Incomplete Nature by Terence W. Deacon

How Mind Emerged from Matter

• But it is not simply a many-to-one relationship; it is the mapping of a continuum to discrete states.
• Morphodynamic work shares one very significant attribute with thermodynamic work: the law of diminishing returns. As this tendency to complexity becomes amplified to a far greater extend when we consider the superimposition of teleodynamic processes.
• how the evolutionary process is able to mine the morphodynamic domain for these sorts of reciprocities and complementarities
• In general terms, an orthograde teleodynamic process is an end-directed process, and more specifically, one that will tend to occur spontaneously
• new teleodynamic systems and relationships are generated from the interactions of prior teleodynamic systems with respect to their shared environmental contexts
• teleodynamic processes because they are end-directed toward specific target states
• orthograde because they are what organism dynamics produce naturally and spontaneously
• Organisms are of course highly complicated synergistic constellations of teleodynamic processes
• But like other forms of work, teleodynamic work can also be used to transform one form of teleodynamic process into another, and to generate emergent phenomena at a higher order
• And since all ultimately depend on thermodynamic work, this is the final arbiter of teleodynamic success
• evolution is a kind of teleodynamic engine
• This shift of work up-level, so to speak, significantly decreases the total amount of thermodynamic work to achieve this end
• The diversity of forms of teleodynamic work is as extensive as the fields of biology, psychology, human social behavior, and all the arts combined.
• One important contribution of this perspective is that it untangles the notion of causal power from undifferentiated notions of causality
• their status as sources of work, that is, the production of non-spontaneous change in some conditions
• Debates concerning the status of human conscious agency are about the proper locus of this causal power.
• Although the fundamental constants and laws of physics do not change, and there is no gain or loss of mass-energy during any physical transformation process, there can be quite significant alterations in the organizational nature of causal processes.
• work can restructure the constraints acting as boundary conditions that determine what patterns of change will be orthograde in some other linked system.
• universe is closed to gain or loss of mass-energy and the most basic level of formal causality is unchanging, but it is open to organizational constraints on formal cause and the introduction of novel forms of efficient cause
• This difficulty may be mitigated by recasting this notion of power in terms of teleodynamic work
• In cognitive terms, orthograde teleodynamic processes may be expressed as goal-directed innate adaptive behaviors, spontaneous emotional tendencies, learned unconscious patterns of behavior, stream-of-consciousness word associations, and so forth
• the ability to discern whether methods and concepts developed in different scientific contexts are transferable in more than merely analogous forms
• with the emergence of new forms of work, the causal organization of the world changes fundamentally, even though the basic laws of nature remain the same
• higher-order forms of teleodynamic processes
• This is the essence of emergence, and the creative explosion it unleashes.
• Claude Shannon
• whose understanding of energy was still laboring under the inadequate and ultimately fallacious conception of ethereal substances
• Even though energy was a defining concept of the early nineteenth century, the development of a relational rather than substantive concept of energy took many decades of scientific inquiry to clarify
• The concept of energy was ultimately tamed by recognizing that it was a quite general sort of physical difference, which could be embodied in any of many possible substrates (heat, momentum, magnetic attraction, chemical bonds, etc.), and which could give rise to non-spontaneous change if able to interact with another physical substrate