This chapter asks the question: Why is it that only human beings spend time and effort to produce and acquire aesthetic experience? It focuses on the role of juxtapositions, bisociations, and blends in human cognition, and proposes that symbolic abilities are a critical basis for this kind of juxtaposition. Symbolic juxtapositions force further juxtapositions of correlated emotional responses, which are presumably independent of the logic of symbolic juxtaposition. These symbolic juxtapositions can thereby induce emergent and highly novel emotional experiences.
A simple molecular system (”autocell”) is described consisting of the reciprocal linkage between an autocatalytic cycle and a self-assembling encapsulation process where the molecular constituents for the capsule are products of the autocatalysis. In a molecular environment sufficiently rich in the substrates, capsule growth will also occur with high predictability. Growth to closure will be most probable in the vicinity of the most prolific autocatalysis and will thus tend to spontaneously enclose supportive catalysts within the capsule interior. If subsequently disrupted in the presence of new substrates, the released components will initiate production of additional catalytic and capsule components that will spontaneously re-assemble into one or more autocell replicas, thereby reconstituting and sometimes reproducing the original. In a diverse molecular environment, cycles of disruption and enclosure will cause autocells to incidentally encapsulate other molecules as well as reactive substrates. To the extent that any captured molecule can be incorporated into the autocatalytic process by virtue of structural degeneracy of the catalytic binding sites, the altered autocell will incorporate the new type of component into subsequent replications. Such altered autocells will be progenitors of “lineages” with variant characteristics that will differentially propagate with respect to the availability of commonly required substrates. Autocells are susceptible to a limited form of evolution, capable of leading to more efficient, more environmentally fitted, and more complex forms. This provides a simple demonstration of the plausibility of open-ended reproduction and evolvability without self-replicating template molecules (e.g., nucleic acids) or maintenance of persistent nonequilibrium chemistry. This model identifies an intermediate domain between prebiotic and biotic systems and bridges the gap from nonequilibrium thermodynamics to life.
Abstract: By his own standards Gregory Bateson was unsuccessful in his life-long quest to explain how the informational or living realm (creatura) could emerge out of the energetic or physical realm (pleroma). Drawing upon recent insights in self-organization theory, the authors suggest a missing link connecting the realms; a simple spontaneouslyarising, non-living, yet evolvable molecular system called an “autocell” consisting of the reciprocal linkage between an autocatalytic cycle and a self-assembling encapsulation process (modeled on viral encapsulation) where the molecular constituents for the capsule are products of the autocatalysis. Autocells are shown to have the rudiments of individuality, end-directedness, function, and valuation; thus bridging the critical initial gap between pleroma and creatura.
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Anthropology
Berkeley, CA 94720-3710
Introduction:
In his book Mind and Nature, Gregory Bateson presents a method of analysis that he believes is critical to sorting out some of the fundamental questions of biology. He argues that this method is largely unrecognized and underutilized, and yet it is essential for investigations within the realm of creatura, i.e. the living world in which information processes, not just material-energetic processes, are relevant. He describes his method as “double description”. More than mere comparison, double description includes elements of both Charles Sanders Peirce’s abduction and Bertrand Russell’s logical types, although neither term is used in their original senses. The historical origins of this concept and its relationship to other analytical concepts such as these will not be explored here. The purpose of this paper is to examine what Bateson means by double description, how it works as an analytic tool in Bateson’s hands, and what Bateson believes can be achieved by its careful application (where possible to determine). In particular, we hope to critically develop the logic of this analysis to the point where we can reconsider an exemplary challenge that Bateson poses at the beginning of Mind and Nature (which involves multiple levels of double description) in light of more recent developments in evolutionary and developmental biology. He asks:
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another? (Bateson 1979 ) Download PDF of full article
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. Download PDF of full article
Terrence W. Deacon, Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley
Chapter 14 in: Bruce Weber & David Depew (eds.) Evolution and Learning: The
Baldwin Effect Reconsidered. MIT Press, 2003
1 Introduction
“. . . something more from nothing but.” Biological evolution is characterized by a collection of highly convoluted processes that produce a remarkably complex kind of combinatorial novelty. The contention of this paper is that biological evolution and evolutionary processes in general are a subset of processes drawn from a much larger set of novelty-producing processes that also includes self-assembly and self-organizing
processes. Not only does it appear that these are related concepts, I think it is also clear that they are interdependent in complex and subtle ways that have yet to be fully delineated, especially in the processes of life and mind. It is also suspected by many writers that a synthesis that successfully integrates the logic of these various kinds of creative processes will do more than significantly advance our understanding of how life came about and how thoughts and experiences are generated. It could possibly also provide new insights into the very nature of physical causality. But there are some broad theoretical issues that stand in the way of this outcome. These issues derive from a set of unresolved problems about the nature of physical novelty itself, and how we conceive of its origination in terms of current theories of causality. These most enigmatic physical phenomena all have something to do with creative or originative processes in nature, and for this reason seem inevitably to come in conflict with our otherwise quite successful reductionistic account of most other aspects of the world.
A more general term often used to describe this larger class of spontaneous, and only weakly predictable, order-generating processes is “emergence.” This is a promising abstract explanatory concept, but one that is at risk of becoming overused and too vague for any technical purposes, precisely because of its generality and only partially specified meanings. The purpose of this essay is to take the concept apart and to attempt to discern what (if any) features about physical causal processes it accurately reflects, so that it contributes to the empirical investigation of biological and mental processes, and not just to philosophizing about them.
One of the great mysteries of animal development is how the cells in mouse embryos and elephant embryos know how many times to divide before committing to fixed cell fates in each tissue in order to produce proportioned adult bodies of vastly differing sizes. Given the incredible difference in scale from zygote to adult organism, it is remarkable that many comparative morphological relationships exhibit highly predictable scaling patterns in animals of different sizes. Such regularities imply that the control of differentiation and growth is highly conserved and tightly regulated even when extrapolated in time and space over many orders of magnitude. Not surprisingly, elephants take longer to grow than do mice, and they also take longer to reach developmental stages comparable to those of mice. Surprisingly, the two animals reach these different end points from highly similar beginnings and by using almost identical mechanisms extrapolated to different degrees during development. Thus, the timing mechanisms underlying development play critical roles in animal design, and their variations are widely cited as likely major factors in morphological evolution. Time, growth, and developmental differentiation of tissues are linked variables, but the mechanisms linking them, the extent to which each is dissociable from the others, and the role these relationships play in the evolution of animal forms remain poorly understood.
Abstract:
An evolutionary world view is not necessarily at odds with the core values of most of the world’s spiritual traditions, and may in fact offer an unprecedented new revelation about the meaning of life, mind, and human experience that is the key to forging a new synthesis of the spiritual and scientific world views of the next millennium. The evolutionary paradigm is relevant to the explanation of far more than just the phylogenetic history of life. Evolution-like processes are now recognized to play a significant role in processes at all levels of life, including cognition, as well as in processes that are not strictly-speaking biological, such as the formation and spread of cultural information. The power of the evolutionary paradigm is that it offers an account of design and function in the world that is emergentist and creative rather than reductionist and eliminative. Prior to this the substantial world has been viewed as passive and blindly mechanistic. By providing an alternative to the paradigms of prior design and preformation, an evolutionary emergent account of natural “design” locates the creative force in the world rather than outside of it. Similarly, an evolutionary emergent account of the neural processes underlying phenomenal experience offers a way to understand human experience and the origins of meaning and value as self-creative phenomena, rather than as passively inherited mental content. In conclusion, whereas traditional dualistic-theistic world views have been an opposed reaction to the deadening metaphor of a soulless mechanistic world, an emergent spiritualism is entirely consistent with an evolutionary world view, and can offer an unprecedented opportunity to reexamine the basis for meaning and value.