What Is Life? Part I: The Problem of Agency

Is there a third way between Darwinian normative nihilism and theism? In other words, is there a different way to deal with the fact that purpose, value, and meaning seem to have a very real grip on our hearts and minds, besides dismissing them as an illusion, with the Darwinist, or appealing to God as their guarantor, with the theist?

Most debates over evolution and human nature simply assume that the answer to these questions is “No.” They oscillate between the two poles of scientific reductionism and theism.

In this post, and two follow-ups, I will make the case for answering these questions with a tentative “Yes.” More specifically, I will show (i) why we have good reason to believe that agency in a strong normative sense is an objective feature of reality (Part I), (ii) why the mainstream Darwinian account of life is radically inadequate (Part II), and (iii) which areas of current scientific investigation might conceivably point the way towards a deeper understanding of living things, and thus of ourselves (Part III).

A blog is obviously no place to try to do serious philosophy. Yet, the exploration of any potential middle ground between reductionism and theism may be of considerable interest to the general public. Also, I have been criticizing Darwinian reductionism in this space from a non-theistic perspective, and I owe interested readers a more detailed account of how this amounts to a coherent position. For these reasons, in this series I will treat these rather involved matters as simply and succinctly as I can.(1)

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I will try to keep jargon to a minimum in this column, but there is one philosophers’ term of art that I need to introduce because there is no ordinary English equivalent for it. That word is “norm,” along with its corresponding adjectival form, “normative,” and abstract noun, “normativity,” which refers to the existence of norms as a feature of the world. So, the first thing I must do is explain what I mean by “norms.”

In ordinary speech, a “norm” is a criterion or a standard. The English word derives from the Latin term for a carpenter’s square—something which sets the standard to which an edge on a table, say, is expected to conform. A shopping list is another sort of norm—when I get home, the contents of my shopping bags should match my shopping list.

Thus, the square plays a role in determining the shape of the table by influencing the carpenter’s actions and the list plays a role in determining the contents of my bags by determining my actions at the grocery store. In general, norms are things that direct or govern our actions and the results of our actions on the world around us. They exert influence over us by getting us to act in such a way as to produce results in accordance with them.

A more succinct way of putting all this is to say that norms are requirements upon our action.

However, the sort of influence that normative requirements have over us is very different from the sort of influence that the laws of nature have over us. This might not be immediately obvious, because we sometimes use the same words to describe results required by norms and results required by natural causes or laws.

For example, I might say I was “required” to stop “because” the light was red and I might also say that the apple was “required” to fall “because” of gravity.  But clearly the sense of “requirement” and the sense of “because” are entirely different in the two cases.

I had a choice about whether or not to stop the car, whereas the apple had no choice about whether to fall. The red light was acting upon me as a normative requirement, not as a law of nature. No law of nature prevented me from running the red light. So, a normative requirement is a very different sort of thing from a causal requirement.

Another aspect of norms is that they form a basis for evaluation. Both the carpenter and I may be evaluated on the closeness of the match between our respective norms and our respective results. If the first table the carpenter cuts is too far out of square, he may need to cut another piece of wood. Similarly, if the contents of my shopping bags are too far out of agreement with my shopping list, I may have to return to the grocery store. In other words, one may succeed or fail to apply a norm correctly.

So, the concept of value is logically connected to the concept of normative requirement. The logical implication works in the other direction, as well. To say that something is absolutely good or bad is to say that it satisfies or fails to satisfy some requirement. To say that the thing is comparatively better or worse than something else is to say that the first thing satisfies a requirement more or less nearly than the second thing.

Purpose enters this picture when we think about the relation between normative requirements and results. A normative requirement is like a target an agent is trying to hit. We also say that agents try to attain their goals, fulfill their purposes, and reach their ends. I use all these terms more or less interchangeably. Whatever term we use, practically all action—indeed all biological activity whatever—involves aiming at something, where the target aimed at has the character of a normative requirement.

Another way of looking at biological purpose is this. Purposes consist in virtual (not-yet-realized) states that represent future possible states of the world. These virtual states exert a normative requirement on an agent such that the agent strives to bring the world into conformity with them—to realize the virtual states in the actual world, as one might put it. For example, a hungry animal has the purpose of finding and consuming food. Before it does so, its actions are guided by the normative requirement of eating. After it has eaten, the actual state of the world conforms more closely to the earlier virtual state that was exerting the requirement and directing the action, and we say it has achieved its purpose.

Needless to say, these virtual states must be embodied in the agent (organism) in the present, somehow. I am not saying the future as such can influence the past (so-called “backwards causation”). I must set aside this worry for now, but I will return to it in Part III.

So far, I have shown that the ideas of normative requirement, value, and purpose are intimately linked, conceptually. This most likely means that the phenomena in nature to which they refer are aspects of a single, complex phenomenon. That phenomenon is clearly agency—the power that agents (organisms) have of acting on the world. Therefore, normative requirement, value, and purpose are aspects of agency, and agency is the real heart of the problem we are investigating.

The last step is to see that the problem of agency is quite general. In other words, agency is an essential—I would say the essential—feature, not just of human beings, and not just of the higher animals, but of all living things. It is what distinguishes living systems from nonliving things.

For the sake of concreteness, here is a brief film of a neutrophil (white blood cell) chasing down and ingesting a bacterium. I provide it just to remind ourselves of the empirical data we are trying to understand:

Here is what I take to be a very natural description of what we observe in this video: The neutrophil is chasing the bacterium because it needs to eat in order to live. In other words, for the neutrophil, living is a normative requirement that it strives to fulfill through its actions.

A subsidiary requirement upon the cell is that it must eat in order to stay alive.(2) We may generalize this point by saying that, while staying alive is the fundamental normative requirment upon all living systems, myriad subsidiary requirements exist, as well.(3) We call these subsidiary requirements “needs.”

All living things—and only living things—have needs. Sometimes, philosophers also speak of entities’ having “interests,” or “concerns,” or even of their “caring.” These are all closely related ideas, but “need” seems to me to be the most straightforward and least tendentious way of expressing what we observe in the video. Cells need to eat, and they chase, capture, and ingest their prey in order to satisfy that need.

Next, we may observe that needs are deficiencies, and as such they correspond to negatively valenced internal states. Their satisfaction corresponds to positively valenced internal states. This is how value first enters the world.

Furthermore, these valenced internal states then cause external environmental states to be evaluated positively or negatively, depending on whether they tend to satisfy or frustrate the needs. Thus, to a neutrophil, a bacterium is good, in the sense of good to eat. Or, as Stuart Kauffman has wittily put the point: Bacteria partition their environment into two domains, “yum” and “yuck.”

Next, the concept of purpose is also quite clearly applicable the neutrophil’s actions. One can simply see the cell’s purpose by simple inspection—it is to capture and eat the bacterium. Moreover, it succeeds at what it is trying to do, but it might have failed, so these evaluative categories are clearly applicable to its actions, as well.

Finally, we may say that satisfying the purpose of catching and eating the bacterium is the reason for the neutrophil’s actions. What could be more natural than to ask, “Why is the neutrophil twisting and turning like that?,” and to answer, “Because it is chasing the bacterium.” Chasing the bacterium is the reason for the cell’s twisting and turning.

Therefore, all of the normative concepts we discussed above—requirement, value, and purpose—seem clearly to be properly applicable to the case of the neutrophil’s pursuit of the bacterium. And if they are properly applicable to the actions of even a single cell, then surely they are applicable to the actions of all living systems whatever.

I submit that the most obvious reason why these concepts are properly applicable to all living systems is that they refer to something that is real—to the phenomenon of agency, which has an objective existence in the organisms themselves, and not just in our heads.

What do I mean when I say the normative concepts are “properly” applicable to the neutrophil, and indeed to all living systems? I just mean that they feel right. When I speak of the neutrophil as having needs and purposes and the rest of it, I seem to be speaking the literal truth, with no sense of discomfort or metaphorical stretch. Or, at least, I would argue that it feels like the literal truth to anyone who has not been prejudiced by the mechanistic and reductionist way of thinking.

Needless to say, Darwinists and others will dispute all this in the liveliest fashion. They will say that the cell is just a “machine.” And they will point to the indescribably complex internal structure of the cell—with all its myriad interacting parts—to support their claim.

But the fact that all of the actions of a cell are made possible by specific structures merely shows that those structures are a necessary condition for that action. It does not prove that the structures in themselves are a sufficient condition for the action—that the action is “nothing but” the operation of those structures.

Of course, I may be wrong and the Darwinist may be right. But the Darwinist does not get to simply assume that he is right and the organism is “nothing but” a machine. That is called “begging the question.” In Part II, I will show how Darwinism is habitually guilty of this philosophical sin.

On the other hand, I do not get to simply assert that organisms are in a different metaphysical category from machines. I need at least to explain in what the difference might conceivably consist—a difficult challenge I will take up in Part III.

What does all this prove? Just this.(4)(5)

We have good reason to believe that normative agency is an objectively real feature of the world, and that it constitutes the essential characteristic that distinguishes living systems from nonliving matter. As such, it ought to be the central focus of biological research. Two obstacles have stood in the way of this happening until very recently.

The first obstacle has been the widespread misconception that the theory of natural selection relieves us from having to think about the problem of agency. The other obstacle has been a lack of alternative approaches. I will examine these difficulties in the next two installments of this series.

Next—Part II: The Poverty of Darwinism
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(1) Anyone with a professional interest in these questions, or simply a desire to dig deeper, may wish to consult the following: James Barham, “The Reality of Purpose and the Reform of Naturalism,” Philosophia Naturalis, 2007, 44(1): 31–52; James Barham, “Normativity, Agency, and Life,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2012, 43: 92–103; James A. Barham, Teleological Realism in Biology, PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2011.
(2) Of course, in nature the neutrophil’s actions also serve a purpose within the larger system—the multicellular organism—of which it is a part. However, there is no space here to consider in the necessary detail the way in which biological systems are hierarchically nested, and I focus on the individual cell, for clarity’s sake.
(3) To be accurate, of course, I ought to speak of “reproducing,” as well. However, acting to stay alive—or, more generally, metabolizing—is conceptually prior to reproducing. Therefore, it is simpler to ignore reproduction in this discussion. The claim that metabolism is more fundamental than reproduction will be justified in Part II of this series.
(4) There are two more important points, but for the sake of brevity I reduce them to footnotes. First, normativity is a far broader concept than morality. Moral judgments of right and wrong are certainly instances of normative requirements on our actions, but they are only a small subset of an immensely larger group of phenomena. Sometimes, this larger set of actions guided by nonmoral normative requirements is referred to as “prudential,” where “prudence” means properly adjusting means to ends. At any rate, nothing in this discussion should be taken to imply that human moral categories reach down to the biological level. Rather, the relation between normativity and morality should be viewed the other way around. Human morality is a specialization of a more general biological phenomenon. The scope of morality is a subset of action, in general—specifically, moral actions are those that are both performed by human beings and impact the welfare of other human beings. Thus, normativity as a general biological category—which is what we are discussing here—has nothing directly to do with morality, though of course our understanding of normativity may throw light upon morality, since morality is a specialized type of general biological normativity.
(5) Second, nothing I have said should be construed as presupposing mentality, in the sense of conscious awareness, in the agents discussed. Of course, it is true that our paradigm cases of normative requirement, value, and purpose all derive from our own subjective experience of agency. But the conceptual links connecting these ideas to one another in no way rely upon the corresponding phenomena’s being subjectively experienced. As we have seen, the concepts are quite clearly applicable to the actions of organisms in which we may well doubt the existence of any subjective experience. Therefore, I believe I am entitled to abstract away from, or “bracket,” the question of the relation between agency and consciousness. In my view, we simply know too little to address this side of the question sensibly. It may be that all biological agents enjoy some sort of primitive subjective experience, or it may not. But be that as it may, nothing I have said here should be taken to imply anything like pansychism. It is perfectly conceivable that agents may act under normative requirement even in the absence of any subjective experience at all. Exactly what such objective (nonmental, nonsubjective) normative requirement might consist in, from a physical point of view, is a question I will return to in Part III.