An emergentist world view sets certain challenges to our notion of science and of the kinds of explanations of our world that it seeks. A first is to identify different emergent levels of reality, the living from the non living, the conscious from the non conscious, and within consciousness itself the distinctive emergence of the creative powers of the mind and the freedom of decision making. A scientific explanation of levels will entail an analysis of what is distinctive about the properties and activities on the different levels, the worlds that they operate in and the upward and downward causal relations involved with other levels. All of these feed into a transdisciplinary approach to personhood.

I

In his DNA, The Secret of Life James Watson formulated his reductionist creed for molecular biology: ‘Life is just a matter of physics and chemistry, albeit exquisitely organized chemistry.’¹ Francis Crick went on to ask the further question: What does DNA do in the cell?² By 1966 it became known that it is involved in the synthesis of the 20 amino acids which in turn manufacture proteins. The genetic code according to Watson brings DNA to life! Red blood cells are produced in the bone marrow by stem cells at the rate of around two and a half million per second. Following Crick and Watson this was interpreted in terms of the active agent DNA synthesizing the haemoglobin in the cells in a most complex and precisely timed switching process. But this basic reductionist strategy of attributing agency to genes, which after all are only chemical molecules, is now being critiqued by some as ontologically and ontogenetically misguided. Alternatively it can be proposed that in the regular manner and precise timing in which we find DNA exquisitely organized in protein synthesis by the cell or more generally the organism we can identify properly biological laws at work. Perhaps Watson in his above remarks is, without recognising it, undermining his very reductionism.

What is distinctive about emergent biological laws is that they are developmental, they are involved in the development of organic life from a single cell to the myriad of body designs and related life cycles that we find in the genera and species of our world. So as well as housekeeping genes involved in protein synthesis there are also to be found in the animal (but not the plant level) the Hox genes that have a fundamental role to play in the development of the emerging body design of the organism, be it a fish, frog, bird or human. These are distributed in a spatial sequence along the chromosome and their switching on and off is precisely synchronised with the development of the body shape along the parallel spatiality of the head to tail body axis. Mutate Hox genes and in many instances you mutate body design. This can lead to the reductionist conclusion that the adult human organism is simply the product of the cumulative switching on and off of the appropriate Hox genes (or more generally the genome) at the appropriate time in the process of development.

But is there not much more to development and evolution than can be learnt by focusing on genes and genomes? Is it not the case that no part of any living unity and no single process of any complex activity can be fully understood in isolation from the structure and activities of the organism as a whole? This leads Jason Roberts in his Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution, Taking Development Seriously to question why organisms are still ‘so often portrayed as basically or ultimately the product of genes.’³ For him taking development seriously involves critiquing the common notions that genes instruct or program the future organism. Acknowledging that there is general agreement about what must be taken into account in a theory of organism development Roberts concludes his book with the questions: Why, then, have the limitations of genes-plus accounts of interaction not been more widely recognised and appreciated? Why do modern consensus metaphors of genetic programs and primacy persist? Again there is being posed the further question: in the exquisite organisation of the DNA in organic development do we not come to understand the properly biological laws of the organism? In organic development does the organism manipulate the Hox genes or the genes manipulate the organism?

To turn to the field of consciousness studies we find Francis Crick setting a tone with his creed that our joys and sorrows, ambitions, sense of personal identity and free will are ‘nothing more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’⁴ In a debate about dreams at The Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson in 2006 a neuroscientist was adamant that dreams were just neural noise, a Freudian, that they had all the meaning and significance in a person’s life of Freud’s interpretative analysis. Are the dreams caused by accidental neural processes or does the organism manipulate the neural basis for the dream out of the life context? As biological organisms can manipulate their chemistry why should the stresses and strains of the psychological processes of an organism not be able through their proper autonomy and laws to manipulate the neural structures and processes in the production of dreams? As Lonergan puts it, in the drama of our lives with others can there not occur a ‘subordination of neural processes to psychic determinations.’⁵ What precisely might be meant here by that subordination of the neural to the psychological?

It is a question that arises in the context of the study of the interaction of emergent levels of activity in the development of a human being. In his electrical stimulation of the cortex while conducting surgery Wilder Penfield observed that the sensory motor action that is so produced was so primitive and lacking in dexterity that it may be likened to the sound of a piano when the keyboard is struck with the palm of the hand.⁶ The memories so evoked were disjointed, hallucinatory, and difficult to analyse. This posed for him the question: how and from where in the brain did the concert pianist transform that crude action into the subtle, dextrous movements of a Mozart piano concerto? Or a ballerina transform the crude cortical reflex into the graceful points and pirouettes of the Nutcracker Suite? It is significant that he poses the question in terms of the pianist being the agent of transformation. Reductionists would rephrase the question as: how does the brain produce the concert pianist and ballerina?

Similarly in the context of learning a new language as spoken with an extensive vocabulary to be learned and used in everyday and technical situations the question arises: does the brain produce the language user or the language learner transform (subordinate) brain processes in the course of becoming a competent linguist? Clearly we can agree with Jackendoff that the brain will be involved at the speaking/phonetic level in learning a language, and at the sensory motor level in becoming a dancer or pianist.⁷ But there is also involved the explicitly conscious levels of the use of the senses, imagination and intelligence. One’s senses are unavoidably involved in assimilating the correct pronunciation of a word or the spatial elements in a dance movement. One’s intelligence is involved in understanding the correct meaning of the words spoken and the manner in which they are to be used in conveying meanings in different circumstance. Both of these dimensions are involved in programming the neural level in learning a language or how to play a piano.

The developmental dimension of language learning has recently been taken up by Maryanne Wolf in her Proust and the Squid: The Story of Science and the Reading Brain.  John Carey opens his review with the remark that reading generates thought and gives a sense of inner selfhood. Wolf, who has a core interest in the problem of dyslexia, holds that being talked to, read to and listened to as a child matters hugely. In a home where conversation is valued, a child by the age of five will have heard up to 32m more words spoken than in a more silent household. The later reading skills of a child are known to be related to the frequency with which stories are read to it in the early years.

In this context one needs to consider the formative and personal transformation involved in reading the classics in literature and the sciences. Einstein’s reading of works on Maxwell and Newton transformed his whole scientific outlook. A whole generation of molecular biologists in the making were influenced by Schrödinger’s What is Life? The great depths of such transformative reading needs to be probed. Further remarks by Carey bring some of our issues into focus:

before a brain can read it must physically rearrange itself. It must create new neuronal circuits to connect the part it uses for seeing with the part it uses for listening to someone talk. Not until it has done this will the brain’s owner realise that the marks on paper present sounds. … Brain scans show that when someone reads an alphabetical language, such as English, specialized parts of the brain’s left hemisphere are activated. But when a Chinese speaker reads Chinese, quite different parts of the brain are used. They are in both hemispheres, and include frontal areas not used for reading by English speakers. Since this proves that the Chinese reader’s brain is connected up differently, it prompts the question whether Chinese thought is different from western thought. Linguists used to argue that there is always a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. This idea fell out of favour under the influence of Chomskyan linguistics and theories of universal grammar. But the advent of the brain scan seems to be reopening the question. What Wolf’s own views are it is impossible to say.⁸

In this excerpt we can see the problems of the relation between the neural and phonetic/symbolic levels in reading and speaking and the further level of intelligence in which there enters the issue of the relation, central to what language is, between thought, word and reality, the world of the language user. To overlook the thought-reality-world relation and concentrate on the neural and the qualia/phonetic levels of language learning and use is to rob language of its core. It is because of the instrumental nature of the sign that our thoughts can be expressed in enormously different symbol systems.

In this context Crick, like Watson, also adds, for him, a quite problematic remark: ‘Our wonder and appreciation (of the explanatory quest) will come from our insights into the marvellous complexities of our brains, complexities we can only glimpse today.’⁹ In this he admits that the eventual solution to the currently unsolved problems will come through a combination of our wonder and insights. In a similar vein Pinker has remarked that it will take an unborn genius – a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness – to come up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.¹⁰ What is also interesting is that in very many case studies of great scientific insights there is identified an element of the presentation by the imagination of the elements of the unsolved problem to our mental striving. As Watson cannot answer and avoids the question as to how the chemistry of life is so exquisitely organized, so Crick and Pinker are left with a conscious mental residue, the wonder and leap of insight of the discovery process which will resolve and clarify all that is confused and incomprehensible in consciousness studies at the moment.

But once that admission has been made about the source of the breakthrough it brings with it some unpalatable consequences for reductionists. It involves the recognition that there is a distinct form of first person consciousness, the scientific form of consciousness that studies the neural correlates of the visual consciousness of others. Called simply human intelligence it can be argued that that form of consciousness does not reduce to anything else but explains everything else. It is fundamentally accessed, not through fMRI scans or the like but through narratives of scientific discovery. Until such narratives of discovery have been composed the insight experiences involved in the discovery process remain in the dark, unknown. Once such narratives of discovery have been recognized for what they are, objectifications of the first person consciousness of the research scientists exploring a particular domain, a reductionist world view is undermined.

II

David Chalmers has forcibly argued that the qualia of the experiential, the awareness of purple or the sound of the spoken words, are irreducibly different from the correlative neural processes in the brain.¹¹ In his review of reactions to Chalmers’ In Search of a Fundamental Theory Robert Almeder singles out Sydney Shoemaker, one of philosophy’s most insightful of materialists.  Shoemaker ‘believes that if Chalmers’ arguments succeed, his achievement will be enormous, for he will then have succeeded in overthrowing materialist orthodoxy that has reigned in philosophy of mind and cognition for the last half century.’ Although skeptical about the arguments he acknowledges that they express clearly and forcefully widely held beliefs.¹²

I would now like to suggest that Chalmers has not gone far enough with his assertion of the irreducibility of the dual properties of the neural and qualia. Effectively it overlooks further components in consciousness, notably the performance of problem solving and resolution by means of insights, aha or moments when something clicks and one can go on with things, around which exactly the same arguments can be made. Such insight experiences are now slowly being recognized as foundational for creative mathematics and science. In can also be argued that there is an even greater irreducible qualitative difference between the wonder and moments of breakthrough that come in insight problem solving, and experiential visual experiences and their imaginative counterparts in and through which the elements of the problem to be solved are presented.

James Watson’ book, The Double Helix is not directly about the molecular biology of the cell but, as the subtitle of the book makes clear, it is ‘A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.’ Among others, two things are happening in Watson’s narrative of discovery. Firstly, there is an account of the actual problem content. There the emphasis is on the chemical properties of DNA. It would eventually find its objectification in the short paper sent to Nature in April 1953. Secondly, there is an emphasis on how those properties were discovered. There the emphasis is on the first person consciousness of the scientific researcher which finds its objectification in his 1968 book. It is addressing, not the question about the hereditary code in the cell but about how he, with Crick and others as human beings, discovered it. Clearly there is the dramatic interaction of the small group of scientists involved in the process which, rightly, has fascinated many. Our present focus brackets that drama to address the question: What does the narrative of discovery teach us about the mental powers or processes which make the breakthrough? Where and from what sources and emergent levels in us do scientific discoveries come?

In his early years Watson was influenced by his reading of Schrödinger’s What is Life in which it is speculated that the key to hereditary processes are locked up in an aperiodic molecule. In 1944 Avery identified DNA as the possible molecule involved. Watson became excited when Maurice Wilkins introduced him to an X-ray diffraction picture of DNA and the discovery that genes could form crystals. This was followed by an introduction to the alpha-helix by Linus Pauling from Jean Weigle. His first approaches to Max Perutz about joining him in Cambridge were unsuccessful but Watson persisted. There followed, in the fateful collaboration with Francis Crick, an at times painful period of learning from his mistakes. Early in 1953 after, yet again, his scheme had been torn to shreds, this time by the American crystallographer Jerry Donohue, he found himself forced to take on board the corrections. He was so fearful at this time that they would lead him, yet again, to another cul-de-sac, that he put the required steps on hold until the following day.

When I got to our still empty office the following morning, I quickly cleared away the papers from my desk top so that I would have a large flat surface on which to form the pairs of bases held together by hydrogen bonds. Though I initially went back to my like-with-like prejudices, I saw all too well that they led nowhere. When Jerry came in I looked up, saw that it was not Francis, and begin sifting the bases in and out of various other pairing possibilities. Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form naturally; no fudging was required to make the two types of pair bases identical in shape. Quickly I called Jerry over to ask him whether this time he had any objection to my new base pairs.¹³

Donohue said no, and the rest is history.

In his account of the content of the discovery in his book, DNA: The secret of Life, Watson refers to the understanding involved as ‘the insight that made it all possible.’¹⁴ What the event teaches us is that once the correct imaginative presentation of the elements of the problem of the base relations is in place the image causes the insight. The fact that the base structures as he now understood them were spatially complementary meant that they could hold together a two chain helix with no irregularities in it. The unzipping and re-zipping of that double helix could in turn be the ground of the hereditary mechanism which they were in search of. After many false starts and oversights Watson now communicated the content of his insight to Crick, and later the staff of the Cavendish and King’s College, inviting them to test it and see if they could find any flaws. Although Crick would not give his approval to the overall structure of DNA until the 1980s the base structure stood up to the test. None were forthcoming.

The content of insights, of eureka moments or discoveries in this sense are always communicable. When the peer group associated with the problem shares an understanding of what conditions a solution must fulfill then the content moves out of its solitary genesis and becomes a part of the understanding of the group. In many cases a new insight can require an intellectual conversion, that is to say a difficult change in ways of thinking about the problem in the group. Still, the communicative nature of the formulations of insights and its rapid entry through the revisions of text books into the educational process reveals that the cultural activity and collaboration that is scientific research and its communication breaks free of the slow process of biological evolution and adaptation. In this sense insight events are at the heart of cultural evolution.

Towards the end of the 1950s three French researchers, Jacques Monod, François Jacob and Arthur Pardee, found themselves drawn into an intriguing puzzle concerning the genetics of cell metabolism. In the course of nurturing the bacterium Escherichia coli on a mixture of two sugars, glucose and lactose, it was found that it stopped growing for about an hour and then resumed, absorbing the lactose. As the growth rate differed from the sum of the individual growth rates it was clear that the organism was digesting them sequentially. Monod, Jacob and Pardee would meet in Monod’s office each day ‘thinking up hypotheses, possible regulatory mechanisms, and inferring from them the results we could expect from the projected experiment.’¹⁵ Leo Silzard, ‘a truculent character crackling with insight and cleverness’ held a theory of generalized repressing, Monod of generalized induction. It took a winter of experimenting, the PA JA MA experiments, to decide the matter.  

As things clarified, the excitement grew. There is in research a unique moment: when one suddenly sees that an experiment is going to overrun the landscape. It is the moment when the facts combine to indicate a new and unforeseen direction. When the change taking place is due more to a feeling, to a premonition, than to the chilly facts of logic. Where the dream of novelty suddenly takes on consistency without being fully assured of becoming reality.¹⁶

There follows in Jacob’s memoir The Inner Statue a wonderful account of the distinction between what he terms day science and night science. Day science is the science of the organized textbook such as we find in Essential Genetics: A Genomics Perspective by Daniel Hart and Elizabeth Jones. It has the majestic arrangement of a Bach fugue or French garden. Night science, on the other hand, ‘wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, falls back, sweats, wakes with a start. … At the mercy of chance, the mind frets in a labyrinth, deluged with messages, in quest of a sign, of a wink, of an unforeseen connection. Like a prisoner in a cell, it paces about looking for a way out, a glimmer of light.’¹⁷ Jacob’s account of the struggle of night science to emerge into the light of day science in his memoir, The Statue Within simply has to be read to complete the picture of science.

At the end of an afternoon on a Sunday in Paris late in July 1958 Jacob and his wife, Lise decide to go to see a film that failed to engage. Perhaps because of this a current of images and thoughts took over Jacob’s idle mind.

I am invaded by a sudden excitement mingled with a vague pleasure. It isolates me from the theatre, from my neighbors whose eyes are riveted to the screen. And suddenly a flash. The astonishment of the obvious. How could I not have thought of it sooner. Both experiments – that of conjugation done with Elie on the phage, erotic induction; and that done with Pardee and Monod on the lactose system, the PA JA MA – are the same. Same result. Same conclusion. In both cases a gene governs the formation of a cytoplasmic product, of a repressor blocking the expression of other genes and so preventing either the synthesis of the galactosidase or the multiplication of the virus. In both cases, one induces by inactivating the repressor, either by lactose or by ultraviolet rays. The very mechanism that must be the basis of regulation. But there is more.¹⁸

His wife discerns that he has had enough of the film and they leave and on the boulevard Montparnasse he tells her that he thinks he has grasped something of significance. Later, in their house, he tries to no avail to communicate the importance of the moment.

Only in September does he get to discuss it with Monod, the two faces of whose character he etches with artistry, the charming and the dogmatic/domineering. There follows over time a long conversation between them, Jacob trying to change Monod’s ideas, a task that he admits was not easy. Jacob liked his hypothesis, not just because of its simplicity but for a ‘crazier reason,’ effectively the imaginative source of his insight.

Some weeks earlier, I had observed my son Pierre playing with a model electric train. The train had no rheostat. Nevertheless, Pierre could vary the speed of the train by manipulating the switch, making it oscillate faster or slower between start and stop. Then why not a similar mechanism in the synthesis of proteins?¹⁹

Reminiscent of the attitude of some to the spatially structured model building of Crick and Watson, Monod considered this ‘argument’ a bad joke. Involved is the presentation to Jacob’s senses and imagination of the imagery of a switch which, transferred, caused in him an insight into a possible explanation of their experimental observations. As their conversation continued and eventually engaged with a wider group, Monod came to change his mind. The switch, central to Jacob’s insight was to become a foundational category of developmental molecular biology.

 To grow on a sugar, the bacterium had to have a particular enzyme to degrade it. Monod found that the bacterium did not have the enzyme initially. It first produced one kind of enzyme to metabolize one of the sugars, and then produced a different kind to metabolize the other. It seems that the bacterium responded preferentially to one of the sugars to produce an appropriate enzyme not initially present while at the same time inhibiting the production of an enzyme to metabolize the other sugar. In this the organism was physiologically adapting itself and changing the proteins it produces in accordance with its environment. They had discovered the fact that the parsimonious bacterium adjusted its metabolism according to the food supply.

A third example of an insight/eureka moment has to do with Crick’s engagement with the question, what is the function of DNA in the cell, what does it do? It was acknowledged that it produces proteins, made up of the then 20 known amino acids. This led to the further question, how does DNA code onto the 20 amino acids in the manufacture of proteins? Centrally his book, What Mad Pursuit, A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, is an account, not just of the solution to the problem of protein synthesis in cells, but of how he and Brenner, with the help of Gamow, Jacob, Marshall Nirenberg and others, came to make it. It opens up for us the creativity of the discovery process. As with the problem of the structure of DNA the quest for an understanding of its role in protein synthesis went through many frustrating moments. Through learning from the errors Crick and Brenner entered progressively into the details of the problem but eventually found themselves stuck. Crick recalls waking up on Good Friday morning 1960 in a state of utter darkness and confusion.

In the afternoon François Jacob presented a seminar in Cambridge which included an account of an experiment, thought up in Paris, but carried out in Berkeley by Arthur Pardee and Monica Riley concerning gene enzyme relations. In the course of a cross examination it became clear to Crick and Brenner that they would have to accept the results of the PM JA MO experiment. But if they accepted their result then it seems to indicate an oversight in their own work. What alternatives did this leave? At this point Sydney and Francis leaped to their feet shouting. And intense discussion followed. According to Crick, both of them had seen the solution to their problem. The messenger RNA was different from ribosomal RNA. It was the Volkin-Astrachan RNA for the phage infected cell. According to Crick, ‘Once this key insight had been obtained, the rest followed automatically.’²⁰

Volkin and Astrachen has shown that their RNA, unlike ribosomal RNA had the same composition as DNA and quickly renewed itself. This clearly suggested its relevance for protein synthesis. Crick later described the impact of the moment.

It is difficult to convey two things. One is the sudden flash of enlightenment when the idea was first glimpsed. It was so memorable that I can recall just where Sydney, François, and I were sitting in the room when it happened. The other is the way it cleared away so many of our difficulties. Just a single wrong assumption (that the ribosomal RNA was the messenger RNA) had completely messed up our thinking, so that it appeared as if we were wandering in a dense fog. I woke up that morning with only a set of confused ideas about the overall control of protein synthesis. When I went to bed all our difficulties had resolved and the shining answers stood clearly before us. Of course, it would take months and years of work to establish these new ideas, but we no longer felt lost in the jungle. We could survey the one plain and clearly see the mountains in the distance. … The new ideas opened the way for some of the key experiments used to crack the genetic code ….²¹

In 1966, largely thanks to the further insights of Marshall Nirenberg and others, and the results of an enormous parallel experimental programme, Crick would finally put the finishing touches to the code structure for protein synthesis.

Further accounts of moments of insight of enormous scientific importance are narrated by Kary Mullis in his Nobel lecture and Craig. J Venter in his book, A Life Decoded, My Life My Genome. The problem which had exercised Mullis for some time had to do with producing a significant quantity of identical DNA from a small initial sample. On a night drive from Berkeley to Mendocino he found his mind in overdrive. Suddenly there occurred what he referred to as three eureka moments out of which was born the technique known as PCR, the polymerase chain reaction. It is one of the basic tools of current molecular biology. After an initial research career dealing with adrenalin Venter dedicated his later adult life to the problem of sequencing an entire genome including the human. After a long period of wrestling with the details of the problem the brainwave ‘all of a sudden it came to be at thirty-eight thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean: I was using the right sequencing technique but on the wrong DNA.’ Venter goes on to recall how when, on the next day he shared his eureka idea with his lab collaborators he was met ‘with a brick wall of skepticism and doubt.’²² The consensus was that there was a high likelihood of it failing. Mullis had a somewhat similar experience.

Insights such as those illustrated are not just isolated moments. Rather they are prepared by a long pre-history involving a mastery of the problem as problem and which usually involves the making of many mistakes. Neither are they marginal or peripheral to science but are definitive in their content of the core of molecular biology. Once they have emerged their consequences for future science and the future manipulation of the world they make known become enormous. In this sense they are not like qualia at all, the immediate empirical/sensible presentations of the elements of the problem. They grasp intelligibility in those sensible presentations, the mechanism of hereditary transmission by means of a four letter code in the base structure of a double helix molecule in human chromosomes or the triplet code by means of which DNA is involved in the production of proteins. In this they have properties which distinguish them from qualia. There follows a need to open up Chalmer’s property dualism to include further irreducible properties such as the creative moments of insight of the human mind and their scientific significance.

Only recently is the importance of these emergent eureka moments in scientific research and problem solving beginning, minimally, to be acknowledged. Related is a growing increase in the use of the word ‘insight’ in scientific literature.²³ In the field of mathematics there is an awareness that insight problem solving is almost the entire engine of the growth of mathematical understanding. Robert Kanigel’s exploration of the genius of the mathematician Ramanujan makes it clear that Hardy, his mentor, was sensitive to the fact that technical mastery was of slight importance in contrast with Ramanujan’s mathematical insights. ‘The theorem itself was apt to emerge just as other creative products do – in a flash of insight, or through a succession of small insights, preceded by countless hours of slogging through the problem.’ Ideas have to come from somewhere before they could be proved, but where? ‘That was the mystery, the source of all the circular, empty, ultimately unsatisfying explanation that have always beset students of the creative process. Here, “talent” came in, and “genius” and “art. Certainly it couldn’t be taught. And certainly, when in hand, it had to be nurtured and protected.’²⁴

In an emergentist definition of science, the consciousness that does original and creative science or mathematics, Jacob’s night science, will then be more significant than that which does day science. This is in line with the remarks in the ‘Preface to the Series’ at the start of Crick’s memoir, What Mad Pursuit. In contrast with the technical and in many instances mathematical based knowledge accumulated by science in its historical evolution, the doing of science itself is an enterprise

conducted by men and women who are stimulated by hopes and purposes that are universal, rewarded by occasional successes, and distressed by setbacks. Science is an enterprise with its own rules and customs, but an understanding of that enterprise is accessible, for it is quintessentially human. And an understanding of the nature of the enterprise inevitably brings with it insights into the nature of its products.²⁵

Stephen Mason prefaces his book Chemical Evolution with a telling quote from Gerald Holton. After acknowledging that progress in science is threatened by the loss of good people and financial support he continues that the most sensitive and fragile ‘part of the total intellectual ecology of science is the understanding, on the part of scientists themselves, of the nature of the scientific enterprise, and in particular the hardly begun study of the nature of scientific discovery.’²⁶ An emergentist view of science will of its nature give the importance that it deserves to the human dimension of this hugely creative and self-revelatory enterprise.

III

A further emergent feature and associated level of the consciousness that does science as portrayed in narratives of discovery is the element of emergent choices, in particular those concerned with choosing a life career. In the life narratives of Darwin, Crick and Venter there is an early period when they have little idea as to where their life is going and leading them. Still with hindsight in many cases there can be discerned in those early periods an extraordinary process of unplanned preparation for the life that is to follow. This is certainly the case for Darwin up to the voyage of the Beagle. Such an early phase comes to a head in a period when there is involved a self conscious decision to pursue a research career in science, and within that career specific problems.

In a chapter entitled ‘The Gossip Test’ Francis Crick describes how he came freely to make decisions about becoming a research scientist and about the creative scientific research which he wished to devote himself to in the course of his adult life. After his wartime experience he found himself at the dangerous age of thirty exploring his life options. Some of his friends even thought that he should go into journalism. He had an ability to turn his hand to new things and was sure that he wanted to do fundamental research, but was unsure of his abilities. On consulting Kreisel about the matter he got the reply: ‘I’ve known a lot of people more stupid than you who’ve made a success of it.’²⁷ Shortly after he found himself gossiping with some of his colleagues with some enthusiasm about recent advances in antibiotics and penicillin. Suddenly he had the insight that what you gossip about discloses what you are really interested in.

Three authors influenced the reflections involved in his decision making: Linus Pauling’s remarks on the importance of the hydrogen bond, Schrodinger’s What is Life?, and Sir Cyril Hinshelwood’s The Bacterial Cell. He confessed to being ‘mainly interested in the borderline between the living and the nonliving, wherever that was’ and in discussion with Wilkins in Kings College felt there was too much emphasis on the biology. There followed a crisis when he was offered a job working on the eye, he having already decided that his field was to be molecular biology, not neurobiology. In taking what turned out to be for him a hard decision Crick told himself ‘that my preference for the living-non-living borderline had been soundly based, that I would only have one chance to embark on a new career, and that I should not be deflected by the accident of someone offering me a job.’²⁸

With some help from his family and a studentship from the MRC he spent two years at Strangeways. A fateful meeting with Mellanby resulted in his being transferred to the Cavendish to work with Sir Lawrence Bragg. It was the subsequent arrival of James Watson in the Cavendish that resulted in Crick, with Watson as a collaborator, working on the problem of the structure of DNA, even though it was not his allotted research.

From our present perspective the important thing is the impact of a life career choice on a life story. Crick’s root decision in his early 30s to become a research scientist would effectively direct the unfolding of the rest of his life until his dying day. After working on DNA there was a follow up dealing with the related problem of the genetic code which was resolved in 1966. At this point he and Sydney Brenner felt they needed to move into new fields, initially embryology and developmental biology. But a move to the Salk Institute in 1976 brought with it a more radical change in direction. After several years of detaching himself from his old interests he began to focus on the workings of the brain.

I decided that my main long-term interest was in the problem of consciousness, though I realized that it would be foolish to start with this. ..  My next problem was to choose some particular aspect of the mammalian brain. How can one study vision in man by working on monkeys? …  I decided that, at least at first, I would not attempt to do experiments. … Having decided that I could learn about the mammalian visual system, my next problem was to select which aspect to study first. …..  Looking back, I can recall now how very strange I found this new field.²⁹

A similar pattern of relations between root and branch decisions, between roads taken and not taken, can be identified in the life of Craig Venter. Initially Venter made the great decision not to go through with a suicide attempt brought on by the impact of his first hand experience as a medic of the dreadful destruction of human life in the Vietnam War. He returned to America and set about getting an education. At a certain point he was interviewed in relation to a future career in a medical clinical programme. The interviewer suggested that with his research orientation he might not be comfortable in such a programme so he choose the path of scientific research. For a long time he worked on problems associated with the functions of adrenaline. A part of it involved gene sequencing. A paper to FEBS Letters followed. This combined with a coincident volume of Nature on gene sequencing led to a ‘major change in the direction of my science.’³⁰ The decision led to him eventually setting up the largest gene sequencing laboratory in the world. The rest of his research life to date has flowed out of that decision. In this sense decisions have flexible causal consequences on all the lower levels in the unfolding of a human life. The life grows organically rather than mechanically out of them.

From our present viewpoint decisions are concerned with what the person considers worthwhile doing with their life. In this case the pursuit was not of manufacturing commodities or infrastructure, but of knowledge of specific genomes, of a solution of a currently unsolved research problem as a value. As there are the neural correlates of visual consciousness so also there are the intellectual correlates of decision making. One can only make such decisions on the basis of one’s understanding, however slight, of some of the details and importance of the unsolved problems. Secondly, decisions are not isolated events in an unfolding life. They have causal consequences; they introduce a direction in a life where previously there was an element of drift. That directing presence can operate almost unnoticed for great time spans. This in turn poses questions about the very difficult problem currently being opened up of upward and downward causation.

IV

The different levels of reality and their worlds, the molecular, biological-organic, sensory-imaginative-qualia, the insightful, and decision making that have been identified pose the challenge, how are we to understand their relationships? Philip Clayton’s discussion in his Mind and Emergence of the problem of explaining the relation between levels in terms of upward and downward causality brings a focus into the problem.³¹ Adding the dimension of narratives of discovery, with their moments of insight and of decision making, enlarges the context in which he and others pose the questions. Such narratives of discovery in many instances provide spontaneous accounts of the circumstances and causes of the insights and decision making and of the awakening of the desires to which they are the responses. In the concluding section I would like to sketch some of the possibilities that this addition and enlargement of the field of the problem might open up.

To begin with a simple illustration, there is the unselfconscious account by Jacqueline de Pré of how, in her mother’s kitchen, just short of her fifth birthday she switched on the radio. Initially she was not too impressed by the music that was playing but when the cello began she listened intently. When it had finished she turned to her mother, who was a music teacher, and said: ‘I want to make that sound.’³² In that moment she fell in love with the cello; it had caused her heart’s desire to awaken. For the great majority listening to music causes a state of enjoyment or peace or calm in our self awareness. The causality involved in du Pré’s experience included that and more. The additional causality involved in the awakening of a core human desire is more like the fertilization of a seed or the initiation of a quest than the more straightforward causality involved in switching off a light or in causing enjoyment.

Because of the musical environment in her family du Pré, at such a young age, would have had a necessary and a sufficient initial understanding of what she recognized to be an awakening of her heart’s desire in order to choose to pursue it. Such understanding is a lower level correlate of decision making. There is in this experience a clear-cut example of upward causation both of the awakening of the desire and of the subsequent decision. What is also important about it is how it clearly indicates that our core activity of decision making is not isolated from our understanding of the empirical and material world but causally inserted in it. Du Pré’s decision was about what she wanted to do and who she wanted to become in the world. Ending the discernment process the emergence of the decision is also the emergence and establishment of a principle of downward causality in the lifestory. Du Pré’s training began soon after and with it the earlier upward causation of the event gave way to a form of downward and even interactive downward and upward causation.

The causality of mind-world relations is of great interest to Clayton. Whereas du Pré’s desire was to become a musician, the desire of the mind of great creative scientists such as Einstein or Darwin is to understand and master a known unknown in the world. Darwin’s eventual desire became that of understanding the transmutation of species. After an intense period of exploration Einstein’s desire eventually focused on the problem of resolving the contradictions between the mechanics of Newton and Maxell’s electromagnetism that were posed by the velocity of light. In his autobiography he comments time and again how basic schooling stifled his native curiosity, the potential in the desire of his mind to find and be fertilized by a problem in the world that suitably stimulated him. In and through his reading and his highly imaginative familiarity with certain empirical aspects of the issue the problem came to him. After an experiential period of confusion groping with a topic the problem in the world suddenly begins to come into focus and draws the inquirer into it. The causality of that beginning is not of an isolated episode separated from what precedes and follows it, but of the initiation of a quest.

It seems from this that the desire of the mind is not internally self starting but needs, causally, to be awakened from its slumbers by external stimulation from the world. Does that subsequent desire interrogate the world as a distant external object from across a chasm which excludes any causal interaction? Is the causal relation purely downward so that the higher level is never moved by the lower? Are the causal relations two-way, so that there can be both an upward and a downward causality in the growth of the problem? Do some anomalous features in the world in an upward manner directly cause the desire to further awaken, and does it respond by initiating an investigation of them? In the subsequent response to the awakening can there be indentified in the story a complex upward and downward interaction as in one phase the desire to know directs the process and in another phase is redirected by the unexpected results of conducted experiments.

There are in many narratives of discovery accounts of how it is through creative moments of insight that we come to understand the workings of the world. This holds true from basic physics, through chemistry – Mendeleyev and Kekulé, the biology of the cell, organisms and their growth, as well as the neural structure of the brain. There is no short-circuiting the discovery process of night science in the emergence of such knowledge. As there is a causal complex associated with the awakening of the desire of the mind in an investigation, is there also one associated with moments of insight? The two most contrasting accounts in the literature of the mental causality involved in understanding are those of Kant and Aristotle. In Kant’s philosophical system strictly understood, our understanding is not in any direct manner, causal or otherwise, related to the empirical world. Although knowledge is a unity of the sensible and the conceptual, it is through sensible intuition alone that our minds are connected with the phenomenal world. The noumenal world is unknowable.

The contrast with Aristotle’s theorem in the De Anima of the identity of the agent and patient, of the to be known and the knower in a mind-world interaction could not be greater. When the bell sounds - as sounding it is an agent cause of the hearing of the sound in the ‘patient,’ that is to say the human subject who hears the sound.  There is an identity in the relation: what sounds in the agent causes the hearing in the patient.

Aristotle holds that the same identity holds true for human understanding. Moments of insight are not isolated uncaused inner mental events. Combined with the formed questioning of the investigator in relation to the data of the problem in the world, the insight in which a solution becomes revealed is caused by the correct arrangement of the imaginative presentations of the problem. When Watson brings together in the model building the correct proportions and relations of the base structure, the insight is caused in him by what those imaginative presentations represent. The same is true of the insights of Mendeleyev and Kekule. In this sense there are imaginative correlates of insights, different imaginative presentations causing different insights.³³ As the sounding of the bell as agent causes the hearing, the presence to the imagination of the correct arrangement of the elements of the problem in the world acts as an agent cause of the insight. The world causes us to understand. In and through that correct arrangement of the elements of the problem a solution can now be conceptualized and spoken about. Correct or not, insights always involve a mind-world relation. If you get the wrong presentations of the problem on the level of the imagination you get the wrong insight. Erroneous theories do not originate in our minds. They originate in the data on which the mind works and which in some way or other is lacking.

Before the insight occurs, the elements of the imaginative presentation of the problem are what Lonergan terms a ‘coincidental manifold,’ an unintelligible aggregate.³⁴ After the insight has occurred what previously was coincidental is now intelligible. This shift in relations from coincidental to intelligible, where the intelligibility can be of many different kinds, is at the heart of the problem of emergence. Lonergan speculates that this emergent relation of the insight in relation to the image is a prototype of all emergences. There is a likeness in it of other forms of emergence but not an identity. Once one has grasped it one has a lever, so to speak, from which to access problems of emergence and of upward and downward causality in disciplines from physics to consciousness. A reason for this is that it is only through our insights into the imaginative presentations that we have access to the solutions to the problems posed by scientists working in all of those disciplines. It is a highly speculative suggestion which needs to be opened up and tested.

When the solution to a problem in the world has come to you then you can in a sense regularly control and manipulate that problem situation. In discovering PCR Mullis discovered that a particular algorithmic-like sequence of events solved a particular problem. It now became possible on that basis for PCR machines to be manufactured which could then take their place in the biology laboratories of the world. When Venter solved the problem of the mechanics of genome sequencing it again became possible to mechanize it and install such machines throughout the world. Out of the unintelligible randomness of the elements of the problem in the pre-solution stage there emerge at different sites in the world the facilities for solving the same problem as the need arises. The problem could now be solved regularly.

From the viewpoint of chemistry the controlled timing and production of red blood cells in the bone marrow and related proteins is just a happy but also unintelligible coincidence. From the viewpoint of biology it is understood as one aspect of the solution to the problem of living in an environment. From this perspective the aggregate of chemical activities and their imaginative representations stand to the solution as, more generally, the image stands to the insight. Speculatively it can be suggested that this is a relation that holds true all along the line, from simple protein synthesis to the complex gene switching that takes place in the growth of an organism. In those emergent and regular recurrences of what from the chemical standpoint are surprising coincidences there can be understood through insight the irreducible laws of the higher science of biology. The secret of life does not exist in the chemistry but in the exquisite manner in which it is organized.

There are possible resonances here with Watson’s remark that ‘life is exquisitely organized physics and chemistry.’ Without the existence of primitive living things, the chemical environment is quite different. Introduce living things and there emerges the regular occurrence of sequences of chemical activities that from the lower viewpoint would be coincidences. As far as the laws of chemistry are concerned it is a mere coincidence that fertilization, cell division, protein synthesis and metabolism, regularly emerge and recur in living things. There has emerged in the living organisms an ability to render regular at the appropriate occasion and time certain sequences of chemical processes. In them solutions have emerged to the problem of living on this level and of the transmission of such life.

Along these lines it can be speculated that the secret of consciousness does not reside only in its neural correlates but largely in their exquisite organization in the course of such activities as learning a language with its spoken words and their meanings, acquiring musical skills or the skills involved in various sports. Those skills are not biological but meaningful, concerned with living in the properly human world.

Neuroscientists are now beginning to accept the possibility of programming and reprogramming one’s neurocircuits in learning a language or controlling one’s anxieties.³⁵ From that standpoint what sense can be made of the neural transpositions that take place when learning and relearning how to perform a surgical operation, serve at tennis or play a piano concerto? What sense can be made of their regular recurrence after such training or retraining on public occasions of no apparent neurological significance? Are their emergences and recurrences just unexpected happy coincidences? From the present perspective the imaginative presentations of such processes on the neural level stand to the higher level human activities in the world as image stands to insight. In both the context of their recurrence and the neural content of the regular recurrences of those lower level activities there can again be grasped aspects of the higher laws of consciousness. The lower level correlates with the higher but does not explain the higher finality of using, meaningfully, a language, acting in a situation, or performing a surgical procedure. Finally, the developmental nature of life warns us that the road to solutions to these problems is more complex than we can imagine at the present time.

On the model of mental causation I am suggesting there is an extraordinary intimacy between the mind and the world. Our spirit of inquiry cannot awaken to its potential, be initiated into its quest without a world there to stimulate it. Our mysterious power of insight is rendered sterile in the absence of the presentations through the imagination of the elements of the problem in problem solving. There is, in this sense, an extraordinary fit between mind and world. As Crick and Watson found DNA beautiful I find that fit even more beautiful. Despite this intimacy of mind and world there is still something more to it. In and through the emergence of our mental powers our proportionate world is opened up far beyond that which is possible for our animal ancestors. There is, it seems, no corner of the universe beyond our mental scrutiny and insistence that we can crack its secret. As the unrestricted potential of our desires becomes progressively manifest do we not find them pointing beyond their very limitations towards the transcendent. As every other level has its upward openness, so too does the desire of the human mind and heart, an upward openness that we experience as a longing for the transcendent.

Endnotes