Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. Science is a campaign to find natural explanations for all natural phenomena. Scientists, therefore can’t resort to explanations that rely on mysterious supernatural beings or forces. With nothing added to nature, all phenomena is natural. How then to explain the difference between physical and living phenomena, physio-chemistry and living effort?
Some say don’t try. Scientists should be able to reduce all phenomena to the most basic natural objects and interactions. That’s called reductionism. By reductionism’s radical standards, we should be able to explain your effort to go get ice cream at the level of interacting quarks.
Anti-reductionists don’t buy it. You neither can nor must reduce living effort to quarks. Still, they’re vague about the alternative. Some argue for what’s called poetic naturalism, that it’s all in how you look at things. If you make effort to just assume effort, that’s cool. Some argue that, with synergy, biological wholes are greater than the chemical sum of their parts as though that explains anything. Some argue that increased complexity explains the emergence of effort though plenty of complex systems, thunderstorms for example, don’t make effort.
Between radical reduction and anti-reductionism there’s an alternative often overlooked even though it’s actually how science is meant to be practiced. Call it emergent reductionism.
With emergent reductionism, once you have a no-smoke-and-mirrors scientific explanation for how properties emerge, you can reduce your further explanations to those properties. After scientist explained how chemical properties emerged from physics, they could use these properties in their explanations. Likewise, once we’re able explain how effort emerges from chemistry we can use effort in biological explanations. The lower level sciences must explain the properties that the higher level sciences assume. Once they’re explained it’s rigorously scientific to assume them.
Scientists can’t yet explain how classical physics emerges from quantum physics and they know it, recognizing that it’s a mystery yet to be solved. Scientists can’t yet explain how living effort emerges from physio-chemistry but somehow scientists seem less attentive to this gap.
Physio-chemistry doesn’t yet explain the emergence of the most basic effort, all organisms’ effort on their own behalf. Effort doing what? Most fundamentally organisms struggling for their existence, preventing themselves from degenerating.
The standard evolutionary model, DNA molecules copied from generation to generation doesn’t explain effort. It ignores breakdown and the focused work, the effort required to heal what breaks down. If organisms aren’t regenerating in real time, they won’t last long enough to generate next generations.
The chemical energy expended in making effort is no different from the chemical energy that yields any aimless work. You burn the same energy as a cornfield on fire. What then accounts for the difference between aimless work and an organism’s means-to-ends effort? It’s all in how organisms channel the energy. Organisms channel energy into effort that regenerates their ability to channel energy into effort.
To explain effort we need therefore to explore how organisms limit or focus how energy is expended, not something added to chemistry but how chemistry becomes self-limiting such that aimless work becomes aimed effort to regenerate.
In the next video I’ll suggest how effort emerges from aimless work. This approach is called teleodynamics, an emergent reductionist explanation for the physio-chemistry of agency. Teleodynamics could finally make effort something explained, not merely assumed.
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