17 • The essence of design
What do evolution, design, and consciousness have in common?
As we have seen last time, certain properties emerge out of dynamic interactions as part of a process. We can name them and point to them as concepts, like evolutionary fitness for instance.
However, what exactly is it that makes organisms fit to their environment? What in their “design” makes them better adapted?
Can there be an “essence of design”?
As we learned earlier, not every category we can define has an essence and allows scientific investigation through systematic import.
Is there an essence of how things are (or ought to be) designed?
And can we have a scientific theory about it?
Before Darwin’s time, the people studying the natural world were often clergymen. Darwin himself was thinking about going into clergy. That’s because people thought if they studied the natural world, they could understand the essence of how things were designed. Because, if we could get at the essence of how things were designed, how things were sort of fitted to their environment, then of course that would give us some deep insight into the mind of God. That’s why clergyman are collecting species and doing all this.
But I think one of the insights — and it’s not given enough attention in the analysis of the brilliance of Darwin’s theory — is to realize that things don’t have an essential design. There is no essential design.
Consider the notion of evolutionary fitness. Now, there’s a problem: There’s a technical definition of fitness, which means the capacity to survive long enough in order to be capable of reproduction that will allow that gene pool or species (all of these are kind of controversial terms) to propagate and exist.
If we want to use that technical definition of fitness, then I need, or I’ll be talking about fittedness. And what I mean by “fittedness” is: What is it about the organism that makes it fit? What is it about the organism that allows it to survive long enough to reproduce?
What I want to argue is: There is no essential design on fittedness.
Some things are fitted in this sense, precisely because they are big, some because they are small. Some because they are hard, some because they are soft. Some because they are long-lived, some because they are short-lived. Some because they proliferate greatly, others because they take care of a few young. Some are fast, some are slow. Some are single-cellular, some are multi-cellular. […]
And the answer for that, of course, is deep and profound: Because the environment is so complex and differentiated and dynamically changing that niches, ways in which you can fit into the environment in order to promote your survival — auto-poetic — are varied and changing.
This is Darwin’s insight: There is no essence to design, there is no essence to fittedness. If you try and come up with a theory of how organisms have their "design" — I’m using this in quotation marks — in terms of trying to determine or derive it from the essence of design, you are doomed because it doesn’t exist.
Self-organizing fittedness doesn’t need a designer
What Darwin realizes is: He didn’t need such a theory! He needed a theory about how what is relevant, in this biological sense, a theory about how an organism is fitted, how it is constantly being designed, redefined by a dynamic process.
Fittedness is always redefining itself, reconstituting itself. It is something that is constantly within a process of self-organization, because there is no essence, there is no final design on fittedness. Fittedness has to constantly be re-designing itself in a self-organizing fashion, so it can constantly pick up on the way in which the world is constantly varying and dynamically changing.
There is no essence to fittedness, but I don’t need a theory of fittedness. All I need is a theory of how fittedness is constantly being realized in a self-organizing fashion.
That’s exactly what the theory of evolution is: There’s a feedback cycle in reproduction, and there is a virtual engine — selection, variation. That virtual engine constantly shapes and regulates how the reproductive cycle feeds back onto itself. There is no — and of course, this is why some religious people get very angry about this process, but notice that this is exactly what we need — there is no intelligent designer to this. This is a process that is completely self-organizing.
The fittedness of organisms constantly evolves out of and is constantly evolving towards other instances of fittedness. Fittedness has no essence, it is not a stable phenomenon. I should not try to give a definition or a theory of fittedness. What I have is a theory of the evolution of fittedness.
And again, even when I say that, you’re tempted to think, “What Vervaeke means is there was no fittedness, and then there was evolution and it resulted in fittedness." That is not what Vervaeke is saying! Vervaeke is saying: Fittedness and the evolution of fittedness are the same thing.
What Darwin proposed, of course, it was the first dynamical systems theory of how fittedness evolves, so that fitness is ongoing. That’s the theory of evolution by natural selection. Now that tells us something that we need. First of all, this is a self-organizing process. It is not homuncular. It can generate intelligence without itself being an intelligent process.
An adapted design emerges out of an adaptive process.
If design relies on continuous adaptation to an ever-changing environment, then how is it possible to design things in one big step, starting from an idea with a good plan and proper execution?
If you’ve ever worked in an industry where this has been tried, you probably don’t have to be convinced that this is nearly impossible — without lowering your expectations towards the achieved fittedness of the final result.
In software, we have mostly transitioned to more iterative approaches that allow feedback at regular intervals. We have learned the hard way that this is absolutely necessary (and, arguably, still not enough).
The fundamental process
Christopher Alexander advocates for a design process that sounds remarkably similar. His fundamental adaptive process to create living structure is a step-by-step unfolding that needs to respect the environment and the wholeness that has already been achieved. From The Nature of Order, book 2, The process of creating life, chapter 8, Step-by-step adaptation [highlights mine]:
Possibly the most basic and necessary feature of any living process is the fact that it goes gradually. The living structure emerges, slowly, step by step, and as the process goes forward step by step there is continuous feedback which allows the process to guide the system towards greater wholeness, and coherence, and adaptation.
Neither the process of design, nor the process of construction work like this. Instead there is a conception of a desired end-state (the design), and the system of architectural and constructional processes is geared up to producing this desired end-state, efficiently, and at all costs as it was initially defined — almost entirely without realistic feedback and improvement and adaptation while the processes are going on.
In any case, the core of all living process is step-by-step adaptation — the modification and evolution which happen gradually in response to information about the extent to which all emerging structure supports and embellishes the whole. It is a necessary, unavoidable core.
The procedural context in which these giant 20th-century projects were taking place — even the design process itself during its early stages — simply did not permit step-by-step adaptation to occur, not during design, not during construction, nor indeed after construction or during maintenance.
From The Nature of Order, book 2, The process of creating life, chapter 1, The principle of unfolding wholeness in nature [highlights mine]:
I suggest that all nature appears as the product of the unfolding wholeness. This means that the living structure we see all around us — in the organic and in the inorganic world — is not merely a result of interaction of densely coupled systems, but that the wholeness which occurs in space necessarily unfolds in such a way as to create more and more life because through the impact of these transformations, larger wholes are created, intensified more often than they are destroyed or weakened. As a result the centers necessarily become more and more profound; and that nature is, in this sense, reaching forward to some kind of order; even though this order is invisible, unpredictable, and not “created”.
What this means is that life and living structure will appear in the world inevitably: not by some magic probabilistic occurrence, but because the nature of things — and, in particular, the mathematical way in which space gives rise to structure which reinforces wholeness — sees to it that living structure comes into being as part of its most normal evolution. This argument implies that all the processes we know — including the relatively simple mechanical processes, the physical processes governed by the law of least action, the coordinated behavior of complex systems which has been identified from recent work in chaos theory and catastrophe theory, and the evolution of organisms — are all governed by this simple, yet deep regularity, which binds these widely different cases together as a common underlying thread.
The process of design is neither top-down nor bottom-up. It is both at the same time. The whole informs the parts as the parts inform the whole. The parts and the whole are interdependent.
When we “create”, in the sense of producing a desired end-state rooted in an image or idea, with a blueprint or a plan, we are not doing the same thing. We suppose that we know what needs to be done before we begin, and we tend to ignore feedback and focus on the wrong things like cost or efficiency along the way.
We are not differentiating (the parts) and integrating (the whole) at the same time.
Differentiating + integrating = complexifying
When a system is self-organizing, there is no deep distinction between its function and its development. It develops by functioning, but by functioning, it develops.
When a system is simultaneously integrating and differentiating it is complexifying. Complexification. A system is highly complex if it is both highly differentiated and highly integrated.
If I'm highly differentiated, I can do many different things. But if I do many different things and I’m not highly integrated, I will fly apart as a system. So I need to be both highly differentiated, so I can do many different things, and highly integrated, so I stay together as an integrated system. As systems complexify, they self-transcend, they go through qualitative development.
Let me give you an analogy for this. Notice how I keep using biological analogies. That is not a coincidence.
You started out life as a zygote, a fertilized cell, a singular cell. The egg and the sperm — a zygote. Initially, all that happens is the cells just reproduce. But then something very interesting starts to happen: You get cellular differentiation. Some of the cells start to become lung cells. Some of them start to become eye cells. Some start to become organ cells.
But they don't just differentiate. They integrate. They literally self-organ-ize into a heart organ, an eye. You develop through a process, at least biologically, of biological complexification. What does that give you? That gives you emergent abilities. You transcend yourself as a system.
When I was a zygote, I could not vote. I could not give this lecture. I now have those functions. In fact, when I was a zygote, I couldn't learn what I needed to learn in order to do this lecture. I did not have that qualitative competence. I did not have those functions.
As a system complexifies, as a system is going through relevance realization, it is also complexifying. It is getting new emergent abilities of how it can interact with the environment and then extend that relevance realization into that emergent self-transcendence.
If you're a relevance realizing thing, you're an inherently dynamical, self-organizing, auto-poetic thing, which means you are an inherently developmental thing, which means you are an inherently self-transcending thing.
As we differentiate, we need to simultaneously integrate. As we add or enhance specific centers, we need to preserve and potentially enhance the already existing wholeness. Alexander’s unfolding is Vervaeke’s complexification.
And what lies at the core of our cognition, may work exactly like this.
Relevance as cognitive-interactional fittedness
Here’s the analogy I want to propose to you: Let’s make relevance analogous to biological fittedness. In fact, let’s call relevance cognitive-interactional — what I mean by that: both in your cognition and how that cognition is expressing itself in problem-solving — cognitive-interactional fittedness.
And I don’t need a theory of [cognitive-interactional fittedness]. What I need is a theory of how [cognitive-interactional fittedness] evolves.
What if my ability to formulate problems, form categories, pick up on conveyance, make inferences, all this stuff — what about that ability? Because, what I’m doing... What do I need?
I need something that constrains the search space, that constrains how I pay attention. I need systematic constraints.
And what are they doing?
Those systematic constraints have to regulate a feedback loop.
And what’s the feedback loop?
The feedback loop is my sensory-motor feedback loop.I’m sensing, but I’m also acting. And my acting is integral to my sensing. And my sensing is integral to my moving. And so my moving and my sensing are [forming] a sensory-motor loop. I interact with the world, and then that changes how I sense it. So there’s a sensory-motor loop.
What if there is a virtual engine, broadly construed, that is regulating that sensory-motor loop so that it is constantly evolving its cognitive-interactional fittedness to its environment? It doesn’t have to come to any final essential way of framing the environment. But what it’s constantly doing is evolving its fittedness — not just its biological fittedness (although I’m going to argue, as many people do, that there’s important continuity between those two) — it’s constantly evolving its cognitive fittedness to the environment.
Then what I need is not a theory of relevance, I need a theory of relevance realization. How relevance is becoming effective, how it is altering, shaping the sensory-motor loop. I need a dynamical system for the self-organizing evolution of cognitive-interactional fittedness.
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art. Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness.
For an overview and synopsis of the first 13 articles, see: Previously… — A Recap.