Could Play, and Freedom, Trace Back to the Building Blocks of Everything?

Anthropologist David Graeber
writes at The Baffler about “play” and how the concept may
be necessary at any and every level of physical reality. I found
the piece via
NPR, which rightly highlights Graeber’s idea that the
self-organizing “play” principle is something approaching a
primitive ancestor to freedom. But, wrongly and unsurprisingly, NPR
differentiated that force from the ones at play in the
marketplace.

An excerpt from Graeber’s
essay:

What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse
perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly,
but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in
lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level
where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as
“self-organizing systems”?

This is not nearly as crazy as it might sound.

Philosophers of science, faced with the puzzle of how life might
emerge from dead matter or how conscious beings might evolve from
microbes, have developed two types of explanations.

The first consists of what’s called emergentism. The argument here
is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a
kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical
laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced
to, what came before. In this way, the laws of chemistry can be
said to be emergent from physics: the laws of chemistry presuppose
the laws of physics, but can’t simply be reduced to them. In the
same way, the laws of biology emerge from chemistry: one obviously
needs to understand the chemical components of a fish to understand
how it swims, but chemical components will never provide a full
explanation. In the same way, the human mind can be said to be
emergent from the cells that make it up.

Those who hold the second position, usually called panpsychism or
panexperientialism, agree that all this may be true but argue that
emergence is not enough. As British philosopher Galen Strawson
recently put it, to imagine that one can travel from insensate
matter to a being capable of discussing the existence of insensate
matter in a mere two jumps is simply to make emergence do too much
work. Something has to be there already, on every level of material
existence, even that of subatomic particles—something, however
minimal and embryonic, that does some of the things we are used to
thinking of life (and even mind) as doing—in order for that
something to be organized on more and more complex levels to
eventually produce self-conscious beings. That “something” might be
very minimal indeed: some very rudimentary sense of responsiveness
to one’s environment, something like anticipation, something like
memory. However rudimentary, it would have to exist for
self-organizing systems like atoms or molecules to self-organize in
the first place.

Read
the rest here.

Graeber is apparently a co-founder of the “Anti-Capitalist
Convergence,” so he too, like NPR, may miss the link between free
markets and self-organization, as well as the ought-to-be
self-evident idea that centralization (even when masquerading as
“consensus”) can only destroy the wonders self-organization (which
requires not consensus but freedom to act) can produce.