The Pinocchio Theory

In my last book, I wrote that Whitehead’s position, that all entities have a “mental” as well as a “physical” pole, needs to be distinguished “from the ‘panpsychism’ of which he is sometimes accused” (page 28). I now realize that this is entirely wrong; such a distinction cannot be made, because Whitehead’s position is, in a very classical sense, a panpsychist one. Moreover, panpsychism is a respectable philosophical position, and not something that anyone needs to worry about being “accused” of.

I come to this new understanding from reading David Skrbina’s work on panpsychism — the philosophical doctrine that “mentality” is in some sense a universal property of all entities in the universe, or of matter itself. Skrbina’s book, Panpsychism in the West, both argues for panpsychism as a philosophical doctrine, and gives an extended history of this doctrine. Skrbina shows that panpsychism has been a leading strand in Western thought for 2500 years, from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza and Leibniz, on to William James and Whitehead a century ago, and up to many thinkers today. The idea that everything in the world thinks, in some fashion, is far more prevalent than its “crackpot” reputation might lead us to assume.

Skrbina’s companion edited volume, Mind That Abides, contains essays on the possibilities of panpsychism by a variety of contemporary philosophers, ranging from analytic philosophers (among whom Galen Strawson is probably the best-known), through post-Whiteheadian process-oriented thinkers, to “speculative realists” along with other non-analytic metaphysicians (there are contributions from Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant). Together, these volumes make a powerful case for the plausibility of panpsychism, as well as making it clear that Whitehead’s contention that all entities have some sort of incipient mentality is a central expression of the panpsychist doctrine.

Arguments for panpsychism come in many forms, and its adherents often contradict one another. But if there is a central strain to contemporary panpsychist argumentation, it is this. If we reject radical mind/body dualism, and accept materialism, physicalism, or any other form of monism, then we must face the question of \emph{how to explain} the indubitable existence of mind or mentality. I am using “monism” here in its widest possible sense; I define it to include, not just scientific physicalism (the doctrine that the world is composed entirely of mass-energy, or that it is reducible to the subatomic particles described by contemporary physics), but also any form of what might be called “immanentism” (the doctrine that the world is composed of something like Spinoza’s unique substance, or of Bergson’s multiple durations, or of “experience” as it is understood in William James’ “radical empiricism”, or indeed as pure multiplicity, or as an open collection of independent objects a la Graham Harman). In other words, any philosophy that rejects supernaturalism or mind/body dualism as a way to explain the existence of mentality, must find some naturalistic, or at least immanent, way to do so.

I am trying to give as broad as possibile a definition of “mind” or “mentality” as well. This may be defined as consisting in cognition, and cognitive operations, of some sort; and, I would argue, in affectivity as well. But above all mentality consists in phenomenal experience, or of what analytic philosophers call “qualia”: my sensation of the redness or hardness of some particular object, or of pain or delight, or simply of being present in the world. Phenomenal experience is often conflated with consciousness, or the state of intentionality, being-aware-of; I have reservations about this identification, which I will get to later, but the rough equation may be accepted for the moment.

Understood in any of these ways, mentality would seem to be an irreducible aspect of our own existence, at the very least — leaving open the question of what other beings might have it. The question nagging at philosophers is how to explain the seeming indubitability, or incorrigibility of phenomenal experience. (“Incorrigibility” is what Descartes bases his entire philosophy upon. Everything that I think may be false or mistaken; but the fact that I am thinking cannot be mistaken). Cartesian dualism is the great classical solution to this dilemma, of course. Descartes has been (rightly) criticized for hundreds of years for reifying the act or fact of thinking into the the form of the “I” as a thing-that-thinks, and for separating the thinking-mind from any notions of body, matter, or extension. But this doesn’t negate the urgency of his initial observation.

Few of us are willing today to take Descartes’ dualist route, however. So the question becomes: how do we explain qualia, or phenomenal experience, or consciousness, or “inner” experience, on a materialist or monist basis? Modern thinkers have tended to favor either eliminativism or emergentism. Eliminativism is a reductionist thesis; it argues that qualia, consciousness, intentionality, and phenomenal experience are merely illusions, or linguistic misunderstandings, which disappear once we understand how neurological mechanisms operate on the physical level (one can find different versions of this position in Daniel Dennett, in Thomas Metzinger, and in the Churchlands).

Emergentism argues that mentality is the epiphenomenal result of interacting physical processes that have attained a certain level of complexity, as is the case with the massive aggregations of neurons in our brains. Phenomenal experience emerges at some point in the course of evolution; it may be associated either with the existence of neurons and nervous systems in animals, or with some more complex development of the nervous system in organisms of sufficient complexity, or in vertebrates, or in mammals, or just in human beings.

Both eliminativism and emergentism can be criticized, however, for just “explaining away” mentality, rather than actually explaining it. As Whitehead says, “philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away.” Eliminativism doesn’t account for mentality so much as it suggests that it is too trivial or illusory to even merit being accounted for; it ignores Whitehead’s insistence that “the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electrical waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.”

Emergentism, for its part, can be accused of begging the question. It is one thing to say that certain physical properties emerge out of other physical properties (in Strawson’s example, a single molecule of H₂O isn’t in itself wet). But it is another thing altogether, Strawson argues, to maintain that mentality, or experience, or phenomenality, can emerge from something that is entirely non-mental, non-experiential, and non-phenomenal.

More generally, I think that it is worthwhile to challenge our almost reflexive belief, today, in the power of emergence or self-organization. (See my previous post, “Against Self-Organization”, for more discussion of this). It’s all too easy for “spontaneous emergence” or “self-organization” to be put into play as a catch-all explanation for things that cannot be explained any other way. The emergentist thesis threatens to violate Whitehead’s ontological principle, which is that “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere.” Theories of emergent self-organization may well be ways of illicitly reintroducing an idea of preprogrammed finality, or of a benevolent “invisible hand,” into our understanding of events, as Jean-Jacques Kupiec has recently suggested.

Panpsychist thinkers propose, against the eliminativists, that mentality is real. Against the emergentists, they propose that mentality doesn’t just come into being out of nothing; it is always already there, no matter where you look. Mind, in some form or other, exists all the way down. Panpsychists argue that mentality, or experience, is itself a basic attribute of matter (of subatomic particles, of quanta of mass-energy, of actual occasions, of minimal differences, etc.). In other words, mentality is not separate from physicality, but coextensive with it. One might think of this, classicaly, in Spinozian terms (matter and mind are two attributes of the same unique substance) or in Leibnizian ones (every monad is at once material and mental, since it is both a particle of the world and a perspective upon the world). But Galen Strawson, David Skrbina, and others have reconceptualized these arguments in terms that are grounded in contemporary physics. As Strawson puts it, the “ultimates” out of which the universe is composed “are intrinsically experience-involving… All physical stuff is energy, in one form or another; and all energy, I trow, is an experience-involving phenomenon.”

This line of argument intersects in interesting ways with the arguments of the Speculative Realists. For it implies that mentality must be seen as intrinsic to the universe itself — rather than just being a feature of the way that “we” (human beings, rational minds, subjects) approach it. To restrict mentality just to human beings (and perhaps also to some other species of “higher” animals) is an unjustified prejudice, an instance of the “correlationism” denounced by Meillassoux, or the human-centeredness questioned by Harman. (This also accords with Whitehead’s frequent point that the duality of subject and object is a situational and always changing one. Every entity is a “subject” in some conditions or some relations, and an “object” in others).

In Skrbina’s anthology, both Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman write about the relation between realism and panpsychism in ways that are too complicated for me to do them justice here. Grant argues for “panpsychism all the way down, that is, without exception”; but in doing so, he complicates the whole question of emergence. For his part, Harman is reserved with regards to panpsychism. He sees mentality as an inevitable component of any relationality, or interaction between objects; “objects collide only indirectly, by means of the images they present as information.” But objects are not reducible to the “information” that they transmit to other objects. Harman therefore denies the property of information, or mentality, to objects insofar as they are in themselves, and therefore to objects that do not enter into “vicarious” relations with other objects. And of course, for Harman, relationality is only incidental to, and not constitutive of, the nature of objects. Hence, for Harman, “even if all entities contain experience, not all entities have experience.” Grant’s and Harman’s articles both raise important issues that I do not have the space to pursue right now — I will have to leave them both for another occasion.

In any case, Whitehead gives his own crucial twist to the overall panpsychist argument. In Whitehead’s formulation, all “actual entites” or “actual occasions” have both a “physical” pole, and a “mental” or “conceptual” pole. He also expresses this by saying that they have both a “public” aspect and a “private” aspect. “There are no concrete facts which are merely public, or merely private. The distinction between publicity and privacy is a distinction of reason, and is not a distinction between mutually exclusive concrete facts.” Everything exists, to different degrees, both physically or publically, on the one hand, and mentally or privately, on the other. Every occasion is inwardly mental or private, in its own process of “concrescence,” as it prehends other (previous) occasions. But every occasion is also physical or public, insofar as it enters into relations with the universe by serving as a “datum” to be prehended in turn by other occasions.

(There is thus a temporal as well as existential asymmetry between the mental and the physical, or between private and public dimensions of existence. This asymmetry has important consequences for how we understand relationality in general. In the privacy of its self-constitution, the occasion prehends, and thereby relates to, the entire universe. Publically, as a datum, the occasion is prehended by other occasions, and functions as a relational factor. I need to work out this asymmetry in more detail — I think that it is crucial for how Whitehead is able to maintain both relationality all the way down, and the sense that an occasion is something more than just the sum of its relations).

The most crucial way in which Whitehead revises the panpsychist argument is that, for him, mentality — or what William James calls “experience” — is not equated (as it is in the work of most panpsychists) with consciousness. Photons and quarks, and stones and thermostats, all have “experiences,” which means that they do possess some sort of incipient mentality; but for Whitehead, they are probably not conscious. Even in human beings, Whitehead says, most mental processes occur unconsciously, or below the threshold of consciousness. What makes them “mental,” then? Whitehead’s notion of unconscius thought is related to, but also quite different from, both the psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious, and from cognitive science’s recognition that most cognitive processes are unacompanied by, and often irreducible to, consciousness. Like psychoanalysis, Whitehead sees unconscious experience as having to do with “feelings” and “appetitions”, processes of action and reaction that are not merely automatic responses to stimuli; but in contrast to psychoanalysis, for Whitehead these feelings and appetitions do not necessarily involve any sort of representational activity.

For Whitehead, mentality is characterised by what he calls “conceptual feelings,” or “valuations.” These are processes in which potentialities are in some sense contrasted or weighed against one another. There is not just the perception (and perhaps the recognition) of what is. For Whitehead, such a perception and recognition is exactly identical to physical causality; to say that B physically perceives or prehends A is exactly the same thing as to say that A physically affects B, or that A is the cause of which B is the effect, e.g. in the way that one billiard ball transmits energy and motion to another billiard ball by hitting it, and causing it to move in turn. In addition to all this, Whitehead says, B also has a mental or conceptual experience of A: the experience, let’s say, of being-caused-to-move. I doubt that the billard ball is in any sense conscious; but the event of energy-transfer is a mental experience for Whitehead, because it involves the activation of a potential (precisely of a potential for movement). Mentality consists in the comparison of moving and not-moving; this comparison is the “mental pole” of the “occasion” in which billiard ball B is hit by billiard ball A and propelled into motion.

Now, the role of mentality, or experience, in the case of the billiard ball is vanishingly small, or (as Whitehead tends to put it) negligeable. Nonetheless, it exists — it is at least present structurally, you might say. Experience is present potentially, but almost not at all actually. But if this is so, it is because experience is in itself the impress of potentiality. The energetic shock of being hit by another billiard ball is precisely a prehension, or an apprehension, of possiblity. Possibilities, or conceptual prehensions according to Whitehead, are always perceptions of what he calls “eternal objects,” or “pure potentials” — and these, in turn, are equivalent to what other philosophers call “qualia.” The apprehension of qualia — of the red glow of the sunset, for instance — is intrinsic and irreducible, because it is felt, pleasantly or unpleasantly as the case may be, and because, insofar as it is thus felt, it implies potential and contrast. Redness-as-a-potentiality is in excess of merely being a quality or an aspect of this particular moment, this particular sunset. My sense of redness implies that this scene could perhaps change, so as not to be red after all; and also that something else could be imbued by redness as well. And my affective response to the sunset has to do with my liking or disliking of this redness, a reaction that extends into the prospect of other things being red, or of this redness itself disappearing (as it does, once the sun has entirely set).

Experience, or conceptual feeling, thus always involves a certain process of “valuation,” or evaluation. Whitehead agrees with the cognitivists in seeing that these evaluative processes are most of the time non-conscious. But he does not see evaluation as itself a “cognitive” process — it has much more to do with “appetition,” which “includ[es] in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not, and may be… All physical experience is accompanied by an appetite for, or against, its continuance.” In this way, mentality (or experience) is not just the calculation and representation of what is, but also involves a striving towards some potential novelty. As a result of this, experience always issues in some sort of decision; and for Whitehead, such decision “constitutes the very meaning of actuality.”

Experience is, as Whitehead says, irreducibly private; which means that I cannot observe anyone else’s experience aside from my own. (There may very well even be a limit as to the extent of my ability to observe my own experience — as Harman also suggests from another angle). The privacy of experience has fueled the skepticism found throughout modern Western philosophy, from Descartes to Hume, and beyond into the twentieth century. (I include, under this head, the answers to skepticism, or dissolution of its paradoxes, given by thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Cavell). But for Whitehead, the decision in which private experience culminates is also what makes it public and potentially conscious. Decision is not grounded in consciousness or cognition; rather, decision is what makes consciousness, cognition, and public relationality possible in the first place. “Feelings,” or movements of “appetition,” are the basic elements of mentality (or “inwardness,” or “qualitative experience”). Cognition, consciousness, and responsibility are consequences of this basic mentality, rather than preconditions for it. An aesthetic of decision precedes and grounds cognition and consciousness — rather than either of these being the grounds or preconditions for any process of decision. I say an “aesthetics” of decision, because it is a non-cognitive, and non-generalizable process; the problem of how decision leads from privacy to publicity, in Whitehead’s account, is a transformation of Kant’s problematic of how a singular, non-cognitive, non-conceptual aesthetic judgment can nonetheless lay claim to universality, through the process (precisely) of being made public.

I will stop here; instead of explicating this in more detail (which certainly needs to be done) I will conclude by simply juxtaposing Whitehead’s notion of experience-as-decision with some recent speculation in the physical and biological sciences. This is a continuation and expansion of some of the speculation that is already in my book.

The biologist Martin Heisenberg, in a recent article called “Is Free Will An Illusion?” makes a similar point about the “decisions” made by biological organisms. Arguing from experiments on bacteria, fruit flies, and other organisms, Heisenberg states that such organisms exhibit “behavioral output” that is independent of “sensory input”; that is to say, these organisms “actively initiate behavior” that is “self-determined,” rather than being “determined by something or someone else.” Studies of plants and slime molds, as well as bacteria and fruit flies, have isolated instances of “decision” that are not causally determined by the circumstances in which they occur, or the conditions to which they are a response.

Recognizing decision in all living organisms might seem to point to a kind of vitalism. But it would be considerably different from traditional vitalism, because it would not claim that some sort of intrinsic vital force would make living beings radically distinct from non-living things. Rather, as Whitehead says, the line between life and non-life of fuzzy, and the mentality or decisionality of life is something that is essential to life, but not exclusive to life: it extends all the way down.

Along these lines, the physicists John H. Conway and Simon Kochen propose what they call the Strong Free Will Theorem. According to Conway and Kochen, under certain conditions that arise as a result of quantum entanglement, subatomic particles respond “freely,” that is to say, non-deterministically, unconstrained by any prior physical events. If experimenters may be said to be acting “freely” when they collapse a quantum-indeterminate state by choosing which of several possible parameters they will measure, then to the same extent the particle thus measured is acting “freely” when it “chooses” which value to give this parameter. If this is correct, then even photons may be said to have a certain sort of inner “experience,” and to make a kind of “decision.”

Life on earth is doomed, according to the biologist Peter Ward in his new book The Medea Hypothesis. This book is meant to be polemical and provocative; I lack the knowledge to evaluate its particular scientific claims. But just as a thought experiment, it is bracing.

Ward’s book is a critique of the quite popular Gaia Hypothesis, originally developed by James Lovelock, which claims that the Earth as a whole, with all its biomass, constitutes an emergent order, a self-organizing system, that maintains the whole planet — its climate, the chemical constitution of the atmosphere and the seas, etc. — in a state that is favorable to the continued flourishing of life. Essentially the Gaia Hypothesis sees the world as a system in homeostatic equilibrium — in much the same ways that individual cells or organisms are self-maintaining, homeostatic systems. Gaia is cybernetically, or autopoietically, self-regulating system: continual feedback, among organisms and their environments, keeps the air temperature, the salinity of the sea, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, etc., within the limits that are necessary for the continued flourishing of life.

Ward’s Medea Hypothesis directly contests all these claims. According to Ward, the ecosphere is not homeostatic or self-regulating; to the contrary, it is continually being driven by positive feedback mechanisms to unsustainable extremes. Most of the mass extinction events in the fossil record, Ward says, were caused by out-of-control life processes — rather than by an external interruption of such processes, such as the giant meteor hit which supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. The great Permian extinction, for instance — the most catastrophic of which we have knowledge, in which 90% of all species, and 99% of all living beings, were destroyed — was caused by “blooms of sulfur bacteria in the seas,” which flourished due to greenhouse heating and poisoned the oceans and the atmospheres with increased concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, which is extremely toxic.

More generally, Ward claims that life processes have destabilizing effects, rather than homeostatic ones, upon the very environment that they rely upon for survival. This is largely because of the Malthusian basis of natural selection. Traits that give any organism a selective advantage over its rivals will spread through the gene pool, unless and until they overwhelm the environment and reach the limits of its carrying capacity. An organism that is too successful will ultimately suffer a crash from overpopulation, depletion of resources, and so on. The success of sulfur bacteria means the poisoning of all other organisms; or, to give another example, the rise of photosynthetic organisms 2 billion years ago poisoned and killed the then-dominant anaerobic microbes that had composed the overwhelming majority of life-forms up to that time.

Now, biologists in recent years have given careful attention to the evolution of cooperation and altruism as means of averting these dangers. For instance, in an environment of cooperating organisms, a cheater will outperform the cooperators, and through natural selection will eventually drive them into extinction, thus leading to an environment of cheaters who no longer have access to the benefits for all of cooperation. But this prospect can be averted, and altruism can be maintained within a group, if the cooperators evolve mechanisms to detect, and punish or otherwise discipline, the cheaters. Scenarios like this have led to something of a revival of the once-discredited notion of “group selection” (a group all of whose members benefit from cooperation will be able to outperform a group dominated by cheaters).

Be that as it may, Ward does not see any evidence that cooperation or altruism can evolve on a meta-, or planetary, level. He argues, counter-intuitively but with impressive statistical analyses, that in fact the total biomass, as well as the diversity of species, has been in decline ever since the Cambrian explosion. And he suggests that life on Earth is doomed to extinction long before the heating and expansion of the sun make the Earth too hot to live on. The depletion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to the extinction of all plant life, the decline of atmospheric oxygen, the consequent extinction of all animal life, and finally the evaporation and loss to outer space of the oceans, could happen as little as 100 million to 500 million years from now — a span far less than the 1.5 billion or 2 billion years we have before the sun roasts the planet to a cinder. The Earth will end up much like either Venus or Mars — both of which initially had conditions that were favorable to the origin and sustenance of life, but no longer do (in this regard, it would be quite interesting if we were to discover, as has often been hypothesized, that Mars once did have life but no longer does).

Now, even 100 million years from now seems too far off in the future for us to worry about today. And, as Ward points out, our current problems — for the next century or so — have to do with too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even if ultimately the Earth will die from too little. Nonetheless (and regardless of whether or not the book’s arguments stand up in their scientific details, which is something, as I already said, that I am unable to judge), Ward’s replacement of Gaia (the good mother Earth) with Medea (the ultimate bad mother, who murdered her own children) makes an important point. In critiquing the Gaia Hypothesis, it is really questioning our contemporary faith in self-organizing processes and systems.

I use “faith” here in as strong a sense as possible. The widespread contemporary belief in “self-organization” is almost religious in its intensity. We tend not to believe any more in the Enlightenment myth (as it seems to us now) of rationality and progress. We are skeptical of any sort of “progress” aside from technological innovation and improvement; and we no longer believe in the power of Reason to dispel superstition and to make plans for human betterment. The dominant ideology in these (still, despite the economic crisis) neoliberal times denounces any sort of rational planning as “utopian” and thereby “totalitarian,” an effort to impose the will on matter that absolutely resists it. This also entails a rejection of “grand narratives” (as Lyotard said in the 1980s), and an overall sense that “unintended consequences” make all willful and determinate action futile.

Instead, we turn to “self-organization” as something that will save us. The anarchist left puts its faith in self-organizing movements of dissidence and protest, with the (non-)goal being a spontaneously self-organized cooperative society. Right wing libertarians, meanwhile, see the “free market” as the realm of emergent, spontaneous, self-organized solutions to all problems, and blame disasters like the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the current Depression as well, on government “interference” with the (allegedly otherwise self-equilibrating) market mechanism. Network theory, a hot new discipline where mathematics intersects with sociology, looks at the Internet and other complex networks as powerfully self-organizing systems, both generating and managing complexity out of a few simple rules. The brain is described, in connectionist accounts, as a self-organizing system emerging from chaos; today we try to build self-learning and self-organizing robots and artificial intelligences, instead of ones that are determined in advance by fixed rules. “Genetic algorithms” are used to make better software; Brian Eno devises algorithms for self-generating music. Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis is taken by humanists and ecologists as the clear alternative to deterministic and mechanistic biology; but even the harcore neodarwinists discover emergent properties in the interactions of multiple genes. Niklas Luhmann, in his turn, applies autopoiesis to human societies. This list could go on indefinitely.

Now, it is certainly true that many phenomena can be better understood in terms of networked complexity, than in those of linear cause and effect. It is rare for an occurrence to be so isolated that linear models are really sufficient to explain it. And it is also certainly true that unexpected consequences, due to factors that we did not take into account (and in some cases, as in chaos theory, that were too small or insignificant to measure in advance, but that turned out to have incommensurably larger effects), interfere with our ability to make clear predictions and to impose our will. The best laid plans, etc. But still —

I think that we need to question our reflexive belief — or unwarranted expectation, if you prefer — that emergent or self-organizing phenomena are some how always (or, at least, generally) for the best. And this is where Ward’s Medea Hypothesis, even if taken only as a thought experiment, is useful and provocative. Lovelock is almost apocalyptic in his worries about environmental disruption; his recent books The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia warn us that human activity is catastrophically interfering with the self-regulating and self-correcting mechanisms that have otherwise maintained life on this planet. For Lovelock, human beings seem entirely separate from, and opposed to, “nature,” or Gaia. From Ward’s perspective, to the contrary, human beings are themselves a part of nature. Human-created climate change and ecological destruction are not unique; other organisms have caused similar catastrophes throughout the history of life on earth. All actions have “unintended” consequences; these consequences may well be destructive to others, and even to the actors themselves. Presumably bacteria do not plan and foresee the possible consequences of their actions, and discursively reason about them, in the ways that we do; but this does not mean that ecological catastrophes caused by bacteria should be put in a fundamentally different category than ecological catastrophes caused by human beings. [I am enough of a Whiteheadian that I am inclined to think that bacterial actions have a “mental pole” as well as a “physical pole” just as human actions do, albeit to a far feebler extent; there is definite scientific evidence for bacterial cognition.] Rather than separating destructive human actions from “nature”, Ward suggests that “nature” itself (or the organisms that compose it) frequently issues forth in such destructive actions. The mistake is to assume that the networks from which actions emerge, and through which they resonate, are themselves somehow homeostatic or self-preserving. Rather, destructive as well as constructive actions can be propagated through a network — including actions destructive of the network itself.

Of course, on some level we are already aware of this destructive potential — as is witnessed in discussions of the propagation of both biological and computer viruses, for instance. Yet somehow, we tend to cling to the idea that positive self-organization somehow has precedence. And this idea tends to arise especially in discussions that cross over from biology to economics. Both Darwinian natural selection and economic competition tend to be celebrated as optimizing processes. Stuart Kauffman, for instance, the great champion of “order for free,” or emergent, self-organizing complexity in the life sciences, has no compunctions about claiming that his results apply for the capitalist “econosphere” as well as for the biosphere (See his Reinventing the Sacred, chapter 11). The highly esteemed futurist Kevin Kelly, a frequent contributor to Wired magazine, has long celebrated network-mediated capitalism, analogized to biological complexity, as a miracle of emergent self-organization; just recently, however, he has praised Web 2.0-mediated “socialism” in the same exact terms.

But the most significant and influential thinker of self-organisation in the past century was undoubtedly Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual progenitor of neoliberalism. For Hayek, any attempt at social or economic planning was doomed to failure, due to the inherent limitations of human knowledge, and the consequent prevalence of unintended consequences. In contrast, and inspired by both cybernetics and biology, Hayek claimed that the “free market” was an ideal mechanism for coordinating all the disparate bits of knowledge that existed dispersed throughout society, and negotiating it towards an optimal outcome. Self-organization, operating impersonally and beyond the ken of any particular human agent, could accomplish what no degree of planning or willful human rationality ever could. For Hayek, even the slightest degree of social solidarity or collective planning was already setting us on “the road to serfdom.” And if individuals suffer as a result of the unavoidable inequities of the self-organizing marketplace, well that is just too bad – it is the price we have to pay for freedom and progress.

Hayek provided the rationale for the massive deregulation, and empowerment of the financial sector, of the last thirty years — and for which we are currently paying the price. But I have yet to see any account that fully comes to terms with the degree that Hayek’s polemical argument about the superiority and greater rationality of emergent self-organization, as opposed to conscious will and planning have become the very substance of what we today, in Europe and North America at least, accept as “common sense.” Were the anti-WTO protestors in Seattle a decade ago, for instance, aware that their grounding assumptions were as deeply Hayekian as those of any broker for Goldman Sachs?

I don’t have much in the way of positive ideas about how to think differently. I just want to suggest that it is high time to question our basic, almost automatic, assumptions about the virtues of self-organization. This doesn’t mean returning to an old-fashioned rationalism or voluntarism, and it doesn’t mean ignoring the fact that our actions always tend to propagate through complex networks, and therefore to have massive unintended consequences. But we need to give up the moralistic conviction that somehow self-organized outcomes are superior to ones arrived at by other means. We need to give up our superstitious reverence for results that seem to happen “by themselves,” or to arrive “from below” rather than “from above.” (Aren’t there other directions to work and think in, besides “below” and “above”?).

Whitehead says that every event in the universe, from the tiniest interaction of subatomic particles up to the most complex human action, involves a certain moment of decision. There are no grounds or guidelines for this decision; and we cannot characterize decision in “voluntaristic” terms, because any conscious act of will is a remote consequence of decision in Whitehead’s sense, rather than its cause. Decisions are singular and unrepeatable; they cannot be generalized into rules. But all this also means that we cannot say that decision simply “emerges” out of a chaotic background, or pops out thanks to the movement from one “basin of attraction” to another. No self-organizing system can obviate the need for such a decision, or dictate what it will be. And decision always implies novelty or difference — in this way it is absolutely incompatible with notions of autopoiesis, homeostasis, or Spinoza’s conatus. What we need is an aesthetics of decision, instead of our current metaphysics of emergence.