John Dupré kicks off proceedings, giving an intro to the ERC project he’s headed at Exeter - which has focussed on the benefits accrued by focussing on processes rather than substances in biological practice 
Also tweeting from this event - @LynncChiu
Dupré tells a semi-apocryphal story about how he became interested in processes. Markets! All the comings and goings of people and objects in a street market place (for more on this, check out his Spinoza lectures)
Organisms are another kind of process.
A (persistent) process is a continuant the persistence of which requires change
One of the main thoughts coming out of the project is that we (biologists and philosophers of biology) spend too much time worrying about stuff *changing* - we should spend more time thinking about how and why things *stay the same*.
(Dupré issues an apology to AN Whitehead, who will ne’er more be mentioned)
Also, keep an eye out for @PhyllisIllari who’ll be tweeting from the event as well!
Many of Dupré’s thoughts about processes emerge out of his thoughts about ants
The leaf-cutter ant network defies a single way of drawing organismic boundaries
All the mingling and symbiotic interconnections problematise the ways that we count organic individuals (and problematises the Thing ontology normally deferred to)
This is the picture the process philosophers are going for - rather than individual static organic substances
What are the implications for the Process view in other areas of philosophy? Here’s a slide!
Dupré says we are highly entangled processes - and that this should encourage us to challenge the thought of ourselves as isolated atomic individuals, (in the political sphere as well as the biological)
And adds, in closing, that he’s slightly embarrassed by the title of an earlier book
Today’s line-up:
Next up: @NicholsonHPBio - The Processual Organism
Here’s the book ‘Everything Flows’ that has come out of the ERC project
The main controversial thesis is that countable individual organic entities are processes. Biology gives us good reasons to say that change is the default and processes are prior, in some way, to substances/things/medium-sized dry goods
But what ARE processes? Main aspects: they have temporal parts and they are constituted by change
Dan historically situates the project - pointing to process philosophers working at the turn of the 20th century (organicists like JH Woodger)
Woodger has been eliminated from collective memory - part of Dan’s project is to recover his work
Woodger already has an idea of organisms as processes, entities possessed of temporal as well as spatial parts
The process philosophers here are taking their lead from people like Woodger rather than panpsychists like Whitehead (not many panspychists in the room) #probio18
Process philosophy has always been a marginal position - historically, philosophers tend towards substances and think about the living world in static machinic ways
A lot of Dan’s work has been to challenge this conception and to focus on the idea of organisms and organic entities as processes, as energy streams rather than discrete boundaries static machinic things
Clearly the machinic metaphor is hugely productive in some ways (eg Harvey and pneumatic pumps / hearts), but there are a lot of important disanalogies - one of the most notable of which is that unlike eg fuel in an engine, matter that we take in becomes a part of us
The idea of living bodies as streams has long-standing and important pedigree... vortices and whirlpools in Cuvier and Huxley
So how come biologists stopped using these metaphors? It disappears, mostly, from the discourse in the mid-20th century - because of the advances in molecular biology
Mechanistic, machinic metaphors (blueprints, coding, etc.) flourished - but we’re now seeing a return to the processual pictures
Here we’ve got some of the benefits of thinking about life in ‘fluid’ terms:
Philosophical approaches to biology tend towards dessication - they dry biological life out, vacuum-pack it - which is helpful for theoretical purposes, but fundamentally mischaracterises the organic process
The focus on fluidity confuses the metaphor of biological circuitry
Mechanistic descriptions are modes of abstraction to help us *do* stuff - they don’t reflect a mechanistic reality. This is something that Levy and Bechtel seem to acknowledge in their Mechanism 2.0
Tea’d up and ready for part 2 of #probio18 with Stephan Guttinger
Looking at the molecular realm in biology gives us good reason to endorse a processual picture
(Stephan has a background in molecular life sciences)
If you develop a process account based on living systems or quantum systems, will that tell us about molecular systems? Probs not.
Ooh and molecules seem to give strong support to a substance view - and this is what Stephan is going to be interrogating today
In certain accounts (eg Burtt and Cobb), DNA molecules are presented as entities with intrinsic properties. They figure similar to substances
And even if substance metaphysicians get confused at the organismic level they can always say, hey, yeah, but *molecules* support the substance view, right? (Classic strategy, according to Guttinger)
BUT Stephan says molecules are processual - take that, substantialists!
Stephan shifts to the methodological level - by mainly focussing on scientific models, processualists stack things in the substantialists’ favour #probio18 - it’s important to focus on PRACTICE, bringing in the constitutive role of relations
A focus on ATP gives us some insight here
How exactly are we analysing ATP? Where is the high energy ascribed to ATP? The high energy is not ascribed to the molecule itself but to the process
We have huge complexity here, so why is it simplified? Scientists are smart, why are things being broken down in these ways? For practical purposes -
Practice matters - and these abstracting/simplifying tendencies occlude important discussions about process in the molecular realm
Stephan getting into the nitty gritty of the biology #deprotonation #probio2018 This work is COMPLEX, and is in practice problematically simplified. IDP researchers like Uversky give frustratingly truncated definitions
The importance of ice buckets
Summary: (1) molecular realm represents a hard case for processulaists to deal with (2) doing traditional scientific metaphys works against process ontology
(3) practice informed scientific metaphysics can show that molecules are made to look this way
Now up: Anne Sophie Meincke! Metaphysical Lessons from Process Biology: Rethinking Persistence and Agency
The metaphysician in the project
One of her main aims in the project was to discuss what, exactly, processes are - what is their metaphysical character?
And to do so specifically in relation to organic individuals - and to defend the processual view of organisms
Anne Sophie is also optimistic about the interdisciplinary relationship between Phil-bio and analytic metaphysics - she thinks it can be a powerfully generative collaboration
Her aim in this talk is to remove some metaphysical reservations about process ontology (and to raise questions about the standard substance ontology)
The bio-processual perspective gives us insight into issues to do with persistence and agency, as conceived in classic analytic metaphysics
Setting out the terms:
In the standard, dominant view, ‘Thing’ ontology reduces processes to things - things (substances) are ontologically prior. Processes ontologically depend on substances. And change DESTROYS identity
By contrast, ‘Process’ ontology gives ontological primacy to *processes*. Things depend on processes (if there ARE things at all - which Sophie doesn’t think there are)
Identity is to be understood in process terms - and change is a truth-maker of identity statements
So: PERSISTENCE. How does some X persist? Perdurantism (things are made up numerically different temporal parts that instantiate different properties) or Endurantism (things have temporally relativised properties)
However both views essentially obviate *change* from the picture
If something perdures, change is just a variance of properties (but that’s not true change!)
As for endurance...
Are processes continuants?
Anne Sophie thinks we shouldn’t conflate ‘substance’ and ‘continuant’
Anne Sophie says her account helps shed light on confusions in the personal identity debate, and problems about agency.
How do actions fit in the natural world? Event-causal theories say that actions are caused by physical events - but then the agent disappears!
...oh no, battery running out! Check out coverage from @LynncChiu @PhyllisIllari @yoginho @SabinaLeonelli
a final slide!!
Here’s Scott Gilbert responding to the papers from the first half!
The notion that one can discuss things as process AND entities depends on the notion of ephemerality
We’ve got our first Donna Haraway reference #probio18
‘In biology we have a tendency to make important things boring’ says Scott
One of the problems with dealing processes is that, in English at at least, nouns are sacred - the noun is an entity that NEVER changes - it stays discrete and unified (and this, perhaps, sustains a substance world view)
Scott deploys some nice linguistic analysis to explain a tendency (again, in Latinate and Greek languages) towards certain metaphysical positions (including relations between parts and wholes)
Next up: Elisabeth Lloyd!
Elisabeth wonders what the processualists are talking about, exactly, when they’re talking about ecological interdependencies - and will be focussing on #holobionts
She’s going to suggest that the process picture is supported by evolutionary genetical theory
James Griesemer is up now! He favours a process perspective but for the purposes of the conference he’s going to be playing devil’s advocate
He thinks of himself as having been a processualist for 20 years
Particularly in relation to biological analyses of reproduction and development
However he’s less happy with this kind of processualism’s monistic posturing - he’s a pluralist
He endorses a pluralist approach because of the benefits of multiplicity in solving biological puzzles #multiperspectivism
We shouldn’t take any one perspective too seriously (including multi-perspectivism)
Griesemer is criticising the proposal, found in the project - and the book, Everything Flows - that process should displace substance, and that we need to choose between ontologies (let a billion blossom’s bloom)
Maybe not a billion - but Griesemer thinks we shouldn’t so swiftly dispense with the substance perspective. Can they not be complementary?
Process and substance living in harmony?
(Or at least as part of orthogonal ontological frameworks?)
Why, asks Griesemer, does successful science - construed in terms of substance and property - need to be translated into processual terms?
Looking to developments in physics and chemistry, Griesemer thinks we should challenge the idea that substances must be dethroned - a substance view might not be the only the way to describe the world (physical chemical biological) but it’s an important perspective
The science and practice of science seems to draw on processes AND substances AND a bunch of other entities with different metaphysical characters
Population biology calls on different ontological concepts when look to different levels
Now we’ve got Sui Huang talking about non-genetic phenomena in non-linear dynamics
Next up: me! (Adam Ferner)
Ready for day two of #probio18!
Antony Galton’s talk: if processes are fundamental what does this tell us about the nature of time?
A nice opening summary of what’s going to go down:
He starts by giving an overview of the at-at theory of motion and change - HT Bertrand Russell. Change and motion are analysed away
The at-at theory is a reduction of change to difference - and this harmonises with the standard mathematical practice of modelling change by means of functions over time
Nb. In the mathematical modelling time is idealised as instants
However, there is no change in an instant (HT Zeno)
How do we get change back into the picture? Here’s one way:
Galton wonders: How else might we characterise the state of change at instant?
But are there even instants in time anyway? Arntzenius isn’t so sure - ‘There are no such things as instants in time, no 0-sized temporal “atoms”’
What are the primitive constituents of time? Instants? If processes, rather than substances, are primitive then the primitive constituents of time are INTERVALS. Galton thinks this would be Aristotle’s view (Aristotle didn’t think there were any ‘nows’)
Maybe an instant is in fact the limit of an infinite nested series of ever-shorter intervals?
What about now?
HT Augustine
The present has a strongly subjective aspect to it - how do we capture our sense of SHARED present? Inter subjectivity? How we’re moving through time together?
HT Butterfield and Calendar
Galton’s view is that his present has a spatial extent determined by the limits of a two-way exchange of signals within the temporal duration of his specious present...
no mention of Bergson yet but there’s still time #BergsonLols
Omg Bergson! HT Bergson in response to a question from Rowland Stout! Galton says he’s quite sympathetic to some of Bergson’s thoughts - but thinks it’s ‘loopy’ to say that space is made of points but that time isn’t @EtheHerring
Now Rowland Stout!
Rowland starts by giving an overview of what a ‘substance’ is - it is something that ‘stands alone’, a thing on which other things depend - and processes can’t be substances because they depend on other stuff for their existence.
His aim in the talk is to say that processes aren’t substances but that they are THINGS (and things don’t have to be static) (and this might be in opposition to what the processualists are arguing)
Rowland is pragmatic when it comes to metaphysical inquiry - and associates with the Strawsonian (descriptive) tradition - and its not clear that the processualists agree with him in this
Some other problems that Rowland Stout has with Process ontology #ProBio18
He wants to resist the view, endorsed by Dan Nicholson and John Dupré that processes have temporal parts
Timeless attribution of a property (my birth date IS x) can be seen as derived from a temporal attribution (I WAS born on x day)
Some nice referencing back to Anne Sophie’s dilemma (how perdurantism and endurantism erase change) and offering solutions eg by modulating copula (in the English lang)
Rowland is taking his lead from PF Strawson - heavily into the linguistic/grammatical analysis and linguistic solutions to these philosophical problems - how do we talk about ourselves, and our ‘lives’ in everyday language
Persisting things change - and that’s another reason for thinking they have their properties at a time and not timelessly - so where does this leave processes??
Do occurrences (including processes?) have their properties at a time or timelessly (and can we hear Rowland digesting his breakfast)? #ProBio18
The occurrence of Rowland giving the talk is happening now, and wasn’t happening yesterday - and could be stopped (if we shout him down) - and it changes in certain way - as his voice gets louder/quieter faster/slower - so occurents do seem to change through time...
And here is the whole argument in a single slide (‘everything else has been window dressing’) - check it:
The discussion is focussing on how the word ‘property’ is being used here - is a property something that some X always has, or something that X undergoes?
Now up, Denis Walsh: Summoning and Sedimentation: Borrowed Concepts for an Agent Theory of Evolution
The talk is going to be an ‘attempt to purloin merleau ponty’s concepts’
...and to compare *object* theories of evolution with *agent* theories of evolution
First, an introduction to the mediational view - and foundationalist commitments: ‘Knowledge of things outside the mind/agent/organism only comes about through certain surface conditions, mental images or conceptual schemes within the mind/agent/organism...’ Charles Taylor
Plenty o’ problems with these foundationalist views (under-determination) - so maybe it’s better to deploy Contact Theory - where an agent has purposes that it pursues
‘Skilful coping’ as merleau ponty has it #probio18
A contact theory denies the separation of the inner realm from the outer realm - and that gives us an agent-centred position - an agent is interacting to the affordances (HT Gibson) of the world
How does foundationalism play out in the realm of evolutionary theory? Here’s a slide:
Foundationalist commitments in evolutionary theory result in this distinct separation between the inner realm and the outer realm - AND since organisms are interfaces between internal processes and the environment, we can get rid of ‘em. The organism disappears
Wrongo, says Denis - organisms obviously do a huge amount - construct niches, ecosystems, regulate functions of their genomes, etc - all properties of organisms
So what to do? given the problems with these foundationalist commitments? Create a contact theory of evolution! See organisms as agents embedded in their settings - foreground commingling of organism and environment - construe adaptation as a response to affordances #probio18
These thoughts, according to Denis, should encourage us to adopt an agent approach to evolution, rather than an object view- doing so will help us explain the dynamicity of the state space( because of the interaction between the agent and the environment)
The agent-centred view is kinda like merleau-ponty’s account of perception (‘summoning’)...
‘To see an object is either to have it on the fringe of the visual field and be able to concentrate on it, or else to respond to the SUMMONS by actually concentrating on it’ - Merleau-Ponty
Now: @ElenaRoccaPD and @ranilillanjum! ‘Approaching Causal Processes in Real Life Contexts’
In handout form:
Standard ontological and methodological construals of causation don’t always work in the lab #probio18
Their research project is firmly grounded in real problems experienced in scientific and clinical practice - and @ElenaRoccaPD starts by giving some examples of the failings of the standard models
👍
Scientific models import ontological models - specifically *Humeanism* - and its because of this that scientists have problems with external validity #ProBio18
This is one nicely laid-out handout
Hume thought that causation is an extrinsic relation between two separated events - for the dispositionalists, by contrast, thinks causation is actually a process of change.
‘This causal process involves the manifestation of intrinsic, dispositional properties of things; or causal powers.’
.@ranilillanjum explaining how these ontological concerns play out in scientific methodology
She suggests that we should move away from the static, closed system model - the default expectation should be that causation is a complex and dynamic temporal process, involving nonlinear interactions with open systems
Now we’ve got @PhyllisIllari and Jonathan Spring talking about ‘Activities and Entitities’
Phyllis was trained in a static substantialist metaphysics - and is attracted by the processual picture
She agrees with a lot in the processualist manifesto (found at the start of the book, Everything Flows) - but wants to interrogate the emphasis on time and change found therein
Shifts from a substance metaphysics will deeply affect how we think about time and change (as we’ve discussed this morning) - “what counts as ‘changing’ is changing”
But what the difference between processualism and mechanism? Phyllis says that a lot of the ‘new mechanism’ is fully on board with the processualists critique of old mechanism (emphasis on the machine metaphor)
Phyllis gives us a breakdown of different understanding of mechanisms
Phyllis is suggesting that we need both entities and activities in mechanistic explanation, but that we need to understand these *dynamically*
The framework of mechanistic explanation raises questions for the processualist - eg what is the right time frame and how do we choose it?
Phyllis, like @ranilillanjum and @ElenaRoccaPD, grounds her work in scientific/medical/technological practice - and is working with Jono on the implication of mechanistic theories in InfoSec (information security)
They have been using the structure of mechanistic explanation to think through issues in information security
According to Phyllis and Jono, entities and activities can change into each other (eg instructions in a delete file and a delete action)
Soooo how do we turn process ontology into an explanatory framework? #ProBio18
And here we’ve got a final slide, emphasising how process ontologists might agree with the new mechanists #probio18
Sad to miss the final sessions of the day - but for awesome twitter insight, check out @PhyllisIllari @ranilillanjum @LynncChiu @SabinaLeonelli @yoginho #ProBio2018
