Ch 12: extract 8

Reflections on the extraordinary lengths we go to in order to preserve the machine model

Attempts to save the machine model in biology

Allowing in the notion of purpose may seem ‘dreadful’ to most orthodox biologists clinging to the machine model, but of course that model itself does not dispense with the issue of purpose: it merely tries to brush it under the carpet. Every machine we know of is designed by an intelligent mind that is external to the machine, conceives the design before building it, and creates it for his own utility, a purpose that is extrinsic to the machine itself. Even a machine that makes another machine does so only because an intelligent mind that is external to both machines programmed, and purposed, the first to make the second. The machine is an embodiment in the external world of human will (whose residence is largely the left hemisphere) to some purpose, and the trail of causation inevitably returns, ultimately, to that source.

Clearly, if organisms are seen as mechanisms, there is a problem here. Because machines do not make themselves. Obviously one machine can make another, but no machine simply makes itself. Saying that this one ‘just does’ – La Mettrie’s ‘clock that winds itself’^[1] – is to say that it is, blatantly, not helpful to compare it to a machine. As Nicholson says,

the trouble with design-talk in biology is that, as we have already discussed, organisms are not extrinsically purposive objects … The very idea of ‘design without a designer’ is not only deceptive – it is also logically contradictory: ‘design’ means made by a designer.^[2]

On the one hand, biologists speaking the language of mechanics do not want to invoke a heavenly engineer (nor do I); but on the other, as I have already suggested, few biologists any longer believe that just waiting for the right sequence of accidents – random mutations – is how nature works.

One solution to this conundrum is genetic animism – Dawkins’s genes with an agenda. Externality and instrumentality are inescapable logical requirements in whatever it is that one claims drives the machine model. So for genes to do the necessary work to support the machine model, they must both carry the idea of instrumentality, and be in some way external to – ontologically, causally and temporally prior to – what they are making (the rest of the organism). But this gambit ‘promotes the misunderstanding that DNA stands in contradistinction to the rest of the components in a cell by virtue of its ability to exert executive power over cellular operations’.^[3] We have seen that this falls down on every count. DNA is not ontologically, causally or temporally prior to the cell, nor does it stand over against the cell in any sense, bring it into being for a purpose, or simply exert power over it.

The other possible gambit to save the machine model is really just to reinvent God, put his eyes out, and call him by another name.^[4] The analogy of the world to a watch, which implied the existence somewhere of a watchmaker, was used by the English clergyman William Paley to buttress his argument for a God. Dawkins, the author of The Blind Watchmaker, used the same analogy to buttress his argument against God. He writes that ‘I suppose people like me might be labelled neo-Paleyists, or perhaps “transformed Paleyists”.’^[5] However, this does not help, for two substantial reasons: organisms are not at all like a watch; and evolution ‘simply does not proceed like a watchmaker, blind or otherwise’, as Nicholson points out.^[6] Both Dawkins and Paley make the same mistake, as Dawkins himself hints.

It has been argued that there might be a way out: that there is no need of a watchmaker, blind or otherwise, since complex structures can arise ‘naturally’ without a will that already conceives what it is that is being built. They ‘just do’. Fair enough: as I say, I am not arguing for an external mechanic, either. But, although the statement may well be true, it is in itself no form of explanation. It merely states as a fact the very thing that was required to be explained and remains to be explained. It simply kicks the can down the road. This would not matter (after all, no sane person thinks they can ‘explain’ the workings of life or the universe), if it were not offered in the spirit of having settled something at last.

The principle relied on in such accounts is that of self-organisation. As to what exactly self-organisation means, let me quote an authoritative source:

To express as clearly as possible what we mean by self-organisation in the context of pattern formation in biological systems, we provide the following definition: self-organisation is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system’s components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern.^[7]

On the basis of what we have considered so far, never mind what we are to consider later in the book, this looks like a deeply problematic claim. Since it is impossible to rule anything out definitively, I will not say ‘impossible’, but, all things fairly considered, ‘improbable’. It seems merely an expression of a dogma, that of reductionism.

Turner writes: ‘To honestly deal with the question at hand here – where does design come from? – there is no way of avoiding the problem of intentionality: it is the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner.’^[8] This is surely wrong: the gorilla is sitting, not in the corner, but in the middle of the room. ‘The living world is not only a designed place’, he concludes, ‘it is, in its peculiar way, an intentionally designed place … a living phenomenon replete with the purposefulness and intentionality that is the fundamental attribute of life itself.’^[9] Let me say, before the howls begin, that neither he nor I are arguing for an engineering God. What we have to explain is how there is order, complexity, beauty and purpose, while at the same time accepting that what we are dealing with is not a machine, and it has no extrinsic purpose, such as a machine has – it does not fulfil, in what would have to be an instrumental fashion, the purposes of something external to it.

There’s a good deal more to say on purpose and design, and it’s something I will return to towards the end of the book (see Chapter 27).

In a last ditch attempt to save the machine model, it may be objected that some machines can, or could potentially, be so programmed as to simulate some of the behaviours of organisms. With the growth of expertise in artificial intelligence it might in theory become possible for machines to simulate some of the operations of an organism less approximately, although the sheer scale of complexity involved in simulating the growth, regulation and development of a single cell – or part of a cell – is so daunting that I wouldn’t be inclined to hold my breath. ‘A single neuron would be more than enough for us to tackle, and even that is probably not amenable to our primitive methodologies’, wrote Ford in 2017:^[10]

For centuries, we have been led to envision life as machinery. The simplistic belief that the brain is a computer, and can be analysed through electrochemical means, is no longer sustainable … The unfathomable complexity of a living cell is not generally appreciated; even a simulation of the way a mitochondrion moves would be beyond our current conventions. Emulating fragments of our trivial understanding does not explain their intricacy, for cells are intelligent, and they live lives that we have hardly begun to address.^[11]

Often mentioned in this context are servomechanisms, whereby feedback is employed to make a system self-regulating: like a thermostat, the machine incorporates elements that enable it to achieve an equilibrium. However, organisms are open, far-from equilibrium systems; and as Nicholson points out, ‘servomechanisms are closed, near-equilibrium systems and consequently they are not capable of truly adaptive self-maintenance.’^[12] Adaptive: remember McClintock’s unpredictable adaptations to unforeseen circumstances?

But suppose for the sake of argument that such machines could be made: what then? Once the machine model is so transformed that it is no longer in any recognisable sense mechanical, it has lost its point. If, in order to make humans appear like machines, you have to posit machines that appear like humans, the metaphor is no longer doing any work. Nicholson takes the example of a paper by Reginald Kapp entitled ‘Living and lifeless machines’, in which

Kapp notes that ‘the living body is analogous to a motor car in which the chassis, brakes, cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, valves and bearings all contained combustible material, some of which was burnt whenever the driver placed his foot on the accelerator’.^[13] The question we must ask is this: how is such a bizarre imaginary motor car still analogous to an actual motor car? … what is the point of clinging on to the [machine concept of the organism] if the price to be paid is that our understanding of machines has to be completely distorted in order to accommodate the characteristic attributes of organisms?^[14]

Kapp is by no means the only author to stretch the machine concept beyond breaking point. The history of biology is, according to Nicholson, ‘littered with memorable examples’. The attempt is reminiscent of an old joke:

What’s green, hangs on the wall and whistles?

I give up.

A kipper.

But a kipper isn’t green!

Well, you could paint it green …

And it doesn’t hang on the wall!

Well, you could hang it on the wall, couldn’t you?

Anyway, it certainly can’t whistle!

Look, what do you expect – to have the answer handed you on a plate?

All attempts at stretching the machine model in one form or another come down to repeating de La Mettrie’s absurdity, that of a ‘clock that winds itself’.^[15] The correct conclusion to draw is not that some watchmaker, blind or otherwise, did or does wind the machine, but that it is not a machine.

The stream of life – a better model?

The words for Nature in Chinese, tzu-jan (ziran), and in Japanese, shizen, mean whatever is ‘of itself’, exists ‘spontaneously’, is ‘just what it is’. They are, in origin, adverbs, not nouns – ways of being, not things.^[16] If there is anything in this ancient perception, and I believe there is great wisdom in it, a vision of the natural world as a thing, and a mechanical one at that, is bound to restrict our understanding of what we are dealing with to a certain rather alienating perspective. A machine implies existence of an external creating force with its own purpose: Nature delights in her own.

In the history of Western philosophy there is a distinction between nature considered as natura naturans (nature ‘naturing’) and as natura naturata (nature ‘natured’), a distinction which, in that form, probably goes back to the early thirteenth-century polymath and scholar Michael Scotus, but is derivable from Aristotle.^[17] Famously, it was later taken up by Spinoza and Coleridge. It is the distinction between an eternally becoming, never completed, self-creating Nature, on the one hand, and an already finished, passive Nature, created by a cause external to herself, on the other. The second of these, natura naturata, suggests reification (‘thingification’), and, I submit, the view of the left hemisphere; the first, natura naturans, suggests flow, and the view of the right hemisphere. (As Arran Gare points out, Friedrich von Schelling, a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosopher whom we will encounter repeatedly at key points on the path ahead, foresaw many of the developments that have taken place in the post-mechanical science of the twentieth century: his influence was acknowledged by the physicist Hermann Weyl;^[18] he was the first to describe the central concept of homeostasis, as well as process biology and was an influence on Haldane and Waddington; and laid foundations for both complexity theory and evolutionary epistemology, as well as the idea of the Earth as a living organism, which we now think of as the Gaia hypothesis.)^[19]

Our troubles in this area, as in so many others, begin with the tendency to start from things, as though they were the important underlying elements in what we are looking at. Physicists have come to realise that the phenomena they are dealing with, though they may have some thing-like properties when viewed from a certain perspective, are better seen as processes. The ‘building blocks’ of the supposedly mechanical universe behave like patterned flows of energy, or force fields: they are constantly moving and changing, have no precise boundaries, overlap and mingle with other equally elusive entities, cannot be precisely predicted or specified, change their nature and behaviour depending on circumstances and context, including whether or not they are observed, and exhibit behaviour that defies any mechanical principles – for instance, a ‘particle’ showing interdependency, or entanglement, with another too far removed across the universe for information of any kind to have had time to travel between them. Matter, it seems, is just, as Einstein confirmed, a particular manifestation of energy; not static and substance-like, but constantly in a state of flow.

Thingness places the emphasis on distinctness and stability; the problem then is to explain how things come to change, to move, to be connected, to overlap with other things, to change their nature when observed, or when the context changes. On the other hand, thinking in terms of patterned flow places the emphasis on interconnectedness and change; the problem then is to explain how apparently distinct entities arise for a while, and how it is they contrive to remain temporarily stable.

John Haldane went so far as to say ‘the conception of a “thing”, or material unit, is … useless in the interpretation of distinctively biological facts’.^[20] But his point applies not only to organisms, and it is not just confined to descriptions at any one particular scale. Science always deals with processes, everywhere, and at all scales. That is its nature, and it is why science is such a wonderfully living business. ‘Classical science emphasized order and stability’, wrote the chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine. ‘Now in contrast, we see fluctuations, instability, multiple choices, and limited predictability at all levels of observation.’^[21]

The most static of sciences might appear to be geology; yet its subject matter is, as philosopher Peter Simons points out, eruptions, earthquakes, the formation and erosion of rock and soil, the movement of tectonic plates, the dynamics of precipitation, the formation of rivers and much else. Astronomy deals with the explosion of supernovae, bursts of gamma radiation, the formation and decay of stars and planetary systems, and the rotation of galaxies.^[22]

In chemistry, too, the fundamental entities are processes. According to Ross Stein, the molecule endures through time, maintaining its identity, like a macro-system, ‘not because it is static and unchanging, but rather because it is a dynamic system’: molecules are ‘dynamic entities that negotiate complex energy landscapes.’^[23] In physics, nothing rests even for a moment: electromagnetic radiation is emitted, propagated and absorbed; there are constant fluctuations in field values.^[24] As philosopher of science Mark Bickhard writes:

the best contemporary physics demonstrates that there are no particles at all. The fundamental constituents of the world, according to quantum field theory, are dynamic quantum fields in a dynamic space-time. Quantum fields manifest particle-like properties in virtue of their interactions being constrained to occur in multiples of fixed quanta, and the conservations of those quantised properties. The quantisation is reminiscent of particles, but it is in fact a quantisation of wave-like processes, not particles … there are no physical particles …^[25]

Dupré and Nicholson take the argument further by positing that particles are the product of a way of attending:

Quantum fields, which are dynamic organizations of energy distributed in space-time, appear to have purged classical notions of elementary particles from the ontological picture … Although contemporary physicists still routinely speak of ‘particles’, these no longer refer to solid micro-entities or tiny impenetrable granules, but to quantised excitations of particular fields. Quantum fields, in other words, are primary, and the various kinds of particles that physicists refer to are derivative entities, appearing only after quantisation.^[26]

Niels Bohr thought it would be a step forward to eliminate the term ‘particle’ altogether.^[27] It was too much like a thing. Thus what were formerly considered the primary ‘building blocks’ of matter have been replaced by ‘statistical patterns, or stability waves, in a sea of background activity.’^[28] And in the early 1950s von Bertalanffy, in a beautiful and succinct formulation, made an explicit analogy between physics and biology:

As in modern physics there is no matter in the sense of rigid and inert particles, but rather atoms are node-points of a wave dynamic, so in biology there is no rigid organic form as a bearer of the processes of life; rather there is a flow of processes, manifesting itself in apparently persistent forms.^[29]

It seems to me that the reason that the world looks different at the very small scale from how it looks at the level of the everyday has as much to do with time as it does with space. When we are looking at the molecular, and much more at the subatomic, level, processes are happening very fast indeed compared to the period of human observation. At the macroscopic level processes are generally slower. And this makes a crucial difference to what we seem to see. To quote John Dupré again:

Mechanistic explanations will be successful only to the extent that the constituents identified are sufficiently stable on the timescale of the phenomenon under investigation … their success should not be taken as a sufficient reason for inferring that the organism really is an interlocking system of mechanisms. It is not.^[30]

From where I am sitting I see the mountains of Skye, and Uist over the water. If a time-lapse camera had been set up to record this scene from the origins of the world to the earth’s eventual destruction, we would see these emblems of enduring facticity rise quickly like waves and then, more slowly, fall away into nothingness.^[31] The most solid-looking manmade objects in the world, say the pyramids of Giza, are quicker, smaller waves – but waves they are. They look static only because relative to our period of possible observation they are flowing slowly. And so it is with everything. Whether something is considered static or flowing is only a matter of scale.

Both in time and in space. If we stand on the mountains, instead of looking at them afar off, we see that, at the level of the stone and earth and dust beneath our feet, the mountains are changing and flowing to some extent all the time; go on down to the level of the atom and beyond, and we find that all is, once again, wholly a matter of flux. Stasis is just an illusion of observational scale, both spatial and temporal.

Scale – quantity – also changes quality in a broader way. This is something we seem inclined to forget: we often seem to believe that if something is good as it is, more of it must be better still. But quantity, always and everywhere, changes quality. And though this fact is nowhere more important than in the realm of human everyday experience, human society and human civilisation, it is also true of all systems. Qualities that obtain at the small scale disappear, and others come into being, emerging as the scale and the degree of complexity changes.

Importantly the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different takes on both space and time. It is something I will deal with at greater length in Part III. In brief, the narrow, piecemeal scope of the left hemisphere, together with its desire for precise targeting, aims to freeze its object, and hold it motionless in a slice of time; the broad, sustained scope of the right hemisphere, and its desire to see the whole, allows it to appreciate flow, what one might call the depth of time. Similarly the left hemisphere flattens space, so as to produce, once again, a slice, while the right hemisphere, seeing the whole of the world in the round, appreciates depth in space.

A single peripheral nerve acts as a seamless functional unit, every part contributing to the same goal. Yet if we take a slice across it, as if interrupting flow in time, it looks like this:

Transverse section of a peripheral nerve

It seems to consist of a lot of separate units: how does it come about that they are they related? However, if viewed along its length, the nerve looks like this:

Longitudinal section of a peripheral nerve

What were previously separate particles are now seen to be interlocking waves.

The ancient Chinese saw this problem, and expressed it as the way one looks at grain in bamboo: ‘on the straight it is of one kind, on the transverse it is of another kind. So the mind-heart possesses numerous principles.’^[32]

Transverse structure of bamboo

Longitudinal structure of bamboo

The best analogy is with music. Take this chord from the end of the loure, the sixth movement of Bach’s French suite no 5 in G major:

This constellation of notes makes no sense at all on its own and is a howling discord: the notes A, B, C and D are sounded simultaneously. Try it, if you have a keyboard to hand. However, in the context of the flowing lines that harmonise together, it does not sound discordant, but takes its place in a pleasing resolution of lines designed to be heard together, and making sense only in relation to one another:

Once the left hemisphere has frozen its object in time, and decontextualised it in space, it is left with fixed, clear, distinct but inert parts, which then have to be reconnected and reanimated; the building blocks have to be put together again, and the power, as it were, switched on. To the right hemisphere these ‘objects’ are already connected, animate, and in motion: the power was never switched off.

Tomorrow, the difference between flow and succession …

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^[1] de la Mettrie 1996 (6).

^[2] Nicholson 2014.

^[3] ibid.

^[4] Dawkins 1986; Dennett 1995.

^[5] Dawkins 1998 (16).

^[6] Nicholson op cit.

^[7] Camazine,‎ Deneubourg,‎ Franks et al (2001: emphasis in original).

^[8] Turner 2007 (137).

^[9] Turner op cit (227).

^[10] Ford 2017.

^[11] ibid.

^[12] Nicholson 2018 (147). For a critique of servomechanisms as analogies to organic processes, see Oparin 1961; and Nicholson 2013.

^[13] Kapp 1954 (101).

^[14] Nicholson 2018 (147).

^[15] ibid. The reference is to de la Mettrie 1996 (6).

^[16] Liu 2016; Kawasaki 2002.

^[17] Mittelstrass 1988 (19).

^[18] Weyl 1950 (176).

^[19] Gare 2011 (67ff).

^[20] JS Haldane 1919 (125).

^[21] Prigogine 1997 (4).

^[22] Simons 2018 (53).

^[23] Stein 2004; see also Cobb 1988.

^[24] Simons op cit (53).

^[25] Bickhard 2009 (552–3: emphasis added). Amongst other sources, he cites Davies 1984; Sciama 1991; Aitchison 1985; Bickhard 2003; Huggett 2000; Cao 1999. For further discussion of these issues, see Chapters 24 and 25.

^[26] Dupré & Nicholson 2018 (15).

^[27] See p* below; and further discussion in the light of the hemisphere hypothesis in Part III, esp Chapter 24.

^[28] Dupré et al, op cit (14).

^[29] von Bertalanffy 1952 (139).

^[30] Dupré 2017a.

^[31] I am told that in physics there is something called the Deborah number, which is an index of capacity for flow, it being observed that all solids flow under the right circumstances. Apparently the name is derived from the Biblical Song of Deborah, as recorded in Judges 5:5: ‘The mountains flowed before the Lord’. The name was chosen by materialist scientists Markus Reiner and Eugene Bingham (I am indebted to molecular biologist Dr Kenneth Kunz for this information).

^[32] Bruce 1973 (291).