And yet we know this to be false. This is the special absurdity of allowing an artificial method appropriate to an isolated perspective upon reality—nature considered as a machine, which is to say nature considered as though devoid of anything analogous to purposive intellect—to hypertrophy into a universal judgment on all of reality, including those of its aspects(—such as, obviously, those instances of purposive intellect that actually exist)—to which such a method cannot possibly apply. To whatever degree I am a physical system, I am also an intentional “system” whose mental events take the forms of semiotic (symbolic, interpretive, "meaningful") determinations, and whose actions are usually the consequences of intentions that are irreducibly teleological. As such, these intentions could appear nowhere within a reductive account of the discrete processes that constitute my actions as physical events; for final causes are not visible within any inventory of the impersonal antecedent physical events composing me. Simply said, I have reasons for being here, and reasons are qualitatively unlike mechanical forces, even when inseparably allied to them. Any good phenomenological description of my choice to be here would be one that could never be collapsed into a physical description of atomic, molecular, or even brain events. Yes, of course, at the level of the exchanges of matter and energy—or of their interchangeable mathematical values—the natural order may always have to even out into an inflexible equation. But the movement of those material and energetic forces is also directed by causal (or rational) relations of a different kind, which impose upon the flow of physical events formal and final determinations that are not merely the phenomenal residue of those events, and that are not visible to those aforementioned physical inventories. The obvious physicalist riposte to this, of course, is to claim that all intentionality is in some sense illusory, or reducible to complex electrochemical brain events, which are in turn reducible to molecular description, and then to atomic description, and so on. But that too is obviously false. Not that I have the time here to argue the point comprehensively (even if I thought it necessary). I will simply note that, over the past few years of my research in philosophy and science of mind, I have become more than convinced that every attempt to fit mental phenomena—qualitative consciousness, unity of apprehension, intentionality, reasoning, and so forth—into a physicalist narrative must prove a total failure. If nothing else, mental intentionality—in the full philosophical sense not only of determinations of the will, but of every act of the mind in orienting itself toward specific ends, meanings, aspects of reality, and so on—is clearly a part of nature, and yet one whose irreducibly teleological structure is entirely contrary to the mechanical picture. This is why, among devout philosophical physicalists, such wild extremes as eliminativism and materialist panpsychism (with or without the supplement of the currently fashionable pseudo-science of “Integrated Information Theory”) are ever more in vogue. The mental, it turns out, is no more reconcilable to the modern picture of material nature than it was in Descartes’ day.



Nor need we confine ourselves to the realm of the mental to call the mechanistic picture into question. It may well be that a conception of causality richer than what materialist orthodoxy can provide will ultimately prove just as necessary for molecular and evolutionary biology. At least, this is where a more diverse causal language seems constantly to be attempting to assert itself—top-down causation, circular causality, epigenetic information, symbiogenesis, teleonomy, convergent evolution, systems biology—even as traditional genetocentric neo-Darwinism strives to contain that language within its more linear narrative. And this is not simply on account of the failure of the human genome project to yield the master key to the entire mystery of life, from protein-folding to my love of Glenn Gould or Ella Fitzgerald. Life appears to be structurally hierarchical not only because evolution is a cumulative process, in which more complex levels are gradually superposed upon lower, self-sufficient levels, but because every discrete organism possesses a causal architecture in which there can be no single privileged level of causation; each level depends on levels both above and below it, and none of these levels can be intelligibly isolated from the others as a kind of causal “base.” At least, such is the contention of Denis Noble, perhaps the subtlest champion of systems biology or (as he also calls it) “biological relativity.” Maybe there was a time when one could innocently think in terms of a master ground or center of life, with the DNA molecule as the primordial genetic repository of information (whatever that means). And perhaps it seemed to make sense to understand life in terms of a very simple dichotomy between replicators and vehicles (those clever selfish genes and the organic “robots” they program for their survival). Now though, argues Noble, we can scarcely even define a gene, let alone identify any genetic explanation of the entirety of living systems; nor can we ignore the degree to which DNA sequences are passive causes, variously informed and given expression as determined by the organism and its environment. And for Noble there is a special kind of beauty in the exquisite complexity of organic life; he positively delights in the interdependent simultaneity of all of life’s functions, the way in which each level at once assembles the components of an immediately lower level while itself constituting a component of an immediately higher level: atoms, molecules, networks, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, holosomatic systems, complete organisms, populations, species, clades, the physical environment. He even, daringly enough, talks freely of natural teleology—in part, because he understands that such teleology, properly understood, is an intrinsic rational determination within a complex system, not a factitious purpose extrinsically imposed by some detached designing intelligence; but in larger part because there clearly are levels of explanation at which purpose constitutes not just an illusory epiphenomenon of inherently purposeless material processes, but a real causal power. An organ, no matter how stochastic its phylogenetic history, exists within an organism because of the purpose it serves, apart from which it would not exist. And these levels are not reducible to one another, but exist only as a totality. Within the hierarchy of relations, there may be discrete levels of organization, but no independent causal functions. The entire structure is a profoundly logical and purposive whole.

Now, maybe this intentional structure somehow emerges—biochemically and phylogenetically—from very primitive causes, which then become ingredients in a recursive system of interactions that were originally random or chaotic, and is therefore still reducible to a state prior to “purpose.” But, unless we are using the word “emergence” as a synonym for “miracle” or “magic,” we are still obliged to assume that the formal determinations of organic complexity—or, as we now call it, their “information”—are already present in those causes in at least latent or virtual form, awaiting explication in developed phenotypes (and other “molar” or “macroscopic” forms); and so we are also obliged to assume that whatever rational relations may exist in organisms (including form and finality) are already present in those seemingly random states. That is to say, we need not assume that, prior to the complex unity of a living system, some extrinsic “design” existed within its material substrate like a kind of algorithm programmed by an intelligent designer; but we cannot doubt that everything that enters into the structure of a living system is already constituted by those rational causal relations that cause discrete purposive systems to arise. Even if we cannot say how life began, or how self-replicating organisms became available for natural selection, we can certainly doubt that those “higher” causal relations are accidental accretions upon some single isolated aspect of their relations. “Irreducible emergence” is a logical nonsense; whatever properties appear in an effect, unless imposed adventitiously, are already implicit in its “lower” causes, even if only in a kind of virtual state. Perhaps even matter, then, in its barest constitution, already has something of the character of mind.

Even Noble, I should note, does not appreciate quite how radical the consequences of a hierarchical view of life might prove. At one point in his book Dance to the Music of Life, he invokes the old experiment of placing, say, a dozen metronomes on a wooden table and setting each in motion independently; over time, the initially asynchronous oscillations of the metronomes will become perfectly synchronized, solely as the result of the chaotic interactions of the vibrations passing between them through the resonant material of the table. This, he argues, is a splendid example of an “initial disorder becoming highly ordered by interaction.” But this is wrong. Actually, it is a case of an initial complexity, stochastically but intricately syncopated, reduced over time to uniformity—which is to say, maximal equilibrium achieved by subsidence to a minimal expenditure of energy. This is not the emergence of order, but a descent into an entropic state, which preserves only such order as it cannot entirely eliminate (though in time, if left undisturbed, even this order will vanish, as table and metronomes alike resolve into dust). To fit the picture that Noble’s account of life adumbrates, the oscillations of the metronomes would have to arrive not at perfect synchrony, but at something like the contrapuntal intricacies of a Buddy Rich cadenza or of Javanese and Balinese Gamelan.