Philip Ball and Iain McGilchrist on How Life Works

This post contains highlights from Philip Ball’s conversation with Iain McGilchrist which focuses on Ball’s book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology.

Philip Ball

…this is a book that has…taken me decades to get to.
…when I’m talking about a new biology, I’m trying to get across what has changed in biology over the past two or three decades, particularly…
…that old narrative of an instruction book that is just read out to build us is no longer the right one. It simply doesn’t work anymore.
…we have to acknowledge that it’s time for a new story.
…this book is…trying to find better narratives that give a more accurate impression of, as the title says, how life works.

Iain McGilchrist

…I want to thank Phil for his wonderful book. I loved it; I found it very well-written for somebody who doesn’t necessarily know all the technical details. I learned a hell of a lot in the course of reading it.
…I was left with a number of feelings that cohere about where we are going to have to go with this in the future. The first is the barrenness of the reductive enterprise.

Philip Ball

Maybe the only way to truly understand life is with reference to life itself.

Iain McGilchrist

…there’s hardly a shorter way of giving a rule for what goes on there than just describing what there is…
I’m just going to name a few areas in which there are problems [with the current paradigm in biology]. The first is, in a way, the sui generis nature of life…
Another is top-down causation, where things seem to be attracted from in front or led from beyond towards something…
Then there’s the whole levels of freedom of interaction and the complexity. So, in a single cell, there are probably a million, maybe more, chemical interactions going on, and even a very small one is immensely complex.

Philip Ball

…most of the time, the cells are very messy. They’re very noisy.
I talk about committees of molecules getting together, having conversations, if you like, and out of that comes the decision.
…this is one of the reasons why we need to get away from this machine metaphor.

Iain McGilchrist

It’s very hard for the imagination to see how all these complex things [in our cells] can work, and not come up with a random outcome, but come up with a desirable outcome. But they do, and they need to.
… Almost all of it is done on the fly. Very little of it is stuff that was previously planned, but it actually has to be done at the moment. Things change in response to what’s happening around them, which is also changing.
…organisms and their environment are interdependent, but not in the conventional sense that an organism has an effect on the environment and then the environment has an effect on the organism. But actually, they co-create one another at the same time.
…it’s worth pointing out that there is a distinct difference between the modus operandi of the left hemisphere and the right. As I understand it from Computer Sciences, left hemisphere procedures are highly computable, and that’s very obvious; in fact, I believe that AI is a way of pushing out the left hemisphere mode of thinking into the environment. But what the right hemisphere does is strictly non-computable, because it has no points of certainty in it. The computer needs at least one or two reference points to begin working with. But in essence, there is nothing but experience, either the experience—if one can talk about this, and I think one can— of the cell (or the plant or the root or whatever it is), but effectively the single cell. It can’t be engineered according to principle.

Philip Ball

…somehow all of these processes are supporting each other at various hierarchical levels to create this organism.
…it seems to me that if there’s one thing that distinguishes living matter from nonliving matter, it is this notion of agency. … You have to have agency.
…until we’re able to have that discussion about organisms as agents—as agents that have purposes, that have goals, and that are able to operate on themselves and on their environment in order to achieve those goals—then we’re missing a central aspect of what life is.

Iain McGilchrist

…the word information can mean…what literally in-forms whatever is there, so it “gives the form” to it. It’s that kind of stuff that we need to be looking for.

What we’re seeing is an enormously creative process, which starts being—astonishing: the genesis of a single cell, and the amazing intelligence that…is in a single cell, is extraordinary. And I think the word intelligence is right. … They can solve problems they weren’t set up to solve. And that seems to me to be one of the definitions of being intelligent.

…not only does evolution govern or suggest or produce or call forth changes in organisms, but…there’s an evolution of evolution. So evolution itself seems to be moving to complex, more-difficult-to-follow ways of doing its job, as organisms become more complex.

What is the negation of and the complete opposite of life is mechanism or mechanisticity. These are the ultra-incompatible elements. And we are moving, I believe, into a world where we think more and more in terms of mechanisms. It’s wonderful that physics has had to give this up, and now it looks to me as though biology is having at least to sophisticate it and move on.

…why have life at all? You said agency, but what agent decided that agency was good? How did evolution “think” that it needed agency? How did any kind of evolutionary process evolve to be the one that says we need agency? … What I’m saying is that what seems so startling about living creatures is, yes, that agency, entirely; which suggests agency towards some sort of end – because agency that’s entirely random and chaotic wouldn’t have any point; so the agency must be used in pursuance of something: and the other thing is values.
Values are incredibly important… …and I don’t just mean survival. That’s why I say, “Why have life?”
…there are some things – values – that attract organisms in this process, because I believe there is a kind of complexity, a beautiful complexification, in whatever it is unfolding.
…part of what life does is to respond to value.

…the so-called paradox of the organisms depends on how you set the situation up. If you set it up so that the organism can’t be like an organism as we know it, then of course you’ve got a problem. … If you try to get consciousness out of matter that has no element of consciousness, then you truly have a hard problem. I don’t think that that can be right. It doesn’t sound logical, and nobody’s got near explaining how this trick could happen.
But I believe it’s true…that when you get this kind of paradox, it’s worthwhile going back to your assumptions and thinking maybe there was something wrong with them. It seems a much more economic idea that there is consciousness. We have no experience of anything except from consciousness…
…consciousness itself must exist. We don’t necessarily need a brain to have consciousness, but we certainly need consciousness to know we’ve got a brain. It may be that we do need a brain. It’s a fascinating topic, and one that I don’t have a perfect answer to.

It’s pretty extraordinary stuff, this matter…
What we’ve seen is the unfolding, like the unfolding of a bud into a flower, which is the fulfillment, not the negation, of the flower. I believe that’s the nature of the cosmos that we know. It is creative. If it is creative,…then where does this creativity come from? What is the urge for creativity? Why not stasis? Why is the universe not actually Newtonian? Why is it not dead, until given a push? Why is it constantly on the change, constantly creative, constantly complexifying?

Sometimes when one comes up with a systematic, mechanistic answer to a problem, what one has done is, as it were, gloss over the problem—how something so extraordinary emerged at all—given the pessimistic grounds of more or less dead nothing suddenly generating something very, very special.

We’ve always been told survival is largely to do with competition. Competition is a very valuable thing, but…the organisms that have survived have tended to be collaborators. Collaboration requires the bringing together of a degree of competition, which is healthy, with a degree of cooperation, which is very healthy. So the story of the evolution of life is…about the evolution of something that seems to be getting more sophisticated in its way of relating to the world…

…where does evolution come from? … Evolution does a lot of work in the kind of story which I’m familiar with… What is evolution if it can do that? What are its, I want to say, goals? …what are its attractive forces? What are the things that lure it onwards? Something is moving. The cosmos is on the move, everything is moving in a certain direction. … I think it’s toward greater complexity. It’s towards the ability to reflect values. I don’t believe that values are inventions of human beings that they paint on the walls of their windowless cell in order to cheer themselves up. I believe that they’re more basic than that. …
I think there are things that have value in themselves situated in the cosmos that lure us towards them.

Philip Ball

…one of the big challenges for biology is to develop a rational, productive framework for understanding concepts such as agency, information, meaning, and purpose. These are not optional add-ons for the philosophically inclined…

What I do say in the book is that there are ideas about how agency arises and what it is, but I think it’s fair to say we don’t have a theory, we certainly don’t have an accepted consensus theory, of what agency is…
I think we can identify some aspects of what agents do or what they are. …it seems that to have agency, an entity needs to have some memory. It needs to have some way of representing its environment such that it can attune itself to that environment…

…central to the notion of an agent is the notion of goals and purpose, and once we recognize that something has goals,…then we can then start to have a minimal discussion about value in the sense that the agent is constantly having to evaluate: Does this thing, does this action, does this response, does this other organism, help me to reach whatever goal or goals I have? That’s going to be the beginnings of a value judgment.

Iain McGilchrist

Why bother with life at all, really? I think this is an important question if there isn’t something before life about the constitution of the cosmos that values certain kinds of things over other things.

Philip Ball

The popular view that science is the process of studying what the world is like needs to be given an important qualification: science tends to be the study of what we can study.

Iain McGilchrist

…there’s a lot of things that are very relevant to what life is like for a human being that simply cannot be studied in the lab. If science insists that it will deal only with what is measurable,…then we rule out an enormous amount. That’s not a problem for science. Science starts from very respectable principles that it’s going for the moment to cut purpose and value out of question, because it wants to look at how the system looks if you just ignore those questions for the time being. It’s perfectly reasonable. But it’s not a logical deduction from having done so to say that there is no purpose, there is no value.

Science is not describing what life is…; it’s describing certain things that it can deal with. …for me, there are bigger and greater things without which life would mean nothing. … I’m the person who experienced them, and I know that they are real, and I’m not alone.
Love. I imagine you’ve been fortunate to experience love. Is it real? Yes. Can it be measured? No. You can find proxies to measure in the brain, but that’s completely another matter, and they wouldn’t help you determine either whether love was present in this brain, or what that love was like.

Much of what we’re dealing with, the most important things—which are the products of all the arts, I think, the products of love, community, fellowship with nature, the experience of things that are beautiful—all of these things are very valuable.

In the book The Matter with Things, I start from neuroscience, I add in philosophy, and then I look at things like physics and metaphysics. The interesting thing is that these paths all seem to converge…on a core that is pretty consistent. …it also happens to be in keeping with the sort of things that have been said by the great wisdom traditions of the East, and of the early West, before it got corrupted by Platonism, and probably by a lot of Christianity. That’s not a dismissal of Plato or Christianity, but just a recognition that they have had undeniable effects on the way we think. … Long live uncertainty, and let’s live there.
But that doesn’t mean giving up the questions… We keep battering away at these questions because little by little more information comes to us. Sometimes they tell us we were moving in the right direction. Sometimes they tell us we were getting it rather wrong…

Philip Ball

…it often seems in biology that the harder we look, the deeper we look, the more complex it becomes, the more mysterious it becomes. To me, and this is what I wanted to also get across with the book, to me that is really exciting.
…this is a tremendously exciting and tremendously rich time for biology to be in, to have realized that we need something more. We need better metaphors, better theories, better experiments.

Iain McGilchrist

I like the image of something that flows, rather than a static mechanism, a machine. Nothing in biology is very like a machine. In fact, I sometimes say there’s nothing in the universe that’s like a machine, except the few million pieces of metal that we created in the last few hundred years. Neither the inanimate nor the animate world is like a mechanism. But things do flow, and seeing that they flow and change is what evolution is. Seeing that there is continuity, and seeing that there need not be separations that are hard and fast, but distinctions that are beautiful within an overall seamless whole is a very good way that we could take forward in science. I think it’s happening already in physics, which is always one hell of a lot further down the line than biology. But here we are.

…it’s only from bringing these things [science & philosophy] together again that we can make leaps forward in our understanding of the world—the meaning of it, not just facts. …
The facts have to be of use in generating an understanding, and understanding is something a human being comes to, bringing many aspects of their knowledge or experience together.