Wholeness, Interiority, Relation, and Other Big Reasons

This next chapter is called The Science of Life: A Study in Left Hemisphere Capture, and while I don't know that the LH is responsible, I certainly agree that biological complexity is not its forte. 

I made my own little stab at this problem in chapter 2 of my book, relying in particular on the thought of theoretical biologist Robert Rosen and a few others such as Michael Polanyi, Hans Jonas, and A.N. Whitehead. 

There's nothing in this chapter that surpasses Rosen's analysis, and in fact, he makes a cameo on p, 476: a living system is not best understood "by likening it to the inanimate," but rather,

the inanimate is best seen, as biophysicist Robert Rosen eloquently explained, as a limit case of the animate. That discussion will have to wait for now.

Since Rosen is returning later for an encore, I suppose I'll have more to say when he hits the stage. 

There's no further mention of him in this chapter, except to say that professional biologists are loathe to acknowledge so much as a whisper "of there being something special about living beings" -- as if life is just a statistically unlikely arrangement of matter. I'm only a psychologist, but this sounds to me like a case of institutional autism. 

I think we could solve a lot of problems by simply distinguishing biology from the philosophy of biology, or "meta-biology." Analogously, you don't expect the guy who repairs your watch to give a discourse on the nature of time. Piano tuners aren't known to be great composers, and your vet can't tell you if dogs go to heaven.

It isn't so much that biologists want to reduce biology to physics (or in Rosen't formulation, semantics to syntax), but to an outmoded physics: biology has -- with prominent exceptions such as Rosen -- 

been stuck in a mid-Victorian mechanistic vision that physics abandoned over a hundred years ago.

But such a model is incompatible "with the phenomena it is trying to explain." Is it because the LH projects its inanimate model on an irreducibly complex, organismic reality? If so, stop doing that. It's annoying. Or, if you must do it, please confine yourself to the lab. Don't pretend you're qualified to generalize your little model and discourse on the nature of reality.

Teleology is also against the law in biology, even if its rejection results in an incoherent cosmos, which is a testament to the fervency of their faith. 

Likewise, "Top-down causation is not supposed to happen in the reductionist model," even though saying it can't happen is making it happen, i.e., freely conveying meaning from mind to mind. 

Lots of stuff about the inconceivable complexity of organisms: "There are an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in the human body. Each one of these cells performs many millions of complex reactions every second" within "complex feedback systems with other cells."

This is so far beyond any capacity to even imagine it that it is as if the mind shuts down and defaults to its simplistic LH model. It also reminds me of something Schuon says about how infinitude stretches in both directions, and how it is a downright mercy that we can't conceive it:

Man is situated, spatially speaking, between the "infinitely big" and the "infinitely small".... If we feel minute in stellar space, it is solely because what is big is more accessible to us than what is small and thus rapidly escapes our senses. 

As for the mercy part, I can't find it. All I remember is that you don't really want to see what goes on down there -- it's like seeing yourself without any skin, and very close up. Ew. 

In living systems "everything does everything to everything." That's a good way to put it, and it is obviously quite different from any machine characterized by linear causation and external relations. A machine has no interiority, but as we will no doubt have occasion to discuss later, interiority is not something added to the cosmos, but rather, an "ontological primitive." 

There is some discussion of the "wholeness" of life, which is something I also latched onto in my book. It's a mysterious property, but, like interiority, one of those ontological primitives. 

I would go so far as to see this anchored in a trinitarian metaphysic, but that's getting way ahead of ourselves. It's enough to say at this juncture that life is the way it is because the Godhead is the way it is (not to attribute this latter opinion to McGilchrist, who is apparently a naughty pantheist, but we'll have to spank him for this error later).

But he does say that "Relationships are prior to relata," and there's a Big Reason for this. He also says that the things related are defined by their relationship (as opposed, say, to their substance), which goes to the same Big Reason. 

McGilchrist also quotes a passage that goes to the cosmic area rug:

Think of the universe as fabric woven on a loom. The warp threads are the laws of motion -- rigid, and invariant, the weft, the emergent random strands that weave within the ordered warp. Together order and randomness from a creative whole.

Now, that's wrong, but it isn't bad, because at least this guy is thinking outside the box. The rug is actually woven from Absolute and Infinite, nor does wholeness "emerge" from them, because again, it is prior, an ontological primitive. Still, it's nice to see someone at least talk about the rug. 

McGilchrist also touches on future causation, which is another one of those things that cannot not be in a fully functioning cosmos, but that's enough for this morning.