From Stars to Brains
MCH conference
in honor of Paul Davies
Canberra, 20-21 June 2006
New Science and Old Wisdom
Minds In and Of the World
Abstract of the presentation
We at this
conference may all agree that our brains, and what they do, emerged in the world. However only recently have some people
begun to alert us to how much our brains are also of the world. In other words, the way our brains work
has been deeply conditioned by where they developed, to the point that we might
not be able to think at all were it not that the environment in which we have developed
has shaped and tuned our brains at all levels of their functioning.
Three
conceptions, one old and two relatively new, link our minds fundamentally to
all other living things and processes. They are natural selection, complexity and autopoiesis.
Darwin’s theory
of natural selection is well known and widely accepted as the primary driver of the
evolution of life on Earth. There
are those, however, who argue there is a richness of potential in the organic
world that cannot be explained by natural selection. How, for example, did our brains, developing long before
music or Bach or Schubert existed, become tuned so that the deeply subtle
patterns of the music of Bach and Schubert could be both conceived and
appreciated? Stuart Kauffman
[1]
proposes instead that the process
of self-organisation and emergence is required to account for this. A vigorous debate has ensued between
advocates of these two conceptions
[2]
.
It seems,
however, that both processes are at work, and there is a powerful synergy
between them. Complex
self-organising systems are poised in a behavioural regime between arid simplicity and anarchic
chaos
[3, 4]
. They are ordered but their order is constantly shifting;
they are changing but not so much as to disintegrate. All living systems seem to be of this kind, and even the
expression of genes as a complete organism seems to be a process of complex
self-organisation
[1]
. This may not be a coincidence. On the one hand, complex systems would seem to provide the
most fruitful raw material for natural selection to work on. Too little novelty in genetic expression
and a species would not be adaptable; too much novelty and it would be all freaks and monsters and
advantageous traits would be lost. Thus, and on the other hand, natural selection would favour the
propagation of organisms tuned to complexity.
Autopoiesis has been proposed by Maturana and
Varela as the defining organisational pattern of living systems
[5, 6]
. The name autopoiesis derives from the Greek auto (self) and poiesis (making). Poiesis is also the root
of “poetry”, so we might say autopoiesis means "self-creating". An autopoietic system is self-generating,
self-bounding, and self-renewing. It
is self-generating in that a cell, say, initially grows by the operation of its
internal processes, and self-renewal here means renewal of the cell’s parts
rather than the reproduction of a daughter cell. Autopoiesis can be manifest
through many kinds of physical structure, from cells to cats, and even,
according to Maturana and Varela, brains.
Autopoietic systems don’t so much respond to the world as couple with the world. They adjust their internal structure in response to
external stimuli, and thus accomplish a fundamental form of cognition. In time the structure of our brain
comes to reflect in some way the patterns in the stimuli it receives, and in
this way it develops an internal metaphor of the world. Metaphors
would thus be fundmental to the way we think.
Very sophisticated responses to the world can be found in all
living things, from prokaryotes to pelicans. If you kick at a rock the results are fairly predictable,
but if you kick at a dog the dog may grovel, or bite, or flee, depending on dog
nature and that dog’s unique constitution, experience and circumstance. Capra
[6]
speaks of all living things
having intelligence, even mind, though this is not necessarily to imply self
awareness or consciousness. Human
intelligence is of a special kind, relatively newly emerged and
self-reflective, but a continuum with other intelligences can be recognised
from this perspective.
This view of life, intelligence and mind is a radical departure
from that which has long prevailed
in Western culture. Not only are
our bodies dependent on the entire global biosphere for their life support, but
our thinking minds also have no separate (nor superior) vantage from which to
comtemplate the world, and they are as much of the world as in the world. John Donne’s words can refer as well to
living kind as to humankind: "No man is an island, entire of
itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … any man's
death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send
to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."[7]
The view that
grows out of evolution, complexity and autopoiesis is much closer to the view
of the Taoists, for whom life is a dance between yin and yang, between yielding
and action, order and upset, between polar complements rather than conflicting
opposites [8]
. A healthy life is not lived at one extreme or the other, but
in a complex ebb and flow between extremes that gives expression to all facets
of our nature, and that engages intimately with the nature around us.
The living
world around us is not to be inspected, dissected, controlled and used, it is
to be respected, engaged with, lived in and negotiated with. Our destiny, if we are to have one, may
not be to leave or transcend the world around us, but to re-engage and grow
with it.
References
1. Kauffman,
S., The Origins of Order. 1993, New
York: Oxford University Press.
2. Dawkins,
R., The Blind Watchmaker. 1987, London:
Norton. 332.
3. Waldrop,
M.M., Complexity. 1992, New York:
Touchstone. 380.
4. Davies,
G.F., Economia: New Economic Systems to Empower People and Support the
Living World. 2004, Sydney: ABC Books.
5. Maturana,
H. and F. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge.
1987, Boston: Shambhala.
6. Capra,
F., The Web of Life. 1996, New York: Anchor
Books, Doubleday. 347.
7. Donne,
J., Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.
1624.
8. Capra,
F., The Tao of Physics. Bantam Revised
Edition, 1984 ed. 1976, New York: Bantam. 346.
About the author
Geoff Davies is a geophysicist, the son of a farmer, an
occasional social commentator and the author of Economia, a new conception of the place and functioning of
economies within society and the biosphere. He is a Senior Fellow at the Australian National University,
he has published two books and over eighty scientific papers, he is a Fellow of
the American Geophysical Union and he has been awarded the Augustus Love Medal
in geodynamics by the European Union of Geosciences. His science involves studying convection in the Earth’s mantle,
which moves tectonic plates and continents slowly about the Earth’s surface,
and the evolution of the Earth’s internal processes over the aeons. In the course of this work he has
learned much about the history and processes of life on Earth and how dynamical
systems play out. Economia synthesises a broad view of life on Earth, humans’
place within it, the principles by which the natural world operates and the
ways in which we must reform our dysfunctional economies so they can be
compatible with and foster both
ourselves and the living world around us.
Geoff Davies' Home Page <http://www.geoffdavies.com/ >
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