Speculative Grace: Hive Causality

I. Pump Priming

Having sketched some of the basics involved in experimentally porting grace onto a non-theistic platform, I’d like to spend the next few weeks exploring some related side trails.

This week, I liked to again address the way that a non-theistic ontology diffuses and distributes the supernaturally singular transcendence of a theistic God across the face of a fundamentally flat world. In particular, I’d like to address this issue from the perspective of causality. To prime the pump, I’ll take a look at Susan Oyama’s incisive book The Ontogeny of Information.

II. Definitions

First, just a brief reminder about how I’m using the terms “theistic” and “non-theistic.”

By “theism” I mean any ontology that understands God, as the Creator, to be the single unifying source of reality. In this sense, a belief in God is not necessarily incompatible with a non-theistic ontology. Only a belief that God is the single unifying source of reality is incompatible with a non-theistic ontology.

But, further, I want to claim that any ontology founded on the axiom that reality is ultimately “One” (whether this basic unity shows up as a governing principle, a macro-totality, a micro-uniformity, a transcendental horizon, etc.) remains essentially theistic. Such ontologies have simply substituted a philosophical avatar of original unity for “God.” 

To be clearly and decisively non-theistic, an ontology would need to break fundamentally with this traditional assumption of basic, original unity. Rather than accounting for how localized multiplicity comes from an original unity, it would have to account for how various localized unities emerge from an original multiplicity.

III. Pre-Formationism

The thrust of Oyama’s argument is that many contemporary biologists – at least tacitly and perhaps often unwittingly – have adopted an essentially theistic understanding of biological development (i.e., ontogeny).

Here, Oyama does not mean that most biologist are crypto-creationists. Rather, she means that they tend to treat ontogeny as a process that, though “godless,” is structurally theistic. They have simply substituted a biological avatar for “God.”

What is it that, in contemporary biological discourse, often functions as an avatar for “God”?

The gene.

The structural homology with theism is three-fold: (1) the assumption that a given form can only be accounted for with reference to a prior instance of that same form, (2) the assumption that some kind of central “intelligence” must be driving and guiding the developmental process, and (3) the assumption that the order and continuity of ontogeny can only be accounted for if they are essentially the result of a single, driving, root cause.

In contemporary biological discourse, Oyama claims, the gene functions an an essentially theistic avatar capable of fulfilling all three of the above functions:

“Powerful and protean, and far from being banished from secular science, the argument from design is ubiquitous. Complex design, it claims, is evidence of creative, typically divine, intelligence. . . . It is a short step from this statement that we are as we are, and do as we do, because of our essential nature as biological creatures to a variant of the argument from design: our nature is created by a genetic plan, an intelligence in the chromosomes, which was in turn created by natural selection. By slow evolutionary winnowing, Nature placed knowledge of herself in chromosomes of her creatures.” (12, emphasis mine)

From this perspective, the gene is understood as a kind of homunculus – a ghost in the machine – that allows preformatted “intelligence” to be packaged in the body of the cell itself. Here, the “gene” is homologous with a theistic “God”: it is the single, unified, already formatted, fundamental causal source that single-handedly formats the unformatted material chaos.

Oyama summarizes this understanding of development with the term “pre-formationism” because it holds the classical view (even despite itself) that “form” is separate from matter, that “form” must precede matter, and that “form” must be the seat of animation.

“Most solutions to the puzzle of how form arises, therefore, including the most recent biological dogma, have incorporated the assumption that form is to be explained by pointing to a prior instance of that very form. To the extent that this is true, they are of limited value in answering questions about origins and development. Whether it is God, a vitalistic force, or the gene as Nature’s agent that is the source of the design of living things and that initiates and directs the unfolding of the design thus matters little to the structure of the argument.” (1, emphasis mine)

As a result, in pre-formationism, form (i.e., Mind, Intelligence, or [genetic] Information) continues to get all the glory and matter continues to get the short end of the ontogentic stick. 

“Whether one traces present conceptions of life to Aristotelian notions of form and matter . . . [or] to Newtonian and Cartesian definitions of matter as inert and therefore requiring outside animation, it is clear that our preoccupations with organisms as material objects whose design and functioning must be imparted to them has a long and complex past.” (14, emphasis mine)

Matter, according to this model, is fundamentally passive, disordered, and inert. Only the imposition of a pre-formatted intelligence can save it.

IV. Hive Causality

In opposition to pre-formationism, Oyama advocates a notion of distributed causality that she refers to as “the reciprocal selectivity of influences.” 

For my own part, I suggest that we might refer to such a network of distributed causes as hive causality.

Rather than continuing to tinker with pre-formationism, she claims that contemporary thought must make a clean break:

“What we need here . . . is the stake-in-the-heart move, and the heart is the notion that some influences are more equal than others, that form – or its modern agent, information – exists before the interactions in which it appears and must be transmitted to the organisms either through genes or by the environment.” (31, emphasis mine)

In the spirit of Bruno Latour’s principle of irreduction, Oyama claims that we must abandon an overly simplistic (and, I would add, essentially theistic) gene-centric view of ontogeny and acknowledge instead the immensely complex network of actors (some genetic, some epigenetic, some environmental, all contingent) that each play discernible and variously crucial parts in the process of development. To grasp ontogeny truthfully, we must recognize the way that causal responsibility for the process is decentralized and distributed among all the actors.

“What I am arguing for here,” she says, “is a view of causality that gives formative weight to all operative influences, since none is alone sufficient for the phenomenon or for any of its properties” (18, emphasis mine).

If this is done, then change “is best thought of not as the result of a dose of form and animation from some causal agent, but rather as a system alteration jointly determined by contemporary influences and by the state of the system, which state represents the synthesis of earlier interactions” (37).

From this perspective, it is recognized that no single, external, and preformatted force guides the unfolding of the process toward order and intelligibility.

Rather, order arises as the result of a hive causality in which the causal pathways are weakly determining and multiply contingent. Information and order are the result of the process rather than its pre-formatted condition. And matter is itself understood to be an active, independent, and intelligible force in ontogeny.

V. Hive Grace

In my view, the shift from pre-formationism to hive causality is an essential step in grasping the structure of a non-theistic ontology. Further, it is my view that, if ported into a non-theistic ontology, grace will then be manifest in terms of the ubiquity of the world’s distributed relations. 

My take-away theses:

Grace: the reciprocal selectivity of influences.

Grace: the intersection of multiply contingent and weakly causal pathways.

Grace: hive causality.

 

Comments

[Eric Lee]

Adam,

Again, thanks, fascinating. A thought and a question:

Based on Oyama's helpful definition then, it seems that even those like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are ultimately operating on "theistic" assumptions for their "atheistic" premises. I think Oyama is really helpful here, as evolution cannot be reducible to a single thing like genes. (My superviser is really positive on Oyama, I just discovered.)

According to Oyama, this usual conception, which needs to be short-circuited (Oyama, Evolution's Eye, p. 78), has everything run through a single bottleneck of constraints (heredity vis-a-vis genes). But on her account, there is no longer a single bottleneck but now multiple constraints, influences, etc. Thus you quote Oyama: “What I am arguing for here,” she says, “is a view of causality that gives formative weight to all operative influences, since none is alone sufficient for the phenomenon or for any of its properties” (18, emphasis yours). My question is simultaneously one of biology and theology then: what becomes the 'selector' of the emergence or arrival of something? And what determines if this is 'better', 'worse', or say, more 'fit'? Philosophically speaking, one may end up with some sort of biological 'Stoicism' of sorts if one equates 'grace' with whatever arrives on these networks of multiply contingent and weakly causal pathways.

Now that I think of it, perhaps that is the wrong question to ask, since that seems to be what exactly Oyama and you are trying to subvert, as now there are multiple selectors?

[Adam Miller]

Eric, good questions/comments.

Regarding Dawkins and Dennett: I believe this is a possible charge one might make against their positions. However, I'd want to proceed very carefully. Dawkins and Dennett are both world class thinkers when it comes to questions regarding evolutionary theory and their actual positions on these particular questions are likely very nuanced, complex, and well-informed.

Regarding what does the selecting: I think you've correctly answered your own question when you propose that there are multiple selectors. The key, I think , is to see the way that these selectors operate conjointly and reciprocally through complex networks of nested feedback loops.

And as for the resonance of this understanding of grace with Stoicism: I think there is a genuine resonance (see, for instance, one of my earliest posts on Epictetus), but I don't think my position is simply identical with Stoicism (especially, obviously, vis-a-vis the metaphysics).

My best,
Adam