Incomplete Nature Pt 1: Intro and Ententionality
This is a Terrence Deacon blog now
The 2023-2024 school year was my first year of full-time teaching (in addition to tutoring part time). I ended up choosing not to make time to publish anything for this project during that time, but I never stopped chewing on it. In fact, I’ve made a more productive and transformative investment in the last year than I did in the time I was actively writing. That investment came in two forms.
The first was my discovery of Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature. My Twitter mutual Cody Moser mentioned it a few times and I caught the hint that it was about the same ideas I was working on at The Semiotic Planet (Cody has since written his own post on the book, which is also well worth reading). When I started the book, it was immediately obvious that Deacon had basically “scooped me” by around a decade, and I’d have to substantially update my approach to this blog in light of it. I listened to the audiobook on my commutes over the course of months, took some time off to digest, joined a short-lived reading group on it, and started a second read alongside composing this post.
The second big push I got this year was simply teaching the full high school science curriculum. Teaching biology, physics, anatomy, chemistry, and earth science all at the same time gives you a pretty unique view of scientific knowledge. It was the perfect supplement to a book like Incomplete Nature, which is about the way that complex structures emerge from simpler ones. Having these classes to teach (and having GPT4 and Claude and YouTube to review and enrich my understanding) helped me fill in a lot of the concepts that Deacon either takes for granted (they are, after all, literally taught in high school science) or simply doesn’t develop in detail.
Taking time to think through things like diffusion, equilibrium, entropy, work, evolution, and convection cells with young people who are learning them for the first time has been indispensable in grasping the broader connections and abstractions that Deacon is drawing between them, and giving me the confidence that I can articulate those ideas in a way that will make at least some sense to some of my readers.
What is Incomplete Nature?
Terrence Deacon’s wikipedia article describes him as a neuroanthropologist, but Incomplete Nature is unambiguously a work of philosophy. Its central question is the same one motivating this blog: how did a universe of fields, particles, and waves give rise to a planet reshaped by stimulus, homeostasis, perception, and evolution, where we experience beauty, morality, and knowledge? And his answer, like mine, draws heavily from Peircean semiotics. In fact, Deacon has published with enough of the luminaries of modern biosemiotics that I was a bit surprised that I didn’t recognize his name.
Deacon also grasped that in order for biosemiotics to answer this question, a very explicit conceptual bridge would need to be constructed from life to physics. The difference is that while I attempted to build that bridge by redefining semiosis, Deacon simply created a new vocabulary. A large proportion of Incomplete Nature is devoted to justifying and explaining this vocabulary. Deacon is not shy about coining neologisms or reframing existing terminology, and that can make the work a bit dense.
Some of those words are quite useful. One crucial term for us is ententionality. This single word encapsulates everything from genetic information to artistic beauty, giving us a much more concise way to refer to the problem we’re trying to solve: how did a universe apparently devoid of ententionality give rise to a planet suffused with it?
Entention describes a physical system that is about something other than itself. Sensation is inherently and quintessentially ententional: chemoreceptors in your nose tell you about the freshness of the milk you’re about to swig. Patterns of light from the LEDs in your screen tell you about the ideas I’m thinking as I write this. But ententionality is far more general than that. It doesn’t require consciousness or even life. It simply describes a relationship between two physical processes. In a thermostat, the state of a circuit closed by a bimetallic strip is about the current temperature of a room relative to a certain set point. Ententional relationships are the physical embodiment of everything we want to account for.
Crucially, ententionality must necessarily be a relationship that with causal relevance within the system itself. It can’t be a merely apparent or observer-dependent pattern—a constellation is not an ententional relationship among stars. We as observers are physical systems with ententionality, because ententionality is a prerequisite of observation. There must at some point have been a physical system that crossed the threshold into aboutness, and everything we know about the history of life and our species suggests that this threshold was crossed long ago and in a much simpler physical context than our bodies.
The nature of Aboutness
Long-time readers of The Semiotic Planet may recognize ententionality as a different term for what I have been describing as semiosis. In my terms, an object that can make a physical process “about” something else is a semiotic adapter. Aboutness is a potential cause-effect relationship that only exists in the presence of the adapter. It is the adapter itself that interprets the cause as information about an effect.
Deacon places the same importance on such physical manifestations of ententionality, though he doesn’t name them directly. Instead, his focus is on the philosophical aspects of how such things come about and what makes them different from non-living processes and objects. He identifies a major philosophical flaw with the way I was approaching this question and structures his argument to address it.
For any given object, we could imagine an infinite number of possible physical interactions, and each would have a distinct effect determined by the properties of the object. We could define everything in the universe as a semiotic adapter, because we could always imagine a scenario in which its unique properties defined a relationship between an otherwise-unrelated cause and effect. The way to make this distinction relies on categorizing causes and effects, and this kind of categorization is only possible within ententional systems; we can’t rely on it as an explanatory element in our story about the origin of ententionality.
Deacon avoids this by shifting his focus from the infinite set of possible interactions an object enables to the finite set of interactions it excludes. He calls anything that excludes an interaction a constraint.
Ententional physical structures embody a relationship between an input and an output that is constrained in a specific, consistent way. The shape of a bimetallic strip in a thermostat is about the temperature of the room because it allows electricity to flow when the air is warm enough and constrains the flow of electricity when it is too cold. The grooves on a vinyl record are about particular sounds because their shape constrains the movement of a needle in a way that corresponds to the original sound wave. The constraint is what confers the conditionality, and thus the specificity, and thus the “aboutness,” of the relationship.
Of course, the non-living universe is full of constraints. Molecular orbitals constrain electrons. Gravity constrains planets in solar systems and stars in galaxies. River channels constrain the flow of water. Intermolecular forces constrain molecules into crystal lattices. These constraints bind matter and energy into shapes and these shapes impose new constraints on their surroundings in turn. But (quantum orbitals aside) these constraints are arbitrary and changeable. The mapping between input and output they relate is not, itself, constrained. If the grooves on the vinyl record changed their shape at random, they would no longer be “about” the original sound wave.
There’s something different about the shapes on Earth. A kind of elementary school explanation of why I call Earth the Semiotic Planet is that we live on the only place in the universe that can remember how to make specific shapes. Other places may generate similar shapes again and again, but only if they happen to hit on similar conditions every time. The shape of a solar flare, a landform on a tectonically active planet, or the arc of a galaxy’s spiral arm—these shapes are the products of constraints, but if they are destroyed, they will never reemerge exactly as they did before. Each snowflake is unique because the universe immediately forgets how it was made. The details are washed away in a torrent of ceaseless change.
On Earth, a shape capable of imposing the same constraints can emerge again and again, year after year, because the process that generated its details can be reproduced exactly despite inconsistent conditions. That, in turn, is only possible because the generative process always encounters the same constraints, imposed by the same shapes. It’s a catch-22: to remember how to make shapes, you need to already be able to remember how to make shapes. Once begun, it’s not hard to see how this cycle could persist. It’s just not obvious how the universe could get there in the first place. In the next few posts, we’ll see how Deacon resolves this paradox, and how this seemingly simple persistence of physical constraints can reasonably be said to give rise to every philosophically significant property of life as we know it.
PS: I started my PhD program at the University of New Mexico this week, studying the molecular mechanisms of plant gall induction. One of my main goals in pursuing this program is to develop a rich body of knowledge in biology that I can use to ground and enrich the work I’m doing here. My time to work on this project will diminish again as the school year starts, but I want to keep pushing on it as much as I can. I feel that the angle I’m developing here could be quite clarifying for my research question and is currently very neglected, but I’m frankly still a bit self-conscious to argue them in front of pragmatic, established academics who may not see much value in this kind of philosophical work. Gotta keep building the theory here if I ever want to bring it forward there.