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Friday, July 27, 2012

Science Terrence Deacon and The Nature of Constraints

Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 10:45 AM

Last week, I posted (Beyond Emergence) about Ginger Campbell's fascinating interview with Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist whose latest book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, presents ideas that challenge current thinking on emergence and self-organization. In that post, I made this comment:

[Deacon's] main point: The disturbances from which the whirlpool emerges are external to it, whereas the dynamics of life are internal and also end-directed. Deacon calls this end-directedness "teleodynamics," which is different from “morphodynamics” (self-organizing or form-producing dynamics). An understanding of how he makes the incredible leap from morphodynamics (a primitive system) to teleodynamics (a complex, autopoietic system) requires reading the book.

I haven't read the book yet, but I did watch this video of a lecture Deacon recently delivered at Standford. The lecture gives a good idea (or provides a better understanding) of the point at which the incredible leap from morphodynamics (self-organization—though Deacon does not agree with this term because, rightly, something like a whirlpool has no self) to teleodynamics (end-directed self-organization) is made...

Here is the point: the nature of the contraint or contraints of a thing. For example, a whirlpool's constraint (this being, of course, what is the whirlpool) functions to maximize the undoing of the whirlpool. Meaning, the contraint is there because water doesn't want to be a whirlpool. Water wants to get rid of the disturbance, the imbalance, the disequilibrium. Now life has constraints, but their function is completely opposite to the function of a whirlpool's constraint. Life's constraints are there to maintain life, to keep it going, to keep things together, and to generate more constraints. To lose your constraints is the meaning of death. So, life at its core is more than an emergence, more than mere morphodynamics—it's a much deeper dynamic, a dynamic the retains, remembers, generates, and transmits contraints. The question then comes down to this: When and how did the nature of constraints change, when and how did primitive contraints become complicated ones? And it's a huge change; more huge than, say, the change from prokaryotes to eukaryotes.

I will read the book next month and make a fuller report of these very interesting ideas.

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Awesome post, Charles! Thanks for posting video link too.

Posted by Confluence on July 27, 2012 at 1:34 PM

Great post. Just one clarification: per Deacon, a teleodynamic system is not an autopoietic system. I certainly understand the confusion, especially given his use of the autocell, but the constraints of the autocell persist or not in direct relation to *potential* environmental co-constraints, what Deacon calls 'ententionality'. This is in contrast to Maturana's notion of autopoiesis, which is more insular and does not explain the dynamic relation between an agent and its surroundings.

Posted by Augustus Bacigalupi on August 29, 2012 at 10:25 AM