Originism: Put Life and Social Sciences on Firmer Footing

A freezer freezes, a search engine searches. In everyday life, we know lots of things by what they do, not by how they do it.

That’s fine for everyday life, but it’s a problem for science. At present, we know organisms by what they do, not by how they do it. Organisms make an effort—all of them, even the simplest, and we don’t yet know how. We know lots about biological mechanisms, but still, don’t understand why organisms make an effort when non-living things don’t.

We assume they have something in them that does the efforting. We give that something a name: will, motivation, appetite, drive, desire, whatever. Then we use that name in our explanations—saying, for example, that your motivations cause your effort—even though we don’t know what motivations are. No one has ever seen a motivation. Motivation happens in bodies, but when a body dies, the motivations are gone, and the body’s still there.

Not knowing how organisms make an effort leaves scientists debating too much like alchemists working with chemistry without knowing how chemistry works. Or like spiritualists, claiming they’ve explained life by saying we have souls.

The life sciences would advance more rigorously if we restored a scientific standard that’s been relaxed in dealing with the stubborn mystery of life. Call it "Originism," explaining properties from their origins in lower-level phenomena.

By originism’s standards, the lower-level sciences must explain the origin of what the higher-level sciences assume, and until they do, we must admit we’re hand-waving more like alchemists or spiritualists than scientists.

Originism is a commitment to building the sciences sequentially. It’s not just inter-disciplinary, it’s sequi-disciplinary. Classical physics now explains what chemistry assumes. Chemistry must explain the effort that biology assumes, and then on up, biology explaining what psychology assumes and beyond.

Where there’s a gap, we need to be honest about it, not patching over it, not pretending that we can fill it with an assumed something, something we name but can’t explain.

The devil’s in the details. Many theories today gloss over the gap between lifeless mechanism and life’s effort by smuggling in some assumed efforty thing, however subtly or academically disguised, that carries the theory over the gap. Emergence, complexity, enactivism, selfish genes, quantum consciousness, free energy—all are fine descriptions of phenomena to be explained. None explain why the living make an effort when chemistry doesn’t.

And no, evolutionary theory doesn’t explain the origin of effort either. Instead, it assumes effort. Evolution isn’t the origin of effort. Rather effort, organisms competing in their struggle for existence, is the origin of evolution.

Effort is something different from nothing but chemistry, yet to be explained. When we’ve explained it, we’ll have put the life and social sciences and even philosophy on much firmer footing.

Originism: A commitment to explaining properties rather than assuming them—a sequi-disciplinary approach. That’s the scientific standard re-imposed where it has been relaxed for lack of a chemical explanation for the effort all organisms make on their own behalf, the struggle for existence that is the origin of life.

In the next video, I’ll introduce Teleodynamics, an example of originist research.