Is it only a mental habit that we explain things and events in terms of efficient causes rather than final causes? That we expect events to be pushed from behind by past antecedents rather than be pulled into the future by intended consequences? Is the exclusion of teleology essential to science? Could we use Occam’s razor to find which explanation is simpler, more parsimonious, and choose it in preference to the other?
Igor N. Todorov describes how cells recover from a severe poisoning of their protein-making machinery. It is a beautiful repair mechanism that is most simply described by such phrases as “the cell mobilizes more energy and raw materials”, “stops making export proteins until its own protein needs are satisfied”, etc. This sounds like what human disaster crews might do after an earthquake, in terms of planning and setting priorities.
Any description that would take the intentionality and planning out of it would sound awkward and lengthy; e.g. “more energy becomes available to the cells that we observed, because the cells that did not do that were eliminated by natural selection and so we could not observe them”. We don’t want to use these circumlocutions every time we describe any of the hundreds of elegant mechanisms! How tedious! But what then of Occam’s razor? Are not simple descriptions preferable to convoluted ones?
However, these are only the DESCRIPTIONS. The same article goes on to EXPLANATIONS, and these are in terms of efficient causes and mechanisms – e.g. how the breakdown of ribosomes stimulates the production of promoters and inhibitors of certain groups of genes; etc. These are typical causal chains all the way. This too is simple and elegant, and Occam would leave it alone.
It seems to me that the explanations are at the more detailed, micro, molecular level, while what I called descriptions are at the more holistic, macro, cellular level. So perhaps efficient and final causes can coexist (as I think Aristotle intended), but operate at different levels. Hofstadter, too, (in “Goedel, Escher, Bach”), refused to choose between reductionism and holism, illustrating his plea for their coexistence in a series of insightful diagrams, e.g. of a large letter H consisting of small letter r’s.
The usual objection to teleology in science is that intention implies intelligence, mind, consciousness, and we are allowed to speak only of matter, energy, forces. But why, especially in biology? Materialism is only an assumption, usually an unspoken one, and the more pernicious for being unexamined. It would be far better to accept the simpler explanation, whatever it is, and razor out the awkward circumlocutions, as Copernicus excised the epicycles from planetary orbits by accepting a new theory, though it sounded revolutionary for his time.
Materialism is not necessary as the philosophical basis of science, just as the Earth did not have to remain the centre of the universe after Copernicus. Radical vitalism is a possible alternative. We can assume, as a hypothesis, that mind is coextensive with matter throughout the universe and all space and time. It was there at the Big Bang, just like matter, though both were very different from today. It is present at the farthest galaxy, we know not in what form. Life is a fusion of matter and mind (we don’t know the connection in detail), and life we know only on Earth so far, though we must keep an open mind about its possibilities in other places. But matter and mind somehow coexist separately everywhere and for all time side by side even if not linked by life.
Mind can operate on matter at all levels, though it gets a much better handle at it in living organisms. Mind is what elsewhere we have called “information” (see the essay on “The Three Essences”, Section II). Information is negentropy (or what someone called “syntropy”), i.e. a striving for organization, structure, pattern. “Striving” is already a word denoting intention, in some elementary form. I choose it deliberately instead of the more passive word “tendency” or “propensity”, but I would settle for the latter at this level if the reader prefers. For there are degrees of mind, and at the level of separate particles or atoms, mind is still weakly expressed; it comes to full expression only in higher organisms, with living cells, tissues and organs intermediate – and it is also weaker (though always present) in lower organisms than in higher ones.
When quarks get together to form protons and neutrons, when protons and neutrons get together to form heavier atomic nuclei, when atomic nuclei capture electrons to form atoms, when atoms combine to form molecules – there are in operation forces of attraction which organize the smaller units into larger ones. Physicists call these forces the strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces; poets might call them different forms of love. There are repulsions as well as attractions among the forces – there is hate as well as love. Actually both attractions and repulsions contribute to the building of structures or patterns, such as crystals, which tile space with their more or less perfect repetitive symmetries. This far mere physics and chemistry can get in its striving for form. It is quite a step up from the chaotic gases and plasmas, in which the particles occupy random (unordered) positions and move at random speeds in random directions.
The tendency to disorder, or entropy, at every step impedes the striving for organization. But the attractive/repulsive forces are sometimes stronger than the randomization; the sorting of the cards is sometimes more effective than the shuffling. Each system moves spontaneously to the best point of balance between the forces and the randomization – i.e. the equilibrium between the enthalpy and the entropy. Entropy does not come from striving, it comes from drifting. It represents where the system would go if the striving stopped, i.e. if the forces shut off. All systems would go to a thin uniformly spread gas, without form, without mind, without beauty – and profoundly uninteresting.
The word “force” itself comes from our observation of our own bodies, when our muscle power pulls or pushes material objects. We are certainly applying muscle power intentionally – why a priori deny this interpretation to particles? It must be an intentionality very different in kind from that which we display – for one thing, very stereotyped (always the same between the same kinds of particles); yet there are strange hints of free will or at least indeterminacy in quantum theory. But no matter how different the forces are, they are compatible, it seems to me, with the assumptions of radical vitalism.
Yet the physical forces can build structures only so far. More intricate structures than repetitive crystals cannot exist at equilibrium. How to maintain structures far away from equilibrium by a flow-through of matter and energy in open systems is an invention of life. This is the further step that forms macromolecules and eventually cells. It is a constant struggle against entropy, in which victory (pattern maintenance) is always only limited and temporary, and yet life has learned to perpetuate itself on Earth -so far, anyway.
Can we then still say that small molecules build up macromolecules, and macromolecules build up cells, and prokaryotic cells build up eukaryotic cells, and so on – by the operation of both intentionality and love? I would argue that we are more and more justified in saying this as we go up the scale; that mind and love is more in evidence between cells than betw~n atoms, for instance. We all picture cancer as an act of revolt or treason by body cells no longer working for the common good of the body; but most people would consider this a metaphor. I differ only in taking it literally, stepping from metaphor to reality. A similar consideration applies to the immune system as the police or army defending the body against invaders (viruses) or criminals (cancer cells), even to the extent of sometimes turning against its own “citizens” in auto-immune diseases (acting like death squads). Other example could be cited. We all think this way about bodily functions at some level; I only add – let us take it literally. There are differences in degree between physiological and social mechanisms, as I have been stressing all along; yet the similarities are too great to be accidental. It is much more arrogant to think that we humans have a monopoly on intelligence and intentionality, than it is to “anthropomorphically” read intentionality back into nature, as vitalists are accused of doing.
Erich Jantsch in “The Self-organizing Universe” writes of the metabolic mind, the genetic mind, the epigenetic mind, the hormonal mind, and the neural mind. These are all ways of organizing and communicating information. Each higher order (and the above represents some kind of scale) comes into existence later to supplement the lower orders, but not to displace them – they continue to operate side by side. Neural mind is not necessarily the end of the line. Metabolic mind is not the lowest order – pre-biotic chemistry had other forms, and the elementary particles have forms of their own.
What is the final end of this striving, this intentionality? The drive seems to be toward union, unity, system-building; so probably the end in view, if it can be attained, is to make the whole universe into a single living system. The drive toward unity of earthly humanity is already getting stronger, though it may yet be swamped by the forces of disorder and annihilate the whole attempt. That final goal, a unified living universe, may be what Teilhard de Chardin meant by the Omega Point.