Kriti Sharma - Interdependence: Biology and Beyond

SERIES EDITORS

Bruce Clarke and Henry Sussman

E DITORIAL B OARD

Victoria N. Alexander, Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities

Erich Hrl, Ruhr University Bochum

John H. Johnston, Emory University

Hans-Georg Moeller, Philosophy and Religious Studies Program, University of Macau, China

John Protevi, Louisiana State University

Samuel Weber, Northwestern University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sharma, Kriti.

Interdependence : biology and beyond / Kriti Sharma.

pages cm. (Meaning systems)

Summary: From biology to economics to information theory, the theme of interdependence is in the air, framing our experiences of all sorts of everyday phenomena. Indeed, the network may be the ascendant metaphor of our time. Yet precisely because the language of interdependence has become so commonplace as to be almost banal, we miss some of its most surprising and far-reaching implications Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6552-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-8232-6553-4 (paper)

1. Autonomy (Philosophy) 2. BiologyPhilosophy. I. Title.

B808.67.S53 2015

111dc23

2014045376

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

To Om and Jyoti Sharma,
generous and loving parents.

To Rulia Ram Sharma, Kanta Sharma,
Giridhari Lal Nagar, and Raksha Nagar,
cherished and respected grandparents.

And to all the ancestors
upon whom this life depends.

Contents

Introduction: Taking Interdependence Seriously

It Depends: Contingent Existence

What Do Objects Depend On? Physical Substance, Matter, and the External World

What Does Sensing Depend On? Transduction, Energy, and the Meeting of Worlds

What Do Organisms Depend On? Bodies, Selves, and Internal Worlds

What Does Order Depend On? Patterns, Gaps, and the Known World

Conclusion: Life as We Know It Notes References Index Acknowledgments: What Does This Book Depend On?

Introduction

Taking Interdependence Seriously

You may have heard the phrase Its all connected before. What does it even mean ? Does it mean that an ice floe calving off the coast of Antarctica is about to cause the electricity to go out in your neighborhood? Does it mean that an intangible something knits together and resonates through all living and nonliving things, and we can tune into its hum? Does it point to the global economy and the vast network of actors and factors upon which each of our lives and personal fortunes depend? Does it refer to deer eating grass and wolves eating deer, or to electrons influencing each other across a distance? Is it a scientific fact? A spiritual experience? A political reality? A marketing slogan? An ethical claim?

Of course, the phrase Its all connected has meant all of these things and more, depending on the context in which it is used. What is being emphasized here is that the theme of interdependence is in the air, framing our experiences of myriad everyday phenomena. The network may be the ascendant metaphor of our time. Yet, it is precisely because the language of interdependence has become so commonplace as to be almost banal that we may miss some of its most surprising and far-reaching implications.

Nowhere, perhaps, is interdependence evoked as vividly and often as in the biological sciences. The careful work of biologists over millennia has produced a massive body of observations that illustrate a vibrant, intricate, causally complex world, in which products depend on processes, processes depend on products, wholes depend on parts, parts depend on wholes, and living beings depend on one another for our lives. The widespread interest in and acknowledgment of the interrelatedness of natural phenomena in biology thus creates the illusion of a coherent view of interdependence.

Still, I contend, the ascendant view of interdependence at play in biologyas in popular culture is not a view of interdependence at all . It remains a view of independence . By and large, we think that interdependence just means independent objects interacting . We say that things interact strongly, weakly, reciprocally, sequentially, and so on, but their ultimate independence from one another remains intact. Indeed, the network, which has enjoyed a place of privilege in biological thinking in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, is just such a map of separate and interacting entities. As long as the ascendant view of interdependence continues to collapse implicitly to a view of independence, I believe that we continue to miss an important implication of our own findings. Our beautifully detailed observations of biological phenomena have been and continue to be interpreted as evidence that our world is composed of a great many independent entities coexisting in interaction. Instead, what these data may be suggesting is that our world is not composed of independent entities at all.

This is a book about how we might meet interdependence as interdependence instead of continuing to view our world implicitly as fundamentally or ultimately composed of independent entities. To take interdependence seriously in this way does not mean viewing phenomena as murky undifferentiated masses or as overwhelming tangles of connections. Though interdependence is often associated with complexity (in the sense of made up of many things) and has therefore often been assumed to be an intrinsically complex topic (in the sense of difficult and complicated), what I hope to show here is that a consistent theory of interdependence can actually be refreshingly simple, useful, and clarifying.

If there is a transition being madein biology as in physics, neuroscience, sociology, and morefrom viewing phenomena as independent to viewing them as interdependent, we can conceive of this transition as happening in two shifts. The first is a shift from considering things in isolation to considering things in interaction. This is an important and nontrivial move; it is also a relatively popular and intuitive concept in those fields. To get to a thoroughgoing view of interdependence, I argue that a second shift is required: one from considering things in interaction to considering things as mutually constituted , that is, viewing things as existing at all only due to their dependence on other things. This second shift is potentially more subtle and difficult than the first, because though the first requires considering the mutual relations and influences between things, it does not actually require a change in the many habits and assumptions that usually commit us to viewing things as fundamentally independent. The second shift requires recognizing and addressing these very habits, which currently obscure a thoroughgoing view of interdependence.

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