This is a transcript of the discussion portion of my presentation for the Agential Biology Institute last night. A fuller treatment of the ideas I shared is available in this article ⤵️
Spiral Genesis: From the Adjacent Possible to the Embryogenesis of God
Back in May, I shared an essay developing an approach to metaphysics that grows out of several years of dialogue with the evolutionary biologist and biophilosopher Timothy Jackson. The challenge is to think not onl…
The comments and questions that took up the bulk of the meeting left me with much to chew on.
Here is how I introduced my talk (for the full explication of what I shared, see the “Spiral Genesis” post linked above or watch the video of the presentation below):
I’m a process philosopher, and I’m going to offer some fairly speculative ideas tonight. I think along the lines of Alfred North Whitehead, whom hopefully some of you are at least a little familiar with—I know Rupert is, and I know Wayne is. You might also detect some of the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce in the background of what I’ll share.
As a way in: I’m going to be talking not only about biology—and in particular Stu Kauffman’s idea of the adjacent possible—but also about theology. And Peirce and Whitehead each have a distinctive way of getting into that subject matter.
When we talk about agency, we can frame it simply in terms of scientific inquiry, where we’re trying to observe and model biological systems. But if we take up Whitehead’s or Peirce’s very similar methodologies, there are basically three domains we need to consider and weave together in the larger speculative project I want to touch on today. The first is our common sense, everyday experience of being agents. We’ve built a whole society on the assumption that we possess some degree of freedom to decide how we behave and what we believe. That commonsense domain is one we more or less take for granted—including the scientists who do research on organisms and on the physical world.
Whitehead has a great line: “scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” So from a Whiteheadian point of view—and from Peirce’s as well—science shouldn’t imagine that it’s in the business of explaining away our common sense presuppositions. The role of speculative philosophy, then, is to adjudicate between the common sense understanding of agency, on the one hand, and what inquiry—observation, experiment, and modeling—tells us about the nature of nature, on the other. There’s no question that science will sometimes upset and disturb common sense. But at the end of the day, science itself depends on common sense as well. The speculative ideas I’m going to offer today are an attempt to mediate between the two.
Charlie Munford: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Matt. That was wonderful—really deep. So much to respond to, I’m sure; all of us have lots of thoughts. So we’re going to go into the discussion part. Just as a reminder, at the bottom of your screen there’s a button that says “react,” and if you press it you’ll see a way to raise your hand. That’s how you ask a question in this format—it puts you in a queue, and I’ll try to go through people expeditiously. If you have follow-ups, try to keep them short so we can keep moving.
Before we do, I just wanted to quickly summarize what I heard, Matt, to refocus everyone. This meeting is about what process gives rise to biological intentions. The question I heard you asking is adjacent to that—the one you started with: are biological intentions predictable, in a sense pre-statable? You’re responding to Stu Kauffman’s idea of the adjacent possible, which basically says no. And you’re bringing Whitehead’s process philosophy to bear on it. In Whitehead, intentions arise through these lures of propositions, which are a combination of pure possibility—this infinite set of forms—and fact. So form and flow, as you said, are wave and trough; they arise together. And that gives us this metaphysics of God, or everything, as a developing whole—something not outside the universe controlling it, but embedded in and part of it. You called it historicizing physics, so that physics itself is developing—a concept we’ve definitely heard before. In fact, Rupert, as I recall, has even empirically investigated whether the constants of physics have migrated over time, which is fascinating.
So that brings us back to the question, slightly reframed. The way I’m hearing it, I’m trying to map it onto: where does the craving for function come from? Because we’re talking about exaptations, and embedded in that idea is already the idea of a novel function. So where the craving for function comes from—out of that combination of fact and possibility—is where I am right now. With that, I’ll turn it over, because I’ve said enough. I think the first is Richard.
Richard Watson: Thanks so much. It’s so easy to agree with all of that—it really resonates with me strongly. Also, Charlie, how do you do what you just did, summarizing so many interesting things and holding them all in one place at once? I totally can’t do that.
My question is much squidgier than that. Matt, I had a couple of small bits I missed that I wanted you to repeat briefly. You said there were three things in this view: creativity, something, and world. Can you tell me the something?
Matt Segall: God—God is the relationship between creativity and the axiological structure of possibility. Whitehead distinguishes these, while most theisms identify creativity with God, so that God is the creator. But Whitehead’s God is not a creator. They’re distinct: his ultimate category is creativity, which means even God is subject to it. God is the relator, instead of the creator.
Richard Watson: Cool, that helps. The other thing was this notion of historicizing physics. It makes sense that we’d want to talk about the history of electrons that makes them not all the same, because they all have different histories—and the history of the cosmos that makes it not unique, because there are other histories it could have had. But when they’re very far away from our sense of scale, they don’t look very agential. Far from our physical and temporal scale, they all look the same, like electrons, or they look like just one thing, like the cosmos—it only happened once. And that gives us a way to historicize, which is not different from agency-ifying everything. But they have an agency that’s relevant to a scale that isn’t so relevant to ours.
So it’s like: well, these are the processes and these are the eternal truths. But to the next layer up, those things look interchangeable. And then there’s a process that transfers one to another—and yet the process that transfers one to the other is also lawlike. And it’s like, ah, now I have to move up another level. So we have this kind of recursiveness to it. Is there any notion of that?
Matt Segall: What you’re recounting of historicization, I totally agree with, and I think Whitehead has something like what you’re describing. He’d describe the history of the universe as laying down a series of nested regimes of order. He calls them societies. Initially there’s what he calls the geometric society, which establishes rules of congruency. Within that, the electromagnetic society. And gradually these environmental societies shelter more and more complex forms of organization within them. So from our perspective it looks like electromagnetism’s laws are set. And yet if you rewind cosmic history, there was a point where contingent “decisions” were made by electrons to behave in a certain way; they could have made other decisions. Once that decision was made, it got locked into place. Looking back, it seems like a law—but thirteen billion years ago it was still contingent. It could have gone a different way. But I might be missing an aspect of your question about recursion—is there more you could fill in?
Richard Watson: No, I think that helps a lot. It’s like—we could list some societies and say there’s a chain of them, where, as you said, they shelter more and more complex forms of relating. So if we’re inside many complex forms of relating, it looks like we’re inside a lawful universe where the laws don’t change. And if we look into finer and finer resolutions of complex relating, things end up looking simpler, but there are more of them. There’s this electron and that electron and—there’s a whole lot of electrons, but they’re all the same. So the family splits, or unifies, as you go in different directions. I think that does speak to the recursion I was after.
Matt Segall: Yeah. Maybe we’ve all seen the movie Antz, which gives them each personalities. But when we look at the anthill, one ant’s as good as another. We could imagine a very large mind looking at human beings, and we might appear just like ants. That’s kind of what it’s like with electrons for us—one ant seems pretty similar to another.
Richard Watson: So they’re all ants, but it matters that there are a lot of them, and they’re all in slightly different relation to one another. And that’s how the colony does something that’s more than just a lot of ants. Cool.
Charlie Munford: Okay, the Kauffmans are next.
Stuart Kauffman: Matt, you’re really quite wonderful—just amazing. Did you ever know—this is not beside the point—Stephen Jay Gould? He and I are sort of the same age.
Matt Segall: No, I never met him, if that’s what you mean. But I certainly read many of his books.
Stuart Kauffman: When I used to listen to Steven, I thought I could play tennis like that—but I can’t. Listening to you is marvelous, and I want to thank you deeply. I think we’re probably going to agree that we’re somehow moving beyond amazing Newton, 340 years later, but it’s so wide open. I’m deeply glad for your representation of what I’m trying to say. Let me end with one more thing. In the past few months—well, maybe a year or so—I’ve tried to marry the idea of catalytic closure and constraint closure. Do you know about this yet?
Matt Segall: Yep. I’ve been spending time with your most recent book, and your earlier ones too.
Stuart Kauffman: Thank you. Okay, so give me a moment, because—whatever you said — form and flow, is related. So for those who may not know this, let me just tell you. Matteo Mossio and Maël Montévil came up with their wonderful idea of constraint closure. In truth, I’d been stuck for fifteen years—I wasn’t smart enough to get what they got. I then took it in a slightly different direction, Matt, that may be really important, though I’d never have gotten there without them. They say constraint closure is a set of constraints that mutually depend upon one another. I’m going to go in a slightly different direction that turns out to be fundamental.
Here’s the way in. What is work? It’s force acting through a distance. Then Atkins says: no, no—work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. So I tried to understand that. Take a cannon, which is a constraint, a boundary condition. The powder at the base, the cannonball, and the boundary-condition constraint constrains the release of energy. You don’t get a spherical wave in the explosion; the explosion propagates down the remaining degree of freedom—the bore of the cannon—and does thermodynamic work on the ball. Okay, I got it. Then I thought: I accept that with no constraints on the release of energy, you get no work. And, being a medical doctor and not a physicist—where did the cannon come from? It took work to make the cannon. Uh-oh. Newton needs boundary conditions, but he never tells us where they come from. I got as far as realizing somebody constructed the cannon—and I got stuck.
So in 2015 or ‘16, I saw constraint closure and said: that’s fundamental. I’m going to change what Matteo and Maël mean. I’ll mean that constraint B depends upon constraint A if and only if A is a boundary-condition constraint that constrains the release of energy into the few degrees of freedom that constructs B. So mine depends upon as a construct—it’s stronger. My favorite example is Gonen Ashkenazi’s nine-peptide autocatalytic set. He feeds in half-peptides from outside, and peptide 1 binds the two half-fragments of peptide 2, orients them in three-space, lowers the energy barrier to ligate them; then thermodynamic work is done, ATP breaks down to ADP, and it constructs a second copy of peptide 2. Peptide 2 does it for 3, and around the cycle, and 9 does it for 1. So this system is both collectively autocatalytic and has constraint closure. That’s what I mean by constraint closure.
I’ve been living with this for about a year and a half: we can define life as the union of catalytic and constraint closure. It’s both form and flow—the flow is the processes. And in a non-ergodic universe, where we’re present way above about 500 daltons, that now constitutes one fundamental sense of agency. I knew all of that. But about two weeks ago I was trying to understand what form is, so I looked up Aristotle’s form. I think this is a modern version of Aristotle’s form from 2,400 years ago—see what you think. For Aristotle, the form of the oak is the essence of this specific oak tree; it’s what makes the oak what it is. There’s a sense of wholeness in form that’s not there in mechanism and parts acting on one another. And I think this marriage of catalytic and constraint closure is the form. We lost the form. Form was central to philosophy for 2,000 years, and we lost it with Newton and entailing laws, which are syntactic. Form is semantic.
I’m beginning to try to understand this as a biologist: cells labor to construct themselves. They’re not constructed from the outside. As Feynman said, what I cannot construct I do not understand—and we cannot yet construct the dividing liver cell. I’m beginning to get the image of an anatomy of construction: inside a dividing liver cell, there’s all kinds of constrained release of energy that builds more constraints, in loops and cycles we cannot see yet. It’s easy to see in Gonen Ashkenazi’s case—some kind of anatomy of autopoiesis, the anatomy of internal construction. And we don’t know this.
Two more points. The RNA world says only template-replicating polynucleotides are a stable molecular form that allows heritability—so the selfish genome. But an autocatalytic set of proteins, which exists, or of RNA or DNA or small molecules, is a completely different stable form of heritability. And that means that over four billion years, the forms of organisms aren’t just carried in the genes; they’re carried in the ever-evolving Aristotelian form. Aristotle’s forms didn’t evolve, but this form has evolved over four billion years. It’s so mysterious. Somehow I’m confident something like this is true. It’s nowhere in medicine—we don’t have an understanding of how cells construct themselves. I trained in medicine and I’m in a biotech company. We don’t have the idea yet, Matt. We can’t see it yet, and I’m just stunned to a stop. Anyway—it’s marvelous listening to you, and I’m deeply grateful.
Matt Segall: Well, thank you, Stu. I can’t remember if it was reading one of your earlier books where I picked up this idea: Newton can describe how the apple falls from the tree, but not how it got up there in the first place. And the thing about Aristotle—he’s just a brilliant observer of the living world and of ontogenesis. He knew nothing of phylogenesis, nothing of evolution. He knew the universe as a static series of concentric spheres out to God, with God as the final cause. But his account of formal cause is very dynamic—it’s this movement from potential to actual. And with Darwin we get variation and selection, but Darwin assumes organization: organisms that want to survive.
Stuart Kauffman: Yes, you’ve got it. Let me throw in—Darwin gives us the filter of heritable variation and natural selection, and it’s brilliant and it’s right. But he never tells us how we get that which is filtered. How did we get life? How do we get variation of form? And thinking about Mike Levin’s morphologies—somehow those morphologies are Aristotelian forms that construct themselves. It’s so mysterious.
Matt Segall: I think the challenge is to bring Aristotle and Darwin together. And this is why I bring in the theological piece—which I’m often a bit embarrassed about, because it can upset scientists. But the imaginative background of mechanistic science is so theological, and we forget that. To really break out of the mechanistic paradigm means rethinking these theological assumptions. Aristotle is not a mechanistic thinker, but he has this view of the divine as final cause—thought thinking itself, beyond the eighth sphere—and that becomes the paradigm that all other forms of organization are trying to imitate. Whitehead does something analogous, but he evolutionizes it. For Aristotle, that divine thought thinking itself is totally unaffected by what happens in the universe; the universe is just copying it, and the divine can’t care what’s happening in the world. Evolution requires us to think differently—that there is no perfectly closed thought thinking itself at the peak of everything. We could still talk about the divine, but it’s got to be as an immanent lure. And that doesn’t just change how we think about science; there are deep existential shifts in our sense of what it is to be a human being and what we can hope for—major emotional consequences. So there are reasons some scientists holding tight to the mechanistic paradigm would resist it, and reasons religious people would resist it too, because it’s disturbing to think of God as not all-powerful, large and in charge. It’s a difficult needle to thread, but I think it’s our task.
Charlie Munford: Great. Sai, did you have a question? I think you might still be muted.
Sai: Thanks for that talk—incredibly interesting, powerful and intense, and it covered a lot of ground, most of which was outside my realm of understanding. I want to follow up on what Stu just said, and what was implicit in it, and also on what Richard asked and your answers—and it relates to the historicity of physics. When we talk about agency in biology, we talk about the ability of all organisms, down to bacteria, to do things. They act with this agency, but also with an ability to be aware of their environment—some sort of cognition. And you could add teleology, because they act for a reason, for a purpose; sometimes that purpose is just to stay alive or reproduce. That characteristic—all living organisms have it. I don’t see that happening in the physical universe, at least at the current time. Your answer to Richard was interesting: you said it happened early on, when decisions were made about how electrons would behave. That could really be true. But don’t you think we perhaps need a different word than the ones we use for life? Because we’re talking about a past historical thing that’s no longer applicable. Today, rocks don’t decide to fall down hills and volcanoes don’t think, “gee, I’d like to blow up.” We don’t see agency in the non-biological world. That may simply be, as you said, a question of perspective—we don’t have that perspective. But if so, I feel it would be useful to find a different word for it compared to what we see in life. How do you feel about that?
Matt Segall: That’s fair. Whitehead says metaphysics, like all sciences, has its instruments that it experiments on. In the case of metaphysics we don’t have telescopes or microscopes—we experiment on the instrument of language itself. So we’re constantly searching for novel phraseology to capture really general ideas. Whitehead reaches for a word like feeling and generalizes it so that it applies to pulses of light just as much as to a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient because it tastes something yummy. Whether that’s a helpful way of speaking remains to be seen, but we have to make choices about what words we use. And Whitehead does distinguish biological life from what’s going on in the chemical and physical world, in the sense that cellular life seems able to originate novelty in its behaviors and decisions that isn’t found in its lineage. A photon will carry the same vibratory frequency forever, until it’s interfered with; a cell can make real breaks with its causal past and do something new. If you’re around a dog and clap your hands really loud, it depends on the dog, or on the mood of the same dog, how it reacts—it’s not a simple mechanism of cause and effect that behaves the same way every time. So agency intensifies as you go up the scale. But Whitehead would say there’s no sharp line, no ontological gap, between physics, chemistry, and the first cell that needs explaining. There’s some basal form of agency—which he relates to what he calls prehension or feeling—present all the way down. Mike Levin says something similar, that agency is a continuum or spectrum in nature. I’d want to make some distinctions, though—I’m not as ready to give up the machine/organism distinction as he is. Even though agency shades down all the way, machines are assembled in a different way. Maybe if he means “machine” in a way that’s assembled at the nanoscale and more like organisms, then that’s a different question.
Sai: That was great.
Charlie Munford: Mary?
Mary: Hi, everyone. Thanks for this discussion, Matt. I think we share a lot of interaction with the integral world as well. I’ve been following your work for a while, and it’s great to talk to you. I have a question about the nature of holons—the turtles all the way down—and what you describe as the societies. Have you had any thoughts about what the invariance might be of these societies, and whether you think they’re continuous, recursive, or rhyming—maybe from the ingression from the platonic space all the way down to, say, bio-civilizations and endosymbiosis? It seems like there may be some habits that are repeated in a rhyming or fractal fashion. I’ll mute for your answer.
Matt Segall: It’s hard not to see the self-similarity at different scales in cosmic evolution—how, in Whitehead’s term, societies take form. A galaxy is a society of stars; a star is a society of atoms; and they each have their lifespans. Galaxies can die, in the sense that the spiral form that allows new stars to emerge breaks down for different reasons. And stars have their life cycle. The astronomer Eric Chaisson describes multiple generations of stars in terms of a metric he calls energy rate density, and suggests we can understand stars as evolving and becoming more complex as heavier elements are produced. So there is a self-similarity at different scales in nature and evolution. But at the biological level there are major evolutionary transitions that make the amount of novelty that can be produced increase rapidly—so it’s not all the same across scales. There are major transitions, but I think there’s a deeper self-similarity at work, and it’s not a coincidence; it’s a deep organizing principle.
Mary: Thank you. Hold on—starting at the highest level, these societies: are we talking about the pre-physical, the substrate prior to what we’d understand, or outside of it?
Matt Segall: I like Arthur Koestler’s term, the holon—something that’s both whole and part. A cell is a whole, but it’s also a part of a multicellular organism, and so on. That nesting relationship is what I was trying to describe with societies enveloping one another, providing backgrounds of order within which more complex order can be sustained. There are all these things the universe needs to keep doing for us as biological organisms to stay alive, far beyond the chemistry inside our skin. If the deeply canalized habits of electromagnetism were to change, we’d immediately break down; other fundamental constants are constant enough that we stay alive. All of that has to be assumed as pretty stable in order for the dynamic stuff in our metabolism to keep doing its thing. So holon is a fine word. There are all sorts of distinctions we could make about different kinds of societies. Some societies in Whitehead’s sense are living, and he’d talk about a dominant monad, percipient event, or presiding occasion of experience—in a vertebrate organism, the environment gets filtered through our senses and nervous system, and that information gets channeled into a presiding occasion. Plants are a little more democratic in their organization, to use a political metaphor, than animals, which are more monarchical. This is Whitehead’s metaphor. So they’re different kinds of societies, not all the same—but again, at different scales, patterns repeat.
Mary: I’m curious what you think the recurring patterns might be. I’ve outlined what I think are the invariances of a holon—perhaps I could send it to you, and you could tell me how far you think it might go in either direction, or if I just missed something obvious. Thank you.
Matt Segall: Sure—please do share.
Charlie Munford: Thank you, Mary. Rupert?
Rupert Sheldrake: Thanks very much, Matt—really stimulating, lots I loved about it. I was interested when you got to the idea of eternal objects being able to be modified or changed through what actually happens. This is the emphasis on creativity. I’m more influenced by Bergson than Whitehead—or at least I read Bergson first—and Bergson has an enormously strong emphasis on creativity, as in his book Creative Evolution. So I like that. I’ve been thinking recently about Michael Levin’s idea of platonic forms; he now has this idea that they can evolve, be modified depending on what happens. This is very similar to what I’ve called for years morphic resonance—the idea that there are formal causes throughout nature, through what I call morphic fields, and that these are influenced by what’s happened in the past. My model is that there’s a direct influence from the past to the present, giving a kind of collective memory in each kind of thing. His model is that the form comes from outside space and time, comes into space and time, then what happens affects the form outside space and time, and when it comes in again it’s different. It gives rise to essentially the same predictions. I think of mine as a kind of evolutionary Aristotelianism—and I loved what you said about Darwin and Aristotle—and his as a kind of evolutionary Platonism. Very obvious when it comes to actual empirical tests.
And in terms of empirical tests, when you talk about evolutionary physics or historicizing physics—I’ve actually been trying to test this, and I wonder what you think of the possibility of tests. Although electrons have been doing the same thing for an awfully long time and are in deep grooves of habit, there are things in the physical world that are new, truly creative. The realm I’ve concentrated on is synthetic chemistry. Chemists make thousands of new organic compounds every year, and they crystallize them—so there are thousands of new crystal forms coming into being every year that haven’t existed before. According to evolutionary Platonism or morphic resonance, you’d expect them to form more easily the more often they’ve happened, as the habits grow up. And it’s well known that new compounds become easier to crystallize as time goes on. One of the tests I’ve done recently is changes in melting points. If compounds become more stable, more habitual, it should be harder to disrupt them—and you disrupt a chemical by heating it up until it reaches a melting point. So I predicted that melting points of new compounds should go up. And in a survey of hundreds of organic chemicals, it turns out practically all of them do go up—by between two or three degrees or more. We’re not talking fractions of a degree. So I think this historicizing of physics is testable. There’s already evidence suggesting a kind of memory in the physical world, or at least the chemical world. One could also do experiments on Bose–Einstein condensates: you can make a new one at 0.1 or 0.01 of a degree above absolute zero, which would probably never have existed in the whole history of the universe—the ground temperature of the universe is 2.7 degrees Kelvin. If you make a new condensate in the lab and keep doing the same experiment, you might observe either evolutionary Platonism or morphic resonance, by seeing the rate speed up. And the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin also suggested the evolution of laws of nature; he thinks it would only happen at the quantum level. If Smolin’s right, it should happen in Bose–Einstein condensates, even if it doesn’t happen in chemical crystals. So I wondered how much you see this as an empirical question too.
Matt Segall: I’m familiar of course with your proposals to test some of these things, but this melting-point data is very interesting. As a speculative philosopher, I’m always very happy when an experimentalist says an idea I’m proposing can be tested—I think that’s great. But I think the issue with this idea of fixed laws and constants is less an empirical matter than a theoretical one. It’s pretty well established that when we go out to measure these things—the speed of light, which you’ve written about—the speed of light being a constant is a postulate. When we try to measure it, it’s never exactly the right speed. So it’s not an empirical issue so much as a theoretical one: we create models where the laws have to be fixed, then filter the observations through the laws and the models. The effective theorization of physics is a very powerful method—but again, it’s mistaking the model for the reality, when the empirical reality is, as you’re suggesting, that these things do change, and change in interesting ways that suggest an interplay between the actual and the potential, where there’s a non-local learning process occurring. Physical distance in metrical spacetime doesn’t put a limit on formal causality. It puts a limit on efficient causality, but not formal. That’s huge. We’re missing a lot if we don’t take that into consideration.
Rupert Sheldrake: That’s a really interesting point—that there’s no limit on formal causality through space. That’s terribly important, I think. I’ll think about that.
Charlie Munford: Thanks, Rupert. Henry?
Henry: I really enjoyed your talk. When you discuss form and flow, the relationship is biologically quite interesting—just as Dr. Kauffman said, there’s an interdependence, but also a co-evolving relationship. For evolution, we think three key components are always involved: information itself; a carrier, for example different species; and the ecosystem. The three are simultaneously evolving, so none can be independent—and the relationship transforms into one another, which is fascinating. The information may be most fundamental: they use energy, they change the form, and the form provides the carrier for information, so information can pass on and become new information. At the same time, the ecosystem defines the boundary of selection. Previously people separated each of these; now we realize they’re not separate. For example, when the environment is in crisis, the conditions change, the information feeds back to the genome, and the genome goes through genome chaos—randomly creating new information and finding the right carrier, a new species, and then the information is preserved.
Interestingly, Darwin never discussed evolution as directional. So what is the direction? Information complexity increasing—that’s the direction. Every time, under stress, the form-and-flow relationship comes into conflict, and the information changes itself. The organization becomes more and more complex because information complexity increases. With this, we can even address what Mary asked about recurrent patterns. Looking back at the history of evolution, there’s always a two-faced evolution: macroevolution reaches first, to create the new system; microevolution follows, to duplicate it. So from beginning to end, to the society, it’s the same thing every time—you change the information, find the new suitable carrier and a different societal form. And evolution is all about conservation; 99% of it is conservation. Now we realize the biological system is different from the physical system: only the biological system can self-create information. All the genetics, everything, is a constraint. So Darwin missed the point—he missed the constraint, and constraint is the most important thing in evolution. Creativity only happens when the ecosystem has a problem, when the form-and-flow relationship is in conflict—that’s innovation, because otherwise they don’t get the chance. So I hope you can share some of your philosophical thinking on this as another way of thinking about evolution. Because gradually the cognition can become so complicated—humans can choose the environment, even choose places larger than Earth to live in; we’ve completely become the opposite of deterministic. But initially, biological systems have very little cognition, and this process is reflected in information complexity. How do you like this framework?
Matt Segall: It all sounds very much congruent with what I’m suggesting. We need to understand evolution as an integrated process—what’s evolving? It’s the whole organism–environment nexus. And this question of information as what makes life distinct is, I think, what you were getting at: life creates novel information.
Henry: Yes. Give you one example: when we try to kill a cancer cell, instantly all the chromosomes shuffle. Each configuration is a new set of system information. So there’s some strange power guiding them. The biological system knows, but it only knows a little—it only knows to increase the probability in general; it doesn’t know the specificity. And natural selection favors the specificity. That’s the story of how the information becomes more complex each time. They only know that they need a mechanism to get a more varied set of variables. That’s about all I’ve got to say.
Matt Segall: In Whitehead’s book The Function of Reason, he talks about the Darwinian account in terms of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest—Spencer’s term—and says that if survival were really the only factor, we’d have no explanation (and this is to your point about directionality) for why organisms comparatively deficient in survival power—more complex, more fragile organisms—would ever evolve. So Whitehead thinks there must be something more, which is why the question of agency is so important: organisms are able to respond creatively to environmental changes in ways that don’t seem accounted for just by inheritance from their lineage. This is another thing Mike Levin is discovering—that there’s creativity in living cells that seems truly intelligent, not just spontaneous in the sense of random. It’s goal-seeking.
Henry: Right. If you look at the history, all the different species have been replaced. What’s left is that the information becomes more complex. That’s the only fact left—everything else, the carrier, is replaced. So that’s a fact we have to think about.
Matt Segall: There are so many questions about information—that would be a whole other two hours, to get into what’s meant by it. The idea of information being stored in a genome always struck me as a new form of preformationism. Information is always, as Bateson would say, a difference that makes a difference—and I’d add, a difference that makes a difference to somebody, to some organism. If there’s any information in biological processes—and clearly it’s meaningful to talk that way—it’s not stored in a particular molecule. It’s as much stored in the whole intracellular matrix as in the environment and the whole series of historical environments a lineage has lived through.
Henry: Right now they do have a mechanism to preserve the information—we need to identify which one, the karyotype coding. But we can discuss that later on. Thank you.
Matt Segall: I’d like to understand that point better.
Charlie Munford: Thank you, Henry. Alicia?
Alicia Juarrero: Thank you, Matt. I’m really appreciative of your exegesis of Whitehead, because I’m trained in philosophy and I never understood Whitehead—the neologisms just killed me. I was particularly struck by your emphasis on how he allows for a historicization of physics. Historicizing, localizing physics is straight down my avenue; I like that a lot. It’s the going-up side that concerns me, because at this point language matters. I’m upset by the idea of neoplatonism—from Levin, from Chalmers, from a lot of these folks—which is partly why, if I had to choose, I’d go more with your Aristotelian approach. But I have a problem with that too. For Plato, forms were eternal, unchanging, fixed, rigid—so the question was how they get into matter. But Aristotle faced the same problem. There are two books I really rely on: Depew and Weber’s Darwinism Evolving, and Lennox and Gill on Aristotle, saying the relationship between formal, efficient, and final cause in Aristotle was never made particularly clear. That’s one reason I think language is important.
I’m not crazy about the idea of Aristotelian evolution, because Aristotle believed in forms just as much as Plato—he just didn’t believe there was a separate realm where they could exist independently. For Aristotle the form always exists embodied, embedded in a particular thing. So for Aristotle there’s no evolution; there’s only what we’d call development or specification—which you suggest is the role of the propositions, that they specify the eternal objects. But that suggests to me that it’s just a question of specification, a technicality—the fifth decimal point of the existing form. I was struck that at the beginning you said it’s a price too high to pay. It seems to me almost a lower price to say: look, the cosmos is creative. It throws off emergent properties that are unpredictable—and I’d say something different from Stuart here; I wouldn’t say it’s a different organization, I’d say the topology changes altogether. So it is creative. And then just dispense with the whole notion of eternal objects—dispense with all of it—and say there’s a mechanism, and I’m perfectly happy calling it enabling constraints, constitutive constraints, regulatory constraints; it’s constraints all the way down and all the way up. In each case you get emergent properties qualitatively different from the ones before. A tornado is a dissipative structure, yes, but it doesn’t have the properties living things do; and human beings have properties that lower animal and plant forms do not. So why do you really think it’s a price too high to pay to forget the whole notion of the eternal? It almost sounds like trying to keep the Ptolemaic theory going by keeping the notion of God, the notion of eternal life. If you chuck all of that and just say there’s a tendency in the universe toward increasing coherence—autocatalytic closure, then constraint closure on top of it, giving you something else, and so on—why isn’t that an option?
Matt Segall: That’s a very good question, Alicia. I’m tempted to say there are cat people and dog people, and there are Platonists and Aristotelians.
Alicia Juarrero: Sure—but my point is they’re the same insofar as both believe eternal forms are eternal, unchanging, and fixed.
Matt Segall: Let me give different examples of the same thing happening at different scales. A mathematician engaged in the creative effort to trace out a new pattern never conceived before. Or an organism that’s experienced a mutation in development, where a new function is discovered as a result. In these cases of creative advance into novelty, the space of possibilities being explored or dipped into—the possibilities aren’t just arbitrarily related. There’s a structure to possibility.
Alicia Juarrero: Oh, correct, correct.
Matt Segall: We could say that structure is established just by adjacency to actuality, and that it isn’t there already, definite, before an actual organism—a living mathematician or a cell—dips into it.
Alicia Juarrero: But why does it have to be an outside entity, like a scientist? Why can’t the constraint dynamics—the recursive aspect, the constraint-closure aspect—be the creative thing? And what it’s created is real new potential, real new possibility. It doesn’t need an efficient cause that’s outside, something outside producing the boundary conditions—which is what Polanyi tried to do. Polanyi was perfectly happy with self-organization until you got to boundary conditions; then he wanted to make sure something outside, some entity or deity, set them. Why not say that’s the key thing about Stuart’s autocatalysis—they create their own boundary conditions, which is in fact what they’re doing?
Matt Segall: I accept that part. I’m trying to walk a line between that and where I hear Mike Levin going—where he gives basically efficient-causal power to the forms; the agency comes from the forms, in Mike’s view.
Alicia Juarrero: No, it should be formal—not efficient causality. It’s a form, but formal, not something that pre-existed in any way, shape, or form. It’s true novelty. Why not? It seems simpler—it’s Occam’s razor. It beats postulating eternal objects and all the rest of it.
Matt Segall: Right. There’s both an axiological side and a logical side to it: this realm of possibility seems ordered, and we, as organisms, in some way ingress that order.
Alicia Juarrero: I think that second part is questionable. New order is qualitative novelty, and it is new. And—you’re absolutely right—it brings axiology in with it, because the function can be better, more efficient, more parsimonious. So you do have valence, qualitative value coming in with every new product. But it’s endogenous. That’s where I thought you were going with the panentheism.
Matt Segall: Well—if you get a chance to read the longer essay I prepared, I’m trying to lay out Whitehead’s distinction between definiteness and determinateness. I know you don’t like his neologisms or the seeming scholastic machinations of his metaphysics, but in questions like this, I’m trying to have it both ways. I really don’t want to hypostatize a separate realm of already-determined forms that we’re just trying to copy.
Alicia Juarrero: Correct. I like that. Correct, correct.
Matt Segall: But there’s a subtler point that keeps me thinking with Whitehead—his account of an intensive ordering of what he calls eternal objects, and the grading of their relevance for each occasion of experience in the life history of an organism—that for some reason I’m not able to let go of. Because then I feel like I lose the ability to understand the structuring of possibilities.
Alicia Juarrero: You’re pushing on exactly the right place—the constraint dynamics, I’d think. Any new creation, because it’s creating new possibilities, is almost by definition multiply realizable. And that opens up the actual realization further down. But whatever is brand spanking new has got to be a multiply realizable reality. I don’t want to use the word form, because then we’re buying into the fixity, the rigidness, the unchangingness, the universality. And if you really believe physics is going to go historical, then that’s got to be all the way up and down.
Matt Segall: It’s such a subtle issue—and I’m with you in what you’re resisting.
Alicia Juarrero: No, I’m very interested, because it is certainly part of the tradition, and I’d like to see what aspect of it can still fit in to this new way of looking at the universe that I’m trying to carve out. Thank you—it was very good. I understood a lot about Whitehead that I didn’t before.
Charlie Munford: Thanks, Alicia. Okay, we’ll move on to Kate Kauffman.
Kate Kauffman: First of all, Matt—that was an absolutely exquisite love letter to Stu. You are a soul son, clearly, and there are many of us who want to keep building on that foundation. So bless you, my son. And Alicia—I think there really is a beautiful space where we can have our cake and eat it too about flexibility and eternal form. Mike Levin says if you ask why long enough, you end up in the math department; I’ve been hanging out there, thinking about the quantum physics, and there’s a lot of good open territory to mine. What Stu and I were talking about—form and function and this idea of eternal form—what if the historicity of everything that’s ever happened builds an ongoing record, which would give us a kind of eternal nature? I think that’s part of what we need to add to the story, in terms of what would support theological ideas like reincarnation and connections between people across lives—like reiterated trajectories in Hilbert space. So you have historicity, context—all up for grabs in terms of history—while honoring the internality and agency that living systems have.
So the way to have the constraints is to add three new closures I’ve been working on. First, clarifying identity closure: how the information works top-down and bottom-up—you’re really an expert in that, Alicia, bless you. Second, enhancing Pattee’s idea of semantic closure, which puts the axiology back in. And, here in the math department, we’re looking at self-referential systems—Gödelian openness in mathematics. So there’s a beautiful space where we can talk about iterative self-reference, distinctions being made constantly through this iterative process, which is part of the transition and translation between the possible and the impossible. And that’s something the agent does fresh in every moment, through its own historicity, contextuality, and perspective—but anchored to axiology through the structure of identity, and the fact that any geometric structure is a resonance cavity. You can anchor the balancing in gauge symmetry—the “yes, this form is right for me” or “that form is wrong for me”—in the mathematical structure and gauge theory. So I’m really excited to go forward with all of this.
Matt, I’m thrilled—a fine young mind with such a unique mastery of language. I’ve never seen anyone as close to Stu as you are in terms of verbal fluidity. And Alicia, I think there’s a lot of hope, by adding identity closure and enhancing semantic closure to clarify what we mean by information closure—then we get to have our cake and eat it too, and a whole new way of thinking about the internal domain and our subjective access into it, particularly the role of emotion. By the way, evolution is a great story, but we need to go back to Darwin, who wrote about emotion in man and animals. He had that from the beginning, but it was laundered out over time with the big push to stay away from anything religious. We’re not there anymore—we’ve come full circle back to what we mean by soul, by spirit. Spirit is really this process, this flux, this flow in any kind of form, that may be eternal, that’s constantly within our own ability to reconfigure. So these are good times; there’s room for optimism. My question for you, Matt: how deep are you going into the math and physics of this? Because everything you’re saying, I think there’s territory to mine there.
Matt Segall: I appreciate the compliments about my verbal facility, but my math is not there—I can’t claim to be making any advances on the mathematical side. I’m always looking for colleagues to collaborate with who are. It’s funny that I’d get into a philosopher like Whitehead, whose method is so mathematical—all his concepts are informed by his work on Principia with Russell, and how and why that project failed. Trying to ground arithmetic in the logic of sets ended up not working; they ran into all these paradoxes, and Gödel came decades later to prove why. But Whitehead was liberated by that to do speculative philosophy—both guided by the example of mathematics and recognizing how mathematics can mislead philosophers. Spinoza, brilliant as he is, thought you could geometrically prove a speculative philosophical view, for example. Whitehead would say philosophy is not about proof; it’s the search for premises.
Kate Kauffman: Indeed. And Peirce has his abductive form of reasoning, which is very relevant here too.
Matt Segall: Yeah—but I’m not making any advances on this mathematically, unfortunately.
Kate Kauffman: Let me finish with this: I’m very fortunate to be privy to the mind of Lou Kauffman, one of the leading theorists on topology and knot theory. He’s helping me fill in the gaps that a bad education left. So I’m happy to pass along—there’s a lot of beautiful stuff about self-reference and the Laws of Form with Spencer-Brown, a whole way of thinking. We’ll talk later. Let me do as much of the heavy lifting as I can, and then pass it along to you.
Matt Segall: That sounds great. Division of labor.
Kate Kauffman: Exactly.
Charlie Munford: Thank you all so much—this was a great meeting. Before I close, I want to read a comment from Wayne Lewis, who had a question burning him up but then had to leave. It’s not actually a question, it’s a comment, so I’ll read it: “Alicia, have you by any chance read Tim Eastman, Untying the Gordian Knot? It unpacks a great deal. The big leap is allowing yourself to admit that pure potentia with internal relations—which is what Whitehead meant by forms—are an aspect of reality just as actuality is. Many problems evaporate. What Whitehead meant by ‘eternal’ was different from how people interpret Plato. Eternal, for Whitehead, means that potentia arise and increase because of historical, unchangeable fact, as time evolves.” So that was just a comment, but he wanted to be sure we heard it.
Alicia Juarrero: Thank you—I’ll look into Eastman.
Charlie Munford: In any case, we’re at time, so I’ll bring this to a close. Thanks so much, Matt. I really want to extend an invitation for you to come back and join future meetings as a member and participant, because we appreciate your work—it’s given us a ton of resonance with many of the thinkers in this group.
Matt Segall: Thanks so much, Charlie. It was a joy to be here. I enjoyed all the questions and challenges—definitely more to think through. Very generative for me.
Charlie Munford: Fantastic. We’ll be coming back to some of this material later in the summer—Stu Kauffman has a session in August, and before that another session with Vadim Backman at Northwestern about the computational properties of the genome. Exciting stuff to come. Join us again, and thank you all so much. Bye, everyone.
It was wonderful to hear a great dialogue.