Reflections on Life and Mind, Final Part
Causal Structure, Mental Structure, and the Highest Form
§91 Perhaps the simplest conclusion one might reach from my previous set of reflections is that, as we know, language is complex and so, since the code inscribed in DNA is a kind of language, it too is of necessity quite complex. That, however, would be to miss the more crucial point. If complexity were the issue, then nothing would follow except certain traditional arguments regarding to what degree the mechanism of natural selection alone suffices to refine life into the astonishing kinds of organic systems we observe in nature and in ourselves; and those arguments are, of course, irresoluble. But that is all quite different from what concerns us here. The true issue is that the genetic code as code—indeed the genome’s whole semeiotic economy of meaning—literally does not exist at the material level at all. The semantic content that defines it is not a physical constituent of the organism. It belongs, rather, to the world of form and of purposes and of values—of pure intelligibility and, in fact (however analogically we must employ the term), of intelligence. The code in itself, considered apart from its physical medium of transmission, is “information” in its purest state, uncorrupted by “noise” of any kind—uncorrupted by matter, chance, entropic dissipation, random mutation, or what have you—all of which appears only at the quantifiable level of transcription, not at the hermeneutical level where the code is efficacious. The moment we begin speaking of systems of signs that contain real semantic information, we are invoking a layer of intelligibility and signification that is eternally and essentially distinct from the physical occasion of its transcription and expression. Life is sustained at a level of meaning as well as at levels of physical operation. Life’s structure is indeed hierarchical, as I have repeatedly asserted, consisting in inseparable levels of causal interdependency, governed by top-down processes that cannot simply be reduced to their constituent parts or to operations that ever existed in isolation from one another; and the very uppermost of those levels, so to speak, which is utterly indispensable to all the systems that depend upon it, is that purely hermeneutical space, which in its turn is presided over by a formal power that has very much a structure like that of mind—or, at least, like that of mental agency. Hence my willingness to rely on an Aristotelian aetiology, albeit only as properly conceived, as a set of inseparable rational relations rather than a collection of extrinsic causal “forces.”
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