Undergraduate & Graduate Days: Peirce, Cybernetics, Neuroscience
Terrence Deacon is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the co-evolution of language and the human brain. His recent work has touched on diverse questions at the intersection of philosophy and biology, such as the nature of complexity and the place of goal-directedness in biology. During our discussion with Professor Deacon, we asked him about the academic path which led him to where he is now: his unlikely meeting with Gregory Bateson, his fascination with cybernetics and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and how the academic and political battles at Harvard in the 1970s led him out of philosophy and into biology.
Terrence Deacon
My intellectual path has been very indirect, windy, and unusual. It took me eight years (1968-1976) to complete my undergraduate degree, for various reasons. One was the political climate at the time. The other was my interest in diverse areas of science and philosophy and an inability to decide on what to focus on. I started at the University of Washington in the Fall of 1968 with a major in physics, motivated by my interest in relativity theory. I also took basic chemistry, biology, and psychology courses, as well as some philosophy of science early on. But my college experience was interrupted after two years, when I was forced to take part in the draft lottery for the Vietnam war, and was assigned number 36. This guaranteed that I’d be drafted. I had been deeply involved in antiwar protest and so I applied to be a conscientious objector, but I was denied due to my lack of religious affiliation. Though inducted, I was ultimately rejected because of my history of asthma. At that point, out of school and financially supporting myself, I found myself bouncing between diverse jobs. One of the most influential was working for a year as the histologist for the Coroner’s office in Seattle. It was a sort of intense crash course in human anatomy. Motivated by this experience I reapplied to Western Washington University as a biology major with my sights set on medical school. But none of that worked out. As I mentioned, my interests were just too broad. Eventually, I shifted to an interdisciplinary undergraduate program to study systems theory, cybernetics, and related topics in a subdivision of the university called Fairhaven College. It was focused on self-directed interdisciplinary studies. It was the perfect place for me.
Auguste Nahas
Do you remember encountering cybernetics for the first time?
Terrence Deacon
Yes. Because I couldn’t afford to buy many books at the time, I spent hours reading in bookstores. And that’s where I encountered cybernetics and systems theory, particularly Ross Ashby’s Introduction Cybernetics and Norbert Wiener’s books. At the same time, I also picked up George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation. Those were my major early influences. It inspired me to write an undergraduate thesis on cybernetics and systems theory.
Auguste Nahas
Do you remember what was so exciting about it?
Terrence Deacon
Well those were the early days of computing, which was very exciting. I took a class in which we used a computer that occupied a full building. And of course, it was also the time in which we were finally figuring out how the genome worked in very simple terms. So the early 1970s was a hot time for system theory, for early genetics, for early computers, and, of course, I became very much interested – partly because of Bateson – in psychology, though I had no background in neuroscience at the time. I became fascinated by it.
Andrea Gambarotto
Did you ever get to meet Bateson?
Terrence Deacon
Yes. There was a fellow named Anthony Wilden at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, about 60 miles from Bellingham. He was one of Bateson’s students, and wrote a book called System and Structure. I still think it’s one of the most remarkable books of that era. Most people don’t know about it. Wilden was strongly influenced by Bateson but also very interested in structuralism, Marxism, and systems theory. His book was all over the map, but quite brilliant in the way it linked Bateson’s ideas with many other fields. I looked him up, drove up to meet him, and talked him into coming down once a week to my university to give a seminar, and chat with me in particular. He then directly introduced me to Gregory Bateson. The first time was as a side trip on the way to an event in Ojai, California, where the mystic J. Krishnamurti held a seminar with David Bohm. Getting there nearly killed us. Wilden was learning to fly at the time, so he offered to fly me down to the conference. As we flew, the clouds started to come in and descend down to the mountains. We were not rated to go above the clouds because we had no oxygen. And so we were pressed down into the mountains until we were flying in the valleys trying to find a place to land. Meanwhile, I was reading a street map, and we were trying to navigate by following streets. It was crazy! I thought it was the end. But somehow, thankfully, we found a place to land. And eventually we found our way to Southern California. We finally arrived at the conference in Ohai, and along the way we spent time with Gregory Bateson in Santa Cruz. Unfortunately we weren’t able to stay long with Bateson because of the conference, and yet ended up leaving the conference early too, because of personal disagreements between Wilden and others.
Andrea Gambarotto
I know the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, widely considered to be the founder of a philosophical movement called Pragmatism, is another one of your major influences. When did you start reading him?
Terrence Deacon
It was around that time that I discovered the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. It was indeed a defining moment for me. At the time, I was studying with Wilden, reading Bateson, and Warren S. McCulloch’s book Embodiments of Mind. McCulloch was one of the people involved in the early Macy conferences along with Bateson, who had suggested that you could understand a neuron as if it were a computer logic gate. He proposed a theory of the brain in which neurons were doing what logical gates were doing in computers: adders, subtractors, multipliers and so on. This was hot stuff. At the same time, I was spending time reading the latest books at the University of Washington bookstore in Seattle. They had the best collection of the latest books on these topics, which were too new to be in libraries. The guy who shelved the books saw what I was reading and would periodically interrupt my reading to suggest that I should read Peirce. He would actually sneak up behind me and whisper it into my ear! I was slightly perturbed and told him I wasn’t interested in philosophy. But then, I saw McCulloch mention Peirce in one of the final chapters of his book. So I I took his advice and picked up a collection of Peirce’s writings read – a collection of Peirce’s writings edited by the philosopher Justus Buchler. It was difficult reading, and unfamiliar in nearly every respect, but I couldn’t put it down. Peirce was considered to be pretty esoteric at the time; there was so little secondary literature to provide an overview of the development of his thinking, particularly his semiotic theory, which is scattered throughout his few publications. But I was hooked.
Discovering Peirce was one of those life-changing “aha!” moments. I felt that all the questions that were being raised by Bateson and by others, were answered in a very different way by Peirce, nearly 100 years ago, and just forgotten. Peirce seemed to dig ‘beneath’ all these other arguments and their assumptions. It posed huge questions about ideas that I had taken for granted and seemed to get ignored in current theories. I got so excited by all this that I dropped out of school for that next year (1975), just to spend the money I had saved for school fees to buy the collection of Peirce’s writings. At the time this consisted of a huge collection of six weighty volumes in four big books. I spent the following year just reading through this collection. My attempts to make sense of it eventually ended up becoming my senior honors thesis, entitled “Semiotics and Cybernetics: The Relevance of CS Peirce.” (submitted in a larger collection called Sanity and Signification in 1976). I still think it’s pretty close to what I would write about Peirce today. I was pursuing the link between Bateson’s thinking on logical types, and Peirce’s semiotics. I realized that these were complementary to one another. It wasn’t until over a decade later, when I began working on the Symbolic Species, that I actually put them together and understood how they fit together. But I got a sense of this interdependency even in that first paper. And at the time, I still didn’t want to graduate. But I was talked into it when the Dean of my college offered me a one year teaching position to teach whatever I wanted so long as I graduated.
Auguste Nahas
So it seems as though all the key pieces were really laid during those eight [undergraduate] years. That’s when you discovered all those key thinkers that were so influential to you.
Terrence Deacon
That’s right. And I knew then that to pursue my work further, I’d need access to Peirce’s unpublished papers stored at Harvard. So I applied to do a masters in philosophy there, specifically the philosophy of education, because Professor Isreal Scheffler who worked on the history of pragmatism had a split position in philosophy and the graduate school of education at Harvard. He ended up being very influential for me. We had so many great conversations. But unfortunately things didn’t work out for me to pursue my Peircean interests.
Andrea Gambarotto
What happened?
Terrence Deacon
Well, I never got to see a single one of Peirce’s unpublished papers. They wouldn’t allow a young graduate student near them. I was also becoming disillusioned with philosophy. At the time, Bateson’s interest in logical types got me to read George Spencer Brown, who still has a very strong influence on my thinking today. His Laws of Form is really a powerful work, and indirectly it was what ironically pushed me away from pursuing a degree in philosophy. At the time, I was able to take classes from Willard van Orman Quine and Hilary Putnam, and I got into this argument with Quine about the importance of George Spencer Brown. He really despised George Spencer Brown’s work, and thought it was damaging to logic. In contrast, I was convinced that it was the key to getting “beneath” logic, understanding why logic is the way it is, and why it has the structure it has. As I see it, George Spencer Brown also lays out a foundation for semiotic theory, though he didn’t see it that way – it was just about logic for Brown. And Quine thought it was just a poetic rewrite of the work of the logician Henry Sheffer and his distalization of symbolic logic based on the operation of a single operator – Sheffer’s “stroke” – basically the combination of not-and described as a “nand” gate in computer operation. Quine urged me to forget about Brown, to stop imagining that his work held any deep insights, and just move on. He could see nothing interesting there.
Auguste Nahas
Fascinating. And you also had major disagreements with Chomsky, right?
Terrence Deacon
Yes, I took a course from Noam Chomsky. I was interested in language, because language and logic were linked. And here too and I got into heated arguments. I felt that his ideas just didn’t make sense from a biological perspective. They were totally a-biological. And this began the long path that I took, influenced by Peirce, through the neurosciences and anthropology to my work today.
Andrea Gambarotto
So your feeling that Chomsky wasn’t paying enough attention to biology was the motivation for you to do neuroscience?
Terrence Deacon
In part. At that time, a graduate student at Harvard could also take graduate classes at MIT, so besides taking a seminar with Noam Chomsky and the philosopher Jerry Fodor (as a sort of counterpoint to my classes with Quine and Putnam at Harvard) I took some great neuroscience courses at MIT. It was really a wonderful opportunity.
At the same time, at Harvard, I was in the midst of major ideological battles over the structure of evolutionary theory. Edward O. Wilson had written his book on socio-biology a couple of years earlier, and William Hamilton – the inventor of kin selection theory – visited for a year to teach a course with Robert Trivers on the wider implications of inclusive fitness theory. At the same time Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin had organized a group of young scholars arguing against this way of understanding evolution. In that intense, the academic context I found was the best of both intellectual worlds (philosophy and biology). I was interacting with the major intellectual combatants embroiled in the two most contentious philosophical-scientific debates of the era: the nature of mind and the structure of evolutionary theory. In this exciting and challenging milieu I shifted out of philosophy to become a PhD student in biological anthropology, pursuing neuroscience informally at MIT. So although my focus shifted away from Peirce, I was in a very good position to apply some of his insights in these empirically grounded fields, in conversation with some of the most brilliant psychologists, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and neuroscientists on the planet. It was an ideal environment in which to embark on interdisciplinary explorations. And even though I had given up on studying Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts, his thinking had already shaped the trajectory I would follow for decades to come.
Auguste Nahas
Could you say a little more about your PhD work?
Terrence Deacon
My PhD project reflects this unlikely mix. I ended up doing my PhD using then new techniques in neuroscience to trace the connections in monkey brains that might correspond to or be homologous to cortical areas and connections in the human brain. This work in monkeys predicted patterns of neural connections discovered a decade later in the human brain. The comparison was finally made possible with the development of new fMRI techniques – diffusion tensor imaging or DTI – which indirectly allowed large scale neural connections to be traced in a non-invasive way in the human brain.
I finished my PhD in 1984 and began an 8-year faculty position at Harvard University where I was able to set up a multidisciplinary biological anthropology laboratory. During that time, I mostly put my thinking about Peirce and semiotics on the back burner. So it was a decade later, after moving to Boston University and McLean Hospital of Harvard Medical School, that I began to reintegrate these two strains of my thinking in the thesis of my 1997 book The Symbolic Species.
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