New Science and Old Wisdom Minds In and Of the World

by Dr Geoff Davies.

Presented at "From Stars to Brains" MCH conference in honor of Paul Davies Canberra, 20-21 June 2006

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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 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.

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. 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. 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. 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/

Presentation in Power Point format [1.5 MB]