Elements of a Dynamical Monism
I would like to say here that ID theorists have been right to criticize those self-organization theorists who claim that nonequilibrium thermodynamics per se explains life [Meyer, 2001]. Hurricanes and candle flames are a far cry from being alive. To be sure, it is an interesting fact that nonequilibrium thermodynamic flows can lead to coherent cycling or oscillation, because that is clearly a necessary condition for life. But equally clearly it is far from a sufficient one. So, what else is needed?
Here, I think that F. Eugene Yates, one of our foremost theoretical biologists, has made a helpful distinction. The kinds of mechanistic laws that govern the local and individual reactions within organisms have traditionally been the object of study of what Yates calls tactical biophysics and chemistry [Yates, 2001]. In order to understand biological organization, however, we must develop a strategic physical biology that will investigate global and collective behaviors at the level of the organism as a coherent, integrated whole (idem). I would like now to discuss a few ideas that I believe may help to move us in the direction of such a strategic biology. For convenience, I will sometimes refer collectively to these ideas, and the metaphysical picture that may be inferred from them, as dynamical monism.
First, it is clear that realism about teleology, combined with the rejection of functionalism and the acceptance of the idea that matter matters, commits us to some form of emergence. Now, one might suppose that emergence is anathema to contemporary physics, with its traditional reductionist rhetoric. However, that is not really true--at least not outside of elementary particle theory. Condensed-matter physicists, for example, tend to look much more favorably on emergence. The great success of the effective field theory program, based on the mathematical formalism known as the renormalization group, is increasingly being interpreted by such scientists to mean that reality itself is intrinsically layered into a hierarchy of emergent levels, each with its own characteristic laws that are irreducible to those of other levels [Cao, 1998; Dresden, 1998; Laughlin & Pines, 2000; Schweber, 1997]. Meanwhile, some philosophers of science have begun to explore the implications of this emergentist picture coming out of physics for their own problems [Auyang, 1998, 2000; Batterman, 2002; Rueger, 2000]. Thus, Robert Batterman points out that the very fact that the world is scientifically intelligible at all presupposes the dynamical stability of processes at different emergent levels [Batterman, 2002]. Dynamical stability refers to the global robustness of processes that are relatively insensitive to perturbations at shorter space and faster time scales. It is the fact that so many real processes are dynamically stable that makes it possible for us to ignore the so-called "negligible terms" in our equations and still come up with decent predictions. Such asymptotic methods are the heart and soul of science, but it is hard to understand how they could work if nature really were rigidly deterministic and all causes at higher levels could be reduced in principle to those at the lowest level. In short, the old reductionist picture is now being strongly challenged from within mainstream science.
The second element in the dynamical monist picture relates back to the boundary condition problem. From the point of view of physics, as Howard Pattee notes [Pattee, 2001], when we call a particular arrangement of matter in any system a "boundary condition" on the system, what we mean is that the arrangement is not a minimum energy configuration. Such a system with a ground state consisting of a large number of nearly isoenergetic substates is said in technical parlance to be degenerate. Now, ID theorists believe that energy degeneracy in this sense is evidence of an outside causal agency, at least in the case of very complex structures like biomolecules. But a globular protein is a system with just such a degenerate ground state, and we now have what seems like a pretty good internal explanation for it. When a typical protein folds into its three-dimensional, functional shape, it is unable to settle into a single minimum-energy conformation. That is because the polymer is so huge and so flexible that its myriad noncovalent bonds constantly interfere with each other--a phenomenon that has been termed frustration [Bryngelson et al., 1995; Frauenfelder, 1997; Frauenfelder & Wolynes, 1994; Frauenfelder et al., 1999; Wolynes & Luthey-Schulten, 1997]. Biophysicists like to describe proteins as "kicking and screaming" as they jump back and forth incessantly between their isoenergetic substates. Now, it is not known exactly how energy degeneracy at the protein's microscale is related to coordinated functional action at its macroscale. Nevertheless, this unremitting writhing does endow proteins with a malleability that would appear to be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the self-organization of long-range, coherent motion. At any rate, what is certain is that the energy degeneracy of the three-dimensional structure of proteins is not engineered from the outside; rather, it arises naturally out of the intrinsic causal powers of the polymers themselves.
Finally, I want to mention a third phenomenon that I believe to be of crucial importance for understanding life: namely, the split in biomolecules between high-energy, or covalent, and low-energy, or noncovalent, interactions. Noncovalent interactions include those involving hydrogen, van der Waals, ionic, and others types of low-energy bonds. This dichotomy is important, both because it makes frustration possible, and also because it appears crucial to the logic of functional action.
In order for functional action to be possible, three things are needed in addition to coherent, dynamically stable oscillation. First, there must be a partial thermodynamic decoupling between the functional system and its surround, so that it is not driven along willy-nilly by local energy fluxes. Second, in order to work actively against local gradients, the system must have access to an external or internal energy supply it can draw on as needed. Third, a system must know when action is needed. For a functional action to be successful, its timing must be coordinated somehow with those external conditions that will allow the action to go through. That is to say, successful functional action presupposes the ability to perceive or sense when the external circumstances are favorable. What this means is that the system must be able to anticipate or predict that an action, if undertaken now, is likely to pay off. How is such a thing possible? That is where the high-energy/low-energy split comes in.
All cognition makes use of signs, which are essentially low-energy triggers of action. A sign is something physical which in itself is too small to hurt you, but which helps you to tell apart the big things that can hurt you from the things that can do you good. I have argued elsewhere [Barham, 1996] that this is the essence of information in the semantic sense--the meaning of a sign is the prediction of successful functional action.
At the level of the whole organism, it is easy to see that this is so. For example, gentle collisions of photons on my retinas help me avoid less gentle collisions as I navigate through traffic. But the same principle can be seen to operate in functional action all the way down to the level of enzymes. An enzyme may be thought of as sensing its environment through the noncovalent interactions at its active site. If the active site perceives that a certain molecule is its proper substrate, then it triggers the large-scale conformational change of the enzyme as a whole, which will usually result in covalent bonding or some other relatively high-energy interaction. It is this perception-like sensing at the active site that allows enzymes to select the molecules they interact with functionally. When this all works like it is supposed to, dynamical stability is maintained, which constitutes success of the functional action. However, sometimes an enzyme may make a mistake. In fact, that is how most drugs work--they mimic the natural substrate of an enzyme just enough to fool the protein into committing to a functional interaction with them. When an enzyme makes a blunder of this sort, and the molecule it thought was its substrate turns out to be the wrong one, the functional action cannot go through. Often, the ringer molecule will remain stuck to the hapless enzyme, whose oscillations then cease. This loss of dynamical stability constitutes failure.
Now, this may all sound like an elaborate metaphor, but in fact I mean it more or less literally. I believe that the sort of highly nonlinear, trigger-dependent, dynamically stable oscillations we see in enzymes are the physical basis of proper functions. That is to say, the dynamical stability of such oscillators constitutes the norm defining the success or failure of biological functions, and therefore is the physical foundation of value in nature.[2] It should be noted in passing that this idea resolves one of the greatest puzzles of teleology: the apparent influence of the future upon the present. Teleology is not about backward causation. It is about dynamical stability, about coherent, goal-directed action and low-energy triggers, about anticipation and prediction--in short, about knowledge.
These three principles--dynamical stability, energy degeneracy, and low-energy triggers--are only a few of the ideas in the literature that I believe move us in the direction of a strategic biology. The old reductionist habits of mind are being questioned in many other areas, as well [Bock & Goode, 1998; Harold, 2001; Kirschner et al. 2000; Laughlin et al., 2000]. One of the most striking of these is neuroscience, where the computer metaphor is fast giving way to dynamical modeling of the large-scale self-organization of nerve cell assemblies [Freeman, 1999, 2001; Juarrero, 1999; Keijzer, 2001; Kelso, 1995; Port & van Gelder, 1995; Shaw & Turvey, 1999; Turvey & Shaw, 1999; van Gelder, 1998, 1999].
To be sure, none of these ideas amounts to a full-fledged theory of natural teleology. Eventually, they must all be tied together somehow into a coherent package. While there is no lack of interesting speculations in the burgeoning theoretical biology literature [Ho, 1993; Hyde et al., 1997; Lumsden et al., 1997; Mikulecky, 1995; Peyrard, 1995; Savageau, 1996; Yates, 1994; for further references, see Barham, 2000], what we probably need most are new experimental methods that will give us the means of studying biological dynamics in vivo without destroying them [Laughlin et al., 2000]. At the end of the day, though, I must admit that we are not there yet. In particular, the origin of life remains very much a mystery. Which raises the question: What conclusion should we draw from our present ignorance?
Naturalism and Theism
ID theorists insist that the design inference is not intended to be an argument from ignorance [e.g., Dembski, 1999, p. 223; Meyer, 1998, pp. 138-139]. However, one might ask: What is wrong with arguing from ignorance? Certainly, there is a case to be made that the reason why we have failed to explain life naturalistically so far is that life did not have a natural origin. Thus, Plantinga has asked,
"Why could a scientist not think as follows? God has created the world, and of course has created everything in it directly or indirectly. After a great deal of study, we can not see how he created some phenomenon P (life, for example) indirectly; thus probably he has created it directly." [Plantinga, 1996; p. 221]
Now, there is an obvious weakness in this argument: How can we know when "a great deal of study" is enough? After all, every breakthrough in the history of science was once a mystery. But even so, I cannot pretend that my predilection for naturalism is based on some dispassionate assessment of the history of science. If I am honest, I must admit it is closer to something like a faith. But is faith in naturalism really epistemically equivalent to religious faith?
First, let me say that I recognize that the dynamical view of the organism I have sketched for you today commits me to something very like Polanyi's view of human knowledge [Polanyi, 1964]. That is to say, only a small part of what we know is knowledge-by-description that can be formulated explicitly. The vast bulk of what we know is tacit knowledge-by-acquaintance, and can be represented explicitly only imperfectly, if at all. But this is as good as saying that there can be no absolute demarcation between science and religion. Both are equally aspects of human experience, and all our experience must be brought to bear whenever any judgment is made. In the end, all there is, is just making sense. Things either make sense to us or they don't. And every single bit of our experience, including the believer's direct perception of God--Calvin's sensus divinitatis [Calvin, 1960; vol. I, p. 43]--will inevitably and rightly bear upon this making sense.
However, having said that, it does not follow that no absolute distinction between science and religion means no distinction at all. It is one thing to acknowledge that science and religion both exist within the same tacit dimension of human knowledge; it is something else to claim that they stand there on an absolutely equal footing.
So what is the difference between science and religion, epistemically speaking? I think the answer is that there is a cognitive asymmetry between them that can be traced to the emergence of man's special nature out of our generic nature as organisms. On the one hand, much of what I believe about the world reposes, not on some logical demonstration, but on my instinctive trust that today will be like yesterday and tomorrow like today. This trust--what Santayana called animal faith [Santayana, 1955]--is something we share with all living creatures. Animal faith is no doubt more complex in us, but it is still the bedrock upon which all else is built. On the other hand, upon this foundation there has somehow emerged the uniquely human, archangelic world of thoughts and feelings. This new world was made possible by language, which gave us the ability to detach ourselves from our own particular perspectives, and to experience the viewpoints of others in our imaginations. Once freed from the prison of our own perspective, we were then able to wander in our minds over all of space and time. But even though it is true that we swim in language and culture like fish swim in the sea, it is important to remember that it is a second sea that has emerged out of the first great sea of natural teleology.
Let me use another analogy to illustrate the relationship between the two seas. I spoke above about the role that signs play in functional action even at the molecular level. Now, semioticians distinguish between two fundamental kinds of signs, which they call icons and symbols. Icons are linked to the state of affairs they predict by some kind of intrinsic causal connection, whereas symbols are not. An example of an icon would be the taste of honey. Honey tastes sweet because sugar is a fuel for us. The taste of honey is a sign or trigger to the rest of the organism that says it is okay to swallow. Sweet means eat. It is a predictor that when the sweet-tasting thing gets to the stomach, it will be metabolized properly. The sweetness and the metabolizability are directly, physically linked to each other through two different aspects of the structure of the same sugar molecules.
Now, contrast this with symbols. The relationship of a symbol to the state of affairs it predicts is genuinely arbitrary. Think of a traffic signal, for example. In this case, green means go. But, in contrast to the sweetness of honey, there is no intrinsic connection between the green light and its meaning. Rather, in this case the meaning is determined by socially imposed rules. Within the appropriate social context, the green light functions just as reliably as the sweet taste does, but its metaphysical basis is very different.
What does all of this have to do with the relationship between science and religion? Just this. I believe that science, though a product along with religion of the second sea of human culture, remains anchored in the first sea of animal faith in a way that religion does not. The knowledge we gain from science is more like the knowledge we have that sweet means eat. Religion, on the other hand, while a universal attribute of human nature, is anchored metaphysically in the second sea in a way that science is not. For this reason, the knowledge that it imparts to us is more like the knowledge that green means go. It is this fundamental asymmetry in the metaphysical ground of the knowledge they afford us, I believe, which explains why there are many religions, but only one science.
Now, the theist might even accept this analysis, but still object that science does not equal naturalism--that naturalism, no matter how reformed, is still more like a religion than it is like science. And I think I would be inclined to agree with him! I am prepared to admit that my reformed naturalism probably functions in my psychic makeup in a religion-like way. I am not shy about saying this, because religion is, after all, one of the great manifestations of the archangelic in man. Of course, the whole point of naturalism is to seek a metaphysical system consistent with science, so perhaps it is best viewed as an amphibious creature, with a foot in each sea.
Back to the Stoics
The phenomenon of religion has many different facets, but to my mind one of its most elevating aspects is the way it gives the individual a sense of communion with one of the great historical cultural traditions. To conclude today, I would like to explore how, as a quasi-religion, reformed naturalism might fulfill this role as well, by coming to see itself, not as something new under the sun, but rather as standing in a venerable intellectual tradition of its own.
What tradition might that be? Unfortunately, most of the names for it have an unpleasant ring to modern ears--animism, pantheism, vitalism, panpsychism, hylozoism. Perhaps organicism and emergentism are the least pejorative of these. I see the tradition as being defined by two basic principles. The first is a form of naturalism that is close to pantheism [see Copleston, 1982; Levine, 1994]. According to it, the intelligibility of nature derives from an objective rational order that is immanent within nature itself. This means that nature gave birth to mind, not the other way around. This principle contrasts with theism, which posits a human-like mind prior to nature. The second principle is dynamical monism proper--a sort of vitalist evolutionism or organicist emergentism. It is the idea that matter is active and dynamic, not passive and inert, and contains within itself the resources for the eventual development of life and mind. This idea contrasts with substance dualism, functionalism, and mechanism. Out of the many historical figures who come to mind [see Appendix], I would like to pick out the Old Stoics as being among the closest in spirit to dynamical monism [Hahm, 1977; Lapidge, 1978; Sambursky, 1987; Todd, 1978][3]
The ultimate principle in Stoic cosmology is a unified, undifferentiated something (ti). This something is fundamentally material in nature. The pluralistic world of qualitatively different things comes into being out of this something by a process whereby matter acts upon itself. Here two fundamental principles are distinguished in order to explain how qualitative differentiation occurs: the that-which-acts (to poioun) and the that-which-is-acted-upon (to paschon). However, this is a conceptual distinction only. The passive and active principles are merely aspects or capacities of a single substance. The passive principle is also referred to as matter, while the active principle is known variously as creative fire (technikon pyr), breath (pneuma), or god (theos). The active principle is rational and teleological, but since it is just an aspect of matter, it is also intrinsically dynamical. Both the active, dynamical principle and the passive, inert principle are held to completely interpenetrate each other in a universal continuum. A particular qualitative state of a body is explained through the varying strength of pneuma at different locations within the continuum. As Sambursky has put it, ". . .hexis, the physical structure of a body, is nothing else but the superposition of all the mixtures of pneuma corresponding to the various qualities of the body. Each of these mixtures forming the ensemble of the hexis co-exists with the others, and they all together permeate the body as tensional motions, thus making it a dynamic entity" [Sambursky, 1987; p. 46]. This is strikingly reminiscent of modern field theory in which particles are viewed as nodes or resonances formed by the superposition of waves. Certainly, it is suggestive of a way of looking at nature that is very different from the one that has dominated Western thinking during the past four hundred years. As one of the ancient doxographers puts it: "The Stoics made god out to be intelligent, a designing fire which methodically proceeds towards creation of the world, . . . and a breath pervading the whole world, which takes on different names owing to the alterations of the matter through which it passes" [Long & Sedley, 1987; pp. 274-175]. I think that this vision of a creative fire or divine breath permeating matter and shaping it according to a rational principle immanent within it is not a bad metaphor for the dynamical monist metaphysics of modern self-organization theory.
What do we gain by associating modern science with these old ideas? My only purpose in this exercise has been to help give dynamical monism a poetic resonance it would otherwise lack--one that I hope will enhance its value as the foundation for a reformed naturalism. As William James remarked about the writings of the Christian mystics: "There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers there from mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores" [James, 1982; p. 421]. I merely wish to say that, to my ear at least, the Old Stoics provide a music that mingles well with the operations of the understanding in contemporary self-organization theory.
What would a reformed naturalism that was in harmony with this ancient music look like in detail? I am not sure what its positive characteristics would be, but I am sure what it would not be. It would be neither a sentimental New Age cult nor a cynical neo-existentialist philosophy. On the one hand, it would decline to view mankind as comfortably ensconced in the cosmic web of Mother Nature. Nature is assuredly our mother, but she hardly resembles the nurturing goddess Gaia; she is much more like one of those marine tortoises who lays her eggs on the beach, then swims out to sea, leaving her young to be devoured by the birds of prey. On the other hand, reformed naturalism would also reject the view of man as an alienated existence without an essence, thrown into an absurd universe upon which he vainly attempts to impose his own arbitrary meanings. Life is not just rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity for no reason and no reward--tell that to the fox that chews off its leg to escape the trap! Life itself is the highest reward for all living creatures. Except, perhaps, for man, who is the only animal not content merely to live. I think there can be little doubt that our exceptional nature gives us a special part to play in the drama of life.
When all is said and done, we must recognize that science and religion both derive from the same source within us. They are both great expressions of the archangelic in man--the thing in us that loves, and longs, and strives--and for this reason, we ought to see them as allies. There is great work for such an alliance to do. For my part, I would like to see a reformed naturalism join hands with traditional religion in the task of rehabilitating teleology, both for its own sake, and in order to defend aspiration and value from their many enemies in the contemporary world. [4]
Notes
[2] I believe that the source of value and the source of subjective feeling or conscious awareness are conceptually distinct problems. However, the question naturally arises as to the place of subjective feeling in the dynamical monist scheme of things. I think that the realist approach to teleology advocated here helps a little with this problem, because it "opens up" nature, so to speak, and makes it easier to see how something like a highly nonlinear, trigger-dependent oscillator can have an "inside" dimension. But in the end I think we must face the fact that knowing and being are distinct categories which happen to coincide within us. Facing inward, our first-person perspective is just what it is to be a knower--it is the being of knowing. But facing outward, our third-person relation to the external world is a very different sort of thing--it is the knowing of being. It seems to me that to ask to establish a third-person relation (which is what giving an explanation amounts to) with the first-person perspective is a kind of category mistake that confuses the knower qua knower with the knower qua being. It is another question altogether whether feeling and value in the dynamical sense outlined here are coterminous in nature (that is, whether there is something that it is like to be an enzyme), whether subjective experience is limited to metazoan brains, or whether consciousness begins somewhere in between these two extremes. These are all question that I believe can be fruitfully studied from the third-person perspective via neural correlates [Metzinger, 2000]. But, of course, we must not confuse the question of determining whether a given creature has subjective experience with the question of what that experience is like. [5]
NOTES:
[3] The Old Stoa consisted primarily of Zeno of Citium [335-263 BC], the founder of the school, and his immediate successors, Cleanthes [331--232 BC] and Chrysippus [c.280-207 BC]. There was also a Middle Stoa (Panaetius [c.185-109 BC], Posidonius [c. 135-c.51 BC]), a Roman Late Stoa (Seneca [c.1-65 AD], Epictetus [fl. c.100 AD], Marcus Aurelius [121--180 AD]), and a Renaissance neo-Stoic revival (Justus Lipsius [1547-1606]). For the ancients, see Rist (1969), Sandbach (1994), and Sharples (1996); for neo-Stoicism, see Lagrée (1994) and Saunders (1955); for a conspectus of the entire Stoic tradition, see Spanneut (1973). The physical doctrines discussed in the text are mainly associated with the Old Stoics, while the later writers were mainly preoccupied with ethical problems. The writings of the Old Stoics are lost, and such knowledge of their physical doctrines as we have resposes on fragments and reports preserved in later writers [Long & Sedley, 1987; pp.266-343]. Due to the fragmentary nature of our knowledge, and perhaps to the obscurity of the original sources, it is difficult to get a clear picture of Stoic cosmology. Perhaps the best brief introduction is Sharples [1996, pp. 43-55]. For more detailed studies, see Hahm (1977), Lapidge (1978), Sambursky (1987), and Todd (1978).
[4]The Old Stoa consisted primarily of Zeno of Citium (335-263 BC), the founder of the school, and his immediate successors, Cleanthes (331--232 BC) and Chrysippus (c.280-207 BC). There was also a Middle Stoa (Panaetius [c.185-109 BC], Posidonius [c. 135-c.51 BC]), a Roman Late Stoa (Seneca [c.1-65 AD], Epictetus [fl. c.100 AD], Marcus Aurelius [121-180 AD]), and a Renaissance neo-Stoic revival (Justus Lipsius [1547-1606]). For the ancients, see Rist (1969), Sandbach (1994), and Sharples (1996); for neo-Stoicism, see Lagrée (1994) and Saunders (1955); for a conspectus of the entire Stoic tradition, see Spanneut (1973). The physical doctrines discussed in the text are mainly associated with the Old Stoics, while the later writers were mainly preoccupied with ethical problems. The writings of the Old Stoics are lost, and such knowledge of their physical doctrines as we have resposes on fragments and reports preserved in later writers [Long & Sedley, 1987; pp.266—343]. Due to the fragmentary nature of our knowledge, and perhaps to the obscurity of the original sources, it is difficult to get a clear picture of Stoic cosmology. Perhaps the best brief introduction is Sharples [1996, pp. 43-55]. For more detailed studies, see Hahm (1977), Lapidge (1978), Sambursky (1987), and Todd (1978).
[5] I would like to thank Ellen F. Hall and Mark McCulley for their invaluable editorial.