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.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so Hard? Intentionality.

Someone I know sent me some material related to their research on consciousness, asking for some feedback. What follows is an edited version of what I wrote to them.
Flint Spear and Arrow-Heads
Solving the easy problem of consciousness — by explaining the causes and neural correlates of particular conscious experiences — is challenging but at least conceivable. This is not so for any claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness — it is going to evoke skepticism from both scientists and philosophers. I’m one of the many neuroscientists that do not think the hard problem is solvable — to us it is not clear that phenomenal consciousness is a scientifically tractable phenomenon in the first place.

What is emergence, and why should we care about it?

CarbonEmergence occurs when there is a conceptual discontinuity between two descriptions targeting the same phenomenon. This does not mean that emergence is a purely subjective phenomenon — only that scientific ‘double coverage’ may be a good place to look for emergent phenomena.

For example, in the case of starling murmuration, there is an aggregate description of individual birds, and a description of the flock as a unified entity. The latter phenomenon invites description in terms of concepts from fluid dynamics, but descriptions of individual birds, however detailed, typically do not.

In the case of phase transitions in physics, the description of one phase of matter, such as gas, does not fully map onto descriptions of the other phases. Surface tension, for example, is not defined for gases, since gases do not have surfaces. In the transition from gas to liquid, a qualitatively new attribute not only emerges, it becomes a defining feature of the post-transition system. From a different perspective we can say that it is the emergent qualitative property that enables us to determine that the transition has occurred in the first place. Quantitative readings of some control variable (such as temperature or pressure) cannot themselves be used to mark out ‘events’ — they can only be used to index them.

A common type of theoretical disjunction involves mismatch between descriptions of parts and wholes. A description of micro-level constituents in terms of atomic properties does not lead in any smooth way to descriptions in terms of thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, or solid state physics. In physics, the lack of smoothness in transitioning from one theoretical domain of discourse to another is not always apparent, since the two domains are often well specified mathematically, while the (often ad hoc) linking assumptions enabling the transition are neglected in popular (and even introductory textbook-level) explanations.

Is reality continuous or discrete?

A performing artist stands among large planets while juggling smaller ones and their satellitesReality is whatever it is… only our models of it can be considered continuous or discrete (or true, or false, or useful).

I say this like it’s obvious, but it’s a potentially controversial opinion. 🙂

People have a strong tendency to confuse the map with the territory. So a very successful theory becomes synonymous with reality itself.

But things get murky when we investigate all the details of the theory. If we are being extra cautious about what we consider “real”, then we can always wait for experimental confirmation before believing in the existence of some thing or process proposed by a theory.