Jesper Hoffmeyer
SIGNS OF MEANING IN THE UNIVERSE
Indiana Univ.Press 1996
pg.25
On Nature's tendency to acquire habits
Just imagine if someone were to switch off the Universe right now and start it up again from scratch with a new big bang. Would this result in my sitting here fifteen billion years later staring at a Macintosh computer screen while writing: Just imagine if someone were to...?
The idea that everything in this life is predetermined by "Laws of Nature" or, in olden times, by fate to such a colossal extent that nothing in this world can occur by chance or because people decide it of their own free will— this theory is known as determinism. And it has been around for a long time. In his book on free will, the Danish author Villy Sorensen quotes the following fanatical observation by the Greek philosepher Chrysippus, who lived in the third century B.C.:"Why send for a doctor? If it is foreordained that I should recover then I shall 7
recover without a doctor; if it is not foreordained that I should recover then I shall die despite the doctor. No, whatever you decide has already been foreordained."
In the eighteenth century, "The-Age of Reason," it is science that supplies the determinists with ammunition."The keynote of mechanistic philosophy," writes Sorensen,"was not the realization tbat there is a natural explanation for everything.The Greeks had been well aware of that fact two thousand years earlier. No, it was the belief that every cause can have only one possible effect and that hence there is only one possible universal scheme which will inevitably run its course."
In 1891 C. S. Peirce rounds fiercely on this "doctrine of necessity." He latches onto the odd fact that determinism refrains from providing an explanation for the most important question of all: where do they come from, these laws that direct the course of life with such fearful inevitability: "Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason."
But the only possible way of accounting for the existence of natural laws is by assuming that they are the result of evolution. Admitting this, however, also means admitting that they cannot always have been absolute and allowing for the possibility that even today they might not always be followed to the letter.Thus, Peirce maintains, an element of indeterminism, spontaneity or absolute chance is introduced into the natural world.Stretching the point a little, Peirce could be said, here, to be predicting the very results which, to almost everyone's surprise, came to light in physics circles in the 1970s in the form of the so-called chaos-theory and "dissipative structures".The fact that most physicists today would most probably agree that the universe could not be expected to follow exactly the same course after a new big bang as it did last time comes from learning more about the behavior of complex systems, as was illustrated by the "butterfly effect". If infinitely miniscule fluctuations can have such dramatic effects, that must, surely, put paid to the determinist theory.
Or does it? The French mathematician René Thom challenges the notion that such fluctuations are prime events, believing as he does that they are simply manifestations of an underlying grand design. In France this has occasioned much highbrow debate which I will, however, refrain from pursuing further. When all is said and done this is a metaphysical problem which can never be resolved conclusively. After all, how can anyone deny categorically that life is not merely the cunrung execution of an endless sequence of steps in the great dance of the god Shiva?
It is in the nature of science—it is, so to speak, a matter of professional principle—to discover causes for the wonders of this world. Scientists have, quite rightly, done their utmost to extend the range of natural laws and hence: determinism—to bring as many as possible of this worlds wonders under control, i.e. render them predictableThe marvelous thing about natural laws is, after all, that they make the world seem safe and predictable.
For instance, it is only thanks to the Newtonian laws that we can be absolutely certain that the sun will come up tomorrow or that a paving stone is not going to leap up of its own volition and hit us in the face.
But useful as it may be to understand the principles behind natural phenomena, this does not mean that everything is bound by law.Yes, one might be tempted to look upon a belief in determinism as an expression of fundamental anxiety among poople who dare not relinquish control."Oddly enough, those philosophers who placed the strongest emphasis on the will also placed strongest emphasis on its constraints," writes Villy Sorensen in his book on free will.
Like Peirce I prefer a philosophy which enables one to comprehend the world as a place where spontaneity is not rejected out of hand and where one can therefore entertain the thought that something radically new,i.e., essentially unpredictable—might be generated.
A philoso-phy that has not already barricaded itself against the path to insight embodied by the question: Where did the natural laws come from? Because, quite honestly, why on Earth should they have been here all the time?
The crux of Peirce's metaphysics is that Nature has a tendency to "take habits." If Peirce is right, this would mean tbat it is not the laws of Nature which control the development of the cosmos; that the laws of Nature also had, at some point, to have originated—as slow-growing deterministic coral islands in a cosmic ocean of free-ranging vibrations.
But in that case we ought to be able to find some trace of such a "habituation" in the history of the cosmos. And in fact we can. From a certain angle, Peirce's theory—this tendency to take habits—appears to represent one of the poles in a continuous process of development, where the other pole could perhaps be termed "anarchy," Nature's tendency to reclaim its independence by means of new "inventions." For simplicity's sake let us call these two opposing forces in natural . history fate and freedom—though without attributing any more to these two terrns than we have already done.
But freedom or the lack of same are dialectic quantities, since, paradoxically, at one particular level a lack of freedom can actually pave the way to a different sort of freedom at a higher level. Thus in retrospect we can see that only when lack of freedom had reached a level at which the wodd became, to some extent, predictable—i.e.,when certain habits or laws had become firmly established—did it become possible to develop the actual ability to predict.
This ability is the hallmark of all life-forms. In a world where nothing was predictable, Life would be out of a job. And the wealth of inherited experience lodged inside the genetic material of an organism would be totally useless without the possibility of cherishing reasonable expectations of the future.
Let us now examine in more depth the two terms freedom and lack of freedom, as they pertain to the way in which matter and energy are arranged within a living cell. In fact the words almost make my point for me. Usually, when we employ the word cell in a human context we are referring to what we call the loss of liberty. As prisoners we are deprived of our freedom, inasmuch as we cannot leave the prison cell whenever we feel like it.
Similarly it can be said that atoms caught by a cell and absorbed into its structure are deprived of their freedom. Until then a carbon atom might, for instance, dream of seeping down, as bicarbonate, into the ground water, whence it would flow out to sea and travel reund the world. But once it has been sucked up by the roots of an oak tree and captured by a cell at the growth point of the trunk, the atom runs the risk of having to wait a thousand years for the oak tree to be felled in a storm and rot away. Only then will the carbon atom be set free. By being captured by life the atom loses its freedom.I hope my readers will forgive this rather frivolous method of explaining things—far be it from me to credit atoms with traits such as dreaming. But it may perhaps be easier to see what I am getting at if one puts oneself—in this case—in the atom's place.
My point is that, as an earthly phenomenon, Life itself exemplifies Nature's tendency to acquire habits.With the emergence of an arrange-ment of matter and energy as unique as that found in a living cell, so too a new and intricate pattern was established in the world—a pattern that could be repeated ad infinitum. And repetition is of course the epitome of habituation: the key to predictability, law, and order. Again and again water and carbon dioxide now had to see themselves being coupled together to produce carbohydrate in a cell before being broken down once more into water and carbon dioxide—over and over again.
How life first came about is something at which we can only hazard a guess, but there can be little doubt that it did. Somebow or other inorganic matter managed to form itself into an ingenious system, the cell, which imposes constraints on its constituent parts, its atoms or
molecules, inasmuch as it is the cel1 as a whole that sets the limits for what the individual molecule may or may not do.The American evolutionary biologists Niles Eldredge and Stanley Salthe have used two terms to describe this situation initial conditions and boundary conditions. Initial conditions are the physical and chemical characteristics associated with the mass of molecules which make up the cell. Boundary conditions are the historic pattern imprinted upon the cell at the very moment of its creation through cell division i.e., the cell's internal organization.
The old idea of a cell being like a sack full of proteins and all sorts of other good things has been supplanted by the contemporary view of the cell as having a complex inner structure that bears more resemblance to the structure of a city than to the structure of a sack of flour (more on this in chapter 6).
But the point at which the true focus of this account starts to become clear is when we discover that it is precisely the freezing of the cell's chemical make-up which institutes a totally new kind of freedom, one which I will call semiotic freedom.Because even the single-celled organism knew a little trick which proved most effective in tempering the growth of predictability. It was able to describe itself—or at least key aspects of itself—in an abstract code embedded in the string of DNA molecule bases. Fragments of this coded self-description could then be copied, sometimes wrongly, and traded with other members of the same species—or even, on occasion, with members of other species. The never-ending sequence of "mistakes" and "misunderstandings" that put all life-forms on Earth into a constant state of flux, the se-quence which we call organic evolution, was set in motion.
The predictability of chemical laws facilitated the establishment of unpredictability at a biological level.The tendency to acquire habits— fate—had been overcome, for the time being at least.
But fate was not about to give up. Slowly and steadily it proceeded with the job of establishing new habits.
The first breakthrough in this endeavor came with the establishment of the eubaryotic cell, a cell type which forms the foundation stone of all
"higher" life-forms.Compared to the primitive prokaryotic cells, which resembled the bacteria of our own day, eukaryotic cells are both very large and very complex. First and foremost the eukaryotic cells possess a unique internal structure, the nucleus, repository of the genetic material. But the eukaryotic cells also contain a large number of other, lesser "bodies," so-called organelles. Of these, probably the best known are the mitochondria which are charged with the important task of producing energy for the cell. In plants, photosynthesis is managed in similar fashion by organelles known as chloroplasts.
As far back as 1893, the German biologist A. Schimper outlined the theory that the chloroplasts in plants were derived from cyano-bacteria (perhaps better known as blue-green algae). Later, and quite indepen-dently of one another, a Russian and an American biologist both advanced the same theory. But it is only within the last two decades that this theory has, at long last, won general acceptance. However strange it may sound, it seems likely that the modern-day eukaryotic cell was generated by some kind of symbiosis, whereby a great many tiny prokaryotic cells combined to form one large departmentalized cell, the eukaryotic cell.
One reason for the acceptance of this so-called endosymbiosis theory is that numereus examples of this kind of symbiosis are now recognized. One of many intriguing instances centers around the termite. As we know, termites eat wood and are notorious for their ability to reduce a wooden house literally to sawdust in next to no time. But the termites themselves cannot digest the wood's ground substance, cellulose. Like ruminants, they have to depend on an intestinal flora of microbes breaking down the cellulose for them. A small single-celled eukaryote organism, i.e., a protist by the name of Mixotricha paradoxa, has a vital part to play in this digestive process. And in return for breaking down the collulose, Mixotricha is provided with a constant supply of ready-chewed wood.
But Mixotricha is an odd creature. For, though we may call it singlecelled, it moves by dint of five hundred thousand miniscule bacteria, the spirochaetas, which cling to the surface of the eukaryote cells.These spirochaetas are closely related to the syphilis bacteria and, like it, they have a little whip (a flagellum) at one end which they can rotate and, thus, propel themselves. And, fitted with five hundred thousand spirochaetas, it has to be said that Mixotricha certainly does get around. But its refinements do not end there, because it has been proved that Mixotricha has no mitochondria; in other words it lacks what might be called its inner power plant. So instead Mixotricha has formed an alliance with a kind of bacteria living inside the cell, where they are apparently happy to carry out the job of producing energy for the protist in exchange for being sure of a steady supply of food.
The question is: is Mixotricha paradoxa a single-celled organism or is it, rather, a colony of more than five hundred thousand bacteria representing several different species? In other words, is Mixotricha one individual or a large number of individuals? From a biological point of view this situation would probably best be described as an extremely close symbiosis, an endosymbiosis. Translated literally from the Greek, symbiosis means the state of living together, and in biology it denotes a very close and enduring association between two species. Most gardeners are familiar with the symbiosis that exists between ants and aphids, in which the ant protects the aphid and, in return, the aphid allows itself to be milked of sucrose. In this case the two parties involved are doing each other a good turn, but symbiosis can also be malignant, as in the case of parasites. With Mixotricha too we are dealing with endosymbiosis since, here, some of the bacteria are actually living within the cell, where they take the place of the mitochondria.
But where does endosymbiosis end and individuality begin? What we, today, can discern in Mixotricha is presumably exactly what took place one-and-a-half billion years ago when the very first eukaryote cell was created.Through time the original resident bacteria simply lost a considerable proportion of their independence and became the mitochondria of our own time. To this day the mitochondria carry traces of their bacterial past, in that they have their own DNA, which bears a closer resemblance to bacterial DNA than it does to that of a cell-nucleus. And Lynn Margulis, the biologist who has fought harder than anyone for the endosymbiosis theory, even claims that not only the mitochondria but also other primary cell functions such as cell division and cell mobility are controlled by organelles of bacterial origin. In a sense a human being too is basically an endosymbiotic system comprised of hundreds of trillions of bacteria.
Viewed in that light bacteria are the only true individuals in this world, all other life-forms being mere combinations of bacteria!
With the formation of the eukaryotic cell the individual prokaryotic cells were to some extent deprived of their freedom, subjected as they were to the conditions set by the eukaryotic cell. Their own particular vital processes had to be coordinated and become more specialized in deference to their collective fate. A new habit had emerged. But once again this renunciation offreedom was to spark off an entirely new form of creativity which was simply acted out at a higher level of complexity.
The eukaryotic cell did have certain talents which far surpassed those of the prokaryotic cells. This becomes most evident if we compare the communicatory skills of the two cell types. The bacteria (prokaryotes) are indeed busily engaged in the comprehensive exchange of signs—in the guise of DNA fragments—which can, for example, be transmitted by means of particular bacterial viruses.
On the other hand, the number of other sign operations taking place between them is very limited.
In the eukariotic organism,however, DNA communication is a family affair. DNA is transmitted almost exclusively to the next generation. There is a tradition in biology for depicting time as a vertical axis (cf. the word descent), and it can therefore be said that the eukaryotic organism translates genetic communication into a purely vertical phenomenon, transmitting from parents to progeny—in other words, vertical semiosis.
To counteract this "privatization" of the genetic material the eukaryotic cells have, however, developed ingenious and efficient methods of communicating with one another by chemical means primarily through physical contact. Special proteins on the surface of the eukaryotic cells can, so to speak, poke their noses into their neighbors' affairs (something which will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6).
In other words, a form of communication evolves that is not based on signs in the form of genes but on signs in the form of proteins or other types of chemical compound.
One could call it horizontal semiosis, the exchange of signs through the three dimensions of space rather than through time. Not so much genealogical semiosis as ecological semiosis.
Even prokaryotic cells had the ability to link up into chains or clusters, but in the eukaryotic organisms this multicellularity was combined with specialization among the colls, whereby the cells somehow learned to communicate with one another on the delegation of work: which would attend to the production of gametes, which would lash the flagella, which would pick up signals from the surround-ing world, etc.The eukaryotic world's multiplicity of cell types was the opposite of the prokaryotic world's multiplicity of DNA fragments.
Once the cells had surrendered their anarchic autonomy and submitted themselves to the greater whole which we call the organism, the stage was set for the creation of the most fantastic life-forms. Now the pace hotted up in the development of sophisticated sensory apparatus and corresponding nervous systems which would enable animals to form fine-tuned internal impressions of what lay round about them, their surroundings.
Their subjective experience of the World, their umwelt became fraught with detail and the horizontal semiosis—that process of lies and deceit, of play and sexuality and Heaven knows what else that binds the creatures of the Earth to one another—grow and grew in abundance. Once again freedom had drawn the long straw.
But Fate had a joker up its sleeve—and one which looked as if it could cause trouble. While there was no way of quashing semiotic freedom, it could be stamped with patterns that would ensure some form of order. And what was this regulator, the joker in the pack? The ecosystem.
As the network of food chains gradually began to seal itself off with a series of closely integrated circuits, a higher form of logic emerged, one which seemed to compel individual species to fulfill particular roles. Nature had arrived at a situation which ecologist G. E. Hutchinson so appositely dubbed "the evolutionary drama in the ecological theatre." Granted, new species continued to appear, and marsupials and mammals replaced the reptiles but any originality was in a sense illusory, bound as it was by the predominant pattern of ecological niches which this planet's ecosystems happened to have on offer.
So had Fate and habituation finally won the contest? Was freedom but an illusion? We will never know. But freedom did have yet another card to play—and as yet that card does not seem to have been covered.
Among all the roles in the ecological theatre there was one pertaining to creatures with lengthy life-histories. To creatures with lengthy life histories and an especially well-developed talent for capitalizing on their experience.
Often these creatures, the apes, had developed brains capable of accommodating an extremely complex image of their surroundings, a very sophisticated umwelt.
And among these creatures was one in particular that played its role so uncommonly well that the role became reality in all of its dreadful isolation.
There came a day when this creature realized that it was itself an umwelt builder; that its role was, in fact, a role; that other creatures performed other roles and had different kinds of umwelt; that the world was one thing and umwelt another; and that, when one died, this umwelt would actually disappear while the world as such would carry on. In short, this creature perceived its own existential alienation from the world.
Fortunately, before our creature made this dreadful discovery—which, had it been totally unprotected, would have driven it insane— it had succeeded in safeguarding itself through the development of a gift for empathizing with other similar creatures. (We will return to this point in chapters 8 and 10.)
This empathic gift enabled the creature to create a common bond of a quite unprecedented nature: a double bond founded on the need to share the umwelt with one another, i.e., making private experiences public property, turning the subjective into the objective.To cut a long story short this creature, with whom the reader is already identifying strongly, invented the spoken word.
As opposed to the primal world in which the laws of Nature have long since established a firm foothold, the world of language is free; in that world anything can happen. In this extraordinary manner— through the creation of a linguistic bond which some refer to as the intellect— humanity freed itself from Fate.
But we had better take care. Nature's penchant for forming habits does not stop at language. Fate still has a few tricks up its sleeve, some of which are very much geared toward standardization. Religion is probably the most intransigent in this respect but there are times when politics can seriously stifle the imagination.And yet nothing has so far been able to suppress the fundamental freedom of the intellect for long. The anarchic nature of human thought and imagination appears to defy any and all civilizing influences.
But we will have to close this account of the battle between Fate and Freedom by acknowledging that Fate can afford to bide its time. Its timescale is measured not in thousands but in millions of years. So who can say that it is not sitting there thinking, "Ah, let the child have its fun."
Peirce's theory that Nature has a tendency to take habits does in fact make good sense.Just to recap:
The Earth's currents of matter and energy were gradually channeled through the increasingly complex recesses of all its many life-forms. Physico-chemical habits became biological habits. Primitive cells were organized into endosyrnbiotic patterns which we call eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotic cells acquired the habit of working together as multicellular organisms which in the course of time adapted to the prevailing logic of the ecosystems.The stabilization of living conditions under this form of logic made both longevity and intelligence an advantage and, hence, the logic of the ecosystems was eventually shattered by the appearance on the scene of humanity with its formidable talent for bossing pre-human life around. But even human beings could not shrug off this knack of forming habits. Each civilization is a manifestation of the way in which a new master plan is accepted, a plan that will significantly boost or diminish the unpredictability of human thought and deed.
Thus the history of the earth chronicles the gradual formation of an ever-widening range of stabilizing factors. While the original prokaryotic cells could only determine the conditions for an insignificant proportion of the Earth's currents of matter and energy, we are now well on the way toward a situation in which many of these currents are determined on a global scale.
Hoffmeyer Signs of Meaning
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