Mike's Notes
I'm reading Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. It's over 600 pages long, and I find it fascinating. It is very detailed, has many new technical words, and is hard work. So far, I'm 35% done.
I'm a visual pattern learner, so I decided to step back and watch videos of his talks, which are easier to follow. He is a great speaker.
I also discovered a great talk by Jeremy Sherman, given at Google. It covered the same material but was for beginners.
That way, I will first get a big-picture overview to give context to all the details in the book. Then, I will read and reread the whole book, marvelling at all the details.
These notes will be added to and changed as I learn what Deacon says.
Summary of different properties of the levels of order
| Life | Self-organising | Thermodynamic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Term | Teleodynamic | Morphodynamic | Homeodynamic |
| Example | Bacterium | Whirlpool | Hot stone cooling |
| Environment | Controls dependence on | Constantly perturbed by | Random |
| Internal constraint | Preserves | Generates | Destroys |
| Entropy Export | Optimum | Maximum | Minimum |
| Self | Has self | Self-eliminating | None |
| Work | Use gradients to create constraints by providing paths | ||
| How | Means & Ends | Cause & Effect | Cause & Effect |
| Emergence from | Self-organising | Thermodynamic | |
Resources
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPzXQfJy19k
- Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves
- Terrence Deacon
- https://teleodynamics.org
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/jeremy-e-sherman-phd
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
- https://www.chronicle.com/article/uc-berkeley-exonerates-anthropologist-who-was-accused-of-stealing-ideas/
- https://childrenofthecode.org/interviews/deacon.htm
- https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/terrence-w-deacon
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Terrence-Deacon
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383059097_Origins_of_biological_teleology_how_constraints_represent_ends
Notes on reading Terrence Deacon
Talk by Jeremy Sherman @ Google 2018
"Researcher Jeremy Sherman poses a huge question still unanswered despite all we've discovered in the physical and life/social sciences: what accounts for the difference between matter and mattering, cause-and-effect chemistry and means-to-ends life?
Sherman distils his book Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, proposing a new solution – organisms prevent their own degeneration. He shows how this prevention could emerge from anything-goes chemistry at the origins of life and suggests implications for computer science." - YouTube
Terrence Deacon -- Language and complexity: Evolution inside out. Talk given at University of British Columbia26 Aug 2010
"Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Deacon explains the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory.
To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection to account for the extreme development of language. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutation or some variant of the assimilation of acquired behaviors to innate predispositions in an effort to explain it.
Recent evodevo approaches have identified developmental processes that help to explain how complex functional synergies can evolve by Darwinian means. Interestingly, many of these developmental mechanisms bear a resemblance to aspects of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, often differing only in one respect (e.g. form of duplication, kind of variation, competition/cooperation).
A common feature is an interplay between processes of stabilizing selection and processes of relaxed selection at different levels of organism function. These may play important roles in the many levels of evolutionary process contributing to language.
Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, and may help explain why so much language." - YouTube
Terrence Deacon, Origins of life, Autogen Demonstration
Life before genetics: autogenesis, and the outer solar system - Terrence Deacon (SETI Talks)
Terrence Deacon - Self-organization is not enough: on beyond complex systems
T19 W117 Terrence Deacon (Keynote) | Thermodynamics 2.0 | 2020
Terrence Deacon. Interactivism in Perspective Preconference Reading Group and Talks
TSC 2016 Plenary 8 Evolution and Consciousness
The very important video: Professor Terrence W. Deacon: The Climate Challenge - in good thinking!
Terrence Deacon Playlist (58 videos)
Teleodynamics
"How does life emerge in a world that moves lawfully toward disorder? Some have answered this question by suggesting that life is a “self-organizing” process. Self-organizing phenomena, like a whirlpool in a bathtub, produce order by turning the law of increasing entropy against itself. They are systems in which ordered forms may emerge locally in order to increase the rate of entropy production globally. The problem is that these self-organizing processes are also self-undermining: they always exhaust the boundary conditions that make them possible. A whirlpool helps the water drain faster, making the vortex disappear.
Life does precisely the opposite. Rather than increasing the rate of global entropy production, organisms do work in order to resist further entropy increase, allowing them to preserve their forms and maintain their structural integrity. This stark difference reflects a radically different form of organization that we refer to as “teleodynamics.” More specifically, teleodynamics is defined as a higher-order reciprocal relationship between self-organizing processes, in which each process creates the boundary conditions that makes the other possible. This mutual synergy ensures that each form-generating process is brought to a halt before it has the chance to dissipate. For this reason, order is spontaneously generated, preserved, and reproduced.
This simple transition has surprisingly far-reaching implications. Browse the publications on this website to see how teleodynamic theory can provide naturalistic solutions to questions that thinkers have pondered for millenia. These questions include:
- How do normativity and value emerge from the physical world?
- What is conscious selfhood and emotional experience?
- How can physical processes come to “interpret” and “represent” the world? How does a molecule like DNA become “about” other molecules?
- How should we define “information” and how does information produce physical effects?
Teleodynamics emerges when multiple self-organizing phenomena generate forms (constraints) that serve as the boundary conditions that make the other self-organizing processes possible, resulting in a spontaneous tendency for the self-generation and self-maintenance of the whole. " - Teleodynamics.org
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