I am almost done this book! What an epic reconceptualization of life, the universe, and everything. And I thought I was in the know after watching the Stanford Dr. Sapolsky lectures on chaos and emergence a few years back. A naturalist who has not grappled with these ideas of work, constraints, substrate dynamics, end-directeness etc is almost taking it on faith that an entropic universe can build us in. Read on your recommendation Prof Anton, so many many thanks for sharing!
"This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans." -Brian Swimme
Second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems. A living being is an open system and is dependent upon energy / material influx from the environment (sun, water, food).
Thanks: ua-cam.com/video/mVsynsSwsf8/v-deo.html also see: www.academia.edu/17865950/A_Heuristic_Sketch_of_Lee_Thayers_Systems_Theory_Orientation_to_Human_Communication
I've just finished "The Third Window." That book too speaks about the need to reform our notions of applying the second law of thermodynamics to biological processes, so I'll be interested in reading this one as well...It has not been extremely well reviewed, but I thought Deacon's contribution to "Moving Naturalism forward...So I will be reading this one. Thanks for the suggestion.
I have been tackling the book of late, and this was a very lucid video about the basic principles involved, so kudos to that. I hope to talk more to Deacon later this year at a conference about how to understand "absentialism" in more positive terms.
Great book and great summary, Professoranton. As someone with a strong background in maths, computer science, and physics I can attest that being familiar with these subjects certainly helps in digesting the book's contents. My only gripe is that the author believes that physics is still wholly materialistic and reductionist in its affairs. And while this is still the dominant paradigm, there are many serious physicists who have a more immaterial, information-theoretic understanding of things.
If I may, the "constraints" and "absence phenomena" you mentioned and that are alluded to in the book, describing how before unseen behavior can crystalize, is better traditionally understood in the sciences as the phenomena of "bifurcation" and "symmetry breaking." Deacon briefly mentions the relationship in his book, but doesn't really touch on the mathematics behind it. Understanding the mathematics is like being given a picture view over what was formerly described with a thousand words.
Fabulous analysis of a mind-bogglingly difficult book. It seems to me that Deacon is updating the 19th c. German Idealist conception of nature and mind, represented mainly by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Very encouraging.
(Belatedly) Thank you for postig this, I have missed it at the time. I just watched several videos where Terrence Deacon talks about his book "Incomplete Nature". This book is definitely on my reading list. Deacon uses the latest in science and in mathematics. I read about this new science in a very good book "The Arrow of Time" by Peter Coveney and and Roger Highfield, very good authors, one of them is a scientist, the other one is a science journalist. Deacon applies this new science to biology and introduces new concepts. I met the term "teleonomy" for the first time in Jacques Monod's book "Chance and Necessity", written in the sixties.
Nobel laureate Philip Warren Anderson wrote a still highly relevant and accessible 1972 paper entitled "More is different," which also rejects the strict-reductionist orthodoxy. He describes how understanding the constituent parts doesn't necessarily allow you to understand how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you've never read it, I guarantee you will have one of those moments where things just click and make sense. I highly recommend it.
Interestingly enough, a recent paper out of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, titled "The Algorithmic Origins of Life" (arXiv:1207.4803) gives Deacon's ideas a much more mathematically rigorous makeover. Life is seen as phase transition in which causal efficacy is gained by higher-level information structures in a context-dependent, hierarchical manner over over lower-level structures, including the matter it is instantiated in. And intelligence is yet higher level extension of this process.
there is a lot of interesting concepts of destiny in Liaofan's 4 lessons (there is a youtube movie/movies about it) which deals with Buddhism, Eastern philosophies I would love to see your thoughts on it.
Anderson's paper gives one a better layman's understanding of symmetry breaking, and how scientists need to make that the focus it we're ever to explain things like life, intelligence, and ourselves. I believe he uses a quantum mechanics analogy, but symmetry breaking is everywhere. For example, in computation, a digital adder circuit emerges when simpler NAND gates are composed and organized in just the right way. And yet knowing how a NAND gate works doesn't tell you anything about an adder.
On the subject of absence: I know this is probably not a thought which will appeal to you, as a materialist, but I will share it anyhow... The speaker (I cannot recall the name) was speaking about the absence caused by death, and finished with this thought: from where are we absent while we are in this world?
Another thought :) Is it not more correct to say, not that live ‘seems’ to stave off entropy, but that life actually does stave off entropy. That life uses the entropic physics of the inanimate to move upstream against the entropic flow of the inanimate to create higher levels of living order and complexity. Life is essentially negentropic.
Matter can be explained better if mind is inherent. Mind can be explained better if mind is inherent. Matter can't be explained very well at all if matter is inherent. Mind can't be explained very well at all if matter is inherent. Intention grows, it doesn't emerge from something else.
Professor, could we define life in a way that goes beyond Seventh Grade Biology to embrace something of what Schrodinger seemed to be implying (if my limited understanding of his ideas are correct), namely that life is a process that takes the necessary and unavoidable move toward entropy and turns it in to freedom without any violations of the Second Law? A mouthful I know...
It's physically impossible for evolution to violate the second law of thermodynamics. The written form of the second law is very misleading in my opinion, as it may lead one to conclude that ordered and structured ice (say) forming from seemingly random and disordered gas particles is impossible. If reproducing matter decreased entropy on earth, it would not violate the second law unless the decrease is larger than the increase created by the heat transfer from the sun to earth.
Deacon doesn't say that anybody or anything violates the second law. He says that living systems actively sidestep it. Meaning that they are actively seeking to stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium in a way that non-living systems don't. For example, whirlpool too is away from thermodynamic equilibrium for a while. However, it maximally increases entropy undermining its own existence in the process. A living system doesn't maximally increase entropy as it needs to use some of its energy and resources to perform work in order to maintain itself. It is this work that living systems must constantly perform to get more resources, energy, and to fix themselves that keeps them from achieving thermodynamic equilibrium. Evolution is a part of the same process across long stretches of time, operating across lineages of living forms rather than over a lifetime of a single form.
"In order to "emerge" from something, that which "emerges" needs to exist within that thing" Garbage. Do the meanings of words "exist" within the letters of the alphabet?
Anyway, it's all very interesting stuff, I could go on, so many directions to go in as you've said yourself, so I'll stop spamming comments in here for now.
Listening to some talks by Deacon re his book. He really is a very smart guy. I like his ideas about incompleteness and constraint. They make for good arguments against crude forms of libertarianism and market anarchisms? But I dont think they make it to an explanation of consciousness; especially qualia? I am neither a materialist nor a monist. If my position turns out to be correct the often brilliant efforts of moderns who want to explain everything in monist materialist terms are Ptolemaic; and theory of mind and consciousness is in a pre-Copernican stage. How about out-of-body near-death experiences? Have you looked into such phenomena?
By most scientific accounts dealing with neurological testing & observations the only thing we perceive is an internal model of ourselves, that's constantly informed and updated by the senses. What i feel to be me is a toy-model the brain constantly runs (except when i sleep, or i'm sedated, etc) so that it can operate in the environment (just like modern car computers have an internal virtual computational model of the car and thermonuclear plants have a central command computer that holds a model of the whole plant). This self-model is always at the centre of every perceptual image of the environment. But it needn't be.. which would permit all sorts of skewed relationships between the self and environment, such as outer-body, or the "oceanic feeling" of perfect integration between the two (which i guess is relevant to the eastern feeling of enlightenment). So, leaving from this informed hypothesis, scientists who studied outer-body experiences say that in certain conditions the brain could do certain "geometric" manipulations of the internal representational space so that it generates the "outer-body" illusion. For the mean time i'll go with that, but i'll always keep my ears open for something that would soothe my inner mortal "soul" :)
Intellectually.. i have as many reasons against thinking that i'm a "soul essence" as i have against thinking that the earth is flat. Nonetheless, the process of refurbishing my interiour matters according to this knowledge is years in the making :)) But as i've said, i still got a deep irrational hope. And it's welcomed, irrationality is part of the art of being a human.
the only way to get exclusionary criteria that are useful, one must accept that the electric law is not rigidly applied in the cell; that is, one cannot overcome the cumulatively compounded improbability of seamlesssly functional processes that compose the daily routine of the cell, without a disposition to functionality, that needs opposite charges to sometimes repel and like charges to sometimes attract(breaking the electric law); otherwise there is not the proper nuance to create a functional cell by several orders of magnitude. it's pretty much 0 probability x billions of events that have to happen in one direction and not any other. biologists are crazy
I am almost done this book! What an epic reconceptualization of life, the universe, and everything. And I thought I was in the know after watching the Stanford Dr. Sapolsky lectures on chaos and emergence a few years back. A naturalist who has not grappled with these ideas of work, constraints, substrate dynamics, end-directeness etc is almost taking it on faith that an entropic universe can build us in. Read on your recommendation Prof Anton, so many many thanks for sharing!
Loved this book... changed my life
"This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans." -Brian Swimme
You (or your viewers) might also want to read Prigogine's "The End of Certainty".
Second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems. A living being is an open system and is dependent upon energy / material influx from the environment (sun, water, food).
Thanks: ua-cam.com/video/mVsynsSwsf8/v-deo.html
also see: www.academia.edu/17865950/A_Heuristic_Sketch_of_Lee_Thayers_Systems_Theory_Orientation_to_Human_Communication
Read the book.
Ordered the book, will likely be in my mailbox when I return from my current trip! Thanks for the suggested read!
this is just incredibly interesting and his ideas resonate the most with what i've been thinking about
I've just finished "The Third Window." That book too speaks about the need to reform our notions of applying the second law of thermodynamics to biological processes, so I'll be interested in reading this one as well...It has not been extremely well reviewed, but I thought Deacon's contribution to "Moving Naturalism forward...So I will be reading this one. Thanks for the suggestion.
I have been tackling the book of late, and this was a very lucid video about the basic principles involved, so kudos to that. I hope to talk more to Deacon later this year at a conference about how to understand "absentialism" in more positive terms.
Great book and great summary, Professoranton. As someone with a strong background in maths, computer science, and physics I can attest that being familiar with these subjects certainly helps in digesting the book's contents. My only gripe is that the author believes that physics is still wholly materialistic and reductionist in its affairs. And while this is still the dominant paradigm, there are many serious physicists who have a more immaterial, information-theoretic understanding of things.
If I may, the "constraints" and "absence phenomena" you mentioned and that are alluded to in the book, describing how before unseen behavior can crystalize, is better traditionally understood in the sciences as the phenomena of "bifurcation" and "symmetry breaking."
Deacon briefly mentions the relationship in his book, but doesn't really touch on the mathematics behind it. Understanding the mathematics is like being given a picture view over what was formerly described with a thousand words.
Fabulous analysis of a mind-bogglingly difficult book. It seems to me that Deacon is updating the 19th c. German Idealist conception of nature and mind, represented mainly by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Very encouraging.
Thanks, Best to you.
(Belatedly) Thank you for postig this, I have missed it at the time. I just watched several videos where Terrence Deacon talks about his book "Incomplete Nature". This book is definitely on my reading list.
Deacon uses the latest in science and in mathematics. I read about this new science in a very good book "The Arrow of Time" by Peter Coveney and and Roger Highfield, very good authors, one of them is a scientist, the other one is a science journalist. Deacon applies this new science to biology and introduces new concepts.
I met the term "teleonomy" for the first time in Jacques Monod's book "Chance and Necessity", written in the sixties.
Nobel laureate Philip Warren Anderson wrote a still highly relevant and accessible 1972 paper entitled "More is different," which also rejects the strict-reductionist orthodoxy. He describes how understanding the constituent parts doesn't necessarily allow you to understand how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
If you've never read it, I guarantee you will have one of those moments where things just click and make sense. I highly recommend it.
I will definitely buy this book.
Interestingly enough, a recent paper out of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, titled "The Algorithmic Origins of Life" (arXiv:1207.4803) gives Deacon's ideas a much more mathematically rigorous makeover.
Life is seen as phase transition in which causal efficacy is gained by higher-level information structures in a context-dependent, hierarchical manner over over lower-level structures, including the matter it is instantiated in. And intelligence is yet higher level extension of this process.
"Given enough time, hydrogen begins to wonder where it came from and where it is going."
- Anonymous
I enjoyed your review while moving books and shelves! :)
there is a lot of interesting concepts of destiny in Liaofan's 4 lessons (there is a youtube movie/movies about it) which deals with Buddhism, Eastern philosophies I would love to see your thoughts on it.
Great work friend!
Anderson's paper gives one a better layman's understanding of symmetry breaking, and how scientists need to make that the focus it we're ever to explain things like life, intelligence, and ourselves. I believe he uses a quantum mechanics analogy, but symmetry breaking is everywhere. For example, in computation, a digital adder circuit emerges when simpler NAND gates are composed and organized in just the right way. And yet knowing how a NAND gate works doesn't tell you anything about an adder.
Have you read Evan Thompson's "Mind in Life"? Apparently Deacon takes a lot of his ideas without referencing them.
On the subject of absence: I know this is probably not a thought which will appeal to you, as a materialist, but I will share it anyhow... The speaker (I cannot recall the name) was speaking about the absence caused by death, and finished with this thought: from where are we absent while we are in this world?
David Walsh ua-cam.com/play/PLD2E07D1648589430.html
*****
Thanks. Will have a look :)
Another thought :)
Is it not more correct to say, not that live ‘seems’ to stave off entropy, but that life actually does stave off entropy. That life uses the entropic physics of the inanimate to move upstream against the entropic flow of the inanimate to create higher levels of living order and complexity. Life is essentially negentropic.
David Walsh ua-cam.com/video/mVsynsSwsf8/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/qgrLWdZ9EX8/v-deo.html
*****
Ty :)
Hey could it be possible to provide us with a more clear view of how the hardcover looks? I'm sorry if this is a weird question
Matter can be explained better if mind is inherent. Mind can be explained better if mind is inherent. Matter can't be explained very well at all if matter is inherent. Mind can't be explained very well at all if matter is inherent. Intention grows, it doesn't emerge from something else.
Professor, could we define life in a way that goes beyond Seventh Grade Biology to embrace something of what Schrodinger seemed to be implying (if my limited understanding of his ideas are correct), namely that life is a process that takes the necessary and unavoidable move toward entropy and turns it in to freedom without any violations of the Second Law?
A mouthful I know...
Matter Emerged from Mind. The universe is mental. What are the origins of these natural laws?
Are there any philosophers out there who share Deacon's views but incorporate them into epistemology and or ethics?
It's physically impossible for evolution to violate the second law of thermodynamics. The written form of the second law is very misleading in my opinion, as it may lead one to conclude that ordered and structured ice (say) forming from seemingly random and disordered gas particles is impossible.
If reproducing matter decreased entropy on earth, it would not violate the second law unless the decrease is larger than the increase created by the heat transfer from the sun to earth.
Deacon doesn't say that anybody or anything violates the second law. He says that living systems actively sidestep it. Meaning that they are actively seeking to stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium in a way that non-living systems don't. For example, whirlpool too is away from thermodynamic equilibrium for a while. However, it maximally increases entropy undermining its own existence in the process. A living system doesn't maximally increase entropy as it needs to use some of its energy and resources to perform work in order to maintain itself. It is this work that living systems must constantly perform to get more resources, energy, and to fix themselves that keeps them from achieving thermodynamic equilibrium. Evolution is a part of the same process across long stretches of time, operating across lineages of living forms rather than over a lifetime of a single form.
I like that even better.
" Mind can be explained better if mind is inherent."
Begging the question fallacy
Best book I have read in the past decade. Makes your mind do work...
"In order to "emerge" from something, that which "emerges" needs to exist within that thing"
Garbage.
Do the meanings of words "exist" within the letters of the alphabet?
Creating video now...we must dialogue on this in real time.
Anyway, it's all very interesting stuff, I could go on, so many directions to go in as you've said yourself, so I'll stop spamming comments in here for now.
Listening to some talks by Deacon re his book. He really is a very smart guy. I like his ideas about incompleteness and constraint. They make for good arguments against crude forms of libertarianism and market anarchisms? But I dont think they make it to an explanation of consciousness; especially qualia?
I am neither a materialist nor a monist. If my position turns out to be correct the often brilliant efforts of moderns who want to explain everything in monist materialist terms are Ptolemaic; and theory of mind and consciousness is in a pre-Copernican stage.
How about out-of-body near-death experiences? Have you looked into such phenomena?
David Walsh ua-cam.com/video/1R2PVsr44nA/v-deo.html
*****
Ty :)
By most scientific accounts dealing with neurological testing & observations the only thing we perceive is an internal model of ourselves, that's constantly informed and updated by the senses. What i feel to be me is a toy-model the brain constantly runs (except when i sleep, or i'm sedated, etc) so that it can operate in the environment (just like modern car computers have an internal virtual computational model of the car and thermonuclear plants have a central command computer that holds a model of the whole plant). This self-model is always at the centre of every perceptual image of the environment. But it needn't be.. which would permit all sorts of skewed relationships between the self and environment, such as outer-body, or the "oceanic feeling" of perfect integration between the two (which i guess is relevant to the eastern feeling of enlightenment).
So, leaving from this informed hypothesis, scientists who studied outer-body experiences say that in certain conditions the brain could do certain "geometric" manipulations of the internal representational space so that it generates the "outer-body" illusion. For the mean time i'll go with that, but i'll always keep my ears open for something that would soothe my inner mortal "soul" :)
anywherein12seconds
What if your soul isn't mortal?
Intellectually.. i have as many reasons against thinking that i'm a "soul essence" as i have against thinking that the earth is flat. Nonetheless, the process of refurbishing my interiour matters according to this knowledge is years in the making :))
But as i've said, i still got a deep irrational hope. And it's welcomed, irrationality is part of the art of being a human.
Histoire a suivre …
the only way to get exclusionary criteria that are useful, one must accept that the electric law is not rigidly applied in the cell;
that is, one cannot overcome the cumulatively compounded improbability of seamlesssly functional processes that compose the daily routine of the cell, without a disposition to functionality, that needs opposite charges to sometimes repel and like charges to sometimes attract(breaking the electric law); otherwise there is not the proper nuance to create a functional cell by several orders of magnitude. it's pretty much 0 probability x billions of events that have to happen in one direction and not any other. biologists are crazy
You skipped over teleodynamics of simple non-cognitive systems!
Argument From Incredulity Fallacy.
Fail.
Argument From Ignorance Fallacy.
Fail.