The most basic point is that life and the second law, entropy and complex systems, are in no way opposed to each other. Far from it. Natural complex systems cycle matter in regions of energy flow. These systems are not in thermodynamic equilibrium, but, living off of and leveling ambient gradients, they help foment equilibrium in their surroundings. Telic, energy-seeking, sensing life-forms belong to a larger class of dissipative structures. Rather than become less organized, these systems become more organized as energy flows through them. Schneider provides an alternate to Lambert’s modern definition of the second law. Schneider’s version is that nature abhors a gradient, a gradient being a measurable difference of temperature, pressure, chemical concentration, and so forth. Living systems are among the class of natural systems that actively reduce gradients as they maintain their internal organization, grow, and spread.
And here from another angle we can espy the deep roots of teleology, the telic protosemiotic that rules nature. Nature “doesn’t like” differences or concentrations of energy and will actively find ways to get rid of these differences or delocalize these concentrations. Convection cells called Bénard cells are hexagonal fluid flows. They are not less but more organized than simple conducting fluids and perform their natural task, reach their natural telos of energy dissipation, more effectively. Complex systems from autocatalytic chemical reactions similar to the precursors of life to cycling storm systems that rectify atmospheric pressure gradients have a naturalistic function, to delocalize energy. When they are finished with it, they are done, both with the tasks and with themselves—they disappear. Complex systems from Bénard cells to living organisms and ecosystems measurably increase rates and regimes of energy dissipation. Stengers confirmed this for me at the conference. Yes, it’s true, she said, complex systems produce more entropy, but your story is not my story.
I showed her my Maxwell demon trick. Three red cards, representing heat or fast-moving atoms, are mixed with three black cards, representing cold or slow-moving atoms. Focusing on the little angels on the back of Bicycle brand playing cards, I turned the symmetrical cards end for end. I then showed that, with no work being done, the cards had sorted themselves out back into a red and black state. The trick simulates moving from a “more probable” state to “less probable” state, one in which a gradient, here represented by red and black cards, is reestablished. In fact this is just a modern version of a classic card trick called “Oil and Water,” where red and black cards (oil and water), after being mixed, re-sort themselves.
It then turned out that Stengers, a fan of magic, was reading Sleights of Mind, a book on the application of magic tricks to cognitive psychology written by three psychologists. My belief is that, after my talk, when she said “I would rather listen to you than physicists” but “my story is not your story,” it was because her passionate project is to review the history of science, to see what it could have been and would have been and what, correlatively, it could still become. A kind of pixie, she, like Jacques Derrida, productively bothers many, if not all, received notions.
Nonetheless, she and Prigogine did not work directly on living systems, and to me one of the most exciting applications of their work is to organisms, which both unconsciously (physiologically) and consciously spend their days recognizing and degrading gradients. “It is true that they produce more entropy.” Stengers’s confirmation bears repeating: The “complex systems” such as your child and your mother and your dog and your cell phone—which seem more ordered, more organized, and which dazzle us with their elaborateness and agency, their intricacy and relative autonomy—are actively spreading energy into the environment. They are converting high-quality energy to low-quality energy at a pace faster than would be the case if they did not exist. Nonliving systems such as Bénard cells also measurably produce more entropy. They seem to occur because nature happens upon ways to efficiently get rid of preexisting gradients. Life is a splendid means of doing so and often has fun (e.g., eating) in the process. It is something nature likes to do, with or without life and with or without consciousness—though both life and consciousness seem to increase the efficiency, partaking of the “forness” in this natural tendency—to find and efficiently delocalize preexisting concentrated energy reserves. It does thus seem that, beyond any particular advantage of a bodily organ, life as a whole exists for something—to spread energy, to delocalize and deconcentrate it, a valuable ability connected to its metabolism and franchised by its genetic reproductive capacity.
I thus disagree with the biosemioticians (e.g., Thomas Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer) who would say, quite liberally given the general climate, that the realm of life coincides with that of semiosis, meaning making.15 I think this is true and love Butler’s discussion of the dog looking at a door to go outside not as language (from French langue, “tongue”) but as “eyeage.” Yes, other organisms speak, not necessarily with their tongues, and we can sometimes “hear” them, not necessarily with our ears. But language is a material mediation. It takes time to convey a message; it requires intermediary parties. And behind discrete messages I would argue is an ur-message, a message that in our heart of hearts we both already know and know that we don’t want to know. At the limit that message is this: that we are among the tools nature is using to send it. Like the heat-curling tape in the old Mission Impossible TV series, which destroys itself after telling the spies their current mission, our ur-message is that we are to foment equilibrium and that we should destroy the message that tells us this message, getting lost in time and stories along the way. Here then, from a 1960s TV show, is a metaphor for the thermosemiotic ur-message. The secret desideratum of all living things, their “higher” message, which is also their “lower” message, and is itself beyond discrete meaning, is to reach equilibrium. This is our impossible mission.
TRIM’S HAT
“I live on Earth at present,” writes Bucky Fuller, “and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”16
In my view that is exactly correct: We have a natural function, fomenting equilibrium, although it is complicated by the fact that completion of this prosaic task would render the message complete and the message sender obsolete. Life’s solution thus is, as Schneider says, to relight the candle: reproduction continues the metabolic process of gradient reduction. Genetic replication (dependent on breaking the triply covalent bonds of nitrogen locked up as N2 in the atmosphere and integrating them into DNA) is part of an expanding 3.8-billion-year-old process that locates and uses—without necessarily using up—available energy. It is a natural process, not defying or violating anything. And complex, sensing systems seem to have a leg up in the ancient gradient-reduction game.
The natural unconscious tendency to spread energy, enabled and enhanced by a natural creation of nonliving—and ultimately living and uncontroversially “teleological” conscious complex systems—confers a broad purposiveness over nature. It is a bit of a disappointment, however, for those looking for an ultimate metaphysical or traditional Judeo-Christian purpose, for example, to do God’s will.
Tao , “the way” in Chinese philosophy, advocates a less humanocentric and more thermodynamically resonant view, I think, a kind of principle of least action, a kind of advocacy of aligning oneself with natural flows, of which one is part but which take part without one in any event—a philosophy that reminds me of setting goals but then opening oneself up to a path of least resistance, a difficult–easy path, free of excess interpretation, which in turn reminds me of Charles Bukowski’s tombstone, which says, “Don’t Try.”
While life’s desires are ultimately focused more on devouring chemical and photosynthetic gradients than on using gravitational ones, the tendency for things to reach their end in the natural world is something we understand, intuitively.
In 1759 Laurence Sterne, in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, ha
s a character, Corporal Trim, who drops his hat:
“Are we not here now”; continued the corporal, “and are we not”—dropping his hat plump upon the ground,—and pausing, before he pronounced the word—“gone! in a moment?”—The descent of the hat was as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.—Nothing could have expressed the sentiment of mortality, of which it was the type and forerunner, like it;—his hand seemed to vanish from under it;—it fell dead;—the corporal’s eye fix’d upon it, as upon a corpse;—and Susannah burst into a flood of tears . . . ,—meditate, meditate, I beseech you, upon Trim’s hat.
The world may be meaningless, yet have a direction. It may have a story, but not the story we want to hear.
When Sterne tells us of the hat that “his hand seemed to vanish from under it;—it fell dead,” we are not sure what he means; when was his hand ever under the hat, did he mean the hand fell dead or the hat, and if the hand, did it stand for the head? Or perhaps he meant to convey Susannah’s view, and from hers the drop of the hat obscured the corporal’s hand, which was behind him after the fall of the hat, creating the disappearance effect. We mistake agency, jump at our shadows, find patterns, and attribute motives after the fact even to ourselves. Language itself is a teleological nexus that, with its telic prepositions, its “fors” and “tos,” draws us in; it pulls us far more than we push it. English, for example, is subtle, supple, a deep and accommodating crowd-sourced reserve of wisdom that we do well to follow, along ancient paths of polysemy, rather than try to impose on it with academic jargon and neologisms. The telic character of language brings forth its own stories.
A vivid example occurred in the notes I made for a biosemiotics conference at the Rockefeller Medical Center on Front Street in New York City. I wanted to talk about how biosemiotics, with its emphasis on language, forms a welcome bridge between the humanities and the science, but that talks in the former are generally read whereas scientific talks are usually spoken. I wanted to say that I found this difference ironic or paradoxical because it should be the other way around: scientists who assume language is a transparent medium to convey unitary knowledge would want to be more careful by writing what they intended to say, while humanities types aware of the inconstancy of language and its irreducible metaphoricity should not worry so much. Practically speaking though, I would like to be able to do both: reading a text can put people to sleep. Thus in my notes, wanting to make the above point extemporaneously, I wrote:
Reading Humanities vs. fall
as leep
safety net
The break between as and leep was not a typo nor was leep a misspelling. Rather, my handwriting had a discontinuity in the word asleep. Still, reading my own writing, it seemed to say something else entirely, a kind of haiku in which someone falls asleep, but the fall that takes them there turns into a leap (misspelled). In fact, my note was merely a prosaic reminder to tell people that although I would prefer to ad lib (as is more common in science talks versus humanities presentations), a written text was for me a safety net against losing my way in the forest of extemporaneity. I didn’t write out the whole note so as to force myself to speak it. But when I went to look at my note before my talk, the “safety net” in the written text looked like the place at the bottom of a poem where the sleeping faller would be caught in a net of dreams.
“Fall as leep”: what I had not tried to do looked more purposeful, and certainly more beautiful, than what I had.
BIOSEMIOTICS
Those still smarting from Snow’s scolding may want to look to biosemiotics. Biosemioticians are interested in healing the Cartesian cut, the rift between body and mind that overlaps roughly with that between the humanities, concerned with thinking, words, people, spirit, literature, and art, and the sciences, concerned with matter and things.
So what is biosemiotics? According to Wikipedia, biosemiosis is “sign action in living systems.” But I am arguing that semiosis, or the natural telos from which it forms and which structures it, is more prevalent than life, that semiosis exists in an unconscious, inchoate form in complex systems generally.
“Particular scientific fields like molecular biology, cognitive ethology, cognitive science, robotics, and neurobiology,” Wikipedia continues, “deal with information processes at various levels and thus spontaneously contribute to knowledge about biosemiosis [which] may help to resolve some forms of Cartesian dualism that is still haunting philosophy of mind. By describing the continuity between body and mind, biosemiotics may also help us to understand how human ‘mindedness’ may naturalistically emerge from more primitive processes of embodied animal ‘knowing. ’”
Biosemioticians are interested in pursuing the rich tapestry of signification systems in living organisms without foregoing, as might be said of Continental philosophy, a reality beyond and independent of such systems. There is an interesting historical connection here as Heidegger, who is so influential in Continental philosophy, was deeply influenced by a figure foundational to biosemiotics, the protobiosemiotician (as Sebeok called him), Jakob von Uexküll. But there was a fork in the road of Uexküll’s influence, as Heidegger, whose notion of Dasein seems largely lifted from Uexküll’s notion of an organism’s life-world, or Umwelt, turns it into something especially human.
Heidegger argues that man exclusively dwells in the house of language, that Friedrich Hölderlin is wrong in thinking that animals, even a lark flying across the sky, have access to “the open”17—that is, Being as a whole rather than an environment. Heidegger asserts that the human hand is vastly different from a monkey’s paw. Heidegger considers all nonhuman animals together. Apparently almost any animal will do—he chooses a bee—to stand in for the essence of “the animal.” Heidegger, who mentions Uexküll more than any other scientist, and though he gets the idea of Umwelt from him, says that animals are poor in world, separated from us language-dwellers by an “abyss.”
So Heidegger takes Uexküll in a distinct direction, running with his important exploration of meaning making, purposeful behavior, and the inner worlds of various organisms, but then applying them almost solely to man. Biosemiotics takes a different fork in the path, expanding Uexküll’s insights to all animals and even to the chemical process of life itself. Wendy Wheeler, for example, in her book on biosemiotics and culture, cites approvingly Hoffmeyer’s notion that life’s basic unit may be the sign and that semiosis and living coincide precisely.18
I think that biosemiotics does provide a way not to deny mind, or mindlike processes, in nature. I agree with this spirit of connectionism exemplified by biosemiotics in its effort to exorcise, with profound realism, the ghost of Cartesianism that haunts science. Jablonka et al. describe heredity, signification, as “four-dimensional”: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and human-style symbolic messages are sent across the generations.19 In epidemiology and psychoneuroimmunology, there is evidence that declines in our social status can shorten our lives, presumably through some sort of signal, that our attitude can affect our immune system, sickening or strengthening us depending on the conscious and unconscious messages we send ourselves. Candace Pert identified peptide receptors in the brain and shows how chemical messengers pass between the endocrine, nervous, gastrointestinal, and immune systems.20
Sign systems work not only inside our bodies in cells but outside them in ecosystems. We now know that genes exist that ensure timely aging unto death. Apoptosis, telemorase rationing, and sugar intake are all involved in ensuring death in aging organisms. (Not all organisms age, which seems strange to us because we do, but, if you think about it, life has already “figured out” the way to maintain as a complex system, basically by directing energy to genetic replication—“restarting the flame” as Schneider says.) The signals for aging are partly mediated by food intake, which is why near-starvation diets allow animals to increase their health and life. Josh Mitteldorf and John Pepper argue that aging behaves like a program that maintains genetic turnover and stabilizes
population flux in ecosystems subject to crashing. This program seems to turn off when populations are low on food, which is why organisms of various species can live longer and even become disease resistant by lowering their intake. Caloric restriction is thus an example of ecosemiosis. The ecosystem talks directly to our genes, normally without us consciously realizing it, and science is just beginning to overhear this fascinating conversation.21
Clearly semiosis and life are connected. But I would argue that the basic signification we see in responsive life, with its naturalistic teleology—the plant reaching for light, the animal shivering to stay warm—has deep roots in the nonliving world. An insulator who uses powdered dust to watch air escaping in a leaky house told me of his surprise to see a streamer go halfway across a ceiling before doing an about-face and returning through the holes of the electric outlet whence it came: even near-equilibrium systems with nothing an ordinary person would remotely call alive seem to “figure out” how to accomplish their natural telos. Prigogine and Stengers, in discussing the coherence of an only slightly more complex thermodynamic system, a Bénard or convection cell, discuss how the parts seem to be “communicating.”
Hoffmeyer writes: “This inversed arrow of time (future directedness) immediately sets functions apart from other kinds of mechanisms that always refer backward along some chain of causation [in] explaining how the feature occurred.”22 I believe this to be the crux of the issue, as humans conflate function, sign-making processes (semiosis and biosemiosis), and conscious or “purposive” processes.23 Immanuel Kant, in the Teleology of Judgment, showed that teleology (like causality, space, and time) is a mental category that we bring to the world. Indeed, it is not so easy to distinguish consciousness from this kind of “future directedness [that] immediately sets functions apart from other kinds of mechanisms [that instead] refer backward along some chain of causation”—“mechanisms” here referring to phenomena such as natural selection and Newtonian-style action-reaction.24 While it may be anathema to biosemioticians to extend sign-making behaviors beyond the realm of the living, consider the evidence: Nonliving complex systems such as hexagonal-shaped thermal convection cells, intricately changing chemical (e.g., Belousov–Zhabotinski) reactions, and typhoons multiplying over the Pacific also originate, maintain, and grow only within gradients (that they implicitly—and semiotically—sense). The differences are in temperature, chemical concentration, electron potential, and barometric pressure. Hurricane wind speeds, part of cyclically organized storms (to which humans, granting kinship, give first names), are directly correlated to atmospheric pressure gradients.
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 12