_ The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies _, Vol. 23, Nos. 1–2, (2023), pp. 218–79.
MARSHA FAMILIARO ENRIGHT
Quote
ABSTRACT: Due to a widespread belief in mechano-reductionism, most intellectuals reject the idea that nonconscious living beings act toward goals. Proposing otherwise is mostly rejected as unscientific anthropomorphizing or necessitating appeals to a supernatural power. This false dichotomy has stymied biology and its related sciences. Herein, I present a new naturalistic gestalt on the nature of life—one based on facts and evidence. It incorporates Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s and Arthur Koestler’s theories of systems and hierarchies with the ideas of Aristotle, Hans Jonas, and Ayn Rand, to identify fundamental formulations on the nature of life, consciousness, free will, and meaning.
~Comment by me on core of Marsha’s paper:
In the natural formation of the first cell, the potentials of the physical factors going into that formation are not, singly or together, ends-directed to getting that formation. Enright concurs in that. That unicellular organisms have self-directing behaviors (without intentionality, but directive all the same) would seem then to be the result purely of physical factors not having self-directing behaviors. And, as Enright acknowledges to some extent, the ongoing research on how that first natural formation happened would seem to be an important part of explaining how life, with its self-directing characteristics, has come to be. (That is, as well, how value came into the world.) At Objectivism Online, we have a thread that accumulates research on the origin of life.
Clastic sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone, are formed from other types of rock already present and by certain physical conditions on the surface of the planet. It is an ends-free series of events that there comes to be clastic sedimentary rocks. It seem to me credible that the first natural cell could be formed by ends-free series of events. Once living things have appeared, ends-free series of events can continue to occur to them and within them, which may be detrimental to continuing that form of life or may be harmless or advantageous. To the result of successor life, because there are numerous single-cell individuals and colonies and multicellular organisms, such organism-rennovations upon novel events are never purely series of accidents. I don’t think that would be a fair way to characterize them in contrast to self-direction. Rather, they are ends-free incidents popping up under the follow-on crushing circumstance of natural selection. Like engineering something under a lot of trial and error and keep trying. Only with nature, there is no trying, only novel occurrence and its continuance within life or not. Explaining life-continuing vegetative behaviors such as response of gravitropic roots on occasion of uprooting in terms of physical and chemical sequences is explanation (only partial if without the larger evolutionary context) of self-directive behavior, but it is no denial or making small of the fact it explains.
There are old notions in organismic biology that did need to be radically reduced, or explained away. Meaning we could and should stop using them. Just as the use of the phrase and idea “natural selection” as a force, which Enright mentions. Or, perhaps, for that matter, thinking of a concentration gradient as a driver of diffusion. Most famously for biology I gather was the notion of “vital force” (as in the vitalism history Enright addresses). I have a solid modern science book titled The Vital Force: A Study of Bioenergetics. The notion of a vital force was such a cover for ignorance and warrant for intellectual laziness and often magical accounting of life, that it is best by now to boot it and replace it with the bioenergetic account.
I suggest, as does Enright, that that is unlike the situation of the phenomena of directedness in living systems, including in vegetative systems. Although one states the function of a part in a machine (a part such as a spark plug) at the level of system design for such a machine—cf. schematic diagrams v. wiring diagrams of electrical appliances—one nevertheless thinks of the part in its function as a cause. This suggest that, similarly, it is sensible to think of function of an organism part, such as ribosomes or mitochondria, as actual causes (function-driven ones), but causes requiring implementation by the structured physics and chemistry which underlies their operation. The circumstance that the schematic diagram in the natural organism case has been drawn only after the appearance of organisms themselves is no impairment to the effectiveness of the analytic parallel.
Enright’s ample layout on Harry Binswanger’s book The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts is nice, and I think it gives the reader of her paper who has not read him a pretty fair picture of what he was up to. I do not concur in Enright’s particular criticisms of his account. And more generally, I do not concur in Enright’s statement of a contemporary intellectual problem in biology—seeing actions of survival and reproduction as “just inanimate chemical and physical actions” (219)—and need of any remedy for such a thing.
Enright has good information on relation of life to thermodynamics. Although, I’d stress that living things do not violate conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics. Utilities came into existence only with the advent of life in the universe, Rand and I and Marsha affirm. The utilization of energy and the storage of energy for utility are processes due to life and its nature, but perfectly in tune with all the physics of energy. Also, as Enright mentions, living systems are open systems, thermodynamically speaking. I’d stress with that that living processes are fully in accord with the laws of thermodynamics; life is not cheating them or getting around them. The perpetual production of entropy by life or any operations of organized matter is compensated for in a living system by the infusion of energy or energy-rich matter preserving the living organization. Metabolism is no affront to thermodynamics. Metabolism is the turnover of free energy—a thermodynamic concept important for some important engineering—for use in life.