Mike's Notes
I first discovered Terrence Deacon in an essay by my friend James Miller. James recently sent me a link to a YouTube video of Terrence talking about his book Incomplete Nature, How Mind Emerged from Matter, in a 2012 interview.
And then I discovered some more talks by Terrence.
Sadly, his faculty page at Berkeley is gone. They may get deleted when professors retire.
It might be available on the Wayback Machine.
Resources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
- http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/terrence-w-deacon
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFE1Au3S8U&t=1289s
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_Nature
- https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/incomplete-nature-how-mind-emerged-matter
- https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=9kGsyTwAAAAJ&hl=en
- https://teleodynamics.org
Terrence Deacon: Incomplete Nature, How Mind Emerged from Matter - Sane
Society
A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry from the UC Berkeley Anthropology Chair, Terrence Deacon.
Terrence W. Deacon on Incomplete Nature: radically reformulating the concept of emergence
By recasting emergence theory in dynamical terms and focusing on the role of constraint in explaining ascending levels of causal relationships, this talk will argue that such basic scientific challenges as explaining the origins of life, the nature of information, and the dynamics of mental function need to be rethought. Though relying heavily on complex systems approaches, I will argue that various approaches to biological and neurological processes that depend on models of self-organizing dynamics are fundamentally incomplete, and that a higher order emergent dynamical approach is necessary, which I call teleodynamics.
Incomplete Nature - How Mind Emerged from Matter
As scientists study the minutiae of subatomic particles, neural connections, and molecular compounds, their attempts at a “theory of everything” harbor a glaring omission: they still cannot explain us, the thoughts and perceptions that truly make us what we are. A masterwork that brings together science and philosophy, Incomplete Nature offers a revolutionary, captivating account of how life and consciousness emerged, revealing how our desires, feelings, and intentions can be understood in terms of the physical world.
As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties—such as mass, momentum, charge, and location—that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a "theory of everything" that does not leave it absurd that we exist.
Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.
Terrence Deacon: Did Mind Emerge From Matter? Origin of Life, Causal Emergence, & Descartes' Shadow
Terrence Deacon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines developmental evolutionary biology and comparative neuroanatomy to investigate the evolution of human cognition, and is particularly focused on the explanation of emergent processes in biology and cognition. Terrence is a Harvard Lehman Fellow, a Harvard Medical School Psychiatric Neuroscience Fellow, a Western Washington University Centenary Alumni Fellow, and the 69^th James Arthur Lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History. He has published over 100 research papers in collected volumes and scholarly journals, and his acclaimed book, "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain" (1997) was awarded the I. J. Staley Prize for the most influential book in Anthropology in 2005 by the School of American Research. His other books include "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter" (2011) and "Homo Sapiens: Evolutionary Biology and the Human Sciences" (2012).
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