Category: Darwin

Life as No One Knows It

Sara Imari Walker is a physicist, (or more properly, an astrophysicist, or even more properly, an astrobiologist since she is looking for “life” in the universe) who has written a book to introduce “assembly theory” to a wider public: Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead Books, 2024). I was drawn to read it because a superficial notice about it in the New Yorker suggested that her positions aligned to some degree with the issues I tangled with in my two recent posts on “Consciousness and Life.” (Links: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/ and

https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/13/consciousness-and-life-response-and-clarification/).

Reading the book showed that those links were not all that substantial. But Walker does declare outright that “to this day . . . we cannot derive life from the known laws of physics, even if we are pretty sure it must be consistent with them” (21). Hence, she shares my view that physics as the science of matter cannot account for life—which leads us to biology, or biochemistry, as the appropriate sciences if we want to get a handle on life.

Interestingly, because “life” stumps physics, there are various physicists who claim life does not exist: since “modern science has taught us that life is not a property of matter” (6), the very category of life is a mistake, “not a natural kind” (22), but a figment of human thought that doesn’t map onto the way the world really is. The parallel with those who declare consciousness an “illusion” is fairly direct. Faced with something we can’t account for within our current scientific paradigms, some just insist those unaccounted-for somethings are not real.

Walker, instead, thinks the available paradigms are insufficient, not that the data (the fact that life exists) should be discounted. Her book is going to introduce the “new paradigm” she and her colleagues are attempting to put into place. That paradigm is called “Assembly theory.”

Before diving into that theory, I must applaud Walker’s quick, but sharp, dismissal of panpsychism. She describes the panpsychist position succinctly: “perhaps consciousness is fundamental, and therefore all matter is conscious” (40). Her dismissal is just as succinct: “an easy way to kill two hard problems [i.e. the nature of matter and the nature of consciousness] with one stone is to make the unexplained thing fundamental” (41-2). Moving the counters around is not a solution (or explanation), but just a way to duck the problem.

So what does “an explanation” look like? “[B]etter explanations are those that explain more observations, change surprising facts into a matter of course, yield accurate predictions of what one should and should not observe, are falsifiable, rest on relatively few assumptions, and are hard to vary such that changing the details dramatically changes the predictions” (152). It doesn’t help that Walker uses the word “explain” in this definition. What does it mean to “explain more observations”? Usually, I dare say the notion of “explain” is linked to some designation of the causal processes that bring the observed thing into existence. And that does seem to be what “assembly theory” attempts to do. I will get to that. In the meantime, we can register Walker’s assertion that “scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts are driven by new explanations, not necessarily new evidence” (152). The observables are there already (in some cases), we just lack a good explanation of them. Such, Walker argues, is the case for “life.” But we should note that, in other cases, there are new observables because new technologies of perception (microscopes, telescopes etc.) bring new objects into view.

Walker’s approach is not to ask “what life is,” but to ask “what life can do”? And that approach starts from consciousness. “Here we are not measuring whether something has experience (what consciousness is), but instead whether something that has experience can do different things because it has an internal world (what consciousness does)” (45). “Does anything in the universe exist that might not be possible if subjective inner worlds did not exist?” (45). The syntax is tortured here, but the question is whether there are existing things that could not exist if consciousness did not exist. Walker’s answer to this question is a resounding Yes. Everything in the built world—cities, technologies, books—depends on humans imagining those things first (in some kind of embodied thought space) and then doing the work of constructing them. “Some things that exist are imagined through abstraction (are counterfactual) and become physical (made actual) through a phenomenon deeply connected to what we call consciousness. It is not that all matter is conscious, but that consciousness is potentially a window into the mechanism for bringing specific configurations of matter into existence across time. If this conjecture is true, consciousness creates the possibility for things to exist that otherwise couldn’t because they did not exist in the past” (47-8). “The key feature is the ability to imagine or represent things that do not exist, such that the act of imagination becomes causal to the existence of some objects” (73).

Construction is, as its name suggests, central to assembly theory. What Walker wants to locate in the universe is causal power (my term, not hers), or to be more Promethean about it, creative power. Basically, she is going to make the same claim about “life” that she makes about consciousness. “Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many, unique, recursively constructed parts” (90). The word “many” is crucial to this description of life. There are simple objects in the universe, ones that are “prebiotic” (her term); that is, they existed before the emergence of life—and, in some cases, still exist in their simple a-biotic (my term) way. These a-biotic objects are not “life” because they do not possess the capacity to generate new objects. Also, they are generally not complex. Living objects contain many parts. (It seems, although I am not sure I understood this correctly, that Walker tells us that only objects that are comprised of at least 15 different biochemical components cross the threshold over into “life.”)

Walker begins from a variant of a traditional philosophical conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing? Her variant is: why does the universe contain these specific objects instead of the many other possible objects that do not exist? Why possible in this posing of the question? Because there are molecular combinations that do not exist even though they, according to the laws of physics, could exist. In fact, humans have managed to create some of these non-existants in the lab. Humans have added to what nature produced on its own. So there are more possible objects than actually existing ones.

So: what caused some objects to come into existence and others not? The causal mechanism Walker turns to is no surprise: evolution and selection. Evolution here is doing its usual work, producing random variations over time as organisms reproduce. Coming into existence takes place over long stretches of time. It is not clear to me how radically Walker wants to upset the idea that all the matter that ever existed or will ever exist was present from the very start. But she does want to insist that “time” is an intrinsic component of (living?) matter, not just the stage upon which matter does its thing. (My “living” with the question mark indicates I am not sure if she is saying “time” is an intrinsic property of all matter, or only of living matter. I am clear that she does divide matter into that which has life and that which does not.) In any case, evolution over time means the emergence of new forms of matter, including forms we would designate as “living.” Life is not there from the beginning, but emerges somewhere down the line. But what emerges as evolution unfolds sets up a variety of constraints; some possible objects become very improbable, close to impossible, once evolution produces a different group of possible objects. The chain of causes is pretty determinative (even if there is always some randomness in reproduction).

Evolution, thus, produces variants (but within fairly predictable ranges once things are fairly launched), just as it does in modern-day (i.e. genetically informed) Darwinian theory. More novel is Walker’s understanding of “selection.” Assembly theory asserts that objects that are “alive” are too complex to simply emerge as products of random genetic mutations, or through any other random physical process. “Some objects require information—an algorithm—to make them. These objects will never spontaneously form and must always be constructed via selection and evolution. . . . All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute ‘life’” (146). “Complex objects, such as molecules, can come into existence only if there is something that can build them reliably, whether it is a cell, an environment, or an intelligent agent. These objects require an algorithmic process to assemble them. Assembly theory considers the algorithm to be an intrinsic property of the object, rather than a feature of the machine that outputs it” (143). [Sidenote: Walker does seem to reproduce the very error she mocks the panpsychists for making; she takes the causal mechanisms she needs, namely time and the informational algorithm, and make them “intrinsic” to matter.]

Selection, then, is made by the algorithm that informs (quite literally) the reproduction of the object—or, maybe it is better to say the persistence of the object over time. It is not the individual who possesses life so much as it is the “lineage” of information that causes the continuity of life forms over time. This shift in locus can be illustrated even in the case of the individual human being. “Over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself—what persists in the informational pattern over time, not the matter (at least not in the traditional sense of the word ‘matter’). . . The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time” (150).

Life is a process—a process of regeneration where the information to bring new forms into existence (or to continually reproduce existing forms that substitute in for prior ones) plays the role of selection. Without that information’s causal power, no life. It is clear that, in Walker’s view, information is necessary to the existence of life, is, in fact, the distinctive “marker” of life. But whether information is also sufficient to the existence of life is less clear. Presumably, there is physical “stuff,” the “objects” she keeps talking about. Information, it would seem, needs to be embodied. There has to be “matter” for information to be “intrinsic” to. I don’t think Walker would deny this. She wants to retain all the laws of current-day physics; she just wants to supplement its accounts of matter and causation with this addition of information as a causal agent embedded in matter. She is not such a complete “process theorist” as to deny any “objectivity” to objects (as William James and Alfred Whitehead at times approach doing.) Or if she is that radical a process theorist, her continual (unexamined) talk of “objects” (possible and existing) undermines that radicalism. Life in her view, it is clear, is a continual making and unmaking, but some of the made things have a relatively stable existence for at least some duration.

In sum, the basic innovation of assembly theory, its supplement to contemporary physics, is the claim that information is causal—and that we cannot explain life without seeing information as its basic cause. There are secondary innovations about how “life” designates complex objects that are “assembled” out of earlier existing objects which embody the information required to construct the new forms. That view opens up vistas of novelty and creativity a more straight-jacketed physics might deny. As usual, the precise biochemistry of information’s creativity is not specified—just as the neural correlates of consciousness continue to elude researchers. Like panpsychism, assembly theory works to animate matter, to introduce principles of motion within matter that do not reduce to the laws of gravity, acceleration, and entropy found in standard physics.

I have left out of my account, Walker’s interest in finding out if life exists in worlds (planets) other than Earth. That’s her astrobiology hat. I will confess to having little interest in that question. Life here on earth is more (in fact, too much!) than enough for me. But to offer a quick and dirty summary of her position (especially since it explains the title of her book, which from my summary of it thus far would be utterly mysterious): since the emergence of life on this planet followed a determinant path set out by the earliest moves in the game, there is no reason to believe that life outside Earth would follow a similar path. Thus, looking for “signatures” of life on Mars (or anywhere else), such as water or oxygen or amino acids, is the wrong way to go. Life on other planets might very well have developed from completely different material bases. The key is informationally driven reproductive processes, not specific molecules or elements. So “life” elsewhere might differ radically from “life as we know it.”

How does Walker’s book—and assembly theory more generally—jive with the questions I raised about consciousness and life? Certainly, I have to appreciate someone who is a real scientist asserting that physics does not have a way of addressing the concept (the fact) of living beings. And Walker, as well, must be counted among the thinkers who is trying to advance new accounts of causation, ones that supplement (at least; perhaps they supplant) traditional mechanistic understandings of cause. Which reinforces my sense (derived from a number of writers) that Darwinian theory does not align with mechanistic (“efficient” in Aristotle’s terms) models of causation–and thus calls for other ways of understanding causation. I also think Walker’s focus on what life and consciousness do (their observable effects) as contrasted to worrying about what they are seems a fruitful and sensible way to proceed. Finally, although she never explicitly says so, I think Walker would agree that consciousness is a feature of “living matter,” not of all matter–and that addressing the puzzle of what life is and does is prior to understanding the nature of consciousness. Understanding life is the best way to make progress in understanding consciousness.

Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy

I recently finished Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2013). It was a great read! Maybe that’s just me in recoil from all the consciousness stuff I’ve been reading—glad to be back in more familiar territory: political philosophy. Not just that, however. It is just enthralling to read a closely reasoned, carefully constructed, argument. There just are too few well-written and well-thought (if I can coin that adjective) books.

Interestingly, when I think through what Lefebvre has to say in order to offer up the gist in this post, it’s not all that startling. It is the care with which he makes his case that is exhilarating, not the substance (although it is hardly shabby. Just not all that startling either.)

So here’s the summary.

Bergson is a follower of Darwin. His reliance on evolutionary explanations for human phenomenon (like religion and morality) is quirky because he is a vitalist. He believes in a fundamental “life force” that drives evolution, so is prone to 1) ascribe intention to evolution and 2) to think evolution has a single, dominating force (instead of resulting from a multitude of random—and unrelated—genetic mutations.)

In addition, Bergson is a dualist. He believes that there exist spiritual entities that are distinct from material ones—and that the failure to give the spiritual its due is disastrous for human beings. Bergson quite cheerfully declares himself a “mystic” and asserts that the spiritual is ineffable even as humans have various intimations of its existence (and importance!).

How do these basic commitments on Bergson’s part play into an account of human rights? It all stems from the paradoxes built into morality. For Bergson, human morality is a product of evolution. “The evolutionary function of moral obligation is to hold society together. Its function is to ‘ensure the cohesion of the group.’” (page 25; quoted passage is from Bergson). Unlike other theorists of morals, Bergson is adamant that morality is “natural,” is produced by evolution, as opposed to something that humans add on top of evolution. Morality is not a human contrivance that tries to counteract natural impulses; instead, morality itself is a natural impulse. Humans are social animals, utterly dependent on social relations to stay alive and to reproduce (the Darwinian imperatives). Morality, insofar as it make sociality possible, is thus produced by evolution as are other human capacities essential to survival and reproduction.

The paradox comes from the fact that morality is exclusive. Societies are “closed,” non-infinite, groupings. One of the things essential to a society’s and its members’ survival and flourishing is protection from external threats. Morality performs its service to life in part by distinguishing between friend (insider, fellow member) and enemy (outside, threat, non-member).

“Closure is essential to moral obligation because its evolutionary purpose is to ensure the cohesion of the group in the face of an adversary. It is this feature of exclusivity that Bergson brings to the fore with the concept of the closed society. The purpose of this concept is not to claim that this or that society is closed. Instead, it designates a tendency toward closure on the part of all societies” (25).

For this reason, war seems inevitable—and certainly human history appears to demonstrate that war is ineradicable. Morality is good for the survival of particular societies—but is not conducive to the survival of human beings as a whole (especially once technology has given humans the means to mass annihilation) or to the survival of individuals (even the “winning side” in a war has many of its members killed in the contest). To put it most bluntly: human morality generates not only cooperation and fellow-feeling with insiders, but also aggression toward outsiders. For all the sophistication of his argument, Lefebvre ends up in a very familiar place: the claim that exclusion justifies doing harm to those designated as “other,” as beyond the pale.

Human rights, then, are an attempt to counteract the tendency of morality to sanction violence. “Human rights are . . . an effort . . . that seeks to counteract our evolved moral nature. . . . Bergson [offers] a vision not just of what human rights must protect us from (i.e., morality) but also why (i.e., because of its [morality’s] biological origins” (54, 57).

The standard way to address this paradox—that we need morality and that we also need something to counteract morality—depends on two planks. The first recognizes that morality (the closed society) at least in the so-called Western world post 1700 functions most powerfully in the form of the nation-state. Wars take place between nation-states—and the brutalities inflicted upon “enemies” have only increased since that time. (The bombing of cities, the murder of refugees.) Even in times of peace between nation-states, a particular state can identify certain people who live within its boundaries as “enemies within” and treat them differently and harshly in distinction from fully admitted members (citizens).

In response, there have been repeated efforts to create supra-national institutions that could rein in the aggressions of nation-states. Such institutions have proved mostly ineffective. When it comes to actually wielding power—and in securing the affective consent of people—the nation-state stands supreme, only minimally beholden to efforts to establish (and enforce) international law. The institutionalization of human rights has mostly been a failure. Human rights are most fully protected when and where the state’s power has been used to uphold them. But that’s useless in cases where it is the state itself that is abusing the human rights of some peoples living in its territory, not to mention its abuse of human rights on enemies during wartime.

The second plank is to widen morality in such a way that it is no longer exclusive. The relevant “in group” would be all human beings—or, as proponents of animal rights desire—all animals. Lefebvre demonstrates convincingly that the idea of “widening the circle” to be more inclusive is a prevalent call in much of contemporary political and moral philosophy. Human rights are meant to apply “universally” and thus stand in direct opposition to any and all distinctions that would justify treating some people (or some groups) differently from others.

Philosophers calling for expanding the circle offer different accounts of how that might be achieved. Basically, the Humeans call for extending sympathy outwards. Fellow feeling for those who can suffer—humans and animals—will underwrite our extending our consideration to them. Kantians rely on reason to bring us to the recognition that only universalism keeps us from self-contradiction. Utilitarians ask us to admit that suffering is a wrong—and then to avoid all actions that would increase the amount of suffering in the world.

Levebvre’s most original contribution to such debates is to deny (forcefully) that expanding the circle is possible or adequate. Morality, he insists, must be exclusive. That is its whole modus operandi. It only performs its natural function by being exclusive. So it’s simply wrong to think it can be transformed into something non-exclusive.

Human rights, therefore, must be something utterly different from morality, not an extension of it. Lefebvre expresses this point by contrasting a distinction in quantity from one in quality. We run into Bergson’s dualism here (although I doubt whether we have to embrace that dualism in order to adopt the distinction between a difference in quantity from a difference in quality.) In any case, Bergson thinks “intelligence” deals in quantities and that we need another faculty (intuition or insight) to handle qualities. Here’s Lefebvre’s account of Bergson’s view:

“[I]ntelligence does some things very well but not others. It has a natural affinity with space and quantity and a natural aversion to time and quality. More to the point, given its aptitude for quantity and number, intelligence views all forms of change in terms of (quantitative) differences of degree rather than (qualitative) differences in kind. This includes moral change, of course. It is no accident or simple error, therefore, which leads us to consider the evolution of morality in terms of expansion, growth, and continuous progress. . . . Intelligence is by its nature driven to picture the evolution of morality as the extension of a selfsame core (i.e., moral obligation) to more and more people” (49-50).

Bergson, then, wants to introduce an entirely different principle, one not based on moral obligation, as the underpinning of a human rights regime. Bergson wants to provide the basis for an “open society” that contrasts with closed societies that standard morality creates. He strives to point his readers toward “a qualitatively different kind of morality, irreducible to obligation. It [intelligence] struggles to conceive of a moral tendency that is not object attached. And it struggles, as Bergson will come to say, to imagine a way to love that does not grow out of exclusive attachments” (50).

Before getting to a description of this “different kind of morality,” a morality of love, one other preliminary point must be made. Bergson doubts the motivational power of reason. He does not think that practical reason of the Kantian sort can move people to action. Instead, he thinks morality must be a matter of habitus, of practice.

“It is helpful to observe what Bergson has in common with an important strand of practical philosophy—call it antirationalism. As Carl Power puts it, ‘Bergson might be said to join a counter-tradition that begins with Aristotle and includes more recent names such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Taylor. What these disparate figures share is a propensity to see the human agent . . . as a being who is immediately engaged in the world and whose understanding of self and other is first and foremost expressed in practice.’ Broadly speaking, for these thinkers moral life is not primarily a matter of concepts and principles but of concrete durable practices that integrate moral obligations into the texture of everyday life. On that view, morality is not primarily a matter of weighing the purity of one’s intentions or assessing the partiality of one’s judgments. Certainly these can be part of moral life; but they are not its backbone. Instead, most of the time the performance of our moral obligations is prereflexive and embedded in the habits and activities of day-today life” (57-8).

It is precisely this emphasis on “practice” that explains Lefebvre’s title: human rights as a way of life. Only through practice, through the embedding of human rights into the fabric of daily existence, can they take up a place in our world. The “love” that Bergson advocates must be habitual for humans, must, in a concrete way, become routine. It’s worth quoting Lefebvre a bit more on what a reliance of “habit” means.

“With his focus on habit, Bergson . . . wants to shift the attention of moral philosophy away from its preoccupation with the rational self-present agent. Only on rare occasions does the performance of duty involve a conscious or deliberative process. By and large, it is automatic, second nature, and unconscious. As he says, we ordinarily ‘conform to our obligations rather than think of them.’ Hence the importance of habits, which for Bergson are the true fabric of moral life. In fact, moral or social life . . . is nothing other than an interlocking web of habits that connect the individual to a variety of groups. But they don’t merely join the individual to different groups, as if he or she were pre-formed. Rather, habits constitute the very stuff of our personalities. They are what make us into parents, professionals, citizens, and the like” (58-9).

We are in recognizably Aristotelean territory here. Character (personality, selfhood) is created through what we do—and our doings quickly become habits. Humans are creatures, mostly, of regularity. Which is not entirely a good thing. “Habit seems to favor not only passivity and acquiescence but also conformity and laziness” (59).

The would-be moral reformer, the preacher, must lead the audience to become aware of their habits and to consider whether they are desirable or not. Bergson “repeatedly characterizes love and openness as an ‘effort.’ Love [of the kind he advocated] does not extend moral obligation and it does not follow the habits of everyday life. It defies them” (60).

So, Bergson wants to enlist the power of habit by making this open love habitual, but he must first break through the habits that make standard closed morality the default mode for most people.

OK! Finally, what is this open love? How to describe it, how to experience it, how to incorporate into one’s way of being in the world, how to make it “a way of life”?

Lefebvre cannot—and does not aim to—offer definitive answers to these questions. The very idea (better: the very experience) of open love grows out of Bergson’s self-proclaimed “mysticism.” Intelligence has nothing of use to say on this topic. What Lefebvre wants to show is that “Human rights are works of love that initiate us into love” (89). We can only proceed by way of examples—and of practices. Examples “disclose love; they bring it into the world” (88).

As mostly practiced in contemporary society (the human rights practices and discourse most familiar to us), human rights attempts to regulate our world of closed societies, aiming to prevent or (at least mitigate) the abuses to which closed societies are prone. Normal human rights strive to protect us from hate.

Open human rights aim not to protect, but to convert. “Human rights are the best-placed institution for the open tendency to gain traction in the world” (89). They offer a pathway toward a conversion to love, to taking up love as our way of life.

Lefebvre offers four examples of this way of life. I don’t think they are meant to convince as much as meant to appeal. The first example is the person who says “yes” to the world and to existence, someone who radically affirms that this life is good and a source of joy. “In this sense, love is a disposition or a mood. It is a way of being in the world, rather than a direct attachment to any particular thing in it” (93).

The second example is a radical indifference (i.e. making no distinctions, and hence an “open” justice), “according no preference to any of the beings in our path, in giving everyone our entire presence, and responding with precise faithfulness to the call they utter to us. . . . Yet this glance is the opposite of an insensitive glance; it is a loving glance which distinguishes, within each individual being, precisely what he or she needs: the words that touch him, and the treatment he deserves” (94 in Lefebvre; he is quoting Louis Lavelle).

The third example comes from Deleuze’s description of the moment in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when the on-looking crowd is deeply invested in Rogue Riderhood’s recovery from an apparent drowning. That crowd is rooting for the life in Riderhood, not attuned to his specific person, personality, or history. They extend those good wishes to everything that has life, but attuned to life’s manifestation in this singular instance which provides the specific occasion for this affirmation of life.

Finally, Lefebvre considers Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of that name. Elizabeth refuses the “insensibility to the pain of outsiders”(97) that, for her, must accompany the complicity with the slaughter of animals that all eating of meat entails. She opens herself up to that pain—and in the process offends any number of human beings, to the extent that she doesn’t quite feel herself part of the human race any longer.

In summary, Lefebvre tells us that “all four portraits are preoccupied with the care of others. Or more precisely, each presents a mode of care made possible only once love ceases to be dedicated to a specific object. [With the first example] it is radiant joy and welcome; with Lavelle it is the responsiveness of indifference; with Deleuze it is attentiveness to singularity; and with Coetzee is it empathy not bound with the group” (100).

Obviously, just how moving these examples will prove to different readers will vary. Lefebvre is offering, in a different key admittedly, his version of the argument between where to place one’s political efforts: in reforming laws and institutions or in reforming hearts and minds. To his credit, he refuses to make this an either/or. We need to do both; he resists the temptation (familiar in various leftist critiques) to see the discourse and institutions of human rights as corrupt and/or positively harmful.

But, clearly, his focus is on conversion, on change at the individual level. He struggles (in my view) to connect his perspective to Foucault’s (and the ancients) idea of “care for the self.” I find this the least convincing move in his book—and I don’t think he really nails the connection he is trying to establish. For me, even if I buy the idea of human rights as a “way of life,” that way of life had much more to do with my relation to others than it does to my relation to my self. The “care” that Lefebvre focuses on in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph is not “care for the self” but “care of others.” Both morality and love are about relations to what is beyond the self. So I think it a mistake to try to bring them into the purview of the self.

I have undertaken to write a review of Lefebvre’s follow-up book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024). I haven’t started reading it yet, but am eager to get into it since I enjoyed reading this human rights book so much. More on Lefebvre once I do finish the new book.

Consciousness and Life: Response and Clarification

My friend Daniel has sent me some questions/responses related to my recent post on Consciousness and Life. (Here’s the link to that post: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/).

Daniel’s thoughts are in standard type and my attempts to address the issues he raises are in italics.

Some thoughts:
1. It may be true that Goff is a “monist,” but it seems a strange description of his position, since he is very much arguing against physicalism–hardly a dualist position. Physicalism, too, isn’t an account “that multiples basic entities.” There is one entity–physical matter, whether it’s a rock, an animal, or a brain within an animal. So I’m confused by the idea that your “pluralist views” coincide with physicalism. I would think the point of physicalism, within the consciousness debate, is to say that there is only one substance. (I know you like the idea of pluralism, but…) The “hard problem” poses a challenge that asks how it is that something that seemingly is without physical substance (a feeling of pain, for instance, or the feeling of a rough fabric touched by a hand) might be, in fact, a physical artifact with a physical location–that is, no different than any other physical substance.

As I read Goff, he is deeply committed to monism, which is why he champions “Russellian monism” as his position. Basically, like almost everyone these days who participates in these conversations, Goff is a fervent anti-dualist because he rejects any “extra” non-materialist entity (spirit, soul, whatever). Once he has dismissed dualism, he thinks there are two contenders for a monist account: physicalism and panpsychism. (To be clear, panpsychism is a materialist position; it just bakes in the psychic from the beginning. Matter has a physic component—or, to us Goff’s term, a psychic “aspect.”) He works hard to eliminate physicalism as worthy of belief—and thus to boost his preferred position of panpsychism on the back of physicalism’s flaws. But he also admits panpsychism’s shortcoming, which is why he mostly falls back on “elegance” and ”parsimony” as the reason to prefer panpsychism. And he even comes to accept a tiny bit of “noumenalism” as most likely inevitable, where “noumenalism” means the existence of a “thing in itself” to which human cognition will never have access. (Pages 230-231 in his book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.)

What I am groping toward is a physicalist pluralism, i.e. a physicalism that is neither monist nor dualist. As I say, I may just have the science entirely wrong—and I also have no doubt that most of the experts in these consciousness debates would find my position out of bounds. More about this is response to point #2.

2. In that sense, yes, a rock and a dog are both made up of the same stuff, even if one is living and one is not. (By the way, it seems that rocks, too, evolve, along with those “living things” you speak of.) I don’t mean to belittle the distinction, but opponents of physicalism are the ones who argue that a dog is different than a rock, not because a dog is alive but because it has consciousness, and consciousness defies physical explanation. Or am I missing something here?

What I am trying to deny is exactly the idea that a dog and a rock are made of the same stuff. Here’s my basic idea. BIG BANG: out of that big bang comes a bunch of different stuff. Basically the periodic table. There are hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, iron atoms, gold atoms etc. These atoms are different things; they behave differently and interact with other atoms differently. Since what we get on the ground is a universe composed of many different things—rocks, water, air, plants, animals—it seems odd to assume we started from one thing. Furthermore, evolution precisely results in a wide range of living creatures as different “niches” are exploited by different creatures. William James says of pragmatism: “an attitude or orientation is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (29 in Penguin edition of Pragmatism.) And when we look at what’s on the ground now, as opposed to speculating about origins, James asserts: “The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed. The world to which your philosopher introduces you is simple, clean and noble” (15). Philosophers are always trying to clean things up. This is Goff’s “elegance.”

But why believe the universe is elegant when all of our experience of it screams that it is not? So I am trying to say 1) why not believe we had many different things from the very beginning and 2) why obsess about origins at all? I’d rather we focused on trying to explain what we have here in front of us right now instead of positing a just so story that claims we got to current multiplicity from some primal unified and monolithic substance. And then we can think about how things present now interact in ways to produce what comes next.

So how to get physicalist pluralism? Precisely through the dynamics of evolution for living things and of physics for non-living things. Do we believe that water or salt existed from the very beginning? Or are they products that emerge later through the interactions of basic atoms? Similarly, do we believe life existed from the start? Or does life emerge from interactions of different elements? You can’t get water from one element; you have to have two. So if everything at the beginning is the same stuff, then emergence of water is a mystery. You get an infinite regress here. Because you are going to have to account for the existence of hydrogen and oxygen (also two different things) if you say we start from one basic stuff. Here is where I admit I may have the science totally wrong. But even if I do, there still has to be some account of how new forms appear on the scene. Evolutionary theory goes a long way (although not the whole way) to providing that explanation for new species on the living creatures side.

Furthermore, if I am right that consciousness is a feature of living beings, then what the philosophers need to explain is the presence of life, not the presence of consciousness. They should be pan-lifeists, not panpsychists. The emergence of life is much more mysterious than the emergence of consciousness, since once you have life the evolutionists have a pretty compelling account of why consciousness is of benefit to life, to how it would give a living creature an evolutionary advantage. In other words, once you have living creatures, evolution can kick in and its mechanisms account for the growing complexity of life forms. But there is no evolutionary explanation for why life itself emerges.

This is not to say that evolution offers a full mechanistic, biochemical explanation of how consciousness emerges. That emergence is lost in the mists of time. But evolutionary theory makes the emergence of consciousness plausible since consciousness serves the basic evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction. Those goals presume the existence of living forms. Evolutionary theory does not help at all in explaining why living forms themselves come into being. The hard problem is identifying the interactions that produce the phenomenon of consciousness and accounting for why those interactions would generate the particular “feelings” or “sensations” or “states of mind” that they do. I am not claiming to solve the hard problem. I am just saying it seems more plausible to me—or, at least, a hypothesis that should be entertained—to say that the physical bases of consciousness are interactions between different elements rather than manifestations of one basic stuff.

To my mind, the interactional thesis better captures the dynamism that characterizes a universe in which life and consciousness did not always exist—and a universe in which life and consciousness (through evolution) are still in the process of emerging, with old forms dying out and new forms coming on the scene (as well as less holistic changes within specific forms.)

3. You probably know it, but I think that you’re forced to include plants in what you’re saying, if “consciousness is a tool for evaluation”; they, too, like any other living thing, “evaluate possible courses of action in response to…circumstances,” no? They certainly seem different, in your sense, from rocks.

Happy to include plants. The problem here, it seems to me, is one that I have been surprised to find gets little attention in all these books we have read. Namely, the line between instinct (or automatic stimulus/response) and consciousness. All living creatures, plants very much included, respond to their environment. Therefore, they must have a way of taking in information about the environment and of altering behavior in relation to that information. Consciousness is, I think, an obvious way of assessing incoming information and evaluating what behavior is best suited to the circumstances. But it seems that instinct does the same work without going through the experience of consciousness. My sense is that all the current research in animal studies and even plants (the book How Trees Think has been a path-breaker here) has pretty consistently lessened the terrain governed by instinct while expanding the domain of consciousness. Still, there does seem to be something we can call instinct that is different from consciousness. The newborn “knows” how to suck at the mother’s breast. That seems instinctual, as does breathing. In short, I’d love to see a convincing account of (what I suspect is) the continuum from instinct all the way up to full self-consciousness.

I think (although here, again, I could be horribly wrong) that consciousness comes in degrees, with pure instinct at one end of the spectrum but with nothing definitive at the other end. I certainly don’t want to say the form of consciousness that seems typical of humans is “full” (the be all and end all) and therefore marks the other end of the spectrum. Rather, at that other end, we find (I think) a variety of forms of consciousness, each (in most cases) evolutionary adequate for the creatures who have that form. Evolution is not flawless, but we can say that it tends to provide for each creature the consciousness it needs to survive and to reproduce. What sends living creatures to extinction is drastic changes in the environment—new predators/competitors and altered basic conditions—not the failure of current capacities to survive if the environment holds constant (which it never does over the long haul—or even the short haul in some cases).

4. When you say that “consciousness is not an illusion,” I think you may be referring to Illusionism–I’m thinking of Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish. In that odd philosophical way, there is a little consequence to illusionism one way or the other; we continue to feel things exactly the same, whether or not our qualia or feels are real or not. So I would think you’d find it a more interesting theory, if only because it (a) gets rid of the hard problem (okay, perhaps too easily), and (b) counters Goff’s anti-physicalist arguments. Frankish is especially bullish on the idea of generating new research projects on the brain; the “illusion” seems to be, from his point of view, simply another name for a process in the brain whereby we fool ourselves (probably for good reason, but certainly in keeping with other ways we respond to, say, optical illusions.) He is thoroughly a physicalist.

Yeah. The physicalists’ task is pretty straightforward. They need to get the experimental results that show the physical processes that produce consciousness and connect those physical processes to the “feel,” the phenomenology of consciousness. I am of the camp that says this is theoretically possible. I am only saying 1) I think working from the various physical elements involved in these processes is much more likely to produce results than thinking there is some sort of primal stuff that explains things and 2) that the phenomenology will also prove to be a product of those processes, not some illusion. (In fact, I am confused by the very notion of illusion. If the processes produce the illusion, then how is the illusion somehow not real? It’s a real product of an actual physical process. I need to read more about illusionism to overcome this basic misunderstanding of what distinguishes an illusion from something “real”.) In short, I am betting on bio-chemistry as “the answer,” even as I admit an answer seems very far from being reached right now.

5. I do agree with you that a biological approach is missing in Goff’s view, and I wonder whether this sort of approach amounts to a “functionalist” account of consciousness. (I’m out of my league here.) The point would be, as you suggest, that consciousness is very useful, for any number of reasons, and likely the result of animal evolution. Though I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of evolution having a teleology. There’s a long history of seeing evolution as having some purpose (in its worst version, a divine design, or, just as bad, the goal of humankind as its epitome); I realize that this is not your intent, but I wonder if it’s even necessary to explain the “emergence” of consciousness by some sort of pull of nature. There is a lot of controversy about teleology in respect to both Darwin and subsequent evolutionary theory. (See, for example, John Reiss’s Not By Design, a detailed and historical argument against any teleological understanding of evolution.)

Yes, evolution acts blindly; it does not have any “purpose.” But, of course, we almost inevitably end up talking about it as having agency. The very term “natural selection” is agency-laden. To “select” is an act—and “nature” is proposed as the agent. Personifying evolution is a bad habit that just about everyone finds difficult (close to impossible) to avoid. That’s because evolution produces things and we (by virtue of grammar Nietzsche would say) connect production to agency. The product is the noun and the action that produced it is the verb.

And, yes, using the term “teleological” only increases the chances of mistaking evolution for some kind of intention-guided agent. But the field of evolutionary studies, especially the writers focusing on consciousness, appear to have decided that “teleological” is the term they are going to use when speaking of evolutionary causes. I assume this choice of terminology comes from relying on Aristotle’s famous—and still canonical—account of causation.

I do think, and here is where we may fundamentally disagree, that the basic point is still valid: an evolutionary cause is not a mechanical, efficient (in Aristotle’s use of that term) cause. How so? What is a cause? A cause is a force that makes something happen in the world. An efficient cause requires an interaction between the cause and the effect. Causation, in this case, is direct. The cause acts upon something and brings about a change (the effect) in the thing acted upon. The water is spilled and the tablecloth gets wet.

An evolutionary cause does not act that way. It is indirect. The efficient cause in evolution is genetic mutation (another source of pluralism, by the way, even as its randomness drains any “purpose” from its generation of effects). But the evolutionary cause is the “fitness” of that mutation for an organism living in a specific environment. So an evolutionary cause has these multiple elements: a living organism embedded in a specific environment, a genetic mutation, a competition for resources required for life and reproduction within that environment, and an environment complex enough to have different “niches” so that multiple species can co-exist. With those elements in place, evolution “selects” for the features of an organism that give it a better chance to survive and reproduce.

What the theorists I reference (Deacon and Solms) do is take this high-level evolutionary cause and bring it into the organism itself. Living creatures become increasingly complex as evolutionary history unfolds. Thus, animals have digestive systems, hearts (blood circulation), lungs (oxygen intake), reproductive systems, and more as well as consciousness. These various systems are regulated (governed) in terms of the needs of the organism as a whole. They are not free agents, but subordinated to the primary evolutionary goal: survival and reproduction. Hence the argument for top-down causation attuned to an end result. The coordination of the various parts of a complex organism cannot be explained solely by efficient causes. That’s the argument.

Is this functionalism? Yes. Darwinian theory is adamantly functionalist. And there have been various ways to try to wriggle out from under what might be called “vulgar functionalism” or what some writers have called “Darwinian fundamentalism.” Basically, vulgar functionalism claims that every instance of animal behavior must be understood as advancing the primary evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction. Hence, baseball must be understood in terms of its helping its players find a mate.

The most common way people (Stephen Gould is a major source here) try to sidestep Darwinian fundamentalism is to say that certain capacities (like the hand/eye coordination that helps someone be a skilled baseball player) evolve in relation to the Darwinian imperatives, but then these capacities are put to uses in ways unconnected to those imperatives. In short, this is a surplus theory. It does not take all our energy and time to fulfill our Darwinian needs, so we use our spare energy and time to do things that our evolved capacities make possible. Needless to say, this solution has not pleased everyone. Plenty of people want to be able to introduce some other fundamental motives into animal existence than just the two Darwinian ones.

Finally, rocks. My life/non-life dualism amounts, I think to saying that efficient causes are sufficient to explain the changes time brings to non-living things. Rocks are not subject to evolutionary causes. Geology has no need or uses for teleological or Darwinian causes. Rocks are not selected in relation to criteria of fitness. Biology is the science that attends to living things, which is why physics and geology are not the right place to go when considering questions about consciousness (if I am right that consciousness is confined to living things). Yes, rocks change over time, but not as a result of evolution; only as a result of brute, mechanical causes.

6. Still, I think we can make general observations about the usefulness or function of consciousness: If I reach for the pan on the stove, I will feel the presence of heat and think twice about grabbing it barehanded. The feel of heat is mine, an instance of consciousness. This feel doesn’t seem like a physical thing; and as skeptics of physicalism point out, it’s not as though you’re going to cut into my brain and find that feel (though you might find the neural correlates). For some reason, none of this seems to trouble me (at least not today). I have a sense that the feel is a function of my brain; or it may be function of my brain in coordination with networks associated with other parts of my body; but one way or the other, it’s related to my physical body. Or, again, it may be a less a thing–what I’ve been referring to as a “feel”–than an illusion my brain creates. No difference.

Consciousness and Life

I have now read about 15 books on consciousness. The most recent was Phillip Goff’s Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford UP, 2023 paperback; originally published in 2017). A very bad book, easily the worst of all the ones I have read on this topic. But, as often happens with bad books, it spurred my thinking wonderfully, since it clarified what I am willing to believe about consciousness and what speculations I find incredible (in the literal meaning of that word, i.e. something I cannot judge worthy of belief).

Goff is a panpsychist—and goes through a torturous path of posited axioms and piled up distinctions (cutting the bologna thinner and thinner, as a colleague of mine used to put it) to make his case. Monotheism has much to answer for. Basically, Goff is striving to be a monist because monism is more “elegant,” more parsimonious, as a theory than any account that multiplies basic entities.

His book just confirmed me in my pluralist views. And pushed me further toward materialism (or what in consciousness studies often gets called “physicalism.) I am, no doubt, ill informed about the basic science here. But I will venture to guess that one of Goff’s major problems is that he takes physics as the fundamental science relevant to his metaphysical project—a project defined by the attempt to identify the “deep nature” of “fundamental reality.” Goff is a believer in substance—and he ends up in a recognizably Spinoza-like place (although he only mentions Spinoza once in his book.) There is only one substance, but it manifests itself in different aspects (Spinoza’s modes) for Goff. And since one of Goff’s axioms is that consciousness self-evidently exists, then the single substance must have some rudimentary consciousness (although he does affirm that consciousness comes in more or less elaborated forms). In his most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Goff substitutes “the cosmos” for God, with what only seems to me a sliver of difference between the two even as he denies belief in God. (I base this on a podcast interview with Goff; I have not read the new book.) You can access the podcast interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFzS8MIhK0

Enough of Goff. What do I now believe? I buy Goff’s insistence that the existence of consciousness is self-evident. Consciousness is not an illusion; the phenomenon of experiencing consciousness needs to be accepted as evidence of its reality—and thus any metaphysical account of “what is” must include consciousness.

From there, accounting for the existence of consciousness leads into the question of whether it is something very different from the things that do not appear to possess consciousness. Just about everyone out there right now hates dualism; they don’t want a metaphysical account that ends up with two radically different fundamental things: consciousness and non-consciousness. So the alternatives seem to become: 1) reduction of consciousness to matter and its processes (physicalism) or 2) panpsychism (baking consciousness into matter from the very start).

On the face of it, neither alternative is very attractive. For the physicalist, the problem is that the actual physical processes by which you get from bio-chemical interactions to consciousness continue to elude us (despite assurances that date back to the 17^th century that the connection will someday be uncovered). For the panpsychist, the problem is that basic matter—stones, not to mention atoms and electrons, do not demonstrate any of the features of consciousness. So on what basis do you claim that consciousness is somehow present in such instances of matter?

Let me start from what may be a huge misunderstanding on my part. Still: as I understand it, when we go to the periodic table of elements, we get a plurality of instances of matter that we could say are structured the same (i.e. however you characterize atomic structure) but which are different. A gold atom is not a hydrogen atom. And a gold atom will interact differently with an oxygen atom than a hydrogen atom will. So that seems to me to argue against the notion of a fundamental sameness, a monism, at the bottom of the manifested world. Instead, we begin from a variety of things that then interact in ways that produce further variety. Scientific laws may delineate the forms that interactions typically take—but the actual outcomes of interactions depend on which elements are interacting. Furthermore, modern science (again as I understand it—and I could well be wrong) usually works with probabilities, not certainties. Interactions do not always produce the same results. There is a considerable dose of leeway, even if science can fairly accurately (over a range of cases) predict the probability of one outcome over other possible ones. All of this, to my mind, suggests neither monism, not dualism, but pluralism.

But let’s leave physics behind. I think it’s a big mistake on Goff’s part to take physics as the place to land in any attempt to account for consciousness or for fundamental reality. As I see it, biology over the past fifty years has replaced physics as the science most likely to get us to the root of things. What is most striking to me about Goff’s book is the failure to link consciousness to life. I much prefer the various thinkers—Daniel Dennett (Freedom Evolves, Penguin,2004), Nicholas Humphrey [Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, MIT Press, 2023), Kevin Mitchell (Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton UP, 2023)—who approach consciousness through an evolutionary lens.

What does that mean? A lot of things. So let me list them here—and then try to discuss each of these items in turn. 1) Consciousness should be considered in relation to the ways it furthers an organism’s ability to survive and to produce descendants. 2) Consciousness should be considered within an evolutionary timeframe. It is not static, but something that changes over time. There is no reason to expect that it always existed (just as human beings did not always exist) and there is no reason to think it is not always in process. Adaptation, mutation, and change never stop. 3) The crucial category for thinking about the fundamental nature of things is “life,” not atomic or sub-atomic structure or some version of quantum mechanics. In short, biology leads us from a “substantialist” way of approaching metaphysical questions to a dynamic, process-focused way of addressing such questions. There is not some fundamental “stuff,” but a dynamic unfolding as “stuff” interacts and is transformed over time.

OK. Let me tackle each of these issues in turn. First, an evolutionary perspective on consciousness. I am mostly following Kevin Mitchell here. Basically, consciousness is a tool for evaluation. A living organism must evaluate its circumstances (what are threats, what are opportunities, what are the affordances) and must evaluate possible courses of action in response to those circumstances (which actions are most likely to be effective, require more of less expenditure of energy, have the least harmful side effects etc.) Self-consciousness is a way of evaluating what we can term the “internal environment.” How am I feeling, what do I want? Since circumstances change in a non-static world, the advantage of having the flexibility consciousness provides is a very valuable evolutionary advantage. Automatic stimulus/response mechanisms cannot adapt to different situations with the subtlety that consciousness affords.

On another level of explanation, the evolutionary view seems to entail accepting a dualist understanding of causation. Harkening back to Aristotle, the mechanistic efficient causation of physics now needs to be supplemented with a teleological causation acting at the level of the whole. Basically, the idea is that efficient causation is from the bottom-up, parts interacting to create something new. (That something new may, at times, be something larger, the product of a merger of the parts. But that is only one possibility; efficient causes can produce any number of effects.) A teleological cause is from the top-down. The whole has purposes that cause certain behavior in the parts. In evolutionary terms, the organism has an overriding purpose (survival and reproduction) that then causes the selection of certain capacities (sight, consciousness) that serve that purpose. In the most basic terms, the organism must work against entropy, must expend energy to keep its complex systems functioning, must defy the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. Mitchell touches to some extent on this insistence that efficient cause does not rule the entire roost, but to get the full blown rewriting of our theories of causation to serve an evolutionary account of consciousness, you need to go to Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (Norton, 2013) and Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Norton, 2021). Their work leads to a cybernetic understanding of consciousness and its function within an information-processing model of living organisms. I do not claim to comprehend this model is all its intricacies, but the basic need to establish the credibility of a non-mechanistic form of causality is clear enough.

My second issue—the non-static, dynamic nature of evolutionary time is less complex. The big point here, for me, is that we hardly need (as the panpsychist insists) to have the psychic baked in from the very start. Things emerge over the long, long time spans of evolution; why should it be impossible that consciousness emerges? Improbable, yes. But impossible, no. If there are evolutionary good reasons for consciousness to emerge, then there are forces to work to make that happen. The real improbability is that life itself emerges. Once life does emerge, the emergence of consciousness is less hard to understand since consciousness delivers such substantial advantages for adaptation, survival, and reproduction. In terms or metaphysics, accepting a dynamic and long time frame moves us away from trying to identify basic entities that are there from start to finish. New interactions of pre-existing elements create new things.

So my third issue: life as the crucial category. I think that here I am going to get pushed into something that looks like, most likely is, dualism. But Goff’s book got me thinking about how intimately connected consciousness and life are—and how this intimate connection has not been explicitly addressed in the various books I have read. Here’s what I mean: consciousness is something only living creatures have. A stone is not conscious. But what is a living creature? A stab at a basic definition: a living creature is one that must take in fuel of some sort that it metabolizes to provide the energy required to keep certain life-sustaining processes going. Digestion, consciousness, blood circulation, fighting off infections are just some of these life-sustaining processes. And, crucially, a living creature can be defined as one that can die. To die is to have those various processes come to an end. No more seeking for and then ingesting fuel, no more feeling hungry, no more devising strategies for allaying hunger.

So the dualism seems to be between something that is alive and something that is not. And it seems as if alive things have consciousness and non-alive things do not. Furthermore, things that were once alive can stop being alive; they die and when they die they lose consciousness. All of which suggests to me that consciousness is produced by bio-chemical processes that require energy to occur and, since these processes can go awry in ways that do not sustain life but cause death instead, that the teleology of “life” must organize the multiple processes embodied in a living organism as it tries to ward off death. Consciousness is just one of those processes—and even if it is more mysterious to us than the digestive system, there seems no reason to believe it is different in kind. Hence my physicalism.

But I am still left with a dualism between the living and the non-living. Another way to express that dualism is to say that the processes of geology are also dynamic and non-static, but they are not processes in which natural selection (as understood by evolutionary theory) plays any role at all. Continental drift has nothing to do with adaptation and, thus (if my thinking hasn’t gotten utterly confused at this point), can be seen as solely an outcome of efficient causes, with no involvement of teleological causes.

I will end here. What I have said here does nothing to address the marvels and mysteries of the phenomenological experience of consciousness. Not surprisingly, as a literary person, the phenomenology is in many ways more interesting to me. How different living creatures think and feel is fascinating. We never cease to be surprised at how differently different creatures evaluate what appears to be the same situation. Except, of course, different creatures actually notice different aspects of that situation; different things are salient for them, attract their attention. And that doesn’t even consider different desires. But I don’t know that I have yet found a good way to even begin to sort out the complexities here. I think we need a book titled The Varieties of Conscious Experience—a deliberate echo of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.