Books I'm Reading

This week I finished reading Berkeley scientist Terrance Deacon's new book: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. With 624 pages of careful and often intense descriptions of the dynamics of emergence, this book took a bit of mental effort to grok. And although it was infuriating at times, the required effort was worthwhile.

Deacon is clearly a brilliant thinker, and his good faith and honesty shine through in his writing. The best part of the book is his elaboration of the multilevel process of emergence. And if Deacon had left it at that, it would have been completely satisfying.

Where this book fails, in my opinion, is in its larger attempt to rescue materialist metaphysics from the inevitable credibility crisis it is now entering. Deacon sides with his materialist colleagues in asserting that consciousness and values "must be physical." And he authoritatively assures us that thinking of human will as somehow "free" is a mistake; it's just the capacity to do work.

Sometimes the most subversive arguments against an ideology come from within that ideology, and Deacon does an excellent job of showing the falsehoods of Richard Dawkins style naive physicalism. Yet even as Deacon proposes a more sophisticated form of materialism that claims to explain the causal efficacy of "teleodynamic self-organization" (i.e. human mind), he ultimately falls prey to the same flattened metaphysical limitations that he claims to have transcended.

This is not an academic science book published by U.C. Berkeley, it's a popular trade book published by W.W. Norton, who touts it as “A profound shift in thinking that in magnitude can only be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein.” And it is these bold pretences to "the leading edge of human understanding" that need to be resisted and countered. Deacon wants us to accept that our consciousness is not "something more" that emerges from the biological level of evolution. Rather, he contends that we are "something less," that our subjective presence is actually an absence, and that the entire domain of interiority in both consciousness and culture is essentially nothing, a "hole in the middle."

In several places Deacon points out the problems created by the "tacit metaphysical commitment" to materialism that dominates his field, but he then goes on to demonstrate his own loyalty to physicalism through an elaborate but ultimately unconvincing theory of dynamical (but still physical) emergence. Deacon's metaphysical commitment to physicalism is also demonstrated by the glaring lack of any discussion of the astounding creativity demonstrated by evolutionary emergence (the term "creativity" does not even show up in the index). This omission of any discussion of creativity is especially telling in light of the recent work of Deacon's fellow systems scientist, Stuart Kauffman, who has focused on the "sacred nature of creativity" as a central element of his latest thinking.

Thus, as a result of these physicalist commitments, this book ends up being a kind of manifesto of second generation scientism. It may give temporary comfort to those who are afraid of spirit, but it is destined to be discarded in the course of history as a credible alternative to mechanistic materialism. Deacon is smart enough to see the writing on the wall: materialism is a worn out belief system. But because he has not been able to effectively escape this worldview, he is destined to go down with the ship.