ABSTRACT
Mechanism and Levels of Being
David Banach
Department of Philosophy
St. Anselm College
ABSTRACT
Mechanism and Levels of Being
A precise understanding of a thoroughgoing mechanism, such as that provided by using the model of a cellular automaton program (e.g., John Conway’s Game of Life), not only clearly reveals the limitations of mechanism, but allows us to see with more precision the ways in which other levels of being might exist and affect our world, as well as the limits of their intelligibility.
Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science[1] envisions a new kind of experimental science based upon simulations involving cellular automata[2] whose complex regularities cannot be practically predicted from simple rules. Philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have been interested in the most famous of these cellular automata systems, John Conway’s Game of Life[3], for somewhat different reasons.[4] The simplicity and transparency of these systems make them an ideal medium for investigating the relationship between the observed regularities of nature, the laws that give rise to these, and the reality that implements the laws. In particular, I believe that the clarity these models provide allows us to formulate a clear model of mechanism, to see its limitations, and to see what kinds of causality and intelligibility other levels of being might have.
Conway’s Life involves just three rules governing each pixel or cell and based upon the eight surrounding pixels. If we use this as a model of the physical world, the pixels represent the most fundamental particles, and the three rules constitute the fundamental laws of Nature. What is surprising is that these simple components and rules give rise to a vast and complex array of patterns which exhibit their own regularities and behaviors.[5] When one looks at the Life world one sees not a world of pixels, but a world of complex objects exhibiting their own sets of regularities. Yet we can see that all of these entities are merely the result of the simple rules that govern the pixels and nothing else.
One of the first statements of mechanism was provided by Plato in the Timaeus (48e-56c) in his Way of Necessity. Here he describes how the properties of the various types of elements are necessitated by the geometrical properties of the fundamental particles that compose them. He also saw clearly that the Way of Necessity was not self-sufficient; it required a Receptacle or Medium, an active agent or demiurge to set up the initial conditions, and a more fundamental set of realities that provide the source of the rules that necessitate the actions of blind matter. In the Life world, the pixels that constitute this world must have a medium, in this case the screen. There must be a more fundamental reality which implements the program, in this case the computer itself. Finally, there must be some agency that is responsible for the actual operation of the program, in this case the factory that made the computer, the programmer, and the user who pushes the button to run the program. The essence of mechanism is external compulsion by some substrate neutral rules or algorithms.[6] Such a mechanism cannot be self-sufficient. Everything cannot be pixels; there has to be a screen on which the pixels exist and a computer to run the program.[7] Getting clear about the nature of mechanism reveals that reality can’t be mechanical all the way down.[8]
The most remarkable feature of the emergent patterns in the Life world is that they do not correspond to entities in the primal reality that gives rise to them, nor do the laws and regularities we can detect correspond to the laws that govern the program that gives rise to them (or any other laws governing objects in the primal reality). On the one hand, however, it is clear that their properties arise from formal aspects of the configuration of the pixels, and we can talk about the forms these patterns have and the universal constraints those forms put on their behavior, even though nothing in the primal reality that gives rise to those forms may have those properties. On the other hand, apart from the fact that it is capable of implementing the functions we detect in the mechanical world, given substrate neutrality, we cannot know anything of the actual forms of causality that operate in the primal reality, or between it and our world. A thoroughgoing mechanism implies at least two non-mechanical levels of being: (1) A Formal Reality, however conceived, that describes the regularities and patterns that emerge from, but are not caused by, the rules of the program; and (2) An unintelligible Primal Reality that somehow gives rise to the implementation of the rules that generates this world.
Now the world we live in may, in fact, not be wholly describable as a set of events caused by something analogous to the implementation of a computer program; Mechanism may be false. My point here, however, is that even if it is true, it is consistent with, and in fact requires, at least two non-mechanical levels of being, and even requires that there be a primal reality with is beyond even the intelligible being of form.[9]
[1] Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media, 2002).
[2] Simple computer programs that manipulate pixels on a grid according to simple rules.
[4] Dennett has used the Game of Life to discuss the nature of physical patterns, the anthropic principle, and freedom and inevitability in deterministic systems. See Daniel Dennett, "Real Patterns," Journal of Philosophy (January 1991), 88(1):27-51; Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, (Simon and Schuster, 1995), Chapter 7; and Freedom Evolves, (Allen Lane Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2003), Chapter 2.
[5] Paul Rendell has even designed a Turing Machine within the Life world, so in principle, all computable processes could be simulated in the Life world. The original paper, Paul Rendell, “A Turing Machine in Conway’s Game of Life,” March 8, 2001, can be found at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~bulitko/F02/papers/tm_words.pdf. Rendell’s page describing the design is at http://rendell.server.org.uk/gol/tm.htm .
[6] See Daniel Dennett’s account of algorithms in Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, (Simon and Schuster, 1995), Chapter 2 for a nice summary of the essential features of mechanism.
[7] Of course, any particular program can be running on a virtual machine within another program. (If a Turing Machine can exist in Life, we could implement another Life world on that Turing Machine.) Still, it should be clear that it can’t be virtual machines all the way down.
[8] There is no reason to think that the primal reality that underlies mechanism is particularly non-natural, spiritual, or soul-like (if any of these words has content here). In fact, if the rules that govern mechanism are substrate neutral, there is good reason to think that we can’t know the nature of the fundamental reality that runs our world. (Could a Life world inhabitant tell if its world was being run on a PC or a MAC?)
[9] Though the way that primal reality is beyond form here is not exactly the way that the One was conceived to be beyond Being in the Neo-Platonic tradition.