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Book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter Cybernetics and Human Knowing. Vol. 25 (2018), nos. 2-3, pp. 173–179 The Self Is Something Less, Not More, than Matter Liqian Zhou1 A review of Jeremy Sherman’s Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, Columbia University Press, New York, USA, 2017. 295 Pages, ISBN: 9780231173332. The emergence and nature of life and mind have long been seen as two of the most fundamental questions in science and philosophy but with no satisfied answers since the very beginning of human civilization. Finally, Terrence Deacon provides a fundamental insight to the questions in his 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. However, because of neologism, writing style and inappropriate editing work, the book leads to many misunderstandings. The book I review here is Jeremy Sherman’s Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, which aims to give a brief and simplified reformulation of those ideas in Incomplete Nature. Purposeful phenomena, like intentionality, self, consciousness, qualia, value, and so forth, are often seen as things fundamentally different from physical processes. Thus, we have to work with two realms: cause-and-effect and means-to-ends. However, if we believe that the means-to-ends realm exists in the physical world, then, where is the place of them in physical nature? How can purposeful phenomena as non-physical processes have physical consequences? How to bridge is and should? How to explain these phenomena constitutes a large part of the studies in contemporary science and philosophy, like AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. There are two ways of approaching the problem: top-down and bottom-up. Since the human mind distinctively shows all these characters, the most intuitive way is to study and stimulate the brain, especially the neural systems, which we intuitively think embodies mind. This is what we call brain science or neuroscience. Some try to build artificial models simulating the functions of brain. This is what we call artificial intelligence. Now those sciences of mind integrate with each other into cognitive science with other disciplines that are thought of as being relevant to mind, like psychology, linguistics, and logic. Most of the accounts of mind today follow a top- down way. As we can see, the approach takes the ontological assumption of mind and matter as being two distinctive things for granted and then investigates the relationship between mind and matter. It is easy for the approach to fall in one of two positions: panpsychism or eliminativism. Panpsychism takes mind as something basic and unexplainable, while eliminativism argues that mind is illusory—that only 1. Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University. Email: [email protected] 174 Liqian Zhou physical processes exist and nothing more. David Chalmers’s (1996) double dimension theory, which claims that consciousness is a basic property of the universe like physical properties, and Thomas Nagel’s account of mind as a basic property of cosmos (Nagel, 2012), stand with panpsychism. Behaviorism (Ryle, 1949), computational functionalism (Putnam, 1973), and eliminative materialism (Churchland, 1981) stand with the machine position. Rather than beginning with the most sophisticated human mind and taking it for granted, the bottom-up approach goes the other way around. Unlike the top-down approach which asks questions like “What is the nature of mind?” and “What is the relationship between mind and brain?” A bottom-up approach asks different ones such as how mind and self in its minimal sense emerged from matter. This is a way taken by few since it is a harder one. Nevertheless, Jeremy Sherman’s book, Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, exemplifies a solution with respect to the bottom-up approach. After working with Deacon for more than two decades, Sherman writes the book as a beginner’s guide of Incomplete Nature for lay audiences. Sherman is an independent scholar and an excellent science blogger for Psychology Today whose blog has been viewed more than 4 million times. He has a masters in Public Policy from Berkeley and a PhD in decision theory and evolutionary theory from Union Institute and University. Sherman does not aim to do an original work but a clear reformulation of Deacon’s idea in Incomplete Nature to show how Deacon’s account is a paradigm shift of ontology, methodology and theory. However, I will show that it does not mean that this is not a creative work. Learning from the feedbacks about Incomplete Nature from a variety of readers, Sherman carefully arranges the structure of the book. He divides the book into seven parts: I) Overview; II) Framing the Mystery; III) Dead Ends, Live Clues; IV) Grounding a Solution; V) Deacon’s Solution; VI) The Interpreting Self, and VII) Implications. The book seems dedicated to solving the mystery of purpose: “What is purpose and how does it emerge from purposeless phenomena?” [p. 3]. There will be no purpose without selves that any purpose must be for. Therefore, Sherman reformulates purposes as aims and selves. Since only selves aim, and their origin and nature are inextricably linked, he argues that the real problem is that of how matter becomes mattering. This is also the problem of the origin of life. Thus, in order to know the nature of mind, we should begin with the origin of life. Both panpsychism and eliminativism, with respect to their top-down approaches, fall short of solving the problem. Sherman calls panpsychism ghost and eliminativism machine. Ghost cannot solve the problem because it just takes aims and selves for granted without explaining. Machine cannot solve the problems either because it tries to reduce them to physical processes. That is to say, one does not explain them while the other does not admit their existence. However, aims and selves are real but not mysterious or supernatural. Hence, Sherman thinks that the solution should be grounded in naturalism but not materialism [p. 107]. Materialism, which means that nothing exists except matter, is the basis for eliminativism. This is not what we want. Book Review 175 We also think that aims and selves must be explainable scientifically or will fall into ghost position. Thus it is naturalism. Then, how can we pursue the solution without falling into any one of the two positions? Sherman argues that the first thing we should do is to change the methodology. The reasons that the top-down approach falls into either ghost or machine are that it falls into a reverse-engineering fallacy. Engineering always starts from “prescription through explanation to description” [p. 97] while science should move “sequentially from description through explanation to prescription” [p. 97]. It becomes a fallacy when doing science in the engineering way. While this is what happened to sciences dedicated to studying mind, like AI, cognitive science, computer science, and so forth, it is a fallacy because function is multiply realized as philosophers of mind had discovered long before. It means that the specific mechanism an engineer would invent to realize the function may not correspond with the actual one. This is what is sometimes called the positive way of thinking. It treats aims and selves as something more than matter and should find the mechanism to make it more likely to happen. If we want to disentangle the mystery, Sherman argues, we should think about it negatively. Rather than concentrating on how to make it more likely, we should focus on what are eliminated. According to the negative thinking which focuses on what is absent rather than what is presented, selves are not something from matter or the dynamic possibilities of matter. Different from a top-down approach (like entelechy, vital force, agency, etc.) that selves are something added on to selfless things, Sherman argues that selves are always possible, but the probability of actualizing them is rare. Then the problem is that how the probability of the possibility of the emergence of self can be improved to be 1, namely how self emerges from the state where self is rarely probable. The secret to solve the problem lies in the elimination of other possibilities according to negative thinking: the state presented comes from what is prevented, namely via constraints. The most counterintuitive feature of life is that it seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics. This is the so-called Clausius-Darwin Paradox. According to the second law proposed by Rudolf Clausius, an isolated system has a tendency to thermal equilibrium, the state with a maximum of entropy or disorder; while the forms of life evolve to be more and more elaborated by natural selection discovered by Charles Darwin. It is a paradox because, in Sherman’s term, a thermodynamic process is a process towards irregularity while evolution is an amplifying process of self- regeneration, or living systems which truly have a self. Then, the mystery of purpose becomes that how self-regeneration emerges from irregularity. This is done through emergent elimination of or narrowing down possibilities through constraint. Suppose there is an isolated system with massive elements which is in thermal equilibrium. It means that the freedom of each element in the system is maximal. “It’s just all possibilities equally presented” [p. 118]. As a result, the probability of the actualization of a specific state of each element—which is in inverse proportion of the number of possible states of each element—is very low. Therefore, it is possible for the whole system to deviate from thermal equilibrium but the probability, which 176 Liqian Zhou equals to the multiplied probabilities of the specific states of the elements if each element is independent of each other, is extremely low.
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