🍄 We Hope You Dance

Everything in life, as in biology, changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition and selfish genes, what if what you get is evolution as a dance?

Oct 20, 2023

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. In March of 2007, we were lucky to get on the dance card of theoretical biologist Brian Goodwin. Goodwin’s advocacy of holistic science, in which emotion and intuition rank equally with rational analysis of natural phenomena, aimed to move science away from a notion of control to an ethical sense of participation in the unfolding story of life. This notion is at the heart of our vision for ALICE, we believe that ideas are not selfish, that ideas are not viruses…that ideas are energy. We believe that the future is constantly changing and non-algorithmic. Which leads us to question that perhaps consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and that artificial intelligence—as classical, algorithmic systems—may never be conscious, no matter their complexity (but, that is for another newsletter.).

Brian Goodwin died in 2009 at the age of 78. Goodwin's dedication to holistic theory and practice led him to advocate that science and the humanities should be merged. The following is a transcript from our meeting at Schumacher College.

The New Biology: Ways of Knowing

"The new biology is something that’s in the process of emerging. But basically I’d say it’s putting together the different ways of knowing that have conventionally been separated. We have the thinking mode, the feeling mode, intuiting and sensing. And these tend to be separated, with thinking and sensing being dominate in scientific culture in modernity so that intuition and feeling tend to be in the shadow…and what we’ve tried to do in developing ways of knowing for the new biology is to bring feeling and intuition back into the light as aspect; ways of knowing that are essentially holistic. You grasp the whole.

Thinking and sensing are very good for looking at parts, for analysis. And we don’t reject that at all. I’m a mathematician and scientist and I love this process of trying to understand the world, of trying to make sense of what we see and what we experience. But in order to do so we need these thinking and feeling modes of understanding. And so we need to bring it all together into a coherent unity, that we understand the world as a coherent unity as well as the possibility of seeing it in terms of many different parts, but the two belong together. There’re not separate; and it’s not the whole comes out of the parts or the whole generates the parts, the parts and the whole belong together and understanding this and getting to know it and behaving appropriately in a holistic context is what we’re aiming to do in the new biology.”

The new biology puts together quantities and qualities.

“I realized that complexity theory was opening a window onto a world of quality which had been closed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when modern science was developed. Galileo and then Descartes and then Francis Bacon, for very good reasons, they said let us pay attention to measurable quantities and their relationships in order to understand the lawful world of order. Now this was an extremely good idea in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and it has given us the structure of science as a predictable form of knowledge. You notice that control and prediction go together. This is the aim of modernity: to understand, to predict and to control. If you’re dealing with complex systems, you cannot predict and control because you cannot predict what the outcome of particular relationships is going to be.

So you have two worlds; a world of modeling where you have consistency between the basic structure and dynamics of the complex system and its outcomes. And then you have the real world, and the real world is always such that you could never know sufficient detail in order to make a clear prediction about outcome. And so we have all kinds of unpredictable consequences; like the collapse of the cod fisheries in the Grand Banks several years ago. Nobody foresaw that collapse, they still haven’t come back, the cod. Why have they not returned? Well that’s a complex dynamic system and we don’t understand the dynamics. We never have and we never will. So we have to adopt a different relationship to complex dynamical systems that has to do with some kind of perception of their qualities. And in their qualities, I include things like health. Now, people intuitively talk…you know fisherman will talk about the health of the fisheries and they do it in terms of…they observe the quantities, relationships and diversity and they know from experience what constitutes a healthy ecosystem. “

Health is one of these words—health or wellbeing— is essentially a word that relates to qualities. It’s a quality of feeling.

“If you think of your own health, it’s a quality of feeling that you experience and you know what it’s like to have a sense of wellbeing. But you cannot turn it into a number, like a number on a thermometer or a pressure or any of the quantities like blood cell counts or the pH of the blood. They will correlate with wellbeing but they don’t actually tell you precisely what wellbeing is. Because wellbeing is a coherent, integrated experience of that dynamic whole by a person, by a subject.”

The Science of Qualities

“Now when we talk about the qualities of an ecosystem like the fisheries or a forest or a lawn or any ecological system that you want to think of, then we’re using a combination of quantitative observation and qualitative feeling about that. And in science, the qualities have tended to be ignored because they’re regarded as subjective and unreliable. This is a very crucial point in the development in the science of qualities. It’s necessary to be able to demonstrate that human beings, using their observational skills and their intuition and their feelings as well as their thinking and sensing modes, they’re able to evaluate the quality of experience of another being. Such as…the quality of experience of animals on a farm, like pigs or cows or sheep, whatever it might be. Now farmers know this perfectly well. And if you come to domestic animals, everybody will say they know when their pet is ill, out of sorts, angry or happy. And science would say ‘no, you can’t possibly know that, you’re projecting your own feelings onto those other beings. It’s not their feelings, it’s your feelings you’re talking about.’ Well this is something that now has been demonstrated to be wrong, in the sense that if you ask different people to observe whatever it might be; a pig behaving in a particular situation and you say to these people, ‘look at this pig and write down the words that you think express its experience.’ And people will write down words like happy, boisterous, and it might be nervous laid back, whatever, words of that kind that describe the quality of experience that pig is expressing through it’s behavior. We do this with each other all the time, we’re very good at it. And it’s been demonstrated by people like Francoise Wemelsfelder, who works in Scotland with her consensus methodology and free choice profiling—these are analytical methods that are used in conjunction with evaluation to show that people are good at this qualitative evaluation, so qualities come back into science as part of the evaluation of the nature of complex dynamical systems.

And that could apply to the quality of soil in a farm. Or the quality of a landscape, or indeed the quality of a building. The experience people have living in a particular space. This is obviously relevant for architecture. It’s relevant for where businesses are conducted. It’s relevant for where people are going to have their organizations, the locations, where they’re going to be. So this notion of health and quality is something that is now coming back into scientific evaluation and we have a science of qualities which includes quantities and qualities.

The way I now experience reality, it’s something that is in constant creation, it’s constantly renewing itself. You think of the body— your liver, muscles, any part of the body—is constantly renewing itself, but that’s true also of trees, plants; it’s true of ecological systems, it’s true of the climate, it’s true in quantum mechanics; you’ve got coming into being all the time of elementary particles from the vacuum, the void, and they come and go all the time.”

Everything is constantly in the process of creation. And that, for me, is reality. So then the question is, how do we come into balance with that continuous creativity of the cosmos?

“Because balance means not just reflecting this but somehow responding appropriately to whatever the changes are or whatever the creative movements are that are going on around us. We need to be part of that and we need to be behaving appropriately in that context.

So, I would say that in order to heal ourselves and in order to heal the planet we need to take action that is participatory, that is we’re participating with the other species, we’re not trying to control them because we’re actually going to go into states of new order with our sensitivities intact and try to find our way into the future.”

The coming into being

“The term morphogenesis, as I have encountered it, arises within biology—it’s literally if you take the two parts of the word; morpho which is from morphology and genesis, which is to generate, to create, so it’s the creation of morphology or form. So this is the coming into being of form; morphogenesis. And so if we think of this in its most general terms, then we can say that morphogenesis, the coming into being of form, is happening all the time in all the systems all over the earth, because form is the manifestation of any form of creation, creativity it always takes some form.

So this applies also to society. And social forms, social dynamics take particular forms and structures. So this is a very general term and I feel it’s really quite important to try to understand how this comes about in terms of the relationship between parts and wholes. And so this is also becoming quite a general issue in a social order because here we have an information society and we want to turn that information into appropriate form, appropriate structures and dynamics. So there’s something very general going on here. And the fact that morphogenesis has extended from biology into these other domains seems to me to indicate that there’s a fundamental dynamic of creativity here that we need to understand and engage in.

Just going back to the biology, it’s interesting that the research I’m doing is looking at the relationship between the process in which genes, the information in genes gives rise to an organism of a particular form, and the process of conversation. We all know about conversation, or we think we do, and the interesting thing for me about conversation is that every sentence I utter is actually ambiguous, it has many different meanings. Whereas it’s assumed that when an organism is making it’s form during embryonic development, during embryogenesis there’s a completely mechanistic, deterministic relationship between reading the genes, making the proteins, the proteins are interacting, and everything is determined according to a plan, a genetic program.

Now the evidence is pointing in a different direction as we read it. People are free to read the evidence in different ways, but as we see it, what we see is that what’s actually going on and this sounds like a metaphor but it turns into something quite rigorous in terms of science; the mathematics of this process is that there is a kind of conversation going on between the genes and the networks that are controlling them. And this information, this signaling and receiving process is something that is like a language and it’s like there’s a conversation going on there and what emerges as meaning, because when we talk about conversation we talk about meaning.

Meaning is what emerges, or you hope it’s going to emerge from a conversation and so the meaning emerging from a conversation taking place is within an organism, within the cells of an organism is the embodied form of the organism itself, the structure, the form. So morphogenesis is the emergence of meaning from a conversation that is taking place within these networks and they are like languages. Now, as I say, this sounds like a metaphor, but it actually is connected with a lot of mathematical analysis and there’s a very deep relationship between ambiguity and creativity, and what I am now realizing is that in order for something to be creative, a process to be creative, there has to be ambiguity and the ambiguity keeps open the possibilities so that you have different outcomes according to context.

We’re engaged in this creative process, so are organisms, so are elementary particles—everything in the cosmos is having conversations about how to generate appropriate form. So this is morphogenesis writ large, if you like, it’s happening everywhere.

And it’s a process that we’re just trying to understand and I think it’s very exciting, these convergences of understanding in all these different domains. So it brings together the sciences, the humanities, the arts, craft, technology…everything is now brought together within this realm of creative innovation. And I think that, for me, is the way the educational system will now be structured in terms of a unity rather than all these separated, different subjects. And it’d be all around the process of liberating appropriate creativity in human beings and in nature, and as cooperating with nature for emergent creative forms."

At the close of our time with Dr. Goodwin, we asked his thoughts for the future, and his hope still resonates with us today: “The one prediction I would make, that if we're going to survive, we will survive in community and not as isolated individuals the way we are at the moment in our culture. People are now engaging in this process of going local, reducing energy use, getting into sustainable energy and renewable energy supplies, and recovering community and having local currencies. Now these are all things that I think are going to be part of future society and it'd be dominated by quality, abundance, celebration, joy, and a general high level of health and wellbeing and a sense of meaning—we'll have recovered a sense of meaning in our lives. So that's the way I think things are going to move, but I don't know how far or how fast…but I'm quite hopeful about it. Are you?”

When you get the choice to sit it out or to dance, we hope you dance.

What else we are wondering…

🔍 Qualia, and the science of feelings
According to the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, science has no explanation for the nature of feelings; no clue as to how electrical activity in the brain can give rise to sensations and feelings. Philosophers have coined the word quale (plural, qualia) to indicate what a specific experience feels like. Qualia has been described “the difficult problem of consciousness” because it has defied any sensible solution. The Faggin Foundation’s main objective is to foster theoretical and experimental research, promote collaborations, and provide financial support to US universities and other non-profit institutions to help develop the new science of consciousness, based on the assumption that consciousness is an irreducible and fundamental property of nature.

🔍📘 Nature’s Due, Healing our Fragmented Culture
In this book, Brian Goodwin, acclaimed author of How the Leopard Changed its Spots, argues for a view of nature as complex, interrelated networks of relationships. He proposes that, in order for us to once again work with nature to achieve true sustainability on our planet, we need to adopt a new science, new art, new design, new economics and new patterns of responsibility. A wide-ranging book with far-reaching consequences, Nature’s Due will be essential reading for all those interested in how nature and human culture can co-exist in the future.

🔍📘 On Growth and Form
In this classic of biology and modern science, Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948), one of the most distinguished scientists of the modern era, sets forth his seminal "theory of transformation"—that one species evolves into another not by successive minor changes in individual body parts, but by large-scale transformations involving the body as a whole.

🔍 On Life, Order, Subjectivity and Creativity
A Conversation with Three Scientists: Physicist Philip Ball, Biologist Brian Goodwin and Mathematician Ian Stewart.

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts
👁‍🗨 Coherence is Health with Brian Goodwin, theoretical biologist.
👁‍🗨 On Morphogenesis and Form with Brian Goodwin, theoretical biologist.