Category: Complicity

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 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).

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)

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).

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.

Just as evolution is articulation of the biosphere, and development articulation of the body, perception is articulation of the phaneron.

When a fox emerges from its den, it is no longer inside the den. When a part emerges from the whole, it is separated from the whole. But this is not so with emergent phenomena. When something “emerges” from the phaneron, it is thereby included in the phaneron. In perception, figure emerges from ground, and thus the phaneron articulates itself. Likewise continuous practice articulates itself by particular acts.

In the same manner as tonally discrete music, the body-surrounding fit is possible only through discretization of the continuum of possibilities, both in the perception and the action relation. Perception possesses a highly constrained selection of possible environment stimuli – ranging from simple cases like the possibility of sensing only groups of specific chemicals and to more complicated cases like the necessary limit of discrimination ability in any continuous perception spectrum (visual, auditive, tactile, etc.). In short, perception and action both possess a certain granularity which allows them to be pragmatically efficient at the price of a certain imprecision. This imprecision, it is evident, implies certain limitations – larger or lesser – on the perfection of the organism-environment fit. Both more perceptual precision (which is also energetically more expensive), on the one hand, and more perceptual economy (which is also less precise), on the other, may be favored by selection, according to the specific conditions in the single case. In semiotic terms, this implies that in the functional circle, a tension is at stake in embodied semiosis between semiotic complexity on the one hand and semiotic economy on the other.

— Stjernfelt 2007, 262

As related in Chapter 9, William Paley’s Natural Theology used the watch analogy to argue that nature must have a designer because it was so complicated, and the parts so admirably suited to their functions. Richard Dawkins (1987, 5), admiring Paley’s ‘beautiful and reverent descriptions of the dissected machinery of life,’ went on to argue that ‘the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics.’ But Dawkins actually carries on the Cartesian (and Paleyan) tradition of viewing animals as complicated machines, based on the ‘misleading engineering metaphor in which independent parts preexist an assembled whole. In biologically evolved systems, however, the integration and complementarity of “parts” come as natural consequences of the progressive differentiation of an antecedent less differentiated whole structure, both phylogenetically and embryologically’ (Deacon 2003, 105).

According to Depew and Weber (1995, 477-8), Dawkins does not offer much of an improvement over Paley.

… Paley’s watchmaker does not completely disappear in Dawkins’s version of evolutionary theory (Dawkins 1986). He is said only to be a ‘blind watchmaker.’ From our perspective, however, there is no watchmaker, blind or sighted, for the simple reason that there is no watch. Natural organization is not an artifact, or anything like it, but instead a manifestation of the action of energy flows in informed systems poised between order and chaos. Directionalities, propensities, and self-organization in a thermodynamic perspective actually exclude the notion that evolution is oriented toward an end in the intentional or design sense. The thermodynamic perspective allows biological adaptedness precisely by excluding design arguments. Directionality of informed, dissipative natural processes excludes directedness.

You could say that organic and mechanical are two ways of looking at systems, rather than two kinds of systems. We can look at some systems either way: we are capable of ‘getting personal’ with machines, or conversely of treating organisms as inanimate objects. But we have two ways of looking at systems because there is a real difference between the two kinds, and most systems fall naturally into one or the other. A mechanical system such as a watch, or a missile guidance system, or the ignition system of a car, are relatively simple to map because they were actually built from maps in the first place – that is, they were deliberately designed and engineered to serve some conscious purpose. You, on the other hand, are much more complex, having self-organized rather than having been artificially assembled from pre-existing parts for predetermined purposes. As Gendlin (APM IV-A.c) puts it, ‘there are no simply separate parts of the body … a part changes and may disintegrate if the processes (subprocesses and larger processes) in which it is involved stop and never resume. Parts of the body are derivative from process-events.’

According to Peirce’s cosmological hypothesis, evolution is a continuing process of growth which accounts for both the diversity and the regularities we observe in a universe both mental and physical.

The regularities or ‘laws’ of nature result from the habit-taking tendency, which tends toward the extreme ‘crystallization’ of form which in physics we call ‘matter.’ But the behavior patterns of the physical universe are never completely determinate, the laws of nature never absolutely exact, because the habit-taking tendency is countered and complemented by a spontaneity which keeps the universe alive and accounts for the growing diversity and complexity of forms. This spontaneity is primal to the mental side of evolution, which involves both taking and breaking habits.

Here is Peirce’s explanation of the ‘Uniformity’ of nature in Baldwin’s Dictionary:

The hypothesis suggested by the present writer is that all laws are results of evolution; that underlying all other laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all things to take habits. Now since this same tendency is the one sole fundamental law of mind, it follows that the physical evolution works towards ends in the same way that mental action works towards ends, and thus in one aspect of the matter it would be perfectly true to say that final causation is alone primary. Yet, on the other hand, the law of habit is a simple formal law, a law of efficient causation; so that either way of regarding the matter is equally true, although the former is more fully intelligent. Meantime, if law is a result of evolution, which is a process lasting through all time, it follows that no law is absolute. That is, we must suppose that the phenomena themselves involve departures from law analogous to errors of observation. But the writer has not supposed that this phenomenon had any connection with free-will. In so far as evolution follows a law, the law of habit, instead of being a movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth from difformity to uniformity. But the chance divergences from law are perpetually acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a sort of natural selection and otherwise (for the writer does not think the selective principle sufficient), so that the general result may be described as ‘organized heterogeneity,’ or, better, rationalized variety. In view of the principle of continuity, the supreme guide in framing philosophical hypotheses, we must, under this theory, regard matter as mind whose habits have become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme complexity and instability. It has acquired in a remarkable degree a habit of taking and laying aside habits. The fundamental divergences from law must here be most extraordinarily high, although probably very far indeed from attaining any directly observable magnitude. But their effect is to cause the laws of mind to be themselves of so fluid a character as to simulate divergences from law. All this, according to the writer, constitutes a hypothesis capable of being tested by experiment.

— Peirce, BD ‘Uniformity’ (1901)

Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the ‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the tendency of all things to take habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient causation.’ Ten years earlier, in ‘The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,’ Peirce had written that the necessitarian, while believing that irregular events are inexplicable, also says

that the laws of nature are immutable and ultimate facts, and no account is to be given of them. But my hypothesis of spontaneity does explain irregularity, in a certain sense; that is, it explains the general fact of irregularity, though not, of course, what each lawless event is to be. At the same time, by thus loosening the bond of necessity, it gives room for the influence of another kind of causation, such as seems to be operative in the mind in the formation of associations, and enables us to understand how the uniformity of nature could have been brought about.

W8:123, CP 6.60

This ‘other kind of causation’ is called by Jesper Hoffmeyer semiotic causality, which ‘gives direction to efficient causality, while efficient causality gives power to semiotic causality’ (Hoffmeyer 2008, 64). This duality or complementarity of causes accounts for the two sides of evolution, the physical and the psychical or mental.

Semiotic causality is implicit in Peirce’s definitions of ‘sign,’ which generally follow the path of determination object > sign > interpretant:

I will say that a sign is anything, of whatsoever mode of being, which mediates between an object and an interpretant; since it is both determined by the object relatively to the interpretant, and determines the interpretant in reference to the object, in such wise as to cause the interpretant to be determined by the object through the mediation of this ‘sign.’

EP2:410

The reverse side of this path of determination is a path of representation: the sign represents the object to the interpretant, which then represents the sign – by determining another interpretant sign, or else a ‘habit-change,’ which is both an end of semiotic causality and a governor of efficient causation, i.e. a determinant of future transformations in the physical realm. Any actual occurrence of semiotic determination/representation must itself determine and represent a change in a state of mind, quasi-mind or bodymind: in other words, it must make a difference to that bodymind, and this difference is both semiotically and efficiently caused.

In other words, the logical interpretant of a sign, as a ‘habit-change’ or modification of the guidance system which ‘gives direction’ to the subsequent practice of the guided system or bodymind, will determine the energetic interpretants of future signs, which over time will make the path of practice by walking it. This in turn will make a difference to the physical (as well as the mental) context of further semiosis.

In terms of evolutionary biology, the way a type of organism interacts with its environment can effect changes in both organism and environment, which may in turn affect the ability of the species to be represented in another generation of organisms. Over time, then, natural selection will weed out the ethos which does not maintain its viability as an occupant of its ecological niche. But natural selection must have a variety of possibilities to select from, and does not in itself account for that variety. Hence the need for the hypothesis that spontaneity or ‘chance’ is a primal element in an evolving universe such as the one we all inhabit.

What do development and evolution have in common?

Any system that starts off simple will tend to get more complex. It has nowhere else to go. Natural selection does not have a lot to do except act as a coarse filter that rejects utter failures. So we get a description of evolution in terms of dynamics and stability, which always belong together.

— Goodwin (1994, 157)

Since both development and evolution proceed toward greater complexity, it’s a natural guess that life must have begun with the simplest possible self-organizing process. As we know that the physico-chemical conditions of the early earth are no longer current, a spontaneous process that was possible then may no longer be possible now. Even if it could occur, the relatively simple systems it would produce would probably get consumed by ubiquitous life on earth before they could reproduce. If all forms now living have evolved from previous forms, they have also changed the conditions and the very process which produced them. In order to explain how it could have happened, then, either on this planet or elsewhere, we need an account of the process which is general enough to be possible in a broad range of conditions yet specific enough to generate testable predictions.

There are of course alternatives to the guess that life began by self-organizing. We might guess that life, or indeed the whole cosmos, could have been created artificially by some pre-existing entity – as we create buildings and machines, only more arbitrarily (and without depending on existing resources as we do). This has the advantage of casting the Creator in our own image, and thus containing creation within the familiar cognitive bubble. This kind of anthropomorphizing may even be instinctive, as Peirce claimed, seeing no more adequate way for man to conceive the Creator ‘than as vaguely like a man’ (CP 5.536). But the hypothesis of an omnipotent, unconstrained yet purposeful Creator can’t be investigated, since there is no way it could ever be refuted by observable events. Appealing to an inexplicable Creator does nothing to explain the origin of anything, but rather blocks the road of inquiry – to which we are drawn just as instinctively as we are drawn to the idea of an intentional Creator. The instinct of inquiry calls us to use the best method of investigation we can find, one that is honestly self-critical and self-correcting, and above all, capable of learning from experience. That’s the scientific method outlined in Chapter 7, and it requires a testable theory to explain how self-organization could arise from unorganized energy flows. Deacon (2011) is an attempt at such a theory (see Chapters 10 and 11).

Life continues to organize its consumption of energy in closed loops like the semiotic or ‘meaning’ cycle. When direct perception and direct expression are one, there is no thought of process, or complexity, or simplicity: presence is immediate. When the gap opens up between theory and practice, anticipation and experience, intention and attention, questions arise.

Why are we always engaging in inquiry – opening questions and striving for answers that will close them? What makes cognitive closure so important to us? Probably our physical embodiment: we must value closure because we are energetically open systems. Energy flows through you, so that your self-organizing identity depends on that flow and on your ability to make it your own. This complementarity between closure and openness to energy flow accounts for the biocognitive tension between simplicity and complexity.

Biological equilibrium is far from energetic equilibrium. Maybe psychological equilibrium is equally far from biological equilibrium. That would explain why challenges are essential to the experience of flow.