A short while ago I wrote about the book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, by Terrance Deacon. On the very day I posted the review I received notice that large parts of the book may have been "borrowed" without acknowledgement from the book I am reviewing today: Dynamics in Action Intentional Behavior as a Complex System byAlicia Juarrero who is Professor of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College, Maryland. She is a member of the National Council on the Humanities, the governing board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The short summarry tells us:
What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory"—the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior—has been unable to account for the difference.
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation—one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike—underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions—as historical narrative, not inference—follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.
Those of you who have followed my development of a model for how our complex behavior fits into the Earth system and the impact of technology on that system know that I believe we are experiencing a paradigm change of major significance. Since I'll be 76 in a month I have a real interest in making our contribution as solid as possible while I am still able. Read on and I'll tell what this important book does and also what it does not do.
First of all, the importance of this topic for us here should be obvious. Whether you are a fan of George Lakoff's ideas about framing and the political mind or not the connection should be obvious. Translate the question above about the difference between a wink and a blink to how people respond to political slogans, etc. and we have made the connection. You can click on my name and go back to my many diaries on this topic to refresh if you wish. Here's the idea in short: Modern neuroscience has established some important things about how our mind works. We use the conscious part of our being much less than we like to admit. So much of what comes to our conscious mind is really formed in our unconscious and is therefore a product of memory. This is crystal clear when we watch the development of a fine performer. As the cabbie answered to the musician who asked how to get to Carnegie Hall: "Practice, practice, practice." The use of the conscious to drill and perfect behavior is aimed at making it unconscious. Only when it has been "put there" as part of a repertoire of mental actions including motor skills and others can it become the smooth graceful action that is desired. Anyone who learned to drive a car, especially a stick shift, knows this very well.
Juarrero's book works with the same realizations that most of us who understand the new complexity theory that is developing also have been working with. The Cartesian Reductionist/Mechanist model of nature just plain missed the point. No we are not badmouthing it. We are identifying its limits. Its successes are all too obvious but as in any sphere , when the tool is a hammer everything in the world is NOT a nail!
Like so many of us today Juarrero goes back to the beginnings to see how we got to where we are. The interplay between Plato and Aristotle is once again revisited. With apologies to Plato, the light is stronger today and the shadows on the cave wall much, much clearer! More importantly the differences that Plato and the formalists who followed him found so confusing and so in need of being gotten around is actually where it is all at! Aristotle had it basically correct. If you look carefully, without stripping away the messy stuff, you find that knowing has a lot to do with explaining why things happen. Certainly here in the realm of politics this is central! The sterile notions of causality that the republicans and others use do not do the job. Causality in complex systems involves more than just one kind. Aristotle knew that when he explained the need for four kinds of cause to answer the "why" of causal entailment. For example "why the house?"
First, Material Cause: The things it is made of.
Second, Efficient Cause: It had to be built by someone.
Third, Formal Cause: The builder used a blueprint.
Fourth, Final cause: It has a purpose
You may find these notions new, but they are not unfounded. There are more like common sense than a lot of explanations we get.
Juarrero reviews in detail the way the absence of this reasoning led to the reductionist paradigm, Cartesian duality between mind and body, and the machine metaphor. All of these things were in the spirit of Plato's essences. The models of reality were idealized and the baby was thrown out with the bath water. The idea tyhat physics is a model was lost and physics replaced reality. If you could not get your answer using physics you were not asking a "scientific" question. When Rosen began to question this he was before his time. Yet gradually the best minds in science came around, a few at a time in the beginning, then the inevitable cascade. By writing here I am very much aware that many scientist and the public in general still have not completely digested the message of "Jurassic Park". If you want a quick fix this book will be a great help.
The conclusion will set you back as it has all of us who have been forced to deal with it. Here we are in the midst of a global crisis in climate and resources and poisoned surrounds and... Yet we look to government and, especially, the very technology that has brought us here to get us out of it. If you understand the implications of the failure of the machine metaphor and the rest of the Cartesian legacy you know better. Or as Juarrero states:
Whether a (complex adaptive) system will reorganize at a new level of complexity or, to the contrary, will disintegrate, is in principle unpredictable. And if it does reorganize, the particular form it will take is also unpredictable. Even the phase change is fundamentally stochastic, however,when ever adaptive systems bifurcate, the newly reorganized regime into which the structure settles (if one is found) will lower the rate of the system's internal entropy production even as it increases total entropy production. So if the system does leap to a more differentiated organization, there will have been a method to its madness: Reorganization always increases complexity and renews both internal order and overall disorder.
Yes things happen for a reason! There will be a purpose in the coming change. It will have little to do with our wants or needs nor will it be under our control. The vanity of politics and science and economics will have to accept this shadow over their magnificent efforts.
We have been using the wrong model for hundreds of years. The chant is growing as eyes are opened. One of the first things Rosen made clear when he realized this was that there is no largest model and there can not be! A real complex system has an infinite number of ways that a human can interact with it and therefore we need an infinite number of models. Physics is a nice model, but needs to be seen in this perspective, Adaptive self organizing systems react to their context, their environment. They are defined by that environment even as they define it. The circle can not be broken! Yet physics HAS provided the rules they must follow. One of them is that if you stress them enough they will reorganize in a manner which reduces that stress. A quick look at the antarctic and the melted ice tells us that we are in for some heavy stuff. Knowledge is power. The republicans deny this. We often are too busy playing election games to use the knowledge. Any surprise that we often find ourselves powerless? Please read this book. It has information of great value.