The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

by Jessica Riskin

Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science.

The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines.

The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.

Genres: Science, History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Technology

571 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 13, 2015

Reviews

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is quite a niche read. But a very rewarding one. I've been meaning to read it since Siri Hustvedt recommended it in the one of her interviews ages ago. The book is devoted to two centuries' argument that broadly comes down to the question "what is life?" One side of the argument is that alive creatures are not different from other mechanisms, just more sophisticated ones - no "ghost within machine" so to speak . On another - that there is a certain "vitality" force, the purposeness from within (the author uses the word "agency': that differentiate alive world. If the second side of the argument seems obvious, it is not. The majority of scientific and philosophic community actually supports the first side. But the book is the history of the development of those ideas. The debate is still unfinished starting from Descartes and the automata of the 17th century, through Darwin vs Lamarck to Turing and Schrödinger and many others in between. I would need to read it at least one more time to be able to summarise the debate in more meaningful way.

For now, I've just touch upon two ideas. First, Schrödinger's view:

"Schrödinger proposed that the essence of life was a form of agency. “What is the characteristic feature of life?” he asked. “When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on ‘doing something,’ moving, exchanging material with its environment and so forth.” Specifically, the most salient “something” that organisms characteristically did, Schrödinger proposed, was to resist entropy, to avoid decay into equilibrium. They achieved this feat by means of their various metabolic functions: eating, drinking, breathing, photosynthesizing. In a world that tended toward disorder and decay, these functions enabled a living thing to maintain its order and energy, “continually sucking orderliness from its environment,” “drinking orderliness,” and “concentrating a ‘stream of order’” upon itself."

I think, this ability of a system to self-organise is actually becoming the one of the recognised features defining what it means to be alive; (and the ability of a system to be "self-evidenced" - monitor itself with awareness - would define a conscious system).

All of it becomes even more fascinating when it comes to the field of artificial intelligence. I was extremely amazed by the far-sight of Turing's ideas (not the first time of course). Mainly that "thinking machine" should be able to learn itself. And also it should be fallible in a sense should be able to make mistakes. He wrote in 1947 "if a machine is not fallible it cannot also be Intelligent". That sounds so counterintuitive at first glance, but than it is a genial insight. He also contemplated teaching a machine through a contrast of "pleasure" and "pain" in its mechanical sense:

"Turing urged, it made better sense to try to simulate a child’s mind. He imagined building, to begin, what he called an “unorganised machine,” that is, a bunch of neuron-like components connected “in a relatively unsystematic way” through “connection modifiers,” their configuration subject to some random variation. He thus laid out a blueprint for an approach to artificial intelligence that a decade and a half later would be called “connectionism.” The machine would become organized by means of an education, consisting of systematic “interference” that altered, fixed, or disrupted the connections among the components.

Turing imagined two sorts of “interfering” input, “one for ‘pleasure’ or ‘reward’ (R) and the other for ‘pain’ or ‘punishment’ (P).” Pleasure interference would work to fix in place the current configuration of the machine while pain interference would disrupt it, causing previously fixed features to change or to vary randomly. You might then simply allow the machine “to wander at random through a sequence of situations, applying pain stimuli when the wrong choice is made, pleasure stimuli when the right one is made,” acting as the machine’s trainer in just the way that Ashby described training the Homeostat. One could even program the “teaching policies” right into the machine, Turing suggested, so that it would learn all on its own and direct its own process of organization."

It is amazing that it has been written in 1947 before any real computer has been designed. The first point does not need any commentary after Chat GPT. But the second is even more fascinating. I've read recently a very interesting book investigating the origins of consciousness The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. I have not reviewed it yet even here as it is absolutely packed with knowledge and ideas supporting its main argument. And I feel overwhelmed so far how to present it in a coherent way. However, its author has got very interesting and strong hypothesis how Consciousness arises. According to him, its main function is to feel as this helps an organism to make quick decisions in uncertain situations. And on the very basic level, it is to feel exactly those two things: pleasure and pain. So Turing was basically mentally conceiving a machine that if realised, might eventually become conscious.

Well, I leave it on this note I guess for now.

This book would be of interest to those who are fascinated by philosophy of mind and history of biology and psychology. But is quite an academic writing, so might require some perseverance.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm an occasional listener of Sam Harris' podcast, and this book stood out to me because of how frustrated I've become by the metaphors he uses to discuss human cognition and culture. Wittingly or unwittingly, he lapses into describing humans and their societies as if they were simply computers – as if DNA were merely a programmer's code – as though culture was simply a series of algorithms, with some functioning better than others. He calls our biology "hardware" and our ways of thinking "software."

I find this pattern of speech limiting. Computers were designed to do tasks that originated in the human mind. If the organism precedes the mechanism, how can it make sense to go about describing organic life with words that are merely mechanical? After encountering Riskin's book, I hoped she could shed light for me on the historical reasons for Harris' mechanical metaphors and reveal alternative approaches to talking about humans, culture, and biology.

Happily, she delivered. Riskin begins her history by narrating the place of automatons in Medieval and Premodern Europe and then extends through the technological, scientific, philosophical, and religious changes of the subsequent centuries to arrive at a surprising conclusion: the materialist, brute mechanist explanations we associate with the "New Atheism" of Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet, and Richard Dawkins had its origins (ironically) in theological science. Agency was originally banished from scientific explanation in order to preserve the ultimate will of Divinity as the prime source of purpose in the universe.

While narrating this history, Riskin uncovers an alternative mode of explanation. She recounts the "active mechanist" tradition that emerged from Kant and early eighteenth-century German scientists, like Alexander Von Humboldt, inspired by his writing. In this tradition, agency was preserved and treated as a fundamental feature of the universe, similar to how we conceive of gravity. These thinkers eventually influenced the biology of Jean Baptiste-Lamarck, whom twentieth-century biologists have often ridiculed as a mystic. In demonstrating the shortcomings of these later scientists in providing consistent explanations of how organisms function, Riskin redeems the legacy of Lamarck and shows his thought to be far more complicated than the caricature of his perspective often lambasted by scientists today.

"The Restless Clock" reinvigorated my interest in agency and purpose as fundamental building blocks for thinking about culture and society. Something changes when we approach living things as creatures that possess an inner, fundamental force of purpose: we move from being analysts of culture to participants in it; from alienated observers of human computers and their algorithms to embodied subjects engaged in conversation with other embodied subjects.

I still have much to think about on these issues, but Riskin's book has pointed me towards a few more sources I hope to investigate: Robert Richard's history "The Romantic Conception of Life" and Erwin Schrodinger's essay, "What is Life?"

[Richard Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was disappointing. I was drawn to its thesis that throughout the history of modern science there have been two competing philosophies of life: (i) that living beings are complex machines that are simply the sum of their mechanical parts, and (ii) that life cannot be understood without recourse to the a idea that it is somehow purposeful, endowed with a vital spark, which transcends simple mechanical explanation. Riskin favors the vital spark theory, which she chooses to describe as "agency," an irksome term of post-modernism that made a tedious book harder to swallow.

There are some interesting surprises here, e.g., that the argument from design relied on by today's creationists was orginally a scientific argument and that the mechanistic point of view was used as an argument for the existence of God. It was also interesting to see how many scientists have been oblivious to the histories of the positions that they espouse.

I was hoping the Riskin would identify a consistent connected thread of the philosophy of purposefulness from Leibniz to Lamarck to Norbert Wiener, but as far as I could tell, she is only able to demonstrate that it is a recurring theme that various scientists and philosophers return to again and again in different ways and for different unrelated reasons. In the end I think that all that she can establish is that the human brain is drawn to explanations of behavior based on purpose and intent. There is something inherently attractive about teleological explanations even when they are clearly false, so that modern scientists use words of purpose and intent as a metaphorical way of desribing natural phenomena even where they know that no purpose or intent exists or is even possible.

The other problem that I had with this book is the turgid writing style. It is thoroughly researched, well-organized and clearly written, but, God, it's pacing is glacial, and the phrasing and sentence structure are postively soporific. I had to put it aside for another book a half a dozen times to get through it. I could have forgiven this if I had bought into the thesis, but a poorly supported idea explicated in a turgid style was too much for me.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magisterial volume. Riskin's core argument, about the way modern science has banished 'agency' from nature, is impossible to fault, and she defends with great spirit the underground tradition that has bubbled up over the centuries to oppose it. I was particularly affected by her interpretations of Leibniz near the beginning, La Mettrie and Diderot in the middle, and Schrödinger at the end, but really the book is a moving feast of intellectual delicacies. It's also beautifully written.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force reconsideration of the history of modern philosophy and science in terms of whether to consider living being as if they were passive mechanisms, or whether to consider them as self-organizing agents. This book fills a large void in the way this history is usually told, and restores a lost history that can be traced from Decartes and Leibnitz through Kant, Lamark and Darwin, down to Turing, Minsky, and Dennett, and then on to the modern biology of epigenetics and autopoesis. The book is filled with intimate historical details drawn from diaries, letters, and manuscript revisions that illuminate this issue as well as lively annedotes that bring the authors of these historical documents to life. It begins with a fascinating chapter on the ancient clockwork automata that played a role not only Greek history, but in the aristocratic gardens of medieval Europe—automata that fascinated the philosophers of the enlightenment. The book explains how and why we are now stuck with a science that dismisses agency as a "ghost in a machine," and can find no role for sentience, consciousness, and purpose in the clockwork universe it posits. She argues on behalf of the development of a new scientific paradigm that can accomodate the idea of organisms as self-organizing, pursuing purposes, and can also find a way to naturalize teleology.

My main complaint is how she gives little attention to some major figures in this debate, including Bergson, James, Whitehead, and Varela. But, one cannot be an expert in every philosophy, and one must make conscious choices about where to focus. Another complaint is that Riskin limits her discussion to active and passive machine metaphors. I keep thinking that there must be a third choice that doesn't depend on the idea of mechanism at all but is more natural and organic—the idea of mechanism has been a useful heuristic tool in science, enabling to dissect and understand many phenomena, but it is such a one-sided metaphor and I wonder if something much more organic might open up whole new areas of investigation that would provide greater balance to our vision of living beings. I'm thinking here of a recent 2019 article by Daniel Nicholson in the Journal of Theoretical Biology entitled "Is a Cell Really a Machine?" that questions the basic premise of the mechanistic metaphor.

[Karl Vergarin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock is the best non-fiction book I've read in the last 10 years (at least). It's not a breezy read but I found it quite exciting, especially when I read the last chapter, which was like the denouement of a thriller.

It is beautifully written, impeccably researched, & deals with one of the most interesting & important questions in the history of science, philosophy, & religion. Riskin doesn't grind any axes here. She is interested in how & why we conceptualize the world & the scientific process - and whether a different point of view might add something valuable to our thinking. In the process she gives many insights into some of the most famous thinkers in Western culture. (A valid criticism might be that relevant ideas of other cultures are not probed. I'd love it if she'd write another book that looks at other cultures' ways of thinking.)

The book presents a very interesting angle on intellectual, scientific, and religious history and how they influenced each other. Ideas that shape how we think & live don't come from nowhere - the ascendancy of an idea is something that is frequently fought over quite intensely & for a long time. Among other things, this book gives a fascinating picture of how important particular individuals - and their personal interactions & ambitions - have been in the way we think about reality.

Part of what makes this history so interesting is how ideas & minds changed over time. That said, there are many names & theories to keep track of & it's possible that Riskin could have organized the book in a way that would make it easier to keep track of the multiple concepts & proponents of ideas. I don't know. I have no complaints at all about the organization of the book.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book blew me away. It was really a mystery novel on the history of science with a wonderful denouement towards the end - is there an agent internal to life, or is it the external influences that manipulate our robotic selves? History matters.

[Dschreiber · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Restless Clock Stanford Professor of History Jessica Riskin suggests there might be a flaw in how explanations are done in the life sciences, perhaps even in all the sciences. The current model, which she finds incomplete, treats all of nature as a machine whose parts are made of passive, inert matter, moving only when set in motion by external forces. Natural entities are themselves viewed as empty of any active power of their own, of any force, will, purpose, self-direction, self-organization, any trace of what she calls in general “agency.” In order to challenge this paradigm, which she characterizes as "brute mechanistic" or "passive mechanistic," she reviews the history of modern science since the seventeenth century, showing how this dominant view has always been shadowed by alternate views explaining nature in terms that do include agency.

The passive mechanistic model was established during the seventeenth century, but not only as a foundation for purely rational, mechanistic explanations of the world. There was also a religious dimension to regarding nature as a machine, a gigantic clockwork. To the thinkers of that time the wondrous complexity of nature and the marvelous fitness of all its parts required a Great Designer existing outside nature — thus, the Argument from Design. Also, if there was no force within nature responsible for its motion and organization, the force must be outside, in other words, a God winding up the great clock of the universe. Riskin believes that science today, secular and at the same time denying agency in nature, is failing to explain the origin of motion and organization in nature.

As a prime example of an early attempt at describing nature as containing its own agency (which she calls "active mechanism"), she offers a quote from Leibniz. He reinterpreted the idea of a clock as something more than a passive device deriving its activity solely from outside forces, and he provided her the title for her book. “In German,“ Leibniz wrote, “the name for the balance of a clock is Unruhe—that is to say disquiet. One could say that it is the same thing with our body, which can never be perfectly at ease: because, if it were, a new impression of objects, a little change in the organs, in the vessels and viscera, would change the balance and make these parts exert some small effort to get back to the best state possible; which produces a perpetual conflict that is, so to speak, the disquiet of our Clock.” Leibniz's clock is a mechanism, explainable in terms of its component parts, but self-organizing under the power of its own balance, a mechanism with agency, a restless clock.

The Restless Clock gives a detailed discussion of the interaction of theories of passive and active mechanism over a period of more than three hundred years. An astonishing number of cases are covered, from Descartes, Leibniz, and Lamarck to John von Neumann, Stephen Jay Gould and Ray Kurzweil, with dozens more in between. The issue shows up not fully resolved even in the chapter on Darwin who, while usually adamant in rejecting agency in nature, nevertheless lapsed occasionally, admitting the existence of natural powers such as “tendencies” or the innate power to vary.

What would it mean to include agency in scientific explanations? Riskin offers only a few suggestions, such as a heliotropic plant following the path of the sun or electrons moving to conserve charge. But she points out that, in fact, even now scientists often use language that suggests agency: they speak of cells wanting to move toward a wound, proteins regulating cell divisions, or genes dictating the production of enzymes. Scientists insist that such phrases are mere figures of speech, shorthand taking the place of a complete, rigorous, passive-mechanistic description. If that rigorous explanation is not known today, they maintain, it will be found in the future. That hope, according to Riskin, is an article of faith, not of science. She suggests, instead, that agency be given a place in scientific explanations as “a primitive feature of the natural world like force or matter, an aspect of the very stuff of nature’s machinery, and especially its living machinery.”

The final chapter focuses on an influential treatise by Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum physics. In “What Is Life?” he argued, first, that a living creature is a machine by definition in that it produces and maintains order. “Schrödinger explained that molecules were configurations of atoms occupying their lowest energy level. In order to change configurations, they needed to receive at least a minimum quantum of energy. The stability of a molecule could perhaps account for the order-producing capacity of genes, responsible for maintaining the structure of living organisms both within individuals and across generations.” But Schrödinger goes on to claim that a living creature is more than a machine; it is essentially an agent because, by means of its action of eating, drinking, breathing, photosynthesizing, and so forth, it resists entropy — it avoids decaying into equilibrium. A living creature is thus a clock — but a restless one, a machine with agency.

Despite its detailed scholarship — or perhaps because of it — The Restless Clock is unlikely to win many overnight converts. It winds its way through innumerable theories, debates, and descriptions, through many people, a great deal of biographical material, but with little effort made to tie the pieces together, to summarize, to reveal an overall pattern. The impression is often of a catalogue rather than an argument.

However, if nothing else, as theory piles upon theory, and one debate shades into another, the book certainly illustrates how terribly difficult it has been for civilization to sort out such a jumble of ideas and arrive at the understanding of the world we now have. And along the way it unearths a truly astonishing collection of historical curiosities.

It even has moments of comedy, as when it describes many elaborate mechanical systems that royalty and other high-ranking Europeans constructed on their grounds in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. These perceiving and responsive machines were able to sense the presence of people and react to them, for example, tempting visitors to pause before a beautiful scene, then bombarding them with a cloud of flour or spraying them with water from hidden pipes, or luring them to sit on a bench, then soaking their bottoms. It was comedy, but it also marked the beginning of machines exhibiting humanlike capabilities.

[Benjamin Percival · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although it was tough reading through such detailed accounts of only slightly interesting things such as primitive early androids, this is an extremely erudite and, now I can view it retrospectively, important. The key argument of the book around agency in science is very intriguing and the historical perspective gives a great depth of insight on the issue. The final chapter was particularly compelling, perhaps because the scientific ideas discussed are more relevant in our times. It did seem like 330 pages on the earlier history was a bit extreme given how simple the basic dialectic is to describe: some people supposed there was vital forces/agency in nature; some people didn't...

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was not such an easy read for me, possibly because of my neurodiversity and my issues with time. It's a good thing that the the admirable Jessica Riskin is such a patient and uncondescending writer and the illustrations greatly added to my enjoyment even though It took a long time to finish. l
I worked unusually hard on my review because I wanted to do justice to the book.
I still have my pages of notes, somewhere, thankfully, but the review was in my lost notebook.
Sadly, it disappeared during my moving house.
I figured it was about time that I marked it as read.
The way things are, I am not sure I will have time to write a fuller review

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extensive and detailed account of the suppression of natural “agency” in modern science. Riskin discusses a number of issues at the crossroads of science, philosophy, technology and history. Loved the level of research completed and the deep questioning of many baseline assumptions prevalent in science today.

[Steve Dock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging and scholarly tome presenting a centuries long argument between humanists and scientists regarding agency versus mechanism. The earliest chapters present a delightful picture of the late Middle Ages where automatons pervaded the spiritual experience .

[Herb Neumann · Rating 4 out of 5]

The publisher's review is quite adequate.

[Mills College Library]

147 R5958 2016

[Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, so far. I put this on the wrong shelf.