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Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, by Terrence W. Deacon
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“A tour de force encompassing biology, neurobiology, metaphysics, information theory, physics, and semiotics.”―Publishers Weekly
As scientists study the minutiae of subatomic particles, neural connections, and molecular compounds, their attempts at a “theory of everything” harbor a glaring omission: they still cannot explain us, the thoughts and perceptions that truly make us what we are. A masterwork that brings together science and philosophy, Incomplete Nature offers a revolutionary, captivating account of how life and consciousness emerged, revealing how our desires, feelings, and intentions can be understood in terms of the physical world. 12 illustrations
- Sales Rank: #437660 in Books
- Published on: 2013-04-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.70" w x 6.10" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 624 pages
Review
Contains many rewarding thoughts about life and mind and their place in nature. (Nature)
Unprecedentedly comprehensive. . . . Imagine the consequences for science and society of having a physical explanation for functional, meaningful and conscious behavior no less scientific and accessible than our explanation for lightning. I believe Deacon provides just that. (Psychology Today)
In his approach to the question of how sentience emerged from ‘dumb’ and ‘numb’ matter, Mr. Deacon mobilizes some radically new ideas. (Wall Street Journal)
A profound shift in thinking that in magnitude can only be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein. (Robert E. Ulanowicz, author of A Third Window: Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin)
This is a work of science and philosophy at the cutting edge of both that seeks to develop a complete theory of the world that includes humans, our minds and culture, embodied and emerging in nature. (Bruce H. Weber, coauthor of Darwinism Evolving)
A stunningly original, stunningly synoptic book. With Autogenesis, Significance, Sentience, seventeen insightful and integrated chapters turn our world upside down and finally, as in the Chinese proverb, lead us home again to a place we see anew. Few ask the important questions. Deacon is one of these. (Stuart Kauffman, author of Investigations)
[Deacon] demonstrates how systems that are intrinsically incomplete happen to be alive and meaning-making. The crux of life―and meaning―is solved. It was worthwhile to wait for this book. The twenty-first century can now really start. (Kalevi Kull, professor, Department of Semiotics, Tartu University)
About the Author
Terrence W. Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Symbolic Species and Incomplete Nature, he lives near Berkeley, California.
Most helpful customer reviews
121 of 151 people found the following review helpful.
Mind Did Not Not Emerge
By Sevens
The author talks about - and to some degree - explores self-organization/morphodynamics; he outlines how systems that are (then) far from equilibrium can spontaneously "create themselves" (not a quote). Ever more complex systems pave the way to, are substrates for and mark steps toward life (and mind). Biological cells are pretty complex. To create them, self-sustaining (autocatalytic) systems (constituted by chemical processes) are necessary which need to progress to autogen(ic) status; autogenic status is characterized by the ability of the system (cell) to repair itself and to replicate itself. Essentially, in order to reach the complexity required for life, (gradual) progress has to be made. Each increase in complexity, each increase in sophistication of systems needs to be protected so that it can be build upon. Very much simplified: imagine a self-assembling sandcastle that needs to protect itself against the onslaught of mindless children who are out to destroy it. Mr. Deacon offers concepts for how that could work (not for sandcastles).
However, while he discusses all sorts of things (prominently: complexity theory, self-organization/morphodynamics, thermodynamics, teleodynamics, intentional/ententional [the latter a term he creates] phenomena, information theory and emergence) it does not converge into progress. At least not to me.
Ententional phenomena (elements that are not directly physically represented, such as purpose and thoughts) seem to be what he assigned a fundamental role to. But a focus on that theme is only present in the book's first half and does not amount to a conclusion, to a new insight, to something to work with.
The focus then shifts to constraints. Constraints prevent things. They cause things to not happen, they cause them to remain absent and to only be what (otherwise) could have been. Incidentally they cause/allow for other, alternative things to happen. (Naturally, they play a role in organization/morphodynamics.) I have a feeling that this doesn't sound like much of a great insight. It wasn't to me. I don't see what can - in respect to the emergence of mind/consciousness - be gained through that, allegedly new, perspective. For one thing, constraints are physically there. They aren't absent/absential features. For another thing, defining things negatively (a banana is a fruit that is not any fruit other than a banana) is not a new invention. I do not see anything resembling the paradigm shift and revolution Mr. Deacon postulates (and the publisher advertises).
In my view, this book doesn't revolutionize the concept of emergence; nor does it revolutionize (or particularly further) the understanding of the human mind. It enlightens few things. But it was interesting to read since it addresses interesting topics (of course that's a subjective assessment -- the second paragraph provides a short list, the first paragraph a minimally detailed example). The author's language could be called convoluted. Nonetheless, he remains modest. His insistence on having outlined something astounding is strange. There's a - let's say small - chance that somewhere in his text an idea is encoded and encapsulated that I could not access with my breadth and level of knowledge. In consequence, I plan to read his previous book (The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain) and, through different authors, to further explore the topics he addresses. The impressions described here are based on having read the full book and are strong enough to warrant a review; I will modify and mark it should I arrive at a new/improved understanding. Criticism is welcome.
155 of 195 people found the following review helpful.
As Game Changing As Origin Of The Species
By Taowin
If it were a snake it would have bit us. It's sitting right under our noses. It's the unifying insight behind the two biggest breakthrough clues toward solving the biggest remaining scientific mystery. Grateful and greatly encouraged by the breakthrough clues we ran with them, ignoring their underlying and unifying insight, the insight that made them both possible. We ignored the underlying insight until Deacon's book, whose 600 exquisitely reasoned and written pages I'll attempt to summarize here.
The biggest remaining scientific mystery is how to close the explanatory gap between the hard and the soft sciences, between energy and information, between physical forces and living desires, between a values-neutral physio-chemical universe and the values-driven bio-psycho-social universe--in a word, between clockwork physics and ever-game-changing life.
In other words, why can we talk about a living creature's intentions, preferences, desires, appetites, adaptations, functions, and purposes, but not a rock, a planet's, or an atom's? What changed, making information and intention cause matter to behave so differently, the way it most obviously does with life? And precisely how do intentions change things?
The two biggest breakthrough clues are evolutionary theory and information theory, and the overlooked underlying insight is about where to look for what life does differently--not in things themselves but in differences, and in particular differences between behaviors that do and don't persist, differences between what remains present and what becomes absent.
Darwin discovered how differential survival, the proliferation of some lineages and the disappearance and absence of others yielded game-changing adaptations over time. Life doesn't require a creator-thing, or an improver-thing in order to evolve. Instead, it requires a difference between the lineages that stay present and the lineages that become absent.
We have embraced Darwin's breakthrough but haven't embraced what it tells us about where to look to finish solving science's greatest mystery. Instead, we treat differential survival as a creator-thing, for example when we say that natural selection designs a trait. And we treat DNA as an improver-thing, a magically powerful yet merely physio-chemical-thing that improves organisms.
Information theory may be less familiar to you than evolutionary theory but its consequences are everywhere. Pioneered by Claude Shannon, information theory made modern computers possible and gave us such essential and commonplace terms as bit, megabyte and pixel. Shannon, an engineer at Bell Labs came up with a simple functional definition of information, as again, a difference between what remains present and what becomes absent.
Pick a card, any card. Before you pick there are 52 possibilities. After you pick there's one. The step-down from 52 to one--the difference between what could have been picked, and what turned out to be picked is a measure of the amount of information gained in the process. Information is not a thing. It's a narrowing of possibility.
Again, though we ran with Shannon's breakthrough, we ignored its underlying insight. We treat information as a thing in computers, in the bit, the hard drive or the memory chip.
We are very thing-oriented.
We are so thing-oriented that, though it has been over 150 years since thermodynamic theory showed that energy is not a thing but a difference, we still treat energy as a thing. Put a frozen pizza in a hot oven and the temperature difference equalizes. And yet we still talk as though we're pumping some heat-thing into the pizza. We pump an energy-thing into our gas tanks and in and out of batteries.
We are so thing-oriented that we ignore how a whirlpool is not a thing but a remainder, a difference between what remains present and what becomes absent as turbulence cancels itself, leaving only a "least discordant remainder."
Complexity and self-organization theory provide a breakthrough understanding of such self-organizing processes but again we have run with the breakthrough, forgetting the underlying insight. A whirlpool is not a self-organizing-thing, because it's not a self-thing and it's not, as complexity theory suggests a process, that gravitates toward an attractor-thing.
The key in all of these cases, argues Deacon is to pay attention to the "constraint dynamics" that produce these differences between what remains present what becomes absent. Heating a pizza is "constraint dissipation," the equalization of differences. The formation of a whirlpool is "constraint propagation," the compounding growth of differences, as the more turbulence cancel each other, the less discordant the remainder, which cancels even more turbulence.
Life is a different kind of constraint dynamic in which constraints constraint, maintain and preserve themselves. Deacon shows step by careful step how with life real selves emerge, not as things but as constraint begetting dynamics, producing from its origins, lineages that in self-regeneration, impose new constraints upon their environments.
And in the process Deacon's approach provides a backdoor solution to the problem of free will. It's not how life becomes unconstrained, but how it becomes the source of novel constraint, acting in novel upon the world as it does in us humans especially, but to some extent in all adaptive traits, organisms and lineages.
The burden is on scientists to show in strictly classical physical terms how informational, intentional behavior emerges from energetic behavior, not at the origins of the universe, not at the origin of the human mind, not at the origin of sentient organisms, but at the origin of life. At the origin, differences between what remains present and what becomes absent become constrained in new ways, constraints that create, preserve and maintain themselves, in ways Deacon explains.
Embracing the full implications of the underlying insight that with life there is a change in how differences happen, Incomplete Nature provides a clear step-by-step description of how intentional dynamics really emerge from physical dynamics--how informational dynamics really emerge from energetic dynamics.
Deacon's approach offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive attempt at a physical science of all informational, intentional and meaningful behavior, a theory of everything" that "does not make it absurd that we exist," a theory that might complete our incomplete theories of consciousness by naturalizing in physic science the incompleteness we experience in life's infinitely innovative capacity to produce Darwin's 'endless forms most beautiful.'
In the past century, quantum physics and general relativity expanded physics in two directions, shrinking the status of classical physics to that of a special case operative under special conditions. Deacon's approach suggests that by understanding the physics of intention, the kind of work we living creatures do, we may be on the verge of a third expansion, a physical science of mattering that expands our scientific accounts of what is physically possible to encompass what has heretofore only been physically familiar.
Imagine the consequences for science and society of having a physical explanation for functional, meaningful and conscious behavior no less scientific and accessible than our explanation for lightning. I believe Deacon provides just that.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Constrained by poor writing
By Thomas Zweifel
I read Terrance Deacon's book "The Symbolic Species" some years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, and understood everything he was saying. It was written clearly. In contrast, this book was maddening and frustrating for me. It took me about six weeks to slog through it because it kept either making me confused or would put me to sleep. If I have to read a paragraph twice, I blame myself, but if I have to read it seven times, I blame the writer. His prose is often convoluted, and he invents new words needlessly. At times, it almost seems as if he is trying to be enigmatic rather than clear, as if he is intentionally speaking in Zen koans. He badly needs an editor to simplify his run-on sentences. This could have been said in 300 pages instead of 600, if his writing had been concise. The basic ideas are reasonable, however, although I failed to see how they are revolutionary or so different from others' ideas on how emergent properties might be realized in physical substrates and be maintained and evolve within a far-from-equilibrium but still physicalist paradigm. The central idea is that causation can proceed because of physical constraints placed on what is possible. How can anyone disagree with that? He confuses the matter when he talks about absence being causal, as if nothing can cause something. He gives metaphors like the hole in the hub of a wagon wheel being an absence that is causal by allowing the whole to rotate around an axle. But really, the axle is constrained by the inner rim holding spokes and to talk of the absence in the center being causal is just confusing. I sure hope a better writer can give a shorter, clearer version of Deacon's argument someday. It would be useful if someone would write a list of what Deacon's claims are in simple English, and what is really new. I read Colin McGinn's review of Deacon's book online, and found it catty and overly condemning. On the other hand, Deacon is himself to blame for making his ideas so hard to extract from the convoluted prose and neologisms.
I find it exciting, however, that scientists, including Deacon, are finally beginning to talk about physical mechanisms that lead to emergence, since philosophers going back to the British Emergentists failed to explain emergence at the level of physical mechanisms. Three other recent books do a much better and clearer job of explaining the interplay of emergence and information in my opinion. Two of them, 'Life's Ratchet' by Hoffman, and 'Physics in Mind' by Loewenstein zoom in on molecule-level biophysics to account for how microscopic 'noise' can be harnessed for the purposive ends of cells and sensory systems. Tse's 'The neural basis of free will' develops a variant of constraint-causation that he calls 'criterial causation'. He develops a new account of the neural code that is fundamentally about rapid synaptic weight resetting which in turns changes physically realized informational constraints on incoming physical and informational inputs. What these last three authors took pains to be was clear. Each of them also goes deeply into biophysics. But the prose is concise and there are not the annoying neologisms. One emerges from these other books with a sense of awe at the beauty of how physical constraints on possibilities could lead to life and mind. This was the goal of Deacon's book too I assume, but it ended up being one of the most frustrating reads of my life. I would approach emergence first by reading one of these other clearer, shorter books. Emergence of purpose and indeed mind within far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems on the basis of physical constraints is an important idea. It is so important that you might want to start with other books first.
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