The Deeper Magic of Reality
On emergent phenomena, scientific reductionism, and the living mystery of everything
Dear Living Dark reader,
Some time ago, I was reading an absorbing interview with Alan Lightman, the theoretical physicist and author, about his 2023 book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, when I came across this fascinating passage, where Lightman explains the concept of “emergent phenomena” and why the reductionist approach of physics and chemistry doesn’t work when such phenomena are in play:
This brings up the concept of “emergent phenomena.” In your recent PBS documentary series, you ask biochemist and Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, “Are we just atoms and molecules?” And he answers: “We aren’t just atoms and molecules; it’s the organization. We are layers and layers of emergent phenomena.”
That’s right. Emergent phenomena are behaviors of complex systems that cannot be understood or predicted from the understanding of the individual parts of systems. The human brain is one of the most fantastic emergent phenomena.
Are there attributes then that we study in biology that are not reducible to chemistry and physics?
Biology studies whole systems, and a living thing is a system. If you try to take away parts of it and reduce it, the way physicists do when they study things, you don’t have a living thing anymore. Let’s say you start with a cell. If you start taking a cell apart, and you study the cell wall, and then you study the mitochondria inside the cell, and then you study the DNA, at that point, you’re getting closer to physics and chemistry than biology. You’re thinking like a physicist or a chemist, which is a more reductionist way of thinking. When you have a complicated system that’s exhibiting emergent phenomena, the reductionist method doesn’t work.1
This comes right after the interviewer has pointed out that, in his book, Lightman says nearly all contemporary biologists are mechanists, meaning they believe “a living body is just so many biological pulleys and springs and chemical flows with no metaphysical spiritus needed,” as distinct from vitalists, who believe “the transformation of nonliving matter to living matter requires some nonmaterial essence or vital force outside the laws of chemistry, biology, and physics.”
As I read—and quite enjoyed—this conversation, I couldn’t help reflecting, as I often do when considering such things, that there is really no difference between the scientific idea of emergent phenomena or properties and the old joke about scientific-sounding non-explanations for what unaccountably happens at some stage of an observed process. According to the joke, such stages are where the scientist quietly inserts, “And then a miracle happens.”
So much of what we commonly take for persuasive and authoritative statements of truth in a culture oriented around science and technology is really just a semantic camouflaging of the fact that literally everything is a mystery. One thinks of Nietzsche’s famous criticism of Kant on the grounds that the latter did not so much offer truths as restate questions disguised as truths. In the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, titled “The Prejudices of Philosophers,” Nietzsche compares this to the words of Molière’s fatuous doctor in The Imaginary Invalid:
How does opium induce sleep? “By means of a means (faculty),” namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere: Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura sensus assoupire [“Because it contains a dormative virtue, whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.”]. But such replies belong to the realm of comedy.
Nietzsche’s and Molière’s point is to call out the absurdity of claiming to answer a question or clarify a mystery by using fancy language to essentially restate the question itself in the form of an assertion. Today, if you multiply that approach by something like infinity, you have the situation that exists in modern technological societies, where it is widely but implicitly assumed that, thanks to science, we all know exactly who and what we are, what the world is, how everything works, and how it all fits together, simply because of the multitude of scientific-sounding but ultimately vacuous and question-begging explanations that undergird our collective worldview.
So much of what we commonly take for persuasive and authoritative statements of truth in a culture oriented around science and technology is really just a semantic camouflaging of the fact that literally everything is a mystery.
I’m not saying, by the way, that Lightman engaged in any such activity. Though I’m only passingly familiar with his books, he has always struck me as an insightful and perceptive writer and thinker. I’m just pausing here, with you, today, to point out that when we live in an environment where, for example, air-conditioning and central heat keep us comfortable, and where pharmaceutical drugs regulate our bodies and minds, and where electric lights and smartphone screens illuminate our darkness and calm our fears, and where the digital cacophony of a perpetual universe of streaming entertainment muffles our existential questions, it’s all too easy to forget that science is just another language for adumbrating the ultimate mystery of everything, and that technology can serve as a sedative to deaden our acute perception of this mystery.
It’s also easy to forget or overlook the fact that this ultimate mystery of existence and reality is our own mystery. We, ourselves, are the center of the wheel. And at those moments when we reawaken to the wonder, fascination, and longing of it all, what we are really feeling and perceiving, often unawares, is our very Identity, the awesome Absolute in its sheer being, consciousness, and imperturbability. Having assumed the dreamlike perspective of individual beings inhabiting an objective world that is separate from us, we begin to receive intuitive intimations of a higher unity and an awesome, scintillating mystery that characterizes both our inner and outer experience. And it dawns on us that this wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective that inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that has dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now.
Or at least that’s how it has come to articulate itself to me, whenever I attempt to verbalize it in my own most honest moments. The other option, of course, is not to try to articulate anything at all, but simply to let the mystery whisper itself and find its confirmation and fulfillment in the sheer wordless sense of it. To which worthy non-endeavor I now gladly hand you over.
Warm regards,
Julien Crockett, “Does a Final Theory Exist? A Conversation with Alan Lightman,” LARB, February 23, 2023.
Great piece Matt, and find myself--despite my ingrained atheism--agreeing with your thoughts on the "wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective that inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that has dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now." I think Iris deMent got it right in her song, which echoes precisely the option to not attempt to articulate the ystery of existence, but to "let the mystery be."
Interesting topic. The type of emergence that's commonly accepted in science is "weak" emergence. The type of emergence where "and then a miracle happens" applies would be strong emergence, which is not really compatible with traditional materialism. One problem with believing that a strongly emergent "vital force" is necessary for life, or consciousness, is precisely that it introduces the equivalent of a "virtus dormativa" which explains nothing. I've just been listening to a Mindscape podcast episode by Sean Carroll (physicist) where he goes into detail on the topic of emergence; I think he would disagree with Lightman's blanket statement that "emergent phenomena are behaviors of complex systems that cannot be understood or predicted from the understanding of the individual parts of systems." That's one concept of emergence, but it would be inaccurate to present it as the one commonly accepted by most scientists.
As for reductionism, I think this often gets misunderstood as implying that if something can be explained in terms of its parts, the whole is not "real" in some sense. I think reductionism is better understood as talking about different levels of explanation which nest into each other but are all valid (except where one theory replaces another by demonstrating it was wrong to begin with). It would be absurd to think that cakes aren't real because they can be "reduced" to their ingredients and the recipe followed, down through the biology and chemistry of the eggs and flour to sub-atomic particles and quantum states. Reductionism is more like pointing out that you don't need Victoria Sponge as an element in the periodic table. It makes more sense to think of reductionism being applied to scientific theories than to things themselves. If a cake can be explained by chemistry and physics, it is still a cake; the concept of cake is still useful. The same would apply to emotions explained in terms of neuroscience, or a purely mechanistic explanation of how life began.
It's interesting that some presentations of spiritual ideas can end up being more radically reductionist than science, for example in the idea that the self isn't real because it can be conceptually reduced to mental "aggregates." Saying "all is one" can be interpreted as the ultimate reductionist statement. In both scientific reduction and this type of "spiritual reductionism" there is a risk of subtle ideas being interpreted too bluntly. I think there is still room for mystery in a reductionist scientific scheme, it's just that the mystery is hidden in plain sight in the very concept of matter - not "cold and dead" billiard balls but more like a magic fairy dust which can manifest as thoughts or cakes, planets or penguins. I think some of the instinctual opposition to materialism comes from an impoverished concept of matter - if materialism is correct, your thoughts themselves are a demonstration of what matter can be.