Category: Darwin

See this link for context on Bruce Damer and David Deamer et al.’s abiogenesis hypothesis.

…

“To sum up: There are two species of process, macroscopic process, and microscopic process. The macroscopic process is the transition from attained actuality to actuality in attainment; while the microscopic process is the conversion of conditions which are merely real into determinate actuality. The former process effects the transition from the ‘actual’ to the ‘merely real’; and the latter process effects the growth from the real to the actual. The former process is efficient; the latter process is teleological. The future is merely real, without being actual; whereas the past is a nexus of actualities. The actualities are constituted by their real genetic phases. The present is the immediacy of teleological process whereby reality becomes actual. The former process provides the conditions which really govern attainment; whereas the latter process provides the ends actually attained. The notion of ‘organism’ is combined with that of ‘process’ in a twofold manner. The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. Thus the expansion of the universe in respect to actual things is the first meaning of ‘process’; and the universe in any stage of its expansion is the first meaning of ‘organism.’ In this sense, an organism is a nexus.” 

—Whitehead, Process & Reality, p. 214-215

In Process and Reality, Whitehead articulates two methods for describing the universe.  The ontologically primary method is what he calls “genetic analysis.” This mode of analysis looks at what transpires within each concrescing actual occasion of experience, abstractly dividing occasions into their component “prehensions” (i.e., either physical feelings of perished occasions in their environing past or conceptual feelings of eternal objects divinely envisaged). Genetic analysis is the “view from within,” an endocosmology. The second method Whitehead calls “coordinate” or “morphological” analysis, which has to do with the mereotopological (whole/part) relations among the entities of the contemporary external world. This latter mode of analysis focuses on the presentational immediacy of extensive relations in space-time, the “geometrical strains” binding occasions together into the prehensive unity of the external universe. This method of analysis backgrounds the subjective feelings and intensions informing the actual occasions that compose the world-process. Coordinate analysis of the morphology of extension is another way of describing what natural science is doing in all its measurements of matter/energy, which are always measurements of what has already become. In contrast, the genetic mode of analysis re-contextualizes the objective beings of the past by involving them in an eternal process Whitehead calls “Concrescence”: objective beings are prehensively unified into novel subjective becomings. Though it is often modeled as such by physicists, the cosmos is not simply a collection of inert particles: it is a community of creative participants. The universe expands like an embryo grows, through cellular division. In all our sophisticated modeling we must remain cognizant of both finished facts and concrescent actualizations of novel facts. We can never have the complete set of facts because the fact is nature itself is perpetually perishing, incomplete, forever passing beyond itself, caught in creative advance. Hence both genetic and coordinate modes of analysis provide essential service to the science of metaphysics. 

Whitehead uses the phrase “intensity of satisfaction” to describe the feeling of concrescence, which is the creative process whereby “the many become one and are increased by one,” or the process whereby the perished past is valued, remembered, and allowed to progress into the future with renewed evaluation accruing. The past can pass into the future only through the present: experience is always a function of what William James called the “specious present,” which is not a solipsistically frozen frame cut off from its origins and destiny, but the living tension between an inherited past and an anticipated future. For Whitehead, our perception of space emerges in the present. He calls it “presentational immediacy”: it’s Descartes’ res extensa. Time perception is a function of what Whitehead calls “causal efficacy,” which is the feeling of transition from one occasion of experience to the next. Concrete reality is a complex relation of these two modes of perception; we distinguish them only for the purposes of intellectual analysis. We relate them not through deductive logic or deterministic causality but through analogy and symbolic imagination. Forgetting this epistemic situation leads to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. 

In Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, the “extensive continuum,” the realm of extension or extensity, is only half the picture. And in fact, even to call it “half the picture” is already the privilege the domain of extensity over the other domain, that of intensity: to say it’s only half, as if 50% was external and 50% was internal, is already to privilege the quantifiability of extension. The quantitative dimension, the “extensive continuum,” is the mathematizable, computable, binary domain; it is what Tim Eastman calls the Boolean domain that can be measured in bits, rendered exhaustively in 1s and 0s. Only in this domain does it make sense to talk about 50% or half, or ratios of this kind. In the realm of intensity, the old rationality with its logical rules of non-contradiction and the excluded middle doesn’t work anymore. The intensity of concrescence is a domain that cannot be measured, cannot be digitized. It is reality-in-process, something I’ve referred to as “creality” to prevent us from imagining it at some “thing” or “state.” It is the process whereby pure potentiality finds an improbable pathway to the achievement of final satisfaction in a complete occasion of experience or “actual entity.” Before a completed entity is achieved, an occasion is composed of many prehensions of its past, some initially in contradiction with one another. The entity’s process of concrescence resolves contradictory prehensions into complex contrasts, sometimes drawing upon prehensions of novel eternal objects not found in its past, transforming clashes into some modicum of aesthetic harmony (these conflicts are why the principle of non-contradiction cannot be applied in the genetic analysis of concrescence, since a definite actuality has not yet been achieved; only once a concrescing subject has achieved its aesthetic aim and perished into objecthood can standard logic and measurements in space-time be applied).  

When Whitehead discusses the intensity of satisfaction of a concrescent actual occasion of experience, he is talking about feeling, about subjectivity and aesthesis, which cannot be spread out in a coordinate grid because it is not yet part of extended space-time. The realm of intensity or of prehension is not in extended space and time; rather, measurable space-time relations are a secondary expression of or emergence from networks (or nexūs or societies) of occasional feelings. Space-time thus emerges out of the collective decisions of actual occasions of experience, a result of what these occasions of experience find satisfying, rather than a pre-existent container of some kind to which occasions are passively subjected and forced to conform. The extent of conformity to a measurable and predictable space-time manifold is a function of the stubborn habits accumulated by past occasions being inherited in the present. The habits of what Whitehead calls “the electromagnetic society,” as well as the society of occasions associated with gravity (gravitonic society) set the base notes for further cosmic evolution, though we cannot be sure that in the distant future our universe will not continue unfolding in more dimensions than what relativity has so far suggested.  

Thus, the very gravitational gradient of space-time, and the energetic dynamics of light, are functions of feeling, functions of feelings of enjoyment, such that the the measurable shapes that the cosmos takes in the extensive domain are a precipitated result of the achievements of the prehensive activities that are underway inwardly and so do not appear in the measurable domain. The concrescent activity of occasions of experience does not appear outwardly because it is what does the peering.  It is the subject side of the equation governing cosmogenesis. When Whitehead refers to “intensity of satisfaction,” what he means to say is that there is an aesthetic achievement whereby the perished objects of the past are brought together under contrast with one another, “prehended.” The many objects of the perished past grow together into a new unity, a new whole of some kind, which has an associated experiential vector that launches it through the present into the future. It is telic, an aim, a purposeful unfolding that feels its way forward, or in thermodynamic terms, “falls forward” into the local minima free energy state (e.g., spherical liposomes). The achievement of stable thermodynamic morphologies, and the creative advance into more and more improbable morphologies at whatever scale of physical organization can be described in such experiential terms using Whitehead’s scheme. It is an account of the “why,” not the “how” (the latter is a matter of detailed scientific investigation of the extensive domain). 

Talk of energy in the extensive domain can, in Whitehead’s terms, be translated into the intensive domain in terms of experience or emotion—not conscious deliberation or imagination, or any of the high grade consciousness that we human beings experience—but a lower more basic form of feeling, a “vector feeling,” in Whitehead’s terms. At the most primitive level of physical process, these vector feelings are just gravitational gradients, or the inheritance of the vibratory frequency of a helium atom from moment to moment of its life-history, the repetition and enjoyment of the feeling of that particular frequency. What starts as extremely simple and relatively habitual feeling vectors amplify themselves as they cycle, as they become recursive, and especially as they develop means of reliable molecular templating and replication. When the geological and astrophysical conditions are right for an “ur-able”* planet to ripen into life, when various reliable rhythms in the environment afford the emergence of “improbability sinks” sheltered by environmental conditions from a background of relative chaos, then the emergence of chemical combinatorial selection becomes possible, eventually bootstrapping cellular evolution. The gradual emergence of living cells occurs in the cycling of these fragile progenitor communities. Not a single, heroic cell, but a heroic community gave birth to life. The progenitor hypothesis that Bruce Damer is developing suggests it was a network of polymers at the edges of warm little ponds that would be drying out and refilling, drying out and refilling, with a crucial “gel-like” phase in between where complex cities of lipid sheaths allowed for the first sharing economy on Earth to emerge. Along the edges of these ponds, dehydration would catalyze the formation of longer polymers, of nucleic acids and peptides, complex chains or molecular worms that begin to manifest the first biological “functions” on planet earth, and perhaps in the universe. 

Bruce Damer likes to say that the universe before life—the atomic, astrophysical, galactic environments—gets a “D” for creativity, in the sense that at these scales relatively few stable forms of organization were found, and for billions of years they have been fixed in place and are just running down or wasting away now. No further evolution can transpire. The abiotic cosmos is thus ergodic. It wasn’t until the biological realm invented template copying and self-repairing complex adaptive cellular organization that the creativity of the cosmos ratcheted up again to find new, more complex energy states to “fall” into. I accept with Damer that the universe before life gets a “D” in creativity, but the important point here is that it is not an “F.” It is just enough to pass, just enough creativity to keep the evolutionary process falling forward. Yes, it unfolds at a much slower rate than life is able to evolve with its more potent novelty producing engines, but at least some degree of aim and effective affective satisfaction (you read that right) was present from the beginning, otherwise atoms, stars, and galaxies could never have emerged. These sidereal processes are tremendous organizational achievements in their own right, considering the chaos from out of which they came. 

To sum up, there is a creative lure toward more intense relationship operative at every scale of the universe, but which becomes qualitatively richer as evolutionary organization complexifies and new means of sheltering improbable energetic pathways, affording interconnection, and storing memories are developed. With Whitehead’s help, we can correlate these aesthetic lures with major evolutionary transitions into more and more improbable phases of psychobiophysical organization: the lure toward intensity of satisfaction is a lure towards improbability.

This tendency is an aim toward order that is driven or goaded by the lure of enjoyment and satisfaction. It is the great cosmic “counter-agency” to entropy that Whitehead discusses in his book The Function of Reason. He is attempting to give physics animacy again. This language is not meant to discount the details of physics in the realm of extensity. It’s just an attempt at reintegrating the for too long neglected domain of intensity back into our modern understanding of the universe. Whitehead does prioritize the realm of intensity as the concrete reality, with the realm of extension being its secondary expression. But it is not like you could have one without the other, an inside without an outside. Both are required for the cosmic engine of evolution to creatively advance. Whitehead’s protest against the sort of scientific materialism that tries to explain away the inside by reduction to the outside is rooted in his claim that we cannot understand the shapes taken in space without giving intensity its due. Intensity is Natura naturans (Nature naturing), and without this ingredient of creative process sprung from intensity of satisfaction, the Natura naturata (Nature natured) would make no sense. Explaining Nature’s external shapes requires making reference to such inward satisfactions. That, at least, is Whitehead’s wager. 

*”Ur-ability” is a new concept Damer is developing with David Deamer to refer to the thermodynamic and chemical conditions necessary for life to emerge on a planet. We are used to thinking of the “habitability” planets, but “ur-ability” has to do with establishing not just habitability for existing life but the conditions for the origin (ur-) of life.