The construction of emergent order, or, how to resist the temptation of hylozoism.

Abstract

Hylozoism, the doctrine that nature is imbued by life even in the apparently inert and lifeless, has as one of its "appealing" features the ability to duck the perplexing issue of how life originated. By so doing, hylozoism has generated even more conundrums such as why rocks, if indeed they are actually animated, don't appear alive. Hylozoism is not so much a resolution as a way of avoiding the possibility of the emergence of the radically novel. But, hylozoism is not just a relic of the past since modern strains of its specific explanatory strategy can be detected in three examples from the study of complex systems, namely, May's and Feigenbaum's explanation of complexity and universality in "one-humped" maps, Maturana's and Varela's idea of autopoeisis, and Goertzel's notion of self-generating systems. These three explanatory strategies are analyzed as to their hylozoist cast with the result that the first is found to be appropriate to the mathematical nature of the inquiry while the second two are found wanting in the same way that hylozoism in general proves unsatisfactory as an explanation. To remedy the problems associated with a hylozoist strategy, a constructional view of the emergence of new wholes is proposed including intimations as to how this constructional process might proceed.