Neither Ghost nor Machine

The Emergence and Nature of Selves

Jeremy Sherman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545990
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geist & Körper in der Philosophie

If the universe is aimless, how do selves and aims emerge? Why do living beings have aims when inanimate things do not? Current science encourages us to reject the ghost-in-the-machine explanation—that something called spirit, soul, mind, or will was somehow breathed into matter—and instead accept that selves are just matter, in aimless mechanistic motion like everything else. But what about life's many emergent qualities, the multifarious purposes that shape actual physical behavior not just in human lives, but in all of life? Even the simplest life forms have adaptive functions, traits that accomplish goals or ends. How can we explain the nature and origin of selves and aims without resorting to supernatural forces or explaining them away as nothing but cause-and-effect mechanisms?

In Neither Ghost nor Machine, Jeremy Sherman explains the emergence of selves and aims in an aimless universe. He distills for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon, which extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. Emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. It offers a physics of purpose, demonstrating that there is a strictly physical explanation for the emergence and nature of selves and aims, one that shows our existence in an otherwise inanimate universe is not absurd. Neither Ghost nor Machine bridges the gap between the hard and soft sciences, suggesting fresh and exciting solutions to philosophical mysteries that have perplexed humanity for millennia, from free will to causality to morality.

I

OVERVIEW

1

THE MYSTERY OF PURPOSE

WHAT ARE WE?

Every generation marvels at what prior generations didn’t know, the mysteries they hadn’t yet solved, perhaps hadn’t even noticed. We might, therefore, wonder what future generations will look back at as our biggest blind spot. What central scientific mystery haven’t we solved yet and perhaps haven’t even noticed?

This book is about a likely candidate, the mystery of purpose:

What is purpose and how does it emerge from purposeless phenomena?

It also proposes a heretofore-unexplored natural science solution to the mystery.

While the term purpose often refers to deliberate, conscious, intended, or declared goal setting, here it will include all traits and behaviors that are functional, valuable, significant, or useful, including all biologically adaptive traits. To expand beyond the narrower implications of the term purpose, I will mostly refer to purposes as aims. Thus, the mystery of purpose becomes how aims emerge from aimlessness.

Purposefulness or aiming is unimaginable without reference to agents, organisms, individuals, or beings. For example, when biologists say that adaptations are functional or serve purposes, they can’t help but identify the organisms whose purposes are served or the aims that those organisms express.

Here I will refer to beings, organisms, individuals, or agents as selves. Selves have purposes or aims. Thus the mystery of purpose becomes how selves and aims emerge from self-less, aimless physics and chemistry.

Physics and chemistry are cause-and-effect phenomena. In contrast, selves and aims refer to means-to-ends behavior. Means-to-ends behavior depends on but is not reducible to cause-and-effect phenomena. Despite great effort over centuries to explain away means-to-ends behavior as nothing but cause and effect phenomena, here I’ll argue that it can’t be done, and that there is no alternative to explaining a kind of phase transition whereby means-to-ends behavior emerges from cause-and-effect events—not just that it must have or that it could have, but how it really does here or anywhere in the universe where means-to-ends behavior exists.

We do not yet have a solution to the mystery of purpose, but we may not have to wait generations for one. This book presents an unprecedented path to the solution, one that doesn’t explain selves and aims as the product of phantom ghostlike forces, or explain them away as nothing but cause-and-effect mechanisms. Selves with aims are neither ghosts nor machines, and yet they are strictly natural; their special properties have a perfectly feasible explanation within the known laws of classical physics and chemistry.

FOUR QUESTIONS

The mystery of purpose is one huge mystery in four questions:

The Nature of Selves: What distinguishes selves from nonselves? What, for example, distinguishes you from lifeless chemistry or a computer?

The Origin of Selves: How could selves emerge in a universe that apparently didn’t contain them at its beginnings?

The Nature of Aims: What distinguishes self-directed, means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect phenomena? For example, what makes you strive to survive and thrive, pursuing what matters to you? What does all functional, adaptive, useful, good, helpful, beneficial, purposeful, intentional behavior have in common and what makes such behavior distinct from things that just happen unaimed, unintended, and without purpose in lifeless physics and chemistry?

The Origin of Aims: How could aims emerge in an otherwise aimless universe? In other words, how does mattering emerge from matter?

These four questions fold into one big mystery for two reasons.

1. Selves and aims are inextricably linked: Only selves aim. To be a self is to aim; to aim is to work toward some potential ends, and the most fundamental such state is to remain a self. Nonselves have no aims of their own. We selves build machines to serve our aims, not their aims. Nothing matters except to selves, given their aims.

2. Origins and natures are inextricably linked: We can’t tell how something emerges if we don’t know what emerges, and we can’t know exactly what has emerged without knowing how it emerged. For example, we know that we are selves, but without knowing how selves emerged, we can’t really know what it means to be a self. Without a solution to the mystery of purpose, we don’t yet know what we are.

DISMISSING THE MYSTERY

Like many big mysteries unsolved by past generations, the mystery of purpose is one that many people hardly consider worth solving. When asked about it, scientists tend to respond as though it’s irrelevant to their interests. They will tend to shift attention toward other questions that to them are more familiar and worthy of their attention.

The mystery of purpose has ancient roots. In the divorce settlement three hundred years ago, when natural philosophy separated from philosophy, taking the name natural science, philosophy got to keep the mystery of purpose. Natural scientists expected that science would get along just fine without having a solution to it.

In her deep intellectual history of debate about living agency, historian Jessica Riskin offers a glimpse of how science is fairing without a solution to the mystery of purpose. She describes a biologist friend, who notes that

It is absolutely against the rules in her field to attribute agency to a natural entity such as, say, a cell or a molecule, but she also agreed that biologists do it constantly, just as a manner of speaking: they speak and write as if natural entities expressed all sorts of purposes and intentions, but they don’t mean it literally. “Sure, we do it all the time, when we’re teaching, in lectures, even in published articles. But it’s just a sort of placeholder for things we don’t know yet. The more we get to know, the less the phenomena will seem purposeful.1

The taboos this biologist describes are ambiguous, expressing unresolved ambivalence endemic in the life sciences, leading to all sorts of equivocation. According to Riskin’s biologist friend:

Certain verbs are worse than others: those that seem “anthropomorphizing,” such as “want,” are only permissible in casual settings. Biologists can say, and allow their doctoral students to say, that “cells want to move toward the wound” in conversation but never in print. In contrast, other active verbs do not seem anthropomorphizing.… Proteins “control” chemical reactions; muscle cells “harvest” energy; genes “dictate” the production of enzymes.2

The “central problem of biology” as Nobel Prize–winning French biochemist Jacques Monod put it, is “how could purposeful systems have emerged from a universe with no purpose?”3 One nonanswer is to simply declare that it emerged, without saying how. Reviewing scientific responses, biochemist Addy Pross said, “the minimal attention that has been directed toward this ‘central problem’ suggests that the scientific community considers the problem solved (or uninteresting) and has accepted the ‘emergent property’ explanation.”4

Thus, one can sidestep by begging the question “How did purposeful systems emerge?” “By emergence!” One can also sidestep it by defending equivocation. To give but one example of many, consider physicist Sean Carroll’s argument from his best seller, The Big Picture: “Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That’s us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.”5

This might make us wonder whether swirls of cream enjoy the ride. The question doesn’t occur to Carroll, who defends equivocation by promoting an approach he calls poetic naturalism as the argument that “there is only one, unified, physical world, but many useful ways of talking about it, each of which captures an element of reality. Poetic naturalism is at least consistent with its own standards: it tries to provide the most useful way of talking about the world we have.”6

To Carroll, “The appearance of something like ‘purpose’ simply comes down to the question ‘Is “purpose” a useful concept when developing an effective theory of this part of reality in this particular domain of applicability?’”7 And elsewhere, “The idea that something wants something else is a way of talking that is potentially useful in the right circumstances—a simple idea that summarizes a good amount of complex behavior in a convenient way.”8

To paraphrase, according to poetic naturalism, we can say that selves want if we, as selves, want to. Of course this is true of everyday explanation, but scientists need to hold a tighter standard. It’s not enough to explain purposeful consequences by means of other purposeful consequences—we want to assume wants. We have to address Monod’s central question, explaining how purposeful consequences emerge from nonpurposeful consequences, or in Monod’s words, how purposeful systems have emerged from a universe with no purpose.

NOT JUST HUMAN SELVES

The first selves to emerge from aimless physics were not humans. Our species appeared on the earth only moments ago in the history of life. So just how far down the food chain should we expect to find selves? Realistically, we need to go all the way down to the simplest known organisms and indeed further still, to the first possible organism here or anywhere else in the universe in order to explain the emergence of selves and aims.

People tend to think of selves and aims as distinctly psychological phenomena—selves as self-awareness; aims as conscious intentions or stated goals and purposes. The mystery of purpose runs much deeper than that.

To corner ourselves with the mystery, here I’ll take the radically inclusive step of regarding every known and unknown organism as a self. By my definition, even trees, the simplest microbes, and as-yet undiscovered extraterrestrial life forms are selves. Every living being that ever existed or ever will exist here or elsewhere, from its conception to its death, is a self. To solve the mystery of purpose requires explaining how selves and aims could emerge anew anywhere in the universe.

Offsetting my inclusive definition of selves, I’ll be excluding some selves commonly assumed to solve the mystery. First, I’ll exclude any supernatural selves. This includes gods, higher powers, souls, spirits, and any nonphysical élan vital or universal life force. Scientists seek explanations within the natural, not the supernatural, realm, which by definition is beyond nature and therefore beyond yielding any empirical evidence whatsoever. Besides, animating inanimate things is altogether too easy. Any of us can imagine Gods as selves with aims as easily as we can imagine that rocks aim to fall, rivers strive for the sea, or the whole universe wants us all to be here. This makes for beautiful, evocative poetry, mythology, spirituality, religion, and fable, but it won’t work for science.

I’ll also exclude natural selection, DNA, and RNA—the chemicals of life. These are not selves and they have no aims.

There’s a tendency, even among some biologists, to talk about natural selection as a purposeful self, aiming to design and improve organisms. The term natural selection encourages this false impression—Mother Nature selecting organisms that satisfy her aims.

Current popularizations of Darwinian theory also encourage the false impression that natural selection has aims. Darwin argued that evolution occurs through the interplay of heritability, variation, and selection. Many popularizers of evolutionary theory have oversimplified heritability and variation down to purposeless replication, the imperfect copying of inanimate molecules. If that were all there was to heritability and variation, then life’s aims could be explained by natural selection aiming to design organisms or program DNA or by inanimate replicating chemicals aiming to self-replicate.

However, there is a difference between chemical replication and what selves do. Replication is the mere proliferation of inanimate molecules. Most chemical reactions yield a proliferation of molecular products. But chemical reactions are ephemeral due to the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency for organization to become disorganized, generated concentrations to degenerate, and energy to dissipate. Chemical reactions peter out.

Purpose is not found in chemical reactions, not even in prebiotic proliferation of DNA or RNA, the molecules that now play crucial roles in all known forms of life.

Though molecular replication eventually peters out, selves have persisted for billions of years. Selves are self-regenerative in two senses: they maintain their own existence, and they produce new selves. They somehow have a capacity to outpace the second law, regenerating the...