No doubt about it: Life is truly amazing. I mean, the things it gets up to far exceed our imaginations! (Just watch a few dozen Ze Frank “True Facts” videos to scratch the surface.) It hardly seems necessary to invest in a post to elucidate what constitutes Life, when a small child will correctly identify instances almost every time. Living beings demonstrate awareness about their surroundings, taking actions broadly in service of goals to thrive and reproduce. An amoeba marks itself as alive because we witness its purposeful mobility to secure food and evade danger.
Yet, living beings are undeniably made of atoms—atoms that do not appear in any close investigation to operate outside the usual rules of physics. Our sensation of awareness, experience of color perception, etc. seems so far removed from physics that the intractable connection is obvious to neither child nor adult. How could this awareness (what we label “consciousness”) possibly arise out of inanimate particles obeying physics without some “special sauce” unavailable to mere “machines” like computers or robots? It seems prima facie absurd, so it requires an unusual suspension of disbelief to submit to the baffling prospect.
How is it even possible, though, that inanimate matter can constitute Life? In a word: feedback. Life is feedback. The sun is of huge importance to Life, but we would not say that it is alive itself even though it actively engages with the universe and is a critical contributor to living beings on Earth. It’s continuance as a star is not contingent on these interactions. No feedback loop makes fusion in the core care what happens in Las Vegas. As an aside, I resist dividing lines and include the Sun (and everything else) in a living whole: just try doing without it!
Feedback Makes Things Cool
I often taught a course for physics majors that had them build—in teams of two or three—a working device whose parameters were pretty wide-open. It needed to sense/measure something in the real world, process that information in some way, then act back on the real world in response—usually in a way that altered whatever measurement was being made. This is called feedback: “Hmmm: the signal is stronger in this direction, so I’ll move toward it; even stronger now!” The explosion of creativity that emerged was a delight—and a lesson in itself. Each year, about half the projects reminded me of projects from previous years, but another half would be totally new/original. One recurrent theme was a little motorized wheeled thingy (car) that could roam around and perhaps ignore obstacles, stay within taped lines, navigate a maze, move scattered objects to a collection point, or track down a target—sometimes a combination of these elements. But we also had one-off devices that sorted marbles by color, mixed cocktails perfectly (college kids), threw a ping-pong-ball into a cup (still college kids), tip-tilted a table to navigate a camera-tracked marble through a maze, pulsed and colored a spinning “sphere” of LEDs in response to tones and volume of ambient music, maintained an inverted pendulum via camera feedback—and loads of other fun, creative ideas. [Before my time at UCSD, Mike Judge of Beavis/Butthead fame went through the same class as a physics major.]
As a warm-up exercise, I would have students build a pair of light sensors on a moving wand, the goal being to have the wand point toward light. It also employed a proximity sensor to keep the wand from running into anything. Even in this well-defined domain, I was perpetually surprised by how much behavioral variety emerged. Depending on sensor arrangement, electronic conditioning, and unconstrained choices on how they coded the decision tree, each one had its own personality. You might think I’m being glib about that word, but I swear those things would often make me laugh when I “tested” them out. Sometimes their reaction was super-skittish when I would move my hand close, and it would take a while before they would tentatively creep back toward the light and that big scary obstacle that might still be there. Others seemed aggressive. Some were jittery, while others smooth and relaxed. The odd duck was a bit loopy and hard to characterize. Relatedly, our chickens with walnut-sized-brains had tremendous and distinct personalities: the bar for personality isn’t terribly high.
The projects demonstrated that sensing and feedback is all it takes for a machine to mimic some (tiny sliver) of the behaviors of Life. Yet while important, that’s not the form of feedback of primary concern here.
Awareness and Reaction
Before I get to the feedback that really makes Life incredible, I want to discuss awareness and reaction. The student projects tended to have some form of awareness (sensing) and made decisions (reacted) accordingly—sometimes displaying baffling behaviors that neither I nor the designers/coders could explain. Occasionally unexpected bugs became valuable features that redirected the aims of the project in fun ways.
Awareness is at the core of what we call consciousness. I’m often “on about” consciousness because of our culture’s tendency to elevate it to a grand, transcendent state in classic human-supremacist (and dualist) fashion—set apart from the mundane elements of the universe. Having such sophisticated cranial hardware—a prefrontal cortex and all—gives us more of this neural connectedness and awareness (of our brian’s workings—or thoughts—for instance) than is the case for most creatures. It is, therefore, this particular quality we select as a definition of superiority: we pretend it’s a game/competition then write the rules to ensure we “win.”
I dismiss the notion of any “quantum” leap in awareness, putting humans on one side of a sharp line. The property appears to track cranial complexity, but even exists to some degree in the absence of brains or neurons. Most of the many-millions of species on Earth don’t bother with neurons, yet still require awareness and reactivity to operate, learn, and survive. Microbes sense food gradients, toxicity gradients, light gradients, etc. and move according to their changing needs. Plants sense water, nutrients, light, and configure accordingly. They also sense infestation and warn others nearby to ready defenses.
Thus, if we must use the word “consciousness,” then extending the privilege to any form of Life, however brainless, seems the least we could do. It’s a continuum of complexity, all apparently rooted in material interactions. Anyone who disagrees can try thinking their objection without complete dependence on matter and energy (arranged appropriately). No one has yet succeeded in that challenge.
Transition States
In another important waypoint en route to the main point, let’s look at seeds and spores. As discussed in a closely parallel post called Decisions, Decisions, seeds can remain dormant and viable for tens of thousands of years and spores for hundreds of millions of years! All that time, they maintain a sort of vigilant awareness of their environment. Yet, they do so without a nanojoule of metabolic expenditure, without neurons, without tiring. (I would venture that what ultimately disables them is a random high-energy particle—from cosmic rays or terrestrial radioactivity—destroying a critical atomic arrangement; more likely to occur for larger, more complex seeds than tiny-target spores.) The patient “awareness” of seeds and spores is more easily traced to a “mechanistic” origin of receptors essentially spring-loaded to effect a change when ambient conditions and resources warrant (opening channels for ion flow). Seeds and spores unable to make “good” decisions in this sense never get folded into successful lineages.
All the Way Down
As a final illustrative example, we’ll consider the electron—as a familiar example of a fundamental particle. An electron is “aware”—to varying intensities—of every other charge in the universe (in its causal “light cone“), constantly reacting. Similar to how a microbe might move in reaction to a sensed food gradient, an electron moves according to the gradient of electric potential. The fact that it obeys strict rules every single time does not in any way preclude complex behavior that is effectively unpredictable and “sensitive” (try the most difficult level of the electric field hockey game; I’ve managed legitimate navigation using 6 placed charges—or 3 in a “loophole” cheat).
So, being aware of its surroundings and reacting accordingly, would we say that electrons are conscious? I suppose I can’t stop anyone from doing so, but it seems inappropriate in the usual sense of the word. The electron is just doing as it must in reaction to its surroundings—in complete, constrained compliance with the laws of physics.
Ah: but if I yank the privileged term from electrons, then surely spores deserve the same revocation: they “just” have some physics-based receptor that will trigger when the appropriate molecules come in contact. Well, then, the microbe is decked with sensors and structured in such a way that signals on this particular channel stimulate this kind of response. It’s still using the same rules of physics (elaborated to the level of chemistry and biology), just in a far more sophisticated way that quickly/easily exceeds our limited comprehension. By the time we have the full self-replicating microbe, we are FAR beyond the level of sophistication achievable by our engineering efforts.
So it goes with plants, fungi, mollusks, worms, frogs, hawks, skunks, and humans. Increasing layers of complexity—conspicuously expressed in hardware (!!)—permit increasing levels of awareness and complex reaction. By the time we get to human-like brains, the prefrontal cortex is wired in contact with many other parts of the brain explicitly to exercise some balancing/management of potentially competing impulses. Thus part of our organism becomes “aware” of (some subset of) our internal processes…and we call this “magic” (transcendence) in the absence of complete understanding—which I’d bet we never acquire.
All this to say: if one wants apply the term “consciousness” to humans, then be prepared to extend the courtesy all the way to elementary particles—which by definition lack constituent parts such as neurons. If no sharp distinctions exist on the continuum, then either all individual particles and collection of particles have (transcendent) consciousness, or none do at all. I prefer the latter, as the original intent of the word obviously becomes stretched to the absurd at the electron level (also fruitful to muse about the free will of an electron, which is so well-behaved as to require no transcendent qualities). I don’t at all mean to imply that because no dividing line exists on the continuum from electrons to humans, both have the same level of awareness: that would be absurd and not at all consistent with material complexity. I just suggest that the spectrum is one of vast differences in complexity, lacking an ontological gap.
What is it that’s so scary about recognizing what we call consciousness as the experience facilitated by a remarkably sophisticated arrangement of matter operating by nothing other than physics? Why not marvel? I’ll tell you this right now: no one has a shred of evidence contradicting this unified description of how everything—including Life—works, while corresponding physical structures are ubiquitously found as compelling circumstantial/forensic evidence.
Back to Feedback
I previously dangled the notion that some aspect of feedback separates Life from inanimate matter. So which is it: all the same stuff, or something transcendent?
Yes to both, in a mundane sort of way. I would put forth that it’s all the same matter obeying all the same rules of interaction (in fact, no choice otherwise—raising the spectre of determinism that some constitutions cannot mentally abide). What makes Life unique is feedback on performance. It’s the painfully simple but unimaginably powerful concept behind evolution. Viable organisms propagate their genetic instructions to future organisms. Non-viable organisms don’t stick around.
What this means is that the amoeba whose reaction to a food gradient is to move in the direction of higher food concentration fares better, so whatever trial coding told it to do that is passed down. That’s the basic story, repeated and amplified and honed in billions of different ways. The fly that lifts off before the horse tail slaps down will remain a fly and make other flies with the correct decision-wiring to automatically evade a fatal slap. Life exhibits proactive, purposeful action because it could not exist any other way. The idea that it manages to do so within a material context is all the more impressive to me.
Practically speaking, Life boils down to electromagnetic interactions (gravity and nuclear forces hardly shaped the origins of Life) executing a stupendously rich dance according to molecular structures and vanilla physics. It would appear to have no other choice: no violations have ever been noted.
The “magic” happens precisely because of this selection feedback. An electron responds to a defined gradient in potential in a fully predictable manner. Life, however, can surprise us (our stripped-down mental models) purely based on the complexity of relevant interactions.
The light-seeking, collision-avoiding wands students built in my class might execute surprising behaviors, but lacked an essential ingredient: the ones I saw were not proven to be reproductively viable in a tangled ecological context. Nothing we build is. No computer, AI platform, helicopter, etc. has the staggering burden of making decisions impacting its viability to remain in the world, and thus come off as empty executors of deliberately de-complexified (debugged, “lobotomized”) code. The quirks of the wands were effectively random, based on arbitrary component properties, physical arrangements, and coding decisions made by the students. When it comes to Life, every quirk has consequences and thus a deep story: a reason it serves the being well (enough), in its context.
The post on rivulets offers a case of inanimate but adaptive, reinforcing decision-making. Rivulets are an example of success-based feedback for self-replicating structures whose initial “random” decisions are selected for fitness so that surviving rivulets appear to have the magic sauce to make “smart” decisions. Though brain-busting complexity sits between mature rivulets and penguins, the fundamentals are not wholly unbridgeable: both are selected to make the kinds of decisions that allow them to survive. That doesn’t diminish the penguin’s amazingness in any way. For me, it serves to inspire even greater awe at the outcome.
What is Life?
Our universe may be one of a multitude—as experimentally-motivated cosmologies and landscape string theories promote. Whether or not this is true, our particular universe has a particular (very small) set of fundamental particles and a rich set of interactions between them (the primary story is interactions, not the bit-player particles). Arbitrary combinations of mass ratios, relative strengths of the fundamental forces, vacuum energy, symmetries, etc. are exceedingly unlikely to produce even atoms or complex chemistry, let alone galaxies, stars, and planets. We’re in the lucky sort of universe that can make stars and truck on for billions of years. Belief in luck isn’t actually required, as our being in the “right” sort of universe represents an unavoidable and major selection effect.
So, what is Life? To me, it’s a staggeringly impressive trick that the universe can perform, playing by the normal rules utilizing the normal material. Wow. Lucky us! When something can happen, we ought not be too surprised when it does somewhere in a vast and ancient universe—especially when that surprise traces to a lack of our own capacity to pin down how it happens.
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I recently started reading Philip Ball's, "How Life Works". He suggests that: "…one of the best ways to characterize living entities is not through any of the features or properties usually considered to define it, such as replication, metabolism, or evolution. Rather, living entities are generators of meaning."
I recommend this fascinating paper about the brain and the immune system: The brain is not mental! coupling neuronal and immune cellular processing in human organisms. " This paper argues that a promising way forward in understanding the nature of human cognition is to zoom out from the prevailing picture focusing on its neural basis. It considers instead how neurons work in tandem with other type of cells (e.g., immune) to subserve biological self-organization and adaptive behavior of the human organism as a whole."
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnint.2023.1057622/full
Having only read the abstract, this perspective appears to make a lot of sense. Many organisms solve problems without neurons, and our own immune systems are a great example. The overall message is that our attempts to draw sharp lines are usually misguided (an expression of our hangups), because the universe is a far more tangled and messy affair than our brains are prepared to handle. Cognition may well be *dominated* by neural activity, but not strictly confined to that channel. We know some things in our bones.
Here's a great quote from near the end:
"… cognition is the result of information processing distributed across all cellular systems in the body, including the brain, which is, in our view, (part of) the body. Speaking about brain-body-environment interactions in constituting cognition may be misleading because it tacitly inherits the distinction between mind (brain) and body. Cognitive processing however, does not require brain plus body plus environment. Rather, cognitive processing takes place in every single cell of our bodies, among which neuronal cells play a key part, but only a part. Hence, one may say that we literally think with all the cells of our bodies, and not just our heads.
… Cognition may be thus better understood as “multi-scale continuum of organizational levels of capabilities” designed to subserve the self-organization and adaptation of the human organism as a whole, rather than a process restrictively confined to the brain and the neural system."
I might even go further to say that the sun is part of our cognitive process, as a key player without which no thought would be possible. The rocks in the earth generate enough gravity to hold the air we need to breathe to supply our body/brain with the atoms/molecules it needs to carry out cognition, so we can't think without all the rocks. Ancient microbes (even those now extinct) contribute to what we are today, and thus constitute a vital part of every thought (without which…). Dividing lines tend to artificially obscure the wholeness and interconnectedness of everything we experience.
Amen to this last reply, Tom!!! And thanks for highlighting this paper Elisabeth R.
Everything is matter and every “thing” – be it a fundamental particle or a complex arrangement of interacting particles – is of consequence/shapes/contributes to the existence of everything else (whether the “thing” is aware of it or not). And vice versa. In short, for me, “Everything is matter and everything matters”.
The subject-object split is a mental abstraction that, if taken as real, leads to mind-body dualism and a blindness to the all-pervasive interconnectedness of it all, which is key to engaging with the word as though everything truly matters. At least that’s how others’ words have lead me to see it…
I second what Bim said! My thoughts in response to the Rivulets post were that life as we know it requires water, from droplets through rivulets up to oceans, so doesn’t that count for something? and around the idea of place-based ‘fire of life’ described in many traditions, that when you dam a river or blow off the top of the mountain, you are destroying the capacity for life downstream. Glad I wasn’t totally off base.
Expanding/riffing on Elisabeth R’s post/link: our guts are homes to trillions of microbes, and responsible for manufacturing over 90% of our body’s serotonin. So, not only is it not a brain thing, it’s literally other organisms shaping our personalities! Learning this has helped me shake off residual duality and I find it oddly comforting.
The idea of the interconnectedness and importance of everything is beautifully captured by the Aboriginal mantra of “Nothing is nothing!”.
Having coincidentally just finished "DNA" by James Watson, I turned to read "What is LIfe" by Tom Murphy. I want to include a couple of quotes from "DNA":
"Life, we know now, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions."
"In addition to laying out a misleadingly dismal vision of our future within the film itself, the creators of Gattaca concocted a promotional tag line aimed at the deepest prejudices against genetic knowledge: 'There is no gene for the human spirit.' It remains a dangerous blind spot in our society that so many wish this were so. If the truth revealed by DNA could be accepted without fear, we should not despair for those who follow us."
OK, Tom. Perhaps you are beginning to convince me. I acknowledge that the "special sauce" appears to be missing. Maybe it's just mathematics, all the way down…
I hasten to add: physics, without mathematics is incomprehensible…
"all the way down…" — It's just a *very* long way down, exceeding our wits. "So what?" the universe says.
[Added later]: Think of it as a hole so deep we can't see the bottom in the darkness, nor can we hear any report of a stone dropped in. Some fear the depth and flee the hole's edge. Others argue about whether the hole's composition is a continuation of the walls they *can* see, or transforms into a truly different phenomenon with no bottom or walls, once deep enough. In the actual case, we can dimly discern the bottom (e.g., DNA made of atoms) but not the walls all the way down in detail. Yet we catch glimpses of wall protrusions here and there, and it's still rock and dirt in every instance. Nonetheless, in the absence of being able to map out the entire wall, some prefer to say that other substances must account for the parts we cannot see, in classic dualist form. Not a perfect analogy, but hits some of the elements.
The illusion of free will leads one to realize the illusion of "self".
It's actually easy to understand if one studies neuroscience, psychology, how the brain and cognition works…. Is fascinating when you first find out.
Illusions are tricks of perspective played on *an observer*. So if 'self' is an illusion then who is being fooled? One can study neuroscience, psychology etc etc until the proverbial cows come home – that won't affect reality, but it might alter one's perception of it.
This seems to be a paradox of construction (artifact of definitions, decontextualized logic, etc.). It forces a subject/object divide, and implicitly assumes a "real" "self" that must be fooled (asserting a "who"). It's possible to bypass such imposed constraints and adopt a view that our entire experience is woven into and by material interactions (within and without), and that part of a brain's function is to abstract elements of the full complex reality—one emergent aspect of which is a constructed sense of self. Whether any words in a finite and rigidly-defined language can capture the essence is doubtful—so that little guidance is likely to emerge from imposing/constraining definitions of words like illusion. Best to realize that everything a brain produces (no matter the hemisphere) is not the original, full reality but an imperfect, reduced model of it represented in neural signals. Every perception therefore acquires an illusory aspect, to varying degrees of fidelity.
You said it beaufully Tom. It is humbling to realise that we merely "observe" our toughts, feelings, we are not authors of anything. (I know the language again might not be best suited again but you get what I mean)
Language has its limitations, as do all human constructs.
"we are not authors of anything"
(Round and round…) That absolves 'us' (humans) of responsibility for the ongoing destruction of nature etc…
On absolution: the concept doesn't even make sense unless already assigning (asserting) a soul-like agent AND a granting moral authority. It should be abundantly obvious that my efforts are vehemently opposed to modernity's blatant destruction of the world. It is totally possible to comport this with a materialist point of view, although it probably can't make sense while lashed to the concept of soul (agency beyond material).
Let's say evolution resulted in an organism that caused mass extinction (perhaps think of cyanobacteria and the great oxidation event). Are those organisms morally responsible? Is it "their fault" that evolution cooked them up? Did they have a say before they were even formed? Is absolution relevant? Can one shift blame to evolution, or does that just "happen" without any moral guidance?
Humans are far more complex than cyanobacteria, and capable of recognizing their (our) role in initiating a sixth mass extinction. Are we wired "well enough" to react to this awful stimulus in accordance with values arising from a social species? I hope so, and will instinctively (compulsively) do my part to raise awareness (amplify the stimulus). Part of that is smashing hubris and aggrandizement, recognizing that we are deeply embedded/connected and not transcendently special. I seek no absolution—just response. Let modernity (and dualism and transcendent hallucination) die.
[BTW: I do admire your concise comments: lots packed into a few words. That I could do as well…]
Yes ok, the word 'absolve' does have religious connotations, you're right. I know you (and me both) are vehemently opposed to modernity's blatant destruction of the world – I was just trying to counter Andrea's assertion that "we are not authors of anything", as that implies a lack of agency. On the 'macro' scale at least, we have agency, therefore we do have responsibility for our actions (eg destruction etc). No soul is needed.
Of course your hypothetical mass-extinction organism would not be responsible. The concepts of 'moral' actions only apply in the human realm. It is *because* we are so much more complex than other animals that we have more agency, and therefore more capacity for 'good' and 'bad' – this does *not* mean superiority (far from it).
I promise this is “my” last contribution for awhile, Tom, but I felt that this might genuinely be of some use/interest to people…
Our “minds”/minds are all made from (and reside in) matter (this captures both the physicalist/materialist and panpsychist views). They are each made from (and perhaps reside in) a lot more matter than just that found in the organ we call the brain. The brain itself is not a closed-off box, though we like to point at the organ and say “that is the brain!”. There has been a contribution from every single particle that appears in our past light cone to our mind/brain, and it is not really a brain at all unless it’s embedded in a body and a surrounding environment (the whole Cosmos ultimately). Our individual minds/brains are all 100% creations of the Cosmos, and 100% its “property”, not ours or anything “beyond the Cosmos”.
The SENSE of “I” that we each carry is a real thing. Indeed, you could argue that a sense of “I”, or – more humbly said – a sense of self, is a requirement for life, even perhaps the major defining feature of life. Persisting as a living organism is about “self-preservation” (this could be my modernity-type thinking edging itself in though…). Life is about the matter “within” a living organism functioning and acting as though it is independent in some sense from the rest of the Cosmos. BUT: the “I” in each of us modernites now desperately needs to fully acknowledge/re-acquaint itself with the fact that “I” is completely grounded in the Cosmos, and that the feeling/belief that it ACTUALLY is separate/totally independent is an illusion/glaringly obvious mistake.
The deep feeling of “I” is very much undeniably real, but there can never be “I” without all the “not-I”. “I” actually has “not-I” as its sole origin and sole “sustaining force”. “I” is literally built out of “not-I” (so much for trusting the logic of our own modern language).
The modernity-type human “I” is a sense of self that has managed to banish itself from the rest of the Cosmos, at the same time as convincing itself it is more important than the rest of the Cosmos (human supremacism a la Descartes). We can have a sense of self, but this self needs to position itself back in correct relation with the environment to be a “healthy self”, which I think the self of every other living thing bar us modernites qualifies as being. “Self preservation” requires preservation of the “non-self”.
Again, there is no real subject-object split. It is purely a mental abstraction. We (“subjects”) are all instances of the universe observing itself. There are no separate “observers”. They are all embedded and composed of the “observed”/“object”. Our own modern-day language does a remarkably good job of keeping us imprisoned/shackled to the idea that the subject-object split is real. Be very mindful of our own modern-day language and the sinister ideas that hide within it! The subject-object split is the faulty foundation on which modern day language is built, or the idea that has infiltrated itself into the meanings we modernites ascribe to so many of its/our words. Another of those chicken-egg-type scenarios again I guess…
And just to carry my last comment a tiny bit further…
The notion of a Cosmos-creating God focussed (solely) on humans dovetails seamlessly into the rest of the dualist’s fictional story of “human supremacism”. This is because it serves as as a highly effective, self-created panacea for the self-imposed sense of loneliness, isolation and general existential angst that otherwise arises from the dualist’s self-imposed removal of the human self from the Cosmos (expulsion from the “Garden of Eden” that is the Cosmos?).
God: “It’s not the Cosmos that REALLY matters, my child, it’s YOU! You just have to truly believe in me to know this fundamental truth!”.
To me, the notion of a human-focussed, Cosmos-creating God is a mental invention made in response to us taking the subject-object “split” literally. In essence, an error borne of an error. The truth is the Cosmos is our one true Mother and Home, not God and Heaven/Nirvana (or Hell…). Our modernite language, modernite (monotheistic) religions and totalitarian agriculture make for a three-headed beast that is very hard to topple.
It's a difficult thing to do, defining life. The collection of atoms doing the defining will be biased, inevitably. Life is an interesting collection of atoms but even "interesting" depends on the observer. The "observer" would seem to be one of those interesting collections of atoms. It seems an impossible mission.
I'm on the final chapter of The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist. That enormous book is a bit like a too-rich pudding – it was good to begin with but I'm struggling to finish it (he over-egged it somewhat).
So (as is quite often the case) the 'truth' may reside somewhere in between.
It seems to me that, despite what McGilchrist says, there's a reality that exists whether or not someone observes it. Also it seems to me that, despite tmurphy's valiant efforts here, there's still no accounting for the *origin* of Life (once it began, then evolution, sure).
Then there's the small matter of matter – where did it come from? Where did the 'Big Bang' come from? To say 'I do not know' is to accept the limitations of science and embrace the Mystery. Materialism can't explain material, no matter what.
Thought of as a deep hole, it is indeed a long way down. Can we really – even dimly – discern the bottom?
I read a 6,000 word summary of The Matter with Things (https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/understanding-iain-mcgilchrists-worldview), capturing 11 main elements—some of which seem pretty "out there" to me so that I have to get off the bus.
Indeed, science is severely limited: unable to answer every question—like why is there something rather than nothing; or (I suspect) why we have the particular particles we do, or why the interactions are what they are. A certain acceptance is healthy. Things just are.
I might recommend re-reading my posts Mysterious Materialism, and Putting Science in its Place. The task isn't to pin down every detail, but neither is it to fill our enormous ignorance with unfounded declarations of "can't possibly."