ABSTRACT

The evolutionary perspective turned the classic worldview on its head. Since Roman times, the world was understood to be hierarchic in structure, explained by a transcendent mind at the top. From there, the great chain of being cascaded down through angels, humans, frogs, protozoa, and finally stones. Inverting the chain of being switched mind from being the ultimate explanation of things, to being the mystery to be explained. As an early critic of Darwin protested, this theory assumes that “Absolute Ignorance” is the ultimate artificer, even of life and mind (MacKenzie 1868). However, the notion that the distinctive properties of life and mind were pro-

duced by a blind mechanism from inanimate matter runs counter to a fundamental assumption of Western thought. It is expressed in the oft-quoted dictum of the Roman poet-scientist Lucretius: “ex nihilo nihil fit,” from nothing, nothing [can be] produced (1994 [n.d.]). Later, the principle was expressed another way by the medieval philosopher-theologians who borrowed a maxim derived from Roman secular law: “Nemo dat quod non habet,” no-one gives what he does not have. For the scholastic theologians, this maxim articulated their conviction that no creation can have more perfect characteristics than the cause that gave rise to it. To imagine that modern science and philosophy have now fully abandoned this

principle would be mistaken. The first law of thermodynamics states that neither matter nor energy can be created nor destroyed, and the second law tells us that, ultimately, orderliness always gives way to disorder. Physical change always and only involves a rearrangement of material and energetic properties that are already there. No chemical transformation will turn lead into gold, and perpetual motion machines, constantly recycling the same capacity to do work, are impossible. Because the capacity to do work depends on the second law – the spontaneous breakdown of ordered states – in the absence of outside interference, a more ordered consequence cannot arise spontaneously from a less ordered antecedent. This precludes the possibility of future orderliness bringing itself into being – a

limitation that must be true of every physical process, including your reading and understanding these words. Yet this familiar mental activity of reading exhibits characteristics that appear, at

least on the surface, to violate this stricture. Presumably, your reading this text was initiated by considerations about what information it might provide you, though this was only a possibility. Moreover, the content conveyed by these words is neither the ink on the paper, the sounds they could refer to, or the neural patterns they have invoked. These are “intentional” phenomena in both senses of that word: (1) actions organized with respect to achieving certain consequences, and (2) relationships of reference in which something present is linked to something absent and abstract. The evolutionary world-view assumes that the functional organization of living

processes and the intentional and experiential nature of mental processes arose spontaneously, out of blindly mechanistic chemical reactions. And yet it also assumes that living functions are organized with respect to arrangements that are not immediately present, something merely possible, and perhaps not even that. For these end-organized features of life and mind to be genuine, and yet to have arisen from physical phenomena lacking any hint of these most fundamental attributes, the ex nihilo principle would have to have been violated. Efforts to resolve this paradox have often led to simple denials of one or the other

horns of this dilemma. One can either argue that functional and intentional properties are ultimately just mischaracterized complex mechanical properties – eliminativism; or that they were always already present even in the simplest mechanical interactions – panpsychism. However, if we wish to accept both assumptions, and thus argue that the resulting paradox is only apparent, we must demonstrate the coherence of a third causal paradigm – emergentism.