Teleodynamics

Abstract: Bateson left an unresolved ambiguity in his explanation of the relationship of the mind to the world, the map to the territory. This ambiguity is related to his failure to develop a theory of intentionality, reference, “aboutness.” However, he left us all the tools necessary to resolve this ambiguity and to lay the groundwork for a theory of intentionality. In using these tools, a different emphasis is placed on the relationship between change and difference. A proposal is made for an understanding of the rudiments of abstraction. Finally, the ambiguity is addressed and the groundwork of a theory of intentionality proposed, through an understanding of the distinction between (a) the indirect access of creatural mental process to the pleromic world and (b) the direct access of our pleromic hands to the pleromic world. It is through the interplay and alternation of indirect perception/cognition of the world and direct action on the world in manually-operated experiments that Bateson’s problem of “maps, of maps, of maps, ad infinitum” is solved and a theory of mediate realism can be derived from his work, linking to an understanding of the roots of intentionality.

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Terrence W. Deacon
Biological Anthropology
Boston University, Boston, MA 02215

From A. Scheibel & Wm. Schopf, eds. (1997) “The Origin and Evolution of Intelligence,” Jones and Bartlett publishers, pp. 103-135. Revised post-publication April 2000 (originally written in 1995-6).

The persistence of top-down explanations in biology
When the theory of natural selection was first presented to the scholars of the last century, many found it to be too implausible to believe. The incredulity of many great thinkers at the time, from brilliant biologists to articulate theologians, was based on a well-reasoned common sense understanding of the world: Left to chance, things tend to get less organized, not more. Millennia prior to Darwin, this same reasoning led Aristotle to criticize the natural philosophy of his contemporary, Empedocles, who argued that all natural processes are the actions of blind chance and that organisms arise out of the preservation of useful accidents (see Aristotle’s Physics). Aristotle easily found innumerable examples of end-directed design in nature that he felt could on no account be explained from such a minimalist perspective. But Aristotle was wrong about this, and only after more than twenty centuries of musing about this conundrum, did scientists come to realize the power of the opposed conception for explaining biological phenomena. When the logic behind Empedocles’ insight was rediscovered and given a more substantive interpretation by Darwin and Wallace, it revolutionized biology by providing an answer to this counterintuitive problem. This has become widely appreciated, not just by biologists, but by the general lay public educated in basic biology.

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Scientific inquiry into the origins of life typically employs a reverse engineering approach. In other words, researchers examine current life forms and extrapolate backwards asking how the whole and its parts got put together. This often leads to a focus on one or another critical attribute of life as a plausible starting place: typically either its information molecules that makes reproduction possible, its metabolic machinery that maintains an organism in a non-equilibrium state, or its lipid membrane container which selectively keeps critical components inside, troublesome molecules outside, and selectively influences which can pass in or out.

For example, biologists recognize that reproduction, supported by the replication of informational molecules (i.e. DNA) is a fundamental feature of all life forms. Many origins of life researchers have therefore postulated that life began with something like a proto-replicator, a first self-copier (e.g. see Dawkins, 1976; Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry, 1999; Woese, 1967, 1998). So what about the accidental synthesis of a first “naked replicator” molecule (Dawkins, 1976)? Given the truly cosmic improbability of such a complex accident, such an explanation is no more scientific than invoking divine miracle or intelligent design. Besides, it is not merely the replication of a molecule that matters, but a complex chemical relationship that both defends against degradation and reproduces this capacity.

Likewise, since all life depends on mechanisms that operate to resist degradation and dissolution under the influence of the second law of thermodynamics, something like a metabolism is nearly ubiquitous (except for viruses which are parasitic on organisms with metabolisms). Many other origins of life researchers argue that life began with something like a proto–work cycle: a first, simple cyclic chemical process that makes more identical parts (molecules) faster than they break down (e.g. e.g. Kauffman, 1986; Eigen and Oswatitsch, 1992; Shapiro, 2007). And since all life is contained in cell membranes that define inside and outside, self and other, still other origins of life researchers have focused on the spontaneous appearance of the first lipid enclosures as the critical first step in the genesis of life (e.g. Deamer and Barchfeld, 1982; Hanczyc et al., 2003). Some laboratories are attempting to combine all three features into structures called protocells (e.g. Szostak et al., 2001; Rasmussen et al., 2004;).

If the goal of origins of life research were simply to engineer life, then building a successful protocell would be success in itself. But engineered life is not tantamount to the spontaneous emergence of life because engineering is precisely what a pre-life universe lacks. Does the simplified combining of components found in living cells provide an adequate picture of an un-engineered missing link between physics and biology, or is it more like a sort of Frankencell, reconstructed from components extracted from once-living cells?

In three respects, the emergence of life from non-life is more challenging than the reverse engineering approach would suggest. First, we cannot invoke prior teleological processes to explain either component fit or the means of their combination. Second, the molecular components cannot be the products of a prior evolutionary process, only spontaneous geochemistry. Third, components cannot merely be brought into proximity with each other, they must reciprocally produce one another and maintain these proximity conditions (e.g. by generating containment). Merely collecting the critical molecular components of cells into a cell-like container it is not enough, even if each performs chemical functions characteristic of those produced in life. This even goes for the self-replication of nucleic acids. In the absence of this synergistic co-production and maintenance of reaction proximity there is nothing more than organic chemistry in a lipid reaction vessel.

The true proof of concept must demonstrate how life could emerge in a universe that completely lacks anything like an engineer’s intervention, and in which astronomically unlikely good luck is neither the only nor the most important explanatory principle. To meet the emergentist challenge therefore requires vigilance to avoid what could be called the Amnesic Watchmaker Syndrome. Imagine a watchmaker, with a serious case of Alzheimer’s disease, absent-mindedly fitting together parts from a previously disassembled watch. Forgetting where these parts came from and finding that they only fit together in certain ways, he combines them in many alternative configurations until he eventually fits them together so that collectively they function to tell time. Astounded by this, he muses that the ingredients for watches may be strewn about the world naturally, and that time-telling machines might just fall together spontaneously by accident.

This is not to imply that protocell researchers and other origins of life theorists are unaware that they are often working with already evolved components. Nor does it suggest that nothing can be learned about the basic principles of time-telling mechanisms or living mechanisms by exploring the way the parts interact. Indeed, this is the probably the best way to understand first-hand how the basic processes work, when the function is already presumed. However, it may not be the best approach toward understanding how this functional logic itself came to exist in the first place, either for life or for watches. Exploring the interactive relationships among components that are already evolved for their functional contributions to a living cell can provide important insights about some of the basic processes of life, but it would be unwise to mistake these as modeling life’s origin. But most important for investigating the origins of life’s telos, this amounts to a spontaneous generation experiment that is contaminated from the start, by the telos of prior life.

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General behavioral science

The life and social sciences are converging with a realization that parallels that which followed Newton’s insights into the movements of heavenly bodies. The physical dynamics that best explain planetary motion also explain terrestrial motion—there is one explanatory regime. So too the behavioral dynamics that apply in one arena of life apply in another.

Expectations as central

Economists study supply and demand. Biologists study selective regimes. Political scientists study power structures. Management scientists study incentive structures. Psychologists study motivations and aspirations. In all of these arenas behavior is driven by exposure to expectations.

Demand and supply; ends and means

Expectations and the behaviors that meet them are like demand and supply, means and ends. Not all of these research fields address both sides. Evolutionary biology most notably has attempted to understand behavior exclusively as a passive response to selective demand. Only recently with evo-devo are evolutionary biologists beginning to detail biology’s supply processes.

Selecti-on and Selecti-off

Exposure’s opposite is non-exposure. In complex systems exposure and non-exposure form a continuum. Organisms are under selective pressure to varying degrees anywhere from negligible to severe. One parameter common to all behavioral sciences is the degree of exposure to a particular pressure.

Clearing normativity from analysis of normativity

When considered positive, a selective force is called a goal, ideal, or standard. When considered negative a pressure is called a constraint, demand, straightjacket. When considered positive, the relaxation of pressure is called liberation, freedom, tolerance. When considered negative the relaxation of pressure is called a lowered standard, degadation, or lassitude. Our tendencies to read positive or negative connotation into the imposing and relaxing of incentives has gotten in the way of a thorough analysis of the dynamics of incentive and disincentive. High and low pressure are neutral means to a variety of possible ends, rather than ends themselves.

Performance standards

Selective pressures are implicit requirements. These requirements are the equivalent to what in public policy are called performance standards. Performance standards specify a performance threshold but not the particulars for how that performance threshold is achieved. Emission standards for example don’t specify how polluters reduce emission but simply the level of acceptable emissions. Micro-management is the opposite of a performance standard. A micro-manager specifies details to achieve certain performance standards. Micro-managers impose selective pressure on means rather than ends.

Means as ends

Means and ends are in hierarchical relationship to each other. Tactical and strategic goals are obviously similar. Tactical goals are still goals—they are ends at a lower or more fine-grained level of analysis. Tactical and Strategic form another continuum, from selective pressure for a very specific necessary condition to selective pressure for a broad overall objective.

Clearing normativity from analysis of normativity

As with the continuum from high to low tolerance, there are positive and negative valences associated with the continuum from narrow to broad selective pressure. Micro-management has pejorative connotations but also simply denotes focusing selective pressure at a relatively fine grain level of analysis. Obviously not all selective pressure at a fine grain level is negative.

Selective matrix

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