Later today, I’ll be in dialogue with Jim Rutt about a chapter recently published with astrobiologist Bruce Damer focused on the origins of life. Jim has expressed some skepticism about metaphysics in the past (he says the word makes him reach for his revolver). I responded preliminarily to his concerns here. My contention in this coauthored chapter (recently published in this book) is that Whitehead's process metaphysics helpfully reconfigures the problem of abiogenesis by reimagining the status of "matter."
Here is a general outline of the chapter, using as much of the original wording as possible:
I. Introduction
- The origin of life is one of the most consequential cosmological questions
- Answering it requires collaboration between science and philosophy
- The chapter approaches the question from two complementary perspectives:
1) The empirical - explicating the Hot Spring Progenitor Hypothesis
2) The metaphysical - leveraging Whitehead's organic realism to overcome Kantian epistemic quandaries
- The goal is to dynamically integrate the metaphysical and empirical aspects
II. The Empirical Evidence for a Hot Spring Progenitor of Life
- Story of two scientists traveling back in time to the Hadean eon to explore the origin of life
- They discover silvery sludges forming along the edges of hot spring pools that appear to be precursors to life
- Overview of Deamer and Damer's research developing the hot spring hypothesis over the past 15 years
- Key aspects: wet-dry cycling concentrates organics and facilitates polymerization; fresh water pools on volcanic landmasses
- Recent experimental progress supporting the hypothesis
- Proposing the concept of a "progenitor" - a complex prebiotic medium with the capacity to give rise to the first living cells
- Speculative propositions about the properties of the progenitor
- Discussing the philosophical and practical implications of progenitor research
III. The Metaphysical and Cosmological Context of Life's Origin
- The need to overcome the mechanistic conception of nature to make progress
- Revisiting Kant's treatment of biological teleology and its limitations
- Whitehead's organic realism as a way out of Kant's epistemic quandaries
- Whitehead's generalization of evolutionary principles beyond biology to a cosmic scale
- The role of "aim" and "satisfaction" in driving this evolutionary process
- Critique of the machine metaphor; need for formal and final causes
- Unpacking Whitehead's process-relational ontology and key concepts
- Interpreting the hot spring progenitor hypothesis through the lens of Whitehead's cosmological scheme
IV. Conclusion
- The need for science to engage in metaphysical reflection during paradigm shifts
- The role of philosophy and religion in integrating and translating scientific knowledge
- The potential civilizational import of origin of life research in our precarious Anthropocene era
Here’s a more specific outline of my part of the chapter:
The Metaphysical and Cosmological Context of Life's Origin section covers several key points:
1. The need to overcome mechanistic materialism: Making progress on the origin of life requires rethinking classical "matter" and leaving behind the mechanistic conception of nature. Whitehead's organic realism replaces inert matter with a process-relational ontology.
2. Revisiting Kant on teleology: Kant recognized that living organisms exhibit a form of circular self-organization and natural purposiveness that is irreducible to mechanical efficient causes alone. However, his adherence to a substance ontology and the limitations of his transcendental method prevented him from granting scientific status to the reality of natural teleology.
3. Whitehead's organic realism: Whitehead overcomes Kant's epistemic limitations by re-grounding science in a metaphysics of organism rather than of substance. He replaces the materialist's abstract "vacuous actuality" with experiential processes of concrescence.
4. Extending evolution: Whitehead extends evolutionary and self-organizing principles beyond the sphere of biology to encompass physics and cosmology. He sees tendency toward increase of complexity and intensity of experience at all scales. Evolution is reframed in terms of "societies" of actual occasions aiming at novel intensities of aesthetic satisfaction.
5. Formal and final causes: Overcoming mechanism requires recovering formal and final causes (in Whitehead's terms, "subjective aims" and "intensities of satisfaction"). The role of subjective aim in concrescence makes the emergence of biological organization scientifically intelligible by pointing to an intrinsic teleology at play throughout nature.
6. Process-relational ontology: Whitehead replaces the classical dualism of vacuous matter and ghostly mind with a bipolar process ontology, whereby every concrete actuality is understood as a momentary drop of experience with both physical and mental poles. The physical pole corresponds to the objectivity of the past, the mental to the possibilities of the future.
7. Relevance to origin of life research: Damer's hot spring progenitor hypothesis can be coherently interpreted as a special application of Whitehead's generic cosmological scheme, with the chemical dynamics driven by the wet-dry cycling corresponding to the concrescent phases in the becoming of actual occasions.
In summary, Whiteheadian metaphysics provides an alternative process-relational framework for theorizing life's origins that grants reality to the self-organizing, end-directed, experiential dimensions so evident in biological phenomena while also maintaining continuity with physics.
Cheering for you, friend. You are doing increasingly great work.
Not sure this is the right place, but this is a comment to the chapter this refers to. Very stimulating essay and application of Whiteheadian process philosophy. Are there to your knowledge any approaches to a «general theory of evolution» or «cosmic evolution» that are not fundamentally «historical»? By this I mean conceptions that take a radically teleological turn, positing the past as «in service» of the present, i.e. that the past we remember and discover through our being in the present must be (teleologically) explained and understood in terms of the present. Obviously there is a degree of this in Whitehead’s philosophy and what you have written about in this chapter, but I’m wondering if you are aware of anyone going further in this particular direction. I get the sense that in freeing ourselves from the limited materialist-reductive paradigm we might also have to free ourselves from the strictly historical/non-teleological framework as well, though it is surely not a case of either/or but both/and here as elsewhere. I’m not familiar with your complete body of work, so this might be adressed in other essays or writings, if so I apologize and hope you can refer me. Once again, very interesting read!