Looking for a New Meta-Theory

I made a note the other day on the need to have a meta-theory of some sort before any thought is expended on the possible meaning of the life phenomenon on earth. Herewith a brief exploration of that notion.

Modern science begins with an inherently monistic assumption that only tangible or at least measurable physical phenomena may be consulted in seeking an answer. Such phenomena, however, only yield limited meanings, thus answers to questions beginning with when, where, and how. The what question is a matter of experience. The why question is never answered although it is unavoidable when comparing living with non-living nature.

It is unavoidable because living nature has a purposive character. Its ultimate purpose is invisible, but its reproductive behavior is clearly teleological. Its undeniable intent is to maintain very complex physical forms despite the fact that all individual instances of it die and return to the inorganic state. We find no parallels to this behavior in the inorganic realm. Yes. Crystals are formed (and deformed) as particular external conditions change—but no crystal ever produces another crystal, and that one yet another, in a continuous chain. Matter at great scales forms spherical aggregates, but these do no reproduce. Nor do such forms actively struggle to “stay alive” by flight or fight behavior. Life therefore displays a discontinuity with the order from which it seemingly arises. The science-based explanation of this discontinuity is that complexity, as such, produces radically new behavior in matter. But why it should be that linking many different structures made of the same fairly limited number of elemental components should suddenly produce purposive behavior has never been explained. These structures, moreover, are unquestionably purposive themselves, providing “tools” for locomotion, oxygenation, nutrition, digestion, etc., etc. To say that something changes magically is also to say that something, matter, has a tropism toward complexity.

The religious view solves the problem of meaning by supplying it in such a potent form that the actual question of what life is becomes trivial. God made it. But God is too high an explanation because God can do anything. This view produces a problem of another kind.

The problem is that while life exhibits a designed—or perhaps better put a quasi-designed—character, thus revealing purposes, the design also clearly arose in answer to stimuli and has an “any which way so long as it works” appearance—as if a half-blind drive, urge, or intention had been present behind it, nothing even close to waking consciousness, much less omniscience. Life is purposive but is also evolving and evolved. It suggests some agency light-years lower in status than divinity. A popular symbol of this quasi-engineered but catch-as-catch-can process is the panda’s thumb, made famous by Stephen Jay Gould. It’s not a thumb but functions as one. The panda has five fingers; the thumb is a wrist-bone promoted to thumb-status by evolutionary pressures.

If living bodies appear to be purposive structures built by some agency operating intelligently (meaning purposefully) but largely in the dark—rather than divine creations, the why of life would seem to require something more than complexity and something less than divine creation as their explanation. Materialism founders on the undeniable teleology of life, creationism on the quasi-engineering of all living bodies.

This in turn demands, even to start looking at life properly, a new meta-theory. It must accept both meaning in the universe and the presence in it of a secondary agency. So far such a theory is notable for its absence—although some elements of forgotten Gnosticism point in the right direction.