Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Incomplete Nature How Mind Emerged From Matter by Terrence Deacon (2011)
Professor of biological anthropology & neuroscience
“It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate com-ponents of the physical world.” https://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Nature
Absent Mind in the Present World
Post 76.April 02, 2019
Power of Absence
Causation In Absentia
There is a glaring gap in modern science, and Terrence Deacon aims to close it – in part by explaining how material things can have “aims”, and how “absence” can serve to fill functional gaps. He is a neuro-scientist whose expertise straddles the borders between Classical & Quantum, Physics & Metaphysics, and between Science & Philosophy. Deacon says, “we need a theory of everything that does not leave it absurd that we exist”. Ironically, his central thesis sounds absurd on the face of it : that non-existence can affect existing things. Although “absence” may be irrelevant to “inanimate things, it is a defining property of life and mind.” So, he hopes to open a dialogue “between our currently incompatible cultures of knowledge, the physical and the meaningful”. He laments that “scientific knowledge is viewed with distrust by many, as an enemy of human values, the handmaid of cynical secularism, and a harbinger of nihilism”. He aims to regain that trust by showing that Science is relevant to heart-felt human interests.
Although Deacon's theory challenges the philosophy of Materialism, he takes great pains to avoid the slippery slope into Spiritualism as an explanation for metaphysical phenomena1. Instead, he offers a naturalistic account for Life, Mind, Soul, Sentience, Consciousness, and most other immaterial features of the world. My own thesis of Enformationism also attempts to bridge the conceptual chasm between Physics and Meta-physics. But the main difference, is that I didn't automatically reject the possibility of a supernatural agent to serve as the First Cause of everything. Instead, I proposed something like a creator god, who created the plenipotent Information system that enforms the world via teleological power : a plan for the development of a cosmos. Of course, the deistic inferences I'm drawing from his evidence are precisely the ones he's trying to avoid. And I view his “Absence” as a religiously neutral term for what used to be known as incorporeal “Spirit”.
The author goes into great detail in his attempt to explain, in scientific terms, the counter-intuitive concept of “absential”2 causal nothingness. For example, he discusses the mechanics of “strange attractors”3 that are weird because they are “specifically absent features” of dynamic systems such as whirlpools. But for my purposes, I'll just use more general terms to describe “Presence” as Real, and “Absence” as Ideal. See the glossary definition for my unconventional usage of “Ideality”. My intent is to avoid the Either/Or fallacy of the categorical terms “Is” or “Aint” in favor of a BothAnd view.
By describing how Presence & Absence work together to make the world go round, Deacon pulls together Body & Soul that Descartes had pushed apart. To fill the explanatory gap in biological science, Deacon audaciously imagines a missing link in evolution, which he calls an “Autogen” (self-creating life form) to show how life could arise from non-life. From that hypo-thetical starting point, this book “speculates on how properties such as information, value, purpose, meaning, and end-directed behavior emerged from physics and chemistry”. Until recently, those metaphysical properties were restricted to the province of Religion and Philosophy. Deacon’s theories will bridge the gap between the “soft” sciences like Psychology, and the “hard” empirical sciences of Physics, Chemistry, & Biology.
Post 76 continued . . . click Next
Where is Absentia?
Deacon’s theory of Causal Absence is intended to be a serious scientific hypothesis. But the notion of a hidden world that somehow interacts with our overt reality is ancient. And people can fill the gap in understanding with imagination, or with logical reasoning. For example : • A fantasy-land of nature spirits or elementals that were assumed to be composed of etheric matter : fairies, fauns, gnomes, sprites & unicorns that do their work unseen among plants & animals. • A heavenly or Olympian realm of supernatural gods & angels above the clouds, manipulating both Nature and the mundane lives of humans. • The Hadean domain of devils & demons where dead people spend their dismal afterlife. • An immaterial zone of disembodied ghosts who hang around in houses & mirrors lamenting their haunted existence, and whispering to mediums. • Alternate worlds within an infinite Multiverse where every possible situation actually exists simultaneously with ours. • Parallel dimensions, like a hall of mirrors, in which sci-fi adepts can practice inter-dimensional travel. • Block-Time, envisioned as an actual place in space, where time-travelers can explore the past or future of the present world. • The mathematical realm of statistical possibilities that exists only in the imagination of G*D.
Some of these interpretations of Effective Absence are imaginatively rich, while others are Occam’s Razor parsimonious, sticking closer to the bare facts.
1. Materialism vs Spiritualism : Those opposing worldviews can be reconciled by the BothAnd perspective of the Enformationism thesis. See Post 74
2. Absential : The paradoxical property of something existing in relation to a non-existent non-thing. It’s a missing link that must be filled in order to complete a whole system. “Although this property is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, it is a defining property of life and mind.” ___Glossary
3. Strange Attractor : In Chaos Theory and Dynamic Systems, a Strange Attractor is a mathematical value, or point in space, that seems to pull the elements of the system into warped orbits, like planets around the sun. What’s strange about these mathematical “objects” is that there is no mass at the center of orbit except a numerical value. Its “pull” is statistical instead of gravitational. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
“I will refer to this [something-that-is-not-a-thing”; elusive character of incompleteness] as an absential feature . . . A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences.” ___Terrence Deacon
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