Part 2: Reemergence
The first chapter was at some pains to identify the P-world as a well-defined entity. Subjective experience is very real; indeed it seems to be undeniable. It is not as though subjective experience were some rare jungle beast whose existence we might doubt for lack of evidence. Subjective experience is what gives us our world in the first place. But recognizing the P-world and its finite, or closed, character does not condemn us to solipsism, for two reasons. The first is the lawfulness of the relation between perception and action. The second is the collective nature of the socially constructed world humans have created. We can look at each of these in turn.
Of Perception and Action
The claim was made, without much argument, that P-worlds arise through the embedding of nervous systems within bodies, which bodies are immersed in information-rich environments. It is time to flesh that out a little. The story to be told is not definitive. There is very much we do not yet know. But we know enough to refine our vocabulary, so as to include subjective experience, the P-world, within our understanding of ourselves, the world, and the integrated whole they form. We start with the interface between bodies and their environment. This is the study of perception and action. A pervasive notion, quickly to be dispensed with entirely, is the idea that perception constitutes input to some system, and that action is the output of that system. This mischievous idea pervades very much of our every day talk about what we see and what we do. It is useless in trying to understand experience.
Perception and action are not two different things. They are different sides of one rather peculiar coin. To see this, it will help to trace out a continuum of development from the single cell to the full-blown human being, with only a few intermediate stops along the way.
Consider the predicament of a single cell. The cell has a vested interest in moving towards areas of relatively high nutrition content, and away from areas of relative toxicity, and this requires that it detect a chemical gradient in its immediate surrounds. The cell is distinct from its environment, and the only point of direct contact between the cell and its surround is the membrane which fully encloses the cell content. For the simplest cells, the prokaryotes, this is a fairly small surface area, which in turn means that there is little chance of a meaningful gradient, or change in stimulation, over the extent of the membrane at any given moment. And so it embarks on a comical series of tumbles and swims, employing flagellae, or little thin strands, in any of a rich variety of ways. By moving about, the presence of a chemical gradient in the ambient liquid is made apparent as a variety of locations are sampled, and the cell moves towards the food and away from the poison. The information that is required is expressed at the surface separating the organism from its environment. And the motion or action that results stands in a direct relation to the information available at this surface. For the tumbling cell, this information has been acquired through action, while simultaneously giving rise to more action.
Bacteria are capable of more interesting behaviors than this, especially when they act collectively. But in this process of chemotaxis we have a simple model of the relation of an autonomous organism to its environment. The organism can move, and in moving, it can acquire information which serves to further guide movement, which generates information, and so on. Neither the action nor the perception is primary. The information is not generic in character. Rather, it is information which is of specific relevance to the organism itself. A chemical is only informative for the bacterium if the gradient is either beneficial or detrimental to it. The information is only information, by virtue of the kind of organism that the bacterium is. It has not noted some objective fact about the world, rather, it has begun to interpret the world in terms defined by its own physical constitution. Right here, with the simplest of life forms, we see a basic principle underlying all experience: we encounter the world in terms which are defined by our own scale and constitution. The bacterium has distinguished "this" from "that", and in doing so it has carved up the continuum around it in terms that speak of its own nature.
One final point can usefully be made about our tumbling prokaryote. We can clearly see that the cell shows a degree of autonomy. The insides of the cell constitute an isolated economy with many parts working together to maintain the integrity of the cell as a whole. Transport into and out of the cell is carefully regulated. The isolation which allows autonomy comes about through a physical surface, the membrane, which interrupts the causal chain of events, separating them into endogenous and exogenous events. If one were to administer a (very small) poke to the cell, its reaction would not be a simple function of the poke. Rather, its reaction would depend on its internal state at the time of the poke, and its internal state is best described as an autonomous system. This rather philosophical observation translates nicely into mathematics if the language of dynamical systems is adopted, but we will forego that pleasure here, keeping it, perhaps, for a future, more formal treatment of these affairs. It is worth standing back though and seeing that the notion of autonomy is, to a large part, a question of the stance of the observer. For a single cell, we can imagine having a reasonably full causal account of all important sub-systems and their inter-operation. A single cell is vastly complex, of course, and we are not quite there, but it is not unimaginable that we might get there soon. Then we would have a largely mechanistic account of the motion of the cell, which could be directly linked to properties of its environment. Would such a mechanistic account mean that we were deluded in ascribing autonomy to the cell? As we turn our attention towards more complex organisms, the very notion that we could construct a full mechanistic account that would relate their actions to their environment becomes completely incredible, but the suspicion lingers that perceived autonomy may be largely a function of the point of view of the observer.
The box jellyfish larva is our next stop on this brief tour. This multi-cellular animal has what has been described as the simplest visual system known. Indeed, given that the animal has only five distinct cell-types in its entirety, any perceptual system would have to be remarkably simple. Of the five cell types, three are contained within the cell, while two cell types are found in the membrane. Even though this is a multi-cellular organism, many of the observations we made about a single cell still hold. There is a membrane that separates the organism from its environment, allowing it to support an internal economy that is decoupled from goings on outside. In this case, the membrane itself is made up of many cells, but the relation of the membrane to the autonomy of the system is the same. Information about the environment that will be of use to the organism is available as a physical-chemical gradient expressed at the surface separating organism and surround. In this case, the information we are interested in is contained in the ambient light. Most of the membrane cells are blind. Each of them has a little cilia or hair which it wiggles in a random fashion. On their own, these hairs would achieve little, as the motion of the larva would be entirely uncoordinated. The second type of membrane cell, however, is light sensitive. These cells are interspersed here and there in the membrane, and they also have little hairs. The visual system of the larva seems to work like this: light falls on these photo-sensitive cells; as a direct result, the cell positions the hair at a specific angle with respect to the light gradient. The result is that the hairs of the light-sensitive cells collectively act as a distributed rudder to steer the larva in a particular direction with respect to the light. The motion of the organism is lawfully related to the energy distribution which arises at the surface that separates it from the environment. Perception and action are inextricably linked; they constitute a single process. And, just as with the single cell, the information that is used in this process is information that is of significance for the organism.
You might think that it will take us a long time to traverse the path of complexity from single cells to human beings. But in fact, most of the salient features of the relation between the organism and its environment have already been detailed here. We will make only one more intermediate stop on our tour, to consider what happens when a nervous system is introduced into the equation. For that, we might as well consider the hydra, which has a nervous system about as simple as a nervous system can be. In the hydra, nerves are distributed throughout the body in a network, without aggregation into ganglia or brains.
Nervous systems convey information rapidly from one location to another. In the jellyfish larva, the light gradient on the sensory surface had its effect in situ, in orienting the hair located within the cell. Once a nervous system is in place, an information gradient at the sensory surface may have effects almost immediately at a location quite distant from that surface. This is one big innovation that nervous systems bring. It allows relatively large organisms to coordinate their action with the sensory information received in disparate locations on their periphery. The second innovation is the combination of information from disparate locations on the sensory surface, such that signals can be correlated and combined. The net effect of these two novel properties is that the relation between the information gradient on the sensory surface, and the resultant behavior of the organism, becomes highly mediated. This is not to claim that it is fundamentally changed. It is not. Rather, the behavioral repertoire of the organism is hugely enhanced, and the apparent indirectness of the relation between sensory information and resultant action makes the impression of autonomy more impressive yet. The hydra has a maximally simple nervous system, and no brain, yet this creature can locomote, trap prey, and generally behave in a manner that appears to be highly autonomous.
Despite the additional complexity in the relation between stimulation and action, the fundamental relationship between the hydra and its environment is not different from that between the single cell and its surround. Nor is it different for the human being. Again we have an apparently autonomous individual separated by a membrane from the environment. Information which serves to inform action is present in the form of physical-chemical gradients at the sensory surfaces. These surfaces are more complex than in any of the organisms we have seen so far. They include skin, the ear drum, the retina, and such. But just like the initial distinction drawn by the tumbling bacterium, distinctions this organism is capable of drawing are, without exception, those that are now, or have been in the past, of significance for the organism in surviving. They do not speak of the nature of the world; they speak of the fit between the organism and its environment. The organism divides the world up based on distinctions that are predicated on its own constitution.
I suggested at the outset that the notion of "we" would take a severe battering herein. Well this is one point at which we need to be sensitive to the very many ways that word can be used. One meaning of "we" is an inclusive use that acknowledges our evolutionary lineage all the way back to single cells. There is a continuum here, albeit not a straight line. At each point along the way, the organisms that have prospered have been those that did better than the competition in exploiting information in the environment that was relevant in their quest to reproduce. The end result is a system of baroque complexity, to be sure, but underlying it is the relatively simple principle that if there is information available at the sensory surface that is relevant to guiding the actions of the organism, and that action tends on balance to increase reproductive success, then that information is just the kind of thing the perceptual system needs to be sensitive to. We see what we see by virtue of the kind of thing we are. If "we" includes our phylogenetic heritage, then this is literally true.
Recovering a Shared World 1: Lawfulness, Noumena and Phenomena
There is an old metaphysical chestnut that can be addressed at this point. If the world I clearly appear to inhabit is brought forth by a nervous system, embedded in a body, immersed in an information rich environment, then how can I ground the belief that we occupy a shared world? The P-world that I am at pains to identify here is associated with an individual. Yet it is the whole phenomenal world experienced by that individual. My experienced table is not your experienced table. This may seem, on the face of it, to justify skepticism about the existence of a shared reality, a philosophical position that is as old as the hills.
It is not my intention in this short work to knit the discourse into the web of argument and counter argument that constitutes the whole of philosophy, both Eastern and Western. What I have to say, I wish to say directly and simply. However the themes that immediately arise are central to the concerns of all major philosophical schools, and so I think it worthwhile at this juncture to make passing reference to philosophical skepticism and to ways past the dead end of inquiry that come hand in hand with the skeptical stance.
Consider the situation in the above figure. Two people are close together and are looking at the same object, a teapot. I have done my best to illustrate that there are two distinct experiences here, but all I can do to point to that is to show the visual appearance of the teapot from two different points in space. A conventional understanding of the situation is that there are two people and one teapot, all sharing the same space. On the view adopted here, there are two distinct phenomenal worlds, each of which has a 'teapot-experience' as part and parcel of present experience. The skeptic objects that this distinction removes all ground for believing in the objective existence of any teapot whatsoever. Is this skepticism justified?
The double pronged answer to be given here is a resounding Yes and No. It is Yes we have no Bananas. First up to the microphone is the would-be saviour of common sense:
No, skepticism about the objective existence of the teapot is not justified. The two people involved share a vast amount of evolutionary history, and thus have similar morphology. At the same time, the relation between perception and action, while complex in the human case, is nonetheless lawful. The phenomenon of the teapot arises from this morphology and this very lawfulness. Nature does not deceive, and the very fact that two people can converse about, jointly manipulate, and generally agree on the properties of a teapot is testament to the lawfulness of the relation between perception/action from which the experience of the teapot emerges. There will be differences in the experiences of the two phenomenal teapots, but these are slight. One such is illustrated in the figure, and arises from the banal fact that two observers must occupy different locations in space. But in general, if we are realists, then two observers must occupy the same world in some meaningful and whole sense of the term, and thus they are looking at the same teapot.
There is a heap of evidence to back up this claim and to support common sense. The relation between the change in stimulation on the sensory surfaces, and the motion of an organism, is strictly lawful. This is as true for a bat or bug as for a person. As you move your head in one direction, the resulting change in the patterning of the light distribution on your retina is a deterministic function of your motion together with the reflective characteristics of the surfaces in the area around you. The sub-discipline of Ecological Psychology has devoted many person-years to the question and generated mountains of scientific reports documenting and explicating this lawfulness. In some circles, particularly those which seek to account for our ability to learn through experience of the world around us, this lawfulness is called sensori-motor correspondence. For our present purposes, we will agree with common sense that for two people in this situation, it makes perfect sense to act in every way as if there were a teapot with an objective existence independent of the observers.
But there is also a Yes answer to be given. Yes, there is every reason to be skeptical about the objective reality of the teapot, despite the obvious success of two people to agree on any and every property that teapot might be thought to have.
Yes, there simply is no teapot which is a differentiated thing independent of the two people in this example. Consider an ant. The ant has an evolutionary history which is largely distinct from that of the people (though obviously not completely distinct). Along the way, the distinctions made by the ant's evolving sensory-motor systems are those which were of relevance to the organism and its chances of reproduction. An ant has a very different morphology to a human. It is much smaller, for one thing. The kind of distinction that is relevant to an ant is entirely different to the kind of distinction that is relevant to a human. A drop of water, which maintains its form due to surface tension, is a rather different proposition for an ant than a human. There is no reason to believe that the phenomenal world of an ant contains distinctions that are congruent with those of a human. I have wasted many a Summer's day observing ants in my garden, and I feel confident in claiming that while they seem to distinguish jam from soil, they do not know what a house is, or how a football differs from a rock. In short, the teapot appears as such by virtue of the shared evolutionary history of the two people, and its existence as a teapot is a function of the form and capability for action of a human being.
It may be helpful to adopt the following stance towards these complementary viewpoints. What we know, we know first and foremost from phenomenal experience. In direct experience we are witness to objects of perceptible scale, partaking in events of perceptible duration. As well informed citizens of the 21st Century, we are of course well aware of objects both larger and smaller than we can perceive directly, thanks to the magic of devices such as telescopes and microscopes that function to bring such objects into the phenomenal world. We are also aware of events and processes that happen at time scales both faster and slower than the scale at which we perceive events phenomenally. Time-lapse photography can make the slow, hence imperceptible, growth of plants directly perceptible, just as it can slow down the rapid creation and destruction of pattern that happens as a drop falls into a cup of milk. Our experience of the world is phenomenal, and our understanding starts with the phenomenal.
A well worn distinction is that between noumena and phenomena. The distinction is between that which appears to us in experience (phenomena) and the underlying, observer-free, character of things (noumena). By the account being developed here, things arise from distinctions that in turn are dependent on the discrimination capabilities and proclivities of an organism with a specific spatial and time scale, and a specific evolutionary lineage. They do not have independent existence as things. The lawfulness we find as we interact with things assures us that the underlying, noumenal reality, is, indeed, real and trustworthy. But is is also not directly knowable. We must learn to live with this unavoidable epistemological limitation: those categories that populate our lived experience do so by virtue of the kind of thing that we are, and not because nature divides up a continuous reality into natural kinds such as teapots, gemstones and legwarmers.
But there is another, independent reason why we manage to act, mostly, as if we inhabit the same world. And this time it is something peculiarly human, so ants can stop reading right now. .
Recovering a Shared World 2: Collective Construction
Something remarkable happened over a period of a few hundred thousand years, a period bounded on the one hand by the emergence of anatomically modern humans and on the other by the onset of documented history. While not exactly instantaneous, the change from an ape-like existence to that of a modern human with language and culture was fantastically rapid when compared to the sluggish pace of biological evolution. We do not have detailed evidence of the time course of the development of truly human language and culture. By the time we see evidence of any language at all, the people who use that language have rich human cultures, tools, music, the whole nine yards. But if we are right in seeing this development as a profound step, then it needs to be compared to other developments in the long chain from the single cell to our present condition, and by the standards of evolutionary time, those few tens or hundreds of thousand years required to pass from ape to human happened in the blink of a compound eye. If we are wrong, we can probably nevertheless agree that from where we are standing, this transformation interpretation to properly assess our position in the grander scheme of things.
The development of language and culture was the latest twist in a branch of evolutionary development that had led to the primates, the monkeys, and most recently to the great apes: Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Orang Utangs and Humans. By the time language and culture appear, these apes had all been around for a while, and collectively they were quite remarkable in the dynamism they exhibited in their social lives. Most animals have social lives, of course, including ants. But an ant is born with a social role, and nothing that happens subsequently alters that. The ant does not spend any effort maintaining its identity as a worker or a soldier, it expends all its effort in being a worker or a soldier. This is quite different from the primates. Every primate species has numerous forms of social hierarchy, and all of these are fluid. In fact, "hierarchy" is a somewhat misleading word here, as each individual of the species must constantly maintain a rich web of social relations with others, and this web instantiates multiple hierarchies and lateral networks. Each individual is connected upwards, downwards, sideways and every which way to very many other individuals. There is some dynamism in the social relations among lions and walruses, but it is cartoonishly simple compared to the rich interconnectedness and potential for social change and development which is so characteristic of primate social lives.
The fluidity of the social roles of the great apes has profound effects, but they are not simple. Each of the 5 ape kinds displays rather different forms of socialization. The orang utangs live relatively solitary lives; the gorillas have very well defined family-like groups centered around dominant males. Chimps live in larger social groups, with all the attendant complexities, as do bonobos, but they have found very different ways of managing this complexity, as is well known from the descriptive work of primatologists such as Franz de Waal. Humans, by and large, have developed family units, though the constitution of the family and its relative importance admits of considerable variation. But humans outdo all the rest in social complexity. The human families are embedded in the richest social networks of all, in an ever changing landscape that started with communities based around hunting groups, then agriculture, from which arose towns and cities, universities, churches, football teams, nation states, sewing circles, and, recently, the uncharted waters of social networks based around various forms of digital communication.
All this complexity arises from sharing. We share belief in social institutions; we modify our physical world beyond all recognition through shared knowledge and shared technology. Language, one of the engines of sharing (though by no means the only one), is a shared phenomenon by its very nature. Cultural values exist only because they are shared. One solitary person on a desert island does not a culture make. And sharing, on the view taken here, is something that happens across individuals, each with their own, first-person, solipsistic, bubble of experience, the P- world.
The view being developed here, which seeks to properly situate our understanding of first person experience in a larger view of the constitution of the world suggests two ways of thinking about the changes that arose and made us fully human. The first is to consider how the "environment" changes for animals whose social lives become of prime importance. The second way of looking at the change is to consider interaction among P-worlds in an abstract, mathematical, sense. Let us start with the more concrete case, and consider the nature of the environment for a social animal, bearing in mind the claim that P-worlds arise from nervous systems, embedded in bodies which are immersed in information-rich environments. What does "information-rich" mean for a social animal?
The changing environment
If we want to understand the action of a single cell in a nutrient soup, we need to know what those features of the physical environment are that are relevant to that behavior. This will typically be an account of chemical distribution in the surrounding medium. For the simple case of chemotaxis, we can readily point to the information gradient that is of direct importance to the organism.
For animals equipped with nervous systems, the salient features of the environment may be much more complex, and harder to define in a way that is independent of the needs of the animal. For example, recent work in the study of mouse brains discovered that certain cells in their brains become more active when the information in the environment is such that the mouse could, if it desired, make a nest there. Now a nest is a very high level property, and it would be almost impossible to say which properties of a visual/haptic/olfactory scene distinguish one which affords nesting from one which does not, but the mouse's nervous system and body are fine-tuned to just those properties of the environment that are of importance to the mouse. (Unfortunately, a wonderful finding like this in neuroscience is interpreted today as demonstrating that the mouse possesses some kind of abstract, conceptual, encoding. That interpretation misses the direct nature of the fit between animal and environmental information completely.)
For highly social animals, some of the most important features of the environment are to be found in the actions of other conspecifics. It becomes critically important to pick up any clues that will allow one animal to predict the behavior of another, or to estimate how another animal is reading a given shared social situation. Is this other animal angry, happy, lustful, hungry? Where do I stand in relation to this other animal? In humans, bodies give off some of these signals. Alone of the apes, our eyes have a white surround to the iris, making it relatively easy to pick up on the direction in which another is looking. Our gestures convey a lot, and we are exquisitely sensitive to aspects of the form of another, such that we can recognize individuals based only on their gait or footfall. But humans provide many many more clues to other humans, signaling allegiance, status, affect and intent. Whereas other animals get by with the environment they encounter, humans have almost obliterated the natural environment in their daily lives, and replaced it with a social environment full of signals, codes and signs. The surfaces we move among have been leveled off, carpeted, tiled, planed or tarred to facilitate human locomotion. Our canopy is a fixed roof whose principal quality is to provide a stability to our ambient environment so that we can get on with the much more interesting business of figuring out what our neighbor is up to, and why.
The contention repeated again here is that individual experience arises from nervous systems embedded in bodies immersed in information-rich environments. As the (relevant) environment changes, so too must the experience that arises therein. And by adopting the stance suggested here with respect to individual experience, it is possible to say something substantial about what that change might entail. Specifically, the sharing that underlies all cultural exchange, all signs and language, further acts to remove us from a solipsism and ensure that we occupy a shared collective world. To see this, it is worth considering what communication might possibly mean for two individuals with their hermetically sealed islands of immediate experience. This account of communication, or sharing across experiential worlds, draws heavily on ideas put forward by Umberto Maturana and Fancisco Varela.
Coupling among P-worlds
The conventional manner in which communication is treated of makes use of the notion of the transfer of information. I have some information, I speak, and now you have that information. Would that things were that simple. If communication worked like that, Jerusalem would have been fixed a long time ago by simply talking. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that communication is much less deterministic. The reason for this is that meaning is a private matter, and not directly communicable. Let us take a simple example. Two people sit side by side, and as they observe a common surface, say a table top, a spider crawls by. One of the two is arachnophobic, the other not. Both are witness to an almost identical event, with directly comparable patterns of stimulation on their respective retinas. Yet the two experiences are completely different. We conventionally talk about this situation as if perception and emotion were separable things. In the present work we are eschewing such premature dissection of experience. We can surely agree that the quality of the two experiences are different, despite the commonalities of the two highly correlated situations.
So too with words. If one person utters a word, there is no straightforward way to predict the effect of that word on a listener. The effect of the word (and hence its meaning for the individual listener) is dependent on the listener's individual constitution. The same word or phrase may elicit rage, tears, a smile, or a frown, but the effect is not a function of the properties of the word, which are essentially arbitrary. This old chestnut has informed a century of linguistics, but the fundamental insight goes far beyond language and applies, ceteris paribus, to any and all outward manifestations originating from or caused by one individual that can be perceived within the sphere of experience of another. It may help at this point to return to cartoons of P-worlds to illustrate the point.
This is one P-world. The boundary points to the fact that it is of finite extent. The cartoon figure inside is a reminder that we appear as physical forms within our own P-world, but that the P-world is present experience, which includes both subject and object (hence the allusion to the well known yin and yang symbol).
These are two P-worlds exhibiting a one-way interaction. Something done by the subject of the green world is perceptible within the blue P-world. The "poke" illustrated here might be a sentence, a gesture, or anything that is potentially meaningful to the subject of the blue P- world. As shown here, this is essentially a one-way process. The green subject makes a sign, and the blue subject perceives the sign. The effect of that sign on the blue P-world is dictated by the internal dynamics or structure of the blue P-world. The effect on the blue world is neither controlled by, nor even perceived within, the green world. This should not seem too odd. How often have you said something only to find that your utterance meant something entirely unpredictable to your interlocutor?
The more usual situation is depicted here, where the interaction is reciprocal. A sign initiated within the green world has an effect within the blue world. As a result, a response sign is generated within the blue world, and perceived within the green world. There is no necessary or deterministic connection between the response and the original sign made by green. A sign, in this broad sense, is anything originating in one world that is perceptible in another. As well as words, this would include gestures, funny hats, aroma, and an infinity of other media.
Each P-world is a domain of autonomy, comparable in very many respects to the autonomy of a cell in a fluid medium. For humans, the relevant environment of the P-world is largely composed of other P-worlds. These continually provide the information we need to manage our lives as intensely dynamic social beings. And these autonomous domains interact. Before further analysis of this situation, consider the wonderful picture below (taken from a photo report on the website http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/). The picture is filled with signs, symbols, and meaning- carrying vehicles. The feathers, markings, dress and tattoos are all meaningful to the subjects depicted. It is a striking image, mainly due to the unfamiliarity of the rich tapestry of social signs in evidence, whose incomprehensibility to most readers of this work will stand in stark contrast to the familiar and meaningful environment of a commercial bus. Our own collective experiences are no less filled with such signs. They are familiar, and each of us has our own kind of way of interpreting them. A meaningless pop tune may annoy you and yet transport your partner to a reverie filled with past experiences and significance. Again, it seems the profound and the banal lie side by side as we analyze experience as objectively as possible.
Now, I have used cartoons and an outlandish picture to characterize the structure of social communication, or interaction among P-worlds. This seems flippant, but is not meant so. The contention being made here is that P-worlds are real, and thus this account of communication is not merely metaphorical. It is the basis for an expanded science that can address human experience and social reality as well as the world of inanimate matter. It will probably not have been apparent to the reader, but the account just provided is actually very close to being a mathematical formulation of these matters, bringing us just a little closer, perhaps, to a rational treatment of some aspects of human affairs where we currently have little to go on but our culture-bound preferences and tribal allegiances. To claim that this account is (almost) mathematical will seem odd to those for whom mathematics is a slightly scary, and definitely difficult, activity practiced by people who possess esoteric knowledge and the ability to manipulate arcane symbols. It need not be so.
The mathematical tradition alluded to is dynamical systems theory, which is a hugely powerful set of formal tools for describing systems that change over time. In this branch of mathematics, a system is first given a formal description as a set of values that describe the state of the system at any given point in time. For example, the economy of Ireland might be described using a large set of numbers related to the exchange of money and the value set upon the activities of its citizens. A dynamic is then a set of rules that describe how those numbers, the state of the system, changes over time. Economists try to formulate such rules all the time. For example, they notoriously attempt to relate change in one variable, say interest rates, to change in another, say inflation. Formulating such rules for an economy is virtually impossible in any precise sense, as there is little knowledge of what the appropriate numbers, or variable quantities, are. But the approach is of great generality and underlies most of the work in the hard sciences that characterizes the motion of planets, the behaviour of materials, the changes in the weather, or the state of health of a person's body.
Where the numbers involved in describing a system are more trustworthy, that is, when they actually capture a variable that forms part of a system which changes lawfully over time, the resulting models may have enormous predictive power. This, after all, is the reason we manage to steer a lump of metal the size of a double decker bus all the way from Earth to Mars and land it safely on the ground there. In this latter case, physicists and rocket scientist have every confidence that the numbers they use meaningfully capture the relevant aspects of the system they wish to understand. A model for predicting the motion of a spaceship will include variables such as the mass of the ship, but not its color. The issue of identifying the relevant variables to describe, model and predict the changing state of a system is a strictly empirical matter. The correct set of variables will depend on the purposes the model is to serve (guiding a spaceship), and on the degree to which the system being modeled is well defined. Therein, of course, lies the difference between the models of the economist and the rocket scientist.
But the mathematics is agnostic with respect to the uses and misuses to which it is put. We do have a wealth of expertise now in understanding how systems can be described, and how they interact. And some general points can be drawn from that, which in turn suggest new ways of approaching our empirical understanding of the relations among P- worlds. The notion of autonomy is well captured within dynamical systems theory. A P-world would constitute one autonomous domain, meaning that its state is defined by quantities within the P-world which are essentially independent of what happens outside. A dynamical description would then characterize the mutual relations among those quantities, and how they affect one another. It is then possible to consider external influences upon the behavior of the system. These will affect the system, but the effect they have will be a function of the internal dynamic of the system itself, unless the influence is so great as to destroy the autonomy of the system. A bullet can have this effect on a human. After death, the body no longer constitutes an autonomous domain of organization. A corpse is just another thing among things.
The idea that P-worlds continually engage in reciprocal interaction introduces a novel twist to this tale. If we have multiple autonomous systems, and they interact, and the scale of those interaction is such that one system affects the other without destroying it, then the mathematics assures us that some very interesting qualitative things happen. The systems will become coupled, and thereby enter into a variety of states with different degrees of stability. Richly coupled autonomous dynamical systems will display forms of organization that are lawful. There will then be real structures, displaying lawful organization, that are defined over multiple systems, and that constrain the dynamics of their component systems. This notion of emergence, or self-organization, is not a woolly metaphor. It is what is guaranteed to happen when systems of this sort interact in a rich and reciprocal fashion. This has consequences for the individual P-worlds. And it has consequences for how we might tackle the job of extending hard science to the domain of social organization.
To get a feel for what is meant by the emergence of structure that is defined over multiple P-worlds, a few simple analogies will help. When the wind blows over a field of wheat, waves are generated that propagate across the field. The waves are real, and they are constituted from the individual plants, but they are defined only with respect to the collective of all the stalks and ears. If one were to track the motion of an individual ear of wheat, one would see motion that arises from two sources. One is the constitution of that particular stalk of wheat, which may be more or less robust, more or less well-formed, compared with the average of the community. The other is the collective phenomen of the wave. By looking only at the motion of an individual stalk, one would see a messy picture in which the two contributions are hard, if not impossible to separate. So too with P-worlds. As they interact richly, dynamic phenomena will arise. But all observation is done within individual P-worlds. We experience a confusing blend of endogenous and exogenous influences, and it becomes virtually impossible to pick apart elements of our experience that arise from the shared collaborative world we generate together, and what comes from within. We are all familiar with this. It has the hallmarks of the banal. Yet a recognition of the autonomy of the P-world may yet allow us to use those tools that have worked for so many other natural systems to better understand what the relation between the individual and the collective truly is.
A brief pause
The first section was spent in the vain attempt to point to subjective experience as if it were a thing, in full knowledge that things are things by virtue of the discrimination capabilities that arise when nervous systems are embedded in bodies which are in turn immersed in information rich environments. Some time was spent in emphasizing the solipsistic notion of the P-world, as it is notoriously difficult to bear in mind the reality and unified character of experience. Our natural disposition is to make distinctions, to carve things up. But experience is a whole. The second chapter then showed in outline how our experience of living in a shared world arises, both from lawful relations between perception and action, and from the reciprocal coupling that humans engage in. A collectively shared understanding of the character of phenomenal reality arises.
Although this is some kind of a metaphysical account, that is not my immediate goal here. Pretty much everything that has been said here is compatible with the natural sciences as they are practiced. No apple cart has been over turned. Much of the time, what has been said has appeared trivially true. But there a point to adopting this view, and to recognizing the reality, well-formedness and nature of P-worlds and their interaction. The remainder of this book will tease out some of the consequences of adopting this view as I see them. There are lessons to be learned for the scientific study of social organization, for psychiatry, for the understanding of sex, language, and ultimately, for this is what the thesis is really about, for better understanding the dual nature of the human condition: both individual and collective.