The Jim Rutt Show EP 157 Terrence Deacon on Mind’s Emergence From Matter
01:59:50
Intent and Reductionism
- Reductionist theories struggle to explain intent.
- Intent, like attending a memorial service, causes physical actions, like driving and consuming resources.
Life's Preservation of Order
- Life goes beyond self-organization by preventing order from dissipating.
- This contrasts with dissipative systems like whirlpools, which accelerate their own demise.
Emergence as Removal
- Emergence involves the removal of possibilities, not the addition of new properties.
- Constraints, or absences, define form and organization.
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Introduction
00:00 • 4min
Terrance's Two Thousand and 11 Book Incomplete
03:45 • 3min
What Is Absent in Our Experience?
06:41 • 6min
Is There a Reductionist Theory of Everything?
12:12 • 2min
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
13:57 • 5min
The Self Organising Process
19:20 • 2min
Evolution - The Origin of Life
20:55 • 4min
What Is Emergence?
25:24 • 4min
The Concept of Constraint in the Transition From Self Organization to Living Processes
28:55 • 5min
The Concept of Orthograde and Contragrade in the Unfoldings of Systems
33:39 • 5min
Homeo Dynamic Processes, Morphodynamics and Telio Dynamics
38:32 • 4min
Morphodynamic Processes - How to Produce a Higher Order Feature
42:30 • 3min
Homeo Dynamic Processes in the Cosmos
45:56 • 2min
Is There a Process of Attogenesis in Helio Dynamics?
48:10 • 2min
The Process of Catalysis - It's a Morpho Dynamic Process
50:29 • 3min
Reciprocal Gadalysis
53:33 • 2min
The Catalytic Process and the Capsid Container
55:27 • 5min
The Relationship Between Absences and Abnormality
01:00:11 • 2min
What's Next?
01:02:09 • 1min
Information Theory - Its Importance in Information Processing
01:03:23 • 5min
The Relationship Between Noise and Signal
01:08:38 • 3min
A Difference That Makes a Difference
01:11:22 • 5min
The Autogenic Process - How Does It Work?
01:16:35 • 4min
The Sensitive Sentience of the Ottogenesis Process
01:20:37 • 3min
Consciousness
01:23:30 • 4min
Having a Distributed Nervous System
01:27:21 • 6min
Neuronal Dynamics
01:33:02 • 2min
Theoretical Modulation of Thermodynamics
01:35:09 • 4min
The Contragrade Process of the Nervous System
01:38:51 • 4min
A Flame Doesn't Have States, It's a Process
01:43:06 • 5min
Conscious Is a Process to Try to Undo Itself All the Time
01:47:38 • 2min
The Hard Problem Isn't as Hard as Some People Think It Is
01:49:23 • 4min
Consciousness Is Not the Hard Problem, It's the Imperative Problem
01:53:12 • 3min
The Difference Between Existing and Being Is Not the Physical Stuff
01:55:43 • 4min
Jim talks to Terrence Deacon about the ideas in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter...
Jim talks to Terrence Deacon about the ideas in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. They discuss the story of zero, integrating absence into physical theories, systems that generate entropy to stave off entropy, the history of emergence & the risk of mysterianism, reframing emergence as removal & constraint, orthograde vs contragrade processes, 3 layers of emergence, the special case of end-directed (teleodynamic) processes, a simple model of autogenesis, contrasting & integrating Shannon, Boltzmann, and Bateson, moving toward sentience, nested teleodynamic processes, feeling as primary to consciousness, rethinking the nervous system in non-computational terms, consciousness as a self-undoing process, inverting the hard problem, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, by Terrence W. Deacon
JRS - EP10 David Krakauer: Complexity Science
JRS - Currents 053: Matthew Pirkowski on Grammars of Emergence
JRS - Currents 015: Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell on Complexity
JRS - EP148 Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing
Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, by Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, & Alvin Toffler
The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold J. Morowitz
JRS - EP105 Christof Koch on Consciousness
Professor Terrence W. Deacon has held faculty positions at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Boston University, and the University of California, Berkeley. His laboratory research has combined human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. This work extends from cellular-molecular neurobiology and cross-species fetal neural transplantation to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language. These topics are explored in his 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. Currently, his theoretical interests have focused on the problem of explaining emergent phenomena, in such unprecedented transitions as the origin of life, the evolution of language, and the generation of conscious experience by brains. His 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, explores how the interrelationships between thermodynamic, self-organizing, evolutionary, and semiotic processes are implicated in the production of these emergent transitions.