Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves

Cover
Title
Contents
Foreword
I. Overview
	1. The Mystery of Purpose
		What Are We?
		Four Questions
		Dismissing the Mystery
		Not Just Human Selves
		When Purposes Emerge
		Stubbornly Mysterious
		Teleology
		Solvable
		Processes of Elimination
		Constrained Self-Regeneration
	2. The Biggest Mystery We Ever Ignore
		Close, But Not Pressing
		Blurring the Difference Between Cause and Effect and Means and Ends
		Science by Equivocation
		Bridgeless
		Weightless Yet Weighty
		A Key to Solving Other Big Mysteries
		Supernatural Ghosts, Eliminative Machines
		Bad Pr and Blinkered Science
		Liked vs. Likely
	3. Deacon’s Solution in Brief
		An Unrocklike Persistence
		Outpacing the Second Law
		Emergent Regularization
		Emergent Self-Regeneration
		The Circular Self
		An Emergent Constraint on Emergent Constraints
		Constraints Accumulate
II. Framing the Mystery
	4. Two Sources of Change
		The Cause-and-Effect Toolkit
		The Means-to-Ends Toolkit
		Blurring the Toolkits
	5. Selves
		Self Redefined Broadly
		Human vs. Nonhuman Selves
		The Self-Body Problem
		“I Am the Body I Have”
	6. Two Ghosts, Two Machines
		Supernatural vs. Equivocal Ghosts
		Emergent Homunculi
		Functional vs. Nonfunctional Machines
		Teleonomy
	7. Interpretation
		For-Ness
		About-Ness
		Generating vs. Tailoring Traits
		Traits Are about Something for Selves
		Caused Events vs. Interpretative Behavior
	8. Aims
		Aiming as Constraining
		Pinpointing vs. Aiming
		If Not Determinism, Constraint
		Determinism vs. Probability
		Possibilities vs. Probabilities
	9. Evolution’s Limited Limiting Role
		Evolution is A Probabilistic Science
		Natural Selection is Aimless
		Only Selves and Aims Evolve
		Replication vs. Regeneration
		Evolution vs. Origins
III. Dead Ends, Live Clues
	10. The History
		An Overstep in the Right Direction
		Agreement, Then Disagreement
		Telos, A Lost Cause
		Guys of the Gaps
	11. Evolutionary Theory’s Elusive Self
		The Ghost That is But Isn’t there
		Self-Fishing
		Everywhere But Anywhere
	12. Information about Nothing for Anyone
		Bits
		If A Bit Fell in the Woods
		Sacrificing Viability for Inviolability
	13. The Engineered Ghosts in Our Machines
		Functionalism
		Selfhood is Not What Turing Tests
		Clustered Consciousness
		Amnesic Watchmaker Syndrome
		Dynamic Systems Theory
		Gaming the Game of Life
		The Reverse-Engineering Fallacy
	14. Small is Dubious
		Quantum Selves?
		A New Flood of What’s Always Already Everywhere
		Looking for the Key Where it’s Darkest
		Floodlighting the Nonsolutions
IV. Grounding a Solution
	15. Processes of Emergent Elimination
		Naturalism But Not Materialism
		Processes of Elimination vs. Processes of Production
		Negative Scientific Breakthroughs
		Emergence as Possible Dynamic Paths Drained Away
		Spelunking for Selves
		What’s Presented from What’s Prevented
		Which is More Complex: A Frog or A Frog Smoothie?
	16. Second Law Irregularity
		Same Difference
		Irregularity Happens
		Energy is Irregularity Happening
		Work is the Second Law Constrained
		Spring-Loading the Second Law
		Constrained Paths
		Processes of Elimination, Paths of Least Resistance
	17. Emergent Regularization
		Imposed vs. Emergent Constraints
		Net-Work
		What Doesn’t Cause the Spiral
		The Misnomer
		Emergent Regularization
	18. Emergent Regularization vs. Emergent Self-Regeneration
		A Footing, Not the Whole Bridge
		Negentropy
		Self-Regeneration
		Selective Interaction
		Other Kinds of Emergent Regularization
		Bénard Cells
	19. Other Emergent Regularization Dynamics
		Flash in the Pan
		Autocatalysis
		Crest and Crash
		Crystals: Frozen Regularity
		Crystals and Life
		Briefly Compounding Constraint
		Three Proposed Missing Links, All Falling Short
		Reciprocal Means and Ends
	20. Coupled Regularization Processes
		Hypercycles
		Error Catastrophe
		Container-Generating Autocatalysis
		Expecting More Luck than is Likely
		Closed, But No Solution
		Unity in Theory Only
V. Deacon’s Solution
	21. Autogens
		Bugs Become Features
		Not the Material Object But the Constrained Dynamic Tendencies
		Autogens Self-Regenerate
		The Minimal Autogen
		Information for the Self about its Environment
		Self-Cleaning
		Evolvable Reproduction at the Edge of Chaos
		The Selective Autogen
	22. Evolved Autogens
		Wisdom to Know the Differences for Self-Regeneration
		How A Molecule Could Become about Something
		A Hypothetical Scenario for Templates
		Just Enough Background: Energy
		The Template Autogen
	23. Where is the Self?
		Are Autogens Selves?
		Reciprocal Means to Prevent Ending
		Using the Second Law against Itself
		The Self is Not A Working Material Object
		How A Body’s Synergistic Couplings Accumulate
	24. The Consequences of Self-Regeneration
		The Emergence of Trying
		The Emergence of Good and Bad
		The Emergence of Self-Other (Not Inside-Outside)
		The Emergence of Foresight
		The Emergence of Memory
VI. The Interpreting Self
	25. Codes, Signs, Interpreters
		Functional Constraints
		Equivocation about Templates, Codes, and Representation
		Genes Are Patterns; Dna is the Molecular Medium
		Signs
		Promiscuity
		Coding vs. Interpretation
		What Interprets?
		Icons, Indexes, Symbols
	26. Kinds of Signs
		Building Icons into Indexes into Symbols
		Waking Up to Symbol Systems
		So Are Genes A Language?
		Template Advantages
		No Interpretation Without Selves
		How Interpretation Happens
		Divergence from Expectation
		Foresight and Expectation
		Generalizing about Interpretation
VII. Implications
	27. A Constraint-Based Approach to Evolutionary Theory
		Redundancy as Freedom to Explore
		Evolutionary Deconstraint
		The Three Rs
		An Evolved Frankencell
		Division of Labor Between Selves
		Implications of Relaxation for Altruism?
		Shifting Constraint and Deconstraint
	28. Implications for the Free Will Debate?
		Neither Free Nor Determined
		From Thresholds to Categories
		Unexpected Consequences
		A Grounding in Incomplete Determinism
		Most Butterflies Don’t
		The Logic That Makes Logic Nondeterministic
		Interpretive Bets
		Round about-Ness
		Selves Are Strange Loops
	29. Making Science Safe for Value
		Hume’s Guillotine
		Nonoverlapping Magisteria
		No Longer Stuck Between A Rock and A Hard Place
		At Home (Dethroned) in the Universe
		The Struggle for Insistence
		Likely Aims in an Apparently Aimless Universe
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index