I’m mystified right now. And I’m high. I got high to change things up. I was stuck at my desk. Felt out of focus, couldn’t think. So I got high. I got high and I brought my laptop over to the couch and now it’s just me and the words. They don’t feel so important, like they do up on the monitor. They feel close and intimate. Like a diary entry, a place to share those real whispers -- the ones that are too scared to come out in the bright light of day.
I started writing about words a few minutes ago. Words have always seemed to hold a special kind of magic to me. And part of the reason is that they hold within them the deep mystery, the one that no one knows the answer to, the one of cosmic importance.
How to describe it? It’s this loaded concept: emergence. It’s this idea of things springing up out of nothing. Of wholes having more than their parts. How could that be?? It seems so impossible.
And words… words have this feel to them somehow. This lurking power. Words cause things. I say, “could you pick up some salt?” to my friend, and an hour later this object appears on my desk. How trivial. The most trivial thing. But it’s not. It’s the most amazing thing in the universe. That a simple utterance, that small spell, that quivering of vocal cords, can orchestrate this whole complex dance, in the universe, in someone else. Those six syllables, that small vibration in the air, does something to you. It impinges on you, cascades through your muscles, causes ink to touch paper, causes salt to move through space. How incredible.
There was this thing I was hooked on a while ago. It was this amazement, this bafflement over the insane degree of control these big floofy things like beliefs have on chemicals. How you could read words on a page, and then the next second, feel a jolt of adrenaline, or be convinced to join a gym, and move your muscles, all of those molecules, those chemical, physical things, twitching around to and fro, orchestrating this amazing complexity. How could that be?? How could something so abstract, so symbolic, so seemingly far removed from the molecules it acts on… cause that? How could abstractions come to exist? How could any of that be real, have real consequences, in a clockwork world devoid of ifs, devoid of maps, devoid of all the things that feel so immediate to us.
And it lingers with me still. This fascination with abstractions. This obsession with life, with minds, with all things that have maps, with all things that exist in this liminal space, this axis of the real. The one of reified ontologies. How could it be?
How is it that when I draw a line around some atoms, all of these things which we care most about, emerge? How is it that some collections are intelligent? Are map-having? And some aren’t? Maybe they all are! It’s a thought. I suspect it isn’t true, though. I think there is something special about some clumps and something not too special about others. What is it? Is the specialness real? Real in some objective sense, real in the sense that despite living in a Laplacian clock-world, these terms mean something. Entropy, causality, information, maps. These things are somehow… true facets of the place we find ourselves.
There is this puzzle, too, about life. What does it mean to be alive? The vitalists believed there was some animating force, some élan vital, that was special to the living. Now every respectable biologist shuns these views. Now we call everything we don’t understand about that “emergence.” But ask a biologist, what changes, when my dog goes from being my living and breathing Spot to when he’s a limp corpse? What does it mean to be alive? All of the physical laws supposedly come to bear on both situations, yet in the corpse, that seems to be all there is. Something seems to leave Spot when he dies. Some animating force. Some élan vital.
I’m not a vitalist. But I am a proponent of believing that there is something real there which hasn’t been addressed. Which we pretend physics has explained even though we can’t say how. I am pretty sure we live in a physical universe, in other words, I don’t think anything immaterial exists. Living things are built up out of atoms. But how the fuck does that work?!
I am not high anymore. It is the next morning. I’m just drinking my morning coffee now, which somehow feels like a bad idea, but my parents are coming over and I don’t want to be a miserable prick to them. Also I feel a draw to finishing my thoughts here, which always goes better with drugs. So here I am again, not high, but spiritually connected to the page, still.
Anyways. There was a great piece by David Chapman once, called something like A Million Tiny Spooks. He talked about how cognitive science had decried dualism, but went on to replace it with a million tiny souls, these things called beliefs. What are beliefs? Everyone claims that they’re something-something neurons somehow, but we don’t really know that. There isn’t a clear mapping from something like “belief” to a physical entity. It’s this big, abstract, floofy thing. Sort of like a soul. Beliefs cause things, they animate the body. If you believe milk is at the store and you want it, you’ll go get it. A million tiny souls. And we’re happy sitting back thinking well, it’s not dualism because it’s all physical! Somehow. And I think that’s partially fair, but I think it’s also sort of weak sauce. The somehow is doing most of the heavy lifting here, and it deserves an explanation.
I’m not a dualist, not yet at least. I’m trying to figure out how this could all make sense on the assumption that physicalism is the right framework. But it’s crazy to me, how all of this complexity can arise, how this intricate dance of atoms can be orchestrated by this symbolic level, this arena so many layers removed, this abstract veneer hovering above, able to exert downward pressure on what is below.
And now that I say that I am thinking about Michael Levin, thinking about how his framework feels really obviously right to me. Levin claims that there is a level above DNA, the software level so to speak, of bioelectricity which orchestrates the movement of molecules. That complex outcomes like “head shape” are encoded in electrical patterns in tissue, long before they’re developed. And not just that, but a single trigger, a single voltage difference in a single cell in development can cause an entire eye to form downstream. It feels suspiciously similar to how thoughts can cause such big downstream effects. It’s the same thing, he would say. Neurons are just speed optimized cells.
There’s this layer, in living things. This level of abstraction which we have somehow harnessed. Somehow. I remember in an interview between Sean Carroll and Michael Levin, Carroll noted that he wasn’t used to levels interacting -- sure you could explain a bunch of gas molecules bumping around with thermodynamics, but it wasn’t like the abstract notion of temperature was causing anything -- it was just another level of description. But in life, there does seem to be this interaction, at least Levin claims, and I believe him.
There’s a level that hovers above DNA, that orchestrates it, a painter of shapes, big things, big complex, abstract things. Things like eyes and antlers and concepts. The bioelectric level is the arbiter of the abstract -- it determines robust, functional, teleological outcomes in living things. It is what differentiates a mouse from a human, despite sharing 98% of our DNA. It is what somehow manages to create the right size tubule in newts, even when cell sizes have been arbitrarily enlarged, a single cell stretching to make the entire cross section when it would normally be 8-10 of them. Why? Because it isn’t operating in a clock-world -- it isn’t just a complex web of it-thens, it’s something more.
There’s something that knows what a tubule is, what it’s supposed to do, and manages to do that under many different circumstances. It’s not just a bunch of individual units all following predetermined rules. I mean it is, in some sense, but it’s also relevantly not that. It is also, to a meaningful degree, abstracted. There is a latent goal lurking. A goal which somehow represents “tubule” in a top-down fashion, and exerts its will. Which is meaningfully different from the bottom-up, reductionist story we currently have of DNA; the millions of signaling pathways working in lockstep, from a pre-specified blueprint. No, there is some level at which the abstraction “appropriate newt tubule” exists, genuinely exists, and that level guides behavior, paints with DNA and with cell function to make it happen.
Is this not what words are?? That pattern of brain activity, upon hearing “could you pick up some salt?” Does that not cascade through so much complexity, but robust nonetheless, into a series of macro-scale motor actions that results in the “same” high level state occurring, despite adverse conditions? Despite different initial conditions? No matter if there’s snow on the road, or if the first store is closed, or if it’s hot or whatever, you can usually still get the salt?
Organisms move through physical space in a dreamworld -- a fantastical realm with tethers to reality -- little strings that pull the right levers -- levers that push the right buttons in the physical universe -- abstractions that have real consequences, that are real in how disproportionately large an impact their existence has on the physical spaces around them relative to how small they seem.
Abstractions are real power in this sense -- in the way that they can manipulate the spaces beneath them with precision and robustness -- in the way that the cascading triggers have these awesome and macroscopic effects from a cause so small.
Abstractions have always seemed to me to be these many to one things, maps, these things which measure, which filter, which carve up the world and say “these things are the same and these other things aren’t.” This is the normal way in which we conceive of it, but now I see that it works the other way too. Not a mapping from the territory to our minds, but the other way around.
Life has somehow commandeered this technique -- has realized that single changes can ripple throughout the physical universe in waves. In patterned waves, in waves robust to initial states and varying conditions. In abstractions. This is the way that abstractions are real, have power. Not just as static maps of an environment, but as levers that reach from inside of us and cascade out into complexity, out into macroscopic effects, on and out into the world.