Interdependence, Biology and Beyond

Introduction

• “This book is [an] invitation to recognize oneself as a biologist and to deepen one’s biological practice—that is, to learn about biology as it is produced through the practices of professional sciences, yes, but also to observe life and living beings carefully oneself and to be willing to be touched and changed by what one finds there.”

1: It Depends, Contingent Existence

• “‘Inherent existence’ means that a phenomenon has some kind of essence—something that makes it what it is, independent of anything else. What is essential is therefore what is fundamental.”
• Examples of essential categories: objects, matter, fundamental particles, energy, spacetime, physical laws, moral laws, logical statements, God, selves, subjects, soul, mind, and consciousness.

• “Essential categories are independent, unitary, and continuous. They exist without any dependence on anything other than themselves for existence. This includes their lack of dependence on perceptions or thoughts, which is why essentialism must entail a metaphysical (i.e., nonempirical) claim.”

• The essence of something cannot be confirmed by perceptions, it exists independent of them.

• We are all folk essentialists. Essentialism comes easy—we instinctively perceive flowers, dogs, or dollar bills as being unitary, continuous, and independent of other objects. Folk essentialism is a way of being for all of us that precedes the formal intellectual theory, in fact our folk instinct towards essentialism are the fertilizer from which grow intellectual theories
• “I would consider myself a folk essentialist who is curious about why I am such and whether I could be otherwise.”

• “The object-subject divide, when reified, gives rise to all kind of logical problems, and several practical problems besides. To remove it is to remove potentially unnecessary (and sometimes unhelpful) conceptual baggage. In other words, contingentism invites us to live without certain familiar but dubious assumptions, thus potentially enriching our lives as well as our views of the lives of other beings.”

• I agree that removing these dualistic assumptions seems to approach truth, but what kinds of problems will arise from their removal? Could it create more problems than it solves?

• “Critical thinking at its best, then, is actually reflexive thinking: the capacity to take into account one’s own habits of thinking and feeling in the course of engaging ideas.”
• Gives an example of coming in from the cold and touching a child’s face, and not inferring that the child has a fever. This is because we take into account our coldness in relation to the child’s warmth. Reflexive thinking takes into account our own state and habits to better equip ourselves to engage with ideas about reality.

• Signal transduction: “The [ORGANISM] [SENSES AND RESPONDS] to the [ENVIRONMENT].”

• Fundamental. The offerer, the offered to, the offering. The water source (cup), the water drinker, the act of pouring. Father, son, spirit.

2: What Do Objects Depend On? Physical substance, matter, and the external world

• We assume that coordinated sense perceptions means objects are inherently unified. A cookie has our senses singing in unison: ‘This is a cookie! It can be seen, felt, smelled, and tasted.’ Moreover, other people refer to these objects in the same way we do, reinforcing their vividness, clarity, and our conviction. “But the unity and vividness of objects depends upon these forms of coordination between one’s own senses and upon the coordinated actions of social members—unity and vividness are not in objects.”
• “It is the observer who perceives a collection of things as a single thing, or, conversely, who perceives a single thing as a collection of things.” Depending on preferences/goals, one could call a book “one book” or “millions of paper fibres”.
• “We accept that objects change, but to do so, we need to see them as the same thing changing. It is the observer with some concept of time who calls the past book and the present book the same book. There is nothing in the book that makes it the same book from one moment to the next.”
• “For objects to appear as if they existed intrinsically, they have to be aggregated as single things, distinguished from background space, posited to be continuous in time, and radically separated from the perceiving subject. This is a lot of cognitive work that is often taken for granted.”

• “The search for fundamental particles—conceived of as the ‘building block of atoms’—can be a search for something indivisible. Space-occupying particles can always be decomposed—if not empirically, then rationally—into even smaller parts.”

• Atom meant ‘uncuttable’. Yet it is made of electrons, protons, neutrons, which are made of quarks, and so on.

• As per Einstein, matter itself (i.e., some aggregation of mass) is really energy in a more concentrated form.

• Just as two magnets of same pole are brought together, and there is a repellent field holding them apart, we could consider their boundaries to actually extend beyond their visible surfaces to include a ‘field’, which is just air. “This is in a crude sense how we might imagine atoms, bounding them as spheres, thought the sphere has no surface but is simply a way of describing how close two nuclei might be able to come to one another. In that sense, the space-filling property of atoms does not describe its own ‘actual volume’ calculated from some bounded surface; rather, volume is relative, in that it is the relation between nuclei.”

• The volume of some ‘fundamental’ particle depends on its relation with other particles, which makes it non-fundamental

• “There cannot be such a thing as an indivisible particle if it has a dimension in space.”
• Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? This is the intuitive view of emergence, where something appears where it had not been present before. When parts come together, it seems like some novel whole emerges—hence its greatness relative to its parts. “Whatever is happening in this shift from an assemblage of parts to a greater whole, it is not necessarily a shift within the thing.” The emergent phenomena could be a reflection of something emerging within us rather than in the object itself; from our subjective relationship with a whole that we relate with/has some relevance to us.
• Properties, such as electrical conductivity, are not inherent in things but describe a relationship between theory and measurement. Electrical measurements are made on copper, and we deduce that copper’s electrons are unstable (relating it to atomic theory). Conductivity describes that relationship between measurement and theory.
• Is liquid inherently wet, or is this an abstraction we create in relation to liquids? Is our conception of wetness dependent on our perception? Can liquid be wet without us, or does liquid—or the whole universe for that matter—just exist?
• When an atom on the periodic table is discovered, because it fit within the theory based on the theories properties or measurable qualities, was an inherent object discovered or did the theory define the object?
• “If the hold it is asking not, ‘How do the properties intrinsic to objects emerge dependent on the properties of their constituent parts?’ But rather ‘How do objects arise?’ then he or she is asking the same thing as a contingentist.”
• “A chase is never itself available to observation, but is rather an inference that is drawn after making repeated observations.”
• Energy and forces do not refer to any observable thing, no matter how subtle. Force, for instance, is a quantity used to explain or predict where things will move or not. “‘Force in some contexts seems to mean ‘what keeps things together’ (or perhaps, ‘what keeps things apart’), but more precisely means ‘what helps predict whether things will be observed together’.”
• “What we experience, observe, and narrate as the regularity and predictability of the universe is just that. Regularity and predictability obviously depend on observers who group phenomena into patterns and relate them with other patterns. The ‘grouping and relating’ process is analogous to how objects depend on observers who experience certain phenomena as bounded and continuous.”

• “[A process such as the establishment of the first law of thermodynamics] does not describe a prior separation from and subsequent revelation of the structure of the universe as it is. Such a process is better described as a full participation in a universe that is rendered explicable, predictable, and understandable by virtue of the participation. It is our very intimacy with and participation in ‘what is’ that gives rise to this very real, regular, and predictable world.”

• Is the first law an inherent property of the universe? Or is it just a pattern, a regularity also immersed in the universe which we participate within? Was the first law revealed to us, or did our participation render it so? Doesn’t this imply some causality…?

• Do our senses indicate inherence in objects? Gives an example where our norm of visual clarity implies sharp edges and contrast, and blurriness is an impairment. But, if everyone were “impaired” and saw blurred edges, those objects and their blurred edges would become the norm. And so the objects, and their seeming inherence, would change based on our sensory abilities.
• “Our sensory capacities simply are what they are, and not what could be thought of as “optimal” in the sense of optimally suited for delivering to us an accurate picture of an autonomous reality.”
• “What our senses deliver to us simply is, and through coordination with social members, it becomes the real, shared world.”
• The contingentist says, to a claim that a meteor floating through space is completely independent to us, that the conception of the meteor cannot be independent of us, since we are conceiving of it. There is an is there, but it is completely beyond human conception.

• To preserve the vastness of what is is (existence itself), we try to assert its independence from us. But that ironically constrains the vastness by imposing assumptions upon it (whether it be “a something” or “a nothing”). It also assumes what it means for “what is” to be, like for it to be independent. “Contingentism helps preserve the vastness of what is by questioning these very assumptions.”

• “What do objects depend on? They depend on observers to bound them and hold them as continuous over time. Their effects depend on observers to distinguish objects from each other, and to note regular interactions between objects that have thus been distinguished. Their properties depend on what is sensed and measured, and on the relations observers make between measurement and theories. Their vividness and their place as bona fide members of the real world depend on the coordination of various bodily movements and sense perceptions, as well as coordination between interacting members of social collectives.”

3: What Does Sensing Depend On?, Transduction, energy, and the meeting of worlds

• Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, wrote in 1948 that “Information is information, not matter or energy.” Information was thus described as its own quantity, with sensing being a kind of information processing.

• Deeply wrong

• Plants are said to assimilate light, as a primate assimilates an apple. We generally think of plants as using light, rather than seeing or sensing it. But it turns out chlorophyll derivatives have been found in animal eyes; for instance, in some fish species they help transfer photons to retinal cells, which expands the fish’s ability to see longer wavelengths (i.e., infrared)
• Interestingly, some fish with the chlorophyll in their eyes did not evolve them through “chlorophyll genes”, rather, they get chlorophyll through their diet and incorporate it into their eyes.
• We have a sense that most things cannot be made the same as our bodies, like an apple seems to. We can assimilate an apple, but what about a smell? Well, a smell can stimulate salivation like a digesting apple secretes gastric juices. A loud abrupt sound can leave our muscles tense for days. Is the sound (and therefore its source) not somehow assimilated within us?
• Information: derived from the Latin in or “into” and forma or “form”. Something abstract taking form.

• “Energy is associated with the chemical bonds of the atoms in gasoline. So this chemical energy is associated with the relationship of the atoms. But most often you like to say that there is energy in your gallon of gasoline.” - David Jeffrey

• So there is a potential of energy—a potential of movement—associated with the chemical structure. That energy is contingent on those chemical bonds—it depends on them (among other things, such as their ignition)

• “[The conservation of energy] states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes…it is a numerical quantity, which does not change…it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it’s the same.” - Feynman
• Is energy inherent? When it changes form, such as from light energy to chemical energy, we nevertheless assume continuity of energy itself. If energy is considered a substance, this is a kind of essentialism; it is considered a number (a la Feynman), that is, a mental abstraction, there is no essentialism since the number is contingently existant, dependent on an observer to bound the system and spit out numbers.

• If we see the world as:

• Things, then objects will be the ‘same substance over time undergoing changes in form,’ and energy will be ‘what causes changes in object-forms.’
• Energy, then energy will be ‘the same substance over time undergoing changes in form’ (e.g., chemical energy into mechanical energy), and objects will be ‘what causes changes in energy-form’ (e.g., muscle contraction via metabolic combustion of energy stores)

• “In either case, the confusion is created by thinking of energy and form as separable from one another, when they are not.

• Energy and information are not two separate things.

• The contingentist perspective sees no causal power linking one phenomena to another. In certain conditions, other conditions arise—yet there is no link between the two other than the cognitive process of linking.
• A similar cognitive process links small scale phenomena to large scale, a whole is caused by (or depends on) its parts, we say. Wooden chairs depend on the wood that makes them up, we think. Yet, the wood doesn’t make the wooden chair (the whole) happen. The wood doesn’t have some inherent power to create the chair.
• One might say “Copper is copper because it is made up of copper atoms and not aluminium or helium atoms.” But, we called them copper atoms because of coppers unique properties in the first place. If we were to find a block that seemed to be copper, we would empirically study the material and dissect it down to find small copper particles. With a copper substance, we will find copper particles, but neither causes the other. They co-arise.
• Is water “water” because it is made up of water molecules? Are water molecules “water molecules” because of their presence when we decompose a substance we call water into its parts? Neither cause the other, they co-arise. We regularly see aggregations of water molecules as water. In the case of one, we always find the other.
• “A set of molecules does not precisely ‘become’ a cell, nor does a cell ‘emerge’ at a higher level of organization from a set of molecules. Rather, the cell is a cell when related with as a cell, and a set of molecules is a set of molecules when related with as such.”
• For the contingentist, “a world of diverse kind is genuinely of diverse kind “because it is experienced as such. There is no intrinsically existent oneness to which this multiplicity is reducible…On the other hand, the world is not intrinsically multifarious, simply because the multiplicity is contingent upon sensing.”
• If no object exists intrinsically, and are rather bound and held continuous by cognition and linked by causal accounts, then we don’t know in advance precisely what will be experienced as an object and what will not. Objects are therefore indeterminate in this sense (rather than deterministic)
• “The ‘free agent’ arises only dependent upon countless factors…Though these dependencies are sometimes described as ‘constraints upon choice’, they can equally be described as ‘what makes choice possible at all’.”

• The physical-psychological divide:

• On the one hand, there’s a fear that a fundamentally physical world is a fundamentally dead, determinate, and mechanistic place.
• On the other, there’s a fear that a fundamentally psychological world is fundamentally indeterminate and therefore mystical, supernatural, and inexplicable.

• What if we could have both?

• Early cell physiologists and pharmacologists used to consider the cell as a series of chemical reactions, rather than an animal-agent. They had yet to dissect the cell and see it as a composite, aggregate, or interacting network of reaction. The cell as a whole was considered reactive: not reacting to its environment but with its environment, transforming both.
• “In the moment of seeing an apple, you haven’t just discovered or met the apple that has been there outside of you. Rather, in that moment, the apple arises as form, properties, continuity, vividness, and the like, for none of these exist intrinsically but arise contingent upon your activities. At the same moment, you are new, being not intrinsically the same thing before and after the seeing. The apple is assimilated into your body, not via digestion, but via sensing. Your physiology is changed upon seeing the apple.”
• “However, this change does not involve the transfer of any substance—neither energy nor information or anything else, no matter how subtle. Though we might usually say, ‘The organism senses the apple’ or ‘The apple caused a response in the body’, we could also say, ‘When the apple is seen, the body is changed.’ Furthermore, if we don’t take the body to have some essence that somehow stays the same over time despite myriad changes in its form, instead of saying ‘The body is changed’ we could equally say, ‘The body is new.’”

• The contingentist account of sensing describes phenomena not as intrinsically existing, nor as interacting, reactive, or changed or transformed over time. The contingentist contends that phenomena arise anew each instant, and this “arising anew” occurs dependently—“that is, phenomena bring each other newly into being in each instant.”

• Bring into being…even this language implies causality, or co-causality. ‘Bringing’.

4: What Do Organisms Depend On?, Bodies, selves, and internal worlds

• Our lungs are surfaces exposed to the “outside” world, and depend critically on that world being air and not water at every moment.
• We assume boundedness and continuity of organisms. The eggshell of a developing chicken embryo seems like a boundary, but it also acts as a lung, diffusing oxygen and carbon dioxide. When does the embryo end if it depends on the surrounding air?
• “The self is assumed to be above or separate from the thoughts, emotions, and actions, a kind of chooser, decider, or integrator. But what is the self other than thoughts, feelings, and actions? Who is the chooser behind the choice, or the thinker behind the thought? Who do thoughts belong to?”
• The rubber hand experiment (where someone is persuaded into thinking a rubber hand is theirs) show us that things that are not usually experienced as part of the self can become experienced as the self.
• Is an experiencer separate from experience? We tell ourselves we’re ’having’ an experience. But can you possess an experience? “Experiences aren’t intrinsically yours or mine.” The linguistic shorthand that, if taken too literally, tell us that experiences are things that can be possessed, giving rise to the separation between experiencer and experience. There is no inherently existent experiencer—experiences simply arise.
• Speaks of dualists, physical monists, and ideal monists. Dualists see two separate physical and nonphysical realms (e.g., matter and consciousness are separate). Physical monists see everything as physical and predictable (if not now, perhaps eventually). This includes (what seem like) cognitive products like experience and consciousness. The idealist monist sees everything as mental, everything as consciousness, with no dependence on matter (for matter doesn’t exist, it is a mental construct).
• The contingentist sees physical substance as necessary for organisms, organism as necessary for experiences, and experiences as necessary for physical substance (for the physical substance cannot be revealed without the light of experience, and whatever it is beyond that lens of experience we cannot know)
• Rather than locating experiences in the body or brain, or attaching them to a possessor such as I or mine, one can simply say “experiences arise.” “This is how the subject can disappear, even if the organism as a nexus outlined for various purposes does not.”

• “What do organisms depend on? They depend on delineations of distinct spatial boundaries and temporal continuity. The organism-as-subject depends on the sense that experiences arise from a locus, whether material or immaterial. Finally, whereas the organism-as-object depends on material and energy flows, the organism-as-subject depends additionally on the experience of the nexus of such flows as a separate, intrinsically existent thing.”

• Paradox—the organism depends on a subjective experience that believes it is something intrinsic (independent), yet the subjective experience depends on the organism who depends on physical substance which depends on experience to reveal it…
• So, we depend, at the very least, on illusions (i.e., that we are independent)?

5: What Does Order Depend On?, Patterns, gaps, and the known world

• “One can say, ‘I don’t believe in the intrinsic existence of objects, so I’m going to stop seeing the world as objects,’ but it most probably won’t work. Developing an intellectual disbelief in substantiality only reaches the most superficial levels of cognition. No one ‘creates their own world at will.’ To claim this is to over-identify the subject with the will and to put undue stock in the inherent unity of the subject as a ‘well-organized organizer,’ or as the agent that causes things to happen in the world while remaining itself free and independent.”
• Good predictive technologies are superior to bad predictive technologies only because they help us predict events, not because they fit more closely to some intrinsically universal order.
• “One might get the sense not only that matter exists outside of experience exactly as it appears to exist in experience, but also that matter existed before experience exactly as it appears right now.”
• “In the course of reflecting upon or describing the past, it is easy to gloss over the fact that this thought of the past is happening right now.”
• Memory has a referent, just as a name has a referent (flower refers to ‘flower-in-itself’). Just as the word flower stays the same and implies intrinsic existence, and yet flowers-in-themselves are not, the same happens with how we conceive of the past.
• We assume our cognitive limit is that we do not have access to all possible experiences, analogous to our lives as being a mere subset of the vast space of all that is theoretically possible. “But maybe the cognitive limit is that we assume there’s more to it all than just this: more to objects than vividness and predictability, more to subjects than experiences, more to natural order than conceptual patterns, and more to knowledge than the ongoing process of living itself.”
• Considering all of which our knowledge depends (body, senses, thoughts, language, culture, society, environment), we may feel trapped. But we could also ask ourselves whether it was supposed to be some other way. Isn’t it these things that enable experience? Couldn’t we be thankful for these things?
• If we picture these processes (body, language, thoughts, culture, etc.) as constraints upon some abstract theoretical space, we can torture ourselves and others into thinking we’re separated from and desperate for the really, really real world. Instead, we can experience these processes as precisely what allow us to live in a world that is plenty vast, vivid, and endlessly changing and those ‘constraints’ change with it.

• “The world is not an illusion.”

• Okay… but what about the essentialist who believes that intrinsic phenomena exist? He’s part of the world, engaging in a belief that seems illusory (and yet sustains him). Is it that the process of experiencing illusion is real and not illusory? Experiences are real?

Conclusion, Life as we know it

• “Like all scientists, biologists seek patterns and describe them. Patterns relate to other patterns, and biology becomes an increasingly intricate, beautiful, regular, and dense net of relationships. It is easy to imagine that the net is grounded somewhere. Sometimes when we come across a spider’s web, it can be difficult to find where it’s anchored; yet the assumption is that is anchored somewhere. Similarly, it is easy to assume that the dense net of experiences is anchored somewhere—in a world of objects, or in a body, brain, or soul. We often believe that the regularities we experience must be grounded in some kind of substance beyond them—material, spiritual, or mental. However, it is entirely possible that the net is aloft, that it is not tethered to anything outside of it. In fact, as far as anyone can tell, the net is all there is, so there can be nothing outside of it that could serve as a tether.”