalized with hypergraphs and information theory (Krippendorff 1986; Zwick 2001). For the maximal decomposition of ABC, namely A:B:C, where the constituents are taken in isolation of one another, mutual information or “transmission” T(A:B:C) = H(A:B:C)−H(ABC), which is a difference of Shannon entropies, is the organization lost in this simple sum of parts. Equivalently, it is the organization present in ABC. T(AB:AC:BC) = H(AB:AC:BC)−H(ABC) measures the organization that is lost in the minimal decomposition of R which includes all three pairs of constituents; it is the inherently triadic and non-decomposable part of the constraint in ABC.
Holistic effects are not exotic; they’re more simply known as “interaction effects.” But when holism is at its most extreme, there can be interaction effects without any main effects. In the limit of maximal holism, any decomposition destroys all the order in the system. This is illustrated graphically by Borromean rings (Livingston 1993; Zwick 2001). For the three-constituent system used here as an example, extreme holism gives T(AB:AC:BC) = T(A:B:C); that is, even decomposing ABC minimally, removing only its inherently triadic constraint, amounts to a total decomposition of ABC into its separate constituents.
Ontology and epistemology should be conceptually distinguished (see Note 6), but they are not completely separable. In the nonlinear dynamics of chaos, future states of a system are determined but not predictable because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It is unclear whether this unpredictability should be regarded as ontological or epistemological, since although predictability might seem to be an epistemological issue, the impossibility of long-term prediction is an in-principle limitation that stems from the necessarily finite precision of any measurement. What ultimately emerges in a concrete chaotic system is not reliably ascertainable by simulation, and thus might be regarded as strong emergence.
O’Connor and Wong (2012) regard Bedau’s (1997) notion of weak emergence as epistemological, but Bedau himself claims that phenomena that in principle are explainable only by simulation exemplify ontological emergence. He argues that the need for simulation follows from “the system’s underlying microdynamic whether or not we know anything about this [italics added].” This illustrates the complexity of interpretations of emergence, and the difficulty of assigning individual thinkers to different positions.
Phenomena demonstrable only by simulation can be further explained (see, e.g., Szabo and Teo 2013).
Fallacies of composition assume that properties of parts must necessarily be present in the wholes that they constitute; fallacies of decomposition assume that the properties of wholes must be present in the parts of which they are constituted. These are both not only logical fallacies but also empirical fallacies.
Nagel gives no reason to think that genomic change rates over history are insufficient to account for the diversity of life. He might better have focused on other problems that afflict a narrowly conceived neo-Darwinism; for example, its exclusively functional-historical character and its need for structural augmentations (Kauffman 1993).
The origin of life was never intended to be encompassed in Darwin’s theory, but neo-Darwinism includes molecular biology, from which one might expect an account of the origin of life.
The awkwardness of Bunge’s use of the materialism label is exemplified in his chapter titles of “physical matter,” “chemical matter,” “living matter,” “thinking matter,” “social matter,” and “artificial matter.” These would have been more appropriately called physical systems, chemical systems, etc.
The three-domain framework of matter, life, and mind was central to Alexander’s (1920) ontology and also to Morgan’s (1923). Alexander had a fourth domain, deity, which he said emerges from mind. This will not be addressed here, except to note that Boulding’s (1956) hierarchy, from which Table 2 is adapted, has a “transcendental” level at its highest point. Alexander also had a level beneath matter, namely integrated space–time, which was the fundamental basis for the existence of relations.
Nagel’s assertion that psycho-physical reduction will forever be a failure is a statement of his belief that this second step of understanding the relevant empirical data will forever elude us, even if the first step of acquiring this data is accomplished.
An aside on levels (3) and (4): The assertion that genomic information governs metabolic autopoiesis differs from the perspective of Maturana and Varela (1980), who formulated the idea of autopoiesis. For these authors, autopoiesis is self-organization that generates its own boundaries, in which information is dispersed throughout the network, rather than being concentrated in a few constituents. In their view also, “genetic information” is observer-dependent and not an objective feature of living systems, but this view would be rejected by nearly all biologists. As defined here, an autopoietic system is one that is closed organizationally but open to a matter-energy flux, where the internal processes utilize the flux for self-production, and where the partition between system and environment does not require an externally provided boundary. By this definition, some nonbiological systems, such as flames, exhibit autopoiesis, so this property is at most proto-life. “Life” is defined here as encompassing not only metabolic autopoiesis, but also centralization of organizational information, which codes for metabolic catalysts and confers upon the system a degree of individuality and the possibility of reproduction that allows populational evolution. This definition is offered as a statement of the core features of life as a general phenomenon. It is not intended as a definition of the minimal requirements that must be satisfied for a particular system to be considered “alive.” An animal that is sterile is no less alive and individual organisms do not evolve, but life in general requires reproduction and evolution.
Since the instantiation of information in matter, life, and mind appeared sequentially in history, this raises the question of teleology: is there, as Teilhard de Chardin (1959) thought, a tendency in cosmological evolution towards the distillation, refinement, and concentration of information? Nagel also asks us to consider the possibility of teleological laws that supplement causal laws, though such additional laws would not be needed if one posits a strong version of the anthropic principle, where basic physical constants of the universe are mysteriously “tuned” to allow for and even favor the emergence of life and mind.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Hugo du Coudray, Kirke Wolfe, and John Hammond for helpful discussions of an earlier draft of this article and of Nagel’s book. He is also greatly indebted to the editor and an associate editor of this journal and the two reviewers for their exceptionally thorough and invaluable critique of that draft. The deficiencies that remain are of course only the responsibility of the author.
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Zwick, M. Mind and Life: Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False?. Biol Theory 11, 25–38 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-015-0231-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-015-0231-1