Spreading out

Evolution is an irreversible process, a process of increasing diversification and distribution. Only in this sense does evolution exhibit a consistent direction. Like entropy, it is a process of spreading out to whatever possibilities are unfilled and within reach of a little more variation.

— Deacon 1997, 29

The consciousness con

The conscious aspect of any thought is always embedded in a much larger and dominant unconscious aspect, upon which it depends for its existence and its meaning. Conscious aspects of thought are simple, relative to the complexity and intricacy of unconscious aspects.

Turner (1991, 39)

Most of us are in the habit of thinking that consciousness and psychic life are the same thing and otherwise greatly to overrate the functions of consciousness.

Qualities of thought and nature

According to the Peircean theory of cognition, even sense perception is a matter of hypothetical inference. Physiologically, perception is the response of a nervous system, in some specific context, to the arrival of a stimulus to its sensorium, such as a barrage of photons upon the retina. In cognitive terms, ‘each sense is an abstracting mechanism’ (Peirce, EP1:50), and consciously experienced sensations or feelings

are in themselves simple, or more so than the sensations which give rise to them. Accordingly, a sensation is a simple predicate taken in place of a complex predicate; in other words, it fulfills the function of an hypothesis.

EP1:42

Cognition then is a continuous inferential (i.e. semiotic) process whose products range all the way from involuntary perceptual judgments to complex theoretical contructs. These products include sensations and feelings which may be recognized as qualities of the objects perceived or imagined.

Some are inclined to doubt that these qualities have any reality beyond our awareness of them. In the fourth of his 1903 Harvard Lectures, Peirce argued by analogy that ‘qualities of feeling’ – the qualities we recognize in our perceptual judgments, as when we perceive a blue color – are elements of the real universe. They are real because they are beyond our control, i.e. not subject to logical criticism.

the distinction of logical goodness and badness must begin where control of the processes of cognition begins; and any object that antecedes the distinction, if it has to be named either good or bad, must be named good. For since no fault can be found with it, it must be taken at its own valuation. Goodness is a colorless quality, a mere absence of badness. Before our parents had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of course, they were innocent.

EP2:191

There is no way to find fault with a percept, and perceptual judgments are likewise innocent. Any criticism of it ‘would be limited to performing it again and seeing whether with closer attention we get the same result’ – but strictly speaking, it can’t be performed again on the same percept, for as Heraclitus put it, one cannot step twice into the same river. Its flow is the essence of the stream of consciousness.

In short, the Immediate (and therefore in itself unsusceptible of mediation—the Unanalyzable, the Inexplicable, the Unintellectual) runs in a continuous stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness.
Thus, we have in thought three elements: first, the representative function which makes it a representation; second, the pure denotative application, or real connection, which brings one thought into relation with another; and third, the material quality, or how it feels, which gives thought its quality.

EP1:42

These are essentially the same three elements that Peirce would later call Thirdness, Secondness and Firstness respectively. By 1903, Peirce was ready to affirm the reality of all three: being the elements of thought and reasoning, they are also really elements of any cognizable universe; ‘every scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous’ (EP2:193). The immediacy and spontaneity of Firstness has its part to play in hypothetical models of nature just as forces and regularities do. Therefore, says Peirce,

if you ask me what part Qualities can play in the economy of the universe, I shall reply that the universe is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God’s purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities. Now every symbol must have, organically attached to it, its Indices of Reactions and its Icons of Qualities; and such part as these reactions and these qualities play in an argument, that they of course play in the universe, that Universe being precisely an argument. In the little bit that you or I can make out of this huge demonstration, our perceptual judgments are the premisses for us and these perceptual judgments have icons as their predicates, in which icons Qualities are immediately presented. But what is first for us is not first in nature. The premisses of Nature’s own process are all the independent uncaused elements of facts that go to make up the variety of nature which the necessitarian supposes to have been all in existence from the foundation of the world, but which the Tychist supposes are continually receiving new accretions. These premisses of nature, however, though they are not the perceptual facts that are premisses to us, nevertheless must resemble them in being premisses. We can only imagine what they are by comparing them with the premisses for us. As premisses they must involve Qualities.
Now as to their function in the economy of the Universe,—the Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem,—for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony,—just as every true poem is a sound argument. But let us compare it rather with a painting,—with an impressionist seashore piece,—then every Quality in a Premiss is one of the elementary colored particles of the Painting; they are all meant to go together to make up the intended Quality that belongs to the whole as whole. That total effect is beyond our ken; but we can appreciate in some measure the resultant Quality of parts of the whole,—which Qualities result from the combinations of elementary Qualities that belong to the premisses.

EP2:193-4

So although ‘what is first for us is not first in nature,’ the ‘Immediate’ and ‘Inexplicable’ which ‘runs in a continuous stream through our lives’ shares a Firstness with ‘the independent uncaused elements of facts that go to make up the variety of nature.’

The misrule of too many rules

Donna Williams (1992), in her remarkable account of her own autistic life, highlights her inability to generalize, to recognize types of situation so that learned responses to one situation can be transferred to another. Being highly intelligent, she could quickly learn the rules of conduct in a given milieu, especially when they were explained to her, but she couldn’t relate them to a different milieu:

My behavior puzzled others, but theirs puzzled me, too. It was not so much that I had no regard for their rules as that I couldn’t keep up with the many rules for each specific situation. I could put things into categories, but this type of generalizing was very hard to grasp.

Categorizing things was not a problem for her – autistics can deal very well, and often become obsessed, with inanimate objects, which they can count on not to startle them – but categorizing rules is far more difficult for hypersensitive people who are chronically overstimulated. Temple Grandin (1996) gives a similar impression of what it’s like to be autistic.

But something like this experience happens to anyone whose guidance system loses its integrity and becomes merely complicated, an ever-growing pile of miscellaneous precepts. “Learning the rules” then amounts to an accumulation of particular laws rather than a continuing modulation of the inner logos which makes sense of the world. The result of this information overload is an ever-spreading sense of anxiety. In the religious context, Isaiah 28:11-13 (RSV) describes it this way:

Nay, but by men of strange lips
and with an alien tongue
the Lord will speak to this people,
to whom he has said,
This is rest;
give rest to the weary;
and this is repose’;
yet they would not hear.
Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them
precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
here a little, and there a little;
that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.

Natural selection and vulgar Darwinism

Natural selection operates at many levels simultaneously; see Depew and Weber 1995, Chapter 14, on the development of this view among biologists. Sober and Wilson (in Katz 2000, 259) summarize multi-level selection theory as follows:

a gene can evolve by increasing its fitness relative to other genes within the same individual, by increasing the fitness of the individual relative to other individuals within a group, or by increasing the fitness of the group, relative to other groups in the total population.

But at any of these levels, since the ‘other’ to which fitness is relative is co-evolving, competition is not necessarily required. What is essential to evolution is a nonlinear dynamic, a feedback process. This entails that the very act of adapting may change its own context as well as the ‘text’ (the specific transform). Besides, natural selection is not necessarily or exactly an adaptive process.

When adaptation is observed, it can be explained by the differential survival and reproduction of variant types being guided and biased by their differential efficiency or resistance to environmental stresses and dangers. But any cause of differential survival and reproduction, even when it has nothing to do with the struggle for existence, will result in some evolution, not just adaptive evolution.… What evolutionary geneticists and developmental biologists have been doing for the last sixty years is to accumulate a knowledge of a variety of forces that cause the frequency of variant types to change, and that do not fall under the rubric of adaptation by natural selection. These include, to name a few: random fixation of nonadaptive or even of anti-adaptive traits because of limitations of population size and the colonization of new areas by small numbers of founders; the acquisition of traits because the genes influencing them are dragged along on the same chromosome as some totally unrelated gene that is being selected; and developmental side effects of genes that have been selected for some quite different reason.

— Lewontin (2001, 56-7)

Lewontin (2001, 52) speaks of a ‘vulgar Darwinism’

which sees all aspects of the shape, function and behavior of all organisms as having been molded in exquisite detail by natural selection – the greater survival and reproduction of those organisms whose traits make them ‘adapted’ for the struggle for existence.… Evolutionary geneticists, on the other hand, … and most epistemologists take a more pluralistic view of the forces driving evolution.

Gerald Edelman (2004) attributes just such a ‘vulgar Darwinism’ to Alfred Wallace, contrasting this view with Darwin’s own:

Wallace, in fact, concluded that natural selection could not explain the origin of our higher intellectual and moral faculties. He claimed that savages and prehistoric humans had brains almost as large as those of Englishmen but, in adapting to an environment that did not require abstract thought, they had no use for such structures and therefore their brains could not have resulted from natural selection. Unlike Wallace, Darwin understood that such an adaptationist view, resting only on natural selection, was not cogent. He understood that properties and attributes not necessarily needed at one time could nevertheless be incorporated during the selection of other evolutionary traits. Moreover, he did not believe that mental faculties were independent of one another. As he explained in his book The Descent of Man, for example, the development of language might have contributed to the process of brain development.

— Edelman (2004, 2)

It would appear, then, that Darwin was not a ‘vulgar Darwinist,’ and in fact anticipated the co-evolutionary theory developed by Deacon in The Symbolic Species (1997).

Turning mutualistic

A “perfect” system of conceptual categories, like an omniscient mind, would be incapable of learning. Likewise a healthy ecosystem, as Ulanowicz (1997) says, requires not only ascendency but also overhead, which furnishes resilience or ‘reliability’ (ability to adapt to new circumstances). Theobald (1997) makes a similar observation in the cultural domain: the most dangerous circumstances result from our success as a species, so we need to use our overhead as a resource by ‘rethinking success.’

Perhaps an open world is not the only enigma to which our discussion is pointing. We also seem to inhabit a world of opposites. We have seen how the mathematics of information theory allows us to dissect system behavior according to its ordered and disordered attributes: ascendency represents how efficiently a system operates; overhead is the catchall for its inefficiency (but it also encompasses, among other things, its reliability). Whenever a system’s development capacity remains constant, any increase in one attribute implies a decrease in the other. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the ordered and disordered fractions – yet they are complementary aspects of what is essential to sustaining the operation and persistence of the system.

… any living system requires some proportion of both attributes to survive. In the same loose sense that the centripetality engendered by positive feedback provides a precursor for selfishness and ego, the relationship between overhead and ascendency prefigures a human dialectic (Salthe 1993). Conflict at one scale can turn mutualistic at the next-higher level.

— Ulanowicz (1997, 93-95)

Exploration and exploitation

Scott Page (2011, 166) says that in any evolutionary or developmental process there is a ‘tradeoff between exploration and exploitation.’ Exploitation consists of consuming useful resources; exploration means trying out new options which are not known to be resources. More variation isn’t necessarily better, but ‘some variation is necessary for a complex system to maintain functionality.’

As early as 1937, in the new field of population genetics, Theodosius Dobzhansky demonstrated the value of biological polyversity in keeping ‘populations tuned to changing environments’ so that each species is better equipped to occupy a ‘specific multidimensional niche’ (Depew and Weber 1995, 293-4).

Since that time, populations have been shown to be generally polymorphic, that is, to contain at least several variant alleles for each trait … Dobzhansky’s abiding concern, and lasting contribution, was to insist not only that populations are in fact full of diversity but that diversity is good for them.

— Depew and Weber 1995, 296 (italics theirs).

Co-evolution

We miss the point if we think that we have evolved by the one-way process of adapting to the environment, by ‘survival of the fittest’ in ‘the jungle out there.’ The truth is that the organisms who compose the jungle have co-evolved in a continuous dance where each helps to constitute an ecological niche for others. ‘Without the color-coding of the flowers, the color vision of the insects would not have evolved, and vice versa’ (Dennett 1991, 377). To be ‘fit’ (and thus to survive and reproduce) is to fit one’s niche. In the one nature there is room for many interpenetrating niches.

Co-evolution is Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of ‘interbeing’ mapped onto evolutionary biology. The process of adaptation is itself mapped, or represented graphically, as a ‘fitness landscape’ depicted in terms of ‘mountains’: that is, ‘up’ is the direction of greater fitness. This of course is arbitrary, and Murray Gell-Mann (1994) reverses the directionality in his diagram so that the ‘lowest’ or ‘deepest’ level is the plane of greatest fitness for the organism. For one thing, this magically rids the adaptive process of the feeling of struggle, epitomizing the view of Lao Tzu that ‘Highest good is like water.’ D.S. Wilson (2002) offers an account of the Balinese water temples that illustrates such an approach to cultural evolution.