Mind Over Matter

In chapter 8, Ruyer starts to shift from convincing us that we need to posit an ideal realm of finalist activity that supplements our usual materialist explanation to explaining a bit more about how this realm works.  The first question he tackles is one as old as philosophy -- the mind body relation.  How can the unity of an equipotential surface like the brain or the embryo coexist with the multiplicity of parts that come to instantiate it?  In particular, how can the unity of our moment to moment subjective experience relate to the multiplicity of the objective content shown in that experience.  Any dualism is inevitably plagued by the question of how the two qualitatively distinct sides can interact.  While we have called these sides 'ideal' and 'material', the real distinction for Ruyer lies not in these names, but in the functioning of each realm.  The ideal realm is defined by the immediate unity we see in any end-directed activity.  It operates through final causes.  By contrast, the material realm is multiple and operates exclusively through the step-by-step linear billiard ball model Aristotle called material causality.  So 'mind' and 'body' are merely shorthands for 'all-at-once' and 'step-by-step'.  The mind body problem is then a question of how final and material causes are related.  Ruyer has spent 7 chapters focused on the insufficiency and contradiction of explanations of conscious activity based on material causes alone.  But his insistence on the reality of final causes means that we now always have two mutually exclusive options competing as explanations of our experience.

The examination of the facts forces us to rethink the Cartesian break between a thinking soul and a mechanical body. The opposition, as it emerges from recent observations and experiments, is instead between (1) the organism as a set of tools or a set of organs insofar as they are tools and (2) consciousness (primary or secondary, organic or cerebral) that assembles multiple elements in such as way as to turn them into "amboceptors" in a causal chain and that thematically oversees the operation of organic machines, regulates them in case of lesion or failure, and thus gives to organic structures the property of equipotentiality. (NF, 76)

It's only at this point that Ruyer bites the bullet and announces himself as an idealist or 'finalist' monist.  He argues that our belief in material causes and material stuff is an 'objective illusion' caused by the conditions of our knowledge, and not an objective feature of the universe in a metaphysical sense.  This is obviously the type of massive metaphysical claim that I think goes beyond questions of proof.  Ruyer has certainly motivated this perspective with examples and arguments.  But at this point I think it's more productive to put aside any possible objections and simply try to sympathetically understand how a worldview that puts mind -- and not just human mind -- first would work. 

This solution can be formulated in a few words: the problem posed by the duality of consciousness and the body, consciousness-organism and body-organism, is illusory for the excellent reason that there is no body. The "body" is the byproduct of the perception of a being by another being. The perceived being is perceived by definition as an object, in the etymological sense of the term. It appears as independent of the observer, and this leads him to substantialize it. This substantialized object is then called a "body." (NF, 77)

The idea is that the only real things are those we are calling 'mental' -- unities that have an immediate "self-enjoyment" or "self-survey".  These things hold together on their own in the manner of our I-consciousness or the embryo, which means they are not things so much as end-directed activities.  Because these are a kind of instantaneous ideal activity, they have no parts, properly speaking.  In a way, they are conscious only of themselves (in relation to a goal as we'll see in the next chapter) and not of any external object.  So not only is Ruyer reducing everything to an ideal realm of consciousness, but he's asserting that the real foundation of all consciousness is self consciousness.  Reality is simply collection of all these immediately self-conscious, or auto-subjective forms that maintain themselves and strive to realize some end in themselves.  So far Ruyer has only given the brain and the embryo as examples of these forms, but we'll soon see him start to include atoms and water molecules, and anything else that has a unitary self-maintaining form -- ie. all those things that we would characterize as "more than the sum of their parts". This is to say that the ideal units of Ruyer's scheme are not just things like humans and perhaps those animals we would normally reflexively self-conscious, or that would recognize themselves in a mirror, but anything that acts in a way that seems to imply that it knows that it is. 

While Ruyer resists calling this a flavor or panpsychism (pg. 74) because that term suggests that these unities are all modeled off the human psyche, he is clearly suggesting that the universe is composed of many individual 'minds'.  Somehow this thesis still seems shocking to me despite the fact that I find it pretty hard, intellectually speaking, to see why believing that reality is at base material should somehow be more natural or convincing than believing that it is 'spiritual'.  Nevertheless if we reject the existence of any objective material particles and accept these innately subjective unities as the only building blocks of reality, we are still left with the problem of why it appears to us, as one of these unities that directly knows itself, that the world is filled with all kinds of lifeless material stuff.  Fortunately, this 'hard problem in reverse' actually turns out to be quite a bit easier to solve.  As Ruyer has argued, it's tough to see how meaningless causal interactions among purely material bodies could ever somehow magic up a new dimension of meaning, even if we claim that this dimension is illusory.  But if we grant that there are many 'subjective atoms', each one a source of meaning and self-actuating activity and intelligence on its own, then it becomes relatively easy to explain where the illusion of materiality comes from.  Each subjective unity is really only conscious of itself, of the inside which composes its entire world.  So when it encounters another, distinct, subjective unity, it can only experience this subject as an outside, as a pure, dumb, object, as non-self.  Materiality simply reflects the limits of each subjective unity.

For this reason Ruyer introduces a distinction between knowledge, which is ultimately always a species of intuitive or internal self-knowledge, and observation, which is a description of what's happening at the 'surface' of the subjective form, the place where it touches other subjective forms.  In the case of conscious human subjectivity, this latter obviously corresponds to how our brain responds to shifting sense objects.  The brain is an example of an equipotential, autosubjective surface that knows (or better yet, "is a knowing of") itself from within, but also observes objects of sensation outside itself.  This is why what we call "sensation" has both an objective and a subjective component.

In everyday life, sensation is at once, indissociably, observation and knowledge, a physical event and an act of knowledge. It is a physical event insofar as the sensory organ is a system that can in principle be replaced by an artificial device; it is an act of knowledge insofar as the living tissue of the organ or of the corresponding cerebral area—or rather what appears as organic tissue to an external observer—forms part of the equipotential and autosubjective domain that is the very reality of the knowing being.  Sensation is an act of knowledge and not of pure observation, insofar as it is the act of a being already in the world, capable of grasping significations and of having a sense of the "other"—a sense as primitive as the intuition of its own existence. Pure observation would never be knowledge, but only event, exchange of energy. Pure knowledge would remain virtual, because it would provide no details about the "other." It is the combination of observation and knowledge in sensation—in other words, of the living being's primary, autosubjective, organic consciousness and of physical events on the sensory organ—that allows a "detailed knowledge" of other beings. (NF, 81)

As a result, what we usually call our body is just an encounter with a domain outside of ourselves, whose principle of unity we don't grasp for the simple reason that our unity doesn't encompass everything (though by hypothesis, it corresponds to some unity as part of some other subject, in this case our organism subject rather than our cognitive subject).  It's important to note that this distinction knowledge and observation, ideal and material, is not an epistemological one based only on the limits of our human autosubjectivity, but one Ruyer consider as real metaphysical distinction (though, oddly, one side of this real distinction only points to illusions).  He approvingly quotes Betram Russel's comment that:

 ... the distinction between mental and physical (in the sense of "material") "belongs to theory of knowledge, not to metaphysics." (NF, 80)

But the theory of knowledge Ruyer has in mind here is a unique one.  The knowledge in question isn't only human, but the knowledge that any subject has.  An object that appears as material to one subjectivity might be entirely contained as an aspect or part of the finalist activity of another.  It's tempting to say that, relative to any single subject, material existence is completely real, and yet if we were to occupy a divine perspective, we would see that there is no such thing as material existence, since all real things are part of some subjective unity.  However, I'm not sure this is correct just yet, since it seems to hypothesize the reality, and hence subjectivity, of a space that contains all the other subjectivities.  That is, this borders on being a theological question.

Ruyer then spends the rest of the chapter explaining both why we believe that there are other subjective unities outside our self and also why we shouldn't attribute subjective unity to just anything outside our self.  The crucial distinction is between forms that our self-maintaining and self-repairing, organic forms that 'know themselves' generally speaking, and what Ruyer calls aggregates, machines, or crowd phenomena.  Objects that fall outside of our direct experience (essentially all objects other than ourselves) may or may not be subjective unities.  Though we can never tell for sure, some of these objects might be subjects, with a self-reinforcing unity of their own.  Others though, for example crowds of people that behave like a fluid (NF, 84), or clouds or waves, might appear to be bound together as objects of our perception, but on further inspection, these bonds are only superficial and don't constitute a real subjective reality.  Objects bound together from the outside in this way are empty phenomena -- they are not real in-themselves because they are not real for-themselves.  Instead, the ontological starting point must always be a subjective unity that is simultaneously in-itself and for-itself.  Even the simplest real thing is already a subject.

Every being, every center of activity, is its own subject and possesses itself. Every being that is not an aggregate, every "organic" being in the broad sense in which Whitehead uses this term—which also includes the individualities of physics and chemistry—is a form, that is, directly self-possession, "for-itself" as well as "in-itself." Brute, blind, and deaf existence has to be understood starting from this presence of forms that possess themselves, in the same way that the laws of classical physics can be rediscovered from the data of microphysics. They derive from these data by virtue of the multiplicity of beings which, having become foreign to one another, only touch by their edges, superficially, and only act on one another step by step; they can thus form clusters, processions, or crowds incapable of autoconduction. (NF, 86)

In the next chapters, Ruyer will begin the difficult task of explaining how we end up with such a multiplicity of beings when we begin with only simple unities.  We might expect him to assert that all these unities were all present from the beginning, but the way Ruyer has used the embryo as his guiding metaphor suggests instead that they derive from a single unity via differentiation.  Which is to say that a single unity somehow "others" itself through its development.    

[
Two tangents related to the distinction of knowledge and observation.While this distinction at first seems to imply some objectionably vague 'intuitive' type of knowledge whose only object is a sense of self, the more I reflect on it, the more I like it.  

For one, it separates and clarifies the two sides of the feedback loop involved in predictive processing or enaction.  The top down aspect of predictive processing is all about modeling or guessing what the world might well be like, predictions which are always based on what we want to get out of it.  Priors are all about the values, significations, ends, of the organism -- they say more about us than the world.  But we test whether these priors fit the circumstance through observation.  Often, proponents of the Bayesian brain hypothesis describe priors as 'models' of the world, and assume that their goal is to accurately represent it.  People rarely seem to discuss who these models are for, and what exactly would make one physical system count as a model of another.  But the whole reason we have certain priors, the whole point of knowing how likely it is that the world is in state A, is that this state is significant for the organism -- it makes a difference. Generating prior probabilities must be a process of learning about the world and must be a calculation incarnated in some neural mechanism.  Nevertheless, what we want to know the prior probability of must come from some sense of its importance of relevance.  That is, the selection of the states that we want to construct priors for seems to act like a form of intuitive self knowledge.  Of course, we can push this selection back by claiming that these cerebral states are 'really just' what our organism wants, and those desires in turn are 'really just' what the species wants, itself 'really just' a product of the magic of self-replicating DNA, etc ...  But the end of this chain is always pure chance, which as we've seen is incapable of explaining value and is contradicted in the very attempt to grasp it.

Second, this distinction also helps to make sense of the puzzling relationship we have to the body during meditation.  If the mind changes, so does the disposition of the body, and even what counts as the body.  Our normal sense of self-identity is intimately tied to the way our cerebral consciousness is geared towards moving us around the world and manipulating external objects.  The brain is the center that controls and integrates these objects -- the technical individual in Simondon's terms -- and immediately knows itself as this significant unity.  These are my limbs and my tools controlled for my purposes.  What happens then when we systematically turn the brain away from its customary contents and customary surveying activity?  What happens when we do nothing, and let the sense of that center drop away?  We sense a strange shift in our consciousness, one that people frequently characterize as a broadening or widening.  And frequently we sense a corresponding shift in the sense of the body.  It may expand, or distend, or at the limit even simply dissolve along with any sense of our conceptual self consciousness.  I'm not sure what's going on there -- perhaps we are able to put our cerebral consciousness into touch with the organic consciousness from which it differentiated, or perhaps we are further differentiating the cerebral consciousness -- but the fact that our self identification covaries with our body identification suggests that these are two sides of the same coin.  Ruyer's scheme accommodates this naturally.  If one subjective unity has greater scope than another, if it encompasses more within itself, it will naturally find less outside itself, thus altering what it encounters as a body.  In fact, Ruyer even provides a thought experiment which inadvertently makes this point by mimicking the traditional immobility of meditation.

    ... man is constituted in such a way that he can be in a relation of observation or even in a "social relation" with himself. He sees his arms and hands extended before him, and he can speak to them like Lady Macbeth; he sees most of his body when he is seated or when he examines himself in a mirror. But the fact remains that if it were possible to conceive a human being living alone, without a mirror, with an immobilized head, incapable of looking at or touching himself, we do not see how such a being could have the curious idea of considering himself as double and as composed of consciousness and of a material body. (NF, 77)

This line of thinking brings us to a tricky question however.  So far, Ruyer seems to have identified his autosubjective unities with our typical everyday I-consciousness.  That is, we, I mean I, the royal we, the editorial, your friend and humble narrator of FPiPE, are a subjective unity.  But this consciousness at least appears to be varying all the time.  My experience changes from moment to moment, though each instant of it is presented as a unity in itself.  Is my subjective unity then instantaneous?  If so, are the instants connected, and how?  Or are they like moments in the development of an embryo that have shifting contents but an overall unity of trajectory?  Does this imply that only my whole life is the subjective unity?  But then where does it start and stop?  And what do we make of the possibility of a spiritual development that suggests we can transform to the point of transcending what once at least appeared to be an existing unity?  These questions are of course closely related to words like "scope" and "more" and "encompass" that I used above without defining them.  How can one subjective unity be 'bigger' than another?  And for that matter, how do things that appear so navel-gazingly closed on themselves even interact with one another?  Ruyer has yet to approach any of these questions.
]

Equipotentiality

It might help to list a few things that are close enough to be synonyms for Ruyer -- consciousness, organic form, whole, pure thinking (not to be confused with representing), equipotential surface.  These are all related to the "domain" of finalist activity, a territorial concept that we will explore more in the next section.  In chapter 7, however, Ruyer is just interested in exploring the similarities and differences between the two equipotential surfaces -- the brain and the embryo -- that he discussed in the previous chapter.  The main idea is that ideal finalist activity expresses itself by means of both of these material equipotential systems.  Even though they are both analogously capable of expressing this activity, these surfaces are not identical or interchangeable because the brain is nested inside the embryo, forming a sort of embryonic organ that retains something of the full embryo's fecund ability to reconfigure itself.  

As we saw last time, the embryo is an equipotential system for a few reasons.  You can make all sorts of modifications to it and its environment, and yet it still exhibits a resilient tendency to produce a determined organic form.  In fact, even modifications extreme enough to produce a 'monstrous' outcome still testify to this overall tendency.  However, this tendency to produce an organism, ie. the finalist activity of the embryo, is not located at any particular point within it.  The activity can't be localized, which explains why you can sometimes cut embryos in half and get two organisms, as well as why the embryo is so resilient to extensive damage.  But the embryo is also equipotential in the sense that it is equally capable of becoming all the individual organs.  In a sense, these are all just forms of development of the embryo which never really stop being parts of its whole.  This development, however, is not reversible -- the embryo 'spends' or 'discharges' its equipotentiality in the course of differentiating into the organs.  In short, the embryo trades potential for structure as it develops.

Obviously, the brain is just one of these specialized structures, but Ruyer's concept of its development is reminiscent of Simondon's idea of neotony.  The brain is an organ that, like the embryo itself, is capable of reconfiguration and further differentiation.  It is an organ that can create more organs, in this case, the organic extensions we call tools. 

Primitive embryonic equipotentiality thus disappears progressively; it is distributed in more and more limited areas. The theme of organs, by taking shape, ceases to be a theme to become a structure. The finalist sense of the organ remains obvious, but this sense is incarnated or fossilized, in the same way that the theme of invention in a machine built by an engineer is replaced by substituted mechanical links. Relative to the embryo that he was, the adult realizes in a sense the ancient myth of the divinity that is transformed into a laurel tree. To be an organ for the creation of organs is what equipotentiality allows. This definition makes clear the resemblance and the difference between the fertilized egg or the young embryo and the brain. Both respond to this definition. (NF, 70)

This is simple point that we've seen many times in Ruyer, and before that in different forms in Simondon and Mumford.  In a way, it might almost be the core of the whole individuation project -- individuals arise within a context.  The brain does not fall from the sky as a deus ex machina of intelligence.  It is produced as a specialized tool of the organism.  We misunderstand it whenever we forget this fact, just as we make the same mistake when we forget that humans build technology.  There's a tendency to let the remarkable flexibility of these organs cover over the fact that they are further differentiations of an already existing equipotential system.  So far, it's not particularly clear how Ruyer conceives this ongoing differentiation in general.  We have the impression that the context in which his individuals appear is always another, prior, individual.  Is there then, by extrapolation, an 'earth embryo' and before that a 'universe embryo' that contain the human one?  And how and why do these new levels of equipotentiality arise?  These general questions haven't been addressed yet since we've really only seen two examples of individual unity.  

But Ruyer's goal in this specific case is clear, he wants to clear the ground by driving home the point that human intelligence is not the sole, nor even the first, type of active finalist intelligence in the universe.  The embryo is already intelligent, already 'thinking' and 'planning' in a finalist sense.  And he spends the rest of this chapter clarifying that this is not some vague proto-thought.  The embryo is not a watered down version of the brain that is analogous but quantitatively inferior.  The embryo is not a stupid brain.  If anything, the brain is more like a stupid embryo, condemned to experience only the objects at its sense doors and to think with clumsy inorganic tools.  The embryo's thought is entirely clear and precise even though it is abstract.  For example, is has a very precise understanding of 'front' and 'limb'.  These concepts are only vague from the perspective of our brain, which has to reassemble them from the fully differentiated parts later used to specify them.  But in the course of the embryo's development, these 'thoughts' have a completely clear object, as Ruyer's study of embryology demonstrated.  So the brain doesn't add something new to the history of thinking, it merely develops a line of thought by prolonging the openness of the embryo.

If we want to grasp the facts, we have to become used to dissociating consciousness and brain and to associating consciousness and organic form. The brain is not an instrument for becoming conscious, intelligent, inventive, or reminiscent. Consciousness, intelligence, invention, memory, and active finality are tied to the organic form in general. The brain's "superiority" or its distinctive character is that it is an incomplete organ, an always- open network, which thus retains equipotentiality, the active embryonic consciousness, and applies it to the organization of the world. (NF, 75)

A Gaseous Vertebrate

Interestingly enough, once we stop identifying finalist activity with conscious intelligence, some of our objections to Ruyer's position can begin to evaporate naturally.  Because if the human brain is merely a tool of a larger organic activity, if it merely reveals, but does not create finality, then we no longer need to see this ongoing organic finality as a tool of an even larger brain.  This may not answer our question of where finalist activity begins, or what it is the ultimate finality.  But it at least defuses the threat of a regress of conscious intelligence that would remake this finality in the image of man -- God is not a "gaseous vertebrate" who designed human intelligence as a tool of his divine plan.  Once we leave behind the anthropocentric assumption that all intelligence must look like our own, once we see the workings of our own brain as merely a peculiar case study in how finalist activity can be materialized, we can appreciate how the root of Ruyer's activity is much stranger than we might have thought.  Ruyer's explanation of this is so clear that I'm just going to quote the whole thing.

Let us translate this thesis into our schema (Figure 19). In the finalist act in external circuit, the brain is an indispensible link (the cook uses his brain to make a dish), whereas in internal circuit, the stomach, for example, operates like a mixer or a furnace regulated by its own nervous centers. If we then admit organic finality by equating the stomach itself to an invented tool, it seems that a second external—"supernatural"— circuit is needed to explain this organic tool, a circuit controlled by a consciousness and even a supernatural brain. Such a duplication of humans or animals by a fabricating God—by a "gaseous Vertebrate," as Huxley said—is not very seductive to biologists.

 

But the error is clear. Finalist action in external circuit, which presupposes a good condition of the brain, is only a complication of finalist activity in internal circuit. It is thus logical to consider the brain as the instrument of this complication, but not as the instrument of finalist action in general. The central nervous system, extended by the eye and the hand, allows the organism to project its finalist activity into the external world; it enables it to structure and organize a vast domain, beyond its integuments and internal organs. The brain expands the field of organic finality; it allows finality to spill over onto the world, to discover materials within it, to construct tools and machines that are organic by their form and not by their matter. But "to transport" or "to expand" is not synonymous with "to create" or "to bring into existence." This is not a curious, paradoxical, or even personal thesis; it is not even, strictly speaking, a thesis. It is the pure and simple statement of obvious facts, of one fact above all, which no one can contest: the organism forges its nervous systems before using it. The brain is thus an "organ of transport" of finalist activity; it is evidently not its "organ" tout court.

While simple and maybe even obvious, I feel like this realization that human intelligence is produced is so profound that we should pause here to appreciate some of its other consequences.  Because we are constantly back-projecting the endpoint of this production as something that was there essentially from the start, then covering over the fact that this is what we have done.  Consider our use of the machine as an analogy for causal determinism.  To say that something operates 'like a machine' or 'mechanistically' is to say that it is purely a meaningless series of feed forward causes and effects, just a chain of billiard balls bumping into one another.  And indeed, this is how our machines operate ... because we built them that way.  We built them as tools for accomplishing goals that come from outside them.  Yet we go on to apply this same notion of what a machine is to natural organisms, and even to nature as a whole, when we claim that everything operates as chains of purely mechanical cause and effect.  Then we go on to complain about how foolish people are for taking a gaseous vertebrate to be the designer of the machine of nature even though the analogy between mechanism and nature relies entirely on the human designer who makes the machine what it is.  That is, we apply the analogy, but erase half of it in a way that reminds me of Einstein's famous joke about wireless telegraphy.  In short, we define the whole notion of mechanistic cause and effect as a chain that can't aim itself.  But this very definition depends on the notion that there is something which can aim itself.  Chalk this up as another of Ruyer's "paradoxes of antifinalism".  

Something similar happens when we define intelligence as how the normal adult human brain operates.  Then we forget that this intelligence requires an incredibly complex organic and cultural production to come into existence.  It is anything but simple or fundamental or 'normal'.  These reflections may seem to be at odds with a neo-finalist philosophy which embraces the existence of overarching ends that organize step-by-step means.  But this tension evaporates when we realize that Ruyer is simply cautioning us not mistake a particular means for the end.  The end is not a particular point but an activity, a process of laying out a space and establishing goals and directions. So the brain is not the goal.  It is a means of reaching the goal that we might simply call 'thinking'.  It's not that the brain thinks, but that thinking may, at some point, employ a brain.

Ruyer goes on to explain in detail why the brain cannot have a monopoly over the factors we associate with thinking -- memory, habit, invention, signifying activity, consciousness -- for the simple reason that the organism that produces the brain already exhibits all these traits.  Obviously, in the case of consciousness, this is a controversial statement, and leads Ruyer to distinguish between a primary organic consciousness and the secondary consciousness of objects that we usually associate with the brain.  The latter is a differentiation or complexification of the former in the same way that the fully developed organism is a differentiation of the embryo.  In both cases, there is a primary activity that is carried further, but not created, by the organs that serve as its tools of realization.  This point is actually closely related to Varela's insistence that the brain is there to do things, not represent things -- it is already embodied.  We will fail to understand it if we treat it as a purely computational device designed to represent pre-given objects because the significance and even coherence of these objects is defined at the level of the whole organism that uses the brain.  At the risk of adding terminology, we might clarify things if we say that dualistic consciousness is merely a small subset of organic awareness.  Awareness doesn't begin with machine constructing adult humans -- these are merely steps in its amplification or differentiation.

Of course, we still don't really know where this organic awareness begins nor much about what it is like (except by analogy with our own sense of self-existence).  So far, Ruyer's goal has been simply to convince us to admit its existence as a dimension of reality alongside the material world.  The main idea of Chapter 6, which compares the functioning of two 'loci' of awareness or finalist activity-- the brain and the embryo -- reiterates this same dualistic thesis by arguing that the remarkable capacities of these tissues cannot be localized in space and time.  That is, the capacity of the brain to produce a thought or the embryo to produce an organism cannot be explained as an outcome of step-by-step causal interactions of genes or neurons or any other physical components.  These structures are merely the objective expression of an awareness that is outside of space and time, an expression which only proceeds through these tissues as a whole.  So, again, the main point is to maintain a dualism between the "domain of sense" and the "domain of causality" (NF, 44).  But this long and complex chapter also gives us the first hint of a structure of finalist activity itself.  It proceeds from what we would usually call the abstract to the particular, from the whole to the part, just as the embryo proceeds from a definition of axes (anterior-posterior, medial-lateral, superior-inferior) to a formation of appendages to a specification of digits, all through a series of cascading differentiations.  Finalist activity works from the top down, not the bottom up.

Ruyer calls the crucial feature that the brain and the embryo share "equipotentiality".  This means that they operate as a whole and in terms of unities, and not step-by-step in terms of parts.  This isn't because they are special chunks of matter though.  Ruyer is quick to dismiss the idea that its something unique about genes or neural networks as physical phenomena that somehow magically turn them into unities.  While it's tempting to think of Ruyer's idea as a form of emergence, and consider his finalist activity as a form of feedback loop, I think this would be inaccurate.  For Ruyer, nothing emerges from matter.  As a dualist, there's no 'hard problem' for Ruyer because awareness is there from the beginning (though we still might wonder why it seems especially related to this particular bit of matter).  These tissues are equipotential because they already have finalist activity dissolved, as it were, or expressed, in each and every part.  The brain and the embryo are 'holographic' in this sense -- the whole can be reconstructed from just a part.  This whole is not the sum of the parts, but stands outside them, organizes them, and tries to express its ends through them in the same way we try to express our desire to build a house by using hammers and nails. 

This organic awareness outside of space and time may all still sound kinda vague and mysterious.  Fortunately Ruyer's discussion of the embryo gives us a concrete reference to guide us.  Obviously, an embryo is in some sense holographic.  The whole tree is there in the seed, or at least the seed seems to aim at the tree as a whole.  And the tree is also, in a manner of speaking, equally distributed throughout the seed.  In fact, we can often cut a seed in half and still come out with a whole tree.  That is to say, something about the seed reflects a unity that doesn't have to do with the extensive parts of seeds or trees.  Normally, of course, we see embryology in exactly the opposite sense, as a demonstration of the mechanical step-by-step construction of an organism.  We think of the DNA as a blueprint for how to build a machine organism.  But if the final organism is a machine, it sure is a peculiar one.  It is not assembled as a synthesis of independent parts but rather as a diffferentiation of a whole.  Somehow this whole seems to be given right from the start, which is in fact precisely why we frequently resort to the metaphor of a blueprint.  If the organism were a step-by-step construction following a blueprint, we would see trees with branches only on the left side, or that made ninety degree turns in the middle.  That is, if a genome were really like a blueprint, then its mode of failure would also be like a blueprint's.  We would see pieces randomly shuffled from their correct position, or the whole structure collapse because the foundation wasn't connected correctly.  This is how our human machines fail -- catastrophically.  One missing piece in the causal chain results in a heap of junk.  But this is not at all how an embryo fails, as Ruyer's brief tour of the study of monstrosity indicates.  People have modified embryos and later genomes in every kind of way.  And of course, you can make such large alterations that nothing grows at all.  But what you can't do is simply treat the organism like a heap of parts that can be reassembled in any order.  You can't just draw up a new blueprint that puts the living room in an arbitrary location.  The modifications all have to follow and influence the overall trajectory of development that's normal for that organism, no matter how surprising the results may look to our eyes (Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants provides a great look at the sort of variations that are possible).  Experimental embryology has uncovered a lot of how this mechanism works.  The organism is structured as a series of progressive differentiations, each level of which seems to have a well defined end or guiding theme. 

Thus embryonic equipotentiality, like cerebral equipotentiality, is bound up with the thematic character of development. The cascade of determinations has a thematic character, because determination precedes differentiation and differentiation proceeds in its turn through themes that can only be designated with abstract terms: a limb bud is determined as a "foot" (as "foot" in general) before it is determined as right foot or left foot. It is also tied to its finalist character (in the strictly etymological sense of the word) because, in all the extraordinary regulations allowed by equipotentiality, the normal end is reached despite the operative disruption of conditions, materials, and means. (NF, 50)

While we've discussed the embryo because it is a particularly clear example, Ruyer argues that the brain works the same way -- as a whole with a goal or theme.  This is why localized lesions to the rat brain don't seem to have much specific effect, and it takes massive damage to the cortex to make it forget a maze.  It also accounts for why the rat never forgets just part of the maze, or why it can reconstruct the overall trajectory even when its previous means of accomplishing the goal is blocked (NF, 63).  The end of reaching the cheese can be expressed in the brain as a whole because this end doesn't exist at a particular point in space and time.  It's as if this theme is infused throughout the brain equally, present in every point, just as the whole tree is present in the seed.  Since the end is everywhere within the tissue, any part of it can serve as a whole, which accounts for the remarkable fecundity of equipotentiality.

I want to pause for a minute here at the conclusion to address an objection that continues to pop up in my mind even though Ruyer has actually already addressed it.  Somehow, this idea that the embryo has a goal of producing a 'normal' organism still seems hard to swallow.  I'm so accustomed to thinking of it as a purely casual chemical process.  Sure, it doesn't work like a normal machine because of its top down differentiation.  But perhaps this merely indicates that our concept of a machine is needlessly narrow.  Does the difference really indicate that embryogenesis cannot be explained as a step-by-step causal process?  Certainly, I'm sympathetic to the argument that this causal process is not limited to the action of genes, and that the genes therefore cannot be thought of as a blueprint.  The seed needs the soil and the water and the light, and the hundreds of genetically identical seeds from the same tree will develop into surprisingly different looking organisms.  So the causal process cannot be laid at the doorstep of genes alone.  But does this license us to say that no causal process can explain embryogenesis?  The more I've thought about it though, the more I've seen that this objection misses the point because so much depends on the word "explains".  Ruyer isn't denying the existence of a causal mechanism that produces a tree, he's simply insisting that this process cannot be explained by a law-governed but meaningless or pointless unfolding, but is somehow guided by its endpoint right from the beginning.  This explanation fails for factual reasons -- if the embryo expressed no goal it would not degrade in the systematic way when its normal development is thwarted.  So it sure seems to act as if it 'wanted' to make a tree.  But it also fails for logical reasons -- strictly speaking, the causal explanation doesn't try to explain the tree at all because it doesn't consider it a real entity.  In this mechanistic explanation, the form we call "tree" is simply a convenient shorthand for certain statistical regularities in the behavior of a set of chemical reactions.  Strictly speaking, there is no tree, and therefore nothing to be explained.  And if we ask why just these regularities exist, we are pushed back to an evolutionary explanation that claims the 'tree-form' just happens to be the set of DNA that best propagates itself in these conditions.  In other words, we are told that the end that apparently guides the development of the seed is ... chance.  Evolutionary explanations never actually explain any thing as anything more than chance, which is why they end up not explaining anything at all.  But as we saw with the axiological cogito, this view of the universe as a purely chance causal process works only up to the point it is articulated, at which moment it becomes self-negating.  But if we admit the meaningfulness of our own thinking, we have admitted at least one thing in the universe falls outside its purely causal mechanics and yet certainly appears to effects those mechanics (judging, at least, by the frequency with which I actually articulate what I mean when I open my mouth, as opposed to simply a series of grunts and hoots -- this frequency is certainly not 100%, but I submit to you that it is higher than chance).  From there we enter this slippery slope where we are forced to reintroduce agents and their meaningful activity back into the world as guides for causal mechanisms.  This gives these mechanisms an end or meaning.

Biological Finality

Ruyer is a dualist.  From the perspective of a monist materialism he is asserting the independence of an ideal realm.  But he's not trying to deny the existence of a material realm.  Indeed, his ideal or purposeful world explicitly needs the material world as a means of accomplishing what it seeks.  As we saw, I assert the existence of meaningful finalist activity by the simple act of making assertions that aim at producing truth, or at least meaning, regardless of whether my assertions affirm or deny meaning in the universe.  Nevertheless, I still always use tools, like language and my larynx, to realize this sort of activity.  

We can explain the operation of these tools or mechanisms in scientific fashion as a step-by-step causal process.  But the existence of tools signals the existence of tool users.  There are two distinct orders of reality here -- the laws governing the causal universe, and the use of these laws to given ends.  This isn't a controversial point at the level of intelligent behavior.  In fact, it's exactly the sort of reasoning by which we would establish the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  As Ruyer points out (NF, 26), we wouldn't be surprised to find that Martian phenomena obey the laws of geometry, but if we observed a figure that proves the Pythagorean theorem we'd flip our lids and probably start nuking the place.  The idea that tools imply tool using agents only becomes controversial when we start to apply it at a strictly organic level below that of conscious intelligence.  We're reluctant to say that the organs of an organism are 'for' anything.  And of course, if you're an evolutionary biologist, it's absolutely anathema to suggest that the existence of a cat's fangs, which sure look like tools for rending meat, in any way demonstrate the existence of a real tool user or tool designer.

But what's the difference between a tool and an organ of an organism?  The example Ruyer uses to question this distinction is cooking.  Fires and pots testify to the existence of a tool user with a meaningful goal -- a clear indicator of the finalist activity called eating.  But these implements are just improved means for accomplishing an organic activity that clearly preexisted them.  In fact, in the case of fire we know that this form of pre-digestion actually partialy replaced human digestive organs; the line between them is not essentially distinct.  So if the use of fire demonstrates directed finalist activity, then doesn't the existence of the colon as an organ?  The colon is an internal tool that can be seamlessly replaced with an external tool that serves the same end.  This implies that, just as we cannot self-consistently deny the reality of the conscious and intelligent user of fire, we also cannot deny the reality of the unconscious user of the colon, namely, the organism as a whole.  Organisms use organs as means to ends. 

Finalist activity, then, doesn't require conscious intelligence.  The organism already testifies to intelligent activity with its very structure.  And of course, this same type of argument applies to instinctual behavior, which forms an intermediate step between the inherited structure of the organism and conscious activity.  I find Ruyer's logic pretty convincing -- if we're willing to attribute reality to conscious human activity, but at the same time ask how this activity can be carried out, we are forced down the rabbit hole of attributing reality to the activity of the organism which this conscious activity merely extends and continues to serve. 

In many cases, we can discover three corresponding levels: organogenesis, instinctive behavior, and intelligent activity. Hence the formation of organic reserves (fat, sugars), instinctive reserves (honey, various provisions), and intelligent reserves (an Eskimo's meat caches, our jams and wealth). So long as we only consider instinctive behavior, it is vaguely possible—at the price of some bad faith and a good deal of nudging in the right direction, and provided we first imagine that organogenesis itself can be explained by physicochemical causes— to argue that instinctive behavior can be explained in the same way. But if we add the intelligent human behavior to the series, the theory becomes untenable. Humans exist and act, and their activity reveals the true nature of organic activity. (NF, 20)

To forestall confusion about Ruyer's argument, I want to note the word "reveals" in this quote.  I've made it sound as if the justification for believing in the reality of a meaningful activity that cannot be reduced to step-by-step local causality is human consciousness.  This might suggest that there's something special about humans or consciousness.  In fact, Ruyer is demolishing this exceptionalism and spreading finalist activity throughout nature.  He began with the contradictions that lead to the "axiological cogito" because this is the easiest place for us to convince ourselves of the reality of the activity.  But our conscious thought only reveals an activity that is happening already.  It does not create, or form the foundation of this activity.  In short, humans were the starting point for pedagogical, not ontological reasons.

In fact, in chapter 4, Ruyer tries to demonstrate that an antifinalist position is as self-refuting on purely biological grounds as we saw it to be on logical grounds.  He prefaces this with a description of the type of incarnated, as opposed to logical, contradiction he is looking for, "How could a being in whom consciousness is an ineffective pure accompaniment have invented anesthetics?" (NF, 23).  If something has no reality, how would nature go about getting rid of it?  Ruyer provides three examples of biological phenomena that directly demonstrate this same type of contradiction.

1) Biological use of chance.  The evolutionary biologist tells us again and again that evolution has no goal.  It is merely a chance process coupled to an automatic, even tautological, sorting mechanism.  For whatever reason, DNA varies.  It mutates.  But some mutations reproduced themselves better than others.  Pretty quickly, we would find the world populated by whatever random sequence happens to best crystallize the environment into more DNA.  How then, are we to interpret the moments, like sexual reproduction, where this system seems to design a game of chance that keeps the genders in balance?  Doesn't this suggest that this game is after all not so chance, if it goes to such elaborate lengths to interrupt its own functioning?  How does the 'fittest' DNA come up with a way to not copy itself.  We might be tempted to argue that anything other than an equal gender split is not sustainable.  While undoubtedly true, this misses the point.  If there were a deterministic mechanism for ensuring this split, evolution could have happened on it by chance.  But how did this random process happen on a chance mechanism for avoiding a determinism which, by hypothesis, doesn't exist?

2) Biological self-modification.  Let's assume instead that an organism is nothing more than a fancy chemistry experiment, just a deterministic set of interrelated chemical reactions that happen to lock into the temporarily self-sustaining loop we call 'frog'.  In this sort of reductionist biology, the frog isn't a real entity.  How then are we to explain those situations where this non-entity suddenly modifies its operation in a way that preserves it from some special danger by suppressing its normal functioning?  By hypothesis, there's no real thing there that could need suppressing, and also nothing to do the suppressing. 

3) Camoflage.  For me, this was the most interesting version of the contradiction.  How does a non-existent organism camoflage itself?  Ruyer gives various examples that all suggest that not only the form, but even the habitat and behavior of the organism as a whole intervenes in its coloration.  That is, 'something' seems to know not only what shape an animal has, but know how other animals will try to recognize this shape, and even what other shapes in the environment it could appear to have.  He talks about the way that eyes are an obvious and well conserved shape with which to recognize other creatures.  So the Lionfish disguises its eye with stripes that prevent the pupil from standing out.  And the Butterfly fish puts a false on the other side of its body. The Amazon leaffish even disguises its eye as a leaf with a hole in it.  If the organism is not a real unit, how does nature color it so that it doesn't look like one.  This is the same sort of contradiction as the invention of anesthetics by unconscious scientists.  These facts all seem impossible to explain without invoking the very phenomenon that is being denied.  If there is something so obvious that it requires explaining away as an illusion, then perhaps it's a real thing after all!

The Beginning of the End

We're almost at the point where we can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the individuation project that began last October.  And it's clear now that it was the light of an oncoming train.  Thinking more deeply about the individual has led us to collide directly with the weirdness of non-duality, where we are forced to confront the reality of a world completely 'beyond' this one, that nevertheless is somehow identical to it.  I have only just begun Ruyer's Neofinalism, the next book on our list, but it already looks as if this one will put a very fine point on the paradoxes of non-duality.  Right away, it posits the irreducible reality of a subjective, qualitative, purposive, and, for lack of a batter world, spiritual, dimension.  And it immediately demonstrates the contradictions inherent in any purely step-by-step causal materialism which attempts to deny the reality of this dimension.  So from the beginning, we are directly confronted with a reality that we would usually call 'out of this world'.   The result is such a challenging change of perspective that I thought I should start writing about it before I even see how it will fully develop.  I suspect there will be many twists and turns along the way.

Ruyer begins with a thought I would have considered unpromising: Descartes's cogito.  There are all sorts of problems with "I think therefore I am".  The supposedly incontrovertible truth contains a number of dubious assumptions.  For example, we can ask how we know that the "I" doing the thinking is the same as the one doing the being.  And we might wonder whether "thinking" is really the crucial activity here -- does Descartes not exist anytime he doesn't think?  And then of course there's the dubious conclusion Descartes reaches as a result of his experiment -- "I am a thinking substance".  Where did a substance enter in?  This hardly seems like a self-evident postulate.  Why does thinking require an "I" to possess it, why must it be a property of a subject?   Today, I think we see Descartes argument as closer to a sophism than a certainty.  Nevertheless, we sense that Descartes is onto something.  There really is some sort of self-actuating circle here that seems hard to deny.  It seems similar to the way the statement, "I promise ..." actually creates a promise upon its very utterance.  After all, wasn't Descartes at least justified in concluding: "there is thinking", even if he instead decided that all your thinking are belong to us?  The activity of thinking does seem to self-actualize. Of all the 'things' that might be said to exist, it seems to hardest to self-consistently deny the reality of the activity of thinking.  It's pretty hard to think something like: "I do not exist".

This self-validating or self-enacting activity -- what he calls the "axiological cogito" -- is Ruyer's starting point.  And even though his handling of it is quite a bit different from Descartes', he wants to point out the relationship between the circularity of his argument and that of earlier versions like the cogito or the ontological proof of the existence of God.  In all of these cases, the very fact of imagining that something exists is meant to prove that it exists.  In Ruyer's case, though, the proof applies to an activity, rather than to a thing.  The activity this time is not thinking in general but something like making sense or creating meaning.  So Ruyer's reworking becomes: "It is absurd to claim and to signify that nothing has a sense" (NF, 11).  Claiming and signifying are forms of making sense, so denying that they exist is as self-contradictory as thinking that thinking isn't happening.  If the universe is only a meaningless succession of causal steps feeding forward in time, then we are certainly in no position to complain about it in a meaningful way!  This is another flavor of the nihilism overcomes itself argument that we've seen many times now.  Nihilism is exhausting only because it insists on attempting something it believes to be impossible.  Ruyer not only sharpens this point to a syllogism but also shows us why it can only apply to an activity, and so why the ontological proof of the fact of God's existence as an entity is sophistic.  While I won't explore the details of the latter demonstration here, the logic of the former is concise enough to quote in its entirety.

It immediately proves that there is a sense in human activity and that a totalitarian philosophy of the absurd is absurd:

1. Being a pure set of processes, I affirm that my activity is senseless.
2. Pursuing senseful ends, I affirm the absurd nature of my activity.
3. Being a pure set of processes, I affirm that my activity has a sense.
4. Pursuing senseful ends, I affirm that my activity has a sense.

Assertions 1 and 3 eliminate themselves. [A pure set of processes cannot "affirm" anything, because that activity presupposes or co-supposes sense]. The fact that assertion 2 is an assertion completely undermines it. [This is not because of the logical contradiction but because of the active or existential contradiction.  You cannot assert that you are not asserting anything any more than you can promise you aren't promising].  So assertion 4 remains. (NF, 7)

So making sense or creating meaning is a self-realizing activity that proves its existence even in denying itself.  But exactly what type of activity is this?  Is Ruyer constructing a sort of subjective idealism or a dualism akin to Descartes', ie. one that rests on the certainty of the conscious thinking subject as proof of its own existence?  The answer I think is no.  We will see as it develops that this initial equation of the activity with conscious thought is only a convenient starting point where we can immediately see that this activity cannot consistently be denied.  That is, thinking is not that foundation of this activity, but merely the easiest place for us to see it and convince ourselves that it must exist.  

Accordingly, Ruyer's second step is to provide a list of characteristics of the sort of activity he has in mind.  Freedom, Existence, Work, Finality, Value.  These are all different aspects of what Ruyer frequently calls "finalist activity".  For some reason he doesn't ever use the term purposeful activity, but we could think of it that way as well, so long as we don't confuse purposeful with instrumental.  We're not talking here about just any activity that accomplishes a goal, or at least, it's not the accomplishing itself but the ability to establish the goal that constitutes the self-realizing part of this activity.  The major point is to distinguish between activity that moves step-by-step, forward in time along a causal chain, and activity that posits some sort of "end", in the sense of a meaning or point.  Ruyer illustrates this with a discussion of calculators that foreshadows (NF was published in 1952) Simondon's comments on the relations between machines and teleology.

The case of calculators, in which the norm of calculation becomes an assemblage of material organs, provides an invaluable guiding thread for understanding the very nature of free and finalist activity. This activity essentially consists in improvising and establishing cerebral or physical connections that allow the incarnation of the good sought-after results in the physical order. The example of calculators also helps us understand the connections between the order of signifying activity and the order of determinism and step-by-step causality. Here the machine borrows its sense from the man who built it in view of a specific end. Just like the results it yields, this machine can be considered good or bad. It is the organ of a free center of activity. (NF, 9)

I've put the most important words in bold here.  The calculator only borrows its teleology from the human programmer.  It operates as an organ of this activity that instantiates a means to its successful execution, just as the brain operates as an organ of our organism's finality.  The activity we're talking about is not the activity of the organs (regardless of whether these are industrial or biological).  Each of these can be deconstructed to reveal its step-by-step causal structure.  These mechanisms can only execute on goals, not posit them.  Finalist activity operates at the level of the whole that establishes what the individual organs should do and thereby improvises a means of striving towards some overall goal.  For the moment, Ruyer has deliberately left the level of this 'whole' quite vague.  I think we're going to discover that it is an ever-moving target, given that wholes can appear as parts of larger wholes.

This distinction between setting or conceiving a goal and accomplishing it strikes me as the essence of intention.  Curiously, this is exactly the point where Buddhism locates our freedom -- we are utterly determined to experience sickness, old age, death, and impermanence, but we are utterly free to shape our karma.  We're accustomed to understanding freedom as the opposite of step-by-step causal determinism.  While Ruyer might not wish to use the term "opposite", he clearly agrees that the essence of free activity, the thing that makes it free, is distinct from the causal instantiation of that activity.  But free activity in this sense is equally distinct from causal indeterminism.  An activity that comes from nowhere, as a spontaneous surprise with no sense or meaning (cf. existentialism) is not free or finalist activity in Ruyer's sense.  Finalist activity isn't demonstrated by the mere absence or incompleteness of step-by-step causal determination, but by the presence of some other dimension of determination.  Ruyer's freedom is not freedom from meaningless causal chains, but freedom to establish the ends, meanings, and values realized by those chains.  He immediately acknowledges that this leads us to the idea of a dualist conception of the world. 

So a dualist conception of two worlds, real world and ideal world, is necessary for understanding sense, finality, work, invention, and conscious existence. If the schema of classical physics is taken to the letter, it is clear that activity proper requires the positing of an ideal domain that is irreducible to the plane where causes and effects succeed one another. In this ideal domain, conscious intention can move and survey (without strict spatiotemporal localization and by exploring possibilities) the plane of causes and effects so as to influence the unfolding of means toward the ideal end. This duality of two worlds is not the last word on the question; but if we want to correctly describe and "situate" senseful activity, then the compensatory hypothesis of an ideal world is the inevitable counterpart of the fiction of a world of universe-lines or of pure causal lines. (NF, 14)

Many years ago, I probably would have considered this type of philosophy as beyond the pale.  But it has been quite a while since I found monist materialism -- scientism -- a compelling philosophy.  In fact, as my little Socratic dialogue indicates, I now find the position incoherent.  Nevertheless, I've noticed in reading Ruyer that I still have a few reactive reservations upon hearing someone articulate the need for dualism so forcefully.  I mean, what are we invoking here? Immaterial Magic? Platonic Forms?The Soul?  What do these even mean?  I call these responses "reactive" because I can think of the many ways they fall apart when their assumptions are carefully examined.  In fact, it's just as easy to take this ideal realm as the self-evident one and question the reality of the torturous, and, given the replication crisis, tenuous, path by which science claims to tell us that the world is "really" just standard model particles.  But if we set aside, for a moment, the instinct to try and establish either side of this dualism as more fundamental, we are still left with the question that plagues any dualist theory -- how do the two sides interact?  This will be the subject of the next post.

The Embodied Mind

I first heard about Francisco Varela because my college friend and sometimes roommate was a big fan of his early work on autopoesis.  While JL was a symbolic systems major at the time, shortly after graduation his study shifted to the paradoxical field of military intelligence, so I'm not sure he ever got a chance to read Varela's collaboration with Thompson and Rosch; its initial publication would have been a recent and controversial addition to the field of cognitive science during the time when we were at The Tree.  I'm also not sure that he would have understood or appreciated the direction that Varela's work took with The Embodied Mind; I know I certainly wouldn't have been capable of appreciating a book that was so far ahead of its time in so many ways.  As Jon Kabat-Zinn points out in his foreword to the revised edition of 2016, applying concepts drawn from Buddhist meditation practices to the scientific study of the mind was a bit out there back in 1991.  And if a synthesis of this sort is now more commonplace, apparently this particular book deserves a significant amount of credit for opening that floodgate.

Though it's significantly better written and argued, the overarching thesis of The Embodied Mind is similar to the other science-dharma crossover book we explored in the individuation project -- Joanna Macy's Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory.  The subject of cognition gets embodied, and its world enacted, when both arises out of pure emptiness as a self-creating feedback loop.  We've seen a number of metaphors that try to capture the insight that emptiness = dependent (co-)origination, that the individual is never given but created as both product of and input to an ongoing process of individuation.  We've talked repeatedly about the vortex.  Simondon preferred to think of it broadly as crystallization.  Macy simply called it mutual causality.  In every case, the core idea is the way subject and object arise simultaneously from the figure-ground splitting of a groundless non-dual emptiness.  Varela et. al. will take embodied cognition as the paradigm for this process of emptiness forming itself.  In other words, while they don't put it quite this way, they suggest that cognition is a form of ontogenesis.  Cognition doesn't represent the world, it creates more of it.  Or, given that they always discuss the operation of cognition mostly in the context of an existing organism, perhaps we should borrow from Simondon's terminology and say that cognition is a form of onto-transformation that we can study through "allagmatics".

One understands that the project of allagmatics, which is already formulated in ILFI and MEOT in passages where Simondon enters into a dialogue with cybernetics, brings the philosophical project in close connection with the idea of a science (see ILFI 561), even if this new philosophical science is by definition transversal and unifying; whereas each positive science is a science of generic structures, allagmatics is the science of genetic operations: 'the operation is that which makes a structure appear, or that which modifies a structure' (ILFI, 559). (Fifty Key Terms in the Works of GilbertSimondon, 204)

To their great credit, the authors take this notion of cognition as ontological production and transformation all the way to its conclusion, and apply it to their own theory.  So while much of the book is devoted to a critique of representationalist cognitive science that relies on the metaphor of computation, and some of it is occupied with their non-representational theory of enaction, all this content is sandwiched between two extended discussions of how their own representation of a theory of cognition might be used to actually transform our experience.  Because their ultimate goal is not to come up with a more accurate theory of cognition, but to use the act of theorizing about cognition to change how we live.  Few thinkers make it to this deeply philosophical point that seems to me to be the heart of the matter.  Why is it that we search for a science of the brain?  Or why do we philosophize or meditate?  Are any these activities really about knowing reality, representing it, "as it really is"?  Or are they more fundamentally about expanding the possibilities of our experience?  Why, after all, do we even think?  Is it not to have an experience that provides us with a doorway to even more experience?  Thinking should be an experience that transforms us, not just another game of theoretical Tetris meant to move us up the high scorer list. 

So the book begins and ends with philosophical sections devoted to the ground and the groundless.  Their departing ground is the way the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as not merely one object among others but as a lived experience. As the book's title suggests, the most important thing to realize about minds is that they are embodied.  Which is to say that thinking is a lived experience of interacting with a world.  Thus, we reflect on the world not from a position outside it, but from within, as a part of the world that reflects on itself.  Merleau-Ponty points to this fundamental circularity of thinking about thinking in a passage they quote approvingly:

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.  (TEM, 3)

As a result, any theory of cognition that attempts to take up a perspective outside the world, as if it could occupy the 'view from nowhere', is bound to fail.  It may produce a theory of how the brain works, but it will not direct us towards the experience of contemplating the theory.  And of course, the same could be said for any philosophical theory, even one as circular as Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.  While phenomenology famously hoped to go to "the things themselves", there's no way to get around the fact that philosophy is ultimately always a form of literature.

In Merleau-Ponty's view, both science and phenomenology explicated our concrete, embodied existence in a manner that was always after the fact. It attempted to grasp the immediacy of our unreflective experience and tried to give voice to it in conscious reflection. But precisely by being a theoretical activity after the fact, it could not recapture the richness of experience; it could be only a discourse about that experience. Merleau-Ponty admitted this in his own way by saying that his task was infinite. (TEM, 19)

It's in this context that the authors turn to Buddhism.  Because while Buddhism certainly contains both religious and philosophical theories of experience, it also provides a set of practices designed to produce experiences.  This of course is what Western philosophy has long lost -- that there is a practice of philosophy which seeks a know how rather than a know that.  As Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, we have lost the sense that philosophy should consist of more than bloodless theorizing but is a discipline meant for living.  So the authors would like to invoke Buddhism as a practice for investigating experience.  As an open-ended practice, it employs concepts, but departs from and returns to the actual living experience of the body, even if it may transform this experience in the process (pg. 30).  Thus, it appears to pragmatically deliver on the theoretical slogan: "to the things themselves".

I say "appears to" because this is the place to insert some caveats that aren't present in the first edition of the book.  While the authors never assert this exactly, one could sometimes get the impression they are claiming that meditation provides an empirical method for a "first person science of mind".  That is, one might believe that we meditate to "see things as they are", and that therefore the phenomena we experience when we meditate are more real, more true, and more foundational than what we find in philosophical or scientific investigation.  And in fact, there are many folks (some with much more meditative experience than I have) that describe the practice in this way.  Needless to say, I don't see things this way.  Meditation regularly supplies all kinds of unique and interesting experiences, including the experience of feeling like you see a deep and important truth, the experience otherwise known as insight.  But to accept any of these experiences as the final, real, ultimate truth of the way things are is to enter back into precisely the realm of theory that we were trying to use meditation to escape.  What we want to say is simply that meditation shows us more reality, and that these experiences can transform our way of approaching life so that we suffer a lot less because we experience a lot more.  That is, we want meditation to open experience, not close it off.  Trying to prohibit or limit or ignore certain experience is the very essence of ignorance.  Thankfully, we don't have to spend much time critiquing the places in the book where the authors slip towards this kind of thinking because one of the authors already beat us to it.  Evan Thompson is not a Buddhist, and his introduction to the revised edition provides a lucid description of the ways the book occasionally falls prey to the problematic assumptions of what he calls "Buddhist modernism".  I completely agree with his caveat that meditation cannot provide a new, firmer, higher resolution, empirical ground to replace science's simple empiricism.  If it contributes to our knowledge, it can only be in Deleuze's sense of a transcendental empiricism, inseparable from pluralism.

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). (Dialogues, preface)

While this caveat is important, in truth, the middle sections of the book usually deliver fairly well on the goal of injecting some pluralism into theories of cognition.  While the authors critique both cognitivism and connectionism as representational theories of cognition, they clearly appreciate the way these research agendas have, in fact, contributed a lot to our understanding of how the brain works.  And their own positive contributions, their theories of cognition as "enaction" and evolution as "natural drift", are both open-ended theories that don't explain how everything must, lawfully, be, so much as draw our attention to the organism's (or the biosphere's) inherent creative potential. 

After all this preamble, let's begin to address the content with their discussion of cognitivism in section 2.  Cognitivism is the idea that the brain is simply a computational device meant to represent the features of an external world so that we can manipulate it effectively.  It's the type of thinking that led Stanford to call its department of mind studies, "Symbolic Systems".  While from the author's perspective, this is clearly an inadequate dualistic view, what they what they point out here is that the cognitivist program seems to simultaneously posit and refute a central self.  On the one hand, the whole idea that the brain represents things seems to depend on the notion that it represents features of an external world to an internal subject.  Something only becomes a symbol or representation when it is of something for somebody.  Representation contains coded information about the world and, as Simondon pointed out, the existence of information requires a distinct sender and receiver.  Representation entails more than a more correspondence or causal connection.  Perfectly causal process that don't mean something are not called information but noise.  Of course, one person's noise is another's information, but this fact is precisely what makes us realize that information is not simply 'out there'.  In short, it seems that any theory of cognition as representation requires the existence of a cognizing subject.  On the the other hand, in practice the cognitivist program treats the embodiment of this representing subject as a pure computational machine.  Representations are constructed through neural computations that extract features of the world.  This information is then passed through the brain and combined with other information about internal states and so forth.  And the final result of this complex computation is a pattern of motor neuron firing that actuates a response to the information.  The subjective self who would 'read' this information and decide what it all means doesn't appear anywhere in the chain.  All the computations used to instantiate a representational model are simply the rule based pushing around of meaningless bits.  As a result, the cognitivist paradigm starts off assuming there must be a subject, and then demonstrating that there can't be, very much in the same way that Daniel Dennett sets out to explain consciousness, but effectively ends up explaining it away.  Conscious experience is required for the whole scheme to operate, but then doesn't seem to have any particular functional role or point within it.  

Interestingly though, in what I would call a prime example of their pluralism, the authors see in this contradiction not merely as a critique of the inadequacies of cognitivism, but the beginnings of an understanding that perhaps a centralized self is not required for experience after all.  That is, cognitivists like Dennett think they have explained qualitative experience away, but looked at from a wider vantage point, all they have succeeded in explaining away is the need for a self to serve as the locus of this experience.  In fact, the authors explicitly analogize the cognitivist deconstruction of cognition to the Buddhist demonstration that none of the five aggregates contain a self.  With the Buddhists, however, emptying the aggregates of a self doesn't empty them of lived experience and prove it is a mere illusion.  No-self is not equivalent to non-existence.  So while the cognitivist struggles with the paradox of understanding how their own, merely computational, brain can come up with such a theory of itself, the Buddhist deconstruction of the self removes nothing essential to our experience or to its own theory, but instead invites us to begin exploring how the sense of self might arise in a fundamentally non-self world.  If we begin with experience, with awareness itself, as the given, we sidestep the hard problem entirely.  Within this experience we find an experience of our self and of the world, neither of which experiences guarantee anything about their veracity or usefulness beyond their phenomenal existence as experiences.  It's only when we begin with the flawed assumption that there must be an objective material world represented by an individual subject that we later discover these two things never seem to reconnect.  This materialism disproves itself by revealing a hidden spiritual dimension it implicitly needs to operate..  The paradoxes of the hard problem that threaten to force us to condemn either the objective world or our subjective self as an illusion are entirely an artifact of a poorly posed question.  There is no hard problem.  But it's a nice part of the authors open-ended and pluralist approach to critique other views of the mind and yet still learn important things from them.

In section 3, the authors move on to a discussion of the brand of cognitive science in ascendancy back in my day -- connectionism.  Connectionism doesn't completely dispense with the idea that the brain is a computational device aimed at representing features of the world, but it does move away from comparing its architecture to the serial symbolic processing we see in our von Neumann machines.  Instead, connectionism approaches cognition with the more biologically realistic model of the neural network.  Here the idea is that the global behavior and 'cognition' of the system emerges bottom-up from simple, mindless interactions amongst its parts.  These stable attractors can of course still be shaped by an environment, but they are more than mere arbitrarily pre-programmed symbols that represent this environment, since they have a self-organizing internal dynamic of their own.  While it operates at a much higher than neural level of abstraction, the authors use Marvin Minsky's "society of mind" metaphor to illustrate the idea that our cognition consists of a complicated interaction of simple agents.  They then explicitly compare this to the Buddhist idea of the 12 links of dependent origination, treating each link as if it were a sort of agent characterized by a particular pattern of action.  The interaction among these links, the way they chain together or form feedback loops, serves as an explanation of why we experience a sense of self when all that's really happening is the casual interaction of simple parts.  In Minsky's analogy though, we are forever condemned to experience what is really a society as a stable and enduring self.  We can't help believing in the illusion.  For the Buddhist, the hope is that deconstructing our experience as a product of the ongoing conditioning of the 12 links, we are eventually able to use our theory to change our very experience of the self.  While I don't find the analogy between Minsky's sub-personal agents and and the 12 links particularly compelling or useful, I do sympathize with their observation that there must be something lacking in any theory of cognition that doesn't account for the fact that it can change.  For Minsky, as we saw for Dennett, hypothesizing that our sense of a stable interior self is an illusion doesn't actually change how either of these thinkers act.  Despite saying that it theoretically can't be done, they continue to talk and write as if they have the same self as always.  This leads to a disconnect between theory and experience that threatens to make all cognitive theory completely meaningless in experiential terms.  In short, it leads to a threat of nihilism.  If deconstructing experience 'scientifically' does not change it, if knowing ourselves 'objectively' has no value for our life, then it seems perhaps it makes no difference at all what we think or believe or take ourselves to be.  As Nietzsche would say, the highest value of truth devalues itself; if the truth doesn't do anything, what's the point of it?  So while connectionism is an improvement on cognitivism in scientific terms, and illustrates the same lack of self we saw before, it still leaves us with a gap between a representational theory and a lived experience. 

It's really only at this point (section 4) that the authors come to the heart of the matter I pointed out earlier.  If cognition is not representational, if it's goal is not to mirror certain pre-given features of the world either through explicit cognitivist symbols or through implicit connectionist attractors, then it must be "enactive".  Instead of mirroring the world, it creates it at the same time that it creates itself.  The subject gets a body at the same time that the world gets an action -- embodiment and enaction are really two sides of the same non-dual coin.

This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification. This change in stance does not express a mere philosophical preference; it reflects the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The notion of operational closure is thus a way of specifying classes of processes that, in their very operation, tum back upon themselves to form autonomous networks. Such networks do not fall into the class of systems defined by external mechanisms of control (heteronomy) but rather into the class of systems defined by internal mechanisms of self organization (autonomy). The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system. (TEM, 139)

Now, of course, we're really sliding into the philosophical deep end where both self and world disappear.  It's one thing for science to examine the brain and fail to find John Malkovich lurking inside.  Especially when this doesn't result in any change in our sense of self or in how we live.  Because science and most of analytic philosophy implicitly and subconsciously bracket the inquirer as categorically separate from the object of inquiry, deconstructing the self (by hypothesis) isn't any different from deconstructing anything else.  But once you begin to question the substantial reality of the subjective world, the objective world also begins to fall apart, and this throws science into crisis.  After all, if there's not a substantial subject to know the immutable laws of physics, then how can we assume such a law governed world even exists?  And if there's no objective world, then who are we scientists studying it, amirite?  We have a sense that it's dangerous to see the solid ground slip from our feet in this way, one the authors diagnose as a "Cartesian anxiety".  We worry that if we let go of the world, and then the self, and then the world again, we'll come unmoored and be cast adrift on the sea of nihilism.  Which is of course why we tend to avoid this type of thinking at all costs.  We really want to have some stable reference point we can take for granted.  For the authors, this amounts to the core teaching of the Buddha -- grasping after the ground, regardless of whether we affirm or deny it, leads to suffering.  In this case the problem seems to stem directly from the idea that our thinking might actually require us to change something about how we live.  If the cognitive scientist really believed their own theory about the self, they would be forced to act differently.  And we know quite well that change is the end of the world.

Previously, the authors drew an analogy between the 12 link version of dependent origination and the society of mind theory of cognition.  Here, we find what I think of as a much more compelling analogy between cognition as embodied enaction and the emptiness version of dependent origination.  We begin to see the nondual vortex that simultaneously produces subject and object.  This leads directly into the two chapters (8 and 9) that form the core of their theory.  The first deals with the way the experience of color is neither exclusively in the world nor in the subject perceiving it, but arises due to their "structural coupling".  The second extends this idea into a novel theory of evolution as "natural drift" rather than adaptation.  We'll have to take these one at a time.

They use a detailed discussion of color vision to illustrate the notion that the experience of color is something that happens between the subject and the world.  It is neither an objective property that can be reduced to the wavelengths of reflected light, nor a purely subjective property that happens in each individual's interior mental space.  Instead, the perception of color depends on the possibilities of interaction between the two.  While I won't go into the details, it seems to me they make a strong case that the known facts about the experience of color only make sense if we see it as constituted by the feedback loop between perception and action.  Color is not 'out there' -- we perceive its reality only because it affords some possibility for action in the world.  At the same time, color is not simply 'in here' as an arbitrary category -- we are able to act on the basis of it only because there is indeed something there to perceive.  The fact that this creates a circle of feedback or chicken and egg problem is the whole point.

We can now give a preliminary formulation of what we mean by enaction. In a nutshell, the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided. (TEM, 173)

In short, what the world is depends on how we look at it and what we want to do with it; and how we look at it and what we hope to do with it depends on what the world is.  Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given subject.  It is the process by which the world and the self come to mutually specify one another.  It is the inevitably historical process of feedback by which these two structure one another.

But what, ultimately, do we really want to do with the world?  The authors take their theory of enaction a step further by considering a neo-Darwinian objection to it.  Sure, we might say, each organism perceives a different world based on their structures and capacities for acting in it, and these capacities are defined on the basis of past perceptions and their associated cycles of action.  But the whole point of all this perceiving and acting is survival.  And the way to survive is to be 'the fittest' -- to  optimally fit your perceptions to the world so as to maximize your survival chances.  It's easy to see that the motivation behind this objection is the evolutionist notion that the real point of life is to survive and its one real action is to reproduce.  In other words, in spite of how evolutionary theorists are constantly pointing out that evolution has no goal, they surreptitiously convert the ideal of survival into a goal.  With this finality, it promises to restore the ground under our feet -- we are all just machines 'designed' for maximizing reproduction, and most of our features, including our cognition, are simple consequences of this fact.  So while we all cognize differently, the goal of all cognition is the same -- optimal manipulation of the world as judged by reproductive success.

I think it's also easy to see what's wrong with this objection at a high level.  It's completely dualistic.  It assumes that there are separate and solid selves out there to be reproduced through some sort of optimal adaptation to a pre-defined environment.  But these are precisely the reference points we've been calling into question.  If there's no inherent self, whose goal is it to reproduce?  And if the world isn't inherently and necessarily any particular way at all, what is there to adapt to?  Finally, if the unit of reproduction isn't clear, and the raw material from which it draws is not uniquely defined, then what does optimal fit even mean in this context?  If the 'goal' of life were for genes to maximally reproduce themselves, the earth would just be one big DNA crystal by now.  This would appear to be an 'optimal fit' in the deepest sense that all of the available material world would be converted into self.  The fact that life looks absolutely nothing like this should tip us off that something is wrong with the logic here.

The authors of course produce a much more detailed criticism of neo-Darwinian adaptationism than my series of rhetorical questions and thought experiments.  But their overarching point is that the theory of natural selection doesn't really explain what happens, it only explains what doesn't.  It's true, systems that cannot survive, don't.  But this tells us almost nothing about the diversity of systems that can survive.  Survival or adaptation, in other words, is not a strong constraint but a quite weak one.  It doesn't winnow life down to a single optimal solution, it simply weeds out the non-viable solutions to leave us with what remains an incredible richness of possible ways of making a living.  Thus instead of natural selection, the authors talk about evolution as "natural drift".  They don't mean the drift of genetic mutation that people discuss in evolutionary biology, and which is in some sense 'unnatural' because it comes from the chance invasion of life's carefully controlled mechanism.  They mean the immanent natural ability of biological matter to spontaneously form new patterns.  Kind of like an evolutionary version of Uexküll, these patterns give body to an organism at the same time as they enact a world as a particular slice of nature's chaos.  This deepens or doubles their theory of enactive cognition because it explains how the specific biological structures that support an open-ended enaction which transforms the world are themselves constructed through what amounts to nature's own enactive cognition.  It's empty turtles all the way down.

As I mentioned earlier, the final section of the book returns to purely philosophical considerations.  If the circularity of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology was the departing ground, with the nihil-ism of Keiji Nishitani we arrive at the groundless.  I'm not familiar with Nishitani, but even their short discussion of his merger of Western metaphysics (he was a student of Heidegger's) with the Zen understanding of emptiness was enough to get him on my future reading list.  We've covered all the basic ideas already, so I won't repeat the story here.  But be on the lookout for the forthcoming JPiPE blog!