Mark,

 Thanks for this note.  There is a lot here and I have been traveling and hanging with family over the break, so sorry for my delay. Let me reply briefly by saying, yes, I am familiar with Deacon's work and was influenced by the Symbolic Species. I tracked his more recent developments via Jeremy Sherman's work. See this blog https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201811/you-are-emergent-constraint. He was Deacon's student and collaborator and wrote a "cliff notes version" Neither Ghost nor Machine. I have also dialogued some with John Torday about Deacon's frame, my frame, the standard frame and so forth. I agree with you that Deacon only gets the final cause, and has no frame for the formal cause (or the related concept of metaphysics, although in reality he is attacking the standard mechanistic/efficient metaphyscial cause frame, wanting to add teleology/final cause).


I am going to be only sparsely on line for the next few days for the holiday. But I wanted you to know that I appreciated this post and have lots to say about it. One final comment is that behavior, work effort as referenced below by Deacon, the second law, negentropy, Tonini's information integration, complexity theory/complex adaptive systems, and animal/human activity as spelled about by Vygostky and the Russian activity theorists:

 https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm, and my BIT embedded in the ToK are all fascinating points that I believe intersect.


Perhaps we can pick up this discussion at some point in a few days.

Best,

G


<https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm>

Soviet Psychology: Lev Vygotsky's The Crisis in Psychology<https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm>
www.marxists.org
From Lev Vygotsky's The Crisis in Psychology, in which he clarifies the epistemological, ontological and methodological issues relating to the science of psychology



[https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-article_inline_full/public/field_blog_entry_teaser_image/2018-10/20329271933_d354c625d2_z.jpg?itok=PvacMNrW]<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201811/you-are-emergent-constraint>

You Are an Emergent Constraint | Psychology Today<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201811/you-are-emergent-constraint>
www.psychologytoday.com
The work you present is a product of the work you prevent.





______________________________________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
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Check out my Theory of Knowledge blog at Psychology Today at:
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________________________________
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2018 11:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Terrence Deacon and Teleodynamics


ToKers:

In 2011, Gregg published his groundbreaking "A New Unified Theory of Psychology," which I presume you have all read.  On page 118, in the crucial chapter on "The Justification Hypothesis," he references Berkeley  neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon's 1997 "The Symbolic Species," but, since they were published concurrently, there is no mention of Deacon's 2011 "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon

According my to Google search, Gregg hasn't mentioned him elsewhere, although NYU's Christopher Collins seemed to have at least referenced the two in his 2013 "The Idea of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of Preliterate Imagination."

https://www.amazon.com/Paleopoetics-Preliterate-Imagination-Christopher-Collins-ebook/dp/B00AND9DZ2

As it turns out, Deacon has developed something related to the ToK (albeit only three "levels," with the last one capable of many more) and he has explicitly linked it with Aristotle -- the basis of the work at my Center, building on Marshall McLuhan, as we've been discussing on this list.

Here are a few citations from the end of his Chapter 11, "Work" --

"One might be tempted to object that the family resemblances between these various ententional notions of work and the physicist’s concept of work are merely superficial, and that the use of the same term to refer to a form of employment or a creative mental effort is only metaphorically related to the Newtonian notion. But if there is a deeper isomorphism linking them all, there could be a great benefit in making sense of this connection. It is becoming increasingly important to discover how best to measure and compare all these diverse forms of work, especially in an era in which vast numbers of people spend their days sorting and analyzing data, organizing information in useful ways, and communicating with one another about how they are doing it. If it were possible to identify some unifying principles that precisely express the interdependencies between the physicist’s conception of work and the computer programmer’s experience of work, for example, it might have both profound scientific and practical value. This is not just because such knowledge could help to assess the relative efficiency of management strategies, aid Wall Street agencies in discerning optimal advertising campaigns, or even contribute to political efforts to manipulate public opinion, but because work is the common denominator in all attributions of causal power, from billiard ball collisions to military coups to the creative outputs of genius . . .

"In conclusion, being able to trace the thread of causality that links these domains avails us of the ability to discern whether methods and concepts developed in different scientific contexts are transferable in more than merely analogous forms. It also makes it possible to begin the task of formalizing the relationships that link energetic processes, form generation processes, and social-cognitive processes. Most important, it shows us that what emerges in new levels of dynamics is not any new fundamental law of physics or any singularity in the causal connectedness of physical phenomena, but rather the possibility of new forms of work, and thus new ways to achieve what would not otherwise occur spontaneously. In other words, with the emergence of new forms of work, the causal organization of the world changes fundamentally, even though the basic laws of nature remain the same. Causal linkages that were previously cosmically improbable—such as the special juxtapositions of highly purified metals and semiconductors constituting the computer that is recording this text—become highly predictable.

"As we will see in subsequent chapters, these predispositions and the work that can be generated thereby are the basis for the generation of new forms of teleodynamic relationships: that is, new information and new representations. In fact, the very concept of interpretation can be cashed out in terms of teleodynamic work. This will be the subject of the next two chapters.

"This causal generativity is a consequence of the fact that higher-order forms of work can organize the generation of non-spontaneous patterns of physical change into vast constellations of linked forms of work, connecting large numbers of otherwise unrelated physical systems, spanning many levels of interdependent dynamics. Although I have only described three major classes of work, corresponding to thermodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics, it should be obvious from previous discussions of levels of emergent dynamics that there is no limit to higher-order forms of teleodynamic processes. Thus, the possibilities of generating increasingly diverse forms of non-spontaneous dynamics can produce causal relationships that radically diverge from simple physical and chemical expectations, and yet still have these processes as their ground. This is the essence of emergence, and the creative explosion it unleashes . . . "

Alas, Deacon commits a fundamental error in all this by "favoring" *final* cause -- thus, his teleodynamics (i.e. purposive behaviors) -- while, as is common with modern scholars, he large ignores *formal* causality.  As a neuroanthroologist, trained at Harvard, I'd guess that he has little background in philosophy.  He is correct to zero in on Aristotle but he can't sort out what is important and what is more his own "spin" in all this.

Deacon's "levels of interdependent dynamics" and "higher order forms of work" seems to be a version of Gregg's "dimensions of complexity."  Perhaps Gregg would like to compare-and-contrast them . . . ??

Mark

P.S. Here's some comments I have recently left on a Facebook thread about Deacon and his significance --

This [citation] is from the end of Deacon's Chapter 11, titled "Work." It is an appropriation of Aristotle's "Metaphysics," that Deacon sorta acknowledges, without pointing to its source. Aristotle invented the term "entelechy" to deal with this, which many simply don't translate but Joe Sachs renders as "being-at-work-staying-itself." Others call it "the realization of potential" or "soul" &c.

"The most sophisticated early recognition of a distinction between these very different modes of causality can be traced all the way back to Aristotle . . . For Aristotle, these were different and complementary ways of understanding how and why change occurs." (p. 45)

To understand what is involved, Aristotle's "act" and "potency" must also be understood, along with his exposition of *causality* as it is tied to "work." Deacon is far too focused on "final" cause and seems to have a poor grasp of "formal" cause, since his entire exposition is aimed at "teleology" (i.e. "purpose".) My Center's work focuses on *formal* cause, building on the work of Marshall McLuhan -- himself an Aristotelian.

Although there are no direct Aristotle references in Deacon's bibliography, the index has many entries for "Aristotle" and "causality models of," "entelechy concept of," "'energy' as term used by" &c. Btw, a free copy of "Incomplete Nature" can be found (and searched) at memoryoftheworld /dot/ org.
P.P.S.  Yes, the plot thickens!  Deacon's wrote the introduction to the 2014 "What is Information? Propagating Organization in the Biosphere, Symbolosphere, Technosphere and Econosphere" which was written by the physicist Bob Logan, a "nemesis" of mine in McLuhan circles.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Information-Organization-Symbolosphere-Technosphere/dp/1608889963

In 2011, knowing of Deacon's book but not Gregg's, I intervened on the Media Ecology Association mailing list on behalf of McLuhan's understanding of *formal* cause.  Logan &al jumped all over me asserting that McLuhan was actually a "precursor" to complexity studies -- which he was not.  They then went ahead and collected a bunch of essays and published it as "Taking Up McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality" in 2017.  Whata wacky world this is . . . <g>

https://www.amazon.com/Taking-McLuhans-Cause-Perspectives-Causality/dp/1783206942


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