Mind and Life: Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False?

Abstract

A partial review of Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False is used to articulate some systems-theoretic ideas about the challenge of understanding subjective experience. The article accepts Nagel’s view that reductionist materialism fails as an approach to this challenge, but argues that seeking an explanation of mind based on emergence is more plausible than seeking one based on panpsychism, which Nagel favors. However, the article proposes something similar to Nagel’s neutral monism by positing a hierarchy of information processes that spans the domains of matter, life, and mind. As depicted in this hierarchy, subjective experience is emergent, but also continuous with informational phenomena at lower levels.

Full text

Biological Theory, 2015, DOI: 10.1007/s13752-015-0231-1, in press.
MIND AND LIFE: IS THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN
CONCEPTION OF NATURE FALSE?
Martin Zwick
Systems Science Graduate Program
Portland State University
Portland Oregon 97207-0751
http://www.pdx.edu/sysc/research-systems-theory-and-philosophy
zwick@pdx.edu
Abstract
A partial review of Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-
Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False is used to articulate some
systems-theoretic ideas about the challenge of understanding subjective experience. The
article accepts Nagel’s view that reductionist materialism fails as an approach to this
challenge, but argues that seeking an explanation of mind based on emergence is more
plausible than one based on panpsychism, which Nagel favors. However, the article
proposes something similar to Nagel’s neutral monism by positing a hierarchy of
information processes that span the domains of matter, life, and mind. As depicted in this
hierarchy, subjective experience is emergent, but also continuous with informational
phenomena at lower levels.
Keywords Consciousness; Emergence; Information; Materialism; Mind-body
problem; Neutral monism; Panpsychism; Reductionism; Subjective experience; Systems
theory

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 2
Introduction
This article uses a partial review of Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the
Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2002) to
present a systems-theoretic approach to the challenge of understanding subjective
experience. From a systems perspective, Nagel’s view of mind omits a necessary
distinction between experience and information processing; his view of emergence is
narrow; his view of neo-Darwinism as materialist is incomplete; and his view of the
relationship between constitutive and historical explanations of life is unreasonable.
These views are rejected and systems-theoretic ideas are offered in their stead. However,
one argument of Nagel’s is accepted after modification: informational processes, but not
psyche, go “all the way down.” This allows the neutral monism and emergence
approaches to mind to be schematically integrated.
Some readers of this article may experience a tension between its review of Nagel’s book
and its presentation of systems ideas. Presenting these ideas is the primary aim of this
article, but Nagel’s important contributions to the philosophy of mind warrant the
systematic assessment of his position that is also offered.
In what follows, a summary of Nagel’s position is presented. A flaw in this position is
pointed out, namely its omission of the necessary distinction between experience and
information processing. After reviewing various conceptions of emergence, Nagel’s
objections to emergence as an explanation of mind are assessed. Nagel’s position is also
criticized because it understates the degree to which life is understood, and because, by
ignoring the significance of information, it incorrectly characterizes neo-Darwinism as
materialistic. The last section integrates these arguments by proposing that informational
emergence occurs repeatedly in the domains of matter, life, and mind, but that subjective
experience emerges only at the highest levels of these domains.
A Summary of Nagel’s Position
Nagel asserts that psychophysical reduction – explaining mind in terms of matter – has
been and will forever be a failure and that therefore, as the book’s subtitle says, “the
materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.” “Mind” here
refers primarily to consciousness; more precisely, subjective experience. Nagel insists
that since human (and animal) subjective experience is a salient property of life, the
inability of “materialist neo-Darwinism” (MND) to explain experience should not be
considered a minor and merely “local” flaw. He argues that extension of scientific theory
to encompass consciousness will require radical change, so current theory is not merely
incomplete, but “false.” Nagel also discusses rationality and value realism, but these
subjects are beyond the scope of this paper.
To situate his discussion in a broader philosophical context, Nagel reviews various
approaches towards the relation of mind to matter; these are summarized in Table 1. He
dismisses dualism out of hand. He also rejects idealism, the standard alternative to
materialism, defined by him as (a) invoking God as ultimate reality (theism), or (b) taking
ideas as more real than matter (absolute idealism), or (c) grounding reality in human
experience (subjective idealism, e.g., logical positivism,1 phenomenology,

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 3
constructivism). His main target, however, is reductionist materialism, the dominant
form of monism, which he also refers to as scientific naturalism.2 Rejecting dualism,
idealism, and materialism, Nagel considers two alternatives: neutral monism and
emergence. Between these, he prefers the former. This article criticizes this preference,
and argues for the latter.
Table 1 Nagel’s summary of philosophical viewpoints on mind and matter
“Cardinality” = ontological cardinality. The currently dominant view is materialism;
Nagel prefers neutral monism; this article advocates REDUCIBLE EMERGENCE.
CARDINALITY
Nagel rejects:
VIEWPOINT
VARIETIES
Dualism
substance dualism
Cartesian dualism
Monism
materialism
reductionism
idealism
theism, absolute idealism, subjective idealism
Nagel considers:
Monism
(unspecified)
neutral monism
EMERGENCE
panpsychism (reductive)
irreducible, REDUCIBLE
Neutral monism is the view that underlying both the physical and the mental there is a
neutral substrate that itself is neither physical nor mental. Nagel’s neutral monism,
however, is different from this, and is identified by him as the same as panpsychism, the
view that everything has aspects of both matter and mind.3 While mental properties may
only be discernable in certain complex entities, they actually go “all the way down,” just
like material properties, and higher-level mental properties derive from lower-level ones.
Reductiveness thus applies to both material and mental properties. This is different from
materialist reductionism, which reduces all properties to material ones, and regards mind
as epiphenomenal or, in eliminative reductionism, as identical to its physical substrate.
In Nagel’s neutral monism, matter and mind are not merely parallel but interact causally
in some unknown manner. Nagel explicitly refrains from attempting to offer any detailed
content to his position. He says (pp. 57-8),
The sense in which they [the elements of the physical world] are [also] mental is
so far exhausted by the claim that they are such as to provide a reductive account
of how their appropriate combinations necessarily constitute conscious organisms
of the kind we are familiar with. Any further consequences of their more-than-
physical character at the microlevel remain unspecified by this abstract proposal.
So Nagel’s neutral monism or panpsychism has, in his own words (p.62), “only the form
of an explanation without any content”; no content, that is, beyond the claim that it might
someday provide the basis for a reductive account of subjective experience. Since Nagel
repeatedly refers to neutral monism and panpsychism together, henceforth, when
speaking of Nagel’s views, these terms will be treated as synonyms.
In the emergence-based alternative that Nagel also considers, mental properties only
emerge at a certain level, so only some higher levels are both material and mental; lower

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 4
levels are just material. Nagel does not attribute a particular ontological cardinality to
emergence (hence the entry of “unspecified” in Table 1), but it is commonly regarded by
its advocates as a monistic view.
For Nagel, neutral monism and emergence each has both appeal and weaknesses. The
weaknesses of monism are that it attributes to simple entities psychic properties that are
unobservable, that it is hard to conceptualize whole-part relationships involving mental
properties, and that it seems to require not only mind but also life to go all the way down,
a violation of Ockham’s parsimony principle. The weakness of emergence is that the
sudden appearance of mind without any precursors appears magical.
Nagel’s analysis includes a constitutive (synchronic) mode and a historical (diachronic)
mode, and implicit in his analysis is the idea that both modes are required for a complete
explanation of any phenomenon. It is useful to expand this explanatory dyad into a
structure-function-history triad (Gerard 1958), where structure refers to the internal order
of a system, function to its participation in external order, and history to qualitative
change in both internal and external orders. In terms of this triad, constitutive analysis of
mind focuses on both brain (structure) and behavior (function), while historical analysis
takes up the origin of mind and its evolutionary development. The structure-function
dyad can also be applied within the nervous system, where the function of a subsystem is
its external relations with other subsystems, and its structure is its internal organization.
Nagel’s objections to materialist neo-Darwinism go further than denying its capacity to
explain subjective experience. He doubts that evolutionary theory adequately explains
the history – especially the origins – of life even in its simplest forms. While this
objection to evolutionary theory is a supplementary argument that is not dependent on his
primary thesis, Nagel’s doubts about the adequacy of MND to account for the origin of
life reinforce his doubts about its adequacy to explain mind.
In the sections that follow, a critique of Nagel’s position is used to articulate an opposing
emergence-based systems-theoretic view on the challenge of understanding subjective
experience. In this opposing view, however, one aspect of Nagel’s position is retained in
modified form.
The Informational is Not the Same as the Experiential
At the very outset, there is a problem with Nagel’s use of words like “mind” and
“mental.” Most of the time he seems to use these words to refer to subjective experience,
but sometimes they appear to refer merely to informational processes occurring in
organisms, without regard to whether these processes are or are not experienced. The
word “mental” can thus mean experiential or informational (or both), but these two
meanings must be differentiated, since they are the very basis for the distinction between
the “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers 1996), namely explaining the fact of
subjective experience, and the not-so-hard problem, namely understanding biological
information processing.
“Information” here refers to what can be analyzed with Shannon’s (1949) theory, which
was originally called a theory of communication but which applies to information more
generally. As defined by this theory, information is not material, despite its being

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 5
instantiated on matter-energy markers, because it is quantified in non-physical units
(bits), i.e., units that do not involve grams, ergs, and so on. Technically, information is a
reduction of uncertainty, which Shannon called “entropy,” borrowing the term from
statistical mechanics. If pi is the probability that a system is in state i, then the Shannon
entropy (uncertainty) of the system is H = – Σ pi log2 pi. Entropy in statistical mechanics,
given by S = – k Σ pi ln pi , involves the same sum over probabilities, but this sum, scaled
to natural logarithms, is multiplied by Boltzmann’s constant, k, which has physical units:
ergs per degree Kelvin. Having such units is an indication that S is physical; H, lacking
such units, is not. The second law of thermodynamics applies to thermodynamic and
statistical mechanical entropy, but not to Shannon entropy: in isolated systems, S must
increase over time or stay the same, but in general there is no such law for H.
Information applies not only to such contexts as communication, measurement, and
computation, but even more deeply to the fundamental notion of constraint, which is
central to the basic idea of relation. So information can be used to characterize and to
measure the organization of any static structure or dynamic process.4 This is further
explained in the next section, where its relevance to emergence is considered.
Nagel’s omission of a distinction between the informational and the experiential obscures
the fact that informational processes (including those occurring in nervous systems) pose
no fundamental challenge to scientific understanding. Functionalist theories in cognitive
science, even those that attempt to explain consciousness (Dennett 1991), are primarily if
not exclusively informational. The experiential aspect is left unexplained, so the hard
problem of consciousness remains unsolved. While it is reasonable for Nagel to argue
that psycho-physical reduction has failed so far for the hard problem of consciousness, it
would be incorrect for him to assert that it has also failed to yield an understanding of
cognitive information processing. While he doesn’t make this assertion explicitly, by not
differentiating in his idea of the “mental” between the informational and the experiential,
he implies that the former is as mysterious as the latter. It isn’t. Through advances in
neurobiology, we have a growing understanding of biological information processing.
It is hard to see how panpsychism could accommodate the difference between the
informational and the experiential and yet remain purely reductive. Nagel repeatedly
(and synonymously) refers to the “protomental” or “protopsychic” but does not define
these. If protomental means only the informational, to explain experience panpsychism
would need a notion of emergence, which is what reductive panpsychism is supposed to
obviate.5 If, however, the protomental includes the experiential, the relationship between
the informational and the experiential needs to be explained. These alternatives might be
called weak and strong panpsychism, respectively. The tension between them cannot be
resolved by saying that the experiential is the inner aspect of phenomena whose outer
aspect is informational, since in panpsychism outer aspects of phenomena are material,
not informational. If panpsychism is expanded into an experiential-informational-
material triad, this scheme would be vulnerable to the criticism that the material and the
informational are plainly apparent in many phenomena, but the experiential is apparent
only in complex biological organisms.

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 6
That material aspects of biological phenomena go all the way down is unproblematic for
everyone (except idealists). That informational aspects of biological phenomena go all
the way down is novel but plausible; in fact, one might argue that whatever scientific
appeal panpsychism might have is its suggestion that something nonmaterial exists at all
levels. But that experiential aspects of biological phenomena go all the way down6 is an
extraordinary claim that lacks not only the extraordinary evidence obligatory for such
claims, but any scientific evidence at all. One might thus abandon experiential
panpsychism, but preserve a pan-informational scheme,7 where information goes all the
way down but experience is a high-level emergent. This position is advocated below, but
first Nagel’s objections to emergence must be considered, and to take these up, it is
necessary to have an overview of some of the conceptions of emergence that are available
in the philosophical and scientific literatures.
Various Conceptions of Emergence
Emergence involves novelty having greater or lesser “irreducibility,” and is thus often
characterized as being strong or weak. O’Connor and Wong (2012), without using these
particular labels, classify the British emergentists of the 1920s, such as Broad, Alexander,
and Morgan, as holding the strong emergence position; Chalmers (2006) agrees. These
emergentists differ somewhat in the strength of the type of emergence that they advocate.
O’Connor and Wong (p. 14) write that
For Mill and Broad, emergence involves the appearance of primitive high-level
causal interactions … additional [italics added] to those of the more fundamental
levels. Alexander, by contrast, is committed only to the appearance of novel
qualities and associated high-level causal patterns that cannot be directly
expressed in terms of the more fundamental entities and principles. But these
patterns do not supplement, much less supersede, fundamental interactions.
Broad’s view is thus stronger than Alexander’s. Despite this difference, for Alexander as
for Mill and Broad “emergent qualities were metaphysically primitive”8 (O’Connor &
Wong 2012). Emergence becomes even stronger in Morgan (1923) when he writes of an
“increasing richness … in substance throughout the stages of evolutionary advance.” If
emergent entities are different in their very substance, this is strong emergence indeed.
Mayr (1982) defined emergence as “the appearance of new characteristics in wholes that
cannot be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the parts, taken separately or in
other partial combinations.” In this, he echoed Broad (1925, p.61), who considers a
whole having constituents A, B, and C in relation R, and defines emergence to mean that
“the characteristic properties of the whole R(A,B,C) cannot, even in theory, be deduced
from the most complete knowledge of the properties of A, B, and C in isolation or in
other wholes which are not of the form R(A,B,C).” Wholes not of the form of R(A,B,C)
include partial combinations of constituents, i.e., decompositions of R that organize one,
two, or even all three pairs of constituents, but do not organize all constituents in a single
relation. Write R as ABC, and its minimal decomposition, which includes all three pairs
of constituents, as AB:AC:BC (the colon means “and”). Information-theoretically, ABC
can embody a constraint that is absent in AB:AC:BC and in any simpler decomposition.
Because of this additional constraint, R can have properties not present in or deducible

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 7
from any “partial combination” of constituents. This is a rigorous interpretation of “the
whole is more than the sum of its parts,” an idea central to emergence; and this is what is
meant above in the statement that “information” encompasses “organization.”9 The
significance of holism was recognized by the earliest writers on emergence: properties of
wholes that go beyond those of their parts are what Mill (1843) meant by “heteropathic”
as opposed to “homopathic” effects, and what Lewes (1875) meant by “emergent” as
opposed to “resultant” effects.10
Such holism can give meaning to Broad’s view of high-level interactions being additional
to low-level interactions. It is also a mereological interpretation of “downward
causation,” a feature often used to characterize strong emergence, as the effect of a whole
on its parts that goes beyond the interactions in all subsets of parts. Downward causation,
however, in the philosophy of mind is often interpreted as the influence of mind on
matter. This interpretation is not mereological, since it is not clear how the mind can be
viewed as a whole that has the body as its parts. Mereological downward causation can
operate wholly in the domain of matter, where the question of how such causation can
occur is easy to state. By contrast, a downward causation of mind on matter is a different
idea, which requires considerable explanation. The two should not be conflated.
Strong emergence is sometimes called ontological emergence, as opposed to weak
emergence, which is called epistemological, i.e., observer-dependent, emergence
(Chalmers 2006).11 O’Connor and Wong define the latter as characterizing phenomena
that cannot be predicted (Rosen 1985) or cannot even be represented in lower-level terms,
but to which no special ontological status is accorded. Downward causation, dismissed
by Bedau (1997) as “magical,” is excluded, so weak emergence, defined by Bedau as
emergence demonstrable only by simulation,12 is “metaphysically innocent.” Chalmers
has a yet more liberal idea of weak emergence, which he defines as involving phenomena
that are “unexpected [italics in the original] given the principles governing the low-level
domain.” Being unexpected is weaker than being unpredictable which is weaker than
being incapable of representation, so epistemological emergence, like ontological
emergence, has stronger and weaker versions. What cannot be represented qualifies
unequivocally as both irreducible and novel. What cannot be predicted but is derivable
by simulation is irreducible in a technical sense (the absence of a closed form solution)
but is not completely devoid of explanatory value; and it is less novel than what cannot
be represented. What is merely unexpected is not irreducible at all. The requirement of
irreducibility can in fact be completely jettisoned, and phenomena can be considered
emergent solely by virtue of their novelty – novelty being the sine qua non of emergence
– even if they have been given – after first being observed – a complete explanation, and
even if this explanation is theory-based and not simulation-based.13 For example,
macroscopic properties of a gas are emergent from the micro-dynamics of the molecules
that make up the gas, but the thermodynamics of gases can be reduced to statistical
mechanics. As Bunge argues (2010, p.77), “Explained emergence is still emergence. In
other words, epistemology cannot erase ontology because the universe is objectively
stratified.” Novelty does not require irreducibility.

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 8
This last conception of emergence makes it ubiquitous and perhaps prosaic. One might
prefer, as Chalmers (2006) does, to reserve use of the word for rare phenomena, but many
thinkers adopt the broader notion. Morgan (1923, p.1) writes that
Under what I here call emergent evolution stress is laid on this incoming of the
new. Salient examples are afforded in the advent of life, in the advent of mind,
and in the advent of reflective thought. But in the physical world emergence is no
less exemplified in the advent of each new kind of atom, and of each new kind of
molecule. It is beyond the wit of man to number the instances of emergence.
Morowitz (2002) offers 28 examples of emergence, and Bunge (2010) regards emergence
as central to scientific metaphysics. Pines (2014, p.22) suggests that emergence is a
“unifying theme for 21st century science,” and writes, “Indeed, we live in an emergent
universe in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify any existing interesting
scientific problem … that is not emergent.”
The systems-theoretic orientation adopts this broad notion of emergence: a system is a set
of elements and a set of relations that link elements via their attributes, where the system
is a higher-level element, and elements are lower-level systems. (Broad’s R, discussed
above, is a simplified notion of system, in which relations organize elements directly
rather than through attributes, and multiple relations between elements are subsumed in a
single net relation.) This recursive definition of system, expanded to speak also of its
environment, reflects a view of the world as inherently stratified, ontologically and
epistemologically. The relations that organize a system confer upon it certain attributes.
These attributes can be novel, i.e., they can differ from the attributes of the elements and
from the attributes of subsystems less than the whole. If so, they are said to emerge from
the organizing relations of the system. Emergence, in this sense, is a very general aspect
of the world. Given this definition, emergence is not the opposite of reduction. They are
two sides of the same coin: emergence is what we see looking up from the lower level;
reduction is what we see looking down from the higher level (Fromm 2004).
Nagel’s Objections to Emergence
Nagel thinks that a neutral monism-based theory of experience is more likely than an
emergence-based theory. His reasons for rejecting emergence are a little obscure, not
surprisingly since we don’t actually have either an emergence-based theory or a neutral
monism-based theory of consciousness to assess, but his position seems to be that
subjective experience is extremely novel, and that an emergence explanation of such
great novelty would necessarily be irreducible, so it would have no explanatory value.
Nagel writes (pp. 55-56),
If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the
organism as a whole, or in its central nervous system, without any grounding in
the elements that constitute the organism, except for the physical character of
those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form…that
connects the physical with the mental…It is hard to give up the assumption that
whatever is true of the complex must be explained by what is true of the element.

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 9
And,
That such purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should
necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted out of the
properties and relations of the parts still seems like magic… such emergence,
even if systematic, remains fundamentally inexplicable.
Understanding Nagel’s viewpoint poses some difficulty, since sometimes it seems that he
thinks that wholes can only acquire properties by inheriting them from their parts, which
would be a fallacy of decomposition,14 but sometimes he seems to give proper weight to
the relations of the parts. The first inclination is illustrated in the above sentence about
what it is hard to give up. It is also implicit in Nagel’s embrace of panpsychism, which
sees the key to the mentality of an organismic whole in the hypothesized mentality of its
parts; this is why he repeatedly acknowledges concern about the problem of conceiving
mental whole-part relations. Overall, the book conveys the impression that Nagel
believes that mental wholes require mental parts.
Yet, as the above quote shows, Nagel sometimes invokes relations explicitly, and he also
seems to accept emergence in some contexts. He writes (p. 56),
That does not mean that new phenomena cannot emerge at higher levels, but the
hope is that they can be analyzed through the character and interactions of their
more elementary components. Such harmless emergence [italics added] is
standardly illustrated by the example of liquidity, which depends on the
interactions of the molecules that compose the liquid. But the emergence of the
mental at certain levels of biological complexity is not like this. According to the
emergent position now being considered, consciousness is something completely
new.
Presumably, this “harmless emergence” is either weak emergence or the broad notion of
emergence discussed above. Nagel doesn’t believe that a theory of subjective experience
based on this type of emergence could account for the great novelty of consciousness, yet
he gives no argument to defend this belief. He is not impressed by the novelty of liquidity
that is explained by “harmless emergence.” More seriously, he does not realize – or does
not accept the fact – that the novelty of life itself is explained by this very same “harmless
emergence.” Nagel never entertains the possibility that interactions of parts might
engender mental properties, especially when grounded not only in material processes but
in informational processes as well.
So one response to Nagel’s rejection of emergence is simply to deny his premise that
emergence in its broadest sense – an emergence fully compatible with reduction – is
inherently incapable of explaining subjective experience. One might, however, ask how
such an emergent/reductive explanation of mind would differ from the reductiveness of
the panpsychism that Nagel favors. The answer is that the reducibility that can be joined
consistently with emergence would not attribute experience to the lowest levels of mind
or life. The realm of experience would be local. It would not cast new light on the basic
properties of life or matter. By contrast, a neutral monism explanation of experience

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 10
would attribute experience to lower levels, and would impact our understanding of life
and matter.
Or, one might accept Nagel’s claim that explaining consciousness requires a form of
emergence that is deeply irreducible. Nagel’s objection to such strong emergence is not
unusual; Bedau and many others concur that strong emergence seems magical, especially
if it entails downward causation. If all that can be said about strong emergence is that it
manifests supervenience, that macro-properties presume changes in but are still not
reducible to micro-properties, then such emergence is indeed magical and the associated
notion of supervenience is scientifically empty. An ontology that posits an emergence of
mind from matter about which nothing more can be said is dualistic, regardless of any
claims it makes to the contrary, and a dualistic ontology cannot offer a satisfactory
scientific explanation of subjective experience.
Nagel’s objection to strong emergence might, however, be countered if one could explain
why reduction is impossible, and if such an explanation can be given, it would provide
content to the notion of supervenience. For example, reduction might be impossible in
principle because of mathematical undecidability (Baas & Emmeche 1997) or because of
spontaneous symmetry breaking (Anderson 1972). Or, irreducibility could be seen as not
mysterious if it is defined as non-decomposability, in the sense discussed above. Such
irreducibility might also be considered a possible interpretation of mereological
downward causation.
Consciousness, Not Life, is Yet Unexplained
Nagel not only conflates the informational and experiential in his notion of mind, but he
also conflates mind and life in his suggestion that the mental quality that goes all the way
down and that explains consciousness in complex organisms might also (at least partially)
explain life in simple organisms. He offers no hint, however, about what mental quality
could possibly accomplish both purposes. His panpsychism, the view that everything has
mind, here shades into pan-vitalism (hylozoism), the view that everything is alive. This
isn’t surprising: mind is commonly assumed to supervene on life, so if mind goes all the
way down, life might well also.
It should be noted that the assumption that mind depends on life is not universally held.
The field of artificial intelligence (AI), for example, is implicitly based in the belief that
mind does not supervene on life, and can thus be instantiated in artificial entities that are
not alive by most definitions of life: these entities are allopoietic, not autopoietic (they
are constructed by external processes rather than constructing themselves via matter-
energy resources gained by metabolism); their structure and behavior are not coded for or
regulated by genomes transmitted by heredity; populations of these entities do not evolve
by natural selection; and so on. So to the degree that one thinks that AI implements
mind, one can reasonably argue that mind does not depend on life.
But here the distinction between the informational and the experiential is critical. AI
implements only the informational. Few scientists would accept the proposition that
current AI instantiations are accompanied by experience. Nonetheless, the assumption of
machine sentience is ubiquitous, especially in the cinema, reflecting the advances that

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 11
have been made in Turing-test mimicry of human intelligence. Even consciousness
researchers do not always distinguish between the experiential and the informational.
Koch and Tonioni (2011) offer a test for consciousness that is a variation on Turing tests
for intelligence; since all such tests are functional, i.e., external, it is hard to see how they
could test for the presence or absence of internal experience. Admittedly, a test for
experience must be functional, since experience is private by definition. But the
functions that are tested must be extensive and diverse. The Koch-Tonioni test (which
asks questions of the sort, “What is wrong with this picture?”) is far too simple.
Nagel links the hard problem of consciousness to what he sees as the inadequacy of the
neo-Darwinian account of life. He writes (p. 8), “Mind, as a development of life … casts
its shadow back over the entire process.” He goes further, saying that our understanding
of life is suspect even on its own terms, because our historical understanding of life is
inadequate (p. 5): “The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the
intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account
becomes.” Nagel doubts the adequacy of MND to explain the diversity of life forms that
exist15 and (especially) also the origin of life.16 This alleged inadequacy of our historical
account of life somehow undermines also our constitutive account of life. But Nagel
does not say what exactly in our constitutive understanding is undermined.
Much can be said in response to Nagel’s views about life. First and foremost, the main
processes of life, viewed constitutively as opposed to historically, are not a mystery. They
are well understood. Pan-vitalism gains no support from any scientific fact. There is no
scientific basis for a reductive theory that attributes protolife to constituents of living
systems, to constituents of these constituents, and so on. Even if one allows, for the sake
of argument, that some constituents or their precursors, e.g., ribozymes, exhibit protolife,
one would not make this attribution for constituents even one level down, since
nucleotides or amino acids are not living in any sense of the word. Life plainly does not
go all the way down. Those who think otherwise typically confuse energy or dynamics
with life. If life does not go all the way down, it is likely that mind – specifically,
experience – also does not go all the way down.
The constitutive explanation of life that is accepted today is emergence based, and this
emergence is not irreducible. Quite the opposite: we explain how biological phenomena
result from components of living systems, their relations, and the interactions of systems
with their environments. Nagel says (p. 87) that his imagined neutral monism
explanation of experience “is modeled on the physical reductionism encouraged by
molecular biology, but with an expanded metaphysical basis.” This is ironic, since the
reductiveness of molecular biology supports and complements emergence, understood
broadly in the systems-theoretic way discussed above.
Nagel’s view that a historical explanation of life requires a convincing account of origins,
and that a constitutive explanation of life requires an adequate historical account, are
unreasonable. Origins are always difficult to explain. The origin of life on earth is one
of many mysteries. The origins of the universe and its galaxies and the solar system and
the human species and human language are also obscure. Nagel is correct in insisting that
a full understanding of any phenomenon requires constitutive and historical explanations,

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 12
but he errs in thinking that these explanations are totally interdependent, and that, within
historical explanations, accounts of origin and development are similarly inseparable.
Absence of an account of origin does not undermine explanation of what happened after
origin. Incompleteness of historical explanation does not invalidate constitutive
explanation. Historical explanations are always incomplete; it is remarkable that they can
be offered at all, since phenomena that occurred in the past not only cannot be
experimented upon; they cannot even be observed directly or fully.
One is certainly warranted in calling neo-Darwinism incomplete, but incompleteness is
the rule and not the exception in scientific theories, so if being incomplete means being
false, much of science would have to be considered false. This may be acceptable –
science takes pride in fallibility – but it is preferable to reserve the word “false” for
assertions that are erroneous for reasons other than incompleteness. For example, the
theory that held that proteins, not nucleic acids, are the carriers of genetic information,
and the theory that declared that stretches of DNA that don’t code for proteins are junk,
were both proven false, and not because of incompleteness. Admittedly, these are easy
cases, and the relationship between incompleteness and falsity is more complicated. One
might, for example, ask: at high velocities, has Newtonian mechanics been falsified by
special relativity, or does the fact that the two theories are identical at low velocities
render Newtonian mechanics merely incomplete, or, to put it positively, a good
approximation to truth in a well-defined, albeit limited, domain?
Resolving such issues in general is clearly outside the scope of this paper, but the
dramatic title of Nagel’s book does call for explicit comment. A great deal in biology has
become comprehensible via neo-Darwinism. Dobzhansky (1973) puts this even more
strongly: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” It seems
likely that what Nagel has in mind in imagining MND proven “false” is something like
the status of Newtonian mechanics after the revolutions of quantum theory and relativity.
In the domains of its past successes, Newtonian mechanics still stands, but in other
domains quantum and relativity theories reveal it to be incorrect in important respects; in
these respects it is appropriate to call it “false.” A neo-Darwinism that was overturned in
the future would probably still be regarded as true, or at least adequate, in the domains of
its successes. But if some future neutral monist theory of mind explained subjective
experience, and altered our constitutive understanding of life, and introduced subjective
experience as an important factor in evolution even for simple organisms, and provided
new understanding about the origins of life, this indeed would be a major revolution in
science; in such a hypothetical future, it would be accurate to say that MND was proven
“false.”
On the other hand, if subjective experience were explained as an instance of emergence,
the effects of this accomplishment on science would most likely be easily assimilated. Its
effects would only be local, and not go all the way down. They would not impact our
understanding either of life or of matter. Such a scenario would confirm Simon’s (1981)
view that reality is vertically “partially decomposable,” meaning that adjacent levels of
reality are usually (though not always) relatively insulated from one another. Of course,
it is possible that subjective experience will never be explained by any theory. But
neuroscience is young, and science has only just begun to take on the challenge of

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 13
understanding consciousness. Despair over our current lack of understanding is
premature, and arguments from impatience are unwarranted.
Life is Not Merely Material but Also Informational
The solution we have to the constitutive problem of life suggests that the constitutive
problem of mind might also be solved by reducible emergence. It also suggests that a
successful solution will not be purely materialist, since our constitutive view of life is in
fact not purely materialist. Nagel’s characterization of neo-Darwinism as materialist is
incorrect, however conventional it is. Life is based not only on materiality, but also on
informational processes. That autopoiesis, replication, adaptation, and evolution can be
conceptualized without reference to a specific materiality is the core insight of the field of
artificial life (Langton 1997): properties of life could in principle be realized via different
forms of matter. But even if life necessarily requires the materiality it has on Earth, it
would still be an error to regard life as purely material, since its signature properties are
formal. Life requires autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela 1980), and such self-organization is
a formal property, although in concrete systems it manifests in material structures; the
purely formal aspects of self-organization are explored, for example, in artificial life
studies (e.g., Bagley 1992, Fontana 1992). Development, viewed as informationally
(genomically) programmed or as self-organization (Laland et al 2014), has a formal
aspect. The principles of evolution are also formal, as shown by the fact that these
principles are applied to nonbiological, even nonphysical, contexts. For example, the
genetic algorithm utilizes the evolutionary principles of replication, variation, and
selection to perform multi-solution global optimization; this algorithm is mathematical
(computational), not physical. Understanding life requires ideas of information to explain
genetic determination, positive and negative feedback to explain biological regulation,
and utility and fitness to explain agency and evolution. Unlike matter and energy,
information and utility are nonphysical. The nonphysicality of Shannon information is
noted above. Utility, in von Neumann and Morgenstern’s (1944) game/decision theory,
is also expressed in nonphysical units: utils, just like bits, do not have dimensions of mass
or energy. Fitness, a concept that is absolutely necessary for Darwinism, is merely one
type of utility; this is clear in evolutionary game theory (Maynard-Smith 1982).
Cybernetic control mechanisms in molecular biology, elegantly first popularized by
Monod (1971), are also inherently formal arrangements. The formal includes more than
the informational, but the informational is a central part of it.
Neo-Darwinism thus relies on “stuff-free” theories (Bunge 1973) that are not purely
materialist, so the M in MND is inappropriate. This is not merely an epistemological
observation; it is also an ontological one: genetic information, feedback control,
evolutionary fitness, and so on, are formal, not material, properties. Both
epistemologically and ontologically, the material and the immaterial are equals.
Referring to the latter as “form,” matter and form are joined together, as Aristotle held:
just as form is always materially instantiated, so matter always manifests with form.
There is no justification for privileging matter over form by calling their fusion
“materialist,” taking form for granted. One could as well call our ontology “formist,”
thus taking matter for granted. Why matter continues to be privileged is best left to
historians and sociologists of science to explain. They would probably understand this as

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 14
a reaction against idealism and dualism and also as the result of an older victory of
atomists over Pythagoreans. The emergence after World War II of systems theory and
cybernetics and the renewal of this research program in the sciences of complexity
partially corrected this imbalance. (Before this development, the fundamentals of natural
science were matter and energy, but afterwards information and utility were added as new
– and nonphysical – fundamental categories.) However, in mainstream science,
materialism still prevails as the default label for scientific ontology. Even ontologies that
posit emergence often come with a materialist label. For example, Broad (1925) wrote of
“emergent materialism,” and today Bunge (2010) calls his ontology materialist17 despite
the fact that he endorses emergence and the systems perspective. Cybernetics was seen
as a neo-mechanism, mechanism often being a surrogate term for materialism. But the
transdisciplinary scope of the systems and complexity sciences derives from their being
stuff-free, i.e., formal, Pythagorean.
Mind is One of Several Informational Emergents
Life is now understood as an instance of emergence that encompasses both the material
and the informational. Mind is also both material and informational, but unless life is
conflated with mind, only mind has, in sufficiently complex organisms, an additional
aspect that is experiential. One can regard experience as an emergent novelty, which is,
however, continuous with other informational aspects of living and nonliving matter.
This continuity could be described as a hierarchy of levels of information, as shown in
Table 2. This hierarchy is introduced to convey three ideas: (1) that types of information
vary over the domains of matter, life, and mind18; (2) that experience occurs only at the
highest levels of the hierarchy; (3) that unconscious cognitive processes, which occur just
below these levels, bridge the informational and the experiential.
Table 2 Levels of information
The list of system types is borrowed with modification from Boulding (1956). The realm
of experience is restricted to only the top two shaded levels.
SYSTEM TYPE
INFORMATION
PHENOMENON
DOMAIN
(8) humans
neurological
self-awareness
(7) complex animals
neurological
experience
(6) simple animals
neurological
unconscious cognition
mind
(5) genetic-societal (e.g., plants)
meta-genomic
differentiation
(4) genetic (cells)
genomic
reproduction
life
(3) autopoietic systems
network
self-organization
(2) control mechanisms
control
regulation
(1b) clockworks (dynamic systems)
algorithmic
organization
(1a) frameworks (static systems)
form
organization
matter
In this hierarchy, emergence is exemplified in differences between levels, but the table
might be viewed as compatible with a kind of neutral monism in the similarities between
the levels. Something does go all the way down but it is information, not experience.
Psyche, understood as subjective experience, does not. Psyche emerges.
In the scheme of this table, subjective experience emerges at level (7); its fuller
development in a consciousness that encompasses a sense of self, not identical with the

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 15
contents of experience, emerges at (8). Level (6) is transitional, being the first level
where information is neurological. Information processing here is not experiential, as
this level refers to the cognition of very simple animals. Information processing at this
level is also a component of cognition in complex animals having subjective experience;
that is, levels (7) and (8) include but go beyond level (6). From the perspective of this
hierarchy, the human mind encompasses all three top levels: some mental processes are
unconscious (6), some are experienced but not associated with a sense of self (7), and
some include self-awareness (8). This triadic scheme is inspired by Bennett (1961), who
called these levels automatic (6), sensitive (7), and conscious (8), respectively. In
Kahneman’s (2011) distinction between types of thinking, fast thinking, which is
associative, exemplifies the automatic; slow thinking, capable of being logically ordered,
occurs at the sensitive and/or conscious levels. Ordinary perception might be considered
to occur at level (7), subliminal perception below it at level (6), and apperception
(perception associated with a sense of self) above it at level (8).
The difference between what is unconscious and what is conscious is partially contingent
or fluid: some mental processes seem to be permanently and fully unconscious, but others
can rise to the level of experience. If neural correlates of consciousness could be reliably
established, one would then try to understand these correlations in the hope of explaining
how the experiential (7) emerges from the non-experiential (6). We cannot imagine now
what an explanation of experience might look like, but we do have an idea of what
empirical knowledge would be valuable to have, upon which a successful theory might
conceivably be built.19 Correlations themselves would not solve the hard problem of
consciousness, but they would focus attention on precisely what needs to be explained.
The lowest level of the table shows information in its most general manifestation (1a),
namely “form” (spatial information) measured in information theory by Shannon entropy,
and the process version of information (1b) developed in the algorithmic information
theory of Kolmogorov (1965) and Chaitin (1975). Level (2) information occurs in
control systems, where it is concentrated and explicit, e.g., the set point of a thermostat.
At level (3), self-constructing but nonliving systems (such as flames, eddies, or
tornadoes, autopoietic in a narrow sense) depend on a network of interactions that
construct and maintain the organization of the system; information here is dispersed
throughout the network. In cells, concentrated genomic information at level (4) governs
metabolic autopoiesis, reproduction, and adaptation; and reproduction generates
populations that have history, i.e., undergo evolution.20 In cellular metabolism, enzymes
are catalysts at level (1) specified by genomic information, catalytic information being
the spatial organization of an active site, which has static and dynamic aspects. Cells also
include feedback and feedforward control mechanisms, assigned here to level (2). In
multicellular plants and simple animals, genomic information is subject to meta-level
control (5) by chemical messengers, e.g., hormones; in differentiation, there is
informationally guided self-organization. In the animal kingdom, organisms implement
informational regulation neurologically (6), and at some point, complex neural systems
allow the emergence of subjective experience (7) and self-awareness (8).
Table 2 hypothesizes that neurological information processing occurs at levels (6), (7),
and (8), but that subjective experience emerges only at (7) and (8). It is thus of interest to

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 16
comment here on Tonioni’s (2008) proposal, which resembles a similar notion by
Chalmers (1996), on the informational correlates of consciousness. Tonioni holds that
consciousness is “integrative” information processing; more specifically, he proposes that
if (a) information processes are holistic (in the sense of holism discussed above as it
relates to emergence) and if (b) their associated dynamic states have high information,
then consciousness will be present. Tonioni’s theory is usually aligned with
panpsychism, but if these two conditions are only satisfied in complex neurological
systems, this theory also posits emergence. Three reservations about this theory: First,
testing for the satisfaction of the two conditions is difficult in practice. Second, the
theory doesn’t explain why subjective experience should be the consequence of these
conditions being satisfied, so it doesn’t propose a solution of the hard problem of
consciousness. Third, the theory implies that mind can be present even if life is absent,
perhaps a difficult proposition to swallow. On the positive side, however, the theory is
testable in principle, if high information but holistic computation can be implemented,
and if convincing tests for consciousness can be devised. Tonioni’s conditions might also
be viewed as only necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to occur.
Table 2 is only a working sketch, and the reader is invited to improve upon it. The levels
are roughly ordered, going upwards, from ubiquitous to less and less prevalent, from the
general to the more and more particular.21 Each emergence adds new informational
phenomena to those already existing, so a system that exhibits informational phenomena
at one level typically also exhibits informational phenomena at lower levels. Levels are
grouped into domains, and the domains of matter, life, and mind are similarly nested: life
emerges from matter, and mind emerges from life. Parts of the table reflect a historical
(evolutionary) sequence.22 Still, since there is no universal character to all instances of
emergence (Bunge 2010), there is no simple organizing principle that governs this entire
set of levels. Some inter-level relations are mereological (compositional), linking parts
and wholes; for example, humans and other animals as well as plants are composed of
cells. Other inter-level relations are regulatory; for example, neurological processes
control meta-genomic processes, which control genomic processes. Aside from the fact
that the multiple instances of emergence in the table are all not of the same type, the table
is also incomplete: it needs at least a level (9) that covers sociocultural, e.g., language-
based, phenomena. The table exemplifies the “crude look at a whole” that Gell-Mann
(1994) regards as a valuable contribution that can be made by the complexity sciences.
This view of mind, which combines emergence with a modified neutral monism, might
be called “continuous emergence,” where “continuous” has two meanings. It refers to
emergent phenomena that are continuous with (that resemble) lower-level phenomena in
being informational, and it asserts continuous (repeated) occurrences of emergence
resulting in a hierarchy of levels, each similar to and different from the level below it.
What goes all the way down is information and not psyche, and higher-level
informational phenomena do not actually reduce to lower-level informational
phenomena, since these emergents are not all of the same type.

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 17
Summary
To summarize: this paper agrees with Nagel in rejecting materialist reductionism as an
explanation of mind. In arguing against reductive neutral monism and for emergence as
the best approach to subjective experience, it disagrees with Nagel. In offering a pan-
information but not panpsychism view in which information but not experience goes all
the way down, it modifies Nagel’s position.
Taking up the question posed by Nagel’s book title of whether MND is false, the position
of this paper is (a) that neo-Darwinism is in fact not purely materialist, and (b) that it is
not likely to be proven false in the future, because an emergence-based explanation of
mind is more likely than a neutral monist explanation of mind. The precedent of our
emergence-based explanation of life gives us reason to expect an emergence-based
explanation of mind. If life emerged from matter and mind emerged from life, and if we
focus only on the constitutive question and not also the historical one, we note that both
life and mind were once mysterious, but now only the mystery of mind remains. The
solution of the first mystery suggests that solution of the second is conceivable. We
cannot imagine the contents of such a solution, but we can imagine the relationship such
a solution might have with the rest of scientific knowledge. The kind of solution that
Nagel predicts would revolutionize nearly all of science. A different possibility, one
which is argued here as more likely, is a scientific revolution that is local, and that
doesn’t alter our constitutive explanation of life or our understanding of matter. Of
course, there are those who believe that explanation of subjective experience will forever
elude us, but it is hard to see how one can defend a prophecy about what science will
never be able to do. Some people who hold this belief even claim to demonstrate its truth
by philosophical argument. From the perspective of a working scientist, such alleged
demonstrations are not convincing.
Continuous emergence takes subjective experience to be absent in simple systems. The
emergence of experience, however, is one of multiple emergent informational phenomena
that range over the domains of matter, life, and mind. This justifies a pan-information
ontology, but not the specific panpsychism ontology that Nagel favors but does not
explicate. But a pan-information ontology does not solve the mystery of subjective
experience. To solve this mystery, new scientific discoveries will be required.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Hugo du Coudray, Kirke Wolfe, and John Hammond for helpful
discussions of an earlier draft of this paper and of Nagel’s book. He is also greatly
indebted to the editor and an associate editor of this journal and the two reviewers for
their exceptionally thorough and invaluable critique of that draft. The deficiencies that
remain are of course only the responsibility of the author.

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 18
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1 The list of idealist philosophies is provided by Nagel. About the inclusion of logical positivism, Nagel
says (p. 37) that the logical positivists “analyzed the physical world as a construction out of sense data.”
2 Materialism per se is not necessarily reductionist, and may be joined to an antireductionist or systems
view that recognizes ontological stratification and emergence. This, for example, is the philosophical
position of Mario Bunge (2010). One might say that materialism + reductionism = physicalism, the
position that everything reduces to the realities described by physics. What Nagel means by materialism is
really physicalism, even though he accords some epistemological autonomy to biology when he speaks of
materialist neo-Darwinism. Nagel also uses “naturalism” or “scientific naturalism” as synonymous with
materialist reductionism. This use of “naturalism” is not conventional, since naturalism is not normally
regarded as the same as materialism. Naturalism allows certain nonmaterialist positions: it excludes
supernaturalism, of course, but it does not exclude nontheistic idealism or neutral monism. Also, it does
not exclude an emergence-based view that gives equal status to matter and information.
3 Saying that everything is both matter and mind differs from saying that underlying everything is a
substrate that is neither matter nor mind, although Spinoza says both: underlying everything is substance,
which is neutral but has attributes of both extension (matter) and thought (mind). Spinoza’s view can be
considered a neutral monism and a panpsychism (Seager and Allen-Hermanson 2013). In this view, matter
and mind do not interact, but are parallel alternative perspectives; the duality of attributes – there are more
but we know only these two – is simply asserted. Dual attribute approaches deny that there is a hard
problem of consciousness; like ordinary Cartesian dualism, they aren’t scientifically generative. Versions
of neutral monism that identify experience as the underlying neutral substrate (see Note 6) also avoid the
problem of explaining experience, since they take it as a primitive. For a survey of versions of neutral
monism, and criticisms of them, see Stubenberg (2014).
4 See Note 7, which discusses Sayre’s ontology based in information theory, and the discussion below of
Tonioni’s ideas about consciousness, which are also based in Shannon’s theory.
5 One can, however, imagine joining panpsychism with emergence, and the philosophy of Whitehead
(1929) might be regarded as such a synthesis. Seager and Allen-Hermanson (2013) write, “[Whitehead’s]
panpsychism arises from the idea that the elementary events that make up the world (which he called
occasions) partake of mentality in some – often extremely attenuated – sense, metaphorically expressed in
terms of the mentalistic notions of creativity, spontaneity and perception.” But Hartshorne (1972), writing
about Whitehead’s philosophy, notes its “admission not merely of emergence, but of emergent or creative
synthesis as the very principle of process and reality.” There is uncertainty about exactly what Whitehead
means by the mentalist properties that he attributes to elementary events. If these are just informational, his
account – written 20 years before Shannon’s theory – might be compatible with the position of this paper.
Whitehead was influenced by the work of Alexander (Haberman 2014).
6 In many versions of neutral monism, the neutral substrate is identified as “experience” per se, regarded as
not being tied either to subject (ego) or to object (matter), or the substrate is identified as sense data which
is closely related to experience but detached from an experiencer. For a review of various thinkers in this
tradition, including Mach, James, and Russell, see Stubenberg (2014). Understandably, this view is often
accused of being a disguised idealism, but, from the perspective of this article, a more pertinent objection is
that it is precisely the fact of experience – the hard problem of consciousness – that lacks scientific
explanation. Stubenberg recalls the wry advice of William James: “Whatever you are totally ignorant of
assert to be the explanation of everything else.” James was referring to “soul,” but scientifically speaking,
we are (nearly) totally ignorant about experience, so neutral monists who take experience as ontologically
primitive are boldly following James’ recommendation. Yet, from an ordinary human vantage point,
nothing is more familiar than experience. What one is “totally ignorant of” and what is fundamental
depend on whether one’s standpoint is anthropocentric or world-centric. Proper science is world-centric.
To take experience or sense data as ontologically primitive is to mistake epistemology for ontology.

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 22
7 A pan-informational neutral monism which might be regarded as a kind of panpsychism (Stubenberg
2014, pp.13-14) was proposed by Sayre (1976), who writes, “an ontology of informational states is
adequate for an explanation of the phenomena of mind, as distinct from an ontology of physical events.…It
is a reasonable conjecture that an ontology of information is similarly basic to the physical sciences.”
Sayre later notes, “The neutral monism I advocate holds that the fundamental principle to which both mind
and matter are reducible is not a substance in any sense (Aristotelian, Cartesian, whatever), but is rather [a]
structure of a sort that can only be represented mathematically. This structure is what information
theorists…call “information.” Sayre is correct in arguing that information is relevant to both matter and
mind, but informational ideas are currently insufficient for explaining experience. However, Tonioni’s
(2008) theory, discussed below, is precisely an attempt to use these ideas to approach such an explanation.
8 If Alexander truly regarded high-level properties as ontologically primitive, yet also as not supplementing
fundamental interactions, one is permitted to doubt the coherence of his position.
9 These considerations are operationalized with hypergraphs and information theory (Krippendorff 1986;
Zwick 2001). For the maximal decomposition of ABC, namely A:B:C, where the constituents are taken in
isolation of one another, mutual information or “transmission” T(A:B:C) = H(A:B:C) – H(ABC), which is
a difference of Shannon entropies, is the organization lost in this simple sum of parts. Equivalently, it is
the organization present in ABC. T(AB:AC:BC) = H(AB:AC:BC) – H(ABC) measures the organization
that is lost in the minimal decomposition of R which includes all three pairs of constituents; it is the
inherently triadic and non-decomposable part of the constraint in ABC.
10 Holistic effects are not exotic; they’re more simply known as “interaction effects.” But when holism is at
its most extreme, there can be interaction effects without any main effects. In the limit of maximal holism,
any decomposition destroys all the order in the system. This is illustrated graphically by Borromean rings
(Livingston 1993; Zwick 2001). For the three-constituent system used here as an example, extreme holism
gives T(AB:AC:BC) = T(A:B:C); that is, even decomposing ABC minimally, removing only its inherently
triadic constraint, amounts to a total decomposition of ABC into its separate constituents.
11 Ontology and epistemology should be conceptually distinguished (see Note 6), but they are not
completely separable. In the nonlinear dynamics of chaos, future states of a system are determined but not
predictable because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It is unclear whether this unpredictability
should be regarded as ontological or epistemological, since although predictability might seem to be an
epistemological issue, the impossibility of long-term prediction is an in-principle limitation that stems from
the necessarily finite precision of any measurement. What ultimately emerges in a concrete chaotic system
is not reliably ascertainable by simulation, and thus might be regarded as strong emergence.
12 O’Connor and Wong (2012) regard Bedau’s (1997) notion of weak emergence as epistemological, but
Bedau himself claims that phenomena that in principle are explainable only by simulation exemplify
ontological emergence. He argues that the need for simulation follows from “the system’s underlying
microdynamic whether or not we know anything about this [italics added].” This illustrates the complexity
of interpretations of emergence, and the difficulty of assigning individual thinkers to different positions.
13 Phenomena demonstrable only by simulation can be further explained (see, e.g., Szabo & Teo 2013).
14 Fallacies of composition assume that properties of parts must necessarily be present in the wholes that
they constitute; fallacies of decomposition assume that the properties of wholes must be present in the parts
of which they are constituted. These are both not only logical fallacies but also empirical fallacies.
15 Nagel gives no reason to think that genomic change rates over history are insufficient to account for the
diversity of life. He might better have focused on other problems that afflict a narrowly conceived neo-
Darwinism; for example, its exclusively functional-historical character and its need for structural
augmentations (Kauffman 1993).

Is the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature False? (Zwick) 23
16 The origin of life was never intended to be encompassed in Darwin’s theory, but neo-Darwinism includes
molecular biology, from which one might expect an account of the origin of life.
17 The awkwardness of Bunge’s use of the materialism label is exemplified in his chapter titles of “physical
matter,” “chemical matter,” “living matter,” “thinking matter,” “social matter,” and “artificial matter.”
These would have been more appropriately called physical systems, chemical systems, etc.
18 The three-domain framework of matter, life, and mind was central to Alexander’s (1920) ontology and
also to Morgan’s (1923). Alexander had a fourth domain, deity, which he said emerges from mind. This
will not be addressed here, except to note that Boulding’s (1956) hierarchy, from which Table 2 is adapted,
has a “transcendental” level at its highest point. Alexander also had a level beneath matter, namely
integrated space-time, which was the fundamental basis for the existence of relations.
19 Nagel’s assertion that psycho-physical reduction will forever be a failure is a statement of his belief that
this second step of understanding the relevant empirical data will forever elude us, even if the first step of
acquiring this data is accomplished.
20 An aside on levels (3) and (4): The assertion that genomic information governs metabolic autopoiesis
differs from the perspective of Maturana and Varela (1980), who formulated the idea of autopoiesis. For
these authors, autopoiesis is self-organization that generates its own boundaries, in which information is
dispersed throughout the network, rather than being concentrated in a few constituents. In their view also,
“genetic information” is observer-dependent and not an objective feature of living systems, but this view
would be rejected by nearly all biologists. As defined here, an autopoietic system is one that is closed
organizationally but open to a matter-energy flux, where the internal processes utilize the flux for self-
production, and where the partition between system and environment does not require an externally
provided boundary. By this definition, some nonbiological systems, such as flames, exhibit autopoiesis, so
this property is at most proto-life. “Life” is defined here as encompassing not only metabolic autopoiesis,
but also centralization of organizational information, which codes for metabolic catalysts and confers upon
the system a degree of individuality and the possibility of reproduction that allows populational evolution.
This definition is offered as a statement of the core features of life as a general phenomenon. It is not
intended as a definition of the minimal requirements that must be satisfied for a particular system to be
considered “alive.” An animal that is sterile is no less alive and individual organisms do not evolve, but
life in general requires reproduction and evolution.
21 A scheme of this type by Marvin (1912), where lower-level entities are more ubiquitous than higher-level
entities, influenced Morgan (Clayton 2004).
22 Since the instantiation of information in matter, life, and mind appeared sequentially in history, this raises
the question of teleology: is there, as Teilhard (1959) thought, a tendency in cosmological evolution
towards the distillation, refinement, and concentration of information? Nagel also asks us to consider the
possibility of teleological laws that supplement causal laws, though such additional laws would not be
needed if one posits a strong version of the anthropic principle, where basic physical constants of the
universe are mysteriously “tuned” to allow for and even favor the emergence of life and mind.