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Aching Voids and Making Voids A review of Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon Review by: Daniel C. Dennett The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 88, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 321-324 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673760 . Accessed: 02/01/2014 10:03 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Quarterly Review of Biology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.64.39.228 on Thu, 2 Jan 2014 10:03:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Volume 88, No. 4 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY December 2013 ACHING VOIDS AND MAKING VOIDS Daniel C. Dennett Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts 02155-7059 USA e-mail: [email protected] A review of able overstatements. The simplistic mechanism Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged of Hobbes and La Mettrie, and Skinnerian from Matter. behaviorism, have been largely abandoned By Terrence W. Deacon. New York: W. W. Norton on one side, while dualism and e´lan vital have & Company. $29.95. xvii ϩ 602 p.; ill.; index. been largely banished from the other (except ISBN: 978-0-393-04991-6. 2012. among philosophers). But there are still potent Suppose a robot exploring an apparently un- manifestations of unresolved conflict. A recent inhabited planet sent us back photographs of Dilbert cartoon showed Dilbert opining: “Free two items found on a beach: something that will is an illusion. Human beings are nothing looked like a clamshell and something that but moist robots. Just relax and let it happen.” looked like a clam rake—iron tines, wooden Are we “nothing but” moist robots? And if we handle. Both objects are highly improbable are, does that have bleak implications for our from the perspective of the Second Law of sense of autonomy, our sense that our lives of Thermodynamics. They both imply makers. striving can have meaning? Alternatively, if the The clamshell-maker (a clam, or something computational perspective “leaves something of that ilk) must have been alive, and the out,” just what is it that is missing, and is it really clam rake-maker must have been not just important? alive, but something of a thinker. We would There are no entirely apt labels for the op- have found clear evidence of advanced intel- posing sides of this gulf, since the ongoing con- ligence on that planet. This is all intuitively troversy turns every battle cry into a derogatory obvious, perhaps, but can the principles be- term for the other side. Reductionism, fie! hind these intuitions be explicitly articulated Holism, fie! “Enlightenment” versus “Roman- and marshaled into a theory that takes us all ticism” is pretty close, as the reader can judge the way from the Second Law to conscious by considering what the following team players thought? Terrence Deacon gives it a fascinat- have in common; on the Enlightenment side: ing try in this hugely ambitious book. Darwin, Turing, Minsky, Dawkins, both Crick He is the latest—and best, in my opinion— and Edelman (in spite of their antagonisms), participant in a tug of war that has been going Tibor Ga´nti, E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, on since Descartes put forward his mechanistic Paul and Patricia Churchland, and both Ray- theory of the body and dualistic theory of the mond Kurzweil and me (in spite of our antag- mind in the 17th century. The unbridgeable onisms). On the Romantic side are arrayed gulf between Descartes’s two “substances” has Romanes and Baldwin, Kropotkin, Stephen Jay not gone away, but in many regards the gap has Gould, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, been narrowed, as players on both sides of this Stuart Kauffman, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigo- opponent process have discarded unsupport- gine, Rupert Sheldrake, and the philosophers The Quarterly Review of Biology, December 2013, Vol. 88, No. 4 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]. 321 This content downloaded from 130.64.39.228 on Thu, 2 Jan 2014 10:03:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 322 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY Volume 88 John Haugeland, Evan Thompson, Alicia Juar- be dependent on external inputs of energy, rero, John Searle, and—off the map, now— rather must grow out of intrinsic physical prop- Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel. Many have erties of the chemistry of their components. been inoculated against the other side by the Crystal growth is a “morphodynamic” process, excesses of some of the participants. Can any- independent of, and prior to, life, and so are body knit up “the Cartesian wound that severed the processes that govern the self-assembly of mind from body at the birth of modern science” some lipid membranes and, later, microtubules (p. 544)? Deacon, defending the Romantic side, out of tubulin molecules, for instance, laying makes some real progress largely because he the foundations for the “teleodynamic” pro- understands and appreciates both sides so well. cesses of life. He is a good evolutionist and cognitive scientist Deacon makes a powerful case that the prob- with insightful interpretations of the strengths lem of the origin of life is not independent of and triumphs of evolutionary and computa- the problems of intentionality and consciousness, tional thinking, and he is trenchant in his crit- and that getting clearer about the preconditions icisms of Romantic lapses into mystery. for the former sets the table for a similarly artic- What is missing from the computational ap- ulated account of the preconditions for minds, proach now so dominant in biology and cogni- conscious or unconscious. In both cases we need tive science? According to Deacon, it is, well, to understand the interplay between “ortho- missingness. Absence does not just make the grade” and “contragrade” processes; the for- heart grow fonder; in many places at many mer, such as free fall in gravity and dissolution levels absence marks the ultimately thermody- under the aegis of the Second Law of Thermo- namic asymmetries that power evolution and dynamics, but also the “fall” into attractor states life, and reactions to absence play the founda- in a “teleodynamic” regime, do not require tional causal role in mental phenomena. The work; they just happen on their own, without separation of the concept of information from further input from outside. Contragrade pro- the concept of energy, which for 50 years and cesses, such as reproduction, self-repair, and more has been seen by many as a key enabling active perception and problem solving, require insight, enriching Darwin’s world with Turing’s work, a concept that gets a definition carefully world, was a premature divorce, Deacon argues, extended beyond its grounding in physics. Hy- and we need to return to basics, enriching the droelectric power depends on structure that context of our thinking by reaching back into can exploit the orthograde process of water Schrödinger territory, looking at the funda- falling downhill in order to produce or enlarge mental requirements of life from the point of a difference that can make a difference, an view of physics. But rather than just alluding asymmetry that permits work to be done. to Schrödinger, as we all do, he digs deeper Where is the absence? There has to be some and reconstructs the arguments about the Sec- empty place for the water to go. Similarly, prob- ond Law of Thermodynamics, drastically revis- lem solving and theory building depends on ing the standard (and woefully out-of-date) structures in the brain that have to be built and ideas about causation that bedevil many—but maintained against dissipation. Mental fog is not all—thinkers today. Then he can address, an analog of heat death, and any theory of in outline, the phenomena in the prebiotic intelligence that does not incorporate such a world that had to churn away for eons to set the dynamical perspective is going to distort the stage for life. “Autogens” are Deacon’s hypo- phenomena, sweeping problems under the rug thetical nonliving but entropy-defying self- that will later emerge to haunt theory. perpetuators. They are the ancestors—or more For instance, Shannon’s brilliant ideal- aptly, enabling predecessors—of the first living ization, defining a communication channel things, such as Ga´nti’s “chemotons,” the sim- between a sender and a receiver, and put- plest hypothetical living things. Living requires ting some constraints on the signals that could work, and work requires constraining structure be sent along the channel, nicely captured one (the enclosing wall of a piston is a simple ex- important aspect of information in its everyday ample), which in turn requires structure- sense. The utility of the Shannon concept of making processes, but some of these must not information, measured in bits, is borne out ev- This content downloaded from 130.64.39.228 on Thu, 2 Jan 2014 10:03:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions December 2013NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS 323 ery day in our confident calculations of band- A residual disagreement between the En- width and the capacity of our USB sticks.
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