If you don't have Aristotle...

...you will follow any idiot who comes along.

Teleology -  don't leave home without it.

Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature, might have been titled Aristotle’s Revenge.
While the book’s subtitle is ‘How Mind Emerged From Matter’, it’s a far more ambitious–and complicated–attempt to show how goal-directed processes, including the origin of life and mind, can arise from purely physical processes.

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Deacon is a Professor of biological anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a previous book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. [Technically, his new book was released late last year, but as it's got a © 2012, I'm selecting it as my pick for this year's most notable.]

 

In Incomplete Nature, Deacon begins by exposing the inadequacy of reductionistic explanations of consciousness and purpose as mere by-products of an impersonal natural order.

He is equally unsatisfied with dualism and the argument that mind and purpose can only be explained by an appeal to the transcendent.

No. For Deacon, the answer has to lie in a closer look at self-organizing processes and how the origins of life and consciousness are rooted in the constraints that bind and shape these processes as they build from the simplest self-assembly of molecules up to the emergence of the first life forms.

At 602 pages, index, notes and all, the book is a long commitment for any reader. And some reviewers (fellow academics) have been harsh. Deacon coins a number of new terms to lay out his arguments, each with its own chapter–homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics–and while the glossary is certainly helpful, it’s not always easy to visualize what each term represents without constant, concrete examples.
Still, Evan Thomspon, a professor of philosophy who has written his own contribution to the field, Mind in Life, sums up the book’s virtues in his review for Nature.

Deacon takes his guiding idea from one of my favourite chapters of a classic Chinese philosophical text from the fourth century B.C., the Tao Te Ching: “Pots are fashioned from clay/But it’s the hollow that makes a pot work.” Similarly, Deacon sees the ‘constitutive absence’ as functional, a defining property of life and mind. Living things are dynamically organized around ends, such as finding nourishment; and minds are dynamically organized around meanings, such as anticipated future events. And like the hollowed interior of the pot, these ends and meanings are both functional and absent, in the sense that they affect a system’s behaviour, yet are not material parts of it.

Deacon is arguing that scientists can accept head on, the notion that conscious thought is not material, and yet in principle can be explained in natural terms by a sort of architecture of constraints.

Constraints, as Deacon wrote last year in an overview for New Scientist, involve:

… the degrees of freedom not realised in a dynamical process. To illustrate, consider how a quickly flowing stream forms stable eddies as it curls around a boulder, or how a snow crystal spontaneously grows its precise, hexagonally symmetric, yet idiosyncratic branches.

In both cases, he said, “the resulting order is a consequence of possibilities that become increasingly improbable by the compounding of constraints, due to continual perturbation.”

“Thus, as the branches of a snow crystal grow, they progressively restrict where new growth can take place. Constraints reflect what is not there,” he said, “and the more constrained something is, the more symmetric and regular it is.”

Admittedly, it’s a long way from the constraints in snow crystals … to the constraints surrounding the conscious existence of you and me. And some of Deacon’s colleagues are skeptical about his program.

But what I liked about the book is it’s author’s insistence that teleology, in one way or another, has a place in the natural sciences. I think modern day Aristotelians would approve.

So I asked Deacon, how he would distinguish the ‘contraints’-based approach to, say, a neo-Aristotelian who came up to him and said, ‘Hey, this is what we’ve been arguing all along…’ (i.e., about the explanatory power of concepts like potentiality and actuality in living systems)?

“He’d be right,” he told me in an email, “though without the science to back it up. But my work only parallels the Aristolelean approach.”

“Thus, where Aristotle tries to save a bit of Platonism, I reject it – replaced with the concept of constraint and a negative conception of form and organization – and to the extent that my theory is based on thermodynamics, deriving order and telos secondarily, I am ultimately grounded on very different metaphysical assumptions.”

Top-down causality is not the answer. But the bottom-up isn’t blind, either.

Deacon discusses the book in some detail in this presentation followed by Q&A.

There is no escaping "first philosophy."

Francis Beckwith on Dawkins' inevitable reliance on philosophy:

Second, critics often issue normative judgments that depend on the reasoning of first philosophy. Take, for example, Dawkins’ criticism of the career path of paleontologist Kurt Wise. In The God Delusion, Dawkins laments that even after earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. under the renowned Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Wise did not abandon his belief in young-earth creationism, the view that the first chapters of Genesis should be interpreted literally and that the Bible teaches that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Although, as I have noted elsewhere, I share Dawkins’ puzzlement with Wise’s tenacity, there is something strangely, and delightfully, non-scientific about Dawkins’ lament. He writes: “I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic – pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.”

This is an odd lament for someone of Dawkins’ philosophical leanings, for he denies that nature, which presumably includes Wise, has within it any intrinsic purposes from which we may draw conclusions about our moral obligations to not frustrating those ends. Dawkins claims that Darwin has shown us that natural teleology of any sort, including intrinsic purpose, is an illusion, and thus maintains that belief in teleology is “childish.” (This, by the way, is rhetorical bluster of the worst sort, since as virtually anyone who has studied the subject knows, Darwinism may count against some versions of design but not all, as Ed Feser, Etienne Gilson, and my former professor, James Sadowsky, S. J., have convincingly argued.)

In order to issue his judgment, Dawkins must know something about the nature of the sort of creature Wise is and the obligations that such a creature has to his natural powers and their proper function. But since Dawkins cannot discover the human being’s intrinsic purposes or our obligations to them by the methods and means of the natural sciences, he opines – when he is not lamenting another person’s life choices – that these purposes and obligations must be illusory and to believe in them childish. Yet Dawkins’ brief against Wise depends on these “childish” illusions.

The key to escaping such counter-intuitive dead-ends is to abandon the failed project that the methods of the natural sciences are the model of rationality for all human endeavors. But don’t just take my word for it. Just observe how Richard Dawkins does not practice what he preaches.

First, click on through to the Gilson book and give me a "helpful" vote.

Second, Dawkins' smuggling of teleology into his life occurs constantly. In one interview he explained that "we’re not put here to be comfortable.” [See this video, at 9:30 minutes.]

"Put here"?

By who?

For a purpose?

So, even Dawkins who claims that he can only "dimly" understand the compartmentalization of the mind in the "rational" and "irrational" cannot escape from teleology.