The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

Living cells do not operate blindly’, writes James Shapiro, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago: ‘life requires cognition at all levels.’

Many, many other elements than the genotype go to make the phenotype – the organism we can see.

In sum, the extraordinary fidelity and robustness of organismal development is not attributable to a programme, an algorithmic sequence of predetermined steps that must be carried out in a certain order, as with a machine. The cell is constantly monitoring, promoting, inhibiting (including, as necessary, inhibiting its inhibitors), repairing, splicing and rewriting DNA.

Teleology is much better than deterministic causation at getting things done, and development is much too reliable to be seen as anything but teleological.

The shape that an organism takes emerges from its own physiological states, as much as from genes, and these are as much under the influence of apparently ‘foreign’ organisms as of the organism itself.

The molecule is a three-dimensional entity, not just an abstract two-dimensional string of symbols such as a computer might read, a fact which tends to be overlooked when speaking of ‘code’.

The machine, the thing, takes priority over the process: it comes first in time, and its existence grounds what it does. For living beings – perhaps they should be called living ‘becomings’ – this is not the case: they are what they do, and come into being through their very movement.

In an organism, by contrast, what has to be explained is, not how it changes, but how it remains stable, despite constant change on an unimaginable scale.

Structure is the static element we illegitimately extrapolate from the flow of time.

In the absence of catalytic enzymes, the decarboxylation of amino acids would proceed with a typical half-life of about a billion years: in the presence of enzymes these half-lives are reduced to less than a thousandth of a second.

conceive. All living things metabolise, that is to say exist in a constant energetic exchange with their surroundings. The word ‘metabolism’, from Greek metabolē, means simply ‘change’. Homoeostasis, growth, and reproduction are the three most fundamental characteristics of cells and all living things – and they are all processes.

Evolution is a flow that seamlessly connects all life. What seem like species are just our way of reifying that flow (‘thingifying’ it) at any one moment in time.

However, in biological systems, causation tends to follow not straight lines, but spirals, involving recursive loops, and multiple causes leading to multiple effects across a network, with sometimes competing factors cross-regulating one another, reciprocally interacting, and in ways we do not understand taking information from the whole.

‘When it comes to physical reality, there are no final explanations but ever more efficient descriptions.’

Flow is a process: a chain is a series of things, that are static until one is given a push or a pull by the thing next to it. An organism is a flow, and is alive. A machine is a chain, and is dead.

Causation could be seen as an artefact – a useful one – of time-slicing, slicing the flow.

Behaviour at the cellular level requires a quantum mechanical account in order to be understood, even if Newtonian mechanics is for most practical purposes an adequate, if approximate, fit.

A further problem with a machine model is that it suggests a direction of action of one thing on another. I have just suggested that it is usually myriads of ‘things’ having an action on myriads of other things. But even that is wrong. In organisms there is never just action without both interaction and mutual construction. Cause and effect in organisms, if it can safely be applied, is never unidirectional, but reciprocal.

Research over the last 80 years or more demonstrates that it is not true that genetic change is simply due to accidents or damage to the DNA. Organisms actively reconstruct their genomes in response to their conditions.

Microbiologist Kriti Sharma, in her fascinating book, Interdependence, writes that ‘the cell is not exactly reacting to an environment, but is reacting with an environment, as oxygen reacts with iron and where both are transformed.’

The orthodoxy is that DNA affects the fate of the cell, the cell affects the organism, and the organism the environment. This is the bottom-up view. At least as true is the top-down view: that the environment affects the organism, the organism accordingly restructures the cell, and the cell makes appropriate use of DNA in doing so.

The first is a shift from considering things in isolation to considering things in interaction. This is an important and nontrivial move; it is also a relatively popular and intuitive concept … [But] to get to a thoroughgoing view of interdependence, I argue that a second shift is required: one from considering things in interaction to considering things as mutually constituted, that is, viewing things as existing at all only due to their dependence on other things. This second shift is potentially more subtle and difficult than the first, because though the first requires considering the mutual relations and influences between things, it does not actually require a change in the many habits and assumptions that usually commit us to viewing things as fundamentally independent.

The activity of individual genes reflects the choreography of chromosomes, which reflects the larger choreography of the nucleus, which reflects the choreography of the cell and organism as a whole with the environment. Who, then, is sculpting whom? How can we know the dancer from the dance?

This opens the first fundamental question: how can the same set of genetic instructions produce a variety of discrete, persistent (non-genetically inherited) cell phenotypes?

Whole outcomes may determine how ‘parts’ behave in order to reach them, at least as much as any of the ‘parts’ determines an outcome.

Since structure and function are inseparable, it is not just the molecule’s function that changes, but its very structure.

‘As genomes evolve, new genes are born and older genes may adopt novel functions, fuse, or disappear altogether,’ writes systems biologist Adrian Verster.125 Genes are malleable processes, subservient to the needs of the organism in which they happen for the time being to inhere.126

What that means is that cells use DNA to adapt to new ends; it is not a matter of DNA using cells to further its own ‘selfish’ ones.

Networks in the regime near the edge of chaos – this compromise between order and surprise – appear best able to coordinate complex activities and best able to evolve as well.

To the extent that one can speak of an organism as having ‘parts’ at all, we find them by dismantling the whole in an inevitably somewhat arbitrary fashion. They are ultimately a product of human attention, a function of the way we choose to attend to the organism for a particular end of our own, and the parts we choose to define change depending on our focus of interest at the time.

And the relationships between the parts don’t go to make up the whole, but derive from the existence of the whole. They are handy post factum mental representations. ‘Parts’ are inextricably involved with their context, without which they are both impotent and unpredictable; and neither the parts, nor even the local interactions of the parts on their own, account for the qualities of the whole organism that we observe.141

‘Although we now recognise that experiential input can bring about epigenetic modification of the cell nucleus, there must be undivined mechanisms that relate the experiences of the entire multicellular organism back to the cell.’

We should remember that information is not a thing: it is the capacity for a channel to create a new link between two processes.

In organisms the whole is also necessary for the functioning of the parts: the part is apparently able to access information about the whole, and act on it in service of the whole.

Organisms don’t just passively wait, then, for a lucky accident or resign themselves to dying out, but actively remodel themselves in response to changes in their environment.

A seminal paper asserts that ‘not all genome changes occur at random and that cells possess specific mechanisms to optimize their genome in response to the environment’185 – not even the gene actively optimising the cell, but the cell actively optimising its genes.

A machine has clear boundaries; a natural system does not.

The truth is that the brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world. Human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region.

Too narrow a focus means that we conventionally think of organisms as sharply delineated individual entities, with linear causative relations. If, instead, we conceived them as systems, in which causation is both distributed and reciprocal, and these systems themselves nested in other, larger systems, and so on upwards and outwards, we would see a quite different picture unfold.

A machine’s functioning is linear, whereas the process of living things is of entities that mutually co-arise.

‘How?’ is the typical, and only meaningful, question in the physical sciences. But biology can and must go on from there. Here, ‘What for?’ – the dreadful teleological question – not only is legitimate but also must eventually be asked of every vital phenomenon … In biology, then, a second kind of explanation must be added to the first, or reductionist, explanation made in terms of physical, chemical, and mechanical principles. This second form of explanation, which can be called compositionist in contrast with reductionist, is in terms of the adaptive usefulness of structures and processes to the whole organism.

But it also involves a shift in our perception of time. It is not just that chains of causation work from the past towards the future: the future, in the sense of internalised potential, pattern or telos – may be as important a driver in the emergence of phenomena as the past. As

The machine is an embodiment in the external world of human will (whose residence is largely the left hemisphere) to some purpose, and the trail of causation inevitably returns, ultimately, to that source.

self-organisation is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system’s components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern.260

The ‘building blocks’ of the supposedly mechanical universe behave like patterned flows of energy, or force fields: they are constantly moving and changing, have no precise boundaries, overlap and mingle with other equally elusive entities, cannot be precisely predicted or specified, change their nature and behaviour depending on circumstances and context, including whether or not they are observed, and exhibit behaviour that defies any mechanical principles – for instance, a ‘particle’ showing interdependency, or entanglement, with another too far removed across the universe for information of any kind to have had time to travel between them.

The fundamental constituents of the world, according to quantum field theory, are dynamic quantum fields in a dynamic space-time. Quantum fields manifest particle-like properties in virtue of their interactions being constrained to occur in multiples of fixed quanta, and the conservations of those quantised properties. The quantisation is reminiscent of particles, but it is in fact a quantisation of wave-like processes, not particles … there are no physical particles …278

It seems to me that the reason that the world looks different at the very small scale from how it looks at the level of the everyday has as much to do with time as it does with space.

Whether something is considered static or flowing is only a matter of scale.

Stasis is just an illusion of observational scale, both spatial and temporal.

Scale – quantity – also changes quality in a broader way.