CONTENTS

1   INTRODUCTION - THE PROBLEM

2   ONTOLOGICAL DEPENDENCE

3  EMERGENT PROPERTIES AND EMERGENT OBJECTS

4   TRANSCENDENCE

5   CONCLUSIONS

4   TRANSCENDENCE

Sometimes the novelty introduced by emergence is so great that we seem to have more than simply new features and new objects. It is instead almost as if a whole new world has emerged. The word “transcendence” is here introduced to denote this strongest form of emergence. In this section we explore how to characterise more accurately this form of transition and look at the two putative examples of transcendence in our experience: the emergence of life from the non-living, and the emergence of the human person out of biology.

4.1       The Emergence of New Causation

In what follows, transcendence will be speculatively identified with the emergence of new causal frameworks, and therefore of new modes of explanation. Underlying this account are the following key assertions.

The first of these assertions, the ontological commitment to the literal existence of causal frameworks, is defended elsewhere. As well as the word "causal", I use the word "modal" to describe these features of the world, indicating that the subject matter is physical necessity and possibility – and, more generally, probabilities. Similarly, the distinction between efficient and final causation is discussed in more detail elsewhere. Rather than defend in the abstract the assertions about the emergence of new causal features, I shall here seek to make them plausible by examining the two transitions which I claim as examples of transcendence in the actual world.

4.2            Biology as the First Transcendence

The claim I am making is that within the Darwinian dynamic which underlies all of biology there are elements of emergent final causation. The presence of this new type of causal principle qualifies the emergence of life as a transcendence in the sense developed above. To make this case, I need first to give the briefest of sketches of what the Darwinian dynamic consists in. This is heavily based on Dawkins’ account in his book “The Selfish Gene”, although any errors and follies I commit in my speculative philosophical interpretation of his account are of course my own fault.

There are two conditions for Darwinian evolution to take place:

Darwin's theory basically says that whenever these conditions are satisfied, the system will evolve by natural selection. For the purposes of the present argument let us agree with Dawkins that the units of selection are the genes, and that organisms are survival machines created by the genes.

As soon as we say something like this, an element of teleology has crept into our explanation. Genes create organisms, in order that they might survive best in an often hostile and uncertain world. Dawkins writes :

“If we allow ourselves the licence of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do?”

The fact that there is such a temptation to use this “sloppy language”, shows that in our accounts of the behaviour of genes there is a teleological mode of expression struggling to get out. When we talk of teleology, the overwhelmingly obvious model is that of our own purposive thoughts and actions, and so that is the natural language to use, even though we know it is inappropriate for genetic material. What we need are the “more respectable terms” with which to express what genes are doing that retains the appropriate elements of teleology.

The crucial question here is: to what extent is a weak notion of purpose essential to biological discourse, and to what extent is it a convenient shorthand which can always be replaced by more accurate if longer formulations? Consider the following example of a typical piece of biological discourse.

The genes induce the mother bird to sit on the nest in order to protect her offspring, and thereby the genes which they carry.

Purposive language could be eliminated by the following rephrasing.

The mother bird sits on the nest. This protects the offspring and thereby the genes which they carry. Genes which predispose mothers to this sort of behaviour will tend be selected ahead of those which do not.

But whereas this is all perfectly correct, it misses out reference to a higher-level pattern, namely that when there is this form of feedback, the whole system acts as if there were purposes involved, namely the interests of the genes. We can choose not to notice this feature, but this does not make it go away.

The first thing to note about our intuition that Darwinism contains elements of teleology is that the mode of explanation is not like the full teleology present in our explanations of human actions (or the theistic explanation of the world as being a product of the will of God). Darwinism seems to be a half-way house between pure efficient causation and fully fledged final causation. Let us call this new mode of causation which we are trying to characterise, demi-teleology.

Before examining constitutes Darwinian demi-teleology, it is important to explain what it is not. This is needed, to allay the fears and misconceptions of those who have worked long and hard to eliminate unwarranted teleological notions from evolutionary thought. These unwarranted notions include:

Of course, evolution has produced more complex forms of life, including human beings. It may also be an important factor in enabling life as a whole to deal with a challenging environment. But these outcomes are the result of purely efficient causation. Evolution does not have a single global goal; in as much as there are goals in the system they are the individual competing goals of the genes.

We can begin to see how Darwinism involves elements of teleology by noting that we can assess the outcome of the activity of genes in terms of success criteria. If as a result of their body building certain genes survive and prosper, their activity can be said to be successful. Conversely genes which become extinct can be said to have failed. This is opposed to purely physical and chemical processes, where the outcomes merely happen. However, by contrast with full teleology, or at least the teleology with which we are intimately acquainted, there are no feeling associated with the success criteria of the genes. Before the event there is no desire to achieve the goal, nor fear of failure. After the event there is no elation of victory nor sadness at losing out. In the human case one of the factors determining success is how passionately the competitors desire success. There is no analogue of this with genes. One cannot point to those which want more passionately to propagate themselves.

We can assess outcomes against success criteria in biology because to a certain extent the criteria are specified in advance. Final causation can be characterised by “in the beginning was the word”. In the human case (and in they hypothetical divine case) we start off with thoughts – not just the Fregean thought-types, but the actual thought-tokens in the mind. The word is made flesh when these thoughts are turned into actions. A world of pure efficient causation is contingent, things simply are. Even when they can be explained by equations of motion, this merely projects the contingency of the initial conditions forward in time (or the contingency of the final conditions backward in time). In a world of final causation, things are what they are through being pre-ordained, “as it was written in the beginning”.

With this insight, we see that elements of final causation begin to creep into biology when the genes can be seen as a code, in which the structure of the proteins, and ultimately of the whole organism is pre-ordained. The “word made flesh” is then an almost literal description of protein synthesis. Once the replicators start to build what Dawkins calls “survival machines”, they start to become words, describing something else. Even at the bare replicator level, they are words describing themselves.

Another difference between the full teleology of the conscious agent and the demi-teleology of the genes is that we expect the agents to “think for themselves”. We expect their choices to be freely made by themselves. (Of course, it might be demonstrated that human agents do not in fact have free will, but this would be a demonstration of the inappropriateness of teleological language to the description of human behaviour.) In the biological case there is no sense in which genes can take decisions for themselves. The tactical decisions are taken by natural selection out there in the interactions between the organisms and the environment, and the strategic decision, that the goal is survival, is embedded in the overall logic of the process.

When we say that the outcomes are written in the genes, we are referring only to the intermediate outcomes, the structure and activities of the body. There is nothing in the gene coding which stands for “I want to survive and prosper”. As has just been said, survival as the goal is a feature of the system as a whole, of all the genes competing with each other in an environment containing limited resources. With a human agent we have two choices: we can look at the bigger picture of actions and outcomes and try to deduce what his or her objectives are. Alternatively we can go to the individual and ask directly, “just what are you trying to achieve here?” In the case of the genes, this latter option is not available to us. If we look too narrowly at what an individual gene is doing, all we see is efficient causation.

The holistic nature of Darwinian demi-teleology also appears when we consider the feedback of results and the evolution of tactics in the light of this feedback. This is an important part of final causation. Often we do not get only a single shot at the target, but instead receive feedback of information on our progress towards the outcome, allowing tactics to be changed if they are not achieving the desired objective. In the Darwinian case this feedback does not operate at the level of individual genes. An individual gene that has tried a certain mutation, does not receive feedback to say that the attempt was a failure, giving it the chance to try something different next time. The result of the failure is elimination from the gene pool. However natural selection means that the gene pool as a whole receives this feedback and does not persist with the failed experiments. Success is reinforced and failure is eliminated, which is just what would happen if an intelligent agent were trying to achieve a goal and were receiving individual feedback on the outcomes of the tactics experimented with.

This is the final reason why a Darwinian system can not be considered as fully teleological. When it is viewed as a whole, there are objectives, and these objectives are attributed to the genes. However if we look at the putative agents as individuals, the objectives vanish. There is no sense of ownership of the objectives at the point at which we want to locate them. Unlike human objectives, which are localised in the human agents, biological objectives are diffuse features of the system as a whole.

To summarise, the arguments of this section lead to the conclusions:

If these conclusions are true then they serve to deepen our understanding of the magnitude of the Darwinian achievement. Not only does Darwinian theory provide the central explanatory framework for biology, binding together a vast body of facts into a science, but it provides us with a new form of causation and shows how this is different from but emerges out of the efficient causation described by physics.

4.3           The Person as Transcendent

This essay started with the problem of describing fully the human person in the context of naturalism. It has now reached the point where the conceptual machinery of emergence and transcendence, developed above, can be applied to this problem. The argument is that the emergence of human beings into personhood is a transcendence; a new mode of explanation, a new dynamic, comes into being. The things which are governed by this new dynamic are new, emergent objects, the human persons, distinct from, but ontologically dependent upon human bodies. The argument is developed in three stages: first looking at the biological precursors of the emergence of persons, then at how the emergence is achieved, and finally at what the consequences are.

BIOLOGICAL PRECURSORS

The production of higher animals must not be seen as the goal of evolution. Evolution is as much about successful bacteria as it is about success through complexity. Nevertheless one of the strategies that some genes have tried is the production of highly complex life forms. Although the genes retain their status as the long-term ends in the Darwinian demi-teleology, the success-through-complexity strategy involves the emergence of a new set of short term, intermediate goals, driving the behaviour of the organism. These are manifested as feelings; diverse intermediate goals are simplified down to the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. This is the part of teleology which is absent in the genes, as has been remarked above. It is as if the two parts of teleology are present in the overall system, but are separated. The plans and the success criteria are properties of the genes, while the feelings are present in the organisms. The feelings are associated with intermediate rather than ultimate goals; indeed until Darwin, no organism had an inkling of what, and where, the ultimate goals might be.

The emergence of the human person can be characterised as the coming together of these two halves. The locus of this coming together is the person. The genetic mechanism remains essentially the same. It is the elaboration of the organism which adds the missing half to the feelings present in all higher animals. Dawkins points out that one of the advantages to genes of producing organisms to act on their behalf in the world is that organisms can react on timescales far smaller than those accessible to genes. To take advantage of this, in the evolution of more complex organisms, genes progressively devolve more and more of the tactical decision making to the organisms, retaining control only of the overall objectives. When this evolutionary process arrives at human beings, the organism in effect says,

"Don't talk to me about tactical decisions, I want to decide the objectives as well".

Devolution has become revolution, and the whole framework of what things are for is overthrown. Dawkins says "We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators". I would go further than that in saying that our whole being is based upon a systematic rebellion of this kind.

THE EMERGENCE OF PERSONS

I have attempted to characterise transcendence as the emergence of a new dynamic and hence of new modes of explanation. The new dynamic associated with the emergence of persons is final causation. It is natural to explain things that persons do in terms of "what for", whereas we have learned only at the end of a long painful process to see that this is not appropriate for the physical realm. Following Darwin's great breakthrough we have begun to understand in what limited sense we can talk of "what for" in the biological realm. Persons can therefore be seen at the end of a three-stage process:

efficient causation ® demi-teleology ® full teleology.

Note that there is no suggestion in a naturalistic account of the world that this process is driven by some overarching teleology which has as its end the emergence of full teleology within the natural world. In the naturalistic story, when human beings emerge blinking into the light of their new status as persons, this is the first the world has ever seen a full teleology.

We can characterise personhood as a full teleology for exactly the opposite reasons for considering purposes in biology as constituting only a demi-teleology. The ownership of the ends is collocated in the person as opposed to being dispersed across the whole system. This comes about, I conjecture, by virtue of our ability to articulate our wishes in language. Because language is primarily a mechanism for referring to things in the objective world, when we use it instead to refer to subjective things such as wishes, it has the effect of objectivising them. It puts a distance between them and us, allowing us to think about them and consider our response. In this way, articulation breaks their purely causal power over us.

Having thus distanced our wishes from ourselves we can bring them back into an even more intimate relationship with us. We can repossess them as truly our wishes, as truly owned by us. They then become constitutive of our autonomy, rather than being heteronomous forces. Those desires which we have decided not to act upon stay outside; they are precisely the heteronomous forces which threaten our status as autonomous agents.

Out of all this we can distinguish three key features of the transition to personhood.

THE TRANSCENDENT PERSON

The revolution which is the coming-into-personhood is not complete. Of course it does not completely supplant biological imperatives in the governance of the behaviour of the human organism. What we can do in the physical world is still subject to the constraints of physical law. The argument is not that the revolution is perfect, but that it happens at all. Even the weakest grasp on autonomy, ever in danger of being swept away by the storms of biological and physical heteronomy, introduces something radically new to what can count as explanation.

It is important also to stress the difference between this naturalistic form of transcendence and that advocated by religions. The former has already happened to us. Our mundane, here-and-now state is already transcendent, in the natural sense. We find evidence for it not in the clouded, problematic pronouncements of the mystics but rather in such commonplace observations as the hunger of children for stories. It may be possible for some evolutionist to concoct a biological explanation for this hunger, but a more obvious explanation is that stories satisfy the existential need to understand what it is we really are. (It is quite possible for both the biological and existential explanations to be true.) Having this hunger for self-definition is part of what constitutes our already transcendent state, in that such a motivation is quite meaningless in the biological realm.

Transcendence is incomplete in the sense that it is only the start of a long pilgrimage towards authentic personhood. It opens up an indefinite set of possibilities, which it is then our task, both individually and collectively, to explore and to realise. This journey into personhood is a uniquely difficult task, and one for which our biological inheritance fits us but imperfectly. The naturalistic account of transcendence therefore shares with the religious account the notion that our state of being involves a journey into the modally indefinite beyond (though not, sadly, the temporally indefinite beyond promised by some religions), but this beyond is not the transcendence. Instead the transcendence consists in starting the journey, taking the first step along the road.

A logical consequence of the picture of the person as transcendent which I have been building up is that, for all that we are completely natural in terms of our ontological grounding, the natural world is a profoundly alien place for us to live in. Put the opposite way, we are aliens in our only home, the natural world. This is a profoundly uncomfortable message for those who have rejected the religious picture in favour of the naturalistic one; it seems to be driven by a desire to smuggle religion in via the back door. Nevertheless I believe that it is an accurate picture of our predicament. People have perpetually struggled to come to terms with bad things done to them by the natural world. When a beloved child is struck down by a deadly virus, they ask, what did she, or I, do to deserve this. The hard answer is, nothing. The virus was just doing what comes naturally. The instinctive human forms of explanation simply do not apply to it.

4.4            Transcendence – Some Generalities

Having looked at the two examples of transcendence, namely the emergence of biology and of personhood, let us conclude by drawing out some general points about transcendence.

• The account of transcendence developed above is dependent on the explanation of the contingent events of history in terms of an underlying modal framework – what I have called here a "dynamic".
  
  
• Transcendence causes a discontinuity in the mode of explanation. At the newly emergent higher level we have uncaused causes (that is, uncaused when looked at within the framework of the new causation). But we also have an overarching explanation which links them together, an explanation which includes the process of transcendence as a meta-causal feature. This meta-causation is of necessity efficient (at least until teleology emerges - it is an interesting question whether, within a teleological framework the agents could will a transcendence).
  
  
• Emergent modal frameworks are ontologically dependent on a historical arrangement of things in the substrate and therefore, unlike prior modalities, can change with time. In particular they can change in response to events in the shorter time-scale world over which they exert their causal powers. The name for this change in emergent modal law is evolution - in the most general sense. We know of two varieties: the biological evolution of the genetic code, and the cultural evolution of human thought. Darwin showed us how the first of these changes is itself subject to a (logically necessary) meta-law. Cultural evolution is a distinctly different process, involving as it does embodiment of the information in discrete, mortal persons, interacting with each other, even across time. But the underlying theme is of a structure which is both stable enough to function on short time-scales as a consistent modal framework and yet labile enough to evolve under the influence of feedback.
  
  
• Nevertheless the nature of the emergent modal frameworks is more constrained by logical necessity than the fundamental modal frameworks of physics. The Darwinian laws of biology are in a sense more general than the laws of physics. One could imagine worlds in which the physical laws were quite different from those in our world. But any community of slightly imperfect replicators in competition for some resource, what ever their physical basis, would obey Darwinian law. This is because ultimately Darwinian law is a law of logic. This does not mean that, as applied to our biological realm, Darwin’s theory is a necessary truth. Over short time-scales, the stability of species is an excellent approximation. It could have been the case that our genetic material were too stable, too perfect a replicator to allow one species to evolve into another over geological times. It could have been that the resources were freely available, so that there was no selection pressure on the genetic units. That these things were not the case is a non-trivial scientific discovery. Given mutation and competition, evolution by natural selection follows as a law of logic (though its discovery was still a highly non-trivial mental exercise). More controversially, I argue elsewhere that the moral imperative follows from the nature of personhood.
  
  Why should biological law and moral law have a necessary form which is not to be found anywhere in physical law? When we say that an entity is biological, that is, a living organism, of that it is a person, we are saying a great deal about it. The richness of content of these descriptions is what allows them to entail non-trivial nomological conclusions. But when we describe something as physical we are saying nothing about it, unless by “physical” we mean simply “obeying such-and-such a set of laws”, in which case the laws are explicitly included in the definition, and follow as consequences only in a trivial way.
  
  
• The particular type of modality which is one of our essential features as persons is such that it must, as a matter of logical necessity, be incarnated in history. This is because our rules are that we continually rewrite the rules (or at least have this open to us as a possibility) and this requires being embedded in time. This necessity does not however extend to mortality as a consequence of being embedded in time: neither the radical mortality of the whole self, nor the mortality of the moment. We could be incarnated in a purely accumulative temporal order - although it would have to be sufficiently non-accumulative to allow for the act of rewriting to replace the old instructions with the new ones. Even if the old instructions were not annihilated, they would have to be relegated to an inactive status.

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