Declaration: “the most sophisticated parascientific ontologies of the day are anti-essentialist”. Works for me. Illusionism is evidently such an ontology. However, in order to avoid gratuitous eliminativism (and descent into anti-realism), once we divest “things” of their essences, we must reconstruct them as processes. Processes are relational and definitionally lack “own being”, i.e., intrinsically lack intrinsic identity.
I feel like it’s a lack of attention to reconstruction that distinguishes eliminativism – even if it’s it’s only “apparent” eliminativism – from a genuinely process-oriented philosophy. In the “west” (or maybe it’s just analytic philosophy?) we still seem to largely deploy processual arguments in service of reductionism.
And much as I love extremely rigorous and unimpeachably analytic interpretations of Buddhist philosophy, modern westerners need more explicit synthesis, not just powerful tools of deconstruction.
We need more explicit synthesis in the contemporary west because of the historical influence of theodicy on our frameworks.
Buddhists and Ancient Greeks could largely take agency for granted. That’s why it’s easy to interpret much ancient philosophy as “a way of life”.
In the west, a little later on, our agency was mystifyingly threatened by that of an omniscient and omnipotent agent. There can only be one agent in a cosmology that includes an omnipotent agent (hint: they’re the same critter).
And theodicy actually won the debate over freedom that took place for centuries within the Christian world. The arguments for freedom that were able to make any headway (or at least survive) under the onslaught of omnipotence were of the “wretched subterfuge” variety.
Eventually, we got rid of God, but retained the problem of theodicy (….darn, I seem to have thrown out the baby instead of the bathwater….).
Some time after we achieved Enlightenment (en masse), we started to refer to the God function as “Laplace’s Demon”, and to think that because we’re only “metaphorically” identifying Laplace’s “intellect” that is “vast enough” with a personified demon, we have successfully banished that naughty function from our philosophy and become truly “Rational” in our acceptance of a universe fully determined by its prime mover and entailing laws.
Or maybe our ancestors drew significant comfort from God’s omnipotence (He’s on our side, right?), regardless of the intellectualising of some of them.
Maybe we continue to derive comfort from determinism (just sayin’)? If so, this is really quite understandable and we can forgive ourselves (immediately!) for seeking comfort when confronted with the vastness of the universe and the complexity of the biosphere.
I, at least, forgive us our continued obsession with apotropaic eliminativism. Sometimes forgiving oneself is the first step on a new, suddenly open and uncertain (unprestatable), path. A confrontation with the future.
(spoiler alert!) The future is terrifying because “I” dies there . Clearly, we can’t spend all our time staring into that abyss. Fear of the void is what got us into this backwater, being consumed by the void is hardly likely to get us out.
Nonetheless, there does *appear* to be a way out (I don’t mind if you call it an “illusion”, it’s a mighty fine one). Not a way “out of this world”, mind you, like some form of (techno-pharma) gnosticism. A way out of our heads and into our bodies. Into the loci of our agential selfhood, i.e., our access to Being. As aspects of Being we are granted participatory perspectives on Being.
(yes, this “Being” is another version of the God function, but it’s a better one, hush….).
Not out of this world, but into it….in the same old ways our species has been checking in with itself for as long as it has needed to (since language? you reckon?).
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Note that Daniel Dennett has become more and more invested in this reconstruction as his career has progressed (even though his defence of free will was there all along). But he still doesn’t seem to feel a need to begin his reconstruction from the level of fundamental ontology.
He always gives lip service to physics being “deterministic” – even though by this he principally means “in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason” – rather than extending his deconstruction and reconstruction into that territory.
From the reader’s perspective, then, it’s all too easy to continue to see him as a descendant of Laplace, though he (weakly) repudiates the Demon. The metaphysical analysis of the temporal relationship between indeterminism and determinism is a way out of this basin of attraction
P.S. There is another reason to deny agency, you may argue – to be “objective” or “scientific”. We must not project our subjectivity onto phenomena (ha!). “Nature is closed to thought”. Sure, but it seems likely that this injunction is itself at least partly descended from theodicy. If our agency hadn’t been threatened, perhaps we would never have denied agency to others. Never would have denied that agency was simply observable. Measurable, even. We can’t prestate an agent’s trajectory, but we can estimate its degrees of freedom.
Carl Jung – detail from Liber Novus (The Red Book). This illustration depicts a common motif from creation myths, in which the world serpent (representing “chaos” and the unknown or the unconscious) gives birth to the world tree (representing the ordered cosmos or consciousness).
This piece contains a lot of philosophy that may seem quite abstract at first. It’s my contention that these apparently arcane concepts are deeply entrenched in human culture and thus that they, in some way, animate all of us. The philosophical process is therefore a bit like that of depth psychology – it’s an attempt to make explicit things that are often only implicit, but are nonetheless influential on the way we think and behave. In fact, the argument could be (and has been) made that when such things are merely implicit, they animate us all the more potently due to our lack of awareness of them. What we bring into the light, we can “intelligently design”. On the other hand, the argument could be (and has been) made that I am merely justifying my own desire to count the number of angels able to dance the merengue on a pinhead (note that the number would be quite different were they tangoing). Well, so be it. I hope you find something useful in all this pontificating.
Ancient Antitheses
In some sense, evolutionism and essentialism are antitheses. Evolutionism is the idea that all things are in flux; are changing; are context-specific; are constantly becoming; etc. Essentialism, at its most fundamental, is the idea that change is an illusion, part of the world of appearances, and what is “really Real”, behind the veil of Maya (or any number of other analogous metaphors), is timeless, eternal – the pure ground of Being, which is not “becoming”, because it simply is and always will be.
Epistemologically, evolutionism may be characterised by scepticism and fallibilism – our search for knowledge is never-ending; the status of our knowledge is constantly in flux; we can never know with absolute certainty; there is no Ultimate Truth (only conventional truth); etc. Epistemological essentialism on the other hand is (naturally) associated with the opposite set of contentions – there are things we can know for certain; we have access to Ultimate Truth (perhaps either through contemplative or scientific practices); etc. In its worst form, an evolutionary approach to knowledge might approach abject relativism (all truth is context-dependent, thus we can all have our own truths). The essentialist pole would therefore be fanatical fundamentalism – I have possession of the Ultimate Truth, it cannot be questioned or criticised, etc.
In all cases, evolutionary thinking emphasises the importance of time and context, whereas in essentialism there are timeless and context-free truths or states. However, we should note that Aristotelian “time” is evolutionist – being merely the changes in relations among things – whereas Newtonian Time is essentialist – being an independent absolute “clock” that proceeds independently of any actual change. As we’re going to see, this apparently antithetical relationship between evolutionist and essentialist perspectives or “stances” exists all over the philosophical map.
Buddhism and Hinduism
If we look back on major philosophical traditions in both East and West, we can easily locate examples. In India, one of the great wellsprings of world philosophy, this dynamic is epitomised by the contrast between the orthodox Hindu schools and Buddhism. We must note here that Buddhism and Hinduism are both extremely diverse traditions, and, share a common ancestry (in “Vedic philosophy” more broadly) and have transferred concepts between them horizontally since the inception of Buddhism some 2500 years ago (note, in particular, the influence of Mahayana Buddhism on Advaita Vedanta). If we superficially understand them as two distinct traditions, we might say that they have been constantly involved in a fruitful dialectic since that time, which is precisely why they are a useful point of reference for the broader dialectic between essentialism and evolutionism. Buddhism is (and yes, I’m massively over-simplifying here) in some sense a sceptical, anti-essentialist (i.e. evolutionist) reaction to orthodox Hindu beliefs. The classic example of this concerns the doctrine of anātman (anattā), which is typically translated as “not-self”. This doctrine is a negation of the doctrine of ātman – the view that every “individual” contains its own essence, its “Self” (ātman), which is a sliver of the divine ground of being (the divine Self), Brahman. For Buddhism, this is a fantasy, there are no essential selves of any kind (“all things are not-self”) because all things are formed (entirely) by context – they are the products of “dependent origination”. This means they have no independent reality, but only exist by virtue of their relationship with other things.
Another way of putting this is to contrast the assertion that relationships are formed from relata (things that relate) with its antithesis, that relata are formed from relationships. In the former, “things” are primary, they have independent existence, and then they enter in relationships with other things. In the latter, relationships are primary, and “things” only emerge as entities as a consequence of relationships (you may well ask what these primal relationships exist between…..and then be told to stop being such an essentialist!). These are complex ideas and I’m not going to unpack them here; my primary intention is to use them as examples of the antithetical relationship between essentialist and evolutionist thought.
Heraclitus and Parmenides
In ancient Greece, this dynamic is (at least doxographically – in the classificatory systems of historians) epitomised by the twin poles of Parmenides (in the essentialist corner) and Heraclitus (in the evolutionist corner). These two are often heralded as amongst the most important of the “pre-Socratic” philosophers. Indeed, each of them has been hailed as the “true father” of all western thought/philosophy/science, which may be a hint that the essentialist-evolutionist cat fight is alive and well in modern scholarship. As is the case for other pre-Socratic philosophers, we know Parmenides and Heraclitus primarily through surviving fragments of their poetic writings, so it can be hard to determine exactly what each of them was trying to say, let alone what they “really believed”. Predictably, there is considerable squabbling in academic circles over interpretation of their texts. Regardless, there is general agreement that Heraclitus was the champion of “eternal flux”, who famously said that “you can never step in the same river twice” (the river and you have both changed between your first and second steps); and that Parmenides asserted that nothing ever changes, not really.
The laws of physics – timeless or evolved?
So, there seems to be something fairly basic about the opposition between these two modes of thinking. As mentioned, both are very much alive and well in contemporary discourse. In theoretical physics, a view in which the laws are timeless is contrasted with a view in which they themselves evolved (see e.g., Lee Smolin’s work). A slightly different notion is that the laws as we know them are particular patterns that we pick out from a much richer (or more “chaotic”, in the colloquial sense) background. This perspective, known as conventionalism, emphasises the contingent nature of the “laws of physics” – they are contingent upon us (as the organisms that “discover” them) being the kinds of organisms that we are. Such a view might be described as “Kantian” (after titanic philosopher Immanuel Kant) and it has deep consonances with the way we understand perception in cognitive science. It’s also being explored in Stephen Wolfram’s new computational physics project.
Mathematics – invented or discovered….or both?
There’s a related question about the origins of mathematics – was it “discovered, or invented”? Here again we see the essentialist and evolutionist poles. If it was discovered it has a timeless, independent existence. If it was invented it’s conventional, contingent upon us as inventors – it’s a tool and tools are not timeless, they are evolutionary traits (more on this here). On the other hand, if the laws of physics describe patterns that we pick out from a larger whole then mathematics (at least so far as physics is concerned) may be thought of as both discovered and invented. The patterns are actual, otherwise they wouldn’t afford us a grip on reality, and this means that we discovered them. However, had we been slightly different organisms, or had the history of physics (as a discipline) been slightly different, we might have discovered different(but no less actual) patterns…so in a sense the specific laws we use were invented, they are specific to the human biological and cultural context.
Essentialist fallacies and being an evolutionist about evolutionism
As an evolutionary biologist and a thoroughgoing advocate of evolutionary (processual) thinking, my heroes have tended to be evolutionists – Buddha, Nagarjuna, Heraclitus, Epicurus, Darwin, Whitehead, Popper, etc. Or at least they have tended to be thinkers in whom I have perceived a strong evolutionary intuition. But, of course, I have also been deeply attracted to many thinkers more typically associated with essentialist perspectives. On the whole I think I have been more sensitive to what I have perceived as “essentialist fallacies” – naïve Platonism; naïve realism (which is somewhat antithetical to Platonism!), and perhaps above all, literalism, which I consider to be an exceptionally widespread and “dangerous” (sometimes literally – ha!) delusion. Literalism is basically confusing something – like a model, map, or metaphor – that stands for something else with the thing that it stands for. What I’m calling naïve Platonism (because I want to distinguish it from all the glorious contributions Plato and Platonism have made) is imagining phenomena that are well-described by mathematical models/equations are mathematical in essence. This is often referred to as “confusing map with territory” – maps are extremely useful guides or descriptions, but they are not the things that they describe, which typically have many properties that the map does not have. Very simple “things” are often very accurately described or even dynamically predicted (as in “predictive models”) by mathematical equations (or computational models), but it’s still a fallacy to imagine that such descriptions are complete. Literalism is also particularly common in the usage of natural language – we imagine that words are the things they stand for (as opposed to being fundamentally metaphorical), or even that words have fixed/definite meanings that transcend context. This is not so – meaning is always context-specific (indeed a community of language users who define meaning is such a context).
Another form of “confusing map with territory” is taking a concept (which is a heuristic), and then confusing it with something actual that it applies to and subsumes. There are a number of words for this kind of practice, all of which are most commonly used derogatorily – “reifying” (making real); “hypostasising” (positing an underlying essence or substance); “concretising” (making, uh, concrete). The process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead liked to speak of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” – attributing definite, concrete reality to that which is merely a map/model/description. This is all well and good, confusing map with territory is fallacious and is absolutely rife at all levels of human discourse, from the popular to the rarefied air of theoretical physics (where it’s particularly on the nose). The thing is, it’s entirely possible to “reify” evolutionary concepts, too. To really be a thorough-going evolutionist means thinking evolutionarily about evolution, being sceptical about scepticism, Darwinian about Darwinism, etc. Ironically, being truly evolutionary in our thinking means admitting that some essentialist maps absolutely have their uses, and indeed might be far more useful than their evolutionary counterparts in some contexts. In other contexts, the two “poles” must exist side by side – each stance has something important to offer.
Creation myths – both evolutionary and essentialist
Consider the structure of creation myths. These are fundamentally (and we should always raise our eyebrows at this essentialist word, of course) evolutionary tales, right? In fact, myths and narratives in general are evolutionary in form – change and development tend to occur in them, after all (or they’d be quite boring). A creation myth seems quintessentially evolutionary – it’s a story about how the deep past transformed into the present, or at least about how that process of transformation began. On the other hand, creation myths are also about beginnings, and beginnings seem to have a slightly fishy, slightly essentialist odour to them. They are Ultimate, in some sense. Actually, a typical creation myth starts with a “ground of being” – for example a God, an egg, or an arena in which things start happening (the world starts flowing up out of the ground, or down from the sky). Where does this primitive (or prime mover) come from? Nowhere. It’s timeless. Essential. Clever atheists understand this as the “problem of infinite regress” that logically refutes creation myths. They might, however, think that “science” has solved this problem. It hasn’t. The problem of infinite regress refutes beginnings of any kind and has nothing to do with God or the supernatural. So, in a creation myth (and yes, this includes the Big Bang model and the simulation hypothesis) there must always be both an essential and an evolutionary element. The (logically, if not ontologically) timeless Ground, and the evolutionary story of what emerged from that to become our universe.
Literalism in evolutionism
What about literalism in evolutionary philosophies? It’s rife. Think of anātman – this doctrinaire refutation of essence, of Self, is often taken to mean that “there is no such thing as self”, as in “self” of any kind – “self” is an illegitimate word. Humans have no selves. Animals have no selves. Rocks have no selves. In some sense perhaps there are no individuals of any kind, because of dependent origination (nothing has “own being”, it exists by virtue of relationships). “Self” is a word, though, and it means a lot of things. There are at least half a dozen different things or processes (which are inherently evolutionary) this word is used to refer to in cognitive science. We mustn’t be literalist about the word “self” – it’s a perfectly useful word. We can say that essential, timeless, static, selves that are slivers of the ground of being probably don’t exist, but that’s different from concretising the concept of self in order to refute it.
In fact, this stipulative concretising is something we do all the time in debate. We literalise a term – “x means y” – and then demonstrate that y doesn’t exist/is fallacious, and thus, quod errat demonstrandum, x is meaningless because it refers to a non-entity. We need several essentialist moves in order to prove our point – proof is an essentialist notion in itself! As for there being individuals or not, this is all a matter of levels of description. It’s generally not useful to think of the cells of a multicellular organism as individuals, after all, their functions are in service of the organism as a whole. But what about single-celled organisms? They are effectively described as individuals. What about social organisms? Is an ant an individual, or is the colony the individual? What about humans? We’re greatly enamoured of the individualist perspective in today’s day and age, but what would we be without our cultures, our societies, even our friends and families? No man is an island. The level one chooses to identify as the individual entirely depends on the question one is asking, i.e. on the level at which one is describing the system.
Absolute negation and finding the middle path
The truth is that evolutionism and essentialism are like chaos and order. We need a balance of the two poles in our thinking in order to be able to reason at all. If your thought is constantly in flux at all levels you will be completely unable to formulate an argument, indeed completely unable to function. If your thought is completely concretised and hypostasised, well, good luck learning anything. Naturally, as an “evolutionist” (not that I want to be an “-ist” of any kind, such labels smack of essentialism!), I generally feel as though essentialism is the bigger problem and we need to combat literalism wherever it rears its (ugly!) head. But then again, relativism, which is a kind of fundamentalist evolutionism, is certainly something all thinking beings need to combat.
When you dig down deeply enough into conceptual antitheses, you often find paradox – you cannot have one thesis without the other. This is also an ancient insight that has been recovered time and again. Think of yin and yang – concepts presuppose their opposites. In Hegelian philosophy there is the idea of “absolute negation”. Hegel’s evolutionary dialectic has been characterised as having the structure of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”. One starts with a particular idea, then the antithesis presupposed by the original idea becomes apparent, then progress is made by merging the two ideas. “Absolute negation” treats the “synthesis” as “the negation of the negation”, i.e. the antithesis negates the thesis, and then absolute negation negates the antithesis, prompting a return to the thesis, which has been transformed by the dialectic process. Rinse and repeat. This seems like a place where the most erudite and esoteric of philosophy converges with the most beautiful and relatable of poetry, as in this sumptuous line from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
By our powers combined
This idea of the union of opposites creating something novel – a “higher” level born of integration – also features in the work of another evolutionary thinker who has frequently been accused of being an essentialist: Carl Jung. Individuation, in Jungian psychology, is a process in which one becomes one’s own “intelligent designer” – the individual takes responsibility for their own development into a unique being. Sounds pretty evolutionary; after all, development is the evolution of an individual, as opposed to a lineage. On the other hand, some critics have felt that it presupposes the idea of a unique individual that one is somehow “destined” to become, if only one can get out of one’s own way. That sounds a bit essentialist. Moreover, Jung’s concept of the “archetypes”, given that they are apparently timeless patterns of psychic energies shared by all people, can seem pretty essentialist. The “collective unconscious”, which is composed of the archetypes and all that we inherit psychologically from our ancestors – basically the structures of the psyche that are determined by the type of organism we are, i.e. by our evolutionary history – seems to combine evolutionist and essentialist thinking. Which is probably because it does. We should note here that Jung himself explicitly stated that the archetypes cannot be accurately or completely described – we should not confuse a map (like Zeus!) with territory. Archetypes are somewhat timeless (or at least ancient) patterns of energy in the human psyche, but their representations in myths and religions (and elsewhere) are entirely contingent on the culture that gives them form.
The empirical and the imaginal
The thing is, when we open our eyes and ears and attend as closely as possible to the raw empirical data we see everything changing, constantly. But in order to get a grip on that constant flux, we need categories, theories, maps. We need to detect patterns in order to be able to interact with the world. This is what our nervous system does – it is a pattern-recognising, theory-forming system that allows us to detect affordances, ways of interacting with the world. This is a thoroughly evolutionary process, but it involves the creation of relatively stable models. Raw sensory data is extremely noisy – resolving signal from noise is a process of (contingent) essentialising. For this reason, when we become very still and look inside ourselves, sealing ourselves off from incoming sense data and allowing consciousness to interact with itself (pure reflexive awareness, etc.) we encounter a world of Forms (Plato), of Archetypes (Jung). This is the imaginal world, and it’s no less “real” than the empirical world.
What we experience in “normal” consciousness is a combination of models/theories (top-down constraints) and sensory data (bottom-up constraints) which “collaborate” to create the world – the Umwelt, as the post-Kantian philosopher of biology Jakob von Uexküll calls it. The “gain” (i.e. its relative influence on the formation of percepts) on one or the other source of information is constantly being adjusted. When we turn down the gain on the top-down models and open ourselves to maximal input from the external world (as in open-monitoring meditation and flow states), our “priors” (again, the models of the world we are “running” on our “necktops”) get updated rapidly, giving us higher-fidelity perceptions of the state of the external world. Conversely, when we disconnect ourselves from the external world and turn our cognitive modelling processes inwards on themselves in certain forms of contemplative meditation (or in isolation tanks), we enter the imaginal realm with its “timeless” qualities.
Perspective and frames of reference
So, essentialism and evolutionism turn out to be products of perspective – dependent on the frame of reference one chooses, which is (hopefully) influenced by the kind of question one is trying to ask. In orthodox Hindu schools such as Vedanta (which, particularly the “non-dual” – Advaita – school, is deeply influenced by Buddhism), there is an emphasis on finding the divine ground of being within oneself and experiencing the integration of the “petty I” with that timeless field of consciousness. In Buddhism, there is perhaps more emphasis on directing the attention outwards in meditation (though of course they love the imaginal realm too), decreasing the gain on top-down models and recognising the impermanent and contingent nature of all things, which not only will pass, but are passing. Heraclitus, perhaps, was a man of the empirical world, one of the founders of the western tradition of empiricism. Parmenides, on the other hand, who was a priest of Apollo and practiced the contemplative interiorising known as “incubation”, was a man of the imaginal realm. Each of them (much like Vedanta and Buddhism) have contributed exceptional riches to the history of human cultural evolution. One might even say that these contributions are “timeless” ;).
If you enjoy this kind of philosophising, subscribe to the blog – there will be lots more articles about evolutionism and essentialism in future. Some planned pieces include:
The debate between Perennialism (essentialist) and Constructivism (evolutionist) is the philosophy of relgion
Essentialism and evolutionism in theoretical physics
“Hierarchies of constraint” – evolved patterns that essentially constraint the evolution of future patterns
Ontological versus cognitive (logical) essentialism
Painting: “Ouroboros” By Genevieve Camille Jackson
The unending process is the evolution of everything, which takes place at multiple scales:
The evolution of the cosmos, the universe, the All
The evolution of the biosphere
The evolution of organismal lineages
The evolution of human culture
The evolution of human knowledge
The evolution of the individual
All of these (and others) are part of the unending process and each of them is, in its own way, unending. I’m something of an “evolutionist” (but don’t label me, bro!), and I believe the best scientific evidence and philosophical arguments indicate that the evolution of the universe is open-ended. Perhaps even more importantly, I believe that the future is open. The future is built from the past and the past constrains the future, but it does not determine it. At some point, in future articles/videos/lectures, we can dive into the nitty gritty of metaphysical determinism and why I reject it as a scientifically or philosophically viable hypothesis. For now, suffice it to say that my main concern is functional philosophy – philosophy that is useful, i.e. that can be fruitfully lived…..and that makes “hard determinism” pretty unattractive.
Now, you might well argue that some of the sub-processes I’ve mentioned above will come to an end at some point – it’s really only the whole shebang that is literally “unending”. Fair enough, but from our limited perspective there are salient reasons to consider these sub-processes (as good as) unending:
The evolution of the biosphere will be unending so long as our planet remains hospitable to bios – which originally meant (in Greek) the course of a human life (now, of course, we use it to mean life in general).
Organismal lineages continue to evolve until they go extinct.
No one really takes claims that history (and “human ideological evolution”) ended with the Cold War seriously anymore – human culture will go on evolving as long as there are humans.
The evolution of human knowledge is also open-ended – we will never know all there is to know. In fact, it’s questionable whether or not we can ever “know” anything with certainty. We’ll be talking plenty about fallibilism and evolutionary epistemology in future articles/videos/lectures.
Individual evolution is also (potentially) open-ended in important ways. Without a doubt, neuroplasticity declines as we mature and people become increasingly “set in their ways” – there are evolutionary reasons for this that we’ll discuss later. On the other hand, if you look at traditions that have been concerned with the “intelligent design” of personal evolution – that is taking an active and expansively rational interest in one’s own development (which is a form of evolution) in ways that allow one a certain degree of control over it – they tend to treat personal evolution as an unending process. Some examples:
Individuation in Jungian psychology is a lifelong process without an end point
The path towards enlightenment in (at least some lineages of) Buddhism is a lifelong process without an end point
The journey to the One in Neoplatonism is also not something that is ever “completed” within a lifetime
It might be argued that “enlightenment” and “communion with the One” are states, not processes. These are alternate views and both have merit. As states, however, they are transitory, not stable (the neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus only reached his highest state of realisation four times in his life). Regardless, when considered as processes, they are not only open-ended, they are non-linear. Jung described individuation as a “circumambulation of the Self”. You don’t just identify your goal and move straight towards it. Individuation, seeking enlightenment, etc, are paths one follows in order to gain knowledge and ultimately wisdom. How could you have knowledge of the goal of achieving more knowledge/wisdom before you achieve it?
Of course (depending on what you believe), just as organismal lineages go extinct, just as the planet will eventually become inhospitable to life, personal evolution comes to an end at the time of your death. No matter your thoughts on the afterlife, however, there are ways in which parts of us continue on after our bodies (and the psyches they support) cease to be animated. Trivially, your constituent atoms will be recycled by other components of the unending process (waste not, want not). Perhaps you’ll pass on “your” (or rather your lineage’s) genes, maybe even some unique mutations (“you” have no influence over these) or epigenetic modifications (you might have influenced these) that didn’t exist before you but may continue to exist for millennia after your death. Maybe your contributions to the “memesphere” – the ideas you created or inflected, or the ways you helped spread other people’s ideas (for better or worse) – will have some (probably small!) influence on cultural evolution. Regardless, your life will leave some impression on the unfolding of the unending process long after you’ve gone – it’s a participatory process, and we’re all in this together.
On a personal level, the “unending process” is the name of a new series of podcasts, articles, YouTube videos, and lectures I’m putting together. It’s part of my personal evolution and perhaps it will be part of yours, too.
What’s the content going to be like? I’m kind of an eclectic – a jack of all trades (and indeed a master of none). Specialisation has never appealed. Having said that, I do tend to view the world through an evolutionary lens. In my day job, I’m an evolutionary biologist and toxinologist studying the evolution of venom systems and using them as a model system for understanding the evolution of novelty more broadly. I also do research on venomous injuries (e.g. snakebite) and the development/refinement of therapeutics for treating these injuries (e.g. antivenoms). Venoms are also a great source of novel molecules for drug design and discovery, so I collaborate with pharmacologists and lecture to pharmacology students on biodiscovery. My PhD is in evolutionary biology and philosophy of science, and my philosophical passions are broad, so we’ll be going deep there. The first degree I completed (not the first I began, mind you) was a music degree, so expect a lot of music content. I’m currently studying neuroscience and psychology, so there will be plenty of content on the mind (and isn’t it all really “in the mind”, after all? Read Kant before you say “no!”). Ultimately, this means that the content of the “unending process” is going to be the unending process itself – the evolution of everything. I hope you find it useful.
A: “Oh? As simple as that? So……can we go home now?”
B: Slow down – sometimes simple explanations are the hardest to understand – so let me unpack this one a bit.
Evolution is the ubiquitous process through which all that was came to be all that is, and through which all that is will become all that will be. That might seem cryptic or hand-wavy, but it’s just a simple statement. Evolution is prosaic.
Evolution is not “natural selection”. Natural selection is not a “type” of evolution. Natural selection is a particular kind of constraint that shapes the consequences of evolution in biological systems. It is not the only kind of constraint that shapes biological evolution, but it’s an important one. Natural selection is one of the best ideas ever produced by hairless apes, because it explains why some of the results of evolution look the way they do (to us).
Evolution is just descent with modification. The future states of a system depend upon (are descended from) prior states. Systems (ones that are actual) are not static – future states are different from prior states. That is evolution: breathtakingly simple and utterly universal.
There are those that wish to defend the word “evolution” from this interpretation, as though it might be tarnished by it. “Following this argument,” they (might) say, “the weathering of a rock, its transformation from a boulder into sand, would be considered its ‘evolution’.” Indeed. As would the transformation of the sand back into rock, were that the sand’s fate. Evolution is prosaic.
“Change is the only constant.” A truism that happens to be true. Aristotle thought that the default state for all things was for them to be at rest. He thought energy had to enter a system in order for movement to be initiated. He used this logic to construct his “prime mover”, or “unmoved mover”, argument. Aristotle was wrong. Heraclitus (a precursor of Aristotle) was closer when he said “everything is in flux and nothing is at rest”. Modern physics refutes Aristotle’s argument – at the “bottom” all is change, all is movement. In fact, Aristotle had it precisely backwards – “energy” is required to prevent change, not to cause it, and even then it’s just a temporary preservation of some “pattern” or another. “All patterns are ephemeral!”, cries the evolutionist.
A: A bit morbid, these evolutionists…
B: Death and taxes, my friend.
Anyway, change is constant, but not all change is permissible, because future states descend from prior states. Future states are constrained by prior states. Evolution, as manifest in the actual universe, is a process that takes place across time. Yes my dear, time is real! The past constrains the future and the deepest level at which we can observe this is by considering the laws of physics themselves. Since evolution is a process in time, if evolution is ubiquitous time must be fundamental and the laws of physics therefore cannot be “outside time”. Lee Smolin hits the nail on the noggin: the laws of physics evolved. Once evolved, they constrained all future evolution. They are one of the earliest “selection pressures”.
A: Why don’t the laws of physics keep evolving then?
B: Huh? I dunno….maybe they do, but maybe they are heavily constrained by something else. I didn’t claim to know everything…..and I was on a roll, do you have to keep interrupting?
A: Sorry….
B: “That’s OK, it was a good question. Anyway, let me sum this up so we can get on with our lives:
Evolution is like this: change is constant, but every system has a set of degrees of freedom which constrain its possible future states. These are the selection pressures or “principles of selection”, or whatever semantically isomorphic phrase one wishes to coin. Different systems….
A: Semantically what?
B: “Semantically isomorphic” – it just means a different choice of words with the same meaning.
A: Well why didn’t you just say that?
B: I think my facial expression says it all right now. Aaaaaanyway:
Different systems have different principles of selection (and working these out is the hard, explanatory task of the evolutionary sciences). Selection pressures themselves evolve, of course, and the laws of physics are an example. The biological sciences have identified thousands of examples, some of which constitute “natural selection”. Systems of ethics are another example – they evolved and they constrain future evolution.
Got it?
A: Sorry what? I was just checking my Instagram feed…
B: Ah. Fair enough I guess. Have you ever read any Marx?
A: Huh? I thought we were done with all this intellectualising once you got through the evolution schtick?
B: We are, but this is funny – one of Marx’s most famous slogans was “permanent revolution!”; little did he know that reality was in a state of permanent Evolution!
A: “That’s not funny.”
B: “Oh.”
– TNWJ
NB.
This piece was originally published on my new blog Sympathetic People which is a collaboration with Johanahan Coludar. The Sympathetic People blog is also the home of the Permanent Evolution Podcast – please check it out and follow it!
It’s forbidden in their world you see. Not for ethical reasons, but because of the risk of overpopulation. If nobody dies…
They haven’t solved the problem of overpopulation?
They have not. Resources remain finite. Space remains finite. Overcrowding…
So they haven’t mastered simulation? World building?
No. Their simulation technology is not sufficiently advanced for people to live full-time within simulated worlds. One reason for that is the amount of power running simulations of such complexity requires. And issues with failsafe technology. But they are really not so different to us in some ways either, you know. Their scientists also have to contend with irrational red tape blocking certain types of research, so they’re not as advanced as they might be. Arbitrary ideologically motivated rules are equally stifling in all worlds.
Indeed. Let’s return to the subject…
Immortality? Yes, they have achieved it. They can stop ageing, prevent all disease, prevent death by trauma. But their own age limit is capped at 120. Once they reach that limit, they are humanely euthanised.
Is there any resistance to that?
I don’t believe so. The date of their death is set at the moment of their birth, so they live their entire lives with that knowledge and have plenty of time to come to terms with it. They are instilled with a keen understanding of social contract theory – make certain sacrifices to enjoy certain privileges. The price of having a life free of the fear of sudden, unexpected death is expected death. Anyway, although it’s strictly prohibited for them to create immortals in their own world, that law doesn’t extend to other worlds.
Such as our world.
Correct. Ours and perhaps others, I don’t know.
How they do it? How do they beat death?
I don’t know, I’ve already told you that. If I knew I wouldn’t be dying, would I? I’ve spent my life trying to understand it and all I’ve managed to do is shorten it.
Your life?
Yes.
You’re dying because of your research?
Yes. You can’t make too many mistakes when you are experimenting on yourself. Studying death is an efficient way to cause it.
What have you done to yourself?
Many things. Mostly protein engineering and tampering with gene expression. Now it’s all out of balance. I’m poisoning myself with the products of my own mutant genes. I’ve accomplished one thing though in my attempts to emulate their achievements.
What’s that?
An accurate prediction of the hour of my own death.
Oh…
I’m on the clock now, that’s why I agreed to this interview. People should know. People must know.
When will you die?
Tonight. Perhaps tomorrow morning.
Are you sure? You look healthy enough to me.
My pancreas and liver are producing enzymes in toxic quantities, poisoning themselves and my other organs. I’m digesting my own muscle mass. Already my kidneys are beginning to clog with cellular debris. It’s a chain reaction in a system far from equilibrium. My organs will begin to fail tonight sometime between 10 PM and 12 AM.
Can’t you do anything?
No.
I see. I’m sorry. Surely…
No, there is nothing. But people must know. Someone must find him.
Who?
The immortal living in our world. Their experiment.
There’s only one?
To my knowledge, yes. They may have other experiments, other treatment groups, in other worlds. In ours there is just one. They watch him. They’ve been watching him for thousands of years.
Thousands?
Yes. He is ancient.
Why have they done this?
To see. To see how one immortal would live, alone in a world of mortals. To see what influence he would have on their evolution. Our evolution. The evolution of our culture, our knowledge, our consciousness, of humanity itself. Would he hide? Would he take control of his world’s destiny? Would he make himself into a god?
Well… he has hidden. That’s the answer to their question…right?
I thought that too. I thought he was a coward, thought he had influenced nothing, changed nothing.
And now?
Now I know.
Know what?
He has changed everything.
***
Early this morning, prominent scientist Dr. Michael Bosnich died of multiple organ failure, apparently as the result of experiments conducted on himself in an attempt to end the process of aging. Sources close to Dr. Bosnich say that as his body failed, so too did his mind and his final hours were spent in raving delusion, asserting fantasies such as the existence of parallel worlds, immortals, and advanced beings conducting experiments on the evolution of humanity. His family asks that members of the public respect their privacy at this time and remember Dr. Bosnich as a great scientist who made important contributions to the field of genomic disease research. In keeping with their wishes, we have decided to withhold publication of the transcript of his final interview.
In a previous post, I pointed out that evolution is an observable fact, similar to the observable fact (for example) that there are rocks and a dog in my garden (if you don’t trust the photo, come over and I’ll show you). I also differentiated between the fact of biological evolution and modern science’s best explanation of its mechanism – the Theory of Natural Selection.
Towards the end of the (very brief) post, I stated that the fact of evolution and the ability of the Theory of Natural Selection to explain it do not disprove the existence of a creator. I also stated that evolution does not only occur in biological systems and listed a few “other” systems in which it occurs. I misspoke in one of these assertions – it’s certainly true that evolution occurs in non-biological systems, but the examples I gave (language, culture and anthropogenic technologies) were all biological systems….my bad.
Regardless, it seems some critics of the piece didn’t read all the way to the end, because a number of responses on social media (and one here) suggest that people felt that claiming evolution as a fact threatened their beliefs. Does it?
Evolution is (again) “descent with modification”. It occurs in non-biological systems, such as (a better example!) the universe (or multiverse, megaverse, or whatever your preferred flavour of “….verse”). One of the products of this cosmological evolution is biology, but the evolution of the universe as a whole is not a biological process. In this context, what “evolution” means is that the future states of the universe are dependent upon (because descended from) past states. Every time the universe changes, it doesn’t blink out of existence and get rebuilt from scratch in a nanosecond – new states are always “built from” old states. This is the same in biological evolution of course and is one of the reasons there is so much evidence of past evolution present in the world today in the form of shared DNA. This is the evidence that allows Richard Dawkins to say “…when you eat fish and chips you are eating distant cousin fish and even more distant cousin potato.”
Some might say that calling the history of the universe its “evolution” dilutes the meaning of the word beyond recognition, but there are actually some deep similarities between cosmological and biological evolution, including the creation of order from chance variation (there are plenty of great authors to read on this topic, e.g., David Christian, Paul Davies, Lawrence Krauss and Seth Lloyd). In this way both the evolution of the universe and the evolution of biological systems are fundamentally different from the weathering of rocks in my garden, which it might be a stretch to refer to as their “evolution” from rocks into sand (although we might have an interesting discussion about that sometime – you bring the beer).
In the range of biological systems currently present in our little corner of the universe, a number of forms of evolution are in operation, including but not limited to natural selection. Evolution can proceed according to the selection of a designer or designers, as is the case for the evolution of tools and technologies such as the computer on which you’re reading this, and the evolution of artificially selected “cultivars” such as Australian Shepherd dogs (like Keneally in my garden). It can proceed without the need for a designer, as in standard natural selection. It can proceed through a combined process of designer-driven and designer-less selection, as in the evolution of a language, in which two forms of designer-less selection occur – natural selection (on us, the organisms that use the words) and memetic selection (on the words themselves) – along with the directed selection of words and conventions for their use by designers (e.g., the Académie française). Evolution can even occur in the absence of any selection pressure at all, as in genetic drift.
The principal belief system threatened by acknowledgement of the fact of evolution is Essentialism, which is essentially (hah!) the doctrine that things have an immutable essence from which they cannot change significantly and to which they always return. The most influential proponent of Essentialism in the history of Western Thought was Plato. Needless (hopefully) to say – Plato was not a Christian. Platonic Essentialism was very influential on Christian theology, but Christians are certainly not committed to it. Multiple Popes have acknowledged the fact of evolution (http://time.com/3545844/pope-francis-evolution-creationism/). In 2014, Pope Francis (though he wasn’t the first to say something of the sort) said “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.” – even the faith can evolve.
Those who acknowledge the fact of evolution and believe in a creator and those who acknowledge the fact of evolution and see no need for a creator differ in that the latter apply (or apply correctly) a simple logical principle – Occam’s Razor. Those who do not acknowledge the fact of evolution are wrong (sorry!). The principle of Occam’s Razor is often misunderstood as “the simplest explanation is always the best”. This misunderstanding often leads to “arguments” of the “God did it. Boom!” variety. This is silly because an omnipotent and omniscient creator is hardly simple. Regardless, Occam’s Razor is actually the maxim “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”. In modern scientific terms, this might be translated as “do not postulate additional causes when sufficient causes have already been identified”. Colloquially, this translates as “don’t make stuff up”. Occam’s Razor is a very useful principle but there is no external agent (like a God, for example) that says you must apply it. You can choose not to – you can acknowledge the fact of evolution (and the presence of rocks in my garden) and leave your belief in a creator untouched….if you really want to.
As covered in my previous post, evolution is an observable fact. So what’s the “Theory of Evolution” then?
“Theory of Evolution” is essentially just another name for the “Theory of Natural Selection”.
Like evolution, gravity is an observable fact. In normal conditions we don’t find ourselves floating away from the ground; we find ourselves sticking to it. If we’re unlucky we find the ground rushing towards us very fast. Gravity is not a theory.
The “Theory of Gravity” is a theory that explains how and why gravity operates. More correctly, it’s the “Theory of General Relativity” that explains the how and why of gravitation. The “Law of Universal Gravitation” describes the observable facts of gravity.
What’s in a name? Why do some people like to say “Theory of Gravity” or “Theory of Evolution”? I don’t know; maybe it’s because they’re simpler than “Theory of General Relativity” and “Theory of Natural Selection”, both of which might sound more technical or ambiguous.
What’s the difference between the modern “Theory of Evolution” and Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) “Theory of Natural Selection”? Not a lot, really – some might say “Theory of Evolution” encompasses what’s known as the “Modern Synthesis” or “Neo-Darwinian Synthesis”.
The Modern Synthesis brings together evidence from all the fields of biology including population genetics, which didn’t exist when Darwin formulated his theory (he wasn’t even aware of Mendel’s early genetic research when he published). Critically, the Modern Synthesis demonstrates that all the evidence from these diverse fields corroborates the Theory of Natural Selection.
The modern theory is therefore the same as the original (Darwinian) theory – it’s still the Theory of Natural Selection (a rose by any other name…).
Calling the Theory of Natural Selection the “Theory of Evolution” is like calling the Theory of General Relativity the “Theory of Gravity” – it’s a simplification or a colloquialism.
Don’t get confused – evolution is not a theory.
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” – Theodosius Dobzhansky (Eminent geneticist, evolutionary biologist and co-formulator of the Modern Synthesis)
Evolution is “descent with modification”; it is an observable fact.
Darwin did not “invent” the concept of evolution, it has been present in both Western and Eastern thought for at least 2500 years.
The primary alternative to belief in evolution prior to its establishment as a fact was Essentialism (or “Special Creation”) – the belief that all organisms contain an immutable “essence” granted them by a creator.
A classic example of observable evolution in a biological system is the phenomenon of multi-drug resistant bacteria (“super bugs”) such as Staphylococcus aureus (golden staph).
Another example of observable evolution in a biological system is selective breeding – evolution driven by artificial selection.
Facts and theories differ in science in that the latter are explanations for the former.
Darwin and Wallace’s “Theory of Natural Selection” explains the fact of evolution by elucidating a mechanism for evolutionary change in biological systems.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed an alternative theory as an explanation for the fact of evolution; it was published in 1809 – 50 years before Darwin’s “On The Origin of Species”.
One way of testing the accuracy of a theory is by comparing its predictions to observable facts. Almost every observable fact from palaeontology, physiology, embryology, biochemistry and genetics matches up with the Theory of Natural Selection; those that do not are explainable as different forms of evolution (e.g., “genetic drift”).
The fact of evolution and the robustness of the Theory of Natural Selection do not disprove the existence of a creator; they just render it unnecessary.
Evolution is not unique to biological systems – it also occurs in language, culture and all anthropogenic technologies.
The Unending Process 