I’m fascinated by the question: ‘Who gets to exist?’ Here, I don’t mean in the biological sense; for I’m well aware of the coupling of a particular appendage with/in a particular receptacle which must precede the conception of a human being. When I ask this question, I’m thinking more broadly about the experience of ‘existence’ for a recursive, culturally-embedded human being: you, me, all of us individually and collectively.
In the (mere) biological sense, the miracle of life is actually quite awe-inspiring. By 21st century scientific standards, I have only a rudimentary understanding of biology and its chemical building blocks. Yet, I know enough about the primordial soup to be amazed that somehow, physical matter generated chemical compounds that coalesced into biological entities of increasing complexity. For 4 billion years, chemicals have been coupling into cells and combining in random ways; thus producing the vast diversity of forms-of-life that we today call biodiversity. The type of organism called ‘humans’ — or technically, Homo sapiens — is only amongst the newest descendent of an evolutionary history so vast that we will never know all the necessary steps for our collective existence to be possible (ie. to be a reality) today. Personally, I’m ok with this mystery because I am more concerned with thoroughly enjoying its effect: the fact that I get to breathe, think, write and act — ie. that I got the chance to exist!
For the particular ‘I’ to exist, I needed my parents to commune in a particular way, at a particular time of the month. That event (ie. the integration of a spermatozoa with an ova) generates a long series of processes which creates and regenerates my human body. Since my genetic progenitors were Homo sapiens, I got to become an organism with a particular shape: 5’5”, female, upright posture, opposable thumbs adapted to tool-use, throat and tongue agile enough for vocal capacities, a very large frontal cortex. Even if I accept that genetic matters a lot, ‘who I am’ qua individual does not end with my biological characteristics: it merely starts there.
After my birth, my brain continued to develop: still according to a pre-determined shape but, at the microlevel of neurones, my actual experiences became increasingly important. It mattered that I was cared for, talked to, and loved. Progressively and through mimicry, I learned to move my human form and interact with other objects and entities in the world. Science knows much more (though not everything) about this process of development because every new human specimen has to go through it. I hesitated and then rejected using the word ‘reproduce’. Each individual undergoes developmental milestones, that is true: yet their experiences are not a reproduction of a ‘model’. Human development occurs within circumstances that are contingent, a mix of unique (ie. familial) and more diffuse (ie. cultural) influences. Again, I believe that it is quite impossible to comprehend ‘how and why’ one individual became the particular ‘who’ they are today. With a lot of effort, an individual so inclined could write an autobiography or a memoir, or orally narrate their life story. Yet these tales would be — at best — a partial reconstruction of a process too complex to be represented linguistically or aesthetically. Life is simply too vast, too multi-dimensional to be captured in a linear series of words.
My comments so far imply that ‘existence’ requires some type of material form. Indeed, I believe that, in order to exist and affect reality, entities need bodies which are situated within that reality. This might seem painfully obvious to most of you. Yet, some philosophers have grown so adept at questioning and doubting everything that, within academia, ‘embodiment’ cannot simply be taken-for-granted as a foundational characteristic of life on Earth. What if we all existed only within a simulation? How would we know that we aren’t ‘brains in vats’ being fed sensorial experiences through neural connections instead of living them through a body? Such metaphysical skepticism can quickly transform the whole process of philosophical inquiry into speculations unrelated to how we actually experience reality. For, if philosophy is to be useful to life, it cannot disregards the clues that life provides about its nature and structure.
That being said, I use the concept of ‘body’ quite broadly, such that ‘embodiment’ is not particular to the human form-of-life. Over the last year, every human has been reminded that viruses too have bodies; however theirs are so small that they can get into human bodies through the pores of our mouth, nose and lungs and ‘jump’ into our bloodstream. The interaction between the virus form-of-life and the human form-of-life is such that their bodies need our bodies to multiply and propagate. Yet their existence depends as much on ‘embodiment’ as we (human) do, even though our forms-of-life and ways to interact are fundamentally different. This conclusion doesn’t merely apply to biological entities, either. The sun exists too: its existence depends on a process which creates its material presence in the form of gravity and light. For the sun, existence means an ongoing nuclear fusion. For biological phenomena, nuclear fusion is deadly. Thus, to each entity its own form with/in materiality. Yet, amidst this variety, existence nonetheless depends on a shared material embodiment. My argument is that diverse entities can only affect and be affected by each other through their commonality: ie. matter.
But what about ‘ideas’ and ‘culture’? For individuals in Western societies (and most readers of this blog), our primary day-to-day work is now the manipulation socially-constructed concepts like money and law. While our reflex is to consider such concepts intangible because they cannot be pointed at (nor banged with a hammer), it’s nonetheless important to remember that ideas are still always ‘embodied’ in materiality: in neurones, in books, in silicon chips. In other words, information always exists within various technologiesand medium devised by human beings to expand and leverage the information-processing abilities of the brain. First, it was through language, myths and signs. Now, brain-power is multiplied (and thus thoroughly interwoven) with algorithms and distributed-knowledge systems such that no single individual can incorporate (ie. bring within their body, where corps is the French word for ‘body’) within their brain all that is collectively known by the human species.
To narrate the evolutionary path taken from our early civilizations to today’s complex state-of-affairs seems — again — an exercise in speculative reductivism: for no single thread can represent such a complex history. Yet, we yearn to explain to our past: in part so we can understand (or predict?) the future. But complex systems — by which I mean the trinity of universe, society and self — are more than the sum of their parts. Complex systems are more than the sum of their parts and the relationships between their parts, assuming we actually could become aware of all those relationships. Such systems are so complex that even the act of ‘looking backward’ and interpreting the past actually reconfigures the relationships and parts within this whole. Indeed, ‘wholeness’ for complex systems is more a ‘coalescing’ (ie. a coming together) than a ‘unification’ (ie. a resulting integration). Moreover, there is no finality in this process: no necessary outcome. To assume a goal, a telos, is as much an interpretative act as historical analysis: it amounts to projecting our present self and state-of-affairs into the future. But I digress…
My point is this: an after-the-fact symbolic representation of the process of evolution is not the only method that can be used to highlight the characteristics of a complex system. Instead of starting ‘from the beginning’ (in the classic narrative structure), I claim that it is more useful to simply take stock of what exists today: to start in media res (ie. in the middle of things).
So here I am, making the obvious explicit: the universe, society and the self are embodied processes. They are ‘processes’ in the technical sense that they are evolving over time. As such, to describe them as ‘things’ obscures their dynamic, shape-shifting nature. But to deny them their ‘thing-ness’ downplays their materiality. Indeed, it is because of their embodied existence that processes of different types can interact in a common ‘fabric-of-reality’.
I suspect that we forget the materiality of information because its embodiment in silicon or ‘wetware’ (ie. organism bodies) is simply not its crucial characteristic. Indeed, we care about information for what we can do with it, not where it is physically located. In the cybernetic research of the early computer era, information became conceptualized as a ‘code’ which is being circulated and used. As a result, information became conceived as something operating in a higher ‘order’ or ‘realm’. Yet, this ‘code’ doesn’t float in the ether. While the Internet is not locate in one specific ‘space’, it nonetheless has roots in each of our devices and in server farms all over the world. Similarly, DNA is the foundational ‘code’ of biological life, yet it is actually present in every cell. The presence of the code, in the form of proteins arranged in a particular way, is constitutive: in the sense that the cell, virus, body is expressive of that information.
Approximately in the same era (though in different conference rooms), McLuhan claimed that the “medium is the message”; ie. that any informational content cannot be perceived and interpreted in absence of its mediating ‘substrate’. McLuhan wasn’t only commenting on TV and newspapers! He would have supported my claim herein that, for culture and concepts to exist, they need a medium and moreover, that such a medium is so constitutive of the ‘message’ that they are both one and the same ‘thing’.
I’m sure that, at some point, I will return to McLuhan — my fellow avant la lettre Canadian. For now, I simply wanted to argue that ‘matter matters’. So, if you do not regularly think about your body’s well-being, then take a minute today to feel how you feel. Better still, go for a walk to get that blood pumping. For if your body or any of its organs suddenly failed to function as it ought (or at least, as it always did), it would threaten your very ‘existence’. And while I get that most people do not spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of ‘existence’, it’s still the crucial ‘thing’ on which everything else in your life depends.