Cartesian long enough

Rene Descartes was, in many senses, the father of modern analytic philosophy.  While very few modern philosophers would imagine that they are dualists, almost all of them have confined themselves within the categories of Cartesian dualism.  Descartes saw the physical world as fundamentally dead: matter in motion.  Thus conscious mind could be accounted for only by supposing that it was ontologically independent of the physical body.  Physicalists and materialists have supposed that the mind was ontologically dependent on the physical body, as red paint is ontologically dependent on the stuff in the paint can.  Yet in doing so they maintain the Cartesian understanding of mind and matter as the phenomena to be explained or, in the former case, explained away.  Descartes’ mind remained something of a scandal for modern physicalist thought. 

This is one reason why Darwinism has been an open wound on the modern soul.  Apart from its supposed challenge to Biblical creation, Darwinism seemed to many to amount to an invasion of the realm of the mind by the physical sciences.  If mind is simply a Darwinian engine for survival and reproduction, then art, literature, music, are only so many scratches and cat calls produced by Cartesian machines.  This is why confirmed evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin went to war against the “ultra-Darwinists” like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Gould and Lewontin were trying to save a space for Cartesian mind to do beautiful things and care genuinely about each other.  I believe this is a dilemma easily escaped once one is liberated from the Cartesian dichotomy. 

The philosopher Hans Jonas saw early that Darwinism cuts both ways.  If it means that life is more dependent on physical processes than Descartes had supposed (and it is) it also means that physical processes are less dead than he supposed (and they are).  As mind and information are always embedded in some material, so the physical matter in the kosmos has within it the potential to produce mind.  Were it not for planet Earth, with its astonishing variety of living organisms, some ghostly visitor to this kosmos would never have guessed that stardust and light had such a potential. 

I submit that the thesis that autonomy is an essential element in the phenomenon of life is the means for finally liberating us from the Cartesian trap.  Here is a bit from the conclusion of the Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno paper I referenced in my last post:

If we understand the phenomenon of life as a complex network of processes that take shape and propagate both at an individual and a historical-collective dimension—in our terms, as the history of the proliferation of various forms of autonomous organization (from chemical to unicellular, multicellular, developmental, cognitive, and, only recently, to rational autonomy)—the radical Cartesian separation between nature and mind simply disappears. The capacity of a system to determine itself, to establish its own rules and norms of behavior, and to create meaningful environments no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of rationality. At the same time, the natural world cannot be regarded as a universe where blind forces, acting without any sense or purpose, operate: the study of the fundamental mechanisms underlying biological organization, with all their intricacies, has clearly refuted that possibility.

Once life begins on this world, it begins exploring.  Lineages extend across time but they also fork.  Organisms push into new niches as they create new niches.  Such niches are defined not only geographically, as creates crawl up the sand of the primordial beach; they are also defined in terms of complexity.  All organisms are autonomous‑resisting what is outside and other in order to preserve what is inside and the self.  As Mirazo and Moreno argue, life jumps to increasingly robust kinds of autonomy.  The eukaryotic cell, possessing a nucleus, can regulate itself in ways that prokaryotic cells cannot.  Multicellular organisms add further levels of self-regulation, including, eventually, conscious awareness. 

Human freedom and nobility are greater, I submit, than anything else in the visible kosmos.  They are greater by many magnitudes than the simple cells from which they arose.  Yet they are expressions of the potential already evident in the Ur organism.  The Cartesian dichotomy has blinded us to this for a long time.  It is time to drop it. 

Dawkins v. Gould & Plato

While cleaning up my basement today, I found a book I didn’t remember that I had.  It’s Dawkins v. Gould: Survival of the Fittest, by Kim Sterelny.  I have been interested in the Dawkins-Gould debate for some time. 

Dawkins (along with philosopher Daniel Dennett) are “ultra-Darwinians”.  They think that the central question in biology is how organisms are so well adapted to their environments and they hold that the answer is always natural selection.  Moreover, Dawkins thinks that the primary unit on which natural selection acts is the genes or, more correctly, gene lineages.  Organisms are just military vehicles built to carry and maintain their genetic architects, largely by victories in battle with other lineages.  Finally, the larger level of evolution‑the emergence of distinct species‑is just the aggregate of events at the level of organisms and genes. 

Reading a portion of Sterelny’s book tonight, I think I finally have a grasp of Gould’s counter position.  Gould thinks that the basic question is why there are really a rather small number of basic organism forms and why there is so much stability in organic form over time.  The basic division of the animal kingdom is into phyla, of which there are about thirty.  Gould thought that they all appeared at about the same time and observes that there has been little change in the arrangement since.  While adaptation surely continues, the era of phyla innovation seems to be well over. 

Gould interprets this as pointing to species selection as one of the primary force in evolutionary history.  From time to time, usually or always as a result of some big change in the environment (think comet strike), a lot of the biological landscape is scraped clean and there are openings for new types of organism.  There are only so many basic possibilities in biological design space and only some are suited to the new environment.  These are the ones that appear.  In this account, it is the species that is the target of selection and limits on species design that account for the basic organic models.  Chance plays a very big role in this, as it is chance that steers the comet or whatever else roles the dice. 

By contrast, natural selection plays a minor role.  Individuals in a successful line will tend to be, well, successful.  Once the successful models have been established, there will be relatively little change until the next apocalypse. 

I discussed the difference between chance, unintentional biasing, and intentional biasing in a previous post with the regard to explaining the origin of life.  While unintentional biasing looks dubious as a solution to the origin problem, it strikes me that Gould took it very seriously as an explanation of the basic disparity of life, i.e. explaining why organisms fall into a number of basic patterns. 

Consider the beetle.  There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of distinct species of beetle.  All of them (by definition) follow the same pattern.  A second set of wings evolved into a retractable coat of armor protecting the functional wings.  In the organic form of the species from which all beetles descend, there was unintentional biasing towards the beetle form.  The proto-beetle, apparently having two sets of wings and whatnot was unintentionally biased toward a new and very successful area in design space. 

I confess that this strikes me as a quarrel that does not force me to take sides.  I suspect that Gould was right to insist on the importance of general forms and stability in evolution.  I have often thought that the chief thing that Darwin explained was not how species come to be but why so many of them remain so stable over time.  I like the emphasis on species selection because it looks to me like a modern version of Plato and I have the hots for Plato. 

At the same time, Gould’s successful species types are successful because the individual members are well adapted to their environments.  Even if cumulative instances of selection are less important in the explanation of general species forms than the ultra-Darwinians suppose, every species is just a bunch of critters and each critter has to make a living and leave a legacy.  The emphasis on natural selection and adaptation is still the fundamental explanation of how organisms are adapted to their environment and how a general species is kept in business.