How Abstractions Impact Ecological Crisis with Terrence Deacon (Part 1)

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Sr. Ilia Delio engages neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon. Together, they probe the paradox of presence and absence—how constraint, incompleteness, and time shape mind, language, and the emergence of human meaning. From Charles Sanders Peirce to Claude Shannon, Deacon traces a lineage that reframes form not as what’s added, but as what’s held back.

What happens when we privilege what’s present while ignoring the creative force of what’s missing? How does constraint give rise to information, and why might Gödel’s incompleteness illuminate consciousness more than mechanism alone? Moving through Descartes’ split of mind and matter, Deacon proposes that what we call “the mental” is the constraint-aspect of the physical—a shift that dissolves false dualisms and re-roots knowing in embodiment.

Later in the episode, Sr. Ilia and Deacon explore symbolic abstraction, culture, and ecology—how our ungrounded representations both empower and endanger us. They close by examining today’s so-called “artificial intelligence,” arguing it’s better understood as a simulation of intelligence, and asking what a grounded, value-aware future might require of us.

ABOUT TERRENCE DEACON

“Almost everything we do is with respect to something that doesn’t yet exist… All of our actions… are really about that absence. I actually think that this is the essence of what it means for something to be alive.”

Professor Terrence Deacon is Distinguished Professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and has previously held faculty positions at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and Boston University. His research in comparative and developmental neuroanatomy has focused on the human brain, using physiological, quantitative, and cross-species methods. He is the author of The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (1997), which explores how language and the human brain evolved together, and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012), which examines how thermodynamic, self-organizing, semiotic, and evolutionary processes gave rise to life and mind. He is currently working on a new book, Falling Up: How Inverse Darwinism Catalyzes Evolution, which explores how the relaxation of natural selection and subsequent degenerative processes have paradoxically contributed to the evolution of increasing biological complexity.

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. In this episode, Ilia engages in a rich conversation about mind with neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon. She begins by asking what first inspired Terry to study language, the brain, and evolution. They explore how the concepts of absence and incompleteness are, at least for Terry, key to moving beyond the traditional mind-body problem. Later, Ilia asks how these abstract ideas shape human life and influence the planet's ecology.

Ilia: It's a privilege to have you. Such an esteemed scientist and someone who's really made a tremendous mark on understanding the mind and nature and evolution. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you came into this field that would be helpful to our listeners.

Terry: My background is really diverse. And I think that may be part of the reason I'm interested in the things I'm interested in. I began really in the 1970s, very much interested in what was then systems theory, cybernetic theory, information theory that was developing then. I've been working with ideas developed by a man named Gregory Bateson, who was a significant influence on my background at the time. And by chance, somebody got me to read philosophy that I had never really spent any time with. 

I began reading the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, and I was sort of tricked into reading it. But what I realized is that this man, who died some 75 years before all of this, had actually been asking questions that were just being begged by all this research we had been doing in cybernetic field systems theory and so on. He had asked questions that were much more relevant to issues of mind and information at the level of information about things, information of value and so on. So I spent actually a year studying Charles Peirce's work and then in the later 70s wrote my undergraduate thesis on his work at a time when nobody really sort of paid attention to his work in semiotic theory. And I thought that I would go to Harvard at the time as a graduate student to get in there to study his work, which his unpublished work was sitting in one of their libraries. 

I sent my thesis work to somebody there who said, "Oh yeah, definitely come. We'll take you on as a graduate student." A man named Israel Scheffler, who was a philosopher of education and influenced by Dewey in particular, but as a result had written a lot on the pragmatists, including Peirce. But while there as a graduate student in the philosophy program and so on, with some of the greats of philosophy at the time, Willard Van Orman Quine and Hilary Putnam were both there, influences on me in some ways, but in effect, our disagreements sent me in other directions. And finally, I was unable to get to any of Peirce's papers, and I became disillusioned and jumped ship into another program in which I began working in the neurosciences. I had done some basic biology work. I'd actually worked as a histologist for years. 

And so it was interesting. And there's great programs at Harvard Medical School and MIT as well. I got involved in that. And I was particularly interested in a question I thought could be answered by studying the human brain, which is why are we capable of what we're doing now speaking in language and no other species come even close, although there's little bits of hints like it's possible. I thought, "Well, gee, it's just the difference in the human brain. Maybe if somebody did a really careful study of the human brain, we could determine what was different about us that made language possible." That became my PhD.

Ilia: Oh, really? Okay.

Terry: And so I was using basic neuroscience technology at the time that we knew about, looking at connections in different brains, in monkey brains, in rat brains, and stuff like that, and did my PhD in that area. And yet it was, of course, motivated, if you think about it. Language, this key semiotic question, really, I thought you couldn't really understand this problem without thinking of it from a semiotic point of view, to recognize that language is a very specialized, very uniquely evolved capability of communication that had to be more basic forms of communication, iconic and indexical kind of communication, that we find rife in the animal kingdom. And of course, we find it in ourselves as well. 

But for the most part, even though I was doing this in the early '80s, finishing my PhD, nobody was particularly interested in that perspective. And it wasn't until a decade later, the mid '90s, that I sort of looked back over all of my work and wrote the book The Symbolic Species, which was my attempt to say, here's what we know about it and why it's still a mystery. Because after 10 years, the main mystery was that, well, I had actually, in the early '80s, shown that connections in monkey brains were homologous to the connections in human brains, particularly for those areas involved in language. And yet, the monkeys weren't doing this, and chimpanzees weren't doing this. 

So I tried to write at the time what I thought were the best guesses as to what were the differences. And the differences were not fundamental. There were no new areas, no new kinds of connections, but proportional changes that I thought were interesting. And so that's what I was doing in the '90s. It was actually my attempt to bring this sort of semiotic Persian perspective into the sciences. So at that time, I really thought, really thought that now, now we're gonna have this. Now we're gonna be able to bring back together this idea that's been mostly lost in the humanities, about the kinds of communication, the complexity of the nature of communication, it's going to inform our thinking about how brains work, how evolution works, how societies work, and today could inform how AI works, if we really thought about it carefully.

Ilia: You have a deep philosophical substrate to your scientific explorations, and I think that's the best of science. I mean I think the best scientists and the best discoveries have been not driven by mechanisms alone, but by deep philosophical questions about what makes the human distinct, what allows for language to emerge on this more complex level. These are fascinating questions. And I think science has never kind of enjoyed the philosophical area for a while. I think of some of the greats, Eddington and Eccles and some of the back there guys, but it's become a whole different. It's so much more technological. It's about technology today. I mean, really the tools and methods and methods of analysis. So I think your approach and your research are deeply important for the, not just the science alone, but telling us more about what makes us us. What is this human person who can talk and reflect on what we're speaking about and communicate?

Terry: Contemplate the size of the cosmos, for example.

Ilia: Yeah, exactly.

Terry: How amazing is that?

Ilia: It's beyond just saying it's, I mean, it is amazing. It's like even awesome doesn't capture the sheer like miraculousness of this whole thing.

Terry: Absolutely.

Ilia: I'm curious, in your book on incomplete nature, I was always struck by the title itself, Incomplete Nature. Can you kind of weed that into your own scientific investigations on language and mind and what you were trying to get at in that book?

Terry: Well, as you were holding up the book just a moment ago, the cover, I meant to capture the idea. The cover is actually, I spent a year trying to find the source of that image. It turned out this was a sculpture that was produced in South Korea by a famous sculptor. It was, however, a single head with a single hole in the middle. And I wanted it to be a sort of a mirror-like, hollow mirror's view, where there are sort of heads inside of heads inside of heads inside of heads, all of them hollow to some extent. That was my attempt to sort of provide a visual image of this eye of incomplete nature. 

So I wanted to make the argument that humans are what we are in part because of what we're not, and that it's really important to sort of focus on that. And that's why I also begin my first chapter, which is not chapter one, it's chapter zero, about absence—and why should that drive my thinking? And that, I thought, was the only way I could get across why this was such an issue that we had ignored in the sciences. And the bigger picture behind this, which I've never actually laid out and talked about, is that it was driven by my thinking of the work of Kurt Gödel and his idea of incompleteness, mathematics. 

What I realized is that Kurt Gödel was saying that you have two choices. You can have a complete system or you can have a consistent system. You know what? Complete or consistent. If it's complete, it's going to be inconsistent. If it's consistent, it's going to be incomplete. What I realized is that's the nature of the cosmos. The nature of the cosmos is if we want the world to be consistent, no sudden jumps, weirdnesses, but a really consistent world, it's going to be necessarily incomplete. That makes a lot of sense, yeah. And the key for me was that also tells us about why there's time. Why there's time. For a simple reason, the world is totally consistent. Causality works. It works at a complicated and various complicated levels. But if the world is consistent, moment to moment, instant to instant, then almost certainly there's a kind of incompleteness to it. That is, there's things that are not yet, not complete. 

You can't describe everything because there's presence and there's absence. And if there's presence and there's absence, there's something that's always incomplete. So for me, the notion of time is literally the necessity of the world being incomplete. And it can never be complete, but it can always be, in a sense, moving in a way, not towards completeness, but towards, in a sense, bringing it together, increasing the, you might say, the coherence of the whole over time. So in one sense, that's behind this whole move. But what I wanted to do in the book was to say, no, let's stay focused on us. And let's focus on the basic science and the problem of the basic sciences. 

The question, the mystery that I think has held us all up was captured in that first chapter of mine, which is about absinthe. It was why we are so fascinated by Zeno's paradox. You know, Achilles is racing against a tortoise and he gets to where the tortoise is, but the tortoise has moved just a little bit ahead. Achilles can catch up to where he was, but the tortoise can move just a little bit ahead. It looks like Achilles can't catch up with the tortoise, but we know he can. And of course, discovering how was the basis of eventually calculus. And it was our understanding of how to work with zero, the absence of something and how to deal with infinity, the incompleteness of something.

Ilia: That question of absence is extremely interesting, right? So are we talking about infinite potential? Are we talking, what is it? You know, what is that absence? Is there anything that comprises absence itself?

Terry: So what I've done, and this is the logic that I tried to spell out in the book, which is to make people understand how absence is important. And the epigraph to chapter one comes from the verse number 11 from the Tao Te Ching. And it's roughly this: it’s roughly 30 spokes converge to the wheel's hub, but it's the empty space that makes a wheel. That we can shape clay into a vessel, but it's where the clay is not. It's that empty space that it creates that is the use of the vessel. We cut doors and windows into walls so that we can use the walls to protect ourselves, that we can use this. It ends by saying, I'm trying to think of how it's actually translated. It's something like, one of the translations is profit. I've thought about it in terms of what we can work with is what's present, but its use is because of what's not there. Use in each of these cases, their use, which is not the substance, is not the stuff. The use is what it can afford, what it can make possible. It's always because of the absence, like the "hub is the whole of the wheel." 

So I realized that thinking in those terms, thinking of the absence, it's not nothingness. It's that part of what's there that is not there. And I realized also that this is a problem that's gone all the way back to the Greeks. It goes all the way back to the challenge that goes on between Plato and Aristotle and the problem of what form is. And Plato, of course, has this idea that there's ideal forms, that the physical world is always a bad reflection of these ideal forms. Aristotle says, "No, no, no, wait a minute. You can't have things without form." And he develops this idea called hylomorphism, which "hylo" means wood, that you could shape wood into all kinds of forms, morphisms. What I realized is that in all of this, we think about form always in the presence. We think about form like a triangle or a square. You know, we've imposed form. You know, we see it. But in fact, form in the world is mostly the result of what doesn't happen, what isn't exposed. 

So I tried to quickly pivot into this idea of constraint, that rather than talk about form that gets imposed, let's talk about form in the absence, again, incompleteness. That constraint says that some degrees of freedom just aren't expressed. And what that tells us is that even a system that's almost completely chaotic, if not all degrees of freedom are expressed, if it's not fully chaotic, then it's a little more formed, it's a little more predictable. The more constraint, the more predictable, the more regular, the more understandable. And I realized that Claude Shannon's theory of information was clearly based on this same idea that it's actually not all of the possibilities that we get. It's the fact that some of those possibilities are just not there, so things are more predictable. So what I've tried to do is to shift our way of thinking about form and matter into this presence and absence relationship, in which the absence is about constraint. That is, you just can't have everything at once. There's not everywhere and everything at once. It's always constrained. And constrained means that there's always some openness.

Ilia: Right. So basically what we are saying is that it's absence that drives us to continue, drives anything to continue to search, create, invent, discover, and bring into present that which is the possibility of being there.

Robert: Absence and zero. Infinity and incompleteness. These abstractions are elusive and difficult to grasp. Yet, what if our very capacity to conceive them reveals something essential about our current challenges and future direction as a species? Ilia next asks Terry how such concepts have shaped society at large, and later, how they have influenced the ecology of our planet.

Ilia: We don't speak in those terms. I mean, but it's an extremely insightful perspective. What do you think this perspective would offer us? I mean, what it offers us for understanding us biologically, but also if we were to translate the same principle, say, to a higher level of organizational life say culture, I mean, how would you see this principle operative on a cultural level?

Terry: That's a really big question. I think one of the first ways into this is to recognize how it gets us out of Descartes' paradox. Mm, okay, that's interesting. So, Descartes' paradox is that there's two kinds of stuff in the world. There's mental stuff and there's physical stuff, or what he calls res cogitans and res extensa. The physical world is extended, the mental world has no dimensionality to it, in some sense. When Claude Shannon developed his theory of information, it's not a theory of aboutness about reference and meaning, it's just a theory about the basis of information. is always in a sense embedded in some medium. And he was studying the medium qualities. But the one thing he noticed is that it's only when you've got constraint on all the possibilities that you have a message, that it can carry something that is distinct. 

What I realized from that is that that's the source of information. And the cogitans, the source of communication, the source of representation, ultimately has to do with constraint. But that allows us to reframe Descartes in the following sense. It's his res cogitans is the constraint side of the world. It's not some separate realm. It's actually we've misunderstood the absence. misunderstood the constraint as being a separate kind of unembodied substance. It's not. The key is that everything in the world has a constraint aspect to it. There is no constraint that's not embodied and no embodied thing that doesn't have some constraint.

Ilia: So as the mind is engaging, right, it engages and it can only engage that which is available to it, which means it can engage everything at once. So it's that which is not there is not part of the mind. And so there is this question of absence then as the constraints on what the mind can know that has to be part of a loop. What was Descartes thinking? That we were self-enclosed thinking monads? He had this idea that the mind was a self-sufficient entity unto itself.

Terry: It was what he said was the indubitable aspect of the world. “I can't doubt that I'm thinking.” Well, probably he should have said, “I can't doubt that I'm experiencing. I can't doubt that I'm feeling.” But it's okay, however you put it. The reality is that we already know that, in fact, it's not just formal. Everything formal, everything that's communicated, everything that's represented is represented by some medium. And what Descartes was doing was separating the medium and the message, so to speak. And as a result, he was carrying on a tradition that goes back, of course, to Plato and before. 

This idea that somehow spirit is somehow separate, completely separable from body. And of course, the term spirit and prana and what, pneuma, all of these refer to breath, breathing. So it's not a surprise that you go back into the past. And if you can't breathe, you die. Isn't that where the essence of life is, is in this air? Well, what happens, of course, by the time we get to Plato is that we're beginning to idealize and abstract this. And he gets this idea of abstract entities.

Ilia: So that in itself is super interesting, right? So the human, we're going back to the brain, a higher level of cognitive function that can abstract, the capacity to abstract from the real and to create images or concepts that are not necessarily first order concepts. They're not necessarily tied in directly to the world. I find that extremely interesting and problematic for us as a species.

Terry: I think it is one of our great gifts and one of the great problems. Just like every great power can be used in all kinds of ways and misused in all kinds of ways. Clearly that was the point of my book, The Symbolic Species, is to argue how this change in representing, in communicating and representing, how this changed us, what might be the difference in the brain that made this possible, and why did it evolve in one species and only quite recently in the history of life on Earth? That's an amazing question, but it's what has allowed this abstraction. Other animals don't have this capacity, but the key is if you have a way of representing that can be completely ungrounded. 

You sort of described it as being sort of abstracted away from the world. It's ungrounded. The words we use don't have any likeness to things in the world, nor are they directly correlated with things in the world. But if we can communicate using this kind of ungrounded, abstracted form of communication, we now have the possibility to represent things that are not concrete, to represent things that are not immediate, not like anything else. And that capacity, which we've had, I think, for nearly two million years, and that has developed quite recently into this amazing capacity, particularly with the advent of In effect, it biased the way we think of the world. Because we can now communicate in this way that is disconnected. But of course it leads us to all kinds of weird disconnected behaviors.

Ilia: So that is my question like, is this, this capacity for higher ordered function on this kind of abstract thinking, is this our first real disconnect from ecology from this ecological wholeness that we know ourselves to be embedded in biologically, and yet there's something that does take place in the human that begins to distinguish itself from the rest of biological life. And then of course it leaves open the capacity to form worlds or to form images or to invent or the capacity to create that which doesn't even exist and then to bring it into existence.

Terry: The amazing capacity that human beings transformed this planet with.

Ilia: I mean, if I think of artificial intelligence just as a case in point or the computer itself, We've always been number crunchers, so to speak, even go back to the abacus and whatever things, but now we have this capacity to build a machine and then to somehow have that machine mimic or mirror at what we're thinking about. That's a whole discussion itself, whether it's conscious or mind or whatever's going on there. But then we give it names. We identify it with language, and therefore we constantly are constructing ourselves. And it is a concern that I have, because I've wondered if we are constructing ourselves out of biological life itself. You know, are we becoming something artificial by the sheer fact that we're losing our biological rootedness, so to speak, or our legacy?

Terry: And of course, the issue is that mother nature will show us the way eventually. You know, we can't get too disconnected because we are connected. We can't pretend that we're not connected. We can't act as though we're not connected, that we're not part of this larger system. And the more we do, eventually it comes back to bite us. And we're beginning to find that out in the nasty way that the next generations are about to experience if we don't wise up a little bit.

So I am very worried about this. And I am also very worried about our misunderstanding of mind that we have now imported into our artificial intelligence, which I think is a terrible name. It's not artificial intelligence. It's the simulation of intelligence. So I like to tell people we can do great simulations of the orbits of the planets and how the solar system formed, but there is no gravity in this simulation. There's no mass in this simulation. There's no velocity in this simulation. It's just the formal. It's not grounded. And so that's exactly what our simulated intelligence is. There's no mind there. There's no value there. There's no truth or falsity there. It's only that which we impose on it.

Robert: Is AI the next step in human evolution or is the story more complex? In the next episode, Ilia and Terry continue their conversation, turning to AI, computer technology, and the future of human evolution.