laws of nature and emergence

Last week, Pedro expressed a reservation about my realism in the
following terms:

"The way natural Law is handled by realists implies for me a
dualistic-Platonic scheme..."

Now, I agree that reductionists are guilty of dualism in this sense, and
I further agree with Pedro (and with Howard Pattee, Robert Rosen, and
many others) that this is a fundamental mistake. That is, the
teleological (normative, semantic) aspect of life processes is
definitely NOT reducible to mechanistic interactions.

But the question I would ask is, must "natural law" be equivalent to
mechanism? Here, I think we must really engage in what Ted felicitously
called "engineering of the metaphysic." Namely, we must reject the
reductionist temptation of identifying the "laws of nature" with
mechanistic interactions only.

What is the alternative? A robust (ontological, not just epistemic)
emergentism. What might this mean?

If the high-energy physicists are right, then all that matters is
getting the Theory of Everything pinned down. Once we have that, then
everything else follows by deduction. There will be one equation that we
can put on our T-shirts that will explain everything, including the
origin and evolution of life, human nature and history, and even the
brand name on the T-shirt itself. However, if one finds this
super-Laplacian worldview absurd (as I do, and I assume most here at FIS
do, as well), then it is possible to conceive of "natural law" as having
a different significance.

I have the impression that some of the subjectivist and idealist flavor
of much of our discussion derives from a tacit acceptance of the TOE
picture for the inorganic world, together with the realization that the
normative character of cognition nevertheless cannot be fit into this
picture. So, instead, some of us retreat to idealism
(pan-informationism) or to dualism (Pattee's "complementarity").
However, I believe there is a viable realist alternative---namely,
rejecting the TOE picture altogether as a misguided fantasy.

If the condensed-matter physicists are right (e.g., Laughlin & Pines,
PNAS, 2000, 97: 28--31; P.W. Anderson, Science, 2000, 288: 480--482),
then new kinds of structures with qualitatively novel causal powers have
emerged over the course of cosmic evolution, and these novel causal
powers will require sui generis "effective" theories---unique to each
level and irreducible to laws at lower levels---to descibe them
adequately (see, also, W. Thirring, "Do the Laws of Nature Evolve?," in
M.P. Murphy and L.A.J. O'Neill, What Is Life? The Next Fifty Years
[Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 131--136]).

In that case, there is indeed hope that we can someday discover emergent
"laws of nature" (in a broad sense) that adequately describe the causal
powers distinctive of life (R.B. Laughlin et al., PNAS, 2000, 97:
32--37). Most distinctive of all those powers is intrinsic normative
functionality, by which I mean low-energy (i.e., information)-guided
purposive action, where the "success" of such action consists in the
preservation of the dynamical stability of the nonlinear oscillator
carrying out the action (F.E. Yates, Mathematical and Computer
Modelling, 1994, 19: 49--74; J. Barham, BioSystems, 1996, 38: 235--241).

The crucial metaphysical point to take away from this "neo-vitalist"
view is that the material constitution of a system does matter for the
causal powers of the system, after all. That is, we have simply been
mistaken in accepting the multiple realizability thesis all these years.
This means that living things are not machines at all, and that the
derivative, externally-imposed functionality of machines and the
intrinsic, spontaneous intelligent striving of organisms belong to two
entirely distinct causal categories. In other words, intrinsic
functionality and intrinsic normativity can only arise out of the sui
generis dynamics of the living state (specifically, that of the
protein-ordered water-phosphate gel), never out of an artificially
engineered set of boundary conditions externally imposed upon
intrinsically inert matter.

Note that this does not mean that the artificial construction of living
systems with intrinsic functionality is inherently impossible; it just
means that it will require the use of organic materials with the correct
causal powers.

James

P.S. Anyone interested in further elaboration of these ideas might like
to consult my "Biofunctional Realism and the Problem of Teleology,"
Evolution and Cognition, 2000, 6: 2--34; and "Theses on Darwin," Rivista
di Biologia/Biology Forum, 2002, 95: 101--133.
Received on Mon May 27 17:11:42 2002