I was really excited when I started reading this book. The excitement came not from the expectation that Deacon's title actually was capable of being realized, but from his recognition of so many things we have been struggling to have people understand for a long time. To start out with, Deacon is either unaware of or has ignored all that work already in the literature. Therefore this review will supply some of the important things missing in Deacon's book. My colleagues and I have been on this track for a long time. It goes back to the works of Rashevsky and Rosen which had its origins in the 1950s. My latest published work and a work in progress are abstracted and linked in a recent diary:(two abstracts of recent work available in this diary). Here we want to dwell on Deacon's work and his claim to have answered the fascinating question: How did mind emerge from matter? This book's jacket has praise from my friends and colleagues, including Bob Ulanowicz and Stu Kauffman. They say things like:
a shift in thinking ...only to be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein
(Ulanowicz). What is most surprising to me is that over the more than 30 years we all have working in this area and used Rosen's ideas to deal with these problems they say nothing about Deacon's failure to acknowledge the ideas he could have easily used to write this book. Read on beyond the break and we will explore these ideas in a more complete manner.
The book is 17 chapters and 566 pages. To give a sample of what emerges (pun intended) here is part of his conclusion:
Although much of my professional training is in the neurosiences, in this book I have almost entirely avoided any attempt to translate the emergent dynamic approach to mental experience into detailed neurobiological terms. This is not because I think it cannot be done. In fact, I have hinted that my purpose is in part to lay the groundwork for doing exactly that. I believe that an extended effort to articulate an emergent dynamical account of brain function is necessary to overcome the Cartesian no-man's- land separating the study of the brain from the study of the mind. But the conceptual problems that remain to be overcome are immense...
I believe that despite its counterintuitive negative framing, this figure/background reversal of the way we conceive of living and mental causality promises to reinstate subjective experience as a legitimate participant in the web of physical causes and effects, and to ulltimately reintroduce intentional phenomena back into the natural sciences. It also suggests that the subtitle of this book is slightly misleading. Mind didn't actually emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter.
Terminology is a big part of this work. In particular, the chapters on Telenomy (4), Emergence (5), Homeodynamics (7), Morphodynamics (8), Teleodynamics (9) and Autogenesis (10) are concerned with developing ideas about complex systems that are in need of such elaboration if one is to understand this very new way of viewing the world.
Deacon takes on the question origin of life first, and in fact devotes most of the book to it. Two questions run in parallel throughout. The question of how living systems emerged from non-living matter and that of mind's emergence are closely related in this analysis.
Evolution is discussed in depth in this new way of seeing things and the separation of evolution from life's emergence is clearly dealt with.
To me one of the most important discussions, which is fundamental for all of this, has to do with causality. In our way of thinking, this is the crux of where classical science put itself in a straight jacket and thereby failed to deal with any of these very interesting issues. Rosen's concepts about loops of causality are at the root of the fundamental difference between living and non-living systems as Deacon recognizes in spite of his apparent ignorance of Rosen. He sees the absence of causal ideas in classical science as being the reason for its failure to even begin to address the questions he tackles. He fails to see that we have been struggling with this for over 50 years, but so it goes. The issue of causality, in our point of view, is intimately related to the lack of an adequate picture of what information in systems really is. His discussion of information falls short because of his failure to integrate these ideas.
The issue of information relates to Aristotle's four causes and the answer to "why?" things have come to be. Causal entailment is how living and non-living systems can be logically distinguished unambiguously. The fourth cause has to do with purpose and this has been a big taboo in science. Deacon, as have others, recognizes the role of purpose in nature. He devotes most of the book to developing the concepts mentioned above as a means for dealing with this omission.
Deacon uses work by others and adds his own embellishments to weave together the absent final causal considerations and a broader concept of absence in the form of the role of constraints in systems. The imposition of constraints eliminates possibilities, is tied in with the use of information and the doing of work. He develops a hierarchy of levels at which these ideas come into play. His concept of how life originated arises from this creation of constraints and thus his focus on "absence" as key feature in understanding these complex matters.
At this point in our history, I have to admire what he has done. He has not told us how life started from non-living matter nor how mind emerged. He has done a good job of showing what classical science failed to show as the conceptual model of processes that have to be involved in such emergence. For that he deserves to be read and to have his work built upon.
Now I want to add a postscript about why this book is important for everyone here. I have been working hard to integrate complex systems theory into a progressive political approach. The abstracts in the diary in the beginning of this review are a part of that. I have asserted again and again that our failure to see the systems nature of our politics and our practice of dealing with "issues" rather than the system is akin to where reductionist science threw the baby out with the bathwater! You loose all the networked relationships and in fact destroy the very thing you want to understand by doing this. Deacon understands this very well and has much to teach us.
6:53 PM PT: I have just learned that large sections of this book "have made extensive
use of the works of Alicia Juarrero and Evan Thompson without the
appropriate attribution. Entire passages in (the) book follow the same
argumentation line Juarrero employed in Dynamics in Action and
Thompson used in Between Ourselves. " This charge has been made by someone who actually handed Deacon these works and discussed them with him.