The Ladder (Epistolution Expained)
For more from Charlie Munford, please explore www.talkingoctopus.com.
The tree of life has many splits in its branches, and a few merges. Our bodies and brains, too, are split and merged. One possible reason for this split is fascinating, and it relates directly to the process of understanding life. Our bodies and brains may be split not only to facilitate balance and locomotion, but to enhance the flexibility of our minds.
In this essay I want to present a fully detailed map, for the first time, of how to understand step-by-step the consequences of epistolution. I want to discuss the two approaches to connecting the different consequences of epistolution together into a full theory of life. When we try to imagine how this insight changes our worldview, we can begin in the details and work outward to the big picture, or we can begin in the big picture and work inward toward the details. So far, in teaching epistolution, the latter approach seems to work better, even though the former is more convincing. It is easier to understand that morality is unexplained and changing, and then work downward toward a possible explanation for it, than it is to work upward from the control of genes toward the implications for how animals express moral intuitions.
Hemispheres
All life descended from a common ancestor, so we are all of us living things cousins, in a sense. Our human lineage occurs in the branch that may have begun from the domain of single-celled archaea, as opposed to the bacteria. But bacteria rejoined us later as the mitochondria in our cells, and of course we now are dependent on the bacteria and other prokaryotes in our microbiomes. We are part of the eukarya, which includes all multicellular organisms, everything living that is visible to the naked eye. Eukarya branches into protists, plants, fungi and animalia. Green and red algae branched from our lineage and then some of them rejoined another branch as the chloroplasts in plants. Our branch is animalia, which includes the arthropods, the mollusks, the segmented worms, the flatworms, the sponges, and the jellyfish. Among the animalia are a large group of vertebrates that descended from fishes. These creatures, including us, all belong to a group called the bilaterians.
Bilaterians are organisms that are divided in half, more or less symmetrically, by a midline. Long ago, we were wormlike tubes swimming in a prehistoric ocean. One end of the tube tended to evolve headed-ness, and the other tailed-ness. The nervous systems of creatures arranged like this had a left side and a right side. When we branched from the fishes, growing fins into lobes that eventually developed into our arms and legs, we retained the right and left-sided-ness of our nervous systems. Today, humans have divided brains and divided nerves. Although our nervous system is centralized, unlike say the sponges, corals, and anemones, ours is separated nearly completely. The right side of our brain largely controls the left side of the body and vice versa. The right and left lobes of our brains are connected only by a thin structure called the corpus callosum, a structure at the floor of the two sides of the brain that carries impulses from one side to another.
This structure can be severed, resulting in “split-brain” experiments in human patients. A split-brain person can live relatively normally, but can act and think independently on one side of their body without the other side of the body/brain being aware of the other side’s acts or intentions. For example, the right side of the brain might be commanded by placing a sign in a certain part of the field of vision accessible only to that hemisphere of the brain to “stand up and stretch” and the patient would then rise from their seat. When the left side of the brain was asked (by a similar placement of signs in the field of vision accessible only from the left brain) why they were standing, that hemisphere would have no idea, but would immediately produce an answer, saying something like “I thought I would go get a Coke” or some other irrelevant explanation. The left brain, having no experience of being commanded to stand up at all, would nevertheless realize that the body was standing and confabulate a reason for it.
The fact that our capacity to produce explanations for our actions is separable from our ability to act is highly salient to epistolution. An act might be described, by someone of a particularly mathematical personality, as performing a computation. But computers cannot invent explanations. We do not know what physical process results in an explanation. To invent explanations, we start at an observation we can’t already explain. Then we reach back in our memory for an explanation. Then we look again at the world for another observation to see if it supports or contradicts our explanation. Let’s say I throw a tennis ball at a wall, expecting to hit it when it bounces back, but to my surprise it goes right through the wall. Why? Is the wall paper? Is it an optical illusion? Was the ball really a tennis ball? Events like these are how we know where to focus our attention, they are what gives us our goals. These are the questions that frame our drive to act and discover more about the world.
Why should our centralized nervous system be divided? Iain McGilchrist, in a wonderfully evocative book called The Master and His Emissary, develops a theory. After spending a career studying this question, MacGilchrist concludes that this arrangement has been preserved for the purpose of separately “attending to” the world from the opposite directions. One hemisphere, usually the left, is slightly more dedicated to grasping and manipulating small details, working out coherent but discrete mechanisms. This hemisphere, the “emissary,” tends to be optimistic and workmanlike, but blind to the larger meaning or implications of its actions. This form of cognition is analytic, also called reductionist. It breaks up a problem into small discrete chunks for processing. This is the no-saying side, the rule enforcer. It attends to the world from the bottom up. This is the predator brain, that singles out a victim. Interestingly, the power of speech usually resides on this side of the brain.
The other hemisphere, usually the right, tends to be more focused on integrating the entire world, and everything in it. All the past and future and present meet in this hemisphere. It perceives flow. It is this hemisphere that can integrate emotion and understand music. This is the integrative cognitive function, also called holistic. It apprehends where and how we are in a global sense, and perhaps in a moral sense as well. This is the prey brain, the function that scans the whole horizon and notices how things fit together, picking out items that might comprise a threat. This is the yes-saying side, the rule-breaker. This hemisphere is associated with creativity, artistic and philosophical invention, and religious inspiration. This side attends to the world from the top down.
These separate ways of attending to the world, in MacGilchrist’s opinion, are the reason for the continued separation of the nervous system. It takes an entirely different process to look at the details and form a picture than it does to look at the whole picture and notice significant details. The two styles of thinking are complementary, but not identical. He very movingly argues for the “master” function of the right hemisphere, and insists that whole epochs of human history have been marked by undue domination by the left brain. The brain is in the world as much as it is in the head, he thinks, and therefore we can cumulatively revolve much in a particular mode of thought as a society. The Enlightenment was a left-brain period, the Renaissance a right-brain blossoming. His scheme is reminiscent of Nietzche’s Apollonian and Dionysian modes…one rational, the other creative, destructive, and passionate.
I believe this division roughly helps to understand how people have interacted with the concept of epistolution as well. Although all of us have two brain hemispheres, out of habit or inheritance we all tend to inhabit one mode more than the other. Sometimes, certain people or situations tend to make us live in a particular mode more than the other. For myself, my daughter brings out my integrative mode; some of her annoying friends bring out my more fastidious, no-saying left brain. In the schema below, I have laid out the two different modes of thought and how they tend to work through the implications of epistolution. For each mode, there are particular stumbling blocks. The analytic path is harder, because in order to progress up the ladder at each rung one has to be aware of the open questions and unknowns at the next rung. One has to forget what one knows and try to imagine what isn’t known. This type of awareness is of course, a right-brain function, so it requires a large brain shift to open up enough wonder and curiosity to rise higher. Most analytic thinkers get lost entirely between rungs and give up, concluding that epistolution can’t be understood.
The integrative path is easier. People who are integrative thinkers usually find it easier to see how the larger moral and intelligence questions rest on a foundation of detailed mechanisms involving things like heredity and gene control. But the details are hard to apprehend for an integrative thinker. They are drawn to the theory because it involves such wide-ranging meanings, and they crave a grand sweep in their judgements. They love the romance of a bold claim, no matter how unclear it might be. But integrative thinkers struggle to falsify hypotheses, they struggle to make sharp distinctions. They make intuitions rather than drawing conclusions. They tend not to divide things into right and wrong, so they cannot make out just what is excluded by the theory and therefore cannot identify what it is really saying. As a result they tend to develop a generally accurate, but very fuzzy view of epistolution.
There are brilliant people in both camps. I have a soft spot for the integrators, but the intellectual with the most powerful arguments for epistolution is an analytic. I discovered epistolution along an integrative path, but I tend to try to show it others along an analytic path because I seem to be less likely to be misunderstood at each step. Perhaps this is also because my left brain is in control of my own speech. Denis Noble, an eminent physiologist at Oxford, recently argued the first three rungs of epistolution in great detail along the analytic path with Richard Dawkins, who is arguably the most famous scientist in the world. In my opinion he clearly won the debate. Both modes are necessary. That’s why we have two brains.
Connections
Let’s begin with a quick summary of what we need to accomplish to climb up the ladder in either direction. In order to see the connections, we have to do considerable reframing.
As you can see I have envisioned the two paths through epistolution as inverses of one another. In the two images above, the directions are switched but the elements are the same. The analytic path begins with the detailed mechanisms and proceeds towards the whole, while the integrative path begins with the whole and proceeds downwards to the details.
I have been having tremendous difficulty communicating these paths to anyone. It involves significant reframing at each stage. At each major element I have redefined what the element really is. In order to link it to the next element, one has to accept this redefinition, perhaps on faith, until the entire picture becomes clear. This is why the whole theory is so counterintuitive, and most people rebel from the concept at one stage or another. One solution might have been to invent a new word for each element rather than using the familiar words that carry the wrong connotations, but I fear that this would only increase confusion. Let me briefly discuss each level.
Integration
Let’s walk through the elements on the downward, integrative path.
Morality
First, let’s imagine we have never heard of morality. It has no connection to religion or ethics, and humans do not exist at all on the earth. There are no books on any moral subjects, in fact there are no books at all. Imagine the world beginning at the start of the living story, 4 billion years ago and ending in the year 2 million BC, when skulking hominins are present in Africa but the rise of the artful, creative, musical human species Homo sapiens is 1.7 million years in the future. In this world we have no Judaeo-Christian God, no Plato, no Jesus. There are no holy texts at all. There are not even any forms of writing, other than biotic signs ljke the pheromone trails of ants and the scent markings of carnivores. What in this world prevents evil from overtaking all? In this context we have to think of evil in a different way. What is evil before there are theories of evil? Can we formulate a thoroughly nonhuman version of ethics?
Taking this approach lets us get extremely general about morals. In this world there are actions of animals and plants that seem (to us) to be good or evil, but what defines these human prejudices? Are they purely arbitrary imports of our human social behaviors onto other forms of life where they do not belong? A child has no trouble separating the good from the bad dinosaurs. We can observe that for us, goods have an aspect that is unifying, amplifying, accommodating, and cherishing of life. Evils have an aspect that is separating, reducing, injuring, and destroying of life. We observe that the natural world is full of examples of both of these themes, in a balance. Survival and reproduction are pruned by natural selection, but never arrested entirely. It eventually swells and fills the world with life. How much nurturing is there in nature, in comparison to destruction? One measure might be the sum total of species, or the total biomass on earth, or the gross number of cells in all ecosystems. By these measures we can see that good and evil are held in check by one another, but also that over long stretches of time good slightly prevails. The biomass of total life on earth has increased since pre-Cambrian times, as has the total number of cells and the total number of species. Extinction spasms have come and gone, leaving destructive legacies, but stable amplification of living forms always follows like sun after a rainstorm.
This perspective alerts us to another feature of goods…their creativity. Life rebounds not by practicing the same routines as before but by modifying itself opportunistically. An ecosystem cycles nutrients, but forms of life accumulate over time by finding new strategies. If other organisms pose threats, they are evils, and if they are allies, they are goods. But the real magic of life lies in the conversion of threats to allies. Consider for a moment the remora sharksucker fish. Its modified dorsal fin allows it to follow and adhere to a predatory fish from underneath. It lives in the shadow of death underneath a dangerous shark by picking small parasites from the shark’s skin, and nipping at scraps from the bloody fury the shark unleashes on its prey. The shark shreds life, wasting remnants, and the remora thrives in the breach. No longer a victim, the sharksucker has become an ally.
Morality in humans controls all that we do. It is the underlying force that makes us prefer anything over anything else. Seen as a personalized ethics, it is our own individual struggle with the world about how to best get along with our surroundings. In moral deliberations we trade short term and long term and eternity with one another. We compare and contrast. We balance. It is all-encompassing and all-embracing. With moral stains we feel impure beyond all redemption, and with moral blessings we feel animated and sustained far beyond the boundaries of the visible world. It must emerge from some deep, intrinsic part of us. It must be some part that is beyond the somewhat arbitrary division between ourselves and other cell assemblages with which we happen not to be able to mate. It must be common if it is so powerful. Evolution morphs the already present, it seldom invents de novo. Morality must be an extension of what other prior forms of life could do, and why should our lineage be completely unique in doing whatever these things are? How otherwise could evolution have given morality the complete power over us that we feel it to have?
The mycologist Tom Horton states that in his lab, where he and his graduate students study the underground networks of arbuscular mycorhyzae that colonize tree roots and allow some plants to thrive and others to become suppressed, he asks the question, “what is a mutualism?” His students and he always arrive at the same answer, “It is reciprocal parasitism.” It is ruthless exploitation itself which arrives at beautifully coordinated communistic interspecies collaborations as solutions. The popular coverage of mycorrhizae have portrayed these organic cooperative phenomena as challenges to the theories of competitive economy that dominate reductionist science, but they are better seen as profound extensions of them. Extreme cooperation and extreme competition are the same thing. This truth is hard to realize when all we see are partial, inartfully manifested forms. The ultimate successful parasite lets its host thrive in a steady bountiful increase, such that its subtracted portion of the bounty also grows larger. The unsuccessful parasite kills its host, and then dies itself.
Imagine the emotional lives of nonhumans as vividly as we see and feel our own emotions. The dispirited sheep mother with a dead lamb, the searching honeybee, the calculating coyote, the frustrated tick. Just anthropomorphize them as much as you need to to feel the intensity of their realistic interiority. Now we can accept that there is a form of love and form of fear at the base of all animal interactions. I began to believe that there really are only two basic emotional poles, love and fear. Love is what motivates us to move towards something and fear is what makes us move away. Like paramecium, we glide towards resources and away from threats, and all organisms do the same in their diverse niches. And all the other emotions, the fascinating complexities of anger, envy, ambition, regret, mourning, lust, anxiety, embarrassment, and disdain are all various combinations of these two primary colors. This is why a psychedelic trip, when it becomes an extreme experience, usually resolves itself into an extreme immersion in love or an extreme captivity in fear.
The paradox of all this is that these cooperations are based not on a loving acceptance of all beings but on a rigorous hierarchy of alliances. We protect and defend those with whom we have rule-based bargains with, and we ignore the rest as a backdrop for the drama of those we care about. We suffer an extreme blindness towards our non-allies. These alliances can be explicit, like courtship-rite guarded matings, but more commonly they are implicit, built into our styles of life, our ontogenies, our habits. They come about as a direct result of our restless activities to remain living. Cast into an ocean of hostile forms, we would immediately discern the least hostile and make ourselves useful to them. Then we would become part of a team, and then we would oppose others with force, until truces could be arranged, and all could flourish to the limited extent that the resources would afford. Alliances are the link between ethics and biology. The ability to form alliances with other beings is the most powerful technology, and it belongs to all living creatures. It even extends to inanimate substances. What is a gopher burrow but an alliance between the gopher and the ground? What is a beaver pond but an alliance between the beaver and the water? The butterfly wings and the air. The grass seeds and the wind. The pine and the wildfire. They are endless.
The essence of moral good is converting threats into alliances. Alliances multiply our opportunities for life, our freedoms, our sacred desires. This is the most powerful benefit that can ever occur for a living thing, and it is usually transmissible to other living things when they see it occur. This is where fear becomes love. There are many examples of this in our evolutionary history. Of course we usually try to move in this direction, but it is possible to turn an alliance into a threat as well, and this is moral evil. Or one can extinguish a possible alliance, by for instance committing a murder. The wicked turn love into fear by violating trust, spoiling carefully balanced alliances. The good knit those balances back together again with care and virtue.
Intelligence
If the core concept of morality is alliances, the core of intelligence is causality. The connection here is not intuitive. Many of us may have a vague sense that morality and intelligence are linked, but our notions of morality as rule-following and intelligence as computation don’t fit this insight at all. Why would intelligence make us moral? Most people reflexively think that intelligence is the ability to do things, and the ability can be used for good and evil. In fact, an evil genius is worse than an evil fool. Good and evil are defined as harms or benefits to others, sometimes accompanied with rules that intend to prevent things that are bad in themselves, like murders, independent of the harms associated. These are the general ideas we are given from our culture. But these definitions are too capacious and they obscure the core of what’s important about each idea. The trick is to focus on a particular aspect of each vague definition and make it very sharp. Try to begin with the idea of morality as the ability to form alliances, because this is the sharp core of the concept. It’s the key part that makes it fit into biology as an explanation.
Let’s begin at the place we left off above. How do I form an alliance? What is an alliance that I need it? An alliance is, of course, something trustworthy in the world. It is something I can rely on to help me solve a problem if one arises. At the most basic level, it’s the awareness of a certain causal connection or relation between things that can be trusted. I mean this in the most general sense. This applies this to some of our most essential evolutionary alliances. For instance, I can trust that if I take a hot ember from the fire and spread it among dry grass, it will catch fire and burn the savannah, attracting grazing antelope to the area that I can hunt for food. This will happen in the right conditions, but in other cases it will not work. If I hold the ember too long it will burn my fingers, and if I spread it into wet leaves instead of dry grass it will be extinguished. In this case, I am using fire as an ally to draw in antelope, by understanding the conditions under which I can trust its behavior. Fire becomes part of my world, a tool I can use reliably to accomplish my goals, but also a force that I have to accommodate. I get something, but I also have to give something.
Now let’s look at a living thing. I can trust that the apples will fruit in late fall, so I can plan to make my camp along the riverbank at that time and be well-nourished. In this case I am forming an alliance with the apple trees. In exchange for nutrition I spread their seeds through the forest. I can trust that there is a causal relation between spring and apples in a certain place, namely the riverbank. As I investigate this further I may find that I can cause apples to occur in other places by clearing the forest and creating riverbank-like areas, and planting apple seeds. Apples become part of my culture, a culture of planting and tending apple trees. I even defend these trees from pests if there are caterpillars in my trees in the spring, or grazing animals among the young saplings. They give something, but I have to give something in return as well.
Now expand this to animals. In this case the blade is sharp on both sides and must be handled with even more care. I can trust that wolves, for instance, are deadly predators that will follow my hunting camp and viciously attack any weak, straying people in my group. So the wolves are a deadly threat that I learn to accomodate and defend against. But then I discover that if you take a newborn wolf from its mothers den and raise it yourself, it will follow you around like you are its mother. As the wolf does this, it grows larger and more perceptive, and it helps you be alert to other dangers as you sleep at night. Then it learns to help you bring down game, and it becomes an ally in your hunting efforts. When you encounter hostile groups of humans, the wolf helps defend your group just as it would have helped defend its wolfpack. Now by working and interacting in a very intimate way with this dangerous animal you have managed to convert a deadly threat into a very powerful ally. This is the origin of Canis familiaris, the domestic dog, bred from Canis lupus, the wolf. Care and virtue was exercised to separate the dangerous aspects of the wolf from its protective, nurturing aspects. This was done by habit, accommodation, care, and understanding.
How does this process exemplify intelligence? First, it is obvious that humans are masters at turning other species into useful rather than harmful co-inhabitants. We have domesticated thousands of other species, and we now plant or husband them to help us survive in every continent and climate of the earth. Without these animal and plant alliances we would still be dependent on hunting large herbivores with stone-tipped spears, and we would have long ago run out of food. So even from a calculative standpoint it is obvious that most of what we spend our brainpower calculating is how to better get along in the world by allying ourselves with the right other species and treating them in the right way. But let’s take a deeper look at the most impactful, important alliances, those with other humans.
When we create an alliance with another human it may be partially instinctive, like the alliance between mother and child, but through development we can elaborate these social protections far beyond their instinctive origins. We can develop them into cultures, tribes, and nations with affinities for the in-group allies that result in collective military defense. After this we developed sub-alliances that were spelled out in contracts for the manufacture of goods and the providence of services. We arranged for lending and borrowing according to rules, an alliance that stretched particular obligations far beyond any personal relationship. All these arrangements are fundamentally protective alliances. They were not inherited from our genetic sequences, they were invented and reconstructed from prior examples. Take for instance the alliance I have with my mortgage lender. The rules for this alliance are described in a document that runs to 35 pages, stipulating exactly what I may and may not do, and what they may or may not do. This allows me to enjoy all the fruits of ownership of a house and the freedom to do everything I desire in that house that doesn’t infringe on the agreement. It allows the lender to be relatively certain of the income from their investment, and further resell and securitize the income stream and rights that I have acceded to them. This raises their stock value, enhancing the desirability of any small subdivided portion of the rights entailed by this stock, much of which which again accrues to common ordinary retirement investors like me.
Undoubtedly there was much calculation involved in the evolution of this type of highly complex alliance. It requires a nested set of overarching alliances, involving the state, the courts, the legal profession, the technologies on which stock trades are completed, and so forth. But it also requires something else. It requires an awareness of the needs and goals of other beings. The treaties that hold this agreement in its contextual place like cement to such a degree that every penny of this loan can be commoditized are all sensitive. They are deals struck at one time or another between previously warring parties. Nations and laws have a bloody history. It requires that these blood-feuds have been concluded in a satisfactory way for the previously aggrieved. The situation is not perfect, but it is acceptable. And these acceptable compromises are then folded onto one another such that a recursive loop of self-improvement is taking effect. The stability of my mortgage allows the stability of my taxi-sharing contract, and the solvency of my grocery store, and the negotiations of my child’s teacher’s union, and so forth, rippling outward in more ways than we can count.
These alliances are built not by calculative or computative intelligence but by contextual understanding. This is the critical feature to focus on. A computer program cannot understand what is appropriate to whom at what time, because it does not have a causal diagram of what causes what in the world. It was building that causal diagram that allowed every step on the creative journey above. With the fire, I formed a casual diagram that prevented me from burning my hand or extinguishing the embers in the wet leaves before I could ignite the savannah grasses. With the apples, I formed a causal diagram that went from seed to earth to sunshine and past the caterpillars and grazing goats into a future full of bountiful harvest. When I domesticated the wolf, I carefully separated the causal elements that were ferocious, like the teeth and claws, from the causal aspects that could be molded to my own ends, like the loyalty, biddability, and powerful sense of smell of the wolf puppy. Without knowing these causally, without knowing and discovering what a wolf is, I could never have invented what a wolf could be in a certain context, namely a dog. I could never have molded the other beings to my own ends in a way that also promoted their own ends.
It is this search for causal knowledge that drives us. We are endlessly trying to invent better alliances with everything around us, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral. Alliances are not bounded just by the formal arrangements we have, but are lived in every detail of life at every moment. Even alliances with beings, like tax attorneys, necessarily involve inanimate alliances as well with what we would rather term “technologies,” like pens and papers and neckties. These technologies are themselves subject to fantastically complex alliances of industrial production and distribution and sales, all of which involve very intimate consequences for workers and managers along the way, which are of course living and breathing beings that are counting, trusting, hoping, on those alliances to pay their bills and further their loved ones needs. The way I shift my body in my armchair is an attempt to invent a better alliance with the cushions of my armchair. Alliances are endless.
Trying to discover better alliances is an all-encompassing search because literally everything we do is an attempt to further an alliance, viewed in this way. It gives us all our motivational power. Our motives have been assumed, lately in history, to derive simplistically from the propensity of our DNA to want to replicate itself by causing us to survive and reproduce. If you have read much from me you will be very familiar with my criticism of this idea. It is utterly inadequate to explain why I do behaviors like skiing and higher education and birth control, things that are obviously contrary to these genetic propensities. We have to have a motive force that anchors morality to something biological. This is provided by viewing an organism in its entirety as a causal diagram. Not simply its brain but its entire organismic system, of which the nervous system is only a part. All organisms are set up with a fundamental drive to derive the causal structure of the world around them and put it into their bodies so that they can get along in life. So that they can ally themselves. So that they can turn fear into love. They all are trying the same thing, from the wiggling planarium to the oozing slime mold to the ciliated bacterium to the blue whale. They are trying to form alliances out of the causal influences that surround them.
An organism is, as I have written, a guess about the world around it. The drive to be moral is the drive to know more, to use what we know to create better alliances. This is what determines not only action and behavior but development, ontogeny, morphology. The question morality is forcing us to ask at every moment is this: Given what I am, what shall I become, such that I know? We are developing into better-allied colonies of cells. That is intelligence.
Sleep
Sleep is an unexplained mystery. It is an activity which takes one third of our lives, and yet we have not discovered why it occurs at all. It is not aimed at saving energy nor avoiding predation nor eating nor breeding, but something like recuperation and repair. But why should a life form require a repair process? Why should it not repair on-the-go? Why should, at the very least, individual cells not sleep independently on slightly different schedules like birds on a wire, so that the whole organism never becomes unresponsive to danger or opportunity? This mystery should scream out at us and make us pay attention to it. How can we ignore the convergent evolution of the most basic process in complex life? The part of our explanation that doesn’t make sense is much more important to think about than the parts that do make sense. How else can we discover anything? We must integrate the mystery somehow.
If a process, like seeing or flying or grasping, has evolved separately in multiple lineages, then we can be sure that it illustrates something very basic about the world. Seeing illustrates that light carries information at a high speed from one place to another. Flying illustrates that air is a possible medium for transportation. Grasping illustrates that objects can be brought under control and manipulated. All these are basic physical concepts that are illustrated by an aspect of convergent evolution in life forms. But what is the physical concept that is illustrated by sleep? Intelligent lineages far from us on the tree of life, like anole lizards, corvids, and even the invertebrate cephalopods from whom we diverged in the pre-Cambrian over 400 million years ago, have convergently evolved REMlike sleep. This fact screams that there is something very basic about life, and especially about intelligence, that we have not comprehended yet.
It is possible that to see this problem clearly, you have to be already aware of the solution. If you think of intelligence as the ability to compute solutions, it is obvious that sleep can serve no purpose toward this end. No known computer benefits from sleep. Not only does the Apple Macbook never sleep, but the abacus never sleeps either. Even the balls on a billiard table are said to be serviceable as a basic universal Turing machine, and none of these forms of computer are compatible at all with sleep. Sleep is a process that interferes with computation. In our own brains, computations are only possible when we are awake and active. But viewing intelligence as the ability to form questions, rather than compute answers, changes the picture considerably.
The act of trying to complete a causal diagram always raises contradictions. This is because no matter how good the diagram is, it will always be in conflict with the world. A causal diagram is not just a map, it is an active object that interferes with the world around it in order to survive. When it is an adequate diagram, it will not encounter any surprises, and it can be naturally selected to continue. But this is never possible for long. Surprises will always emerge, places where our explanations don’t match our world. We just cannot know and understand and accurately predict everything about our environment, so we will always have questions. Contradictions raised by surprises must be resolved somehow by changing the causal diagram, by reshaping oneself. In other words, the physical process of constructing a causal diagram necessitates curiosity.
From this point of view, sleep makes perfect sense. A causal diagram cannot be erased and re-drawn piecemeal one line at a time. It must be re-drawn as a whole, in a comprehensive process of reconfiguration. A causal diagram is the sort of thing where each part of the drawing is dependent on the whole, and must be altered a tiny bit by any change anywhere within it. Imagine you are trying to redraw a sketch of the tensioning of a spider web stretched between two branches. You want to move the branches slightly on the paper, but this requires redrawing all the lines and nodes of the spider web stretched between them. It is as if pulling any thread moves the location of all the junctions of the web slightly. In order to redraw an object like this, it is necessary to move all the lines on the paper at more or less the same time. If any part of the drawing was excluded from the re-drawing process, like for instance by placing a wax paper over it so it could not be erased and redrawn, then that section of the drawing would become grossly mismatched to the rest. It would no longer fit. This would destroy the function of the drawing entirely. Instead, all the lines on the paper must come up for review together, so that they can be relinked in a coherent way.
That is why sleep makes sense when you look at intelligence as a causal diagram. If the nature of intelligence is an inferred diagram of causality, the pen that etches the diagram into the body is sleep.
Use/Disuse
How can the process of sleep work? It must have a specific mechanism…something that can have evolved in different ways from different origins in the different lineages that can sleep. Flying can be done with feathers, or with skin flaps, or with helicopter blades, but there are some universal principles that make it possible. It is the same with other convergent functions like sight, or grasping. Fish eyes and frog eyes and squid eyes have evolved separate mechanisms to accomplish the same fundamental process of detecting different wavelengths of light. Claws and pincers and hands and muscular tongues are different structures, but they do the same things, isolating objects and manipulating them. The techniques different life forms employ to accomplish flying, seeing, and grasping come from their different histories, but they have converged into methods that illustrate the fundamentals pf the basic processes at work. So what is the basic process illustrated in the sleep function? What are its fundamentals? How do the methods, whatever they might be, at work in octopus brains when they are sleeping, mirror the methods used by human brains to accomplish sleep? What is sleep, anyway?
I have described sleep as redrawing the causal diagram of the body. In my view the body of an organism doesn’t just contain a causal diagram, it is a causal diagram. What sort of process could redraw a causal diagram composed in a living body? What does this really mean? I envision the causal diagram as a set of connections…connections between parts of the body and connections between parts of the world. A causal diagram answers the question, “what wiggles what?” Parts of the organism “wiggle” other parts, that much is obvious. But what is not obvious is that parts of the world wiggle other parts of the world through the organism, and this is how the organism remains alive. The organism’s body serves as a causal bridge from one part of the world to another.
The importance of use and disuse have been known in biology since long before the nineteenth century. It was already taken for granted by Lamarck, and fervently believed by Darwin. Denis Noble avers that Darwin mentions use and disuse eight times in the Origin of Species. I could only find five, but I will take his word for it. It has been consciously erased from our conception of biological function, but it is still unexplained. Why, and how, does exercise make us stronger? This question has never been answered.
If the process of sleep is how causality is etched into the body, then use and disuse are the marks and erasures of that drawing. But use and disuse are famously vague concepts. What constitutes use? There are some forms of damage, for example liver cirrhosis, which do not result in more vigorous function of that organ. And there are also forms of damage that do result in more vigorous function, for example from exercise or fasting. What distinguishes healthy damage from corrosive damage?
To work this out, I believe we have to get away from what questions. Use and disuse must be processes, and they must distinguish between processes. It cannot be that a particular thing is either used or disused. There is not a filter that sorts between cells, for instance, when I exercise, killing some and amplifying others. Likewise with organs, or mitochondria, etc. There is change in all these things during development and function, but they are changes of process. There must be some other way of dividing the body into units that can be filtered. It must be that a particular way of operating is “use” and another way of operating is “disuse.”
This requires that there be some unknown units between which use and disuse are filtering. For sleep to be selectively repairing some processes of the organism and allowing others to degrade, there must be some processes to distinguish between. There must be selection. My answer to this mystery is to propose that the units to be filtered are oscillators. Used oscillations are strengthened and disused oscillations stochastically mutate.
What is an oscillator? It is a physico-chemical interaction that happens over and over in a cycle. For example heartbeats, or breaths, the Krebs cycle, eyeblinks, or the circadian rhythm. All of these are circular interactions that run on a flexible schedule. We can measure oscillations by measuring the levels of a particular factor or condition, and how they fluctuate. These are the first “vital signs” that are measured when a patient enters the hospital…respiratory rate, heart rate. The majority of proteins in the bloodstream, for instance, have been shown to have a circadian fluctuation. If you think of an organism essentially as a set of these circular processes, then you can begin to imagine how the description can cover nearly the whole living being. Nearly everything in an organism is part of a circular routine process of chemical fluctuation between two points. Not everything is an oscillator…there are one-way processes, like vomiting or ejaculation. But even these one-way responses to a disturbance then necessitate a recovery period in which the original state is re-established. Antlers are grown and shed, a one-way expression. But then the deer’s body recovers seasonally and prepares for another antler-building process. To do so, it depends on signals from the environment to time its actions.
Imagining the whole organism as a nested, semi-hierarchical group of oscillations is difficult because we are accustomed to seeing everything as a logical machine. A nested set of oscillators is not the sort of machine we have any experience with in design or construction. But this is says nothing about it as an appealing model for life; we have no experience with how life actually works in a technical sense. I have to create a thoroughly unfamiliar structure in my mind to do it. But once I do this, I can see that the nervous system appears very differently in this light.. The nervous system appears not as computer-wires running all over to execute commands, but as a somewhat decentralized group of oscillators very sensitively timed to one another. What is the recovery period of a neuron? This unit of time is built into its structure. When will it fire next? This unit of time is dependent on the external world. The patterns that run through the nervous system are sensitive oscillations to the outer conditions. The configurations are malleable; the synapses are damaged and healed during bouts of sleep and wake.
Inheritance
Organisms are collectors of order. Whatever one’s explanation for life, this fact cannot be brushed aside. In a world of flux, change, and entropy, living being stand alone in being able, through some physical mechanism, to separate order from disorder by expending energy. This requires that there be some filter through which some things escape and others are retained. The filter separates a disorderly space from an orderly space. The organisms orderly patterns are stored somewhere. This is the problem that should be now in every biologist’s deepest dreams. In our private contemplations, we should all be wondering, where is the sink for order?
The selfish-gene concept solved this problem nicely by proposing a blind search at the level of the genome. Random mutation, the servant of disorder, was brought into harness by natural selection, the servant of order. But this explanation, as I pointed out in my essay Adaptive Plasticity as Causal Inference, is inherently subtractive. In an infinitely expanding world with no natural selection but with active living beings, all surviving forever, evolution would still occur. Then, evidence intruded to falsify this simple mechanism. Mutation turns out not to be random at all, and genes turn out not to be the only storage units for order. Order turns out to be stored throughout the organism, a fact which is proven by inheritance by fission and ramets, and inheritance through transgenerational epigenetics.
I won’t rewrite the adaptive plasticity essay here, because I think it is well worth reading and I can’t state its argument better in a shortened form. The important concept here is that the blind search for function requires a random process to be reduced into an orderly process by the chance encounters we have with our environment. This is an essential feature of the explanation of life. Order has to emerge out of disorder because of a naturally occurring filter. Since we have discovered that order is stored not only in the genome, but in the whole body, the concept of inheritance becomes a very different process. Inheritance is not only the inheritance of specific molecular seeds which cause the sprouting of all development, but rather the inheritance of a certain pattern of oscillations throughout the body.
I recently wrote to Dr. Oded Rechavi about his interview with Dr. Andrew Huberman on his Huberman Lab podcast, and in my letter I asked him:
“In the interview you discuss the way a brain stores memories in its internal connections without any external material being added. But then you insist that in germline cells memories must have a molecular component, and RNAi fits the bill in some cases. Why must germline cells inherit knowledge only through added molecules or specific molecular genetic changes? It seems to me that any cell must be connected in a sensitive way to its environment, like a tiny brain, otherwise it would not remain alive. Like a brain, it stores patterns in its internal organization as well as its patterns of interaction with its external environment. How this self-organization works is still a deep mystery. Brains (and Levin’s planaria) recreate memories after extensive damage to neurons. Why could these connective patterns between the parts of the germline cell not, in principle, also carry knowledge?”
Indeed. Why must inheritance exclude the how questions and only ask the what questions? Inheritance, we now know, can pass from mother to child without any material overlap at all, through behaviors and imprinting. Why could it not also pass through the configurations and activity of the germ cell and the fetal environment, without directly replacing any particular molecular structure? Why could we not view the bulk of inheritance as a change to the way the same structures are activated, a change to the way they interact and oscillate with the world? These are exactly how we view the changes to brains that we call learning. Learning does not add particular molecules, learning rearranges, but the rearrangement is probably secondary to simply having been activated differently. A different pattern of use, after sleep, becomes a new configuration. None of this necessarily involves new molecules.
Gene Control
In the same letter to Rechavi, I asked this question:
“I have a question for you. I’m puzzled by the metaphor of genetic material as being like Ikea instructions for assembling a chair. I know this idea is very widespread but I can’t make sense of it. Instructions are sequential and specific. When I follow an instruction manual, there are very few choices to make about which steps to take in which order. But in the case of genes, there is no particular sequence of expression patterns written into the DNA itself. DNA could be expressed in a superastronomical number of combinations even in one cell in one given moment. It appears to me that it must be the cellular environment that narrows all these possibilities down into the very few that produce living function. Therefore the genes are more like an alphabet, and the environment provides the instructions.”
I won’t reproduce Rechavi’s answer to my question because I did not ask his permission to do so, and also because it was deeply unsatisfactory. If inheritance is the set of instructions matching living bodies with niches, gene control is a matter of understanding that the expression of DNA is always controlled by the niche. There are no instructions in the DNA, only instruments necessary for carrying out the instructions.
We can illustrate this is in myriad ways, many of the best examples are laid out in my Adaptive Plasticity essay. But perhaps the best example comes from my brief essay called “How God Controls our Genes,” This was published on my YouTube site as “Epistolution for Kids.”
“Have you ever wondered how your body really works? Science tells you that your body is made up of trillions of tiny cells that do all sorts of different things. So how do they all work together and not do the wrong things?
Inside our cells are long lists of templates for making proteins. Each cell has the same list; they are called genes. But what tells the cell when to make each protein? One cell might make 1000 times more of one type of protein, and the next door cell might make 1000 times more of a different sort of protein. Something controls protein-making that is different for each cell.
Genes are turned on and off by long loops of causation. This means that one thing affects another which affects another which affects another, until the first thing is affected again. Imagine a string of dominoes that go in a circle. If you tip one, each one knocks over another one until eventually the domino falls back at the start. Making proteins is like that. If there is a need in the cell for a certain protein, the loop of dominoes falls faster and the cell makes more proteins. If there are already enough of that particular protein, the dominoes fall slower.
The problem is that these loops don’t just stay inside the cell. If I go into a donut shop, it changes the proteins my cells make. First I smell the donuts, then my mouth waters, then my stomach grumbles, then I reach for my wallet, then I eat some donuts, then I get a little fatter. Each of these things happens by causing my cells to make certain proteins.
If things like donuts and donut shops are in the loop that makes my proteins, then it means that there must be some logic to the way our bodies interact with the world other than the list of genes. Otherwise our cells would be going haywire when we change environments.”
Analysis
This picture we just drew can also be re-drawn in reverse, from the analytic perspective. This method builds up from the argument from the details towards the argument for the grand syntheses. Just follow the same steps in reverse:
Gene Control
In order to accept that genes are controlled by the environment, it is necessary to reimagine what a gene is. Genes (particular sequences of DNA) are usually considered to be instructional molecular artifacts that self-replicate. I am claiming that instead they are just modular information storage units, templates from which useful solutions can be constructed. Genes are traditionally considered to be the complete or near-complete causes of traits, but I am saying that they are only tools that can be used by the organism in building traits. The genes do nothing on their own, they are not capable of self-replication. They are like words in a dictionary. In order for something to be built with them, meaning must be created from them by an external force. A good resource for this idea is Noble’s Suzhou lecture. My essay Adaptive Plasticity as Causal Inference gives a good epistolutionary overview.
Inheritance
In order to view inheritance as something driven by use and disuse, we have to have an image of inheritance not as physical reinstantiation of the same molecules, but as a process that strengthens some fraction or subroutine of itself, and weakens other subroutines. This conflicts with the intuitive, static view of an organism as something that is built and stays built, like a building, and heritability as particulate replication. Instead, the organism is like a river, in which the currents and subcurrents carry momentum, and cause new shapes to emerge further downstream. The process of self-organization is not about re-instantiating the same currents with identical molecules, but about ensuring that there is any water in the river at all. Life does not replicate at all, it reproduces. This only generates the same tools for life and not the same instructions. Instructions come from the riverbank anew each generation. A good resource for this idea is my essay Letter to an Epigeneticist.
Use and Disuse
In order to view use and disuse as something that can be inherited, we have to see it paired with the repair process of sleep as a continuous, dynamic, fluctuating reaction to the environment. For it to completely explain organic forms, we have to consider it not as a discrete effect on only certain cells (say muscles for instance) but as a condition in the operation of every part of every cell. The sleep requirement is by definition a requirement for holistic repair, otherwise there would be a more advantageous repair cell by cell, or molecule by molecule, as needed. This means that all of the molecules in the organism are involved somehow in use and disuse. Likewise, every stage of every biological process is reframed as either use/disuse, or the recovery from use/disuse. A good resource for this idea is my essay Bad Lamarckism, Good Lamarckism. My initial paper on Epistolution is a good exploration of the cognitive and computer science model. For those who are technically predisposed, the oscillator theory of epistolution through use and disuse is formalized in this Instruction Deck.
Sleep
In order for sleep to fill the role of the universal linkage between use/disuse and intelligence, we have to posit that all organisms of any sort sleep in some form. This conflicts with our idea of sleep as a particular behavior that appears only in higher animals. Although more intelligent animals have convergently evolved recognizable sleep as a behavior, the link to use and disuse has been downplayed because of the genetic theory of self-organization. Sleep is sometimes interpreted as an energy-saving behavior, which is intuitive but false. Instead, it is a repair process that requires the involvement of the entire organism, and it must be present in some form in all organisms of any sort, even unicellular life. A good resource for this idea, though it contains some mistakes, is Why We Sleep.
Intelligence
In order for intelligence to be something that fulfills moral goals, it must be separated from computation and connected to contextual awareness. Our current theories of computing and artificial intelligence fail to make this distinction. Computing has been a superhuman property of machines since the days of the abacus. Intelligence, on the other hand, is the ability to make contextual causal inferences that generate explanations for reality. This has never been programmed, and it is present only the behaviors of life forms. Since humans use this ability to make computations, and we revere the ability to make computations more than the ability to understand them, we have conflated these two fundamentally different processes. A good resource for this is Deutsch’s lecture on AGI.
Morality
In order to make the leap from general intelligence to morality, we have to reframe morality as a creative process of ad hoc, self-protective, competitive alliance-building rather than as a set of rules that can be derived from logical analysis of eternal principles. This angle makes the connection from morality back to biology very explicit. Without this view, morality appears to be a uniquely human capacity that results from a very high level of reasoning. But this begs the question…why has this property emerged from a biological system? And it ignores the parallel behaviors in so many other social creatures, from apes to dolphins to birds to ants. My inspiration for this view of morality came from reading John King Fairbank’s History of China, and Confucius. My idea of moral alliances is explored in my book The Human Body is A Guess in Chapter 4: Evolved Morality and Chapter 17: Immorality.
Outreach
It is worth noticing that my ideas form most of the connections above between Noble’s and Deutsch’s views. I developed the first coherent versions of epistolution between having read Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and Noble’s Dance to The Tune of Life. When I discovered Noble’s version of downward causation my ideas were informed and clarified. Noble’s insights cover the first three elements: gene control, heredity, and use/disuse. He stops there, and has not yet made the further connection to sleep, intelligence and morality. Deutsch has a theory of Popperian epistemology and creativity that formed the backbone of epistolution. At first I was describing the use/disuse and sleep/repair with a word blundersplat, and describing organisms as conjectures. This was the same idea I use now in different language. Deutsch sees the intelligence element much the way I do. I am not sure that he would agree with my view of morality as a set of hierarchical alliances or not. I do think he would agree that real biological intelligence is inseparable from morality and involves contextual inference of a kind that has not been invented yet.
On Jan. 17, 2021, I wrote Dr. Noble and copied Deutsch:
Dr. Noble,
It is a delight to hear that the book is being well received, because the reach of your argument about biological relativity is terrifically exciting. I’m not sure if you realize that it solves the problem of artificial general intelligence!
David Deutsch, your colleague at Oxford, replied to an email I sent him earlier with some of the same ideas I sent you…I have copied him on this email.
Here’s how your theory solves the AGI problem: You write, “A single stretch of DNA cannot ‘know’ when to trigger mitosis. No single gene, or even a set of genes, can possibly have this level of dynamic natural purposiveness. That purposive behavior lies in the networks, since they have the dynamics necessary for the logical operations required to work out when the cell state is ready for division and what to do to ensure that, usually, this takes place accurately….Such purposiveness necessarily emerges at a level that has the degree of dynamic complexity necessary for it to be instantiated (italics mine). Cells clearly have that complexity. Molecules do not.” (p.111)
Creativity and intelligence is instantiated not primarily at the computational level of the brain and its neurons, but at the level of the network of interactions between the whole organism and its niche. Information is only one small part of the sum of human knowledge. Information is only the part that is alphabetical, therefore universally transmissible. The rest is physically instantiated in the configuration of our bodies through interactions with our physical environment, including other organisms.
If you adopt a Popperian view of the whole human organism, you can think of the configuration of the body at any given moment as an expectation, a conjecture, in Popper’s language, and perturbations to it coming from the environment as refutations. Digital computers, as they are now instantiated, usually react deterministically to expected inputs. Organisms, on the other hand, are at rest when conditions are as expected; they react only to the unexpected, in order to maintain homeostasis. If you apply this principle to the “nervous system” of a robot configured to be sensitive to the environment of the human niche, in cycles of decay and trauma followed by any healing algorithm, it will become creative just as humans do as they develop as children.
I wrote to Dr. Deutsch that if the two of you could get together for a long cup of tea, between the two of you you will have the power to design the research programme that will take our species across this profound threshold. I am not kidding.
Sincerely,
Charlie
Every word of this letter is as true today as when I wrote it two years ago. I have discovered since then that connecting these ideas, and connecting these people, is much harder than I initially expected.
Illustration
This is the end of what I have to say here. The last contribution I have to this essay is to show the slides I put together for a talk on why epistolution is a worthy investment for an impact investor. I hope this will help, if none of the above prose did it for you. And with these images I will leave you for a while. I won’t be writing much in the coming months, as I plan to be starting a new job soon and our family is moving to Vermont. I hope some of you will discover this idea and derive as much meaning from it as I have. Bon voyage, dear reader. As Socrates quipped, the unexamined life is not worth living.
Copyright March 4, 2023 by Charles S. Munford
