President's Dream Colloquium on Emergence and Complexity of Life

Lecture Abstract

Theories of living and mental processes limited to the logic of self-organized dissipative systems can't account for the semiotic, teleological, phenomenological, and normative features that are these processes' defining properties, any better than earlier mechanistic theories could.

To explain these properties and how they emerge from and depend upon physical substrates that otherwise lack these properties requires a three-level concept of dynamical emergence.

I characterize this by three nested dynamical forms of organization—homeodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics. Single-level conceptions of emergence, based on self-organizational analogies, part/whole relationships, and top-down/bottom-up conceptions of causality fail to explain these properties. I describe a simple model molecular system, an autogen, formed by a special synergy of self-organized processes (morphodynamics), that precisely demonstrates the emergence of teleological, semiotic, and normative properties from antecedents lacking them. From this demonstration of emergent continuity a radical reconception of such fundamental concepts as work, information, self, evolution, and consciousness follows. These consequences are described in my recent book Incomplete Nature.

The few philosophers who have critiqued my book as 'just another complex systems theory approach to consciousness' exemplify the persistent failure of those caught within contemporary paradigms to even recognize the possibility of an alternative. Thus they don't even acknowledge the possibility that a significant departure from the complex dynamical systems approach might be necessary to cross this threshold from the non-semiotic to the semiotic world. This blind-spot and the knee-jerk anger and dismissive responses it has generated offers an interesting perspective on the nature of the social epistemic turmoil that inevitably accompanies serious paradigm challenges.

Given time I will comment, as an anthropologist, on this now familiar historical process as it is exemplified in this case.