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Beyond Mechanism: Kant, Philosophy of Biology, and the Phenomenon of Life Robert Hanna University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

It is quite certain that we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them; and this is so certain that we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans to make an attempt or to hope that there could ever arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather we must absolutely deny this insight to human beings.

--I. Kant (CPJ 5: 400)1

For a phenomenon such as life, the physical facts imply that certain functions will be performed, and the performance of these functions is all we need in order to explain life. A vitalist might have claimed that it is logically possible that a physical replica of me might not be alive, in order to establish that life cannot be reductively explained. And a vitalist might have argued that life is a further fact, not explained by any account of the physical facts. But the vitalist would have been wrong Vitalism was mostly driven by doubt about whether physical mechanisms could perform all the complex functions associated with life: adaptive behavior, reproduction, and the like. At the time, very little was known about the enormous sophistication of biological mechanisms, so this sort of doubt was quite natural. But implicit in these very doubts is the conceptual point that when it comes to explaining life, it is the performance of veraious functions that needs to be explained. Indeed, it is notable that as physical explanations of the relevant functions gradually appeared, vitalist doubts mostly melted away. Presented with a full physical account showing how physical processes perform the relevant functions, a reasonable vitalist would concede that life has been explained. There is not even conceptual room for the performance of these functions without life.

--D. Chalmers2

If there is anything in the approach I adopt, it will follow that concepts like life, life-form, etc., have something like the status Kant assigned to pure or a priori concepts. [E]ven if our concept life-form arises with experience, it need not be thought to arise from it; its content is rather supplied by reflection on certain possibilities of thought or predication.

--M. Thompson3 I. Introduction

What is the nature of biological life, and how do we represent it? In this paper,

using Kants theory of mental representation and his philosophy of biology as starting

points, I am going to argue that there is not only a non-trivial explanatory gap but also

a correspondingly non-trivial ontological gap between reductive materialist or

physicalistwhat I will call naturally mechanisticapproaches to biology on the one

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hand, and the phenomenon of life on the other. If I am correct, then just as the well-

known non-reductive arguments about consciousness that surfaced in the late 20th century

forced us seriously to reconsider and rethink our basic commitments and basic concepts

in the philosophy of mind, so now we must seriously reconsider and rethink our basic

commitments and basic concepts in the philosophy of biology. Or otherwise put: Having

taken the phenomenon of consciousness seriously, we must now also take the

phenomenon of life equally seriously.

But at the same time, since my starting point is specifically Kantian and

specifically not Cartesian, I am also going to argue for a Kantian version of non-

reductionism about biology and life that does not involve any epistemological or

metaphysical equivalent of Cartesian dualism. On this Kantian picture, the phenomenon

of life is neither explanatorily nor ontologically reducible to the causal natural

mechanisms bound up with fundamental physical properties and facts, but at the same

time the phenomenon of life is also not essentially distinct from physical causal

processes. The phenomenon of life is a non-reducible, non-mechanical necessary a priori

immanent structure of certain complex thermodynamic physical processes.

More precisely, if I am correct, then non-reducible life is nothing more and

nothing less than a non-mechanical immanent structural property of the causal behaviors,

functions, and operations bound up with fundamental physical properties and facts in

thermodynamic systems of a suitable level of complexity, corresponding to an a priori

formal representation of life, in just the way that, according to Kant in the Transcendental

Aesthetic section of the Critique of Pure Reason, space and time are nothing but

necessary a priori immanent structural properties of the causally efficacious objects of

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human experience, corresponding to pure subjective forms of sensible intuition. Hence

life is non-reducible because it is a transcendental non-mechanical fact about the the

causal processes bound up with fundamental physical properties and facts in certain

complex thermodynamic systems, not because it is an essentially different further fact

that is something over and above the fundamental physical world, and not because it is

nothing but a multiply realizable second-order physical fact that is logically

supervenient4 on first-order, fundamental physical facts.

II. Natural Mechanism, Computation, and the Varieties of Vitalism

The thesis of reductive materialism or reductive physicalism about life says that

biological life is either identical with or logically supervenient on the causal behaviors,

functions, and operations bound up with fundamental physical properties and facts.5 I will

call this the thesis of Natural Mechanism.

But what, more precisely, is the very idea of natural mechanism? My claim is that

there is a deep and indeed essential connection between natural mechanism, effectively

decidable procedures, recursive functions, and Turing-computability. More precisely,

what I am proposing is that anythings causal behaviors, functions, and operations are

naturally mechanistic in both their existence and specific character if and only if they

strictly conform to the Church-Turing Thesis (a.k.a. Churchs Thesis).

And what is the Church-Turing Thesis? To state it clearly, I must briefly define

some terms. An effectively decidable procedure is a rule-governed, step-by-step process

which yields a pre-established determinate result of a binary kind (e.g., either 0 or 1) in a

finite or countably infinite number of steps. Otherwise put, an effectively decidable

procedure is an algorithm. This appears to be the very same notion as that of a recursive

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function,6 and it also appears to be necessarily equivalent with the notion of a Turing

machine.7 Then the Church-Turing Thesis (a.k.a. Churchs Thesis) says that every

effectively decidable procedure is a recursive function and also a Turing-computable

function, which in turn restricts effectively decidable procedures to digital machine

computation,8 on the two plausible assumptions that the causal powers of any physical

realization of an abstract Turing machine are held fixed under our general causal laws of

nature, and that the digits over which the Turing machine computes constitute a

complete set of spatiotemporally discrete physical objects.

Therefore, according to my proposal:

Anything X is a natural automaton, or natural machine, if and only if Xs causally-efficacious behaviors, functions, and operations are all inherently effectively decidable, recursive, or Turing-computable, on the two plausible assumptions (a) that the causal powers of any physical realization of an abstract Turing machine are held fixed under our general causal laws of nature, and (b) that the digits over which the Turing machine computes constitute a complete set of spatiotemporally discrete physical objects. It is extremely important to recognize that although all deterministic processes are

Turing-computable, not all Turing-computable processes are deterministic. As Hilary

Putnam pointed out in the 1970s, during the heyday of computational Functionalism in

the philosophy of mind, there can be indeterministic Turing-machines.9 More generally,

however, if an indeterministic process implements a step-by-step probabilistic or

statistical rulei.e., if the process is stochasticthen it is Turing-computable. Therefore

although all and only naturally mechanistic processes are Turing-computable,

nevertheless naturally mechanistic processes can be either deterministic or

indeterministic. This, in turn, is the same as to say that each and every one of the causal

behaviors, functions, and operations of naturally mechanistic physical processes is

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entailed or necessitated by algorithmic causal laws of nature, together with the set of

settled facts about the past.

In this connection, however, we need to recognize that there is a fundamental

distinction between (i) mere consistency with natural laws and (ii) strict entailment by

natural laws, or more precisely, that there is a fundamental distinction between

(i) a natural events being merely consistent with, in the sense of merely being true along with and not in any violation of, all the general causal laws of nature together with all the settled facts about the past,

and

(ii) a natural events being strictly entailed by, in the sense of strictly being necessitated by, all the general causal laws of nature together with all the settled facts about the past.

This crucial contrast, in turn, is a generalization of Kants well-known distinction

between

(i) acting merely according to a moral principle or rule,

and (ii) acting strictly from a moral principle or rule (GMM 4: 397-398).10

When fully generalized beyond intentional action and deontological (i.e., duty-sensitive,

choice-involving) contexts, however, to contexts involving physical behaviors, functions,

and operations of any kind, and indeed to contexts involving necessitation and rule-

following of any kindwhether deontological, causal, mathematical, or logicalthis is

the same as the comprehensive fundamental distinction between

(i) mere conformity to a law (or rule), and

(ii) strict governance by a law (or rule).

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This comprehensive fundamental distinction applies directly to digital or Turing

machine computation. More specifically, there is a correspondingly fundamental

distinction between

(i) what is merely correctly describable or can be simulated in Turing-computable terms,

and

(ii) what strictly encodes or implements a Turing-computable process.

As John Searle has correctly and emphatically pointed out, just because some state of

affairs can be correctly described or simulated in digital computational terms, it certainly

does not follow that it strictly encodes, implements, or really incorporates digital

computation.11 Indeed, virtually anything in the actual physical world can be correctly

described or simulated in Turing-computatable terms. But just because a heap of empty

cans of Dales Pale Ale can indeed be correctly described or simulated in Turing-

computable terms, it does not follow that this heap really incorporates a Turing-

computable process. Similarly, but even more radically, self-organizing complex

thermodynamic systems such as the roiling movements of boiling water, traffic jams, and

weather systems, not to mention living organisms, can indeed be correctly described or

simulated in digital computational terms, but they do not really incorporate Turing-

computable processes, precisely because they are uncomputable processes.

What is the essential difference, then, between a Turing-computable process and

an uncomputable process? Non-technically put, one necessary condition of a Turing-

computable process is the fact that, at any given stage in the process, there is no sufficient

reason why the process should not halt or stop right there. This is because every

effectively decidable procedure is inherently a terminating process. By sharp contrast,

then, an uncomputable process is such that, at any stage of the process, there is always a

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sufficient reason why the process should not stop right there. Uncomputable processes

are therefore inherently non-terminating processes.12 That an uncomputable process is

non-terminating does not mean that it is interminable, in the sense that it will necessarily

always go on, but instead merely that it is a process which does not have to stop, and

always really can go on. As we shall see later, uncomputable processes include all

inherently goal-directed, purposive, or teleological processes, which are internally and

irreversibly forward-directed in spacetime, and thereby exemplify an important kind of

complex thermodynamic asymmetry.13

It is directly relevant to note in this connection that if we dropped the plausible

assumption that the causal powers of any physical realization of an abstract universal

Turing machine are held fixed under our general causal laws of nature, and if Turing

machines could radically vary their causal powers, then it seems that there would be no

fundamental mathematical or metaphysical difference between Turing-computable and

Turing-uncomputable functions; and correspondingly it seems that there would be no

fundamental mathematical or metaphysical difference between machines and non-

machines, including living organisms.14 But this claim, I think, is just equivalent to a

philosophically interesting but not at all exciting thesis to the effect that if some physical

realizations of Turing machines, contrary to actual fact, and perhaps even necessarily

contrary to actual fact, were self-organizing complex thermodynamic systems, then there

would be no fundamental mathematical or metaphysical difference between machines

and non-machines, and ultimately no deep difference between Turing machines and

living organisms. Here is an analogy: Suppose it is true that if apples were changed into

oranges by sending crates of apples into Malament-Hogarth spacetime,15 then you could

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make orange juice out of apples. That is philosophically interesting, but not at all

exciting, since we have no reason whatsoever to think that it is actually true that apples

can be changed into oranges by sending them into Malament-Hogarth spacetime. Indeed,

for all we know, it is logically or metaphysically impossible that apples can be changed

into oranges; and since any statement whatsoever follows from a necessary falsehood,

counterfactual statements with impossible antecedents are all vacuously true.

It is also directly relevant to note in this connection that if we dropped the

plausible assumption that the digits over which the Turing machine computes are all

spatiotemporally discrete physical objects, and if some effectively deciding or recursive

machines could compute over non-discrete (i.e., either continuous or vaguely-bounded)

physical items, then it seems that the Church-Turing thesis would be false, in the sense

that there would then be some effectively decidable procedures or recursive functions in

real physical nature which are not classically Turing-computable.16 But this claim, I

think, is just equivalent to another philosophically interesting but not at all exciting

thesis, this time to the effect that that if some items over which some effectively deciding

or recursive machine computes, contrary to actual fact, and perhaps even necessarily

contrary to actual fact, were just like non-discrete neural assemblies in the human brain,

then our brains would be real physical computing machines that are not digital. Here is

another analogy: Suppose it is true that if apples were just like non-discrete neural

assemblies in the human brain, then you could make orange juice out of apples. Again,

that is philosophically interesting, but not at all exciting, since we have no reason

whatsoever to think that it is actually true that apples are just like non-discrete neural

assemblies in the human brain. Indeed, for all we know, it is logically or metaphysically

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impossible that apples are just like non-discrete neural assemblies in the human brain;

and, again, since any statement whatsoever follows from a necessary falsehood, this

guarantees that counterfactuals with impossible antecedents are vacuously true.

So Natural Mechanism says that all the causal behaviors, functions, and

operations of everything whatsoever in the natural world are ultimately reducible to what

can be digitally computed on a universal deterministic or indeterministic Turing machine,

provided that the two plausible assumptions (a) that the causal powers of any physical

realization of an abstract Turing machine are held fixed under our general causal laws of

nature, and (b) that the digits over which the Turing machine computes constitute a

complete set of spatiotemporally discrete physical objects, are both satisfied. In direct

opposition to Natural Mechanism, the general thesis of Vitalism in the philosophy of

biology, as I am understanding it, says that biological life (and in particular, the living

organism) is neither identical with nor otherwise reducible toand in particular, not

logically supervenient onthe Turing-computable causal behaviors, functions, and

operations bound up with fundamental physical properties and facts, whether these causal

behaviors, functions, and operations are governed by deterministic laws or

probabilistic/statistical laws. So if the general thesis of Vitalism true, then Natural

Mechanism is false.

Now Vitalism in its classical or mid-19th and early 20th century guise (which in

turn has its original intellectual roots in Aristotles De Anima and Physics, when

combined with late 18th and early 19th century Romantic conceptions of nature) also has

two distinct versions, which in turn closely parallel the internal structure of classical

Cartesian Dualism in the philosophy of mind:17

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(i) Substance Vitalism, which says that life is an essentially different kind of dynamic stuff from naturally mechanistic matter (e.g., ectoplasm, the lan vital, the Wille zum Leben, etc.),

and

(ii) Property Vitalism, which says that life is determined by essentially different kinds of dynamic properties from those that characterize natural mechanisms, even if life is not an essentially distinct kind of dynamic stuff from naturally mechanistic matter.

Many of the early 20th century British Emergentists, e.g., were Property Vitalists but not

Substance Vitalists.18

In sharp contrast to classical Vitalism, however, Michael Thompson has recently

argued for the two-part thesis that our everyday, pre-theoretical representation of life

(a.k.a. folk biology) requires a distinctive Fregean logical form of what he calls

natural-historical judgments, and that this distinctive logical form entails the existence

of a non-empirical concept of life with irreducible semantic content and structure, which

necessarily shapes our ordinary perceptual and practical activities. This two-part thesis,

which I will call Representational Vitalism, has significant anticipations and parallels in

Kants theory of the feeling of life, of the identity of mind and life, and of teleological

judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment; in the later Wittgensteins notions of

forms of life and seeing-as in Philosophical Investigations; and in Hans Jonass

existential philosophy of biology in The Phenomenon of Life. More precisely, however

and now generalizing over the several similar accounts provided by Kant, Wittgenstein,

Jonas, and ThompsonRepresentational Vitalism, as I will understand it, says

(I) that our everyday, pre-theoretical representations of life in sense perception and other non-conceptual representations, conceptual thought, and in biological or natural-historical judgments and statements are neither identical with nor otherwise reducible to naturally mechanistic theories of biology and life,

and

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(II) that these representations of life entail the existence of some a priori representations with irreducible semantic content and structure, which necessarily shape our basic cognitive and practical encounters with the natural world. Unlike either classical Substance Vitalism or classical Property Vitalism,

Representational Vitalism is officially neutral or open-minded with respect to the

question of the correct metaphysics of biological life. Indeed, Representational Vitalism

is fully consistent with the denials of Substance Vitalism and Property Vitalism alike. But

Representational Vitalism is not neutral with respect to the question of whether vitalistic

explanation is reducible to reductive materalist, reductive physicalist, or naturally

mechanistic explanation. If Representational Vitalism is true, then there is no explanatory

reduction of the phenomenon of biological life to any possible formal theory of the

Turing-computable deterministic or indeterministic causal behaviors, functions, and

operations of fundamental physical properties and facts. This crucial point closely

parallels Thomas Nagels famous explanatory gap argument for the irreducibility of

mentalistic concepts to physicalistic concepts,19 and, rather ironically, given his official

reductive materialism about the phenomenon of life, it also closely parallels David

Chalmerss formulations of the Inverted Qualia, Zombie, and Panprotopsychist

arguments in The Conscious Mind for both the explanatory non-reduction and also the

ontological non-reduction of consciousness to the fundamental physical world.

Even more importantly, however, if we also assume the truth of a highly plausible

thesis I will call Minimal Representational Realism, which says

that for each semantically distinct mental representional content there is a corresponding distinct rough-grained or fine-grained property in the world, whether that property is instantiated in the actual world or not, and no matter what properties turn out really to be, provided that the representation of X also satisfies the the Minimal Logical Meta-Principle of Non-Contradiction:

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accept as truths in any language or logical system only those statements which do not entail that it and all other statements in that language or logical system are both true and false,

then it automatically follows that explanatory non-reduction also entails ontological non-

reduction. So if Minimal Representational Realism is true, and if Representational

Vitalism is also true, then Natural Mechanism is false. I will explicitly work out three

versions of that argument in section V.

Before moving on, however, I want to make three further points about Minimal

Representational Realism.

First, I want to re-emphasize that Minimal Representational Realism is saying

only that for each semantically distinct mental representation there is a corresponding

distinct instantiated or uninstantiated property in the world, no matter what properties

turn out really to be. So in other words, Minimal Representational Realism is perfectly

consistent with all substantive theories about the nature of properties, including platonic

realism about properties, idealism about properties, nominalism about properties, and

even pleonasm about properties, i.e., the linguistic theory of properties. Hence even if a

property is nothing more than a faon de parler, nevertheless there is a faon such that

one can parler according to it. Otherwise put, all that Minimal Representational Realism

is committed to are the following three corollaries:

(1) Minimal Representational Realism for Perception and Non-Conceptual Content: If I perceive X, or if I otherwise non-conceptually represent X, then in some objective sense there is the property of X-ness. (2) Minimal Representational Realism for Thought and Conceptual Content: If I think about anythings being F, or if I conceive of anythings being F, then in some objective sense there is the property of F-ness.

and

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(3) Minimal Representational Realism for Perceiving-As, Judgment, and Talk: If I perceive X as G, or judge that that X is G, or state that X is G, then in some objective sense there is the property of G-ness.

In these ways, Minimal Representational Realism is truly a minimalist realism about

properties. The only theory of properties which is inconsistent with Minimal

Representational Realism is an outright eliminativism or an error-theory about properties,

according to which properties simply do not exist and are mere metaphysical myths. Still,

according to Minimal Representational Realism, to borrow Bishop Butlers lovely words

again, it remains true that a property is what it is, and not another thing. It is objective in

some sense for which there is a substantive theory of its nature. So Minimal

Representational Realism is also truly a realism about properties.

Second, because Minimal Representational Realism is only a minimalist realism,

it will not follow that any non-identity or difference in properties which can be proved by

using it as an assumption, is an essential difference in properties. Therefore Minimalist

Representational Realism cannot be used to ground any form of substance dualism or

property dualism. Otherwise put, Minimal Representational Realism can be used to

establish property non-identities and property differences, but not essential property non-

identities and not essential property differences. It does not entail, e.g., that whatever

instantiates that property is something simple, in that it is not composed of other things.20

Even so, a non-identity or a difference between properties is what it is, and not

another thing. Hence the establishment of a non-identity or a difference between

properties by means of Minimal Representational Realism is sufficient to establish

explanatory and ontological non-reduction, even if it does not establish any form of

dualism. But that is all to the good, because as I mentioned in section I, I want to reject

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all forms of vitalistic dualism and yet also defend a specifically Kantian version of both

explanatory and ontological non-reduction about biology and life.

Third, because Minimal Representational Realism is constrained by the Minimal

Logical Meta-Principle of Non-Contradiction, it follows that the representability of

properties is broad enough to allow in every logically and semantically possible kind of

property except those that lead to the logical phenomenon of Explosion, which is that

every statement whatsoever follows from a contradiction. That would be logico-semantic

anarchy and chaos. So the Minimal Logical Meta-Principle of Non-Contradiction is the

paraconsistency parameter21 in Minimal Representational Realism. Either covert or overt

contradictions in representation are therefore minimally permissible, provided that

Explosion is ruled out. But at the same time, this constraint is maximally liberal, short of

logico-semantic anarchy and chaos: all kinds of analogical cognizing, imaginability,

mental modelling, and pattern recognition are ruled in, provided that they are not

Explosive. This liberates the rational creativity of the Representational Mind and gives it

full scope, while also preserving basic coherence in its representational acts and

operations.

III. On the Representation of Life

I think that Thompson is correct that there is a defensible argument for the two-

part thesis (i) that our everyday, pre-theoretical representation of life requires a

distinctive logical form of biological or natural-historical judgments and statements, and

(ii) that this distinctive logical form entails the existence of a non-empirical concept of

life with irreducible semantic content and structure, which necessarily shapes our

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ordinary perceptual and practical activities. But I also want to hold generalized versions

of Thompsons theses:

(I) Our everyday, pre-theoretical representations of life in sense perception and other non-conceptual representations, conceptual thought, and in biological or natural-historical judgments and statements are neither identical with nor otherwise reducible to naturally mechanistic theories of biology and life. (II) These representations of life entail the existence of some a priori representations with irreducible semantic content and structure, which necessarily shape our basic cognitive and practical encounters with the natural world.

As I mentioned above, theses (I) and (II) jointly comprise Representational Vitalism.

Representational Vitalism is well-supported by Wittgensteins remarks on forms of

life, and on seeing the difference between living things and dead things, in

Philosophical Investigations; by recent empirical work in cognitive psychology by

Deborah Keleman on the phenomenon of promiscuous teleology22; by recent

philosophical work by Tamar Szab Gendler on the distinction between alief and

belief23; and by Kants theory of the feeling of life, of the identity of mind and life,

and of teleological judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Here is what Wittgenstein says: Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. One says to oneself: How could one get so much as the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! And now look at the wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to get a foothold there, where before eveything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain. Our attitude to the living is not the same as to the dead. All our reactions are different. If anyone says: That cannot simply consist in the fact that the living behave in such-and-such a way and the dead do not, then I want to intimate to him that this is a case of the transition from quantity to quality.24

If one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul.25

To me it is an animal pierced by an arrow. That is what I treat it as; this is my attitude to the figure. This is one meaning in calling it a case of seeing.26

Imight say: a picture does not always live for me while I am seeing it. Her picture smiles down on me from the wall. It need not always do so, whenever my glance lights on it.27

What has to be accepted, the given, isso one could sayforms of life.28

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Here is what Keleman says:

In summary, British and American children have a promiscuous tendency to teleologically explain the properties of both living and non-living things in terms of a purpose. One proposal is that this bias occurs because, during development, across cultures, children primarily develop an artifact model when reasoning about the natural world. There are several implications if this turns out to hold truth: from a theoretical standpoint, it suggests that while teleological thought may play a crucial role in childrens early reasoning about living things, its presence is not necessarily indicative of a truly biological [i.e., physically mechanistic] mode of construal. From an educational standpoint, it helps to explain why people consistently misinterpret natural selection as a quasi-intentional, designing force rather than as a blind physical mechanism.29

Here is what Szab Gendler says:

[Consider the following example, borrowed from an essay by Kendall Walton:] Charles is watching a horror movie about a terrible green slime. He cringes in his seat as the slime oozes slowly but relentlessly over the earth destroying everything in its path. Soon a greasy head emerges from the undulating mass, nd two beady eyes roll around, finally fixing on the camera. The slime picking up speed, oozes on a new course straight towards the viewers. Charles emits a shirek and clutches desperately at his chair. How should we describe Charless cognitive state? Surely he does not believe that he is in physical peril; as Kendall Walton writes Charles knows perfectly well that the slime is not real and that he is in no danger. But alongside that belief there is something else going on. Although Charles believes that he is sitting safely in a chair in a theater in front of a move screen, he also alieves something very different. The alief has roughly the following content: Dangerous two-eyed [living] creature heading towards me! H-e-l-p! Activate fight or flight adrenaline now! I argue for the importance of recognizing the existence of alief. As a class, aliefs are states that we share with non-human animals; they are developmentally and conceptually antecedent to other cognitive attitudes that the creature may go on to develop. And they are typically affect-laden and action-generating. I offer the following tentative characterization of a paradigmatic alief:

A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively linked content that is representational, affective, and behavioral, and that is activatedconsciously or nonconsciouslyby features of the subjects internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional.30

Most importantly, however, here is what Kant says:

To grasp a regular, purposive structure with ones faculty of cognition (whether the manner of representation be distinct or confused) is something entirely different from being conscious of this representation with the sensation of satisfaction. Here the representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life (Lebensgefhl), under the name of pleasure or displeasure, which grounds an entirely special faculty for discriminating and judging that contributes nothing to cognition, but only holds up the given representation in the subject to the entire faculty of representation, of which the mind becomes conscious in the feeling of its state. (CPJ 5: 204) It cannot be denied that all representations in us, whether they are objectively merely sensible or else entirely intellectual, can nevertheless subjectively be associated with gratification or pain, however unnoticeable either might be (because they all affect the feeling of life, and none of them, insofar as it is a modification of the subject, can be indifferent). (CPJ 5: 277)

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Life without the feeling of the corporeal organ is merely consciousness of ones existence, but not a feeling of well- or ill-being, i.e., the promotion or inhibition of the powers of life; because the mind for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself), and hindrances and promotions must be sought outside it, though in the human being himself, hence in combination with his body. (CPJ 5: 278) For a body to be judged as a natural purpose in itself and in accordance with its internal possibility, it is required that its parts reciprocally produce each other, as far as both their form and their combination is concerned, and thus produce a whole out of their own causality, the concept of which, conversely is in turn the cause (in a being that would possess the causality according to concepts appropriate for such a product) of it in accordance with a principle; consequently the connection of efficient causes could at the same time be judged as an effect though final causes. In such a product of nature each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole, i.e., as an instrument (organ), which is, however, not sufficient (for it could also be an instrument of art, and thus represented as possible at all only as a purpose); rather it must be thought of as an organ that produces the other parts (consequently each produces the others reciprocally), which cannot be the case in any instrument of art, but only of nature, which provides all the matter for instruments (even those of art): only then and on that account can such a product, as an organized and self-organizing being, be called a natural purpose. (CPJ 5: 373-374) Strictly speaking, the organization of nature is not analogous with any causality that we know. (CPJ 5: 375)

It might always be possible that in, e.g., an animal body, many parts could be conceived as consequences of merely mechanical laws. Yet the cause that provides the appropriate material, modifies it, forms it, and deposits it in the appropriate place must always be judged teleologically, so that everything in it must be considered as organized, and everything is also, in relation to the thing itself, an organ also. (CPJ 5: 377)

And here are the basic take-away points. (1) The representation of life is the

representation of natural things as living organismsi.e., as dynamic physical systems

that engage in goal-directed, purposive, or teleological, and causally spontaneous

activities. (2) The capacity to represent things as alive appears to be innate, in that it

manifests itself in children and also more mature human cognizers under poverty of the

stimulus conditions. (3) The representation of life can be overextended to things other

than actual living organisms, but in every case it changes our practical attitudes towards

the things that are perceived as alive or taken to be alive. (4) The representation of life is

generated by a cognitive capacity that is encapsulated or insensitive to beliefs, and at

the same time its representational outputs are presupposed by both ordinary and scientific

18

beliefs, judgments, and thoughts about life. (5) As a consequence of points (1) to (4), the

representation of life is arguably non-empirical or a priori in that its content and structure

are both strictly underdetermined by the actual contingent facts of conscious human

sensory experience.

Here are two further comments on Kants theory in particular, before moving on.

First, for Kant, the representation of biological life not only has semantic content

but also phenomenal character, which he calls the feeling of life. This is the same as

the pre-reflectively conscious pleasure or pain we experience in the actual operations of

our cognitive faculties insofar as they track purposive (i.e., goal-directed or teleological)

structure in objects. Kants idea seems clearly to be that the semantic content of the

representation of biological life and the phenomenal character of the feeling of life are

necessarily mutually bound up with one another, which directly implies what is known in

contemporary philosophy of mind as the Phenomenology of Intentionality and

Intentionality of Phenomenology theses, or Anti-Separatism.31 Acording to this

Kantian picture, consciousness and intentionality are mutually inseparable via the

neurobiological life of embodied animal minds.

Second, Kant explicitly identifies biological life with mind. This, I think, is best

understood not as either literal identity, i.e., panpsychism with respect to biological life,

or downwards identity, i.e., the reduction of mind to life, but rather as what Peter

Godfrey-Smith calls the strong continuity view:

Life and mind have a common abstract pattern or set of basic organizational properties. The properties characteristic of mind are an enriched version of the properties that are fundamental to life in general. Mind is literally life-like.32

This is also what Evan Thompson calls the mind-in-life thesis:

Where there is life there is mind, and mind in its most complex forms belongs to life. Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational properties, and the formal and organizational

19

properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. More precisely, the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life.33

In other words, mind is explanatorily and ontologically continuous with life, in the sense

that whatever is metaphysically required for mind is also present in biological life, but

not necessarily as organized in the right way and with appropriate dynamic complexity.

Therefore not necessarily every living thing is conscious, but necessarily every mind is

also biologically alive.

If the Kantian mind-in-life thesis is correct, then the way is open for thinking

about conscious, intentional, caring, desiring animal minds as nothing more and nothing

less than appropriately dynamically complex forms of life, which grow naturally in

organisms like us, and correspondingly for thinking about phenomenology, the science of

consciousness and intentionality, as nothing more and nothing less than a special branch

of macrobiologybiophenomenology.

What, more precisely, is the semantic content of the non-empirical representation

of life, i.e., the non-empirical representation of living organisms? Using the

Transcendental Aesthetic and the Critique of the Power of Judgment as philosophical

sources, together with complex systems dynamics and contemporary biology (which I

will discuss in the next section) I want to say that it includes three basic elements.

(i) Teleological dynamics in organisms: their self-organizing natural purposiveness, including reproduction, growth, motility, death, and evolution.

(ii) Causal spontaneity in organisms: their efficacious metabolism (as a matter of empirical fact, involving DNA) by means of epigenesis.

(Here is a relevant side-comment about this second basic element. The thesis of

Epigenesis in biology says that biological material is initially unformed and that form

gradually emerges through the non-predetermined or relatively spontaneous operations of

20

an innate endogenous organizational or processing device in interaction with its

environment.34 Kant explicitly defends the theory that biological life is epigenetic, and

also extends this theory analogically to his theory of cognitive innateness (CPJ 5: 424)

(CPR B167).)

(iii) Essential indexicality in organisms: their inherent context-dependency, together with egocentric centering in a frame-of-reference (but not necessarily actually conscious centeringsee, e.g., Einsteins observer relative frames-of-reference for tracking motion), together with orientable space and irreversible time (a.k.a. times arrow).

IV. Kantian Non-Conceptualism and the Complex Systems Dynamics Model of Life

What is the semantic structure of the non-empirical representation of life? I think

that Thompson is mistaken that the content of the non-empirical representation of life is

conceptual. On the contrary, I hold that its content is essentially non-conceptual and that

its structure directly corresponds to what Kant would have called a form of intuition

(CPR A19-49/B33-73).35 As a consequence, I think that Kants theory of teleological

judgments, when taken together with a Kantian theory of mental content that I have

elsewhere dubbed Kantian Non-Conceptualism,36 provides a sigificantly better account of

the nature of the distinctive semantic content and structure of the representation of life

than Thompsons Fregean account does.

The thesis of Non-Conceptualism about mental content says that representational

content is neither solely nor wholly determined by a conscious animals conceptual

capacities, and that at least some contents are both solely and wholly determined by its

non-conceptual capacities.37 Non-Conceptualism is often combined with the further thesis

that non-conceptual capacities and contents can be shared by rational human animals,

non-rational human animals (and in particular, infants), and non-human animals alike.

But in any case, Non-Conceptualism is directly opposed to the thesis of Conceptualism

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about mental content, which says that representational content is solely or wholly

determined by a conscious animals conceptual capacities.38 Conceptualism is often

combined with the further thesis that the psychological acts or states of infants and non-

human animals lack mental content.

As a sub-species of Non-Conceptualism, Kantian Non-Conceptualism is the

following three-part doctrine:

(i) that mental acts or states in conscious human or non-human animals have representational content whose semantic structure and psychological function are essentially distinct from the structure and function of conceptual content,

(ii) that the specific psychological function of non-conceptual content is to guide conscious intentional body movements for the purposes of cognition and practical agency,

and

(iii) that the semantic structures of essentially non-conceptual content are equivalent to Kants spatiotemporal forms of intuition,

More precisely however, according to Kantian Non-Conceptualism, X is an essentially

non-conceptual content of representation if and only if X is a mental content such that

(i*) X is not a conceptual content, as defined by a defensible, non-question-begging theory of concepts and conceptual content,39 (ii*) X directly refers to some or another individual macroscopic material being B in the local or distal natural environment of the conscious (rational or non-rational) animal subject of Xand it is also really possible that the conscious animal subject of X = Band thereby both uniquely (if not always perfectly accurately40) locates B in 3D Euclidean orientable space and also uniquely (if not always perfectly accurately) tracks Bs thermodynamically irreversible causal activities in time in order to guide the animal subjects conscious intentional body movements for the purposes of cognition and practical agency,

and

(iii*) X is an inherently context-sensitive, egocentric, first-personal, intrinsically spatiotemporally structured content that is not ineffable, but instead shareable or communicable only to the extent that another ego or first person is in a cognitive position to be directly perceptually confronted by the same individual macroscopic material being B in a spacetime possessing the same basic 3D Euclidean orientable and thermodynamically irreversible structure.

22

Here is a simple argument for the existence of essentially non-conceptual content,

which I call The Handwaving Argument. This simple argument stands on its own. But it

also anticipates a slightly more complicated argument for the same conclusion, using

directly perceivable qualitative three-dimensional material duplicates that are also mirror-

reflected spatial counterparts, a.k.a.incongruent counterparts, or enantiomorphs,

which I have spelled out in detail and defended elsewhere.41

The Handwaving Argument

(1) Suppose that I am standing right in front of you and saying All bachelors are males, and all males are animals, so it is analytic that all bachelors are animals, right? By hypothesis, you are concentrating on what I am saying, and clearly understand it. (2) Suppose also that as I am I saying All bachelors are males, my arms are held out straight towards you and I am also moving my right hand, rotated at the wrist, in a clockwise circular motion seen clearly from your point of view, which is also a counterclockwise circular motion seen clearly from my point of view. (3) Suppose also that as I am saying, and all males are animals, I begin moving my left hand, again rotated at the wrist, in a counterclockwise circular motion seen clearly from your point of view, which is also a clockwise circular motion seen clearly from my point of view. (4) Suppose also that as I am saying, so it is analytic that all bachelors are animals, right? I am moving both hands simultaneously in front of you in the ways specified in (1) to (3). (5) Your conceptual capacities are being used by you to concentrate on what I am saying about bachelors, males, and animals, and to understand it clearly, which by hypothesis you do. (6) Insofar as you are using those conceptual capacities to concentrate on and to understand clearly what I am saying, you are not using your conceptual capacities to see clearly what I am doing with my hands. (7) Yet you also see clearly what I am doing with my hands. Your conscious attention is divided into linguistic understanding and lucid vision, but by hypothesis your conceptual capacities for linguistic understanding are not distracted. (8) Therefore you are using your non-conceptual capacities to see clearly what I am doing with my hands. (9) The kind of mental content that guides and mediates the use of non-conceptual capacities is essentially non-conceptual content.

23

(10) Therefore essentially non-conceptual content exists. In any case, and furthermore, I also think that there are contemporary scientific

models of lifee.g., those provided by non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a.k.a. dynamic

systems theory, a.k.a. complex systems dynamics,42 when informed by contemporary

biology43 which conform much more closely to our everyday, pre-theoretical

representation of life, as informed by Kantian ideas about the representation of life, than

to the scientific model provided by reductive materialism or physicalism about life, i.e.,

Natural Mechanism. Here is Bruce Webers highly informative summary description of

the complex systems dynamics model of life:

Animate beings share a range of properties and phenomena that are not seen together in inanimate matter, although examples of matter exhibiting one or the other of these can be found. Living entities metabolize, grow, die, reproduce, respond, move, have complex organized functional structures, heritable variability, and have lineages which can evolve over generational time, producing new and emergent functional structures that provide increased adaptive fitness in changing environments. Reproduction involves not only the replication of the nucleic acids that carry the genetic information but the epigenetic building of the organism through a sequence of developmental steps. Such reproduction through development occurs within a larger life-cycle of the organism, which includes its senescence and death. Something that is alive has organized, complex structures that carry out these functions as well as sensing and responding to interior states and to the external environment and engaging in movement within that environment. It must be remembered that evolutionary phenomena are an inextricable aspect of living systems; any attempt to study life in the absence of this diachronic perspective will be futile. [L]iving systems may be defined as open systems maintained in steady-states, far-from-equilibrium, due to matter-energy flows in which informed (genetically) autocatalytic cycles extract energy, build complex internal structures, allowing growth even as they create greater entropy in their environments.

The impact of Schrdinger's [What is Life?The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell] on a generation of physicists and chemists who were lured to biology and who founded molecular biology is well chronicled. Knowledge about the protein and nucleic acid basis of living systems continues to be obtained at an accelerating rate, with the sequencing of the human genome as a major landmark along this path of discovery. The self-replicating DNA has become a major metaphor for understanding all of life. The world is increasingly divided into replicators, which are seen to be fundamental and to control development and be the fundamental level of action for natural selection. Indeed, Dawkins relegates organisms to the status of epiphenomenal gene-vehicles, or survival machines. A reaction has set in to what is perceived as an over-emphasis on nucleic acid replication. In particular developmental systems theorists have argued for a causal pluralism in developmental and evolutionary biology. However, the rapid progress in gene sequencing is producing fundamental insights into the relationship of genes and morphology and has added important dimensions to our understanding of evolutionary phenomena.

What is less known is the over half-a-century of work inspired, in part, by the other pillar of Schrdinger's argument, namely how organisms gain order from disorder through the

24

thermodynamics of open systems far from equilibrium. Prominent among early students of such nonequilibrium thermodynamics was Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine influenced J. D. Bernal in his 1947 lectures on the physical basis of life to start to understand both how organisms produced their internal order while affected their environment by not only their activities but through created disorder in it. Harold Morowitz explicitly addressed the issue of energy flow and the production of biological organization, subsequently generalized in various ways. Internal order can be produced by gradients of energy (matter/energy) flows through living systems. Structures so produced help not only draw more energy through the system, lengthen its retention time in the system, but also dissipate degraded energy, or entropy, to the environment, thus paying Schrdingers entropy debt. Living systems then are seen an instance of a more general phenomen[on] of dissipative structures. [According to Jantsch] With the help of this energy and matter exchange with the environment, the system maintains its inner non-equilibrium, and the non-equilibrium in turn maintains the exchange process. A dissipative structure continuously renews itself and maintains a particular dynamic regime, a globally stable space-time structure . However, thermodynamics can deal only with the possibility that something can occur spontaneously; whether self-organizing phenomena occur depend upon the actual specific conditions (initial and boundary) as well as the relationships among components.

Seeing the cell as a thermodynamic dissipative structure was not to be considered as reducing the cell to physics, as Bernal pointed out, rather a richer physics of what Warren Weaver called organized complexity (in contrast to simple order or disorganized complexity) was being deployed. The development of this new physics of open systems and the dissipative structures that arise in them was the fulfillment of the development that Schrdinger foresaw. Dissipative structures in physical and chemical systems are phenomena that are explained by nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The emergent, self-organizing spatio-temporal patterns observed in the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction are also seen in biological systems (such as in slime mold aggregation or electrical patterns in heart activity). Indeed, related self-organizational phenomena pervade biology. Such phenomena are seen not only in cells and organisms, but in ecosystems, which reinforces the notion that a broader systems perspective is needed as part of the new physics. Important to such phenomena are the dynamics of non-linear interactions (where responses of a system can be much larger than the stimulus) and autocatalytic cycles (reaction sequences that are closed on themselves and in which a larger quantity of one or more starting materials is made through the processes). Given that the catalysts in biological systems are coded in the genes of the DNA, one place to start defining life is to view living systems as informed, autocatalytic cyclic entities that develop and evolve under the dual dictates of the second law of thermodynamics and of natural selection. Such an approach non-reductively connects the phenomena of living systems with basic laws of physics and chemistry. Others intuit that an even richer physics is needed to adequately capture the self-organizing phenomena observed in biology and speculate that a fourth law of thermodynamics about such phenomena may ultimately be needed. In any event, increasingly the tools developed for the sciences of complexity and being deployed to develop better models of living systems. Robert Rosen has reminded us that complexity is not life itself but what he terms the habitat of life and that we need to make our focus on the relational. Organization inherently involves functions and their interrelations.. Whether the existing sciences of complexity are sufficient or a newer conceptual framework is needed remains to be seen. Living beings exhibit complex, functional organization and an ability to become more adapted to their environments over generational time, which phenomena represent the challenge to physically-based explanations based upon mechanistic (reductionistic) assumptions. By appealing to complex systems dynamics there is the possibility of physically-based theories that can robustly address phenomena of emergence without having recourse to the type of vitalism that was countenanced by some in the earlier part of the twentieth century.44

In other and fewer words, dynamic systems are unified collections of material

elements in rule-governed or patterned motion. In connection with dynamic systems,

25

complexity is the fact that the causally efficacious exchange of energy and matter

between a dynamic system and its local natural environment does not remain constant, or

fluctuates. Self-organizing complex thermodynamic systems, in turn, are unified

collections of material elements in rule-governed or patterned motion, involving heat and

other forms of energy, that also have dissipative structure and natural purposiveness. A

dissipative structure is how the natural energy loss or entropy in a complex

thermodynamic system is absorbed and dispersed (hence dissipated) by the systematic

re-introduction of energy and matter into the system, via a non-static causal balance

between the inner states of the system and its surrounding natural environment. And

natural purposiveness is how a complex thermodynamic system with dissipative structure

self-generates forms or patterns of order that determine its own causal powers, and in turn

place constraints on the later collective behaviors, effects, and outputs of the whole

system, in order to maintain itself. The prime example of a self-organizing complex

thermodynamic system is a living organism, with its teleological dynamics, its causal

spontaneity by means of epigenesis, and its essential indexicality.

This in turn raises a further important issue about how the biological and

psychological properties of rational human animals are cognized or known in the exact

sciences, as Kant understood those sciences. Kant has notoriously high standards for

somethings qualifying as a science. Not only must a science involve a systematic

organization of objective facts or objective phenomena of some sort, it must also be

strongly nomological in the sense that it expresses necessary a priori laws (MFNS 4:

468). Sciences in this sense, in turn, can include either constitutive (existentially

committed without conditions, and assertoric) principles or else regulative (at best

26

hypothetically existentially committed, logical-fictional, and non-assertoric) principles.

Now an exact science can be a naturally mechanistic physical sciencethat is, an exact

science which satisfies the conditions of Natural Mechanismif and only if its

phenomena and its laws are fully mathematically describable (MFNS 4: 470) in terms of

recursive functions, which in turn are all Turing computable, according to the Church-

Turing Thesis. But as I have argued elsewhere, Kants notion of mathematics is

significantly narrower than our contemporary notion.45 So we must assume that full

mathematical describability in tersm of recursive functions for Kant is equivalent to

analyzability in terms of Primitive Recursive Arithmetic or PRA, the quantifier-free

theory of the natural numbers and the primitive recursive functions over the natural

numbersthe successor function, addition, multiplication, exponentiation, etc.46

Therefore for Kant, at least implicitly, a given theory will be a naturally mechanistic

physical science if and only if its underlying mathematics is no more complex than PRA.

Because PRA encodes all and only the primitive recursive functions, then obviously

every function in PRA is also inherently Turing-computable.47

As we have seen, Kant regards biology as a merely regulative non-mechanistic

life science that supplements the classical Newtonian deterministic, mechanistic

mathematical physics with the teleological concept of a natural purpose or living

organism (CPJ 5: 369-415). But at the same time Kant regards this biological

supplementation of physics as explanatorily necessary. And that is because biology

provides representations of natural phenomena that are themselves explanatorily

irreducible to deterministic mechanistic concepts:

It is quite certain that we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them; and this is indeed so certain that we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans ever

27

to make such an attempt or to hope that there might yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws. (CPJ 5: 400, underlining added)

Translated into contemporary terms, this means that according to Kant, biology adds the

notion of the non-linear, non-equilibrium dynamics of self-organizing complex

thermodynamic systemsi.e., complex systems dynamicsto the familiar classical

notions of mechanistic causation and the linear equilibrium dynamics of inertial physical

systems.

As I mentioned above, the general mathematical theory of complex dynamic

systems is often called dynamical systems theory or DST. The mathematics of DST is

essentially richer than PRA and Peano Arithmetic alike, in that it includes a full range of

non-linear functions. Now Gdels incompleteness theorems say

(i) that there are logically unprovable true sentences in any elementary or classical second-order logical system that also includes enough axioms of Peano arithmetic,

and

(ii) that all such logical systems are consistent (i.e., non-contradictory) if and only if they are incomplete (i.e., not all the truths of the system are theorems of the system) and have their ground of truth outside the system itself.48

So Gdels incompleteness theorems, taken together with the Church-Turing Thesis,

jointly show that formal logical proof is not sufficient for mathematical truth, and also

that mathematical truth itself is not a Turing-computable function that could be realized

on a digital computing machine. Therefore mathematical truth itself, and especially

including mathematical truth in DST, is an inherently uncomputable, non-mechanical fact

of nature.

The thesis of ontological emergence says that new, global or system-wide

causally efficacious properties can arise in certain complex thermodynamic systems over

time, and that these properties inherently change the overall dynamic constitution of the

28

entire system.49 This emergence thesis is significantly metaphysically stronger than either

the thesis of epistemic emergence (which merely says that dynamic systems can

exemplify global relational properties that cannot be known or predicted by knowing the

intrinsic non-relational properties of their parts together with their extrinsic law-governed

modes of relational combination) or the minimal thesis of historical emergence (which

merely says that dynamic systems can exemplify global relational properties at later times

that they did not exemplify at earlier times). Given the notion of a self-organizing

complex thermodynamic system, DST predicts that there are natural systems of

interacting material proper parts or elements whose actual behaviors over time can be

neither digitally computed nor nomologically predicted due to random exchanges of

causal information, energy, and matter with the surrounding environment, and which

exemplify ontologically emergent causally efficacious properties that are not

explanatorily reducible to and thus not logically supervenient on the intrinsic non-

relational properties of the elements of the system together with their extrinsic relational

properties. For example, according to the accounts provided by contemporary

cosmological physics, the Big Bang and black holes are self-organizing complex

thermodynamic systems with ontologically emergent properties.50

For our current purposes, what is most crucial is neither the non-trivial fact that

the Big Bang and black holes are self-organizing complex thermodynamic systems, nor

the equally non-trivial fact that the thesis of ontological emergence predicted by DST is

significantly more metaphysically robust than either a mere epistemic emergence thesis

or a mere historical emergence thesis. Instead, what is most crucial for our current

purposes is that according to this Kantian account the biological, conscious, intentional,

29

and rational processes of human animals also constitute self-organizing complex

thermodynamic systems and also exemplify ontological emergence, and thus that this

self-organization is inherently non-mechanical in the strong sense that it inherently

exceeds the reach of Turing-computability. The rational, conscious, intentional, and

caring biological and neurobiological processes of human animals are, as it were, and as I

mentioned above, Little Bangs. Like all living organisms, they are really causally

efficacious in physical nature, yet they are also underdetermined by all the general causal

laws of nature, whether deterministic laws or probabilistic/statistical laws, and

nomologically unique. This means that via their rational, conscious, intentional, caring

and living organismic, causally spontaneous choices and acts, they bring into existence

one-off or one-time-only causal-dynamical laws of rational human activity, which

significantly enrich and supplement the repertoire of general causal laws.

On this Kantian picture of physical nature, most explicitlybut unfortunately,

also only fragmentarilypresented in the Opus postumum, the complete set of general

causal laws provides a skeletal causal-dynamic architecture for nature, which is then

gradually (and, in the special case of human organisms, literally) fleshed in by the one-off

laws of self-organizing complex thermodynamic systems. So on this Kantian picture, not

only is there natural entropy via naturally mechanical or Turing-computable physical

processes, there is also a natural generative negentropy via natural purposiveness in

accordance with the causally efficacious operations of onboard epigenetic systems,

according to which every living organism contains a real causally spontaneous

productive capacity for constructing its own process of self-organizing growth from

environmental inputs (CPJ 5: 421-425). As with organisms, so too the basic formal

30

principles of epigenesis apply to the self-organizing activities of the Big Bang, black

holes, the creation of stars, the atmospheric and topological causal system of the Earth,

hurricanes, traffic jams, and the surface structure of boiling water. For the purposes of

correctly understanding Kants theory of transcendental freedom, we must be able to see

how it is no trivial fact that in the 1750s, he wrote treatises on the rotation of the Earth,

the age of the Earth, universal natural history, fire, earthquakes, and the theory of winds.

Kant was in fact a proto-theorist of complex dynamic systems, lacking only the

essentially richer mathematics of DST and the other post-Kantian formal tools of modern

logic, biology, chemistry, and physics. In this way, on this Kantian and post-Kantian

picture, nature inherently contains not only deterministic or indeterministic automatic,

mechanical, or Turing-computable processes, but also inherently uncomputable, naturally

creative or self-organizing complex thermodynamic processes. Nature essentially grows

and has a complex dynamic history.

Thus there is for Kant an irreducible explanatory gap between the correct biology

on the one hand, and classical or Newtonian physics on the other handan explanatory

gap which, when it is updated to include modern formal theories of arithmetic, also

entails the contemporary explanatory and ontological gap between the non-linear, non-

equilibrium, non-mechanical, uncomputable thermodynamics of self-organizing complex

living organismic physical systems on the one hand, and the classical linear, equilibrium,

mechanical, Turing computable dynamics of inertial, non-living physical systems on the

other. Otherwise put, for Kant all biological facts are explanatorily irreducible to the facts

of classical Newtonian mechanistic physics,51 and, correspondingly, for us post-Kantians

all biological facts are explanatorily irreducible to naturally mechanical facts more

31

generally. But at the same time, as rational human minded animals or real human

persons, we do consciously possess the feeling of biological life occurring in our own

bodies via our teleological inner sense intuitions, and thus at least some biological facts

actually exist. Therefore for Kant there can never be a Newton of the actual biological

life of the human animal body in both an explanatory sense and also an ontological sense.

And, correspondingly, for us post-Kantians there can also never be either a Church or a

Turing of a blade of grass, a non-human animal, or a rational human minded animal or

real human person in both an explanatory and also an ontological sense.

We will recall here Chalmerss remark, quoted above as one of the epigraphs of

this paper, in strong support of reductive materialism or physicalism about life, i.e.,

Natural Mechanism:

Presented with a full physical account showing how physical processes perform the relevant functions, a reasonable vitalist would concede that life has been explained. There is not even conceptual room for the performance of these functions without life.

What I want to say in direct, three-part reply to Chalmers is (a) that a reasonable

vitalist is in fact a Representational Vitalist, and neither a Substance Vitalist nor a

Property Vitalist, (b) that the relevant vital functions are best described by the complex

systems dynamics model of life, not by naturally mechanistic functionalist analysis, and

(c) that even if there is not even conceptual room for the performance of these functions

without life, there is nevertheless more than enough essentially non-conceptual room for

life to perform its vital functions non-mechanically. This sets the stage for the three non-

reductive arguments I will spell out in the next section.

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V. Inverted Life, Suspended Life, and Non-Local Life: How Biological Life Does Not Supervene on the Physical, and Why

As we saw in the last section, it is arguable that biological life is not merely the

performance of certain mechanical or Turing-computable behaviors, functions, or

operations. I think that life also essentially involves what I will call vital systems:

complex organismic processes with teleological dynamics, causal spontaneity, and

essential indexicality. If this is correct, then organisms occupy unique spatial locations in

their environments, take unique paths through them when they are motile, and in any case

necessarily include intrinsic temporal asymmetries, and inherent forward-directedness.

Metabolic processes, e.g., are thermodynamically and temporally irreversible processes.

Now as I argued above, it is plausible to hold that essential indexicality is the same as

inherent context-dependency,52 together with egocentric centering in a frame-of-

reference, together with orientable space and thermodynamically irreversible time. Facts

about vital systems are therefore essentially indexical facts.

In The Conscious Mind, Chalmers explicitly argues that indexical facts do not

logically supervene on the fundamental physical facts:

Does indexicality pose a problem for reductive explanation? For arbitrary speakers, perhaps not, as the fact in question can be relativized away. But for myself, it is not so easy. The indexical fact expresses something very salient about the world as I find it: that David Chalmers is me. How could one explain this seemingly brute fact? . The issue is extraordinarily difficult to get a grip on, but it seems to me that even if the indexical is not an objective fact about the world, it is a fact about the world as I find it, and it is the world as I find it that needs explanation. The nature of the brute indexical is quite obscure, though, and it is most unclear how one might explain it. The indexical fact may have to be taken as primitive. If so, then we have a failure of reductive explanation distinct from and analogous to the failure with consciousness.53

Granting Chalmerss thesis that indexicality does not logically supervene on the physical,

let us consider now the phenomenon of metabolism in living organisms, and the three

following arguments.

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Argument 1: Inverted Life

(1) It is representable that actual organismic metabolism is either enantiomorphically reversed in space or that its times arrow is systematically structurally deformed away from the classical time-model of continuous linear development (e.g. cyclical time, hyperbolic spiralling time, punctuated equilibrium time, etc.), while also representing all other actual physical properties and facts as fixed. (2) We assume that Minimal Representational Realism obtains. (3) Therefore there is an instantiated or uninstantiated property in the world according to which actual organismic metabolism is either enantiomorphically reversed in space or its times arrow is systematically structurally deformed away from the classical time-model of continuous linear development, while also holding all other actual physical properties and facts fixed. (4) Therefore it is possible that actual organismic metabolism could be be either enantiomorphically reversed in space or its times arrow is systematically structurally deformed away from the classical time-model of continuous linear development, while all other actual physical facts and properties are held fixed. (5) Therefore the logical supervenience of biological life on the physical fails. Argument 2: Suspended Life

(1) It is representable that actual organismic metabolism is universally frozen in actual time and actual placei.e., that it is in a universal state of suspended animation without terminationwhile also representing all other actual physical properties and facts as fixed. (2) We assume that Minimal Representational Realism obtains. (3) Therefore there is an instantiated or uninstantiated property in the world according to which actual organismic metabolism is in a universal state of suspended animation without termination, while also representing all other actual physical properties and facts as fixed. (4) Therefore it is possible that actual organismic metabolism is in a universal state of suspended animation without termination, while all other actual physical facts and properties are held fixed. (5) Therefore the logical supervenience of biological life on the physical fails. Argument 3: Non-Local Life (1) It is representable that actual organismic metabolism is spread over the universe in such a way that it lacks unique location and causal determinacyas in non-locality and indeterminacy effects in quantum mechanics, e.g., Schrdingers cat paradox54while also representing all other actual physical properties and facts as fixed. (2 ) We assume that Minimal Representational Realism obtains.

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(3) Therefore there is an instantiated or uninstantiated property in the world such that actual organismic metabolism is spread over the universe in such a way that it lacks unique location and causal determinacy, while also holding all other actual physical properties and facts fixed. (4) Therefore it is possible that actual organismic metabolism could be spread over the universe in such a way that it lacks unique location and causal determinacy, while all other physical properties and facts are held fixed. (5) Therefore the logical supervenience of biological life on the physical fails.

These three arguments, respectively, are precisely analogous to Chalmers

formulations of (i) the Inverted Qualia Argument for the non-reducibility of

consciousness, which entails the failure of the strict determination of the specific

character of consciousness by the physical, (ii) the Zombie Argument for the non-

reducibility of consciousness, which entails the failure of the strict determination of the

existence of consciousness, and (iii) the Panprotopsychist Argument for the possibility of

universal proto-mentality in a physical world, which shows that some version of neutral

monism is possible.

The significant differences between my arguments and Chalmerss, however, are

that, first, unlike Chalmers, I have not grounded the inferential step to possibility on

conceivability but instead on representability more generally, which fully includes the

semantics of essentially non-conceptual content, and second, unlike Chalmers, I have not

grounded the inferential step from representability to possibility on Two-Dimensional

modal semantics and Textbook Kripkeanism, which are both questionable in various

ways, but instead on the much weaker and correspondingly much more plausible thesis of

Minimal Representational Realism. The crucial point here is that since essentially non-

conceptual content is inherently veridical, non-propositional, and non-epistemic in nature,

and since Minimal Representational Realism excludes property dualism, there is no gap

whatsoever between representability and possibility. Such a representability gap can

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arise only if the content is conceptual or intensional, and only if the properties picked out

are dualistic. For only in that case is it possible that a representation which apparently

maps a priori to a non-physical property according to the 1-intension, actually maps a

posteriori to a physical property according to the 2-intension. Essentially non-

conceptual contents in a Minimal Representational Realist framework, sharply unlike

concepts or intensions in a Two-Dimensional framework, always map representations to

properties one-to-one in a directly referential way like an essentially indexical term, and

never many-to-one in a descriptive way like a Fregean sense or Sinn.

To be sure, the acceptability of any inferential step from representability to

possibility depends on the nature of the properties represented. If the property picked out

were only a faon de parler property, then obviously that would not be sufficient to

guarantee real possibility, but instead would guarantee only faon de parler possibility.

Nevertheless, the primary goal of my strategy in being very liberal about properties is just

to allow in my favored class of a priori immanent structural (i.e., orientable,

egocentrically-centred, dynamically relevant, spacetime) properties in addition to the

dualistic properties accessed by 1-intensions or 2-intensions, and then to rely on the

semantic integrity of an essentially non-conceptual content to guarantee the step to real

possibility. So the argumentative work in the three arguments is really being done by the

essentially non-conceptual content of the representation, not by the liberality of the

property ontology per se.55

If I am correct, then the phenomenon of biological life does not logically

supervene on the Turing-computable deterministic or indeterministic causal behaviors,

functions, and operations bound up with fundamental physical properties and facts. So

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Natural Mechanism is false, and also, ironically, Chalmers is as it were dead wrong

about the reducibility of the phenomenon of life, even though he is absolutely right about

the non-reducibility of the phenomena of consciousness and indexicalitybut not for the

reasons he gave.

Essentially the same non-reductive philosophical points I have just made were

also made by Hans Jonas in the mid-1960s (although in the framework of existential

phenomenology, not in my favored framework of Kantian cognitive semantics and the

complex systems dynamics model of biological life, together with Minimal

Representational Realism, and the three non-reductive arguments from the essentially

non-conceptual representability of Inverted Life, Suspended Life, and Non-Local Life):

Suppose that it is a living body, an organism, on which the gaze of the divine mathematician heppens to rest. It may be unicellular or multicellular. What would the God of the physicists see? As a physical body the organism will exhibit the same general features as do other aggregates: a void mostly, crisscrossed by the geometry of forces that emanate from the insular foci of localized elementary being . But special goings-on will be discernible, both inside and outside its so-called boundary, which will render its phenomenal unity still more problematical than that of ordinary bodies, and will efface almost entirely its material identity through time. I refer to its metabolism, its exchange of matter with the surroundings. In this remarkable mode of being, the material parts of which the organism consists at any moment are to the penetrating observer only temporary, passing contents whose joint material identity does not coincide with the identity of the whole which they enter and leave, and which sustains its own identity by the very act of foreign matter passing through its spatial system, the living form. [T]he object-view of the divine mathematician is less concrete and colorful than oursbut would we also grant it, as before, the possibility of being truer? Emphatically not in this case, and here we move on firm ground, because here, being living bodies ourselves, we happen to have inside knowledge. On the strength of the immediate testimony of our bodies we are able to say what no disembodied on looker would have a cause for saying : the the mathematical God in his homogenous analytical view misses the decisive pointthe point of life itself: its being self-centered individuality, being for itself and in contraposition to all the rest of the world, with an essential boundary dividing inside and outsidenotwithstanding, nay, on the very basis of the actual exchange.56

It should be emphasized that the specifically Kantian and representational version

of Vitalism that I have just spelled out does not require either vital spirit (Substance

Vitalism) or the nomologically supervenient, synchronic, static emergence of essentially

distinct vital properties (Property Vitalism) in biological life. It is entirely a vitalism of

dynamic systems, and entails at most the non-supervenient, diachronic, dynamic

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emergence57 of certain necessary a priori non-mechanical, uncomputable immanent

structural properties in living organisms.

It is a characteristic thesis of Kants theory of mental representation and his

transcendental metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason that both representational

contents and the phenomena (things, properties, or facts) which correspond to them can

be unanalyzable, non-reducible primitives in the sense that they cannot be wholly

logically decomposed into conceptual, descriptive parts, or propositional parts (a.k.a.

logical atoms), although they do nevertheless have some necessary a priori immanent

structures and proper parts. Or in other words, for Kant either a mental content and or a

phenomenon can fail to have a complete analysis, even though it still has a non-substance

dualist, non-property dualist, and non-supervenient essence in the sense of a set of

necessary and sufficient immanent structural conditions for its real possibility, which can

be correctly stated by synthetic a priori propositions. It is therefore possible to provide a

non-dualist Kantian metaphysics of X even if it is impossible to provide an explanatory

reduction of X. It seems to me that life is one of the explanatorily non-reducible

phenomena for which we can provide a Kantian metaphysics. More precisely, when we

combine the Transcendental Aesthetic in the first Critique with Kants account of life in

the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and take them together with complex systems

dynamics and contemporary biology, we get the following Kantian metaphysics of life.

The necessary and sufficient conditions of the real possibility of biological lifei.e., of living organismsare: (1) teleological dynamics in organisms: self-organizing natural purposiveness, including reproduction, growth, motility, death, and evolution, (2) causal spontaneity in organisms: efficacious metabolism (which, as a matter of empirical fact, includes DNA) by means of epigenesis, and (3) essential indexicality in organisms: inherent context-dependency, together with egocentric centering in a frame-of-reference, together with orientable space and irreversible time.

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VI. Conclusion

The complex systems dynamics m