Today I was reading an absorbing interview with Alan Lightman, the theoretical physicist and author, about his new book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, when I came across this passage:
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.
From “Does a Final Theory Exist? A Conversation with Alan Lightman,” LARB, February 23, 2023
This came right after the interviewer 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’s 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: “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. Nietzsche compares this to Molière’s fatuous doctor:
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 1: The Prejudices of Philosophers
Multiply that times infinity, and you have the situation that exists today in modern technological cultures where it’s implicitly assumed that, thanks to science, we pretty much know who and what we are, and what the world is, and how it all fits together.
I’m not saying that Lightman asserted such a thing, by the way. 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 pointing out that it’s all too easy, here in the glow of electric streetlamps and smartphone screens, and amid the digital cacophony of perpetual streaming entertainment, to forget that science is just another language for adumbrating the ultimate mystery of who we are and what all of this is.
