Deacon: "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter" (book)

[Alex]

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter 
by Terrence W. Deacon 
Hardcover: 624 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 21, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0393049914
ISBN-13: 978-0393049916
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393049914




Terrence Deacon in 2008

Book Description

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.
 

Review

“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)

“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)

“[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)

“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)


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.

[Alex]

Publishers Weekly

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.


Library Journal

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


http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/incomplete-nature-terrence-w-deacon/1101999530

[Alex]

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

Leading biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon, whose acclaimed book The Symbolic Species explained how the human brain evolved its capacity for language, now offers a radical new approach to the riddle of consciousness. The fact that minds emerged from life and life emerged from inanimate matter leads Deacon to reexamine this mystery from the bottom up. While the same kinds of atoms make up rivers, bacteria, and human brains, Deacon shows how their dynamical relationships produce their different properties. In Incomplete Nature he reveals a missing link: emergent processes that are neither fully mental nor merely material, which provide a bridge connecting the two. He demonstrates how functions, intentions, representations, and values-despite their apparent nonmaterial character-can nevertheless produce physical consequences. Origins of life, information, sentience, meaning, and free will all fall into place in a fully integrated scientific account of the relationship between mind and matter.

Shared Symbolic Storage

[Alex]

Biosemiotics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosemiotics


譯最精點：生物符號學。研究生物怎樣生產和解釋符號，及就符號採取行動。生物符號學試圖整合科學生物學和符號學的研究成果，代表著一個生命科學的範式轉移，顯示指號過程（semiosis，以符號指代事物的過程，包括賦與含義和解釋）是生物的內在功能。



Alex's commnet:  Is biosemiotics the bridge between the physical brain and the non-physical mind?

[Alex]

Life emergent
Evan Thompson
318 | NATURE | VOL 480 | 15 DECEMBER 2011

How is mind — cognition and consciousness — related to biological life? Current thinking in cognitive science suggests that living and cognitive systems share basic organizational properties, such as being autonomous or self-producing and self-sustaining. Anthropologist Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature is a welcome contribution to this field.

Deacon draws on thermodynamics, complex-systems theory and biology to show how we can understand the characteristics of mind in relation to life, and those of life in relation to inanimate matter, without losing sight of their continuity. He plots the ways in which non-living physical systems can self-organize and evolve into living systems, and how living systems can evolve into cognitive systems.

Deacon takes his guiding idea from one of my favourite chapters of a classic Chinese philosophical text from the fourth century bc, the Tao Te Ching: “Pots are fashioned from clay/But it’s the hollow that makes a pot work.” Similarly, Deacon sees the ‘constitutive absence’ as functional, a defining property of life and mind. Living things are dynamically organized around ends, such as finding nourishment; and minds are dynamically organized around meanings, such as anticipated future events. And like the hollowed interior of the pot, these ends and meanings are both functional and absent, in the sense that they affect a sys­tem’s behaviour, yet are not material parts of it.

This idea leads Deacon to offer a new twist on theories of how inanimate matter can self-organize and evolve to become living, and how living systems can evolve to become cognitive. To reflect absence, he introduces the concept of constraints in a dynamical system. For example, water molecules heated in a pan organize into rotating convection cells, with their motions constrained by the geometry of the cells. In this system, absence is the variety of alternative paths the water molecules could have taken. Yet the system, Deacon says, depends on their absence.

Applying this idea to the emergence of life, Deacon considers autocatalytic molecules. These copy themselves by catalysing their own production, and can collectively build systems that evolve to have a metabolism and reproduce. In Deacon’s version, autocatalytic molecules manufacture by-products that self-assemble into a container that then houses those reactions. Again, the absence on which the system depends is the other ways in which the mol­ecules could have been distributed.

Such self-generating systems, for Deacon, already have a minimal kind of self. Multicellular organisms have a more complex bodily self than these systems, and animals with brains have a cognitive self because the brain must constantly represent its own ongoing activity in relation to the body and to the outside world. As Deacon unfolds this narrative, he provides perceptive accounts of key notions, such as information and emergence — how complex systems arise from many comparatively simple interactions.

But Incomplete Nature has shortcomings. Deacon doesn’t discuss other theorists who have given similar accounts of life and mind, such as Alicia Juarrero in Dynamics in Action (MIT Press, 2002) or myself in Mind in Life (Harvard University Press, 2007). He also sometimes overemphasizes the differences between his views and those of the theorists he does cite.

Deacon stumbles at two crucial junctures — his explanations for the emergence of meaning and for the emergence of consciousness. The problem of meaning is the problem of how it is possible for certain physical phenomena, such as brain states, to have content or to be ‘about’ something beyond themselves.

Deacon’s answer is not easy to decipher. Roughly, he seems to be saying that certain states of a self-generating system acquire content when they correlate reliably with features of the environment that are useful to that system. For example, a system that needs molecules from the environment in order to reproduce ‘interprets’ the pres­ence of these molecules as meaning that the environment is conducive to reproduction. But this seems little more than metaphorical. As many philosophers have shown, meaning cannot be reduced to such processes.

With consciousness, Deacon says that sentience — the capacity to feel — arises from a system being self-sustaining and goal-directed. So he sees individual cells as sentient. But, as he explains, an animal’s sentience is not the sum of the sentience of its individual cells: the nervous system creates its own sentience at the level of the whole animal. Yet Deacon doesn’t get to grips with the hard problem of explaining why and how we and other animals have conscious experience.

Simply pointing to the neural activity associated with sentience is not enough to answer this question. What we need to know is why this activity feels pleasant or painful to the animal, instead of being an absence of feeling. In my view, Deacon’s error is not that he has no answers to such questions (no one does), but that he fails to recognize them.

On the empirical side, Deacon's discussion also falls short. He doesn't explore the neuroscience literature showing how large-scale brain activity is related to consciousness, and makes no use of writings that relate these findings to how we experience emotion, time and the self.

Although incomplete in these ways, Incomplete Nature contains many rewarding thoughts about life and mind and their place in nature. ■

Evan Thompson is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada.  e-mail: [e-mail]