Music, Memory, and the Song of Life (dialogue with Karen Wong)

Karen Wong invited me on The Meaning Code again to discuss ideas we both find enriching. Below I’ll share a near transcript of some interesting tidbits, including discussion of Michael Levin’s work.

Mike Levin frequently quotes William James, who defines intelligence as the ability to accomplish the same goal by different means. This definition emphasizes flexibility and adaptability to novel circumstances, while keeping the same aim in mind. It suggests learning how to accomplish that aim in a variety of different contexts. This is a departure from the Cartesian paradigm, where knowledge is often seen as a fixed entity, as if we already know what the world is capable of throwing at us. This perspective suggests that we don’t need to be sensitive to the uniqueness of each moment and each environment. However, research in biology is leading to a paradigm shift where knowledge is re-imagined as an ongoing process of learning. In philosophy, these entails the need for an evolutionary epistemology, which James was among the earliest thinkers to contribute to.

Modern philosophy has thought of knowledge as something connected to experience and experiment. However, in the line of thought influenced by Descartes and Kant, knowledge is still often seen as derived from a fixed table of categories that we are either born with or acquire through language. Philosophers like James, Whitehead, and John Dewey argue against this. They say that we create new categories all the time and that categories are more like scaffolds. If we freeze these categories into rigid structures, we become incapable of learning and maladapted to life.

This shift from knowledge to learning is crucial. It breaks us free from the idea that knowledge is like an already completed dictionary. In this old view, we already have all the knowledge we need; we just need to look it up as new experience comes in. This doesn’t allow for the novelty of experience or for learning.

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The pervasiveness of teleology, or purpose-driven behavior, in the living world has long been a point of contention, especially in a materialistic understanding of the universe. If we view organisms as machines designed by natural selection, we try to erase purpose but end up speaking in teleological terms anyway. Ernst Mayr coined the term “teleonomy” to soften this, suggesting that life appears purposive in its behaviors but that it’s just an artifact of our own human purposes. So humans then are somehow special, actually purposive and not merely apparently purposive organisms like all the rest? In this way materialism is constantly led into self-contradiction or human exceptionalism when it tries to deny that purpose is part of nature.

Mike Levin talks about purpose in an experimentally grounded way. He argues that if attributing goals to an organism helps solve problems and make predictions, then why wouldn’t you attribute purpose to them? However, there’s a deeper ontological issue. What is the nature of reality such that there should be human beings capable of scientifically investigating the world? If we don’t root this in our biology and potentially more deeply, we run into paradoxes and contradictions. We need to look again at the materialistic paradigm and understand the universe in a more coherent way, where purpose drives the process of complexification from the beginning.

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Instead of thinking of an organism as a machine with replaceable parts that can be understood in freeze frames, it’s more like a song. The genetic code would be the musical score, and the cells are like the orchestra. But in the case of a cellular orchestra, they’re actually building their instruments as they go. This time-developmental pattern that plays out over the course of an organism’s life-history is more like a song, its genome more like a musical score than a blueprint to build a house. When human beings engage in any art form, but music in particular, we’re really tapping into the essence of life and perhaps even the essence of the cosmos. That’s why music is so sublime: we feel like we’re tuning to our deeper, maybe even the deepest, purpose. As a Whitehead would say, the teleology of the universe is the production of beauty; there is no higher good than the production of beauty.