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

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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 of . 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

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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, , 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 and , 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 ; 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 , 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 , 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 -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. Bioin- lightenment and the Romantics is about formatics could not exist without it. But if we whether brains compute, and one way of asking are going to have a proper account of informa- that question is to ask if the organization that tion that matters, which has a role to play in orchestrates the activities of billions of neurons getting work done at every level, we cannot just is properly considered to be enough like a com- discard the sender and receiver, two homun- puter program to underwrite computational culi whose agreement on the code defines what neuroscience (for instance). Deacon says no, is to count as information for some purpose. but he does acknowledge “[c]omputationlike Something has to play the roles of these processes” (p. 537), and would agree, I think, missing signal-choosers and signal-interpreters. with the rejoinder that at least many of the Many—myself included—have insisted that thinking methods we human beings have devised computers themselves can serve as adequate and then imposed on the underlying organiza- stand-ins. Just as a vending machine can fill in tion of the neurons, exploiting their labor in for a sales clerk in many simplified environ- effect, are enough like programs to warrant ments, so a computer can fill in for a general being considered computational. Here, as else- purpose message-interpreter. But one of the where, the details matter more than the gen- shortcomings of this computational perspec- eral (ideological) picture. tive, according to Deacon, is that by divorcing One of the weaknesses of Deacon’s book information processing from thermodynamics, flows from his decision to coin a host of new we restrict our theories to basically parasitical terms—absential, entention, contragrade, orthograde, systems, artifacts that depend on a user for and teleodynamic—piled on top of the usual jargon—, attractor—in which to couch their energy, for their structure maintenance, his arguments. This burdens readers with the for their interpretation, and for their raison extra task of rehearsing these not obviously d’eˆtre. Roboticists may reply that they have obligatory novelties. One of strengths of the postponed consideration of such phenomena volume is that Deacon does not try to bludgeon as energy capture, unaided reproduction, self- the skeptic with proofs of the necessity of his repair, and open-ended self-revision, expecting position and the futility of theirs. Instead, he is to reap the benefits of this simplification by first content to let the details pile up, showing how getting clear about the purely informational phe- his perspective has good things to say about nomena of learning and self-guidance (a kind many topics the Enlightenment has not yet of autonomy, however incomplete). Nobody been successful at addressing, such as—at one would dream of complicating the design of a extreme—the order in which the obligatory chess-playing computer by requiring it to ob- features of living things must have emerged in tain its energy from sandwiches and soft drinks, the prebiotic world, and—at the other ex- obliging it to monitor not just its time but its treme—the way some emotions tire us out and depleting reserves of usable energy. Human others ease the passage to discovery. In the chess players have to control their hunger former case, starting with physics allows Dea- pangs, and such emotions as humiliation, fear, con to describe “teleodynamic” systems simpler and boredom, but computers can finesse all than the simplest living systems we know today that with impunity, can they not? Deacon is not (simpler, even, than viruses) but still primitively alone in insisting that postponing consider- self-sustaining, thanks to the synergy between ation of these all-too-human phenomena is a autocatalysis and self-assembly of membranes. big mistake—this is the theme song of the Ro- Most “origin-of-life” scenarios make use of parts mantics, you might say—but he does the best that are themselves products of teleodynamic job yet of demonstrating this in terms that do processes of living things—Frankencells, com- not beg the question against the Enlighten- posed, like Mary Shelley’s monster, of ca- ment vision. Those who think they have taken daver parts, not suitably “raw” materials. the measure of the Romantics in their earlier Starting with physics also allows Deacon to encounters should reserve judgment until they construct an imaginative scenario in which see what Deacon does with these familiar ideas. nucleotide chains, quite robust but -

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 324 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY Volume 88 less, could gradually evolve into the repre- scale and at the wrong kind of physical mani- senting medium for reproduction. At the festation” (p. 516). The right organization other extreme, he can offer a (very sketchy) would involve higher-order teleodynamics, and account of “what it feels like” in terms of the something like negotiation, alliance formation, brain’s tendency to change in the direction and the exploitation of “noise” in the system. of “work minimization.” He wants to arrive at This is at least a tempting idea, worth further the conclusion that “[c]omputations and cy- exploration. bernetic processes are insentient because There has been a deeply regrettable contro- they are not teleodynamic in their organiza- versy about Deacon’s book, involving charges tion” (p. 536) and although he has given us of intellectual theft, not plagiarism of explicit ways to see the differences between teleody- formulations, but plagiarism of ideas from other namic systems and other complex systems, recent books that deal with many of the same this step is less persuasive—because less issues (see http://theterrydeaconaffair.com/ worked out in detail—than the earlier steps. and http://terrydeacon.berkeley.edu/plagiarism Curiously, the philosopher Ned Block’s (1978) -investigation-exonerates-terrence-w-deacon). thought experiment about the Chinese Nation The constellation of problems Deacon addresses can be put to good use to locate Deacon’s has been a hotbed of theorizing and interpre- position, as I understand it. Block imagines tation for some years across several fields, in- harnessing the entire population of China into cluding philosophy, and with hindsight we can a gigantic hand-simulation of a massive artifi- judge that Deacon, a prodigious citer of earlier cial intelligence program simulating a human work, overlooked some clearly relevant antici- being’s mind, with each Chinese citizen assigned a small computational role in implementing the pators. I myself have been trying in recent years whole kaboodle. Would the resulting implemen- to say quite a few of the things Deacon says tation be conscious? Block assures us it would not, more clearly here. So close and yet so far! I without giving any arguments for this “obvious” tried; he succeeded, a verdict I would apply to verdict. Deacon would say that the reason the the other contenders in equal measure. Alicia Chinese efforts would not sustain conscious- Juarrero (1999) and Evan Thompson (2007) ness in the subject whose brain they were sim- have both written excellent books on neighbor- ulating is that the individuals are being turned ing and overlapping topics, but neither of them by the giant program into computers! If they managed to win me over to the Romantic side were given more autonomy, and the right (see, e.g., Dennett 2011), whereas Deacon, teleodynamic organization, there would be a with his more ambitious exercise of reconstruc- conscious super-subject composed by their ac- tion, has me re-examining my fundamental tivities, and they would be just as oblivious to its working assumptions. I encourage others who content as our neurons are to ours. “Looking see versions of their own pet ideas emerging for mental information in individual neuronal more clearly and systematically in Deacon’s ac- firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of count to join me in applauding.

REFERENCES

Block N. 1978. Troubles with functionalism. Pages 261– Juarrero A. 1999. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior 325 in Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Founda- as a Complex System. Cambridge (Massachusetts): tions of Psychology. Minnesota Studies in the Philoso- MIT Press. phy of Science, Volume 9. Minneapolis (Minnesota): Thompson E. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenol- University of Minnesota Press. ogy, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge (Massachu- Dennett D. 2011. Shall we tango? No, but thanks for setts): Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. asking. Review of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenome- nology, and the Sciences of Mind, by E. Thompson. Journal of Consciousness Studies 18:23–34.

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