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Accepted Review Article for Dec. 2017 edition of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Special
Issue on Integral Biomathics: “The Necessary Conjunction of the Western and Eastern Thought
Traditions for Exploring the Nature of Mind and Life".
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2017.08.010
Chreods, Homeorhesis and Biofields:
FINDING THE RIGHT PATH FOR SCIENCE THROUGH DAOISM1
Arran Gare
Abstract:
C.H. Waddington’s concepts of ‘chreods’ (canalized paths of development) and ‘homeorhesis’ (the
tendency to return to a path), each associated with ‘morphogenetic fields’, were conceived by him as
a contribution to complexity theory. Subsequent developments in complexity theory have largely
ignored Waddington’s work and efforts to advance it. Waddington explained the development of the
concept of chreod as the influence on his work of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy,
notably, the concept of concrescence as a self-causing process. Processes were recognized as having
their own dynamics, rather than being explicable through their components or external agents.
Whitehead recognized the tendency to think only in terms of such ‘substances’ as a bias of European
thought, claiming in his own philosophy ‘to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese,
thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought.’ Significantly, the theoretical biologist who
comes closest to advancing Waddington’s research program, also marginalized, is Mae-Wan Ho.
Noting this bias, and embracing Whitehead’s and Waddington’s efforts to free biology from
assumptions dominating Western thought to advance an ontology of creative causal processes, I will
show how later developments of complexity theory, most importantly, Goodwin’s work on
oscillations, temporality and morphogenesis, Vitiello’s dissipative quantum brain dynamics, Salthe’s
work on hierarchy theory, biosemiotics inspired by Peirce and von Uexküll, Robert Rosen’s work on
anticipatory systems, together with category theory and biomathics, can augment while being
augmented by Waddington’s work, while further advancing Mae-Wan Ho’s radical research program
with its quest to understand consciousness.
Keywords: Epigenesis; Complexity; Biofields; Neurophilosophy; Consciousness; Daoism
‘If you do not change direction, you are likely to end up where you are heading.’
Lao Tzu (ascribed)
1. Introduction
Norbert Wiener introduced the term ‘cybernetics’ in 1948, characterizing it as the scientific study
of control and communication in animals and machines. It subsumed the concept of ‘homeostasis’.
This term was coined by Walter Cannon in 1926, but the concept had been put forward by Claude
1 ‘Daoism’ is the pinyin spelling, generally used by sinologists. The Wade-Giles spelling is ‘Taoism’. ‘Dao’
becomes ‘Tao’. I will use the pinyin spelling throughout since this is almost universally used among academics,
particularly sinologists, except when quoting those (mainly Joseph Needham and Mae-Wan Ho) who used the
Wade-Giles spelling, in which case I will insert the pinyin spelling in square brackets following this.
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Bernard in 1865, and by Friedrich Schelling in 1799. Cybernetics and homeostasis, incorporated into
systems theory and complexity theory, are now central not only to biology but have been taken up in
a whole range of other disciplines, and these concepts are now transforming society. This is not the
case with two concepts developed and named by the theoretical biologist C.H. Waddington, ‘chreod’
(or ‘creode’ or ‘creod’), a path of development, and ‘homeorhesis’, the tendency to return to a
trajectory or path of development when made to deviate from it. These concepts were developed
through work in embryology and the study of biological development, and emerged under the
influence of Alfred North Whitehead from the concept of ‘morphogenetic field’. The notion of a
morphogenetic field, influenced by the concept of field in physics, originated in the work of Hans
Driesch, although the term was not used until 1912 when it was coined by the Lithuanian/Russian
biologist, Alexander G. Gurwitsch (Lipkind, 1998, 39). The notion of mophogenetic field has always
suffered from its association with Driesch’s supposed vitalism and Idealist notion of entelechy as an
immaterial organizing agent. However, I will argue that a deeper problem is antipathy to the concept
of field, even in physics, despite the word being used and the supposed triumph of quantum field
theory. Proponents of the notion morphogenetic field, for instance those influenced by Gurwitsch
such as Marco Bischof and Fritz-Albert Popp, or Brian Goodwin (who undertook his Ph.D. with
Waddington) and the biologists associated with him (such as Gerry Webster, Peter Saunders and Mae-
Wan Ho), are treated as radicals on the margins of mainstream biology (as David Depew and Bruce
Weber noted in their history of Darwinian evolutionary theory), even when, as with Brian Goodwin,
they go out of their way to relate their work to more established research traditions (Depew and
Weber, 1996, 418).
My contention, which I attempt to defend here, is that all these concepts should be fully embraced
and should have been at the centre not only of biology but science generally, but their acceptance has
been hindered by deep assumptions that developed with European civilization that are now blocking
the advance of science. They are crippling our ability to make life and mind intelligible. Through an
historical examination of the development of the concepts of chreod, homeorhesis and field by
Waddington and other theoretical biologists, it is shown that there has been an unreasonable
resistance to their acceptance. My claim is that, because these concepts were influenced by Chinese
philosophy, they were alien to deep assumptions of mainstream Western thought, and this made it
difficult for most biologists to incorporate them into their thinking. The consequence has been a
fragmentation of the challenges to mainstream thought posed by alternative research traditions.
Examining Chinese traditions of thought to reveal the coherence of these concepts when they are not
interpreted and judged through the assumptions of mainstream Western science could free us from
these blockages, it is argued. The work of Mae-Wan Ho, a theoretical biologist aligned with the
tradition of theoretical biology but strongly influenced by Daoist philosophy, is shown to illustrate the
potential of such freedom from old assumptions, in the process, advancing our understanding of life
and consciousness. Her work is shown to pave the way for fully embracing and further developing the
concepts of chreod, homeorhesis and biofields and also integrating other challenges to mainstream
biology and science generally. This provides the basis for putting science on a different path, advancing
not only biology, making the emergence of sentience and consciousness within nature intelligible, but
advancing all the sciences and the humanities. Finally, it is suggested that this could have a major
impact beyond science, facilitating a change in the direction of civilization.
2. Waddington’s Research Program
In the early 1930s a group of outstanding biologists, inspired by the theoretical revolutions that
had taken place in physics, D’Arcy Thompson’s book On Growth and Form (published in 1917), and by
the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, formed the Theoretical Biology Club at Cambridge
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University from which they launched a major new research program, mathematico-physico-chemical
morphology. They then attempted unsuccessfully to get the support of Cambridge University for this,
and its participants dispersed (Abir-Am, 1987, 1-70). Unlike the research program of molecular biology
which developed much later, this research program was never able to gain widespread support.
Waddington, along with Joseph Needham who later became a leading sinologist, was a leading figure
in this movement, and despite the failure to get support from Cambridge University and then losing
his position at Cambridge, continued developing the research program until the end of his life,
providing an alternative to the research program of the molecular biologists and proponents of the
synthetic theory of evolution with their reductionist agenda. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he
organized four major international conferences on theoretical biology, involving most of the leading
opponents of reductionist biology (dominated by molecular biology and the synthetic theory of
evolution) in Anglophone countries. The proceedings of these conferences were published in four
volumes as Towards a Theoretical Biology. These have been a major reference point for strong anti-
reductionist theoretical biology ever since, but Waddington’s research program has seldom been
embraced in its totality.
Central to Waddington’s research program were the concepts of chreod, homeorhesis and
morphogenetic field. Waddington himself wrote that he first used the terms of chreod (originally spelt
creode) and homeorhesis in Strategy of the Genes published in 1957, although he had presented the
idea of homeorhesis in Introduction to Modern Genetics, published in 1939, without naming it
(Waddington, 1968, 178). Early in his career he had noted the various changes in the development of
the embryo involved switching between different possibilities and was affected by a great many genes.
The specificity resided within cells, and was characterized as a ‘masked evocator’. While to begin with,
he thought this evocator had to lie in the switch, through the influence of Alfred North Whitehead’s
characterization of ‘concrescence’ as a process of self-creation, Waddington recognized that this
switching could be an internal property of such concrescence or self-causing self-formation related to
but not determined by other acts of concrescence (Waddington, 1969, 81.). As Whitehead realized,
his concept of concrescence broke with deep assumptions of Western thought, and was much closer
to Indian or Chinese thought. As I will indicate later, through the influence of Chinese thought on
Leibniz and the influence of Leibniz on Whitehead, it was actually influenced by Chinese thought, and
ultimately, by Daoism. While used to characterize epigenesis – the differentiation of cells and
generation of form in an organism’s development from embryos into adults, Waddington defined
‘chreod’ very generally. In The Nature of Life, published in 1962 he wrote:
There seems to be no generally recognized word to indicate a path of change which
is determined by the initial conditions of a system and which once entered upon
cannot be abandoned. I have suggested for this idea the word ‘creode’ from the
two Greek words χρη necessity and άδος a path. We can say then that the
hereditary materials with which an organism begins life define for it a branching
set of creodes. Different parts of the egg will move along one or other of these
creodes, so that they will, after a long process of progressive changes, finish up as
one or other of a number of different end-results, as it might be heart muscle,
nerve, kidney and so on. … A path of development, or creode, exhibit a balance
between inflexibility (tendency to reach the normal end-result in spite of abnormal
conditions) and flexibility (tendency to be modified in response to circumstances).
I have used the word ‘canalization’ to refer to this limited responsiveness of a
developing system (Waddington, 1962, 64).
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Waddington characterized homeorhesis by contrasting it with homeostasis. In homeostasis a
property such as temperature is kept constant through negative feedback. Homeorhesis is the
capacity to maintain or buffer a chreod or path of development over time, so that if the system is
made to deviate from this path of development or trajectory, it will return to the path further along.
For instance, if a large chunk is taken out of an embryo early in its development it can still develop
into a normal adult organism. This buffering was visualized through Waddington’s concept and
representation of epigenetic landscapes. Possible paths of development are represented by valleys,
divided by ridges, which canalize streams. If a stream flowing down a valley is diverted, it will usually
return to the centre of the valley further down. A very large diversion, however, might result in the
stream flowing over a ridge into a different valley. The nature and degree of the buffering is
represented by the steepness and height of the ridges and the difficulty the stream would have in
flowing to a different valley.
While elaborated in the process of characterizing and comprehending developing organisms,
Waddington argued these concepts could be applied more generally, suggesting they could be used
to account for how the brain responds to stimuli (Waddington, 1969, 247), the development of
cognition and language (Waddington, 2012, 288) and how cities (Waddington, 1972, 59-72),
economies and societies develop (Waddington, 1977, chap.7). They were concepts designed not only
to overcome reductionist materialism, but to overcome Cartesian dualism and the divisions between
the natural and human sciences, the humanities and the arts by granting a place to experience in
nature and making thought, consciousness and society intelligible.
All these notions emerged out of the concept of morphogenetic field that Waddington had
embraced early in his career as a biologist. As noted, this concept had been introduced by Driesch in
1891, characterized as an harmonious, equipotential system, and was first explicitly characterized as
field first by Gurwitsch in 1912. The concept was developed in the 1920s and 30s by Hans Spemann
and Paul Weiss, Ross Harrison, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy (the founder of general systems theory).
The field concept, borrowed from the physics of Faraday and Maxwell, functioned first of all as an
analogy with magnetitic fields and as an heuristic device to study and model mathematically how cells
differentiate and organize into forms according to their position in the developing organism. However,
it was sometimes accompanied by physical explanations of its role. Gurwitsch argued that these fields
are immaterial, generated by interpenetrating electric fields produced by the constituent cells to
corollate actions and the development of organisms (Haraway, 2004, 57f.). He had identified
biophotons, specific types of photons produced by living material that influence division rates in
growing organisms, and took these to be products of such fields and central to their organization.
Fields, he argued, unlike time, are not measurable and can only be described geometrically, not
physically. Following Gurwitsch, theorists took morphogenetic fields to be electromagnetic fields, but
in the 1920s they had little success in developing this idea (Bischof, 2000, 1-25). Other theorists
postulated one or more potentially identifiable chemical substances distributed in space to define
fields, with gradients functioning to orient cells, and by the late 1930s, this view came to dominate.
What then is a biological field? To characterize such work, Anton Markoš in a study of marginal
schools of thought in biology, marginal by virtue of their commitment to do justice to the reality of
life, offered a working definition of the concept that remains valid up to the present:
A field is any entity whose components know of each other and therefore behave
differently than when removed from the field. The verb ‘know’ stand for
coherence and nonlocality. It follows that (1) changes in any part of the field are
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felt in all places within the field (coherence), and (2) such changes are inherent in
the field, not a product of any external forcing (nonlocality) (Markoš, 2002, 94f.).
It could be added to this definition that such fields are at least to some degree immanent causes of
themselves (or self-causing) and therefore at least partially autonomous from their environments and
constituents. And they do not have what Whitehead characterized as a fallacious assumption of
modern thought, that what exists must have a ‘simple location’ (Whitehead, 1978, 137). They only
exist as such extensively and over durations. Although the notion of the field is now widely used in
science, it is really alien to Western thought, looked upon with suspicion, and tends to be interpreted
in a way that denies its full significance. For example, the greatest advances in physics over the last
century culminated in the development of quantum field theory, but as I will point out in more detail
later, it is usually interpreted as part of elementary particle physics. Like concrescence, the notion of
field really derives from the influence of Chinese thought, ultimately, Daoism, on Western thought.
The notion of field was embraced by the members of the Theoretical Biology Club. It was first taken
up among this group by Joseph Woodger while collaborating with von Bertalanffy. As with the other
members of the Theoretical Biology Club, Woodger was strongly influenced by Whitehead who, under
the influence of Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell and Hendrik Lorenz and the revolutions taking
place in physics, had attempted to provide a philosophy that could make the reality of fields intelligible
(Desmet, 2015, 190-223). As I will show later in this paper, the work of Faraday and Maxwell, focussing
on and showing the relationship between magnetism, electricity and light, was really the triumph of
the anti-Newtonian Romantic natural philosophers inspired by Friedrich Schelling and Roger
Boscovich, who in turn were influenced by Leibniz. Both Schelling and Leibniz were directly influenced
by Asian thought. Woodger was defending an anti-reductionist organicism in opposition to both
mechanistic thinking and what he took to be Driesch’s vitalism with his Platonic notion of entelechy.
Needham and Waddington, who had worked in Spemann’s laboratory in Germany in 1932-33, also
embraced the term ‘field’. Waddington introduced the notion of the individuation field to describe
the formation of different organs with characteristic individual shapes. He emphasised that these
fields could not be equated with a particular region, since if a field is cut in two, each half could
constitute a complete field, while two fields brought together could constitute themselves as one field.
Also, if part of a field is removed, the remainder could compensate for the defect and become
complete again (Waddington, 1956, 27-28). These dynamic fields are influenced by both genes and
the environment, but have their own, self-stabilizing trajectories.
Needham, who began as a biochemist concerned with the forms generated by chemicals, was also
concerned to defend a hierarchical conception of nature with the focus on different levels of
organization and the patterns associated with these. He also embraced the notion of field, which he
characterized as wholes actively organizing themselves. Needham noted that while the notion of field
was based on an analogy, it is possible that there is a formal identity between magnetic and
morphogenetic fields. He acknowledged that the field concept has suffered greatly from inaccurate
definition, but defended Waddington for having provided the best definition of ‘field’ as ‘a system of
order such that the position taken by unstable entities in one portion of the system bears a definite
relation to the position taken up by unstable entities in other portions.’ It is then ‘a dynamic
description of a spatio-temporal activity, not a mere geometrical picture of a momentary time-slice in
the organism’s history’ (Needham, 1968, 108). He attempted to account for these field properties
biochemically, with proteins seen as crystalline fibres oriented in patterns by active substances or
hormones (Needham, 1968, 96ff., Webster and Goodwin, 1996, 97, Haraway, 2004, 124).
While Waddington did not refer to fields in his later work, he still assumed this concept. René
Thom, who collaborated with Waddington to develop a mathematics able to conceptualize chreods
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and homeorhesis, suggested in a letter to Waddington that ‘chreod’ is a synonym for ‘support of a
morphogenetic field’ (1968, 168). Waddington agreed with this suggestion. Thom, who played a
prominent role at the famous Serbelloni conferences on theoretical biology in the late 1960s and early
70s, developed differential topology to model epigenetic landscapes, including paths of development
and what is involved in the switch from one path of development to another (later called
catastrophes), and coined the term ‘attractor’ to characterize the end point to which paths develop.
Waddington also invited Lewis Wolpert to the first of these conferences in 1968. Wolpert’s prime
concern was to account for spatial pattern formation in organisms, relating this to Waddington’s
concepts of chreods, homeorhesis and epigenetic landscapes. Although he did not use the term ‘field’
in his contribution (he did use it in his later work), the problems he was addressing in his contribution,
how the proper proportions between parts are developed and maintained, how within limits, a part
can produce the whole or can become any other part, and how the polarity is maintained so that the
parts maintain their correct positions, were essentially the problems of defining a field. His approach
was to ask how positional information is conveyed to units to compute their position in the field and
respond appropriately, and how this process could be modelled (Wolpert, 1968, 125-133). He
proposed the existence of chemical morphogens, the gradients of which would serve to provide this
information, triggering differentiated responses at particular thresholds. He was universally seen as
contributing to the development of the concept of field.
At this time Waddington believed such positional information would be provided by patterns of
oscillations. As he wrote in the proceedings of the second conference on theoretical biology:
We could not have a 'neural plate substance, a fore-limb substance, a hind-limb
substance' etc. but neural plate, fore-limb or hind-limb oscillatory patterns, which
could be regarded as analogous to musical themes or chord sequences. The later
phases of differentiation into the various cartilages, bones, muscles, etc., must
certainly involve the 'activation' of different structural genes controlling the
proteins in these different sorts of cells; but we could interpret these changes as
similar to the development of the initial themes according to the conventions of
some school of classical music composition (1969, 180f.).
When differentiation is conceived in this way, neighbouring cells can be taken to act as temporal
templates which entrain the oscillations of the cells according to their position in the organism, a
process that is now better understood than when Waddington was writing (Kauffman, 1993).
In an anthology co-edited by Waddington and published soon after the theoretical biology
conferences, Evolution and Consciousness, included a chapter by Ilya Prigogine on the slime mould
which supported this conjecture. The slime mould transforms itself from a community of protozoa
into a single, multi-celled organism. The isolated cells (between 10 and 100,000) which develop from
spores exude the chemical acrasin at increasing rates as the food supply is depleted, while at the same
time becoming more sensitive to this chemical. The increased production destabilises the
homogeneous solution producing a far from thermodynamically equilibrium state which generates
dissipative structures in the form of oscillations. A certain critical wavelength exists which determines
the spatial distribution of the cells. The cells oriented by this wavelength then aggregate, eventually
forming a structure in which some cells become rich in cellulose and develop into a foot or base while
others rise above it and become rich in polysaccharides. The mass on top eventually develops as a
fruit, producing a large number of spores. Prigogine noted that predictions of the behaviour of
individual cells based on the theory of dissipative structures have been verified by Keller and Segal
(Prigogine, 1976, 107ff.). This anthology coincided with the redefinition of such anti-reductionist work
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around the concept of complexity theory, a reorientation embraced by Waddington in the book he
was working on, Tools of Thought, published posthumously.
3. The Subordination of Waddington’s Research Program
The conferences on theoretical biology were not meant to establish a dogmatic position but to
define a direction for further research in biology, bringing together the most promising developments
in theoretical biology and related disciplines, revealing the problems that had to be addressed and the
challenges that lay ahead. If there was a target to all this it was to overcome and replace the
reductionist thinking associated with molecular biology and the synthetic theory of evolution that had
reduced biology to chemistry and statistics, with evolution explained entirely in terms of variation and
selection of genes. Waddington gave a place to advanced developments in mathematics and
theoretical physics, and included the burgeoning new field of complexity science, best represented at
the conferences by Stuart Kauffman who later became a key figure in the development of complexity
theory. Despite this, Waddington’s research program failed to define the direction of biology, even
among those who appreciated the deficiencies in molecular biology and the synthetic theory of
evolution.
There were a number of reasons for this failure. One was that there were major differences
between the theorists. Thom played a prominent role at the conferences as someone who had worked
with Waddington to develop mathematical models adequate to his concepts. However, he was only
one of the mathematicians, and his Platonist or Pythagorean understanding of mathematics differed
not only from other mathematicians, but from the conception of mathematics defended by Alfred
North Whitehead, the philosopher who had most influenced Waddington. David Bohm, the radical
quantum physicist who was challenging not only mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics
but their very idea of science, played a prominent role at the conference. Howard Pattee, another
theoretical physicist, upholding a more conventional view of science, also attended the conference.
Pattee’s conception of epistemological cuts, used to account for how molecules become symbols and
to explain control, was based on John von Neumann’s interpretation of quantum theory. If the insights
of these two physicists are to be embraced, some work is required to reconcile their differences.
Kauffman’s study of the emergence of order in Boolean networks simulating autocatalytic sets able
to catalyse their own formation, fed into the later work of the Santa Fe Institute established in 1984,
in which he came to play a leading role. His later work demonstrated the possibility of self-stabilizing
canalizing of development purely on the basis of such Boolean networks (Kauffman, 1993, p.447f.).
While vastly superior to the crude accounts of life of the molecular biologists, this was a bottom up
explanation for the emergence of order and did not invoke support from the concept of
morphogenetic fields, although there was no reason for not combining these two approaches, with
fields providing the conditions under which Boolean networks can form, exist, self-catalyse, develop
and be utilized. And in fact Kauffman’s work on the origins of life, explaining it in terms of self-
organization based on the emergence of autocatalytic sets in which chemicals catalyse or inhibit each
other’s reactions, is really a holistic explanation, showing how an environment is formed that
constrains its components to reproduce it, to some extent transforming these components in doing
so. However, many of those involved in the development of complexity theory saw complexity as it
had initially been defined by Warren Weaver (1948), the originator of the project to understand
complexity. For Weaver and his orthodox followers, complexity was the last frontier for reductionist
science. Weaver did not take seriously the anti-reductionist traditions of thought that had made
complex phenomena their focus to challenge Newtonian science and justify radically new alternatives.
For complexity theorists following Weaver, the appearance of complex patterns at a macroscale is
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nothing but an appearance generated by interaction between very large numbers of elementary
components acting on principles that require no reference to these broader patterns, and in no way
are the effect of these broader patterns. There is no acknowledgement of downward causation. This
has been clearly recognized by James Crutchfield, a prominent member of the Santa Fe Institute
(1994). Norbert Wiener had already appreciated this in the 1950s when he argued that cybernetics,
which underpins much of complexity theory, should be seen as a triumph of mechanistic materialism
(1981, 44).
So, the marginalization of Waddington’s work and the failure to take up his core concepts was not
simply a matter of the continued dominance of molecular biology and the synthetic theory of
evolution. These were being effectively criticised from a number of directions, although from less
radical positions than had been defended by Waddington. Most importantly, it came from more
mechanistic forms of system theory that had embraced cybernetics, information theory as developed
by Shannon, Alan Turing’s concept of a computation, von Neumann’s idea of a computer, and the
reductionist forms of complexity theory as initially promoted by Weaver (Scott, 2007), including neural
nets, spin glass and cellular automata. Such approaches can give a place to emergence analogous to
the emergence of mind within the brain. For example, through the individual entrainment of individual
alternating-current generators in a national electrical power grid, a virtual governor emerges which
controls the entire systems, even though it has no palpable or locatable physical existence. Such
mutual entrainment of oscillations and their effects are really examples of cybernetic feedback, and
have been used to develop much more complex control systems designed to achieve ‘generalized
optimal-superadaptive control’ (Dewan, 1976, 179). This can be taken as a model of the mind’s
relation to the body. The success of general systems theory developing such ideas reduced the appeal
of approaches requiring a more radical rethinking of the assumptions of science.
The more radical ways of thinking promoted by Waddington were dismissed as vague, lacking the
rigour required to really advance science. Even some of Waddington’s erstwhile defenders distanced
themselves from his work. Thom in his introductory contribution to the conference on theoretical
biology organized by Brian Goodwin and Peter Saunders in 1987, belittled Waddington’s
achievements. Listing the words that Waddington had coined, he wrote;
‘Individuation’ was the first term proposed by Waddington to describe the overall
organising effect of an ‘organizer’ (such as the celebrated dorsal lip of the
blastophor in amphibians). I do not think this attempted ‘word launching’ was a
successful one. … ‘Epigenetics’ was the result of a marriage synthesis between
‘Epigenesis’ (the classical older theory opposed to ‘preformation’ in embryological
theory) and ‘genetics’ …. Personally I am inclined to think that the distinction in
embryology between ‘genetic’ and ‘epigenetic’ events is a moot question (perhaps
as ill-defined as the classical problem of distinguishing inherited from acquired
characters). … Canalization was the great discovery already presented in
Waddington’s (1940) book, Organizers and Genes. … Among biologists, however,
it was considered as a useful concept but with no explicit application. The same
observation applies also to the allied concept of creod. … I adopted the word, but
in my mind for a fairly precise situation. The concept as Waddington proposed it
was obviously too general, as nothing was said about the nature of the process and
how it could be described. … Because of this too general, fuzzy setting, the creod
concept had little relevance for verbally described processes. … I claim that the
general theory of morphogenesis in biology has been plagued by vague
conceptualizing and, accordingly, by a proliferation of ill-defined terminology. …
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Had people realised that the notion of a morphogenetic field is a purely descriptive
notion, by itself devoid of any explanatory power, then a lot of trouble could have
been avoided (Thom, 1989, 2,3 & 4).
Thom was more sympathetic to the notion of homeorhesis and the idea of epigenetic landscapes. He
wrote of Waddington’s picturing of the epigenetic landscape, ‘There is no doubt that the model of the
epigenetic landscape was for me the decisive clue to the discover of catastrophe models’ (Thom, 1989,
5).
4. Reasons for Defending Waddington’s Research Program
Why then support Waddington’s research project? One reason is that reductionist theories in
science, even mainstream complexity theory, not only cannot account for experience; they render
experience, including feeling, awareness, emotion, consciousness and the sense of being a subject of
experience, unintelligible. At most, experience can be granted a place as an epiphenomenon, and this
is merely an ad hoc acknowledgement of the obvious reality of experience. While it is possible that
some people have evolved into things approaching automatons who can only operate mechanically
and have no sense of being conscious (which appears to be the case with behaviourists and
psychologists promoting a computational model of the ‘mind’), even these post-humans can be shown
to experience pain and pleasure, and even these are incomprehensible from the perspective of
mainstream science. Secondly, what one finds among most reductionists is that, as with experience,
a whole range of phenomena, including final causes, are surreptitiously assumed despite their
inconsistency with their reductionist program, and many of these assumptions derive from the
traditions of anti-reductionist thought exemplified and further advanced by Waddington. Thirdly,
Waddington’s ideas and those he influenced have been taken up, developed and proven to be fruitful,
but for the most part in a fragmentary way that has prevented the achievements of this tradition from
being properly acknowledged and integrated. However, the most important reason, I will argue, is
that Waddington’s ideas were inspired by a radical tradition of thought, specifically, the work of Alfred
North Whitehead, that had challenged the deep assumptions of modern science, assumptions that
had given plausibility to Cartesian dualism and reductionist materialism. By virtue of having challenged
and offered alternatives to these assumptions, this tradition could provide a far more coherent
research tradition than mainstream science is capable of providing, even in its more radical forms as
with complexity theory. This radical research tradition can incorporate what advances have been
made by the molecular biologists and reductionist forms of complexity theory, while these approaches
cannot account for the insights and achievements of the more radical anti-reductionists. And it is
because of the failure to appreciate this with all its implications that advances in science challenging
mainstream science, are dismissed or misrepresented, fragmented and then forgotten about. To begin
with, however, I will examine claims that Waddington’s ideas could not be developed with sufficient
rigour to justify his aspirations for them to become the dominant tradition in biological thought.
The work of Thom and those he influenced illustrates much of this. Thom’s criticism of vague
definitions had already been made by Needham in 1936. There will always be vague definitions, and
this is also true of mainstream science. As C.S. Peirce argued, it is important to have vague terms, or
‘real vagues’ as well as more precisely defined terms, if for no other reason than the future is open
and it is necessary to give a place to future possibilities that cannot be anticipated. The theoretical
‘objects’ that science investigates, such as atoms, fields, systems or whatever, have to be defined
vaguely to facilitate their investigation that will involve altering how these are understood, and to
provide reference points for different theories of these objects. Science advances not by achieving
absolutely precise, final definitions of concepts that are ascertained to be true but by continually
10
refining definitions (for instance, what is an atom, or what is an electron, as well as what is a field)
rethinking them in relation to other concepts, occasionally putting forward new and/or rival concepts,
requiring both vague concepts and precisely defined concepts. This point was also made by David
Bohm, following Alfred Korzybski, who pointed out that more precise concepts, such as those
developed in mathematics, support longer chains of deductions, allowing the implications of theories
to be explored, but at the expense of more limited applicability (Bohm & Peat, 2000, 1-14). The
richness and complexity of what there is, is abstracted away from, and to fail to acknowledge this is
to commit what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, taking abstractions for
concrete reality. In this regard, the relationship between Waddington and Thom echoed the
relationship between Faraday and James Clark Maxwell. Faraday knew little mathematics, but in 1846
developed the concept of electrical and magnetic fields and their relationship, and applied it in his
technological innovations. Maxwell formulated Faraday’s ideas through mathematics in 1864,
presenting his more refined concept of the electromagnetic field, revealing far more than Faraday
could about the nature of this field, showing that light could be accounted for as electromagnetic
radiation, and predicting the discovery of radio waves. However, all this was still dependent upon
using the more informal concept of field developed by Faraday to characterize what was being
investigated.
Thom was able to clarify and reveal the implications of Waddington’s non-mathematical ideas. This
meant going well beyond the intuitive understanding of the ideas Waddington was developing; but
this is what should be expected. As P.T. Saunders and C. Kubal put it, ‘While the properties of the
epigenetic landscape can be understood in terms of those systems of non-linear differential equations,
the converse is not true. It would be astonishing if it were; a pictorial representation, however
ingenious, can hardly be expected to capture all the richness of a whole class of complex mathematical
structures’ (Saunders and Kubal, 1989, 17). However, it was a mistake by Thom to believe that his
mathematics left behind Waddington’s concepts. This was a consequence of Thom’s commitment to
a Pythagorean Platonism that identified reality with its mathematical representation, a commitment
that led Thom to defend ‘scientism’, the view that science should at least aim to provide the one
universal language capable of grasping the whole of reality, and in accordance with this, to defend
determinism (Thom, 1983a, chap.16, Thom, 1983b, 11-21). This was challenged by Prigogine who (in
accordance with Whitehead’s philosophy and his critique of the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ -
mistaking abstract models for concrete reality) argued that all mathematics involves idealizations and
so cannot be identified with reality as such (Prigogine, 1983, 36-42). The relationship between the
morphogenetic field identified through a relatively vague concept and the mathematical description
of this was clarified by Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin. Accepting Rom Harré and E.H. Madden’s
criticism of the conflation of logical necessity, through which predictive deductions are made, and
natural necessity, by which causal powers bring about effects, they wrote ‘the term “morphogenetic
field” denotes something real, irrespective of the adequacy of our theories, because we can physically
manipulate fields and because they cause things to happen. Knowledge of the existence of fields is,
arguably, a permanent addition to our knowledge of what exists in the world’ (Webster and Goodwin,
1996, 98).
Subsequently, it was shown by others observing what was being left out by Thom’s mathematics,
that Thom’s mathematical ideas were limited. This led to the development of more general
mathematics that integrated Thom’s ideas with chaos theory and other developments in mathematics
into a general mathematics of complexity. E.C. Zeeman, Thom’s disciple, contributed to this at the
conference organized by Goodwin, where he noted ‘the failure of [Thom’s] programme for structural
stability’, and sought to overcome this by introducing ‘a little stochasticity’ (Zeeman, 1989, 9).
11
5. Brian Goodwin’s Development of Waddington’s Research
Program
It could be argued then that the failure of Waddington’s research program compared to molecular
biology was just an unfortunate confluence of circumstances. That this was not the case is evident
from the career of someone with outstanding ability and perseverance who carried on Waddington’s
project. If there was one person among the participants of Waddington’s theoretical biology
conferences who best represented Waddington’s own vision of the future for theoretical biology, it
was his former student, Brian Goodwin. Goodwin maintained his commitment to the concept of
morphogenetic fields, to explaining these through oscillatory patterns and to developing forms of
mathematics adequate to such ideas. Like Prigogine, Goodwin was committed to comprehending all
this through the concepts of thermodynamics. He went on to organize the conference referred to
earlier on theoretical biology and to lead a group of radical theoretical biologists in Britain to challenge
mainstream biology, relating this work to structuralism and participating in the burgeoning field of
complexity studies. Goodwin contributed to advances in mathematics beyond catastrophe theory and
became a major figure in the development of complexity theory, supporting Waddington’s concept of
chreods by showing that development in organisms is ‘an intrinsically robust process’ in which ‘the
dynamic organisation of the system resulting from the interactions for the constituent processes
results in a morphogenetic sequence that does not require continuous fine tuning or parameters to
guide the system to a particular state’ (Webster and Goodwin, 1996, 233). This was illustrated with
the single celled organism, Acetabularia, as well as with multi-celled organisms. However, while having
some influence, the group associated with Goodwin remained marginal. As Depew and Weber (1996,
418) observed, he did not occupy positions in top universities, and ended up teaching at Schumacher
College. And as noted, some of Waddington’s core ideas were simply dropped. Goodwin’s work shows
that Waddington’s concepts can be rigorously defended and can guide further developments, but also
why the more ambitious research program of Waddington has disintegrated and faded into the
background.
Goodwin’s first major work, Temporal Organization in Cells: A Dynamic Theory of Cellular Control
Processes (1963) used the mathematics of classical statistical thermodynamics to show how control
of metabolism and epigenesis involving spatial differentiation and hierarchical ordering could be
achieved by coupled biochemical oscillators. The role of coupled oscillators was taken much further
than in reductionist forms of systems theory in that the organism itself was shown to identify and
respond to resultant patterns, and deploy at specific times and places the conditions for such patterns
to emerge, thereby advancing one of Waddington’s key conjectures - that oscillations served to
coordinate activity within the organism. Goodwin also showed through this approach how different
oscillations characterized by radically different process rates could both be insulated from each other
and influence each other, thereby explaining hierarchical ordering. While using statistics to avoid the
problem of dealing with nonlinear oscillators, the work was commended, despite these limitations, in
a review by Robert Rosen (1965).
Oscillations and rhythmic activity in achieving coordination was acknowledged, although not
emphasised, in all Goodwin’s later work, work in which he fully embraced and developed the concept
of field. One of his contributions to an anthology was titled ‘Developing Organisms as Self-Organizing
Fields’ (1987). It is by developing the concept of field that Goodwin explained Waddington’s notion of
chreods, that is, the capacity of a developing organism to respond to various perturbations so that at
the end the result of development is perfectly normal. He pointed out that the kind of explanation for
this offered by Wolpert, in which genes within cells interpret signals that specify their position in the
field, their ‘positional information’, cannot account for pattern formations associated with the
12
development of limbs. This requires holistic explanations in which constraints arise because elements
are generated in groups which are constrained relative to each other. This process can be modelled
by field equations. Thus a transformation from a five digit pattern to a four digit pattern of toes in
frog’s foot does not involve the loss of an individual digit, ‘but a change in whole aspects of the pattern’
(Goodwin, 1984, 113). Goodwin showed that ‘domains of distributed potential, which are the
morphological fields of developing organisms, give rise to actualized patterns of localized structure,
which is overt organismic morphology. … Each organism carries within it the potential of creating a
great variety of forms, for each morphogenetic field is described by equations with many solutions
which define the set of morphological possibilities’ (1984, 118).
In this scheme, what Waddington called a chreod becomes ‘a trajectory through the space of
solutions of the morphogenetic field equations’. The high degree of stability through variations in
temperature etc. is what ‘Waddington (1957) called genetic canalization’ (Goodwin, 1984, 118).
Goodwin characterized a fertilized egg as a ‘developing organism insofar as it is a totality describable
by a field,’ which cleaves to produce ‘complex parts such as neural plate, limb fields and eye fields’
(1987, 176). In accordance with Waddington’s broader understanding of chreods, he showed that
‘once parameters were adjusted so that the intrinsic wavelengths of emergent patterns were smaller
than the size of the initial regenerative domain that detailed structure could be generated, the system
had a natural tendency to pass through a sequence of shape changes’ (Webster and Goodwin, 1996,
233). He later described this process as self-stabilizing cascades of ‘symmetry-breaking bifurcations
that have an intrinsically hierarchical property, finer spatial detail emerging within already established
structures’ (Goodwin, 1994, 100). On this basis Goodwin claimed that ‘morphogenetic fields … have
a definition as precise as any field used in physics’ (1994, 88) and implicitly characterized chreods
through them.
Goodwin developed another aspect of Waddington’s research program. In the epilogue to the
conclusion of the fourth and last symposium on theoretical biology, Waddington commented on
Howard Pattee’s contribution to the symposium in which Pattee had grappled with the question, How
does a molecule become a message? Pattee concluded that a symbol can only function as a symbol
when it is part of a system of symbols. Waddington suggested that the structures mediating global
simplicity can profitably be compared with language and suggested that theorists of biology are just
beginning to feel their way towards a language-metalanguage analogy so that the disjunction between
genotype and phenotype will be seen as the analogue of symbol and symbolized. He argued that this
requires a rethinking of what language is, arguing in opposition to most philosophers of language,
including logical positivists and Chomsky, that the basic character of language is imperative, not
indicative. It is meant to have an effect. As he concluded, ‘To a biologist, therefore, a language is a set
of symbols, organized by some sort of generative grammar, which makes possible the conveyance of
(more or less) precise commands for action to produce effects on the surrounding of the emitting and
the recipient entities’ (Waddington, 2012, 288).
Waddington was severely critical of philosophers of language for their preoccupation with
statements, referring favourably to Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner who had argued that we are, first
and foremost, practically engaged in the world, and should understand language in the context of such
practical engagement. Utterances are first and foremost imperatives, and descriptions have a
secondary status. Invoking Piaget and Bruner was not a random choice. Waddington had participated
in an earlier conference on the life sciences in which both Piaget and Bruner participated (Koestler
and Smithies, 1971). Piaget, who characterized his study of cognitive development as genetic
epistemology, describing cognitive development as a process of assimilating inputs from the
environment to cognitive structures and then accommodating these structures to better assimilate
13
inputs from its environment, fully embraced Waddington’s work and characterized cognitive
development as he himself had theorised it, as having its own chreods (Piaget, 1971, 18ff.).
Waddington in turn praised Piaget and argued that his own work on genetic assimilation could be used
to defend Piaget’s claims if it were ever shown that cognition and the ability to use language could
develop in individuals in the absence of practical engagement in the world. This was later shown and
used to dismiss Piaget’s work.
Following Waddington again, Goodwin characterized organisms as cognitive and cooperative
systems, drawing upon developments in linguistics to develop this characterization (Goodwin 1976,
chap.7). Goodwin and his colleague Gerry Webster aligned themselves with structuralism, a broad
intellectual movement centred in France that was very fashionable at the time and later, and under
the influence of Webster and Goodwin, was strongly promoted in biology by Atuhiro Sibutani (1989).
While Sibutani aligned himself with the work of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Chomsky, Goodwin,
following Waddington, aligned himself with Piaget, starting his contribution to an anthology published
in 1989 devoted to structuralist biology with the sentence, ‘Structuralism is based upon the
proposition that actual phenomena are particular realisations from a defined set of possibilities’
(1984, 49). Piaget’s notion of cognitive structures as self-regulating systems of transformations did
have much in common with Waddington’s notion of fields as this concept had been defended and
developed by Goodwin.
The turn to structuralism, while promising, was problematic in several ways. Piaget was not a
mainstream structuralist but a genetic structuralist, highly critical of many of the other structuralists
(Piaget, 1971). Using Piaget to advance theoretical biology was a promising way of relating biology to
cognitive development. With its assumption of the primacy of action and his interest in evolution as
well as development of cognition, Piaget’s work, which gave a major place to the development of
signs, including language, could also provide a bridge to the work of the biosemioticians influenced by
C.S. Peirce. However, the French structuralists, and to a lesser extent, Piaget, were aligned with the
structuralists in mathematics, a highly formalist approach that did not support Waddington’s
understanding of mathematics, and which later ran into insuperable difficulties (Corry, 2004).
Goodwin, and Peter Saunders, who also embraced structuralism at this time, were influenced by this
philosophy of mathematics. As a consequence, they virtually identified structures with what could be
represented through mathematics, rejecting concern with any substratum, or aspects of reality that
could not be grasped in this way. This involved assuming that all creativity could be mathematically
modelled, prestating all possibilities before their realization, the claim that Stuart Kauffman later
rejected and provided very good arguments to reject (Kauffman and Gare, 2015, 219-244).
Also, reviving the rational morphology of the pre-Darwinian biologists associated with this
structuralism meant abandoning some of Waddington’s core ideas. Goodwin not only argued that
evolutionary theory should be subsumed under a theory of development, but denied any significance
to variation and selection in explaining evolution, suggesting that to explain organisms by referring to
their parents is equivalent to explaining the sun rising today by pointing out that it rose yesterday.
This denied any significance to Waddington’s theory of genetic assimilation whereby the striving of
organisms exploring new possibilities was granted a central place in evolution, with the survival of the
most adaptable organisms concentrating genes over generations, facilitating the adoption of this
particular chreod until the chreod developed without external stimuli.
The consequence of this was that what was a strengthening of Waddington’s research program,
bringing it up-to-date and opening new directions for research, through efforts to fit in with current
academic fashions helped disguise this program, the concepts associated with it, and its heuristic
power, while weakening its appeal. As Anton Markoš wrote of this movement, ‘Biological
14
structuralism was the red herring of the 1980s in biology, surviving tolerated, neglected, or ridiculed
on the margins of mainstream biology’ (2002, 81).
One of the last books written by Waddington, Tools of Thought, was largely focussed on the
problem of understanding complexity, and the next phase of Goodwin’s work was to embrace this
quest, a quest that exploded with the establishment of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984. As a member of
this institute and aligned with this project, Goodwin reformulated all his work around complexity
theory, making major contributions to this research. A later book, written with Ricard Solé, Signs of
Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology and published in 2000, provided an overview of all work in this
research program along with accounts of their own research. This involved accepting one of the major
advances in complexity theory, the study of networks and their common features, self-organized
criticality, fractal patterns and the creativity associated with systems moving to the edge of chaos.
This did not involve a rejection of earlier work, but a new characterization of it. Through the study
of networks it could be shown how living processes achieve functionality and robustness in their
organization through their interconnectivity. Goodwin’s engagement with this continued his quest to
overcome all forms of reductionism. One facet of complexity theory embraced by Goodwin was the
appreciation that mathematical models valid in one area, for instance in physics, could be valid in a
totally different area. For instance, the Ising model and related models developed to model the
magnetization of iron have been successfully applied to the distribution of galaxies, the adaptability
of RNA viruses to their hosts, the interiors of rain forests, the development of cities, and voting
behaviour. In each case it is shown how individuals responding only to their immediate neighbourhood
generate patterns over a long range. With the mathematical model being applicable to a vast range
of phenomena suggests there is no need to privilege one level of reality to explain phenomena.
However, as noted above, the goal of complexity as defined by Warren Weaver had really been to
explain complexity through mainstream reductionist science, and many complexity theorists, notably
Per Bak, were overtly reductionist in how they defined their work (Gare, 2000). Goodwin’s alignment
with such thinkers led to a tendency to focus on patterns while ignoring the forces generating them.
This was a tendency criticised by Howard Pattee who pointed out that computers can now simulate
any pattern, and doing so cannot equate to explanation (1996, 381). This was not the case with the
study of dissipative structures by Prigogine whose work played a major role in the development of
complexity theory, since Prigogine’s work was always tied to the development of thermodynamics. It
meshed well with Waddington’s research program, and it was embraced by Goodwin. However,
despite Goodwin’s early alignment with statistical mechanics, Prigogine did not define the direction
of his work in complexity theory. So while chreods, homeorhesis and fields were absorbed into
Goodwin’s effort to understand complexity, they were relabelled again, further disguising
Waddington’s research program and blunting the challenge to the metaphysical assumptions of
mainstream science.
In Goodwin’s last work, Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture, the full range of ideas
associated with Waddington’s work were revisited and supported, including the inspiration
Waddington gained from Whitehead. It became evident that despite the rigorous defence of
Goodwin’s claims, the boldness of this last work diminished the status accorded his work by
mainstream biologists. This was a possibility recognized by Goodwin. Referring to work influenced by
Whitehead attempting to give a place to feelings in nature, Goodwin wrote, ‘it remains a territory of
extreme disagreement and dispute, and is generally rejected by the scientific and philosophical
establishment, which continues to be split by the paralysing dilemma of living with and by feelings and
qualities but being uncertain of their reality’ (Goodwin, 2007, p.82). I will come back to this later.
15
6. The Fragmented Advance of the Post-Mechanist Tradition
The changes in direction of Goodwin’s work were followed by most, but not all of the radical
biologists with whom Goodwin was aligned, some of whom had participated in Waddington’s
symposia on theoretical biology. Despite these changes in direction and efforts to align their work
with different research traditions rather than Waddington’s research program, Waddington’s ideas
were advanced. Like Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman reaffirmed the bold quest for a reconception of life
and its place in the cosmos present in Waddington’s symposia in his 2016 book Humanity in a Creative
Universe. Although this was not defined in relation to Waddington, it largely reaffirmed the radical
ambitions of the movement for mathematico-physico-chemical morphology, including giving a place
to experience and consciousness (Kauffman, 2016). And there have been other developments in
biology, uninfluenced by the theoretical biology movement, but consistent with it and capable of
further supporting it. The problem is that because Waddington’s research program was marginalized,
such ideas have not been properly integrated and fully developed. For anyone wishing to defend and
revive Waddington’s vision it is necessary to recognize all such achievements and relate these to each
other.
The work of Thom itself is important in this regard. Despite having distanced himself from
Waddington, the trajectory of this thought and those who were influenced by Waddington’s ideas,
and despite not acknowledging this, preferring to relate his ideas to Aristotle’s philosophy, Thom
continued to advance Waddington’s concepts. This was also true of those influenced by Thom. For
instance, a major work on morphogenesis taking Thom as a key reference point edited by Sarti,
Montanari and Galofaro, Morphogenesis and Individuation (2015), is clearly dealing with a theme
central to Waddington’s research project, but does not mention Waddington. The term ‘individuation’
is taken from the French theorist Gilbert Simondon. Along with morphogenesis, Thom became
interested in signs and language and how they function, writing two books largely devoted to this
(1983 & 1990). This work was the main inspiration for the biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri which,
granting a place to mechanistic explanations, challenged mainstream biosemiotics inspired mainly by
the work of C.S. Peirce and Jacob von Üexkull (Barbieri, 2003; Barbieri, 2008). It made no mention of
Waddington’s conjectures.
Biosemiotics inspired by Peirce and Jacob von Üexkull and led by Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi Kull,
emerged as another radical tradition alongside not only mainstream biology, but also the tradition of
theoretical biology inspired by Waddington and his colleagues (Favareau, 2008). These
biosemioticians have also embraced the work of Gregory Bateson, which itself was inspired by the
work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics, while partly under the influence of Whitehead, rejecting its
mechanistic aspects (Hoffmeyer, 2008). Carrying on Wiener’s project, Bateson deployed cybernetics
to anthropology as well as biology, redefining information non-mechanistically in the process as ‘a
difference that makes a difference’ (1972, 453). This non-reductionist form of cybernetics was entirely
commensurable with Waddington’s theoretical work. Links did develop between the biosemioticians
and the theoretical biology movement, however. Howard Pattee’s work on how a molecule becomes
a symbol was accompanied by a major contribution to conceptualizing hierarchical order. He argued
that such order develops through new, enabling constraints. This means that there is no need to
postulate a life-force and then a Cartesian mind over and above physical processes to account for life
and mind. Their emergence can be accounted for as self-reproducing constraints. This idea was taken
up vigorously in ecology by Tim Allen and then in theoretical biology by Stan Salthe, who pointed out
that semiotics as it was being developed by biosemioticians could be understood through such
constraints (Salthe, 1993). Pattee’s work was then embraced by the biosemioticians. And later,
16
Hoffmeyer did examine and utilize Waddington’s ideas. However, they have remained separate
research programs.
While Barbieri has debated with these Peircian biosemioticians, the work of Piaget lauded by
Waddington which could also be seen as a contribution to biosemiotics, has been ignored by both
Barbieri and the Peircian biosemioticians, despite Peirce, von Üexkull and Piaget having emerged from
a similar post-Kantian tradition of philosophy that emphasised the primacy of action over reflective
thought in understanding cognition, signs and language. The concepts that Piaget offered, by filling
out the Peircian notion of ‘intepretant’, could bridge the divide between these biosemioticians, as I
will suggest below.
Many theoretical biologists allude to the role played by oscillations in generating and maintaining
order in organisms. As previously noted, this was an important dimension of Waddington’s research
program. However, even in the case of Goodwin, this was pushed into the background and was not a
focus of his interest, although it was not forgotten. However, the importance of oscillations and their
entrainment has been rediscovered in one specialist area of biology after another, revealing what
Denis Nobel characterized as ‘the music of life’ (2006). Entrainment of oscillations was shown to be
central to all forms of biological organization by Art Winfree, building on the work of Nobert Wiener
who recognized such entrainment as the outcome of mutual feedback (Strogatz, 2003). It is now
recognized that smell is not based on spatial properties of molecules fitting receptors, but on
resonance of oscillations (McFadden and Al-Khalili, 2014, chap.5). This is only a special case of such a
relationship involving receptors. Candace Pert in her work on the role of chemicals involved in
communication in the functioning of the body, in memory and emotion, also argued that resonance
is central to the functioning of organisms. Her work was on the highly specific relation between ligands
and receptors. As with smell, these have usually been visualized as keys fitting into locks, but as Pert
showed, their relationship is based on resonance of oscillations also. As she put it, ‘a more dynamic
description of the process might be two voices – ligand and receptor, striking the same note and
producing a vibration that rings a bell to open a doorway to the cell’ (2003, 24). This message can then
change the cell dramatically. Ligands can be neurotransmitters, steroids or polypeptides, the most
complex of the ligands. It is these that Pert showed were the molecules of memory, and interacted
with the emotional state of the organism. As she summed up this relationship:
The body is the unconscious mind! Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming
emotion can be stored in a body part, thereafter affecting our ability to feel that
part or even to move it. The new work suggests there are almost infinite pathways
for the conscious mind to access – and modify – the unconscious mind and the
body, and also provides an explanation for a number of phenomena that the
emotional theorists have been considering (Pert, 141).
Another advance in science that supports Waddington’s project, but which was developed quite
independently of it, is ‘endophysics’ as developed by Otto Rössler, George Kampis and others, taking
seriously that people, including scientists carrying out experiments and interpreting the results, are
part of the world they are attempting to comprehend (Rössler, 1998; Kampis and Weibei, 1994). In
Rössler’s work, the world is characterized as an interface between the subject and the rest of nature
generated by a process of enfolding, a view that is consistent with and could be used to advance the
work of those inspired by Whitehead and Peirce.
There are other radical developments in theoretical biology associated with efforts to take
seriously the implications of field theory. Alexander Gurwitsch continued to develop his ideas, and his
research program was never completely abandoned. In a book published in English in 1970, A.S.
17
Presman demonstrated impressive results of research in the Soviet Union and elsewhere on the role
of electromagnetic fields in biological processes (Bischof, 2000; Presman, 1970). Based in Russia with
allies in Western Europe, particularly Germany, biologists inspired by Gurwitsch have continued to
explore what role electromagnetic and other physical fields play in not only morphogenesis, but also
the development of consciousness (Beloussov et.al., 2000; Popp and Beloussov, 2003; Tzambazakis,
2015). This has been associated with a revival of interest in biophotons. Catcha and Poznanski (2014)
defending biophoton field theory, argued that this can actually account for consciousness. This
research program has been taken up in USA by Beverly Rubik (2002; 2015), who has promoted the
notion of the biofield as a bridge between the mind and the body. The proponents of photonic fields
are not the only group arguing for the importance of physical fields in biology, however. Herms Romijn
(2002) has tried to explain consciousness through virtual photons (a transient fluctuation that exhibits
many of the characteristics of ordinary photons, but exist for a limited time in the interaction between
charged particles). Romijn did not refer to the proponents of biophoton field theory, and they did not
engage with his work. D. Lehmann (1992), a Swiss neurologist aligned with the research program of
synergetics inspired by Hermann Haken, argued that electric fields are central to functioning of the
brain and are responsible for its integration. It has been suggested more recently by the British
biologist, Johnjo McFadden on the basis of experimental work that electromagnetic fields synchronize
nerve firing, pulling together coherent ion channels in different parts of the brain, and this could play
a role in the transition from being unconscious to being conscious (2006). If biophotons and weak
electric or electromagnetic fields are central the organization of the body and to brain functioning,
this indicates that, as Presman (1970) argued, integration associated with electromagnetic fields
should be seen as communication rather than through an imposed force. If this argument is accepted,
then such work could also be understood as a contribution to biosemiotics.
There have been other attempts to explain consciousness through quantum fields, notably those
of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. According to their theory, ‘consciousness arises from quantum
vibrations in protein polymers called microtubules inside the brain’s neurons, vibrations which
interfere, “collapse” and resonate across scale, control neuronal firings, generate consciousness, and
connect ultimately to “deeper order” ripples in spacetime geometry. Consciousness is more like music
than computation’ (Hameroff, n.d.). The theory is referred to as ‘orchestrated objective reduction’
(Orch-OR) (Hameroff, Craddock and Tuszynksi, 2014; Hameroff, 2006). Its proponents have defended
their conjectures with experimental evidence showing that if crucial areas of the brain where such
reductions could occur are prevented from functioning, people lose consciousness (Craddoc,
Hameroff, and Tuszynski, 2015), suggesting that these reductions are what is experienced as
consciousness. Despite this, there has been considerable scepticism about the possibility of coherence
over such scales. This follows a severe critique of this claim by Max Tegmark (2002) arguing that it is
impossible to maintain quantum coherence at body temperatures for the time required for such
control of neuronal firings. Even by those promoting the importance of quantum coherence in
explaining biological processes such as photosynthesis have accepted the validity of Tegmark’s
critique (McFadden and Al-Khalili, 2014, 255ff.; Goodwin, 2007, 117).
Alternative explanations of consciousness have been offered invoking different versions or
interpretations of quantum theory. Much of this has been influenced by David Bohm, a major
participant in Waddington’s theoretical biology conferences. His speculative ontology originated in
the quest to make sense of quantum theory and overcome the opposition between quantum theory
and relativity theory, but was also concerned to enable life and conscious experience to be
comprehended. Karl Pribram, and following him, Walter Freeman (1995 & 1999), working in
neuroscience but influenced by Bohm, developed a holographic model of the brain and advanced the
notion of the many-body field to explain its functioning. Paavo Pylkkänen (2007) has also defended
18
Bohm’s theoretical work to explain consciousness, collaborating with him and his successor, Basil
Hiley, in further develop this work. Henry Stapp (2009) has drawn on Whitehead to interpret what he
claims is the Copenhagen version of quantum theory to explain consciousness. Beginning in the 1960s,
the Japanese quantum field theorist Hiroomi Umezawa aligned with the Italian theorist Ricciardi
developed a quantum model of the brain. This was associated with continued work on quantum field
theory incorporating thermodynamics (1993). Their work was taken up and developed by Mari Jibu
and Kunio Yasue (1995) to develop a general theory of quantum brain dynamics (QBD), work which
has been further advanced by the Italian theoretical physicist Guiseppe Vitiello (2001) who developed
a dissipative quantum model of the brain. Gordon Globus (2003; 2009) has developed equally radical
ideas drawing upon and aligning his work with these Japanese and Italian theorists, but also
integrating it with the work of Pribram (Globus, Pribram and Vitiello, 2004). Globus’ work, which is
also strongly influenced by Gestalt psychology, Martin Heidegger (who was strongly influenced by East
Asian thought), process philosophy and post-phenomenology (including the work of Hubert Dreyfus),
could be seen as aligned with efforts to naturalize phenomenology, work which could also support
Waddington’s research program (Kauffman and Gare, 2015), although the leading proponents of this
appear to have their own distinct agenda. Although there is a general sympathy for process
philosophy, these diverse efforts are divided by lack of agreement on what is quantum theory and
how it should be interpreted, and on what is consciousness, and often, ignorance of each other’s work.
Finally, major advances in mathematics and complexity theory not only have provided means for
further advancing Waddington’s research program, but for clarifying and supporting his
understanding of mathematics while offering new forms of mathematics to better model evolution as
Waddington understood it. After having abandoned the quest to reduce mathematics to logic and set
theory, Whitehead had characterized mathematics as the study of patterns and their transformations,
and it was this view of mathematics that Waddington had assumed. With the development of chaos
theory and complexity theory, including neural nets, phase space portraits, cellular automata the
study of fractals, this way of understanding mathematics most clearly illuminated what the advance
of this research involved. However, it was with the development of category theory that what
Whitehead was striving to achieve became fully intelligible, and his project advanced. As Michael
Heather and Nick Rossiter showed, Whitehead in Part IV of Process and Reality, laying new
foundations for geometry, was building on his earlier developments of Hermann Grassman’s
extension theory to represent connectivity in a physical world of process, in place of geometry
formulated in terms of mathematical points. He had sketched a mereology (a theory of part-whole
relations) but had not developed it (Heather and Rossiter, in press). His theory could enable
mathematicians to bypass set theory, but this possibility was only fully realizable with the
development of category theory. Developing category theory in this way, bypassing set theory with
its limitations on reflexivity, also enables category theory to be formulated more simply and clearly
and developed further.
Complexity theory was developed further by Robert Rosen by utilizing category theory to model
anticipatory systems that have models of themselves, in the process developing a general theory of
modelling. This work illustrated the implications and potential of category theory. Modelling, Rosen
argued, involves finding congruence between entailments, either in modelling different branches of
mathematics, or in modelling physical or biological processes. This involves recognizing that modelling
requires simplification, with the models being more precise but less rich in detail than what is
modelled. Category theory, with its focus on representing operations, is ideal for representing causal
entailments and also lends itself to being interpreted through Peirce’s characterization of
mathematics as diagrammatical reasoning, along with Whiteheads characterization of mathematics
as the study patterns and their transformations (Gare, 2015). The Newtonian tradition of science,
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committed to a totally objective view of reality, is extremely weak in modelling entailments and
incapable of modelling the entailments characteristic of living beings where it is necessary to pose
questions of ‘Why?’ Living beings as anticipatory systems having models of themselves, must include
these models in any model of them. An implication of this characterization of modelling is that it shows
the impossibility of grasping the complexity of reality through an ultimate mathematical model. It is
necessary to recognize irreducible multiple models in genuinely complex systems with terms defined
impredicatively (generalizing over a totality to which the entity being defined belongs). This enables
entailments to be situated in contexts, including the context of their observation. In such modelling,
mathematics cannot be reduced to syntactical relations between symbols, as Hilbert aspired to
characterize mathematics, but must involve reference to what is being modelled, and can
acknowledge the observer (Rosen, 2000c). Consequently, it is impossible to simulate the dynamics of
such systems on a computer without using approximations. All this is consistent with and can be used
to defend and further develop Whitehead’s understanding of mathematics, and justifies
Waddington’s and Prigogine’s understanding of mathematics and its role in science as dealing with
abstractions, as against Thom’s Pythagorean (or Cartesian) Platonism identifying existence with its
mathematical models (Gare, 2016).
These advances open the possibility of developing more adequate mathematical models by fully
exploiting the potential of category theory. Andrée Ehresmann and Jean-Paul Vanbremeersch in
Memory Evolutive Systems (2007) have utilized category theory to develop an integrative dynamic
model for self-organized multi-scale evolutionary systems, but unlike Rosen who attempted to
represent living systems by a unique category, these authors have utilized a family of ‘configuration’
categories indexed to time. Quite apart from the promise this might have for representing chreods in
the development of embryos and systems of similar complexity, they argue that this frees science
from being dominated by the very limited notion of objects as physical objects located in space.
‘Objects’ should include ‘a musical tone, an odour or an internal feeling. The word phenomenon (used
by Kant, 1790) or event (in the terminology of Whitehead, 1925) would perhaps be more appropriate’
they argued (2007, 21). An ‘object’ can be a body, property, event, process, conception, perception or
sensation, and they attempted to take into account more or less temporary relations between such
objects. In their models they ‘make use of fundamental constructions, to give an internal analysis of
the structure of the dynamics of the system’ (2007, 33). Acknowledging the challenge this claim makes
to traditional Western science, they wrote that ‘Long ago, the Daoists imagined the universe as
dynamic web of relations, whose events constitute the nodes; each action of a living creature modifies
its relations with its environment, and the consequences gradually propagate to the whole of the
universe’ (2007, 21). Ehresmann and Plamen Simeonov (2012) have attempted to integrate Memory
Evolutive Systems (MES) with Wandering Logic Intelligence (WLI), a ’practical framework for designing
evolutionary communication architecture and their services and applications in terms of an ever
growing model’ (2012, 105) as WLIMES to further advance theoretical biology.
7. Diagnosing the Problem and Overcoming It
Why then is there a mainstream reductionist or mechanist tradition of biology that is easy to
identify, is strongly supported by funding bodies, dominates academic appointments in major
universities and research institutions, and has insuperable problems in accounting for consciousness,
often advancing by trying to explain in its own terms the achievements of the anti-reductionists, while
the radical anti-reductionist tradition is fragmented, with advances often forgotten about and then
having to be rediscovered or reinvented, with its members marginalized? Firstly, the anti-reductionist
tradition, recognizing the autonomous dynamics of what is being studied, is not guaranteed to
produce knowledge of how to control things and thereby the means to make new weapons, profitable
20
technology and instruments of social control. Reductionism serves this purpose because it reveals how
things can be controlled, to the extent they can be, by altering components, or in the case of the less
common holistic forms of reductionism, by identifying controlling factors in the environment of what
is being controlled. As Lewis Mumford pointed out:
The fact is that organic models yielded to mechanical models in interpreting living
phenomena mainly for two reasons: organisms could not be connected to the
power complex until they were reduced, in thought even more than in practice, to
purely mechanical units; and it was only through their attachment to the power
system, which, as Comte noted, came in with the employment of the engineers as
the key figures in advanced industries, that the physical sciences had, from the
sixteenth century on, flourished (Mumford, 1974, 385).
However, there are deeper reasons that need to be identified, including reasons why modern
civilization is driven by a passion for total control even though this quest and occasional successes
continually generate new, more insoluble problems and is now associated with growing threats to the
future of civilization. What should be evident from this schematic history of anti-reductionist biology
after Waddington is the extent to which philosophical differences are implicated not only in biological
research, but in the differences between those challenging mainstream thought, not only on the
details of claims to being scientific knowledge, but on what is knowledge, what is science and what is
mathematics and how they are related. This was clearly evident in Thom’s criticisms of Waddington.
What has to be appreciated about Waddington’s work and research program is how heavily it was
influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead. It included a conception of mathematics and its role in
science defended by Whitehead in his later work. Waddington affirmed this influence at the second
theoretical biology symposium at Serbelloni (Waddington, 1969, 72-81), endorsing David Bohm’s
strong statement on the central role of metaphysics in science in which he proclaimed:
I think the most important aspect of the interchange is the emergence of a
common realization that metaphysics is fundamental to every branch of science.
Metaphysics is ... something that pervades every field, that conditions each
person's thinking in varied and subtle ways, of which we are not conscious.
Metaphysics is a set of assumptions about the general order and structures of
existence ... It seems clear that everybody has got some kind of metaphysics, even
if he thinks he hasn't got any (Bohm, 1969, 41).
Bohm then went on to point out the implications of this:
... the practical 'hard-headed' individual has a very dangerous kind of metaphysics,
i.e. the kind of which he is unaware... Such metaphysics is dangerous because, in
it, assumptions and inferences are being mistaken for directly observed facts, with
the result that they are effectively riveted in an almost unchangeable way into the
structure of thought... [W]hat is needed is the conscious criticism of one's own
metaphysics, leading to changes where appropriate and, ultimately, to the
continual creation of new and different kinds. In this way, metaphysics ceases to
be the master of a human being and becomes his servant, helping to give an ever
changing and evolving order to his overall thinking (41f.).
It was in light of this observation that Waddington began his book, Tools of Thought, with a defence
of philosophy, and a warning against the Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group, or
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‘COWDUNG’. The conventional wisdom of the dominant group in the twentieth century, according to
Waddington, was that the world consisted of things. Following Whitehead, he aligned himself with
Heraclitus who argued that the world consists of processes. According to COWDUNG, ‘the world and
everything in it is constituted from arrangements of essentially unchanging material particles, whose
nature has already been largely, if not entirely, discovered by the researchers of physics and chemistry’
(1977, 19). It is because COWDUNG is so deeply embedded in a culture that ideas contrary to it tend
to be ignored or misinterpreted. Also, such contrary ideas are not consistent with each other, or at
least do not appear to be. Given the marginal status and often insecure positions of those developing
such alternative ideas, sorting our which ideas cohere with each other and which do not is time
consuming and extremely difficult. It requires a great deal of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries
and creative work to reconcile apparent inconsistencies. It is not difficult to see why opponents of
COWDUNG do not carry out this work and so are often in disarray and prone to undermining each
other, allowing the adherents to COWDUNG to neutralize opposing traditions by selectively
appropriating and reinterpreting the advances made by such radicals that are impossible to ignore.
COWDUNG tends to be even more entrenched than Waddington acknowledged, presupposed in a
range of notions that are difficult to challenge all at once. For instance, reductionism is deeply
embedded in assumptions about what is involved in explaining anything. It is almost always assumed
that an explanation involves showing that appearances are deceptive and what looks like an
independent phenomenon is really an aspect or effect of something else. As G. Spencer Brown noted:
To explain, literally to lay out in a plane where particulars can be readily seen. Thus
to place or plan in flat land, sacrificing other dimensions for the sake of
appearance. Thus to expound or put out at the cost of ignoring the reality or
richness of what is so put out. Thus to take a view away from its prime reality or
royalty, or to gain knowledge and lose the kingdom (1969, 126n.)
This is the case even when holistic theories are being proposed. So the development of the notion of
field which initially was seen as revolutionary was assimilated to assumptions about explanations by
claiming that all phenomena investigated by science will ultimately be seen as manifestations of one
grand unified field. This would be a deterministic block universe. Any claim that what is being
examined is partially self-organizing, or even self-creating, is left without any plausible means to
defend its claim since it cannot involve such an explanation, and what explanations are offered are
likely to be ignored unless surreptitiously a new form of reductionism is being introduced.
Whitehead explained such tendencies as a consequence of taking substances as the primary reality;
that is, beings which are themselves unchanging but have changing attributes and relations, blaming
this on Aristotelian logic. However, in the evolution of Western civilization something even more
fundamental was involved. COWDUNG is characterized by a strong tendency to objectify the world
and to take seriously only what can be objectified and measured, generating a sharp opposition
between objects and subjects of knowledge, with a propensity to either Cartesian dualism, a
materialist monism that eliminates mind, or an Idealist monism that eliminates matter. Processes are
objectified, along with time, so that processes come to be thought of as changing spatial relationships
between unchanging objects, or temporally extended objects. This tendency to objectify the world
has engendered a range of other theoretical objects that have been upheld as the reference points
for comprehending everything else, along with particles or space-time blocks. Propositions have been
conceived of as Platonic entities, that is, as objects, along with facts, and the logical positivists
understood mathematical truths as mental objects, consisting of nothing but a complex array of
tautologies. Even when sensory experience is taken seriously as part of the physical world, there is a
22
tendency to objectify it and take sensations as ‘things’ of some peculiar kind. In philosophy all this is
associated with what Mark Johnson and George Lakoff characterized as ‘objectivist semantics’
according to which the actual world, along with any possible world, consists of entities and sets built
out of those entities which have properties and stand in definite relation to one another at each
instant, and that meaning consists in the relationship between abstract symbols and elements in
models of the real world or possible worlds that consist of these entities. Correct reasoning is nothing
more than manipulating symbols in accordance with the set-theoretical logic of the model (Johnson,
1987, ix-xxxi). This is what Cornelius Castoriadis characterized as the ‘ensemblistic-identitary’ (‘set-
theoretical,’ ‘logical’) institution where ‘the sovereign scheme is that of determination … The
requirement here is that everything conceivable be brought under the rubric of determination and
the implications or consequences that follow therefrom. From [this] point of view …, existence is
determinacy’ (1997, 11). In mathematics, it is associated with efforts to eliminate external referents
and to reduce all mathematical reasoning to syntactic rules for the manipulation of symbols, a
conception of mathematics that reached its most extreme form in Hilbert’s formalist program (Rosen,
2000c).
This objectifying tendency is associated with blindness to context, both temporal and spatial.
Propositions are really proposed answers to questions and can only be understood as such, and
questions only make sense in the context of the reasons why they were asked. Such reasons involve a
hierarchy of assumptions. The ultimate assumptions are metaphysical assumptions, such as the
assumption that if something happens there must be a cause. ‘Facts’ are ‘true propositions’, and as
Ludwig Fleck pointed out, are socially produced as such by validating propositions in the eyes of
scientific or other intellectual communities (Fleck, 1979). Such social production requires enduring
institutions, forms of communication and education over generations to maintain their status as facts.
These institutions in turn require enduring biological processes, which in turn require enduring
chemical and physical processes and structures. We can only develop science because we are part of
and participants within nature. This is recognized tacitly within both special theory of relativity and
quantum theory where the perspective of observers making measurements are built into these
theories. Claims made for regularities in the physical sciences are always made in the context of
boundary conditions that usually are set up by experimenters designed to reveal such regularities,
blocking out actual or potential interferences which are then ignored along with the constructed
boundaries. This was pointed out by Michael Polanyi, who argued that such boundary conditions could
explain the possibility of hierarchical organization, as for instance the boundaries produced by
chemical processes to produce the characteristics of metal make possible the creation of machines
operating according to a higher level of organization incomprehensible through chemistry (Polanyi,
1969, chap.13). Howard Pattee developed Polanyi’s account of hierarchical ordering by showing that
these boundaries could be harnessed by enabling constraints. For instance, the order in DNA, in which
by virtue of physical forces constituting the form of the nucleotide bases with near equipotential for
any sequence of these bases to exist and then be reproduced, is constrained so that it can function as
an enduring memory for much more complex chemical processes, just as the boundary constraints
imposed by language on the sounds humans can make facilitates complex forms of communication.
Appreciating this requires a background of tacit knowledge. All this tacit knowledge, including
knowledge that scientists are conscious subjects are part of and physically engaged in the world they
are striving to comprehend, is excluded from awareness by those dominated by this objectifying
tendency.
Such objectifying tendencies have never completely dominated and there have always been people
who rejected them. However, scientific communities impose COWDUNG routinely on people, blinding
their members to alternatives. Claiming in 1975 that the conventional wisdom was that nature
23
consists of material particles appears odd after the revolutions in physics from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards. However, this does seem to have been the case in biology, particularly from the
1950s onwards. With the rise of biochemistry and molecular biology, biology was dominated by those
claiming that all biology could be explained through chemistry, that is, through the atoms making up
molecules from which organisms are supposedly composed, along with the Darwinian mechanism of
evolution through variation and selection. Proponents of this view, such as James Watson, tended to
think of the universe as composed of elementary particles. Even in physics there is a persistent
tendency to privilege the ontological status accorded to particles over fields, and if fields are
acknowledged, to treat them as nothing but mathematical constructs to facilitate predictions about
particles, or as objects themselves. The persistence of this view is itself in need of explanation.
Recognizing the persistence of ways of thinking demonstrated to be defective has led radical
thinkers to find ways of distancing themselves from their cultures to achieve some perspective on its
limitations and to reveal alternative ways of thinking. In some cases, mathematics itself has facilitated
this distancing. While Faraday developed the concept of field explicitly, Mary Hesse in her study of the
history of the concept of field argues that before Faraday, the mathematician Euler had developed a
mathematical concept of field in his work on hydrodynamics. He succeeded by ignoring current
conceptions of the material world, unlike Bernoulli and other scientists who sought to develop their
mathematical models to accord with the prevailing Newtonian cosmology (Hesse, 1965, 189ff.). It is
for such reasons that some physicists make no effort to interpret their mathematics in physical terms,
leaving behind defective conceptions of physical existence; but then this leads to the objectification
of mathematical models while leaving current conceptions of physical existence unchallenged. Others
have engaged in historical work to reveal a time before COWDUNG had come to dominate. They take
an interest in the history of science. The deeper assumptions require longer histories. The most
fundamental assumptions sometimes require a return to Ancient Greek thought to expose and bring
them into question. This is what happened during the Renaissance, making possible the Seventeenth
Century scientific revolution, and then again in Germany in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth
Centuries, and it is happening around the world at present.
Often such work is undertaken by philosophers. Martin Heidegger, attempting to discover ways of
thinking prior to the dominance of this objectifying tendency, illustrated this. However, scientists and
mathematicians have also undertaken such investigations, returning to re-examine the scientists and
mathematicians of the Seventeenth Century to question their assumptions, and to the Ancient Greeks
to provide the necessary perspective on the current state of science. Invoking Heraclitus is common,
but Heraclitus is not the only thinker investigated to achieve this distancing. Whitehead, who was a
mathematician and scientist as well as a philosopher, studied Plato’s Timaeus. Otto Rössler, in
developing his radical ideas on endophysics in which the world is characterized as an interface
between the subject and the rest of nature generated by a process of enfolding, challenging a whole
range of current assumptions, invoked the work of Anaxagoras (1998, chap.1). The physicist Carlo
Rovelli (2011) made a major study of Anaximander to demonstrate what is wrong with current physics.
Thom made a study of Aristotle in order to recover a role for final causes, which in his mathematics
he designated as attractors, thereby attempting to transcend the opposition that emerged in the
Renaissance between Pythagoreans identifying reality with mathematics and denying final causes and
Aristotelians who regarded mathematics as nothing but abstractions and gave a central place to final
causes. And Robert Rosen (2000a) studied the Pythagoreans to identify and free himself from their
assumption that mathematical intelligibility requires computability.
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8. Invoking Chinese Thought: From Lao-Tzu to Joseph Needham
However, examining the origins of European or Western thought among the Ancient Greeks still
involves being limited by one civilization. The sense that there are such limits has provoked major
philosophers and scientists to look beyond Western civilization for new ways to thinking that could
bring to light, facilitate questioning and possibly provide alternatives to current ways of thinking. Most
famously, Leibniz studied Chinese thought for this reason, and Whitehead, who was influenced by
Leibniz and a tradition within German philosophy, science and mathematics influenced by him, which
in turn influenced the field theory of Faraday and Maxwell, argued that his own philosophy of
organism ‘seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western
Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate’
(Whitehead, 1978, 7). If this is the case, Waddington’s thought manifests the influence of Chinese
thought, and it seems that it is for this reason that it has been more difficult to assimilate to Western
traditions of thought, even by radicals concerned to question mainstream thought.
This was the conclusion drawn by Joseph Needham after Cambridge University blocked research
in mathematico-physico-chemical morphology by refusing to accept a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation (Abir-Am, 1987). Needham’s turn to the history of science can be seen as an effort to show
the coherence of the tradition that led to his research program and the limitations of mainstream
thought, and in the process of developing this history, Needham came to appreciate the enormous
influence of Leibniz on this tradition, and beyond Leibniz, Chinese thought. On this view, Whitehead’s
organicist philosophy was seen by him as the culmination of a tradition going back through Lloyd
Morgan, S. Alexander, Jan Smuts, Engels, Marx, Hegel, Schelling and Herder to Leibniz. The spectacular
originality of Leibniz, the ultimate source of the opposition to the tradition of Cartesian dualism and
Galilean-Newtonian science, Needham argued, derived from the influence on him of twelfth century
Chinese philosopher who synthesized Daoism and Buddhism with Confucianism, Zhu Xi (1130-1200).
Needham wrote of Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi): ‘Behind him he had the full background of Chinese correlative
thinking, and ahead of him he had - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (Needham, 1956, 291). Needham’s
massive study of science and civilization in China, told from the perspective opened up by Whitehead’s
Chinese influenced philosophy, was designed in part as a way of clearing the path for the advance of
the radical reconceptualization not only of biological theory but of science as such, exemplified by his
own work and that of Waddington (Gare, 1995, 309-328). More broadly, he claimed that the
perspective created by Whitehead paved the way for a synthesis of all that was most valuable in
Chinese and Western civilization.
It appears from the study of Chinese thought that language has played a part in encoding deep
assumptions. European languages, with their ‘subject, verb, object’ structure, privilege nouns that
identify things, essences or substances. These are then are seen as doing something or having
something done to them or attributed to them, leading to efforts to identify the nature of these things
underlying appearances. Ancient Chinese languages, by contrast, having no definite or indefinite
articles, focused on events and relations, fostered concern to orient people to live in the context of
the becoming of the world. It is for this reason, A.C. Graham argued (1989, Appendix 2), that Western
philosophy was dominated by metaphysics and epistemology while Chinese philosophy focused on
how to live and how to cultivate people, including oneself. While until recently, ‘way’ had no place in
Western philosophy, it is central to Chinese thought. Dao means ‘path’ or ‘way’ – and since it did not
have either a definite or indefinite article (neither ‘a’ nor ‘the’) and could be singular or plural, it is
best treated as the part-whole sum of ways. While it is tempting to treat Dao as equivalent to the
Western notion of Being for this reason, Dao is essentially a concept of guidance. It is immanent in,
but not identical to Being. Dao can also be a verb, understood as ‘guide’. Dao does not necessarily
25
determine actions, and as a consequence Chinese philosophers allowed that it is possible to
participate in developing Dao by augmenting the way or even to open new ways. As Confucius (551-
479 BCE) put it, ‘It is Man that can enlarge the Dao which he follows, and not the Dao that can enlarge
men’ (Chan, 1963, 44). And as Chuang Tzu wrote ‘A road [path or dao] becomes so when people walk
on it’ (Chan, 1963, 183f.).
Needham discussed the concept of Dao in relation to early Confucian philosophy and to Daoism,
and then in relation to Zhu Xi, noting that initially Confucians meant by Dao the ideal way or order of
human society, while for Daoists it meant the way the universe works, or, as Needham put it, ‘the
Order of Nature’. Zhu Xi, in constructing a cosmology for Confucianism in the twelfth century CE, used
this term to cover both meanings (Needham, 1956, 37). In characterizing the meaning of ‘Dao’ for Zhu
Xi, Needham wrote:
[T]he original meaning of tao [Dao] was ‘way’, while that of li was the graining or
pattern of markings (Gestalt) in any natural object. ‘The term tao [dao]’, [Zhu Xi]
says, ‘refers to the vast and great, the term li includes the innumerable vein-like
patterns included in the Tao [Dao]’ (Needham, 1956, 484).
For the earlier Daoist natural philosophers, however, Dao encompassed ‘li’ rather than li being defined
in distinction from Dao, and it was only with Wang Bi (the leading neo-Daoist of the third century CE)
that li understood as principle or pattern, reason or rationale, was introduced to characterize Dao
(Mu, 2009, 48). In Lao Zi’s (Lao Tsu’s) Dao-De-Jing, Dao included all these meanings, characterizing
both the source of and what guides natural processes. As Bo Mu pointed out in his exposition of the
Dao-De-Jing:
[T]he metaphysical dao is … not like Platonic Form, beyond and above, but consists
of and in particular things in the universe, i.e. wan-wu… [W]hen the dao is
possessed or manifested in particular things, it becomes its manifested character
…. In sum, the dao is the ultimate source, unifying power, and fundamental
principle of nature and the universe; it manifests itself through particular
individual things. (Mu, 2009, 45)
Explicating the Dao-de-Jing, David Hall and Roger Ames (1998) wrote:
The natural cosmology of classical China does not require a single-ordered cosmos,
but invokes an understanding of a ‘world’ constituted by ‘the ten thousand things’.
There is no Being behind the beings - only beings are. And in toto, these beings are
dao. Continuity makes dao one; difference makes dao myriad; change makes dao
processional and provisional. Dao is thus both the One and the many, or better,
the field and foci through which it is entertained. The Chinese ‘world as such’ is
constituted by ‘worlding’ (ziran), a process of spontaneous arising, or literally,
uncaused ‘self-so-ing’, which references no external principle or agency to account
for it. The one and the many stand in a holographic relationship: there is the
indiscriminate field (dao) and its particular focus (de). Dao as field is always
entertained and focused from some perspective or another, from some particular.
Just as in a holographic display where each detail contains the whole in an
adumbrated form, so each item of the totality focuses the totality as its particular
field (1965f.).
26
Showing how Zhu Zi developed this conception of Dao, Needham ascribed to him the insight that
‘first, the existence of a universal pattern or field determining all states and transformations of matter-
energy, and secondly, the omnipresence of this pattern. The motive power could not be localized at
any particular point in space and time. The organization centre was identical with the organism itself’
(Needham, 1956, 466). Zhu Xi also saw this matter-energy as consisting of two opposing forces, that
nature works in a wave-like manner, and that new things are produced by reactions which we now
call chemical (Needham, 1956, 467). On this basis he was able to set forth a comprehensive philosophy
of cosmic and human creativity, formulating a viable account of the formation of the world in stages
to provide a foundation for the Confucian concepts of human nature and self-cultivation.
These ideas were developed and embraced by only some philosophers in China, and the Chinese
did not develop science as an organized systematic inquiry as it emerged in Europe in the Seventeenth
Century. However, developed to oppose the philosophy of Legalism, the domineering orientation of
the Qin dynasty very similar to the domineering orientation came to dominate European civilization
and the West (Rubin, 1976, chap.3), these ideas had a major influence on Chinese and other East Asian
cultures, making it easier for at least some East Asians, and Westerners exposed to Chinese traditions
of thought, to think in this non-domineering way. It is against this background, with the influence of
Chinese thought on Western thought along with creative responses by East Asian scientists in their
efforts to critically appropriate and advance the achievements of Western thought without completely
abandoning their own cultural traditions, that it also becomes easier to understand and then further
develop the core concepts of Waddington: chreods and homeorhesis (and individuation), understood
in relation to fields, and also to see why such ideas are not easily assimilated by those thoroughly
immersed in mainstream traditions of European thought. Chreods are paths. They individuate to
become paths within broader paths. The paths are within and guided by fields, but fields are generated
and transformed by what they guide. They are aspects of processes. As Needham wrote, the notion
of field is ‘not a mere geometrical picture of a momentary time-slice in the organism’s history but is
dynamical’ (Needham, 1968, 108).
When considering the development of organisms and their cognition, or cities, or the development
of ecosystems or the entire cosmos, when freed of the assumptions of mainstream Western science
it should also be clear why the concept of ‘chreod’ is potentially such an important concept and why
it should be given a prominent place in science, with the very idea of what science is and the role of
mathematics in science adjusted accordingly. And in doing so, it should be evident why Waddington
was justified in believing that science reconceived this way, displacing old assumptions, would
overcome its current fragmentation. All these domains can be seen to involve inter-related paths of
development characterized by fields within fields, which also develop, with new fields emerging from
other fields along self-stabilizing paths. Cybernetics and homeostasis are aspects of an order that has
come into existence, but it is through chreods and homeorhesis that diverse kinds of new order come
into and are maintained in existence.
9. Mae-Wan Ho’s Theoretical Biology
That orienting scientific research by this general conception of the world makes a difference can
be seen in the work of Mae-Wan Ho. Ho was born and first educated in Hong Kong and was a colleague
of Brian Goodwin and aligned with the research tradition inspired by Needham and Waddington. She
was strongly influenced by Chinese thought while developing her ideas in Britain. The most radical of
the biologists aligned with Goodwin, her radicalism, and her achievements as a consequence of this
radicalism, manifest in the greater constancy of her perspective, were summed up in a paper she
wrote with Peter Saunders, ‘Beyond neo-Darwinism – An Epigenetic Approach to Evolution’ (1979), in
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another by herself ‘Toward an Indigenous Western Science: Causality in the Universe of Coherent
Space-Time Structures’ (1994a), and later, and more fully, in The Rainbow and the Worm (2008). The
arguments in this were further developed in its sequel, Living Rainbow H2O (2012).
In ‘Beyond neo-Darwinism’, Ho and Saunders referred to and aligned their work with Waddington’s
notions of ‘epigenetic landscape’, developmental pathways, ‘homeorhesis’ and ‘heterorhesis’ (to
describe an adaptive change of state resulting in a large variation in morphology). Accepting
Goodwin’s suggestion that organisms are ‘cognitive’ systems that take in information about survival
and reproduction from the environment, they argued that the organism in some sense internalizes
the environment during evolution: ‘there is a successive canalization of novel developmental
responses to environmental challenges and possibly a fixation of these responses through genetic
assimilation’ (1979, 585). However, they argued that Waddington had been unclear on the mechanism
involved in canalization and novel developmental responses. This was the challenge. Noting that it is
not the genotype but the epigenetic system that interacts with the environment to generate the
phenotypes on which natural selection can act, and that the response to the environment is at the
morphological biochemical level, they suggested that these changes could leave a chemical imprint in
the cells that could persist over generations, resulting in changes being assimilated to later
generations. Pointing out that physicochemical systems possess many properties of biological
systems, including persistence of environmentally produced changes, they argued that it should be
possible to provide physical explanations for such changes. Rejecting explanations in terms of chance
variations and selection does not require recourse to vitalism, they proclaimed.
In her later work, Ho, did not deploy the terms ‘chreod’ and ‘homeorhesis’; however, she did
describe aspects of what should be regarded as chreods, and more importantly, developed a
conception of physical existence to defend this concept and to integrate it with a range of ideas that
in the past challenged mainstream science, along with ideas now emerging in post-reductionist
science. Although at one stage Ho, like Goodwin, embraced Piagetian genetic structuralism, for the
most part she characterized her own work as ‘a Whiteheadian “process” view in which organisms are
seen not as the consequence of natural selection of past random mutations but as dynamic structures
which are immanent and simultaneous with process.’ On this view, ‘The organism, as well as the
human observer as organism, are firmly located within nature where they are empowered to shape
their own evolution and destiny’ (Ho and Fox, 1988, 14). She tentatively defined life as ‘a process of
being an organizing whole’ (Ho, 2008, 6). Being alive:
… is to be extremely sensitive to specific cues in the environment, to transduce and
amply minute signals into definite actions. Being alive is to achieve the long-range
coordination of astronomical numbers of submicroscopic, molecular reactions
over macroscopic distances; it is to be able to summon energy at will and to engage
in extremely rapid and efficient energy transformation (Ho, 2008, 11).
She embraced Henri Bergson’s ‘intuition of inner organic time of “pure duration” as a dynamic
heterogeneous multiplicity of succession without separateness’ which, she argued, ‘the advances in
neuroscience over the last two decades have borne out’ (Ho, 2008, 320). She also embraced Erwin
Schrödingers’ observation that ‘Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular’,
claiming ‘[t]hat description is just what the state of coherence entails: a multiplicity that is singular’
(Ho, 2008, 331).
This was seen by her to accord with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, according to which, as
Ho interpreted it (very much in accordance with Chinese traditions of thought as described by
Needham and others):
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An organism, according to Whitehead, is ‘a locus of prehensive unification’. This
corresponds to a field of coherent activities that is sensitive to the environment,
drawing on its experience of the environment to make itself whole. Whitehead
asserts that the fundamental particles of physics such as protons and electrons are
organisms, as much as, at the other extreme, planets such as Earth and even
galaxies. Nevertheless, he does recognize gradations of organisms and hence of
consciousness. Each organism, in the act of prehensive unification, enfolds the
environment consisting of others into a unity residing in a ‘self’, while aspects of
the self are communicated to others. The realisation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are thus
completely intertwined. The individual is a distinctive enfoldment of its
environment, so each individual is not only constituted of others in its
environment, but also simultaneously delocalised over all individuals. The society
is thus a community of individuals mutually delocalised and mutually implicated.
(Ho, 2008, 321f.).
To advance this conception of physical existence and explain life through science, Ho first focused
on developments in thermodynamics or energetics, and then electromagnetic fields and finally
quantum coherence, particularly in relation to liquid crystals. Both the notions of energy and of fields
can be seen as developments of Naturphilosophie that, inspired by Herder, Goethe and Schelling, all
influenced by Leibniz, had challenged Newtonian science at the end of the Eighteenth Century. One
of the most important aspects of Ho’s work is that it privileges the concept of field, and tacitly assumes
the validity of quantum field theory rather than mainstream quantum mechanics. Field theory, as first
put forward by Faraday who argued that what exists are extended, enduring forces rather than objects
with properties, was inspired by Naturphilosophie along with the work of Roger Boscovich, who was
directly inspired by Leibniz. His work was part of the tradition of thought that Needham claimed had
been inspired by Chinese thought (Williams, 1980). This notion of field was a major influence on
Whitehead, whose first significant work (since lost) was a study of Maxwell’s equations. Field theory
was and remains a challenge to mainstream Western thought, and is resisted accordingly. As Globus,
Pribram and Vitiello (2004, xi) noted in relation to the resistance to fully appreciating the advances in
science based on the notion of field, ‘it is the concept of field which is found frightening. The
ontological prejudice by which “things” are made of little beings, individuals, atoms, able to survive
even in the absence of any interaction with similar beings, strongly contrasts the idea, implicit in the
concept of fields, of abandoning the individual as “the actors” able to establish or not establish some
sort of relation with other individuals. In the concept of field the “action” is more fundamental than
the actors, and there cannot exist one isolated, single actor, but only a multitude of them.’
As Rodney Brooks in Fields of Color (2016, 46f.) has shown, mainstream physics, despite speaking
of fields, almost always reverts to privileging particles. Brooks defended the work of Julian Schwinger
and Hideki Yukawa against Feynman, Schrödinger and de Broglie against Born, Heisenberg and Dirac,
and Lorenz against Einstein, noting that in each case those defending the primacy of particles prevailed
over those defending fields. This defence of fields over particles is not dependent upon the acceptance
of Schwinger’s theories, however. There are a number of theorists explicitly defending the primary
reality of fields, although they are still in a minority. Schrödinger continued to defend and develop the
concepts of fields to the end of his life (Bitbol, 1996, 221f.), and even Feynman eventually concluded
he had to embrace the primary reality of fields (Wilczek, 2008, 83f.). The major problem is that those
utilizing quantum theory ignore its ontological implications and tacitly assume the primary reality of
particles (Kuhlmann, Lyre and Wayne, 2002). Significantly, a number of Japanese theoretical physicists
are among those who have fully embraced the notion of field. It was Yukawa who in 1935, isolated
from other physicists but free from the tendency to think in terms of particles, recognized that
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radiation from the strong field could exist as quanta (mesons) the propagation of which could be
described by a field equation, with a mass 200 times greater than an electron. Continuing this
tradition, Umezawa in his exposition of quantum field theory showed why it is necessary to leave
behind quantum mechanics, embrace quantum field theory, and privilege fields (1993, 8ff.). Pointing
out that quantum field theory, unlike quantum mechanics, applies to the macro-level, Umezawa
applied quantum field theory to neuroscience, specifically to account for memory. Subsequently he
influenced other theorists concerned with the implications of quantum field theory for understanding
macro-patterns, life and consciousness (Jibu and Yasue, 1995, Part III; Vitiello, 2001; Yasue, Jibu and
Della Senta, 2002; Globus, Pribram and Vitiello, 2004; Blasone, Jizba and Vitiello, 2011).
When Schwinger was writing six physical fields were acknowledged. Now, with the acceptance of
the Higgs boson, at least seven fields have to be recognized. Einstein and those who supported his
conception of science, have striven to develop a grand unified field theory implying a determinist block
universe in which temporal becoming is only an appearance, while Schwinger argued for the
irreducibility of time to a dimension of space. This is consistent with allowing the possibility of new
fields emerging. In quantum field theory, fields exist in three different forms: as quanta – which are
chunks of fields that have a life and death of their own, self-fields which are created by a source and
are always attached to that source, and the vacuum field which is the background field to the quantum
fields. The seven basic types of field are the two matter fields or fermions: leptons and quarks, and
the force fields: the gravity, electromagnetic, strong, weak and Higgs fields and their associated force
carriers or bosons There are also component fields, for instance, the electromagnetic field contains
the electric and magnetic fields, and the strong field contains three fields with charges +1, -1 and 0.
Lepton fields have four component fields accommodating the two possible ‘spins’ and charges, while
baryon fields are constituted from quark and gluon fields. Since within field theory there are no
particles to spin, this notion is replaced by ‘helicity’, a mathematical concept related to the number of
field components and how they change when viewed from different angles. Fermions include leptons
and quarks, baryons which are made up of an odd number of quarks, and composites of these,
including protons. The bosons are force carriers and include gravitons, photons, gluons, mesons,
weakons and Higgs bosons. Mesons are composite bosons composed of quarks and anti-quarks. The
‘self-fields’ are attached to quanta of fields, whether these be fermions or bosons. Self-fields are also
attached to large entities formed from these fields. For instance, the gravitational field and magnetic
field of the Earth are self-fields of the Earth. Energy is found in the oscillations within these fields,
directly proportional to frequency of these oscillations. Ho focused on and has shown a role in
biological organization for electromagnetic and associated fields (electric, magnetic and photon fields)
and has also suggested a possible role for the vacuum field, and examined the potential of all these
fields as resonators capable of entrainment and of precise communication to form emergent biological
fields and to engender consciousness.
Viewing organisms through thermodynamics and field theory, Ho argued, requires a synthetic
approach to complement analysis. Organisms need to be viewed as first of all, dissipative structures
transforming energy, then maintaining themselves in existence while grappling with new situations,
and developing through this. Such developments preceded RNA and DNA because physico-chemical
systems are able to preserve changes, effectively, remembering the past. So while analysis leads to
giving a privileged place to DNA, followed by RNA and then proteins, understanding organisms
developing through their evolution requires that we work out how the most primitive forms of life as
dissipative structures, consisting of water and proteins largely held together by hydrogen bonds,
constructing RNA molecules, utilizing these to stabilize their reproduction, which in turn were used to
construct DNA molecules characterized by far greater stability. As part of living processes, their role
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cannot be understood in abstraction from epigenesis, which can also involve remoulding DNA. As Ho
argued in ‘On not holding nature still’ (1998, 132), the genome is fluid.
Ho’s contribution to the thermodynamics of life, building on the work of a range of theorists,
including Ilya Prigogine and Herbert Fröhlich (1968), involved shifting from describing living systems
in terms of a succession of equilibrium states to describing them in terms of forces and flows, working
towards a science of organized heterogeneity. While Prigogine had provided the mathematics
required to model the process by which structures, including living beings, are able to maintain
themselves by feeding on negative entropy, Fröhlich, focusing on energy transfer dynamics, had
argued that energy could be stored in an organism in a variety of vibrations (or oscillations), that these
vibrations could account for the coherence of organisms, and electric dipole oscillations could be
propagated as coherent waves along filaments within cells with minimal dissipation of energy. Ho
pointed out that organized heterogeneity can involve the creation of a hierarchy of near-equilibrium
regimes despite the whole being far from equilibrium, thus maximizing the efficiency of energy
transformations. She was particularly concerned to show in such transformations energetic cycles are
coupled so that the output of one cycle is prepared to be an input of the next cycle. This added a new
dimension to the place accorded by Waddington and Goodwin to resonance and entrained
oscillations. ‘Coupled cycles are the ultimate wisdom of nature’, she argued. ‘They go on at all levels,
from the ecological to the molecular through the range of characteristic timescales from millennia to
split seconds’ (Ho, 2008, 54). These have a fractal pattern, being self-similar at all temporal scales.
They provide the capacity to store useable energy in hypercycles at multiple levels, and to be able to
transform energy quickly with minimum entropy production since energy yielding activities supply
energy directly to the energy requiring activities. As Ho put it, ‘There is always energy available within
the system, for it is stored coherently, and ready for use, over all space-time domains’ (2008, 93).
Organisms are excitable media poised to respond to specific signals disproportionately because large
amounts of energy are available to amplify small, weak signals, often into macroscopic action.
Building on her work on thermodynamics, Ho argued that development of pre-patterns and
patterns in the ‘embryonic field’ could be due to electromagnetic fields. As she and her colleagues
noted:
Electrodynamical forces include polarization fields (which may phase order
macromolecular arrays ….), electronic or proton currents, dipole interactions,
electromechanical forces and deformations (such as are involved in the interaction
of proteins and calcium), electrodiffusion of ions and larger molecules by
electrophoresis and dielectrophoresis … as well as polarization waves, dipole
oscillations, phonon and photon exchanges of a resonant nature or otherwise. (Ho
et.al., 1994b, 196).
Since ‘all molecular and intermolecular forces are electromagnetic’, it is probable that
‘electrodynamical forces are sufficient by themselves to mobilize and organize the molecules within
the embryonic field into macroscopic pattern’ (Ho et.al., 1994, 196). To test this hypothesis, they
demonstrated that weak magnetic fields affect pattern formation in Drosophila embryos.
Electromagnetic fields are also central to the formation of intermolecular complexes that organize
the cell, Ho argued. Such organization involves communication between components of this field, with
molecules resonating at the same frequency being capable of great specificity and selectivity in
attracting each other over long distances (Ho, 2008, 135). In this way, molecules and molecular
structures can communicate, exchange energy and organize themselves in relation to each other. Only
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weak signals are required for such communication, and these can come from diverse components or
aspects of electromagnetic fields.
To play the required role, Ho believed that these electromagnetic fields must be quantum
coherent. She concluded that the fields of biophotons identified by Gurwitsch and his followers,
including Fritz-Albert Popp with whom Ho collaborated as part of her exploration of the role quantum
coherence, could play a significant role in such biological organization. As Ho noted, Popp’s work is
consistent with the theory of coherence in quantum optics, and that ‘observations are consistent with
the idea that the living system is one coherent “photon field” bound to living matter.’ Popp claimed
that this field is ‘coherent simultaneously over a whole range of frequencies that are nevertheless
coupled together’ (Ho, 2008, 195). Biophotons are in a ‘squeezed state’ in which the indeterminacy of
position and momentum are equal. They are emitted from quantum patches, that is, the coherence
volumes and times in which the probability amplitudes are maintained, rather than from a precise
location. They can be trapped or stored for a long time, and they can be focused to a spot of atomic
dimensions, or extended over the whole volume of an organism (Bischof, 2003, 38f.). Organic matter
is largely transparent to these biophotons, it is claimed, enabling the components of an organism to
be instantly informed about each other. The conclusion that Ho and Popp came to through their
collaboration was that biophotons are central to communication required for biological organization,
including morphogenesis and consciousness, and that:
Biocommunication is the key to biological organization. An organic whole, in
contrast to a mechanical whole, does not consist of a hierarchy of parts which exert
control over other parts. Instead, it is a maximally responsive and transparent
system in which changes and adjustments propagate simultaneously 'upwards',
'downwards' and 'sideways' in the maintenance of the whole. So, instead of
'control', it is much more appropriate to think in terms of 'communication'. (Ho
and Popp, 1994, 432).
In this way, the biophoton field, along with other components of electromagnetic fields, could regulate
biochemical and morphogenetic processes, and Ho suggested, play a role in memory.
Her last work was inspired by Needham’s suggestion that, as he put it, ‘Liquid crystals … are not
important to biology and embryology because they manifest certain properties which can be regarded
as analogous to those which living systems manifest (models), but because living systems actually are
liquid crystals’ (Needham, 1968, 157). Her argument is that it is because of the peculiarities of water
molecules, which are strong dipoles, that they can take the form of liquid crystals with properties
characteristic of living organisms. Making up 70% of organisms, water provides the conditions for
coherent electromagnetic organization, including quantum coherence at ambient temperatures,
while allowing diverse vibrational transitions. The connective tissue that ties all the cells in the body
to one another contains bound water and is also a liquid crystal, capable of intercommunication. The
crucial chemical is collagen made up largely of polypeptides that bind water and also influence its
vibrational transitions. It is collagen, Ho argued, that contains the cellular memory that determines
body pattern during development, the cells remembering the structure into which they are committed
to develop. With electrodynamic activities patterning the liquid crystal domain of the morphogenetic
field, liquid crystals could be involved in the long-term memory that enables the developing organism
to make specific structures and organs later in its development.
By virtue of this, claimed Ho, ‘[i]n a literal sense, the embryo is conscious of its body, and
remembers what grows and develops where and when’ (Ho, 2008, 228). This is a broader conception
of consciousness than that associated with conscious awareness focused on by the emerging science
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of consciousness, but Ho rejects this narrow focus as a bias of Western thought. For the Chinese, the
seat of consciousness is the heart as much as the head. She suggested that ‘[t]he self-image or memory
of our body could exist in some quantum hologram-like interference pattern’ so that ‘we may literally
have an image of ourselves in both the brain and the heart; or in our ear, our foot, or our hand. Each
part is a literal microcosm of the whole, as envisaged in traditional Chinese acupuncture theory’ (Ho,
2008, 240). She argued that the form of consciousness associated with the central nervous system and
the brain is based upon and presupposes this more general form of consciousness. As she put it:
Body consciousness possessing all the hallmarks of consciousness – sentience,
intercommunication and memory – is distributed throughout the entire liquid
crystalline matrix that connects each single cell to every other. Brain consciousness
associated with the nervous system is embedded in body consciousness and is
coupled to it. (Ho, 2008, 237).
This accords with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of incarnate consciousness, particularly as it
was developed in his later works (Kauffman and Gare, 2015, 223f.), and in defending and developing
this view, Ho could find some support from the work of Candace Pert on the role of polypeptides in
body memory.
Ho also conjectured that liquid crystals could enable electromagnetic fields to maintain quantum
coherence at body temperatures. This would explain how we are able to ‘gate and bind our
experiences in a series of local simultaneities that appear abruptly as large scale phase-synchronized
activities in separate parts of the brain that has no obvious source in the brain itself.’ She suggested
that ‘they are generated (almost) instantaneously in the liquid crystalline matrix in which all cells,
including neurons in the brain, are embedded’ (Ho, 2008, 240f.). Anesthetics work, she suggested, by
breaking up this coherence, explaining this as the consequence of removing bound water from
proteins and membrane interfaces (Ho, 2008, 237).
These ideas are fully developed in Living Rainbow H2O published in 2012. The picture she finally
presents is summed up in the introduction to this book:
[Q]uantum coherence is a sublime state of wholeness; a quantum superposition of
coherent activities over all space-times, constituting a pure dynamic state towards
which the system tends to return. The organism is a macroscopic quantum being,
and has a wave function that never ceases to evolve by entangling other quantum
organisms in its environment. The organism is thick with coherent activities on
every scale, from the macroscopic down to the molecular and below. I call the
totality of these activities “quantum jazz” to highlight the immense diversity and
multiplicity of players, the complexity and coherence of the performance, and
above all the freedom and spontaneity. … The quantum coherent organism plays
quantum jazz to create and recreate herself from moment to moment. Quantum
jazz is the music of the organism dancing life into being. It is played out by the
whole organism, in every nerve and sinew, every muscle, every single cell,
molecule, atom, and elementary particle, a light and sound show that spans 70
octaves in all the colours of the rainbow. (Ho, 2012, 3f.)
In embracing the concept of field and characterizing fields dynamically, Ho was rejecting extreme
forms of objectification that take primary reality to be measurable, precisely defined objects, reducing
the status accorded to process to nothing but change of position, or eliminating it entirely, while
situating the subject outside this objective world or denying the existence of subjects entirely. In this
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objectivist scheme, the organism is treated as an arrangement of matter, the outcome of past
struggles for survival among its progenitors. Spelling out the implications of the opposing view, Ho
argued that ‘the organism itself – its functions, volitions and actions – will then be rightly perceived,
not as the sole consequence of natural selection, but as a focus of being immanent to process and
emerging simultaneously with it. Thus relocated within nature, the organism becomes both actor and
producer of the evolutionary drama’ (Ho, 1988, 118). That is, Ho was defending a first or second
person perspective on living beings, rather than assuming a third person objectivism. To investigate
organisms without objectifying them requires minimum intervention to achieve sympathetic
understanding of organisms as co-participants in nature. As she put it:
The dilemma of the absolutely ignorant external observer betrays the alienation
from nature that the mechanistic scientific framework of the west entails, for it is
premised on the separation of the observer as disembodied mind from an
objective nature observed. That is also the origin of the subjective-objective
dichotomy, which, when pushed to its logical conclusion, comes up against the
seemingly insurmountable difficulty that in order to have sufficient information
about the system, one has in effect to destroy it. … Ideally, we should be one with
the system so that the observer and the observed become mutually transparent.
… Perhaps such a state of enlightenment is just as what … the Taoists [Daoists] of
ancient China would say, being one with the Tao [Tao], the creative principle that
is responsible for all the multiplicity of things. (Ho, 2008, 314)
10. Defending Ho’s Research Program
Impressive as Ho’s achievements are, her work can be criticized, and it can be further advanced to
integrate other theoretical developments in biology. Much of Ho’s work has elicited skepticism,
particularly her engagement with quantum theory and support for biophotonics and integral
biophysics and associated with this, her claims for the role of quantum coherence in liquid crystals. In
fact, there is a tendency by neurobiologists to dismiss all work in their discipline that invokes the
notion of field. As Walter Freeman (1995, 34) put it, ‘With continuing advances in the analysis of
anatomical pathways in the cerebellum, it became increasingly obvious the concept of fields of energy
flow made no sense. What are those axons for, if activity can flow diffusely?’ However, Ho’s
understanding of fields did not reduce these to fields of energy flow or ignore the importance of
neurons and their axons, or hormones. She was simply arguing that traditional explanations of the
brain’s functioning through neurons, axons and synapses is not enough.
Ho’s claims can find support from other theorists. The claim that consciousness is an aspect of an
electromagnetic field, without claiming quantum coherence for this field, has been defended by
Johnjoe McFadden in an anthology in which most of the other contributors were explicating and
defending Orch-OR theory. Reviving speculations of the early Gestalt psychologists on the relationship
between physical brain fields on perceptual fields, McFadden proposed that ‘Digital information
within neurons is pooled and integrated to form an electromagnetic information field. Consciousness
is that component of the brain’s electromagnetic field that is downloaded to major neurons and is
thereby capable of communicating its state to the outside world’ (2006, 396f.). He argued that Orch-
OR theory cannot account for most of the essential features of consciousness, while the influence of
the endogenous electromagnetic field on neuronal firing can account for all these features. He did not
exclude direct quantum effects in the brain, but argued that these were likely to be in the interactions
between the brain’s electromagnetic field and voltage gated ion channels in the neuronal membrane.
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Ho was not content to simply defend the role of electromagnetic fields, however, and her work
hinged to some extent on her claims for quantum coherence in these fields. Such coherence is
required for the generation of holographic memories (Jibu and Yassue, Section 41) that Ho believed
to be important. If, influenced by Tegmark, biologists are skeptical about the role of quantum
coherence in Hameroff and Penrose’s ’Orch-OR’ theory of microtubules it can be expected that, given
the distances and times involved, they would be far more skeptical of Ho’s claims that entire organisms
are quantum coherent liquid crystals at ambient temperatures. And her arguments for this have been
questioned. Her claim that organisms are capable of astonishing efficiency in the conversion of energy
which can only be accounted for by postulating such quantum coherence has been dismissed by Alex
Hankey (personal communication) who has shown in his own work (2015, 301) that this efficiency can
be explained through complexity theory as an effect of self-organized criticality rather than through
quantum theory.
However, Hameroff and others have vigorously defended their claim that quantum coherence is
possible at body temperatures in microtubules where they are insulated from thermal noise (Hagan,
Hameroff and Tuczinski, 2002; Hameroff and Penrose, 2014) and that such coherence is necessary to
account for consciousness. An even stronger defence is available to those invoking quantum field
theory. Herbert Fröhlich (1968, 1977, Tzambazakis, 8f.), the theoretical physicist responsible for
introducing quantum field theoretical techniques to condensed matter physics, examined long range
coherence in biological systems. He showed that such coherence, equivalent to achieving
superconductivity and superfluidity at room temperatures, could be achieved through longitudinal
electric modes associated with oscillating electric dipoles containing more energy than thermal
equilibrium. This is ‘motional’ order rather than spatial order. Focusing on macroscopic wave
functions, he could see no problem in putting forward this claim. Umezawa rejected Tegmark’s
argument because, as he pointed out, neither neurons nor other brain cells are treated as quantum
objects as assumed by Tegmark, and the quantum variables are basic field variables (Vitiello (2001,
86). Vitliello argued that what Tegmark had really shown were the limits of quantum mechanics, and
thereby why it is necessary to use quantum field theory in modelling the brain. Ho herself and her
collaborators provided further evidence that the fields she was referring to are quantum coherent and
that they are required to account for consciousness. They have shown that biophotons could only
have been produced by quantum coherent fields (Popp, 1988). And she revealed coherence in the
whole of living organisms through her research using a polarizing light microscope and other
observational techniques that is simply not acknowledged by most biologists and cannot be explained
by them. She and others have demonstrated coherent patterns in the behavior of molecules,
completely aligned with their electrical polarities, in radiation from these, and in neural activity
achieved almost instantaneously, and such work is continuing, with important implications for
medicine (Tzambazakis). These phenomena cannot be explained by the electro-chemical pulses
associated with the transmission of signals through neurons, dendrites, axons and synapses. Ho has
also shown that the time taken for vision to take place after receiving stimuli is far less than would be
required if only the chemical processes of signal amplification through neurons were involved (Ho,
2008, 8).
Support for Ho’s claims comes from Walter Freeman who teamed up with Vitiello to challenge
mainstream neuroscience and to defend the role of quantum coherence in brain dynamics,
proclaiming:
The common belief is that, if physics has to be involved in the description of brain
dynamics, classical tools such as non-linear dynamics and statistical mechanics
should suffice. However, many-body field theory appears to us as the only existing
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theoretical tool capable to explain the dynamic origin of long-range correlations,
their rapid and efficient formation and dissolution, their interim stability in ground
states, the multiplicity of coexisting and possibly non-interfering ground states,
their degree of ordering, and their rich textures. It is historical fact that many-body
quantum field theory has been devised and constructed in past decades exactly to
understand features like ordered pattern formation and phase transitions in
condensed matter physics, similar to those in the brains, that could not be
understood in classical physics.
The notion of coherent collective modes, which are macroscopic features of
quantum origin, has been used in many practical applications (in solid state physics
and laser physics, for example). In a familiar crystal, a magnet, the ordered
patterns observed at room temperature, without recourse to low-temperature
superconductivity or superfluidity, are well known examples of macroscopic
quantum systems. (Freeman and Vitiello, 2006, 96)
This proclamation was made on the basis of Umezawa’s claims for quantum field theory. However,
in developing her ideas, Ho aligned herself with the work of David Bohm whose theories, particularly
his later work, also tend to be dismissed by mainstream scientists. However, this dismissal is usually
based on confusion between Bohm’s general claims and his specific theories. Bohm was primarily
opposed to physicists, under the influence of neo-Kantianism or logical positivism, abandoning the
quest to comprehend experimental findings where both particle-like characteristics and wave-like
characteristics have been found. For genuine science, Bohm claimed, this requires a radical rethinking
of what exists to account for these observations. Bohm never claimed that his own theories were final
solutions. They were designed first of all to illustrate what is genuine science. The hostility to Bohm
really reflects the hostility to questioning deep assumptions about the nature of being, and this is
preventing the advance of science. Bohm’s arguments and conjectures have inspired a number of
radical thinkers, including Paavo Pylkkänen who has also attempted to use his ideas to comprehend
consciousness in a way that could support Ho’s work, although she does not refer to him, nor does he
refer to her. Bohm originally formulated his version of quantum theory as a particle theory with an
additional pilot wave which does not carry energy or momentum, before developing the more radical
holistic theories associated with the notion of the holographic implicate order being make explicate
that influenced Ho. However, he saw these theories as only provisional and aspired eventually to
develop his theory as a quantum field theory (Bohm, Hiley and Kaloyerou). When he died he had not
been entirely successful in this project, as Pylkkänen, who collaborated with Bohm and Hiley, pointed
out (Pylkkänen, 2007, 174-180). As far as Ho’s work is concerned, it is what Bohm was aiming at that
is important. She was aligned with Bohm in his quest to advance quantum field theory according a
place to holograms and making the reality of consciousness intelligible.
The claim that consciousness is a quantum process is also supported by an increasing number of
more orthodox theorists. Although Stapp defended the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum theory as formulated by von Neumann who argued that consciousness is involved in
measurement and the collapse of the wave packet, Stapp also aligned himself with the process
philosophy of Whitehead, and argued that an essential aspect of quantum events is non-locality. As
he put it, ‘the structure of predictions of quantum theory itself demands that the basic process of
nature be intrinsically global: it cannot respect spatial separations in the way that familiar causal
processes do. Thus the extent to which we confine our thinking to processes of the familiar local kind
the quantum choice must appear to come from nowhere’ (Stapp, 2009, 144). Stapp argued that
quantum theory so interpreted can account for the experience of making choices as described by the
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psychologist William James. On this view, which to some extent accords with Ho’s, ‘the mental
universe of each human being consists exclusively of the felt quality of actual events constructed out
of the symbols that are the building blocks of the (generalized) body-world schema: consciousness is
the felt quality of the manipulating actions of these symbols upon each other’ (Stapp, 2009, 138). On
this basis, Stapp (2017) defended the reality of free will. However, Stapp’s way of construing
consciousness itself manifests a Western bias towards what is focused upon. What is left out of Stapp’s
account of experience that has a central place in Ho’s, is the background pre-symbolic, pre-predicative
experience, awareness or feeling of situated embodiment along with unreflective spontaneous action
(as described by Merleau-Ponty, for instance, but also acknowledged by William James), taken for
granted in the more focused experience, attention and decision-making that Stapp was concerned to
account for.
It could be demanded of quantum theory that it be developed to account for Ho’s (and Merleau-
Ponty’s) characterization of experience, and neuroscientists associated with Umezawa have
developed ideas on and explanations of consciousness closer to Ho’s. While advancing quantum field
theory, Umezawa and Luigi Maria Riccardi developed a quantum model of the brain which could
account for memory. These ideas were further developed in Japan by Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue. Jibu
and Yasue, along with Stuart Hameroff and Karl Pribram, developed a theoretical framework for
quantum optical coherence in cytoskeletal microtubules that, although focusing more on the brain,
accorded with Ho’s conjectures on quantum coherence of electromagnetic fields in liquid crystals.
They argued that ordered water within cylindrical microtubules, behaving as waveguides, could
facilitate superradiance and self-induced transparency, with superposition of states among
microtubules. These in turn could be in superposition with other microtubules, accounting for a
coupling of microtubule dynamics over wide areas. Like Ho, they claimed that this could account for
the unity of thought, holographic memory, information processing, and consciousness (Jibu, Hagan,
Hameroff, Pribram and Yasue, 1994).
This work was elaborated into a general theory of quantum brain dynamics (QBD) by Jibu and Yasue
in Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness (1995), a work that largely supports and complements
Ho’s explanation of consciousness. In this they asked ”What is mind?” and “What is Life?” and
proclaimed, having reached the same conclusion as Ho: ‘We will address these two issue from the new
point of view that water is the fundamental constituent of both life and consciousness’ (p.158). They
then characterized quantum brain dynamics as the quantum electrodynamics of the electric dipole
field of dipolar solitons and water molecules. The main difference with this work is that, unlike Ho,
these authors conceived consciousness only in relation to the brain, postulating a ‘cortical field’ and
‘corticons’ as cortical field bosons. However, it is not difficult to grant a place to the body from the
perspective of these theorists since their arguments for quantum coherence in the brain can be used
to defend quantum coherence in the whole body, and in fact, this had already been recognized by
Umezawa and accepted by Jibu, Yasue and Vitiello (Vitiello, 2001, 92), although this was not the focus
of their research. The importance of understanding consciousness in relation to the whole body of the
organism has been recently argued by Hinterberger et.al. (2015) while examining the relationship
between synchronicity and consciousness. In doing so, they pointed out the significance of the body
in emotion.
The ideas of these Japanese theorists were then further advanced by Vitiello (2001) and others
(Globus, Pribram and Vitiello, 2004) whose work not only concurs with Ho’s, but offers more detailed
explanations of the relationship between quantum fields, water, thermodynamics and the growth of
the organism that could integrate Ho’s conjectures with the work of Candace Pert on the role of
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polypeptides throughout the body in memory and emotions. In My Double Unveiled: The dissipative
quantum model of brain Vitiello conjectured that:
[T]he filamentary propagation of the em field in structured water may be the origin
of the formation of the cytoskeleton, namely of that complex structure made of
microtubules which pervades the cell and which is so crucially relevant to any
metabolic activity. … [R]esonance occurs when the molecule oscillatory
characteristic frequency matches the field frequency. The gradient force thus acts
selectively on the surrounding molecules according to a well defined resonance
pattern. … The attracted molecules may in turn contribute to a change of the field
frequency in the filament, with consequent, say, attraction of molecules of
different characteristic oscillatory frequency. The filament thus gets coated by a
molecular pattern, which may stabilize into a polymeric structure of the coating
molecules may form stable chemical bonds. … Such a scheme thus provides a
dynamical description of cytoskeleton formation and of its structure. (Vitiello,
2001, 57f.),
All these conjectures, along with experimental work supporting Ho’s contentions, can still be
doubted. However, it is possible to look at the issue of invoking quantum field theory to explain various
facets of life, mind and consciousness from a different angle and ask whether the diversity of coherent
extensive patterns in living organisms, the almost instantaneous coherence achieved in these
patterns, along with consciousness itself, could be accounted for in any other way except through
quantum coherence acting non-locally. Conversely, it is also necessary to account for the breakdown
of coherent extensive patterns, as occurs for instance with cancer or in mental breakdowns that are
as yet not properly explained by giving some account of the breakdown of cohesive forces. The more
rational approach, as suggested above, would be to recognize the observed phenomena that need to
be explained and then to use work in biology to guide the further development of quantum theory to
explain consciousness; and this, effectively, is what Umezawa and those he inspired have been doing.
Ho acknowledged the provisional nature of her work, pointing out that science itself is in flux with
no claim to truth settled for very long. Much of her work is speculative, including work on the role of
quantum coherence in biological organization and the identification of quantum coherent
electromagnetic fields in liquid crystals with consciousness. She embraced this aspect of science and
acknowledged the boldness of her conjectures, writing in her last book,
When I first proposed the organism is quantum coherent in the early 1990s, only
a handful of exceptional scientists thought that quantum theory had anything to
do with biology. The situation has changed greatly since then. … But [scientists who
spoke about quantum coherence in 2010] have yet to catch up with the quantum
coherent organism, brain and body together, or mind and body undivided. (Ho,
2012, 80)
Work commensurable with Ho’s research program continues, its successes and the challenges it faces
reported in the anthology, Fields of the Cell (Fels, Cifra and Scholkmann) published in 2015. While the
conclusions reached were that there is no proof that biophotons are quantum coherent and evidence
that weak biophotons are not, the contributors to this work have demonstrated that biophotons are
involved in synchronizing cells, and that there must be some way in which cells are able to recognize
the small number of weak biophotons among the billions of biophotons impacting on them, and they
reviewed further work showing the importance of synchronicity in biological organization, including
the development of consciousness. What is most important is that Ho’s conceptual framework is that
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she could at least begin to make intelligible the most important features of life and consciousness in
a way that mainstream concepts prevent. And it is by virtue of this that she was able to integrate the
findings and developments of a great many researchers who have been marginalized and their
arguments, research findings and observations ignored by mainstream biology. To a considerable
extent, Ho was able to ask crucially important questions and put forward promising proposals because
she was not encumbered by deep assumptions, or COWDUNG, that have crippled or clogged up most
Western thought in the quest to understand life.
11. Overcoming the Limitations of Ho’s Research Program
There does seem to be other problems with Ho’s work, however. To begin with, her focus on
quantum coherent electromagnetic fields not only involved downplaying the importance of electro-
chemical and mechanical processes (for instance, the role of vibrations of membranes) in biological
organization, but a consequent failure to study the interactions between these different processes (as
examined by Vitiello (2004)). This is particularly important for understanding the role of the brain and
its specialized regions, their different contributions to cognition and how these different contributions
are integrated. However, these problems were addressed by Umezawa and by neuroscientists
influenced by him, including Vitiello. Ricciardi and Umezawa (2004) in their ground-breaking paper on
memory (originally published in 1967) not only acknowledged different functions of the brain, the
regionalization of the brain necessary to deal with these and the need to coordinate these regions,
but argued that quantum field theory is required to account for such differentiation and subsequent
integration of the different functions. Vitiello argued for a crucial role in humans of the frontal lobes
in making possible the separation of thought and action.
Related to this, in her concern to show that the physical world has many of the properties of life to
account for the emergence of life, Ho did not adequately acknowledge the uniqueness of life. Ho’s
speculations on consciousness is defended with reference in The Rainbow and the Worm to Walter
Freeman who demonstrated that the brain functions holistically and is creative (Ho, 1997) and to the
work of J.J. Gibson. She also emphasized the importance of memory. This is superior to most work on
the science of consciousness, which tends to ignore long traditions of philosophy, Gestalt psychology
and radical work in neurobiology that have investigated the nature of consciousness in the past.
However, Ho’s work still underestimates the complexity of conscious experience.
Firstly, she did not acknowledge that, as Friedrich Schelling argued, living beings in actively
maintaining and developing their forms through exchanging material with their environments, are
asserting their ordering principles in opposition to the homogenizing forces of their environments. In
the process, they define their environments in relation to themselves as their worlds (Gare, 2013, 8).
This argument was based on another principle, that nature is made up of opposing forces, either
balanced or unbalanced, which is actually central to modern science, although seldom discussed in
this way. Secondly, Ho did not acknowledge that organisms in some sense model themselves, being
simultaneously involved in the flux of becoming and able to maintain their identity through this flux.
This was postulated by John von Neumann who argued that living beings must have models of
themselves, an idea developed by Robert Rosen in his theory of anticipatory systems. The importance
of this is most evident in the case of consciousness, as Kant and everyone influenced by him realized;
however, in the case of more primitive organisms, such an identity is of a more basic and immediate
kind, without the reflexivity associated with consciousness. Furthermore, as the proponents of the
microgenetic theory of consciousness argue, building on the work of the Leipzig school of Gestalt
psychology, the higher forms of self-reflexive consciousness are built on and presuppose the more
primitive and immediate forms of cognition as inchoate, pre-conscious felt dispositions (Bachmann,
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2000, chap.1; Brown, 2015). Each act of cognition up to and including language and reflective self-
consciousness, unfolds through moulding the more basic and more global forms of cognition to
achieve greater specificity to achieve these more advanced and more detached forms of cognition.
Some of these issues were taken up by Vitiello (Vitiello, 2001, 140) who in developing his dissipative
quantum model of the brain, described ‘a self-interaction or back-reaction process’. As we have seen,
Vitiello’s work accords with Ho’s basic assumptions and so can be used to augment Ho’s work.
Vitiello’s model is based on two facts, that the brain is a dissipative open system permanently coupled
with its environment, and that quantum fields have an infinite number of states of minimal energy,
that is, the vacuum states, each of which can be characterized by a particular ordering identified by
its code, which, Vitiello argued, could serve as memory code. Being in the lowest energy state both
makes it robust, guarantees that it is easy to create and readily excited in the recall process. Thus, the
brain is a mixed system involving two separate but interacting levels, memory based on quantum
dynamics, and the electrochemical processes of neuro-synaptic dynamics, creating a Double in the
relationship between memory and ongoing activity. As Vitiello described his theory and its
implications, ‘the overall mathematical structures of the model and in particular the specific
dissipative character of the dynamics strongly point to consciousness as a “time mirror”, as a
“reflection in time” which manifests as nonlinear coupling or dialogue … with the separable own
Double. … In some sense, the unavoidable coupling with the external world is “interiorized” in the
dialectic, permanent relation with the Double’ (Vitiello, 2001, 141). Developing this idea later with
Walter Freeman, they wrote, ‘the Double is conceived as a massively coherent, highly textured brain
activity pattern that by replaying the past can predict the future. Therefore the Double is Mind, not
Matter, yet it is completely entangled with brain matter that is shaped in the original AM [amplitude
modulation] pattern’ (Freeman and Vitiello, 2016, 16). They concluded, ‘the relation between matter
and mind can now be expressed in terms of the evolution of dynamic trajectories along parallel time
lines, one corresponding to reconstructing the past in remembering, the other to forecasting
environmental trends by extrapolation into the future in predicting’ (Freeman and Vitiello, 2016, 17).
Thirdly, organisms are actively searching for new inputs and accommodating themselves to their
environments, and in doing so are capable of creativity. Ho’s conception of consciousness understates
its orientation to the future, particularly in the case of more highly developed forms of consciousness
associated with humans. For instance, her identification of proprioception with quantum coherence
of the electromagnetic field of the organism functioning as a liquid crystal, explaining this through the
generation in the organism of a hologram-like interference pattern, could not easily explain the
experience of phantom limbs after amputations where people continue with passive anticipations (or
protensions) of what they can do with these limbs, nor could she recognize the significance of and
then account for the capacity to knock on an imaginary door, something that some brain damaged
people are unable to do. These reveal the importance of an embodied anticipatory imagination to
experience. More generally, she did not acknowledge the qualitative differences between cognition
in different organisms – amoeba, plants, fish, various mammals and humans, and attempt to
comprehend the uniqueness of each. That is, she barely touched on the characteristics of what Gerald
Edelman characterized as higher-order consciousness.
Not acknowledging the uniqueness of humans, Ho did not attempt to explain the evolution of
various levels of cognition. While her holistic approach, conceiving the whole organism and not only
the brain as a quantum coherent liquid crystal, was a better basis for accounting for the diffuse felt
directedness which, according to the Leipzig school of Gestalt psychologists and the microgenetic
theorists of consciousness, she could not explain the actual genesis of the various forms of
differentiation of separate sensations, perceptions, distinct acts of remembering, distinct thoughts,
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and so on. She not only did not offer explanations for the capacity of humans to use metaphors and
construct stories to augment awareness of broader contexts, including awareness of the significance
of the distant past, including the whole history of the cosmos made possible by such stories, but did
not provide the framework to develop such an explanation. This requires a much more complex notion
of memory as a condition for all other higher-order aspects of consciousness, such as language, than
Ho considered. In fact, this seems a problem for all those who have invoked quantum theory to
account for consciousness, most of whom have ignored the work of the microgeneticist theorists of
consciousness. As Gerald Edelman argued:
Memory is a system property: it differs depending on the structure of the system
in which it is expressed. In biological systems, memory must not be confused with
the mechanisms that are necessary for its establishment, such as synaptic change.
Above all, biological memory is not a replica or a trace that is coded to represent
its object. In whatever form, human memory involves an apparently open-ended
set of connections between subjects and a rich texture of previous knowledge that
cannot be adequately represented by the impoverished language of computer
science – “storage,” “retrieval,” ”input,” “output.” To have memory, one must be
able to repeat a performance, to assert, to relate matters and categories to one’s
own position in time and space. (Edelman, 1992, 238)
Correspondingly, Ho did not attempt to explain the capacity to form long-term goals on the basis of
such narrative memory. That is, she did not attempt to explain imagination and the capacity to
envisage new scenarios, hypothetical situations and fictitious worlds, humanity’s creative capacities
on which societies and civilizations are based. Nor could she account for tensions and conflicts
between different levels of awareness and consciousness engendering various forms of self-deception
associated with sub- or semi-conscious motives. A more complex relationship between quantum
coherence and experience is called for.
But again, such work has been advanced within the school of thought inspired by Umezawa.
Freeman and Vitiello, alluding to Merleau-Ponty, have argued for a central place for imagination,
although they are inferior to Ho in not acknowledging the central place proprioception plays in all
forms of awareness and consciousness in animals. Alluding to the capacity of the brain to generate a
time-reversed copy of the organism as an open system and thereby hypothesize what will come next,
they wrote ‘where do the hypotheses come from? The answer is from imagination. … [T]he mirror
copy exists as a dynamical system of nerve energy, by which the Double produces its hypotheses and
predictions, which we experience as perception, and which we test by taking action. It is the Double
that imagines the world outside us, free from the shackles of thermodynamic reality. It is the Double
that soars’ (Freeman and Vitiello, 2016, 15). They suggested that the frontal lobes enable the organism
to think without acting, and block action without thought. Gordon Globus, integrating Gestalt
psychology and post-phenomenology with process philosophy while engaging with work in quantum
field theory as developed by Umezawa and Vitiello, has attempted to characterize the full complexity
of human existence (Globus, 2003; Globus, 2009). In doing so, he has attempted to free quantum brain
dynamics, including Vitiello’s work, from a residual dualism between the mind, located in the brain,
and the external world (2009, p.116f). Since Globus aligned his own work with process philosophy and
embraced quantum field theory, his work is commensurable with Ho’s, supplements it, and could be
used to augment it in a way that the proponents of the microgeneticist theories of consciousness have
called for, although I will suggest below, even Globus’ work is not enough by itself in this regard.
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Ho was concerned with humanity and human consciousness, and to complete this paper it is
necessary to defend and extend her efforts (and those of Waddington, Needham and Goodwin) to
overcome the Cartesian dualism that continues to afflict not only modern science but the broader
culture. To this end, it is important to appreciate that the notion of fields was associated with process
thinking, and to acknowledge the centrality of becoming in the original idea of fields. Processes are
extensive and durational and do not have a simple location in space and time. Time, as it was
understood by the Naturphilosophen and by the main proponents of field theory, including
Whitehead, Waddington, Needham and Ho herself, cannot be treated as equivalent to an extra
dimension of space and is not infinitely divisible. Time involves durational becoming with an open
future in which possibilities have not yet been actualized, a past in which possibilities have been
actualized, and a present where possibilities are in the process of being actualized. Space on the other
hand should be understood as characterizing the potential and actual causal relations between
processes, with different forms of space emerging with the evolution of the universe, life and
humanity. Accordingly, we should speak of time-space rather than space-time, as Milič Čapek (1971,
229-37) argued, and allow for a multiplicity of these supporting and interacting with each other. To
understand reality in this way requires what Michael Polanyi (1969, chap.13) termed ‘indwelling’ in
that which is being comprehended, captured to some extent by what Ho referred to as synthetic
thinking. Ho allowed for fields within fields, both within morphogenesis and more broadly to conceive
the universe as ‘a nested hierarchy of individualities and communities’ (Ho, 2008, 334). Fields focused
upon have to be seen in the context of broader fields and/or more specific fields, which again requires
indwelling to contextualize that which is being investigated (Bitbol, 1996, 227ff.). We have to
acknowledge that scientists and their experimental apparatuses are part of the world they are trying
to understand. By thinking in this not completely objectifying way, Ho was able to present biological
fields as emerging from and being developments of physical fields, although with some degree of
autonomy from the fields from and within which they emerged, capable of then utilizing these physical
fields for autonomous ends. However, the physical fields were referred to in a fairly unsystematic way,
based on research findings about particular fields in organisms, such as the morphogenetic field, the
electric field, the electromagnetic field, the biophoton field and the vacuum field, with minimal effort
to characterize the emergence of new fields or to acknowledge the importance of disposition feelings
in living organisms driving their quest to maintain themselves in existence against environmental
forces.
The possibility of the emergence of new fields, and the hierarchical ordering that such emergence
engenders, can be made intelligible by Pattee’s notion of enabling constraints, although Pattee did
not conceive such ordering in terms of fields. This also makes intelligible the ordering of the sequence
of emergent fields, as when in an embryo fields for specific parts of the body such as a leg emerge
within the total embryo field, and then the field of the extremity of the leg where digits develop
emerges from this field. Allowing fields emerging within fields, there are multiple temporalities with
various processes existing over different minimum durations, with some durations containing and
integrating others. This complex view of temporality was developed by Bergson (Čapek, 1971, 159),
whose work Ho embraced. It was consistent with Goodwin’s early work, and was central to the
traditions of Chinese thought that influenced the development of the concept of field. In discussing
the mind, Ho emphasized that it is non-local, containing diversity in a unity, but it should also be seen
as multi-temporal, containing multiple durations within a hierarchy of durations. It is by virtue of this
complexity that we recognize enduring forms within change, and presence of the past in the present.
This was well conveyed in the lines of the Sung Dynasty poet, Li Po (1963, 193):
Petals are on the gone waters and on the going,
And on the back-swirling eddies,
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But today's men are not the men of the old days,
Though they hang in the same way over the bridge-rail.
Appreciating the reality of becoming involves acknowledging the reality of possibilities, along with
propensities or powers and liabilities to make possibilities actual. Acknowledging possibilities might
be regarded as of no significance, merely acknowledging logical possibility, as a determinist committed
to a block universe might still acknowledge possibilities as logical abstractions or mere terms used to
define what there is. However, it is also possible to take a realist rather than a nominalist approach
and grant possibilities a definite ontological status as potentialities. Whitehead did this in
characterizing them as eternal objects that are selected by actual occasions as part of their
concrescence or self-formation, while in his cosmology C.S. Peirce took possibilities as Firstness
(equated with impersonalized feeling), actual existences (which are a limitation on possibilities) as
Secondness, and laws as Thirdness. Following Peirce, Stuart Kauffman argued for an interpretation of
quantum theory in which the paradoxes of theory were dissolved by distinguishing possibilities (or
‘Possibles’) from what is actual, and pointing out that a different logic pertains to possibilities than
pertains to actuals (Kauffman, 2016, 124). For instance, it is not necessary to accept the excluded
middle where possibilities are concerned; a proposition about possibilities can be both true and false.
Such possibilities can be outside space, or non-local, but inside time. Following Kauffman and
embracing this strong sense of the reality of possibilities to interpret quantum field theory (where
electrons, for instance, are treated as excitations of an underlying electron field rather than particles,
and a field is conceived of as ‘a set of infinitely many degrees of freedom extended across spatial
regions or the whole of space’ (Jibu and Yasue, 1995, 221)), possibilities can be conceived of as
propensities of existing fields in their extensive and durational becoming, including possibilities for, or
propensities to interact with other fields and to participate in the emergence of new fields, as has
been shown to occur in condensed matter physics with the formation of crystals (Vitiello, 2001, 12ff.).
This accords with those quantum theorists who argue that quantum theory should be seen as
reintroducing real potentialities and propensities or dispositional states into physics (Bschir, 2016,
36ff.). While possibilities are infinitely divisible, what exists is not. The primary beings of the universe
only exist as processes of extensive, durational becoming which sustain possibilities or dispositions,
including dispositions which if realized, are incompatible with the realization of other dispositions. It
is in relation to such extensive, durational becoming that paths need to be understood, including
necessary paths or chreods, and the epigenetic landscapes that represent these. Epigenetic
landscapes and their mathematical models are mappings of the possibilities of fields in their process
of becoming, revealing those real possibilities that an epigenetic process will most probably follow, or
have a propensity to follow and realize, as a valley, while at the same time, mapping other possibilities
and propensities, including adjacent possible paths that could be followed. It is by taking adjacent
possible paths that an organism can respond creatively to new contingencies, as with pre-adaptation
where a trait evolved to serve one function is co-opted to solve a new problem (Gabora, Scott &
Kauffman, 2013).
In the case of elementary quantum processes these paths and their mappings are relatively simple,
but become increasingly complex with emergent enabling constraints involving fields within fields, or
co-extensive, mutually dependent fields which are nevertheless irreducible to each other. This is the
condition for the development of organisms which, by incorporating models of themselves and their
environments, are able to anticipate and then respond to what is anticipated. These are the
anticipatory systems as characterized by Robert Rosen, systems which require multiple models to
represent them, with each being components of the others but without there being a largest model
from which the other models can be derived (Rosen, 2012). The mathematics involved in such
modelling requires the use of impredicative concepts characterized by circular definitions, or
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technically, where ‘a set M and a particular object m are so defined that on the one hand m is a
member of M, and on the other hand, the definition of m depends of M’ (Kleene, 1952, 42). Effectively,
this is modelling processes that are, in philosophical language, internally related to each other. As
Rosen argued, it is only with such models that final causes characteristic of anticipatory systems can
really be said to have a place, and accordingly, in which it is necessary to recognize components as
functional components and not simply fractionated components of the whole. While Thom’s use of
the term ‘attractor’ was meant to equate to a final cause, such attractors were nothing but where the
dynamics of a system lead to. This is how the notion of attractor was conceived when it was embraced
by complexity theorists and incorporated into dynamical systems theory. Systems were then classified
according to whether they led to a point, periodic motion, quasiperiodic motion where there is more
than one possible frequency, or to chaos. Later, the ‘edge of chaos’ and ‘criticality’ were recognized
as attractors of self-organizing systems. There was no recognition by these complexity theorists of
paths of development to more complex systems, although this was focussed on by complexity
theorists who had embraced hierarchy theory, such as Howard Pattee and Stan Salthe.
By contrast, in anticipatory systems there are multiple fields irreducible to each other but
inseparable from each other operating over diverse durations, there is a form of downward causation
constraining components to functionally serve the end that the process is realizing. This is an essential
aspect of final causation. As Salthe argued, ‘constraints from the higher level not only help to select
the lower level-trajectory but also pull it into its future at the same time. Top-down causality is a form
of final causality’ (Salthe, 1993, 270). For instance, when the field of the leg emerges from the field of
the whole embryo it clearly has some autonomy, as is evident from experiments transposing of
material from the leg to another part of the embryo, such as the wing. It will still develop as leg tissue,
but according to its position in the wing field, constrained by the whole to serve a function. As a
function, however, it cannot be identified simply as a fractionated component of the organism but has
to be recognized through its function, as a leg facilitating locomotion, although as such it utilizes the
potential of physical structures and can be used for other and completely new ends. Organism as such
are emergent ‘objects’ with final causes which cannot be modelled as dynamical systems (Ehresmann
and Vanbremeersch (2007, 139ff.).
Modelling mathematically all the complexity that Ho identified in organisms, including chreods and
consciousness, will require not only the insights of Rosen but the further advances in mathematics
made possible by the further development of category theory by Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch
(2007, esp. chap.10), by Ehresmann and Gomez-Ramirez (2015) and by Ehresmann and Simeonov
(2012; 2017) with the development of biomathics. Progress in deploying category theory to model
consciousness has been made also by Goro Kato and Daniele C. Struppa (2002).
12. Biosemiotics and Genetic Structuralism
Once final causes and functions are acknowledged, it become possible to appreciate semiosis and
the centrality of semiosis to all living beings. Epigenesis was always understood by Ho, along with all
members of the theoretical biology movement, as a process involving interactions of the epigenetic
process with the genome and the environment, and it was assumed that an organism’s metabolism
involves a constant exchange with its environment. For the most part, the fields that Ho wrote about
were whole organisms or parts of them. She situated these in broader contexts, including ultimately
the entire cosmos, and on occasion wrote about ecosystems and society. When discussing the brain
she always situated this as part of and integrally related to the rest of the body. However, despite
reference to cognition, the organism within its environment was not treated as a field. That it should
be was argued by Jacob von Uexküll, who claimed that it is only possible to understand an organism
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when seen in relation to its surrounding world, or Umwelt, the environment to which it is sensitive
and has a meaning for it. This was accepted by the ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, by von
Bertalanffy, by the biosemioticians and by Piaget. Vitiello’s dissipative quantum field theory supports
this claim. As he put it, ‘Consciousness seems thus to emerge as a manifestation of the dissipative
dynamics of the brain. … [C]onsciousness appears to be not solely characterized by subjective
dynamics; its roots, on the contrary, seem to be grounded in the permanent “trade” of the brain (the
subject) with the external world. Consciousness is only possible if dissipation, openness onto the
outside world is allowed’ (2001, 141). It is only through recognizing, as Jacob von Uexküll argued, the
organism in its environment as an irreducible field, that biosemiosis, the production and interpretation
of signs by the organism as whole and within it can be fully understood, and therefore, it is only by
seeing the organism in its surrounding environment that epigenesis can be properly characterized. As
the biosemiotician, Jesper Hoffmeyer, argued, embracing Waddington’s emphasis on the autonomy
of the zone between the genotype and the phenotype, ‘this is a zone where not only embryological
but also semiotics influences are of the essence. And in fact, perhaps the most crucial single aspect of
the embryological process (after the attainment of brute viability) is the development of the Umwelt
of an organism’ (Hoffmeyer, 2008, 200). Elaborating on this, Hoffmeyer suggested it is necessary to
provide an extra layer, the Umwelt landscape to map this ‘canalysation process’, arguing ‘that it is the
semiotic competence of animals that seriously puts (or should put) the intermediate embryological
zone (the combined epigenetic-Umwelt landscape) at the forefront of the agenda in evolutionary
thinking.’ Selection should be seen as flowing down ‘semiotically constructed pathways’ (2008, 200).
As noted above, biosemioticians embraced and developed Peirce’s theory of signs, explaining a
vast variety of forms of semiosis from the vegetative semiosis where growth is the interpretant, to
semiosis in animals where action is the interpretant, to the complex forms of symbolic semiosis
associated with human culture, with the later forms building on and being dependent on the more
basic forms of semiosis, including the dispositional feelings studied by the proponents of microgenetic
theories of consciousness. They also investigated the semiosis that operates inside organisms, that is,
endosemiosis, although differentiating what is internal and external is problematic. As Hoffmeyer
noted, in terms that resonate with those of Rössler’s endophysics, ‘the processes of life are … played
out across multiple surfaces, one enveloping another’ (2008, 213). It is this differentiation through
engendering and enfolding surfaces that we have the co-emergence of subjects defined in opposition
to objects, although these are really aspects of the same emergent processes. And as Merleau-Ponty
pointed out, subject and object are reversible, as when I touch one of my hands with the other. (It
appears that with meditation some people are able to dissolve this opposition, achieving a form of
experience of being prior to this division.) Such work challenges and provides an alternative to work
on feedback utilizing the standard concept of information, unless information is redefined as it was by
Gregory Bateson, as ‘a difference that makes a difference‘. This broader definition can allow for a
variety of forms of information ranging, as John Collier argued, from a lowest level of physical
information determined by distinctions to explicit representation in linguistic social communication,
with the higher levels involving extra restrictions on the lower levels (Collier, 2011). Bateson’s work
was taken up and developed by the biosemioticians, and, aligned with them, Søren Brier, who
developed the concept of ‘cybersemiotics’ (Brier, 2010). It is through this work on semiosis interpreted
to accord with Waddington’s notion of canalysing along semiotically constructed pathways that it
should be possible to revive, develop and then redeploy Waddington’s notion of homeorhesis.
Such work can be further augmented by the work of Piaget. Peirce was strongly influenced by Kant.
His highly general theory of semiosis postulated three components – representamen or sign, object
and interpretant (which can in turn become a sign), is applicable to everything from cell functioning
and plant growth to the development of art and science. The notion of ‘interpretant’ enfolded the
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place accorded to synthesis by Kant in perception and judgement, that is, the constructive aspect of
experience involving schemata and imagination. As Sandra Rosenthal observed,
Peirce in appropriating Kantian schemata, takes from Kant the fundamental insight
that concepts are empirically meaningful only if they contain schematic
possibilities for their application to sensible experience. … However, Peirce’s
pragmatic appropriation of these insights radically alters Kant’s understanding of
the schema. Such a schema is no longer a product of the productive imagination
as distinct from the understanding of the faculty of judgment. Rather, both
understanding and imagination are unified and transformed into a creative
functioning of habit as providing a lived or vital intentionality between knower and
the known. (Rosenthal, 1994, 26)
Peirce developed his philosophy before the rise of Gestalt psychology which, utilizing the concept of
field, focussed on its synthetic aspect in the context of the organism rather than in relation to a
transcendent ego. As Piaget characterized the core idea, formulated in 1912, of the founders of Gestalt
psychology, Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, ‘perceptible structures were interpreted by
means of field models applicable alike to perception, to the nervous system, to the organism, and
even to an agglomeration of physical phenomena made up by Köhler – a physicist by training – and
given the name physische Gestalten’ (Piaget, 1971, 245). The Gestalt psychologists set about
determining the laws of form. The consequence of this was that higher totalities were reduced to
perceptual or motor Gestalts.
Piaget, who originally studied philosophy aligned with neo-Kantianism, also was strongly
influenced by Kant and embraced his notion of schemata, redefined as ‘structure’ which the organism
can transfer or generalize from one object, situation or circumstance to another, as when a baby
having played with a ball generalizes the cognitive structures generated by this to another ball. Piaget
argued that the main problem with the work of these Gestalt psychologists was that they irrevocably
subordinated these forms to equilibrium laws, constrained from without as well as from within, giving
no place for constructive activity or development. Piaget’s own work was an attempt to overcome this
deficiency, and it was through acknowledging order in this development that Piaget recognized that
his work required Waddington’s concept of chreods, with the development of cognition being seen as
founded on and a further development of the morphogenesis of the organism. That is, Piaget did not
reject Gestalt psychology but advanced beyond it. Piaget also grappled with the nature and role of
signs and symbols, up to and including language, seeing language as built on and presupposing the
structures developed through practical engagement in the world whereby organisms develop the
capacity to recognize invariant patterns in their environments (Furth, 1981, Part III). Seen against the
common background of Kant and post-Kantian thought, the ideas of the biosemioticians and Piaget’s
theory of cognitive development are commensurable. There is no reason for not acknowledging a
place for structures, as conceived by Piaget as hierarchically organized self-regulating systems of
transformations, as aspects of semiosis as characterized by the Peircian biosemioticians, as I have
already suggested.
Considering all this, we can revisit Ho’s engagement with Piagetian genetic structuralism and her
effort to conceive consciousness. As Waddington and then Goodwin and Ho argued, it is possible to
understand morphogenetic fields as developing structures as Piaget had conceived them. In Ho’s
contribution to the structuralist phase of the theoretical biologists she not only completely aligned
her own work with Piagetian genetic structuralism as did Goodwin, but emphasised process. As she
put it:
46
Piaget (1968) defined a structure as a system of transformation. From an
evolutionary perspective, however, it is structuring rather than structure that
should concern us. This takes us right to the heart of Whitehead’s (1920) nature as
process. … in the time-honoured tradition of the resolution of opposites, a
‘structuralism of process’ offers us a synthesis of the eternal and existential. And
it does so via the participation of the organism in the con-structuring of reality.
Time and creativity are of the essence. … Piaget (1968) identified three main
properties of structures: wholeness, transformation and self-regulation. I
introduce a fourth, which is characteristic of organismic structures: heredity, or
memory. (Ho, 1989, 31).
She continued:
A life-history is thus presented as a sequence of forms connected by
transformations from a particular structure in the context of the co-existing
contingencies. … In the organism, the novel environments or habits adopted may
result in physiological changes which predispose the development of the next
generation to occur in certain ways. This is the essence of the internalisation of
contingencies, which Waddington (1957) expressed as the canalisation and
eventual genetic assimilation of a novel developmental response. (Ho, 1989, 34f.)
However, the chapter in which she wrote this was entirely devoted to morphology, not cognitive
development or consciousness. As such, it could be seen as a contribution to what the biosemioticians,
and Kalevi Kull in particular, characterized as vegetative semiosis where the generation of form itself
is seen as an interpretant in a semiotic process, and thereby a sign for other life-forms (Kull, 2009).
Once this is accepted, it is not difficult to characterize cognition associated with action, and then with
thought dissociated from immediate action, as developing from such vegetative semiosis.
12. Rethinking Waddington and Ho through Robert Rosen
I have suggested elsewhere that Peircian semiotics requires a more complex understanding of
causation than Peirce provided, and that this can be provided by hierarchy theory based on the idea
notion of enabling constraints as it was developed by Pattee, Rosen and Salthe, along with Rosen’s
characterization of causal entailment in anticipatory systems (Gare, 2007). Conceived along these lines
it is not difficult to see how semiosis associated with action and symbols can be understood in the
same way as vegetative semiosis as developing structures, effecting a synthesis of Waddington’s
theoretical biology, biosemiotics and Piagetian developmental psychology right up to the most
abstract forms of symbolic semiosis. This is associated with a constructivist theory of knowledge and
of consciousness, which can be defended through Robert Rosen’s work on anticipatory systems in
which he argued that functional components of living beings cannot be identified with the
fractionated components they can be analysed into (Rosen, 2000b). Considering Rosen’s arguments,
Ho’s explanation of consciousness, most importantly proprioceptive consciousness through quantum
coherence, while illuminating looks too simplistic. Can it be defended? With modifications based on
the ideas I have already argued for, I believe it can.
Living beings are very special kinds of physical beings. They are dissipative structures self-
differentiating along paths of development engendering hierarchical organizations based on enabling
constraints, but they are more than all this. They are anticipatory systems, and it is by virtue of this
that they are alive. As Rosen argued, living beings cannot be identified with the sum of their
fractionated components, and their specific characteristics can be defined independently of the
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physical processes that are required and are utilized by them, such as the energetic processes and
forms of integration that Ho described. However, they still must be recognized as physical processes
and it is necessary to understand how these physical processes make life and consciousness possible.
The best way to understand physical processes in relation to living beings, and the structures they
generate, is in terms of how living beings utilize them. It is here that mechanistic forms of explanation
can be apposite, providing it is acknowledged that mechanistic explanations always presuppose
teleology, and life cannot be understood as a collection of mechanisms. For instance, the compounds
such as calcium carbonate that form bones of legs provide strong structures than facilitate
locomotion, among other things, including on occasion entirely new uses. It is here that most of the
work undertaken by neuroscientists can be recognized as important. Work on different types of
neurons, dendrites, axons and their interconnections, synapses, specialized regions of the brain,
neural nets, brain waves and other electrical and magnetic patterns can be seen as having an
important place in cognitive processing, providing they are understood as making possible and being
involved in and largely determining the nature of conscious living rather than being identified with it.
Long term memory is possible because physical processes, including certain chemicals, for instance as
Candace Pert argued, polypeptides, are able by themselves or through their modifications of
electromagnetic fields, to maintain records of past events. RNA and then DNA complement
polypeptides in this regard. However, biomolecules are assembled and disassembled over a short time
span of a couple of weeks, and the long term stability characteristic of memory can only be explained
through quantum field theory, that is, through the electromagnetic vacuum field.
As such, these biochemicals, vacuum states and modulations of electro-magnetic fields are not
memories, but by virtue of their relation to biofields, they can serve as sign vehicles that have the
properties that enable them to be organized by codes with all the differentiation that coding entails.
Similarly the claim by Ho that consciousness is the quantum coherent liquid crystal, Jibu and Yasue’s
that ‘creation and annihilation dynamics of corticons and photons in the QBD system in the sub-
microscopic world of the brain’ is ‘the entity we call consciousness or mind’ (Jibu and Yasue, 1995,
179), along with Hermes Romijn’s claim that the ‘fleeting, highly ordered 4-dimenional (space and
time) patterns of virtual photons (electric and/or magnetic fields), generated by assemblies of
dendritic trees of a specialized (e.g., cortical) neuronal network … encode for subjective (conscious)
experiences (Romijn, 2002, 74), are misleading. These physical processes should be seen as crucial to
making consciousness and such subjective experiences possible, and as crucial components of living
beings as conscious subjects, rather than being identified with or as encoding subjective, conscious
experience. Explaining the possibility of these is not insignificant, however. If the world were
ultimately composed of nothing but interacting particles along with forces of attraction and repulsion,
machines or even digital computers, even allowing for the diverse patterns identified by complexity
theorists, consciousness would be inconceivable. Furthermore, as Pylkkänen (2004) argued, following
David Bohm, the nature of consciousness is largely determined by the quantum dynamics that make
it possible and these dynamics are utilized by thought, and have many of the same characteristics.
Adopting this perspective, rather than identifying quantum coherent fields associated with liquid
crystals with consciousness, which amounts to identifying a fractionated component of an organism
with its function, such quantum coherent fields should be seen as explaining the possibility of
consciousness and as crucial to the consciousness of living beings and determining to a considerable
extent the nature of conscious experience. It can be argued that living organisms have evolved to be
able to utilize coherent quantum fields, those associated with quantum coherent electromagnetic
processes and vacuum states facilitated by liquid crystals, as a means of constraining, coordinating
and stabilizing neural activities, including patterns of virtual biophotons and vibrations in
microtubules, thereby augmenting semiosis, including the memory required for this. This has greatly
48
increased the sensitivity of organisms, for their capacity to identify diverse ends and possible actions,
their capacity for quick responses, to reassess goals, interpretations and possible actions, and also,
particularly with humans, for the creative development of semiosis; that is, for enhancing cognitive
structures. Quantum coherent electromagnetic fields would then be inseparable from consciousness
as a highly-developed form of cognition, including proprioception and a sense of where the organism
is in its world. Consciousness as such should be seen as built on and presupposing simpler forms of
semiosis and cognition associated with interactions between the organism and its environment and
within the body, forms of semiosis that are associated with feeling and awareness rather than
consciousness. Consciousness in humans has engendered the imaginative development of complex
ideas in literature, philosophy, science and mathematics. In making such complex semiosis possible,
such quantum coherence is different from the quantum coherence that might occur outside living
organisms. As Ho argued, organisms are organized into vast fractal hierarchies of energetic processes,
including neural activity, self-organizing to criticality such that negligible energetic activity, for
instance, the energetic activity associated with interpreting signs defining the situation of the
organism in its environment, can trigger a massive cascade of transformations, resulting in the rapid
deployment of large amounts of useable energy for quick action by the entire organism.
From this perspective, coherent electromagnetic fields made possible by liquid crystals in
organisms situated within environments are at the apex of and supervene by suffusing and
coordinating through constraining hierarchies of fields and their structures over multiple scales. These
fields include, maintain, develop and create new repertoires of possibilities (or cognitive structures or
concepts) for interpretation and action (that is, habitual, skilled forms of interpretation and action) at
multiple levels of organization, including repertoires for modifying or creating new possibilities
(accommodating cognitive structures or developing new habits). This coordinating function would not
be simply local. It would operate simultaneously over different durations, such that these possibilities
could be actualized according to particular circumstances. These ‘possibilities’ could then be
conceived of as possible chreods, and include cognitive structures as characterized by Piaget, including
chreods of development of these cognitive structures.
This accords with what Waddington argued at the second theoretical biology conference
commenting on a presentation by Richard Gregory on how information controls behaviour.
Waddington responded:
Richard Gregory asks the question – a very good one – how so little information
controls so much behaviour, and answers it by arguing that the information
triggers pre-existing models of objects in the perceivable world which have already
been formed within the brain. This is an attractive thesis, but I find the word
‘model’, with its suggestion of miniature clockwork railway locomotives and other
object-like hardware, rather inhibiting to an imaginative grasp of what is involved.
I should prefer to think of these ‘models’ as chreods. …. [W]e have to suppose that
the space of brain states is divided into a number of domains, each characterized
by a vector field which, at any given time, is dominated by a particular attractor. …
In such a picture it is easy to realize the provisional character of the ‘internal
information’, i.e. the boundaries of the various domains, the characteristics of the
vector field and attractors, and to appreciate that this must be subject to continual
change and adaptation through processes of learning. (Waddington, 1969, 247)
Waddington’s claims in this regard can be supported by the experimental work of Walter Freeman
who showed that when an rabbit learns to identify a new odour, it does not store memories that are
49
compared with present inputs, but effect ‘global modulations constituting generic commands’ (1995,
165).
In this scheme, there can be chreods within chreods as organisms define their worlds and their
place within them as the context for identifying both broader contexts and more particular situations,
along with specific events, objects, organisms, persons, signs, actions, or utterances. The repertoire
of possibilities could be actions which are simultaneously interpretations (in Peircian biosemiotics
terminology, where the interpretants are actions as part of what Jacob von Uexküll referred to as
function-circles, or with what Piaget referred to as sensori-motor intelligence) or a separate
interpretation of signs followed by a choice of actions (associated with the development of ‘inner-
worlds’ as conceived by von Uexküll, or with Piaget’s ‘operational intelligence’).
Such cognition involves the constitution of and orientation in the world by the organism in its
environment as the field of all its fields of activity, with anticipations or protensions and also retentions
(to use Husserl’s terminology), with protensions being fulfilled or challenged and then registered as
such as retentions. That is, to use Gerald Edelman’s terminology (which can be seen to fill out Vitiello’s
notion of the Double), there is a re-entrant mapping so that what comes to be experienced as present
has been anticipated and is actually a construction, a ‘remembered present’ based on memory of the
past, and this, argued Edelman, is the basis of primary consciousness (Edelman and Tononi, 2000,
chap.9) on which higher-order consciousness associated with symbols and language is build (Edelman,
1992, chap.12). This temporality of being-in-the-world is more fundamental than what is normally
thought of as memory, the conscious reflective re-presentation of the past, contextualized through
stories to situate the present in history. This basic temporality of anticipatory systems is associated
with the capacity of living organisms, including plants, to anticipate and change on the basis of what
has been anticipated, and also to respond creatively to failures of anticipation, involving a form of
abduction. That is, organisms, on the basis of memory, are oriented to the future.
What is involved in all this becomes clear when such temporal integration breaks down, as it does
to some degree when people suffer damage to the right frontal lobe of their brains. Frequently, they
can no longer acknowledge the failure of protensions, for instance, they cannot acknowledge that one
of their limbs is paralysed, a condition known as anasognosia (McGilchrist 2009, 41). Such people lose
the capacity to appreciate anything new or to see things in context, and they lose the capacity to
develop new cognitive structures. This is a defective condition, highlighting what is normal. Chreods
normally develop through the restless, exploring activities of organisms that open up new paths of
evolutionary development; of swimmers, runners, climbers, fliers, herbivores, carnivores, scavengers
etc., along with new forms of symbiosis with new synergies. They are selected for success in the paths
they pursue, and this has concentrates genes required for the successful pursuit of these paths. In the
case of humans, such restless exploration associated with the imagination and the capacity for
institutionalize practices has led to the development of new cultural, social, political and economic
forms.
As noted, more developed forms of consciousness are associated with developments of inner
worlds of organisms mediating between interpretation and action, and then with humans, the
incorporation into these inner worlds the perspectives of others. To begin with, this is associated with
the development of mirror neurons that, functioning as signs, respond to the actions of others in the
same way as they respond to the organism’s own actions, but such incorporation of the other can be
augmented with the development of the more complex forms of semiosis associated with culture
(Favareau, 2002; Thellefsen, 2001). These complex forms of semiosis are associated with a capacity to
see oneself from the perspective of others, to interpret interpretants, to reflect upon their adequacy
based on memory of failed anticipations and modify these accordingly, associated with a greatly
50
extended capacity for abduction. It is this incorporation of the others and symbolic semiosis that paves
the way for reflective self-consciousness as a participant in a socially defined world maintained
through cultural, social and economic fields, sustained by the embodied dispositions of their
members, or habituses (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology) who effectively incorporate these fields
in orienting themselves in their own creative becoming (Gare, 2002). These fields are assumed as the
context of memory and focussed perception, action and thought; in the language of a
phenomenologist strongly influenced by Gestalt psychology, Aron Gurwitsch, they are the fields of
consciousness (Gurwitsch, 1964, Part Five and Six). As Samuel Todes (2001, 83) argued, building on
Gurwitsch’s work, ‘memory, our sense, and our ideas presuppose in our experience a probability of
order founded on the condition that all our experience occurs in a holistic spatiotemporal life-field
generated by our holistically active body in its attempt (which must be at least minimally successful)
to meet its needs unified as all its “own”, all belonging to its singular bodily self.’
It is within these broader contexts that coherent electromagnetic fields can be essential
components of the ‘mind field’ postulated by the neurophysiologist John Eccles, without definite
position in space and ‘carrying little or no energy, which nevertheless can trigger neural processes, for
example in the motor cortex’ (Hiley and Pylkkänen, 2005, 20). The capacity for creativity could be
accounted for by organisms’ capacity to self-organize at different levels, including the central nervous
system or cortical field, to the edge of chaos in which there are generated multiple equipotential
attractors, any one of which could prevail as a consequence of minimal inputs. Walter Freeman has
also shown that chaotic attractors are essential to the functioning of the brain where it is important
that resonance patterns and entrainment do not develop (Freeman, 1999, 89f.). It is in this way that
imagination, including the radical imagination postulated by the social philosopher Cornelius
Castoriadis, could be accounted for.
That is, it is being able to influence which of a range of pre-existing possibilities maintained by the
complex hierarchically organized fields composing the organism and its communities, each organized
to follow different possible paths, including paths to the edge of chaos, that makes this quantum
coherence serve the function of enabling the organism to cognize quickly different possibilities and to
choose between them, and to explore and even create new possibilities. Such influence is mediated
by complex forms of semiosis through which organisms orient themselves within their environments,
including above all a proprioceptive sense of embodiment within their world, including their social
worlds with their histories. And it is only as functional aspects of semiosis of the whole organism,
actively and emotionally engaged in its world, that it is possible to understand qualia such as the
experience of different colours. ‘Qualia’ are experienced in the process of discriminating between
aspects of the world, and are essentially relational, something revealed most clearly by the Gestalt
psychologists. As such, this semiosis can suffer defects, including false protensions, as with the
experience of phantom limbs. False protensions are just one way in which organisms manifest
deficiency of comprehension of themselves in their environments.
It is in the context of the whole organism in its environment, constructed as a surrounding world
embedded in a social world, that quantum coherence as described by Ho and neuroscientists can
explain the experience of being a subject not completely local with the freedom to act spontaneously.
Conceived in this way, choice is not necessarily a matter of self-assertion, but of finding the best way.
As Ho (2008, 332f.) wrote, ‘the overt act, or choice, does follow from the antecedent, but it cannot be
predicted in advance. One can at best retrace the abstract “steps” and represent the evolution of the
conscious being as having followed a “trajectory”. In truth, the so-called trajectory has been traced
out by one’s own spontaneous actions, both overt and covert up to that point. … In a sense, the
51
quantum coherent organism is most spontaneous and free, which is the Taoist [Daoist] ideal in poetry
and art, and indeed in life itself.’
It has been through humanity’s complex forms of semiosis and the social and cultural fields
generated by these that through philosophy, history and science people have been able to understand
the physical world and their place within it as embodied, situated, free agents. Acknowledging the
constructive nature of knowledge is usually associated with a rejection of realism, suggesting that
what we take to be reality is only a virtual reality, and we are cut off from the possibility of knowing
reality as it is in itself. However, drawing this conclusion manifests the failure to have overcome
Cartesian dualism. From the perspective defended by Ho and further developed here, freed from the
deep assumptions that have dominated Western civilization that identifies what is knowable with
what can be objectified, it is through us that nature is achieving consciousness and understanding of
itself. There is no need to measure this consciousness and understanding against some supposed grasp
of the world that is independent of any subject, because we can appreciate that subjectivity is an
aspect of living participants in a creative world in its process of becoming. We as knowing subjects are
part of the creative becoming of nature. The very idea of virtual reality implies something that is not
virtual reality against which it can be seen to be in some sense inferior, and we have been freed from
having to acknowledge any significance to the duality assumed by this idea. Such is the achievement
of the synthesis of Eastern and Western thought.
13. Conclusion
Identifying the roots of Waddington’s theoretical biology in a tradition of thought influenced by
Chinese thought, making this tradition and its assumptions explicit and showing how they facilitated
this relatively coherent vision for theoretical biology, advanced by the successful integrative work of
Ho, indicates the potential of utilizing non-Western traditions of thought to advance current science.
Extending this integrative work to encompass a range of work in theoretical biology, including
hierarchy theory, quantum brain dynamics, Robert Rosen’s ideas on the mathematics of anticipatory
systems, and then using this to defend developments in biosemiotics and Piagetian theories of
cognitive development, offers further grounds for optimism in this regard. On this basis we are much
closer to understanding the nature of life, sentience and consciousness and the place of consciousness
in nature. However, it is not simply a matter of advancing science. All this work should be seen as an
effort to free science, and culture more broadly, of deep assumptions that have dominated European
and then Western culture. While these assumptions associated with an extreme form of objectivism
are partly responsible for the success of European and Western science, they have engendered a
dualism between the objective and the subjective which is not only hindering the further advance of
science, but is having a damaging effect on civilization and its relationship to the rest of nature.
The focus of this paper has been on three concepts: chreods, homeorhesis and fields, although for
the most part these concepts have only been alluded to rather than being the focus of discussions of
the work of various theorists. In returning to these concepts, I am suggesting it is these that need to
be at the core of the challenge to mainstream reductionist science to unify it and maintain a constancy
of vision. ‘Chreod’ as ‘necessary path’, influenced by Whitehead’s notion of concrescence as the
creative process of self-formation of an actual occasion, the primary beings of the cosmos, resonating
with the Chinese notion of Dao, should function to orient research in all branches of science and the
humanities. Refined through the notion of homeorhesis interpreted and defended through Peircian
semiotics, it has the potential to replace the excessive focus on prediction and control fostered by
mainstream science with a focus on what is required to foster healthy people, societies, civilizations
and ecosystems. These concepts provide the means to identify and understand the path that current
52
civilization is on, which appears to be a path to global ecological destruction, to reveal what alternative
paths there are, and what is required to switch from this path to some viable alternative. In the
concluding chapter to his last book, The Man-Made Future (1978, 337), Waddington quoted with
approval the report of a group set up by the Club of Rome on the state of the international order,
chaired by the eminent economist Jan Tinbergen of Holland: ‘In recent years we have come to realize
that despite considerable achievements in many fields the path along which we have chosen to travel
seems destined to disaster and despair … and as we struggle to make sense of our present
predicament, the future, like some gigantic tidal wave, threatens to consume us.’ The recovery of
Waddington’s concept of chreod, bringing into focus the significance of paths, should enable us to
recognize that we are still on this same path, but also that we can change direction. As Waddington
(1978, 337) put it: ‘The problem amounts to nothing less than discovering a new way in which the
whole world can arrange its affairs – economic, industrial, agricultural and social.’ This is the project
that those inspired by his work are engaged in (Gare, 2017).
Presupposed by the concepts chreod and homeorhesis is the concept of field. Although it has been
obscured by logical positivist interpretations of science or by representations of time as equivalent to
a dimension of space, this was and remains a major challenge to atomism and its associated
reductionism, a superior challenge to that provided by the concept of system. While initially aligned
with process thinking, the concept of system, incorporating cybernetics, lent itself to being
domesticated by mechanistic thinkers with the help of metaphors from information technology. For
the anti-reductionist potential of the concept of field to be realized, it was necessary to develop a
concept of fields emerging from and within fields, with multiple levels of fields, and fields inter-
penetrating with and being mutually constitutive of other fields, with paths of development and
emergence of new fields. While this was implicit in the Daoic thought of the ancient Chinese by virtue
of the vagueness of its language without articles, the challenge was to preserve this understanding
while being analytically rigorous. Embryology provided the ideal site for developing this concept of
field, but it needed to be related to the concept of fields being developed in physics to be fully
successful, and then extended to the organism as a whole in its environment, the brain, cognition,
consciousness and communication, and then to ecosystems, communities, societies, cities, cultures
and civilizations. While the term ‘field’ was not a central focus of Ho’s work, it persisted in the
background and gave coherence to all her work, and extending the concept was one of the most
important aspects of and achievement of her synthetic efforts. Although Ho did not engage with work
in sociology and human ecology, she did point out some of the implications of her work for these fields
of study, and her work provides support for further efforts in this direction.
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