Reflections on Life and Mind, Part Three

Structure, Hierarchy, and Living Systems

§21 We have before us, then, three possible approaches to nature’s qualitative disjunctions between system-level phenomena and their “material” or “subvenient” substrates: reductionism, emergentism, or formal and final causation. That mental agency is qualitatively different from biology is obvious, even if occasionally contested; that life differs qualitatively from the mere chemistry underlying biological forms seems almost equally so (in much the way that the architecture of a house is qualitatively different from the timber, bricks and mortar, concrete, and other materials composing the house), even if that too is contested; and it is at least arguable that the laws of chemistry are similarly discontinuous from those of physics (but there we can suspend judgment for now). Whatever the case, qualitative discontinuities exist at the level of systems, structures of information, semeiotic communication, agency. None of that, of course, need suggest any disruption in the quantitative continuum that unites each subvenient to each supervenient level of reality; even mental agency is susceptible of physical measurement, in that it requires an expenditure of energy and physiological functions; but, as one ascending tier of the hierarchy of nature surmounts another, the qualitative disproportion grows, until one reaches a point—mind—where the physicalist or mechanistic narrative of causality falls apart. Reductionism, as we have seen, is a worthless explanatory model if the phenomena it dissolves into their material basis cannot then be reconstructed from that basis without the invocation of the formal structures from which the work of reduction began; and, in the case of mind and life, there is no way of doing this without attempting to annul an absolute qualitative difference in terms of a merely quantitative process. This is hopeless. This is why emergentism is the natural retreat of the physicalist: because it seems usefully to collapse the distinction between qualitative and quantitative difference. But, as we have also already seen, it does so only through a lexical trick—the imposition of a univocal term on two antithetical causal rationalities: “weak” (or “structural”) emergence and “strong” (or “magical”) emergence. Once this difference is properly recognized, emergentism fails no less dismally than reductionism to explain the special properties of supervenient levels of reality. And so, of our three approaches, formal causation under the guidance of an antecedent finality would seem to be the only one that does not begin from an always already fractured logic. This, of course, runs contrary to the entire “dispirited” form of the current “naturalist” perspective, which may have moved on from pure mechanism as a theory but which still presumes the essential mindlessness of the material order as the fundamentum inconcussum of its ontology. There are at present, therefore, certain philosophers and scientists who—still wanting to argue for a kind of emergence of life and mind from originally lifeless and mindless physical states while also acknowledging the limitations of a mechanistic metaphysics—have proposed a number of novel ways of overcoming the difference between quantitative and qualitative transitions in the structure of nature, precisely by attempting (though they might not put it this way) to collapse the distinction between weak and strong emergence (as we shall see later).