The Force is with Us
The secret is out: I'm an optimist. This is not a great day for an
optimist. Yes, we are about to go to war for umpteenth time in the last
century, but this is not the real problem. This is about as close to the
problem as I can see right now:
'Conflicts
rage across the globe' by Christy Oglesby, CNN, Friday, January 31,
2003
(CNN) -- Iraq and North Korea have dominated
the world's attention in recent months, yet in countries and regions around
the globe, strife smolders with sporadic notice.
Civil war. Mutilations. Threat of nuclear
deployment. Human trafficking. Starving babies. Those are some of the seeds
and harvest of conflicts in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.
And, no, I don't think we are going to muddle through this one, but it
won't be for lack of trying. We are, after all, the paragon
muddlers. There is a light at the end of this tunnel, but we won't see
it until we see it. I claim to see it. More than that, I claim to
be able to point to it. There are not many people on the Internet today
who are making such a claim. Let's see if I can back it up.
The point is that we are not here by accident, and we will not depart this
scene until we have finished our business here. We have much unfinished
business, just now. Don't you agree?
The light at the end of this tunnel is not a 'smoking gun',
fortunately. The force that is with us is something all-pervasive.
It is sometimes referred to by economists as the 'invisible hand'. They
just don't realize how invisible it actually is, to them. They speak of
subtle 'market forces', as if they had their finger on that pulse. They
are won't to give themselves Nobel prizes for writing the formulas for market
stability, etc. They had better think again.
The tiniest tip of this 'iceberg' is the Anthropic Principle, and how many
economists ever worried their pretty little heads about that? They have
not the foggiest notion of what makes this world tick. And ditto for
almost every other intellectual presently pontificating. These same ones
speak so knowingly of the 'dark ages', as if they could see the light!
It has never, and will never be darker than it is today. That is my
promise to whomever can read these words.
The invisible hand is far from idle. It has no time for the Devil's
work. It is God who is in these details. Life is the one monument
to the life force, as if that were not sufficient!
Exhibit A, which just recently came across my screen: "Protein Interaction
Networks" (975 hits).
It is almost amusing to peruse this pages. The scientists speak so
confidently of their understanding of these 'PINs'. Give it a name and
it belongs to us! Who was the last person who got a grant of money from
any source for professing ignorance? Not in our lifetime!
Just one little caveat. ............
---------------------------
[Shuttle and crew lost
-- terrible.......]
[2/2/03]
I sense a contest today between my chutzpah and NASA's hubris. I will
win. We will all win this one for the Gipper.
Yesterday was the end of the space age. Yesterday, true to my words,
was the darkest day of that our darkest age, launched by the one who may have
been our darkest President. The words above were written just before
Debbie called me with the news, upon leaving the gym at 9:45 am.
Unless my orbital physics and armchair psychology is all wet, those
astronauts would have been saved were it not for NASA's hubris, and its last
ditch effort to save the space shuttle program.
The administrators could probably guess that an inspection of the shuttle
from the space station would have resulted in its permanent docking
(tethering, this one had no dock) right there. The crew would had to
have been off-loaded with shared suits and brought back to Earth in the
embarrassingly (to NASA) trustworthy Soyuz. That would have been the end
of the Shuttle anyway. Deep in the communal subconscious of the Agency
was just one thought: Let's go out with a bang!
Yes, this was the day of infamy. It will be the turning point
which we have all been expecting.
This marks our very dramatic turn to inner space, where our attention
finally belongs.
The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped
-- the only thing left to fly at NASA will be recriminations. Never
again will Texans have to awaken to retrieve body parts from their front
lawns.
------------------------------------
My attention turns back to complexity. It is in complexity that we
will discover the force that is with us, and, yes, within us.
The limit of natural complexity is our own brain. The limit of
artificial complexity is this net. The materialist minded complexity
theorists run their spontaneous self-organizing principle up against the
primordial human self. I will prove them wrong, ultimately, by replacing
Google on the Internet with the authority of a cosmically inspired sense of
coherence. That is the long and short of it. Against this chutzpa,
NASA's hubris will hardly hold a candle.
Now, back to my 'caveat'. I was about to say that 'proteomics'
(270,000 hits) is perhaps the newest science; it was not in the
ms-dictionary. It is not easy to trace the history of proteomics
before 2000, when so much attention was being focused on genomics. The
decoding of the human genome in 2001 was the last hurrah of materialism.
It was a brief swan song. After that it is complexity all the way
down. 'Proteomics' is a convenient label for this unending vista of complexity.
The only way out will be upward -- all the way up. There will be no
half-way point. A few of us are pointing to the telos. One of us
will break through the noise.
Yes, there is limit to how much complexity materialism can carry before its
back is broken. I'll bet that proteomics is the final straw. It is
just a question of when will come this break. I'm thinking two years,
just off the top. One of us will be ready.
With proteomics there is so much to be organized. What is the
organizing principle? Where does it reside? To what could it
possibly be reduced? The known complexity of cells has been doubling on
the average of about once a year since when? Since 1665? Just
about! Our ability to explain the coordination of this complexity has
been falling further behind for these last three centuries. At some
point we will invoke a coordinator. The necessary ultimate singularity
of this coordinating agency will not be difficult to appreciate, once we start
thinking about it. When will we start? Will we have to wait
another three centuries before we get off our reductionistic kick? I'm
doubting it.
Yes, there are subtle forces. But they are not all that subtle when
we confront them in the deepest recesses of our being. Sometimes our
conscience can be every bit as subtle as a brick bat! Wake up,
people! The only thing we have to lose is our incoherence.
It could well be the Columbia that starts this snowball
rolling. At some point it will find its direction, and that cannot
happen spontaneously, or even naturally. We'll know very well when and
how it happens. We will also know who. What greater monument to
the seven heroes?
For now, we just need to find those who are questioning the spontaneity of
all this complexity. These days, with everyone questioning authority,
who is questioning the alleged non-authority of the complexity? Who
dares question its 'naturalness'. Yes, there are the 'irreducible
complexity' folks, but they only question its origination, not its
coordination. A small difference in emphasis, but a gaping chasm in
perspective. 'Vitalism' is not in their dualist lexicon. Vitalism
smacks of animism and paganism in their mechanistic view. They care only
for the 'watchmaker', while the nature of the watch eludes them.
Biological complexity
(4,900 hits).
SYSTEM-LEVEL GENETIC CODES:
AN EXPLANATION FOR BIOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY by John F. McGowan.
[2/3]
I have been perusing the above list. Here is the bottom line on
biological complexity: there is no bottom line.
What I mean to say is that with complexity of any kind we confront our now
almost familiar friend: the epistemic-ontic divide,
or, rather, the lack thereof.
With the early completion of the genome project, complexity theory is
coming into its own, with a vengeance. The only problem is that there is
no theory. There is an expanding plethora of theories, yes, but there is
no encompassing theory to integrate the field. Thus there is no single
measure of complexity in general or of biological complexity in
particular.
Bottom line: complexity is complicated, and no one is in a position to say
just how complicated it is.
After genomics
(788,000 hits) comes proteomics
(272,000 hits), metabonomics
(1,080 hits), metabolomics
(3,600 hits), transcriptomics
(2,600 hits), etc...??? And, yes, it gets even better: Omes
Table. This table lists a number of 'Omes' (and see 'Ome
Sweet 'Omics-- A Genealogical Treasury of Words by Joshua Lederberg and
Alexa T. McCray) along with their Google and Pubmed counts, and the first year
in Pubmed. Twenty-four Omes are listed, including the Secretome,
Pseudome and Unknome. I kid you not. Are they kidding? I'm afraid
to ask right now: 'To add new and innovative Omes to the list email: [email protected].'
Is my point taken? What is my point? What is their point?
Biologists are able to poke fun at themselves, but there may be a more serious
issue behind this professional humor.
The genomic reductionism apparently contained the seeds (sic) of its own
deconstruction. Before the final, dramatic decoding of the human genome,
biological complexity was a theoretical abstraction best left to those Santa
Fe odd-balls. But now this complexity is exploding in all of our
faces. Biologists and mathematicians are just beginning to try to pick
up the pieces. We don't wish to rush to judgment do we? Yes and
no.
I believe that I may be under some possibly 'cosmic' pressure to look
ahead, to look at certain kinds of contingencies, as is pretty well covered
here.
The 'Ome explosion' may be an omen. It may signal a public and
consensual breakdown of the very traditional epistemic-ontic divide.
This straw, nay, this haystack will break the back of materialism. Am I
shifting from my contingency voice to my prophetic voice? I, personally,
don't see how it can fail to have this effect in the almost foreseeable
future. By that, I mean within this decade, and that is being optimistic
relative to the half-life of materialism. More realistically, as
speculated above, I give materialism a half-life of about two years from Columbia
day. Its breakup will be even more spectacular, and will be carried
live.
There are many now, and will be many more in the months ahead, who, when
asked, will say that I am beating an already dead horse. They may be
correct. Perhaps I should be speaking of materialism's wake. It
will be more like a party, really a celebration, as all good wakes are
supposed to be (see, again, Finnegans Wake -- talk about prophetic, I'm
just the amateur in this neck of the woods).
This will be a universal wake. Attendance, nay, participation will be
virtually mandatory. I will not be the party-pooper. This time I
will be the party-planner. Just recall that this is the
before-party. We are talking pre-millennialism. I am the wedding
planner. I'm the Hierogamos guy. The Columbia crew got to
celebrate their nuptials just about a thousand years early, those lucky
stiffs. The Heaven's Gaters don't really count: they were party
crashers; although, on second thought, and to be perfectly honest, I was
standing at that gate.
-----------------------------------------
How exactly will the 'Ome explosion' subvert the epistemic-ontic
divide? Without a central theory of complexity, without a Grand Unified
Theory of complexity, there can be no coherence in the mushrooming Omic
fields. There will be no single measure of complexity -- no single
definition of it. Complexity will necessarily be an ad hoc science, a
pragmatic science. Complexity will have to be defined in terms of ad
hoc, pragmatic and functional considerations. These consideration are
all strongly subjective in nature. The now exploding science of
complexity will be the first objectless science.
Epistemology and ontology will be officially reintegrated.
Is not psychology already an objectless science? Yes, but just for
that reason, most scientists did not consider it to be scientific. But
now with biology teetering on the brink of objectlessness, with the entire
medical system hanging in the balance, the scientific establishment is going
to have to do a public soul-searching concerning the nature of science.
Just when it seemed that the biological sciences were poised to switch from
'soft' to 'hard' science, the ontological rug has been pulled out from under
them by the 'Ome explosion'. As biology slides back into the softness of
the soft sciences, it will threaten to pull the rest of science with it.
There will be last-ditch resistance from the hard-core scientists. The
(Sokal) 'Science Wars' will re-ignite. This time the hard-core
objectivists will find that their end of the stick will be much shorter than
it was just a few years ago. Thus will end objectivism and the
epistemic-ontic divide.
----------------------------------------
On complexity and
emergence -- Standish, R. K.
Numerous definitions for complexity have been
proposed over the last half century, with little consensus achieved on how to
use the term. A definition of complexity is supplied here that is closely
related to the Kolmogorov Complexity and Shannon Entropy measures widely used
as complexity measures, yet addresses a number of concerns raised against
these measures. However, the price of doing this is to introduce context
dependence into the definition of complexity. It is argued that such context
dependence is an inherent property of complexity, and related concepts such as
entropy and emergence. Scientists are uncomfortable with such context
dependence, which smacks of subjectivity, and this is perhaps the
reason why little agreement has been found on the meaning of these terms.
[2/4]
How much complexity is too much for biology? That depends on
how much can be explained.
There will only ever be one natural explanation for biological complexity:
natural selection. How great is the explanatory burden which natural
selection can bear? The good news is that we do not know the
limit. The bad news is that we do not know the limit. In other
words, we have no idea as to the explanatory power of natural selection.
The saving mantra of the naturalists is that there is no alternative
explanation. How long can they maintain this stance in the face of the
explosion of complexity? I guess we'll find out. So far, they are
putting a brave face on it -- keeping a stiff upper lip.
Occasionally it is suggested that natural selection can explain virtually
no complexity. How often do the naturalists have to remind us that there
is no direction to evolution? They readily admit that there is
nothing in natural selection to suggest a secular or temporal increase in
complexity. Complexity is not a trait, per se, which would ever
be selected for. Complexity might augment adaptation, or it might not,
depending on the particular circumstances. This is just another aspect
of the objectlessness of complexity. The objectlessness of traits is
another matter.
Certainly in engineering it is simplicity that is golden.
There was an overriding imperative to simplify the functional designs of our
artifacts until, it would seem, we came to the computer age. There has,
subsequently, been an explosion of complexity that is frequently compared with
biological complexity. Does this artificial complexity provide any
explanation for its biological counterpart? It hardly seems so. In
fact, it is just the 'bioinformatics'
(992,000 hits) being made possible by computers that is mainly responsible for
our exploding awareness of biological complexity.
Is there a biological limit to complexity? Is there any way to
predict how much more complexity we may be discovering? Will our ability
to discover biological complexity be limited only by epistemology? Were
any biologists ten years ago predicting the explosion of complexity we have
witnessed in the past ten years? I seriously doubt it.
Was there not a general impression among biologists that biological
complexity must be limited by the amount of information that is contained in
the genetic code? What has happened to this notion? Is the current
explosion not seriously threatening any such limitation or linkage, if it has
not already overrun it? Is there not emerging a very serious information
gap between the cell and the gene?
It will be more than curious to watch the impact of the biological
complexity explosion on Artificial Intelligence. It is now requiring
supercomputing power simply to delve into the complexity of just few aspects
of a single cell. Where does that leave us with regard to simulating the
the brain power of the interactions of 10^11 of such cells? Does this
not foreshadow an indefinitely widening gap between natural and artificial
intelligence, just when the pundits were predicting that we were on the brink
of having our carbon rendered obsolete by silicon.
Nowhere is the genetic information gap greater than when it comes to
explaining biological or natural intelligence. One can almost do the
calculation on the genetic side. The human genome carries less than
40,000 functional genes, with an average of 72,000 base pairs each, and they
are >~99% identical to those of chimpanzees. The difference in native
intelligence between the chimps and us is to be explained by no more than
something on the order of a megabyte of code. Imagine that! When I
last checked, Windows XP was 500 megabytes. Are to we believe that blind
and random natural selection is so much more efficient and direct than 30,000
Micro-softies hammering diligently at their keyboards? And besides, at
every conception of a new human, how much of that one megabyte total for our
IQ code is being randomly scrambled by the natural process of genetic
recombination? Imagine what would happen if we were to randomly
recombine my binary code for XP Home with my wife's binary code for XP
Professional (Library Edition). What would be the IQ of the resulting
mish-mash? I think our son would have been institutionalized long
ago.
This is hardly rocket science, is it? But where else on the Internet
is anyone keeping score for materialism and naturalism? The only other
articulate skeptics are the Intelligent Designers. But they are much
more mechanically minded, in their very narrow pursuit of Design, than even
are their naturalist opponents. They are more genetically minded even
than the geneticists. Their view of Creation is every bit as clunky as
that of the UFO-nauts with their alien breeding stories. For the
Creationists, the notion of vitalism is as welcome as Witchcraft.
(Forget Harry Potter!) Their God is the one painted on the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel, and they don't even have the gender right!
There is a stonewall of silence when it comes to a holistic and substantive
critique of the Scientific worldview. That barrier of silence will be
broken, right here on the Internet.
---------------------------------
There is an apparent information gap between the genes and the rest of
biology. This is not unlike the 'missing mass' or the 'dark matter' that
is believed to comprise almost ten times as much mass as the visible matter in
the universe. In biology we have missing information. Where is
it? Is it in the genome, the proteome, the metabolome, etc.? It is
manifested in all of these places, but resides in none of them. Consider
how much information is contained in all the laws of physics. Where does
that information reside? Certainly not in each one of the elementary
particles. Like organisms, the elementary particles exhibit many
law-like traits, but we do not suppose that these traits are coded in their
genes. It may be that the genetic information simply serves to trigger
and amplify an information that is much less particulate or even
physical.
It may well be that there is holistic, informational 'mind' field. It
may have holistic properties rather like language. The eight letters of
the word 'elephant' certainly do not contain all of the information of the
word. The information is to be found in the relational properties or
associations of that word with all the other words of the language. Thus
it is with genes and proteins, etc.
What about the Mandelbrot set? How much information is contained
therein? It would naively appear to be infinitely complex, and yet it
can be generated simply by the formula of its 'genetic' kernel z' = z^2 + C,
which contains, at most, a few bytes of information. Is there not a
similar disconnect between the manifest infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot
and its simple genetic formula?
I would suggest that the Mandelbrot exhibits the holographic-like
complexity of the entire number system. Every number is a holistic construct,
having no meaning in isolation. There is only a number field.
There is a similar biological field, with a potentially infinite holographic
complexity. The genome operates within and upon that field. Unlike
the number field, the biological field has teleological properties that are
manifested particularly in our mental states as an intentionality.
---------------------------------
At this point it is no great stretch to postulate several intimately
related fields or manifolds which contain or carry a spectrum of meaning and
functional information. These would be the mental, biological,
mathematical, and linguistic manifolds. We should not forget the
space-time manifold which manifests the symmetries and laws of physics, and
which seems closely associated with the mathematical manifold. Each one
of these manifolds has its peculiar ontic and epistemic aspects. The
quantum, entropy, anthropics, relativity and the directionality of time all
seem to conspire to introduce a strongly epistemic quality into the alleged
objectivity of the space-time manifold. If we knew the deeper relations
between these several manifolds we would hold the keys to the kingdom.
We will have plenty of time to work this out.
In the meantime, we only need to appreciate that reintroducing aspects of
vitalism into the semiotic flux of biology would be a very natural step when
seen in this larger context. The remaining resistance to vitalism is
just the death rattle of materialism. Let us respect its senescence while we plan
for its wake. Also realizing that the misguided Creationists may,
ironically, be the final source of resistance to vitalism. The force
will be with them, too.
[2/5]
To underscore that last point consider:
CAN
FUNCTIONAL LOGIC TAKE THE PLACE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN? A RESPONSE TO
WALTER THORSON by William
A. Dembski (2002):
Thorson's methodological naturalism leaves room
for teleology in nature, though a teleology that falls short of full
intelligent agency.
For Thorson, getting the scientific community
to admit the reality of this functional logic and to make that logic a
fundamental focus of scientific investigation would constitute the sort of
paradigm shift in science with which he would be entirely happy. He sees
Michael Behe's work on irreducible complexity as feeding into such a paradigm
shift inasmuch as Behe's work shows that a functional logic pervades biology
all the way down to the molecular level (below which biology gives way to
physics and chemistry). Nonetheless, Thorson is not willing to follow Behe to
his conclusion of intelligent design. Why
is that?
The problem according to Thorson is that any
sort of designing agent responsible for that functional logic in biological
systems would be a scientific surrogate for divine agency. Indeed, from a
Christian perspective it is hard to see what a designing agent responsible
for biological complexity could be other than the Christian God. Intelligent
design, if it could be developed as a scientific theory applicable to
biology, would thus have immediate theological implications, not the least
being that God's handiwork in nature was empirically detectable and
therefore not inscrutable.
But this for Thorson is theologically
unacceptable. Following Karl Barth and a theological tradition that places a
premium on divine inscrutability, it is unacceptable to Thorson that God's
agency in the world not be completely shrouded in mystery. In addition to
Barth, Thorson cites Austin Farrer, who argued that the metaphysical joint
at which divine agency intersects the created world is fundamentally
inscrutable. Thorson concludes that "divine agency is essentially
mysterious at every level."
I've long ceased to be impressed by claims of
divine inscrutability. Whenever I'm confronted with such claims, I
invariably recall G. K. Chesterton's epigram, "We don't know enough
about the unknown to know that it is unknowable." To be sure, it might
serve certain theological interests to keep God, and divine agency in
particular, inscrutable. But the claim of divine inscrutability, just as any
other controversial claim, needs an argument if it is to be judged in the
market of ideas.
I'm going to have to investigate Thorson on my own. His functional
teleology seems closer to a rational theism than does Dembski's watchmaking
Mechanic. Why Thorson sees functionalism as favoring the inscrutability
of God is presently inscrutable to me. Unfortunately, Thorson's article
is not yet available on the ASA
website.
What I do notice from perusing biological complexity
is that the IDers are continuing to rock the scientific boat. Even
though their mechanistic conception of creation is wrong, their boat rocking
could well create an opening for a more metaphysical view. I do notice
some polarization between the IDers and the ASA contingent. The ASA
might provide a platform for a less mechanistic account, as they did for
Thorson. Their journal is not posted to the web until one year after
publication. If they want to participate in the premillennial politics,
they will have to be more expeditious than that. However, they probably
will not wish to associate with someone with my radical view of spiritual
politics. Once again, we'll have to pray to the Google gods!
Here is the latest scoop:
DARWIN AND
DESIGN: A debate about the latest defense of intelligent design. --
William A. Dembski and H. Allen Orr (12/02).
The primary attack on Dembski concerns his mystagoguery. I agree with
that criticism. Bill will never be able to squeeze any rational
coherence out of his Cartesian dualism.
Dembski refers to James
Shapiro (Univ. Chicago) associated with ISCID:
The International
Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a
cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems
apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or
reductionism.
That sounds promising!
A 21st
Century View of Evolution by James A. Shapiro:
Molecular genetics has
amply confirmed McClintock’s discovery that living organisms actively
reorganize their genomes. It has also supported her view that the genome can
"sense danger" and respond accordingly. The recognition of the
fundamentally biological nature of genetic change and of cellular potentials
for information processing frees our thinking about evolution. In particular,
our conceptual formulations are no longer dependent on the operation of
stochastic processes. Thus, we can now envision a role for computational
inputs and adaptive feedbacks into the evolution of life as a complex system.
Indeed, it is possible that we will eventually see such information-processing
capabilities as essential to life itself.
Had I not been forewarned, I might have missed Jim's still implicit
anti-naturalism. What he may say in private to Bill is another
matter.
There is now a burgeoning field of 'evolutionary
computing' (27,000 hits). I am not aware of any pervasive
anti-naturalist sentiment in this field. Most of the workers seem to
feel that they are actually exploiting Darwin, not refuting him. Where
Jim and the ISCID part company with this nascent industry needs
investigation.
Genome
Organization and Reorganization in Evolution: Formatting for Computation and
Function by James A. Shapiro (2001):
Molecular discoveries
about mechanisms of DNA restructuring show that cells possess the Natural
Genetic Engineering functions necessary for evolutionary change by rearranging
genomic components and reorganizing system architectures. The concepts of
cellular computation and decision-making, genome system architecture, and
natural genetic engineering combine to provide a new way of framing
evolutionary theories and understanding genome sequence information.
This is a bit more explicit. This seems rather like the functionalism
that Dembski was just criticizing in Thorson. Jim
continues:
The most profound, and
most challenging, new aspect of thinking in a 21st Century fashion about
evolution will be the application of information-processing ideas to the
emergence of adaptive novelty. A major problem, often cited by religious and
other critics of orthodox evolutionary theory, is how to explain the
appearance of complex genomic systems encoding sophisticated multicomponent
adaptive features. The possibility that computational control of natural
genetic engineering functions can provide an answer to the problems of
Irreducible Complexity and Intelligent Design deserves to be explored fully.
Contrary to the claims of some Creationists, these issues are not
scientifically intractable. They require an application of lessons from the
fields of artificial intelligence, self-adapting complex systems, and
molecular cell biology.
[...] One
philosophical question that has proved extraordinarily contentious concerns
the respective roles of design and chance in evolution. This topic is so
heated because it touches on fundamental differences between materialistic
assumptions and religious faith. However, I argue that molecular discoveries
about cellular information processing, epigenetic modifications of the genome,
and natural genetic engineering place this issue in a new
(?) naturalistic perspective. We can now postulate a role for some kind
of purposeful, informed cellular action in evolution without violating
any tenets of contemporary science or invoking actors beyond experimental
investigation. It remains to be established how "smart" cellular
networks can be in guiding genome reformatting and sequence reorganization
towards adaptive needs.
Say what?? We have here a 'naturalistic' 'purposeful' action!!
On previous occasions I have resorted to using the word 'oxymoronicity'.
I think here the phrase 'Oxymoron City' would be more apt. George
Orwell could take some pride in this exemplar of Doublethink. Am I being
too tough on Jim? That remains to be seen. Perhaps his use of
'new' needs further examination.
From ISCID:
James Barham asks
important questions on design, teleology and the considers the notion of
"thinking matter" ... [more]
[...] No doubt,
most readers will assume that empirical science passed a negative judgment
on this idea long ago. They will feel that today thinking matter is at best
a bare possibility, not a live one. Certainly, the proposition that a
certain kind of matter has an intrinsic power of thought flouts the spirit
of the Mechanistic Consensus. However, I shall argue below that the
Mechanistic Consensus is mistaken in each of its main theses: (1)
present-day physics and chemistry do not provide the conceptual resources
for a complete understanding of how living things work; (2) natural
selection does not provide an adequate ground for naturalizing the normative
teleology in living things, which is no mere appearance, but rather
objective reality; and (3) thinking is not just a matter of computation, nor
does the normative character of thought have anything to do with brains per
se. The upshot of these negative arguments will be that living matter is
special. Finally, I will conclude on a more positive note by briefly
reviewing some ways in which we might begin to understand this specialness
scientifically.
Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Is this what Jim S. was
talking about? Jim B. continues:
A term like
"second messenger," they say, is a metaphor that, while not
strictly necessary, is useful in order to avoid intolerably verbose
descriptions of the mechanistic interactions that underlie the appearances.
Such a façon de parler is a promissory note redeemable in the hard
currency of physics and chemistry. But like any IOU, this promise issued by
molecular biology is only as sound as the other sciences backing it up. If
they cannot make it good, then the note is worthless. Therefore, it behooves
us to take a closer look at the conceptual solvency of the Mechanistic
Consensus.
[For later reference: BACK TO
THE STOICS: Dynamical Monism as the Foundation for a Reformed
Naturalism (Talk Delivered at Calvin College, May 25, 2001) JAMES BARHAM.
'Reformed naturalism'? OK, that's what Jim S. must have been
alluding to above.] Now continuing from 'thinking
matter':
To say that a chemical
compound "survives" or that a crystal "reproduces"
itself is to employ metaphors that obscure the point at issue. The very
thing we are trying to explain is how it is possible for an organism to
direct energy in a way that promotes its self-preservation, and not in other
energetically equivalent ways. Thus, the notions of survival and
reproduction already contain the normative feature of striving to
achieve particular preferred states. They are far from the unproblematic
mechanistic concepts that a successful reduction would require. Rather, they
demarcate the boundary between the living and the nonliving, and so
constitute the very heart of the problem of teleology.
Yes, I meant to say that earlier!
However, this does not
mean that we are forced to accept the Intelligent Design conclusion. We may
just as well reject the premise, instead. In that case, we may say that the
"design inference" (Dembski, 1998) constitutes a reductio ad
absurdum of the proposition that organisms are machines. If we drop this
premise, then we are free to view organisms as active and fully integrated
systems, in which a change in one part leads to appropriate changes
cascading throughout the system in accordance with functional logic. In this
case, evolution begins to make sense from a physical point of view. But now
Darwinism has forfeited all of its reductive power! We have simply assumed
the functional organization of the cell, which is the very thing we claimed
to be able to explain by means of the theory of natural selection.
Darwinians often
complain that such criticisms are based on a misunderstanding. It is not
chance, they say, that bears the explanatory weight in their theory, it is
the selection principle. Natural selection is said to act as a ratchet,
locking into place the functional gains that are made, so that each new
trait can be viewed as a small incremental step with an acceptable
probability. But what Darwinians forget is that the way a ratchet
increases probabilities and imposes directionality is through its own
structure. In the present context, the structure of the ratchet is simply
the functional organization of life. Darwinians are only entitled to claim
that the explanatory burden of their theory lies on the selection
"ratchet," thus avoiding the combinatorial explosion problem,
provided that they also acknowledge that the structure of this ratchet
consists precisely in the intrinsic functional correlations among the parts
of the organism. But now they have merely assumed the very functional
organization that they claimed to be able to explain, thus sneaking teleology
in by the back door.
Has it really taken us a century and half to finally articulate these most
basic facts of life? The Darwinians have been having a free logic lunch
all these years. When these chickens come home to roost, it will be a
hot time in the coop. Did I say 'two years' from Columbia
day? I'm being very generous!
[2/6]
It appears that ISCID (International
Society for Complexity, Information, and Design) could be an important
resource. It is more open to metaphysical speculation than are the
IDers. It does not have a theological agenda, as do the IDers, despite
their frequent protests to the contrary. I will be looking out for
connections between ISCID and the biosemiotics
groups previously discussed. I can't recall having seen this site before
now. I may have confused it with one of the many ID sites. I'm
going to be looking over the rest of their material. James Barham
appears to be the most relevant for me. I gather that the IDers are
ambivalent about ISCID. They simply don't know what to make of it.
Wait 'til they grok on biosemiotics. The fields of biosemiotics,
informational ontology, and complexity theory seem to borrow in part from
cybernetics and systems theory (see here,
here, etc.(12,000
hits)). I am a bit rusty in this area. The whole game is about
transcending the epistemic-ontic divide. It is a very tricky
business.
I am struck by Barham's take on reproduction.
If he is correct about its being irreducibly normative, that puts normativity
at the center of Darwinism. Notice Rex Kerr's
response,
posted on 2/4:
But by using words like
"normative" here, we're immediately in danger of being misled. Does
present-day physics and chemistry have the conceptual resources for a complete
understanding of how living things work? Yes, as far as they go. It is
inconvenient to use the language of physics and chemistry to describe systems
of such complexity, though, so we use additional language. Barham seems to be
implying that our use of additional language imposes some deep
philosophical burden upon us.
Yes, that is precisely Jim's point. Jim's respondents don't quite
appreciate the depth of the burden. Perhaps it could stand further
explication. I was missing this simple point myself until Jim's remarks
hit me over the head with it yesterday.
Biological reproduction is an open ended, indefinable concept. It greatly
transcends even the basic concept of copying, which is itself fraught with
ambiguity. Just look at the concept of 'copy'. It is an almost
entirely normative in meaning, unless taken in a purely abstract,
digital context. And if taken in its most abstract form, you would then
have to contend with the deep metaphysical issues surrounding Leibniz' Identity
of Indiscernibles.
Does that mean that biological reproduction is metaphysical? Yes and
no. Any particular instance of it could be perfectly physical or
mechanical. But Darwinians are not talking about instances.
They do and must appeal to a universal concept of reproduction.
Evolution is not an instance of anything. If it is anything at all it is
a very general pattern of inheritance.
Darwinians assert that reproduction, along with mutation, is the basic
'mechanism' of evolution:
Reproduction + mutation --> (cause) evolution?
But is reproduction a causal entity? Is it fair to say that
hurricanes cause destruction? It is fair for a layperson to say that,
but that does not make it a scientific statement. Hurricanes happen and destruction
happens, and there is some correlation between the two, but that is not
science: it is not cause and effect.
Darwinians claim to understand evolution. Biologists claim to understand
reproduction. Let us grant that biologists do have a good grasp of many
of the particulars of 'reproduction'. The problem comes when you subsequently
attempt to employ 'reproduction' as an ontological or causal
entity.
The most that Darwinians can legitimately claim is that reproduction
happens and evolution happens, and the two processes seem to be
correlated. Who knows where the causality resides?
I am a teleologist. From my perspective evolution causes and comes
logically prior to reproduction. It is the primordial, metaphysical necessity
of the Telos that causes and ultimately explains the emergence of biological
and reproductive phenomena.
My teleological claim is just as much justified by the observed correlation
between evolution and reproduction as is the Darwinian claim.
Darwinians appeal to our mechanistic and materialistic sensibilities.
Evolution is alleged by them to be reduced to reproduction and mutation, both
of which may or may not be further reducible. They postulate a hierarchy
of phenomena where all the causation is mechanistic or 'upward'.
Is their claim just a 'facon de parler'? I think
not. I think that they think they have worked it all down to the 'brass
tacks', to the 'nuts and bolts'. There is nothing in the phenomenon of evolution
to suggest whether the causes are upward or downward or both. The only
thing to suggest otherwise is the Darwinian appeal to an illegitimate ontology
of 'reproduction' and many other emergent entities which are every bit
as much epistemic in substance as they are ontic. As such they are
neither physical nor mechanical and may not legitimately be appealed to as if
they were, or even might be!
James Barham is pointing out that the Darwinians need to get serious about
their logic and ontology, after a century and a half of very loose talk.
[The substance of the above argument is posted
on the ISCID site.]
----------------------------------
Now may be the time to look at 'evolutionary
computing'. The implicit and sometimes explicit claim is that by using the
technique of 'natural selection' we can spontaneously produce artificial and
perhaps even natural intelligence. Thus might evolutionary
computing demonstrate the truth of Darwinism. This could also go a long
way toward substantiating the tenets of Transhumanism. Perhaps the force
is not with us. It is with artificial life. We had better take a
look before it is too late! [This is postponed temporarily in favor of
the ISCID forum.]
[2/9]
The conversation on the ISCID forum
continued through yesterday. I invited Mark Szlazak to compare and
contrast his views with those of Gregg
Rosenberg, whom Mark has quoted several times. Gregg shows up on a list
of active anti-reductionists that I was putting together back in
November.
While waiting for Mark to respond, I might as well attempt my own
assessment of Gregg's work. I have only briefly reviewed his book, so
first, by way of placing his work in an historical, intellectual context, let
me start with some general comments on the status of
anti-reductionism.
Active anti-reductionism presently exists in three principal areas.
Two of these are driven mainly by philosophical considerations. On the
Anglo-American side there is the continuing fall-out from the several failures
of the analytical enterprise that arose near the beginning of the last
century, which in its turn was an attempt to ground philosophy with a few
simple and self-evident truths, rather in the spirit of Descartes and of
axiomatic mathematics. Striking form within its ranks, Godel and Quine
had managed to effectively derail this enterprise by mid-century. Since
then, analytical philosophy has lived on, mainly as a style of thinking and
writing. Several people on the above mentioned list
pursue their anti-reductionism in the analytical style. Gregg is one of
them.
On the 'Continental' side there is a different philosophical story.
There it was Kant who set the stage, and it is a more complicated story.
Kant's strategy for dealing with
Humean skepticism was mostly one of containment. According to his
'critical idealism', only Science could be protected from Hume's
skepticism. The attempts to rebuild metaphysics after Kant had to borrow
heavily from the few glimmers of his idealism that he allowed to shine through
his critical armor. Out of this reconstruction came the doubly
contrary Dialectics of Hegel and Marx. What survives now is
Phenomenology, which is a curious amalgam of Kant and Descartes.
Semiotics has spun itself off from the phenomenological and structuralist
traditions. Lacking any firm attachments, it threatens to drift in
the analytical direction. This is particularly true of its youngest sibling:
biosemiotics.
The third front in anti-reductionism is being driven, ironically, by the Artificial
Intelligencers. As noted previously
the practical demands of knowledge based systems are forcing its practitioners
to take up the ontological enterprise eschewed by their philosophical
colleagues. Surprisingly they are launching into this task with some
gusto, and even performing some metaphysical peregrinations of their
own.
It is no secret that these anti-reductionist efforts are singularly lacking
in coherence, both individually and as whole. The is only the strongly
implied hope that their patient labors in the analytical trenches will, as it
seems to have with their scientific colleagues, reward them eventually with a
full blown cosmology that can stand up to, and ultimately surpass that of
science. These workers see themselves mainly as revising, reforming and
extending the awesome scientific edifice. For now, they labor, barely
noticed, in its deepest shadows.
I am skeptical of any analytical effort to resurrect metaphysics. I
believe that it is self-defeating. The best that can result is a
papering over of the numerous antinomies of materialism and analytical
philosophy, along with the grafting of some ungainly appendages. This
reformist mentality is not taking seriously the notion of a Kuhnian paradigm
shift, and the resulting incommensurability between old and new
paradigms. It is somehow hoped that the now bloated analytical apparatus
of the old system can be imported, more or less, intact into whatever is to be
the new system.
With a new paradigm, we will have to make a new start. The task
appears daunting. How could we ever hope to compete with, or even
significantly influence, our colleagues on the other side of the metaphysical
divide, without strongly emulating their now traditional enterprise?
There is, I believe, only one strategy that is even modestly
inviting. This is to appeal to a coherent, comprehensive
rationality. One might suppose that this would be a fairly obvious and
well-trodden path. However, as my search for fellow sojourners on this
path continues in vain, I can only conclude that it is the necessarily radical
nature of the resulting rationale that keeps the mere voyeurs at bay.
Furthermore, the resulting coherent rationale cuts right across the major
metaphysical schools of the past. Someone who is even moderately
comfortable within any one of those schools, will not have sufficient desire
to venture out across the various metaphysical no-man's-lands that are the
gaps between the traditional systems.
Furthermore, one has to also be willing to take on the prophetic and
proselytizing burden that goes with any such radical departure from historical
norms. This is not merely an intellectual journey. It is a
metaphysical journey in the full sense of that word.
[2/16]
Several days later, and the conversation
on the ISCID forum
still continues. I'll use this space here to collect my thoughts and
look ahead. My part of the conversation is with a physicalist and a
naturalist. I will try to persuade the physicalist to retreat to
naturalism. The next real sticking point will likely be the MIR (mind
indep. reality) in view of the apparent depth of time and space, relative to
human consciousness. But I would argue that is just a subjective matter
of relative degree, as between oranges and apples. Why would it be more
difficult to reject the MIRH just given the phenomenal existence of another
person, as compared to that of another galaxy? How much more
difficult?
In fact, I would argue that our intuition primary intuition of an MIR comes
from other people. It is then to the rest of the world that we extend
that notion. This is a fact of epistemology.
Suppose that one were a King of Shangri La, with a virtually static
history. Where then would the be the MIR? The concept of possible
worlds is not live.
[2/22]
I was removed [r]
from the ISCID forum last
night. That means I am no longer allowed to post a message there.
The topic to which I was posting 'thinking
matter' was closed at the same time. The postings, however, are
supposed to remain in their archive. This was only my second attempt at
participating in a forum, not counting the Sarfatti
mail list. The last time was eight or nine years ago on the CompuServe
UFO forum, which ended in a similar fashion. I doubt that as much
time will elapse before I make another such attempt. Each time is a
learning experience. Permit me now to collect my thoughts, and rethink
my strategy.
Off the top, it appears that I have very little difficulty in significantly
stirring an already controversial pot, but how does one poke around a hornets'
nest and not get stung? It's not that I am opposed to being stung per
se, but in the process of getting stung one usually looses the thread of
the discussion, both figuratively and literally in these cases. It is
distracting for all involved. It's also like a high-wire act: the
balance will always be precarious.
I need to be aware of the 'politics' involved. How much of the
politics will simply be reflex reactions, and how much will be
deliberated? I need a technique for sounding out the 'political' tendencies
of the various parties, to anticipate the optimal point balance. This is
not easy when deeply controversial issues are involved, as they are bound to
be in the case of religious beliefs. In such cases the participants will
harbor many unconscious motivations. A mere sounding-out may trigger the
unwanted reactions.
How does all this relate to the Eschaton? I would say that
things remain on track for the imminent messianic introduction of the
Millennium and subsequent eschaton. Not many more forays like this
should solve any problems relative to Internet visibility via Google, and the
like. At the same time, in the process of sharpening my rhetorical
skills, I can use the intermezzos to tighten up the presentation of these
topics here, which still leaves much to be desired. By getting a better
feel for the relevant psychology and spiritual politics, I can be more
discerning about the optimal targeting of the eschatological message. So
I will probably use the next few days here to work out a better outline of my
ideas, and then contemplate another testing of the waters.
In the meantime I'll be taking in the Gods
and Generals movie -- four hours of it, I am told.
[2/23]
Norms are an inescapable core of reason. They are stronger than mere
convention. There have functional and teleological aspects.
Thus are norms inescapable in both the physical and life sciences. The
normativity cannot be disentangled from the objectivity; and, furthermore,
objectivity itself is normative. Mathematics is similarly invested with
the norms of reason. The normative methods cannot be removed from the
results. There is nothing natural about math. All abstracting is
normative.
The normativity of science is reflected in its use of
counterfactuality. Modality is essentially normal, and vice versa.
Normality is about modality. Causality is both normal and
modal.
How are norms unnatural? They are intentional, aesthetic, pragmatic
and you name it. They make it possible for us to analyze, reflect and
'objectify' the world. They are often universal. Norms are built into
every artifact. They cannot be formalized, but every formality is
normative.
Thought cannot escape from its own norms. If there were a
non-normative, mind independent reality, we could not know it. Both
quantities and qualities are ineluctably normal. Reductionism and
analysis are essentially normal. There is no mind independent
nature. It would be inconceivable. But are the monster group and
big bang normal?
What does the normality of reason imply about AI? Normality comes out
of thought; but it cannot be put back into it, certainly not in any piecemeal
fashion. Norms like thoughts and language are holistic. Like
functions, they cannot be analyzed. They are
self-referential.
But what of the BB & MG? Are they not both MIRs? How could
they not be? Are they convenient, theoretical fictions?
The past is a fiction. I can be effective only through the
present. Time is surely a fiction, especially in its
directionality. All events are fictions, especially in their causal
aspect. But especially is the luminous (specious?) present a
fiction. Consider presence and absence.
-------------------
Why, historically, was there never a non-prophetic theism, and ever only
one of the other? Rational theism must contend with that history.
How do we rationalize around that singularity? There are devotional
mysticisms like Krishna consciousness, but there is no story or
codification. Historical theism is singular. The prophetic and
historical elements must be inseparable. Why only one chosen
people? Only one contract? One savior? One God of
history? How can full theism be considered rational if it is so
rare?
Consider the subjectivity of presence. Also of relationality.
But what is reality w/o relations? Even the concept of the real is
subjective and modal. It implies an unreal.
If we were so wrong about an MIR, how can we not now be skeptical of
God? It is a question of logic and reason. We reason to a
source.
Relations are ineluctably normative.
God is just the ultimate norm and normalizer. There must either be an
ultimate subject of object. Either God or universe. God is just
the BB of norms. All Hubble 'norm' shifts point back there. It is
a simple triangulation with norms.
After the big Norm, then we're off to the BPW and eschaton
races.
How are norms normally deconstructed? That is not possible with
holism.
--------------------
Non-reductionism. Any irreducibles would be normative. These
also point to a Source, using the self as a stepping stone. Norms, coherence,
relations and self are all inseparable. Relations are irreducible
and immaterial.
The self is the necessary purveyor of coherence. Those two functions
are inseparable.
The imminent deconstruction of science. Ironically it will hinge upon
scientific realism. Can we drop back to instrumentalism and
conceptualism?
The pragmatics of complexity is forcing us to reconsider
ontology.
Why? From the unreasonable effectiveness of math, to that of science
and language. The notion of progress is problematic as well.
The incoherence of reductionism. Science has never been comfortable
with it.
But there are no isolated irreducibles. Holism reigns there, as
well. There is only functional and telic alignment. These point to
a supra-mundane telos: a source of coherence.
It may seem like a great stretch, but it could be that the MG is
responsible for our psychological projection of the MIR. It could even
be associated with a primordial fear of some kind.
All the anomalies of materialism are beginning to come into
coherence. We needed to be able to look at the world, modulo
atomism.