Aching Voids and Making Voids

By Daniel C. Dennett. 2013

A review of Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. By Terrence W. Deacon. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95. xvii 602 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-393-04991-6. 2012. Suppose a robot exploring an apparently uninhabited planet sent us back photographs of two items found on a beach: something that looked like a clamshell and something that looked like a clam rake—iron tines, wooden handle. Both objects are highly improbable from the perspective of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They both imply makers. The clamshell-maker (a clam, or something of that ilk) must have been alive, and the clam rake-maker must have been not just alive, but something of a thinker. We would have found clear evidence of advanced intelligence on that planet. This is all intuitively obvious, perhaps, but can the principles behind these intuitions be explicitly articulated and marshaled into a theory that takes us all the way from the Second Law to conscious thought? Terrence Deacon gives it a fascinating try in this hugely ambitious book. He is the latest—and best, in my opinion— participant in a tug of war that has been going on since Descartes put forward his mechanistic theory of the body and dualistic theory of the mind in the 17th century. The unbridgeable gulf between Descartes’s two “substances” has not gone away, but in many regards the gap has been narrowed, as players on both sides of this opponent process have discarded unsupportable overstatements. The simplistic mechanism of Hobbes and La Mettrie, and Skinnerian behaviorism, have been largely abandoned on one side, while dualism and élan vital have been largely banished from the other (except among philosophers). But there are still potent manifestations of unresolved conflict. A recent Dilbert cartoon showed Dilbert opining: “Free will is an illusion. Human beings are nothing but moist robots. Just relax and let it happen.” Are we “nothing but” moist robots? And if we are, does that have bleak implications for our sense of autonomy, our sense that our lives of striving can have meaning? Alternatively, if the computational perspective “leaves something out,” just what is it that is missing, and is it really important? There are no entirely apt labels for the opposing sides of this gulf, since the ongoing controversy turns every battle cry into a derogatory term for the other side. Reductionism, fie! Holism, fie! “Enlightenment” versus “Romanticism” is pretty close, as the reader can judge by considering what the following team players have in common; on the Enlightenment side: Darwin, Turing, Minsky, Dawkins, both Crick and Edelman (in spite of their antagonisms), Tibor Gánti, E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and both Raymond Kurzweil and me (in spite of our antagonisms). On the Romantic side are arrayed Romanes and Baldwin, Kropotkin, Stephen Jay Gould, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Stuart Kauffman, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigogine, Rupert Sheldrake, and the philosophers