The Deactionary: A glossary of terms from Terrence Deacon’s ‘Incomplete Nature’
Terrence W. Deacon’s 2012 book Incomplete Nature is a bold attempt to conceptualize the emergence of life and mind using a consistent ‘physicalist’ framework. I put the term ‘physicalist’ in scare-quotes because one of the appealing quirks of the book — and perhaps one that isn’t given enough attention despite a length of 500+ pages — is that Deacon wants us to add something to the list of physical things, which typically only includes matter and energy. This something is… nothing. The incompleteness in the title seems to refer to this idea: a qualified nothing or absence is central to emergence.