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 and Nature of Selves, Columbia University Press, New York, USA, 2017. 295 Pages, ISBN: 9780231173332.

The emergence and nature of 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 , 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 , self, , 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 . 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 (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 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 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 . 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 or disorder; while the forms of life evolve to be more and more elaborated by 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. Furthermore, the emergence of self-regeneration is much more unlikely given the condition of thermal equilibrium because the dynamic configuration of it is much more specific. Then, how can the rare possibilities be actualized? Negative thinking would say, that if alternative possibilities are eliminated, then the probability of a specific possible state would be improved significantly. The way to eliminate the possibilities is to create resistance that they cannot overcome. Then, the remaining possibility will be the end result. We call this process, a generation of constraints, as it is a reduction of freedom or possibilities. We design varieties of constraints on things to achieve our purpose in daily life. These kinds of constraints are called imposed constraints by Sherman, meaning constraints imposed by agents. However, agents are what we want to explain here. The kind of constraints we have interests in here are those involved in so-called self-organization. Throughout dynamic interactions between different systems, which are in different states, the spontaneous tendency toward thermal equilibrium is changed locally. As a result, regularization emerges spontaneously with the greater part of possibilities being eliminated and the remaining possibilities coming to actualization. Since there is no self in self-organization, Sherman thinks that emergent regularization is a more proper name for the phenomenon, of how regularization emerges from irregularity. It should be clear that emergent regularization does not violate the second law. It does change the tendency towards equilibrium locally but finds the paths which have the least resistance to irregularity globally. “Order is the fastest path toward disorder” [p. 133]. That is to say, emergent regularization not only does not violate the second law but provides the most efficient way to accelerate it. Emergent regularization provides a variety of physical forms that once were strange with respect to science, like Bernard cells, autocatalysis, turbulence, crystals and so forth. But it is not self-regeneration. Self-regeneration has three distinctive capacities differentiating it from emergent regularization: self-repair, self-protection and self-. Fundamentally different from emergent regularization thermodynamically, self-regeneration is a process in which “selves defy the second law tendency toward irregularity, thereby generating Schrödinger’s sustained negentropy” [p. 135]. However, self-regeneration emerges from synergistic coupling between two reciprocal emergent regularization processes: autocatalysis and crystal formation process. Those two processes are reciprocal in the sense that each one prevents the other from degenerating towards irregularity in the dynamic coupling. On the one hand, autocatalysis provides materials as its byproducts for crystal formation constraining molecule depletion of crystal formation; on the other hand, crystal formation constrains catalyst dissipation through forming a container as the protector of autocatalysis. Thus, the synergistic coupling “is reciprocal means to the prevention of ending” [p. 187]. Deacon calls this synergistic coupling, autogen which means self- regeneration. Book Review 177

An autogen system has a capacity of self-repair that when its enclosure, its container, is broken, it can reclose. The container as the part of and produced by autogen provides protection for autogen. Autogen systems can also reproduce themselves when they open, the reciprocal constraints released from the old autogens being seeds for new autogens. Therefore, autogen fulfils those three criteria. What is more important, self and aims emerge with autogen systems. Autogen systems are self-directed in that autocatalysis and crystal formation reciprocally couple with each other contributing to autogen and, in turn, the formation of synergistic coupling in autogen prevents those two emergent regularization processes from ending. As we can see, autogen systems exist for themselves. That is to say, an autogen system is the aim of itself. Thus, the mystery of purpose solved! Some may think that Deacon’s solution is not something new, and that similar ideas have been proposed by many scholars, like dynamic theory of , hypercycle theory, and autopoiesis theory. Some even alleged that Deacon has stolen the ideas from other scholars. Although an official investigation lasting 13 months has shown that Terrence Deacon is cleared from all these allegations,2 the investigation does not actually show the essential differences between Deacon’s theory and those accounts. The good thing about Sherman’s book is that it gives sound arguments explicitly clearing the differences and Deacon’s fundamental originality. First, it is clear that the phenomena explained by the complex dynamic theory are those of emergent regularization. Emergent regularization does contribute to self- regeneration but is totally different from it and cannot solve the mystery of purpose, as Sherman shows to us. Therefore, Deacon’s solution is essentially different from Juarrero’s (1999) account of intentional behavior as a complex system. Second, the autogen is different from the hypercycle proposed by Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster (1978) obviously because the latter is just a coupling between two autocatalytic processes. On the one hand, the hypercycle is not a self-generative but an emergent regularization process; on the other hand, the hypercycle becomes error ridden with the increase in the complexity of the network of chemical reactions. Third, the autogen process is also different from container-generating autocatalysis (Luisi, 2006; Thompson, 2007) which is a chemical version of autopoiesis. Closure is necessary for autopoiesis but not for autogenesis. Closure even is a problem for the origin of life. It requires a selectively semi-permeable membrane which is highly unlikely to emerge accidentally. Moreover, autopoiesis has no capacity of self-repair. Autogen is closed sometimes within the container and open at other times. Autogen self-repairs and self-reproduces when it opens and self-protects when it closes. Autogen systems are not the end of the story. On the contrary, Sherman convincingly shows that they are the beginning of a new story. He plausibly argues that autogen can evolve into the selective autogen where starts. He also illustrates a hypothesis of the origin of templates like DNA and RNA, which Deacon has proposed in his lectures in public many times, but still falls short of publication.

2. See https://terrydeacon.berkeley.edu/plagiarism-investigation-exonerates-terrence-w-deacon 178 Liqian Zhou

Furthermore, Sherman also articulates the arguments behind Deacon’s idea that Incomplete Nature tries to provide a scientific foundation for The Symbolic Species, which is Deacon’s first book on the coevolution of brain and language. Without a scientific explanation of self, “semiotic theories have tended to be predominantly phenomenological taxonomies rather than dynamical explanations of the representational processes of natural systems” (Deacon, 2007, p. 123). In Part VI, “Interpreting Self,” Sherman helps Deacon articulate the relation between those two works. Sherman further discusses the implications of the ideas in Incomplete Nature on evolutionary theory, the free will debate and the value problem in natural science in the last part of the book. I think that Deacon’s solution supports the so-called life-mind continuity thesis proposed by Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996) arguing that since anything that has a mind is alive, the explanation of the nature of life must play a role in the explanation of mind. It even further, supports the strong continuity concept that “Life and mind have a common abstract pattern. The functional properties characteristic of mind are enriched versions of functional properties that are fundamental to life in general.” (Godfrey-Smith, 1996, p. 31) The functional property of living systems, according to Deacon’s solution, is teleodynamics, or, self-regeneration in Sherman’s terms. This shows why the bottom-up approach is a harder way compared with the top-down approach, because it is the beginning rather than ending. I agree that Deacon’s solution provides fundamental insights for solving the mystery of purpose in what physicists consider a mechanical reality. However, the relationship between life and mind is still waiting to be scientifically figured out. Since autogenesis is the most primary model of life, we have to explain how it evolves to the more sophisticated life forms, and how the basic agency of autogen systems get enriched to mind. As we can see, even if strong continuity is right, there still is lots of work to do. Nevertheless, Deacon’s solution is more promising than the positions of ghost and machine. The selves are not something more, but less, than matter, the dynamic possibilities of matter. After all, to start right is more important than running fast sometimes. Some may complain that the book cannot reach basic standards: it is not original because it just introduces Deacon’s ideas; the usage of some concepts is too loose and too ambiguous, like self; the book discusses so many subjects and theories but references far too little, and so forth. I admit that the book is not satisfying if we evaluate it according to some academic criteria. However, this is not an academic book. The author is not trying to write an esoteric book for professionals. Rather, he just wants to write a book that anyone can understand so that Deacon’s fundamentally innovative ideas can be communicated as broadly as possible and avert misunderstandings about these ideas. If you look for the articulation of these ideas for an academic purpose, please go to Incomplete Nature after you finish reading Sherman’s book. Although the ideas in the book are not original, it does not mean that the book is not creative. Actually, this is the most creative book I ever read. It is creative not only Book Review 179 in the way he shows those ideas with his superb writing skills but also his penetrating understanding and applications of the ideas. I could never have imagined that Deacon’s theory could be illustrated in such a crystal clear way before I read the book. It is a book full of inspiration and wisdom. I suggest that you should treat it as an independent book rather than as a guide to another book. I highly recommend the book to anyone who has interest in the philosophy of mind, the nature and origin of life, semiotics, biosemiotics, studies, sciences of complexity, emergence, or metaphysics. I am sure you will be not disappointed and hope you can enjoy it with as much pleasure as I had when I read it.

References

Chalmers, D. (1996). Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Churchland, P. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), 67–90. Deacon, T. (2007). Shannon–Boltzmann–Darwin: Redefining information, Part 1. Cognitive Semiotics, 1, 123–148. Deacon, T. (2012). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Eigen, M., & Schuster, P. (1978). Part A: Emergence of the hypercycle. Naturwissenschaften, 65, 7–41. Godfrey-Smith, P. (1996). Complexity and the function of mind in nature. New York: Cambridge University Press. Juarrero, A. (1999). Dynamics in action: Intentional behavior as a complex system. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Luisi, P. L. (2006). The emergence of life: From chemical origins to synthetic biology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, T. (2010). Mind and cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly wrong. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Putnam, H. (1967). Psychophysical predicates. In W. Capitan & D. Merrill (Eds.), Art, mind, and religion (page range?). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson. Sherman, J. (2017). Neither ghost nor machine: The emergence and nature of selves. New York: Columbia University Press. Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Coy, J. (1989). Ghost Head (detail). Acrylic paint, Japanese ink-block & pastels on paper; Approx. 30.5x20 in. Coy, J. (2011). La Loteria El Tambor. Digital montage.