The seed of all seeds
March 1st, 2008 at 9:02 pm (Axiomatics)
As I said in my previous post, the essence of life is… reproduction ! But what about creativity? Sure enough, life is the most creative process ever. But no one can deny that the whole process of life is supported by reproduction. Don’t you think there is a paradox here ?
If any, it has been solved by Darwin’s differential reproduction principle which only means that some will reproduce more than others. Please, feel the beauty of the thing : it is a quasi-tautology and… it has such a huge explanatory value !
As a matter of fact, it has been expressed as a plain tautology by Gregory Bateson who wrote : “what Darwin called ‘Natural Selection’ is the surfacing of the tautology or presupposition that what stays true longer does indeed stay true longer than what stays true not so long (Mind & Nature, 1979:206 (220 in the 1980 Fontana edition).
Bateson was very fond of tautologies and conceived of the world of mental processes (the Creatura) as a slowly self-healing tautology bound to internal consistency of ideas and processes. I love this idea because it give such a role to likeness, similarity and, eventually, reproduction. Indeed, consistency or coherence entails some sort of similarity between two things which are, thus, mutually supportive.
Did it ever occur to you that we say “like” for what we are attracted for? Implicitly -hence strongly- it means that we like what is like. Like what ? Like what we expect, of course ! Hence the reproductive aspect of the psychological organization which is so well known by laymen -and nowadays ignored by most scientists- as “habit”.
We are made of habits. We are nothing but habits. Nothing but a whole bunch of tendencies to reproduce and/or maintain the dynamics of our interactions with the world, i.e., maintain ourselves.
Biological life means reproduction. Psychological life means habit. It is the great law of stability. As expressed by C.S. Pierce : “underlying all other laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all things to take habits“.
My seed is the following : all what it takes to think the world is acknowledging the generative power of reproduction, which is, always, differential reproduction since variations are inevitable. It seems deceivingly simple and surely naive. Can we seriously hope reducing the complexity of the world to so simple a mechanism?
That what this garden of ideas is all about !
The next seed will concern ontology, i.e., the question of “what reproduces in the first place?”