“Something happens when a living being passes from life to death.  The material particles are the same and in the same positions, but the living being is gone.”  I’ve said this a few times in polite conversation and the results have been underwhelming.  No one listens.  It’s boring, I’m a bore, and folks check out by saying stuff like, “So what? Death is no different than turning a robot off.”  Here folks use a materialist image to dismiss an unwelcome conversation.  They envision an organism as a machine, such that to understand the mechanical workings of its parts, be they atoms, cells or chips, one understands the whole thing. 

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I do it too.  When someone gets a little too spiritual with me, I hear my inner voice refute that person with words like, “that’s not soul, it’s just dopamine in the brain.”  Sometimes it happens in church when I’m tired and in a bad mood, not willing to expend the energy needed to really listen to the pastor.  In this case, materialism is a cheap way for me to refute an argument without having to think about it.  It’s educated spite. 

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I still want to know the difference between life and death, though.  Anybody who’s witnessed another cross over the line, when the light leaves her eyes, knows that something is gone and it isn’t a material part.  Something fundamental happens at the moment of death, even though the parts and their positions haven’t changed.  

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To explain death, a modern scientist says, “this part broke thereby causing death.”  He uses his default image of material particles combining like Lego blocks to create everything.  And therein lies his leap of faith: that the parts explain the whole.  Parts-to-whole analysis is powerful and necessary, but the parts can’t explain the whole nor the loss of the whole in death.  The biologist Steven Talbott says,

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“whatever the level we analyze, from macromolecular complexes, to organelles, to cells, to tissues, to individual organs, to the organism as a whole, we find the same principle: we cannot reconstruct the pattern at any level of activity by starting from the parts and interactions at that level. There are always organizing principles that must be seen working from a larger whole into the parts.”

 

Mr. Talbott speaks of organizing principles that work from a larger whole into the parts.  That is, the whole maintains the parts.  In a living being, the parts change and flow hither and thither, but the whole being remains in his essential nature.  On Earth, a stable pattern of life has remained for billions of years despite the flow of parts.  The ancient Greeks saw this as the mystery of constancy within change.  How does the whole maintain stability around the flux of its parts?    

 

Both Darwin and Aristotle answered the question: Darwin with his theory of evolution, and Aristotle with his principle of forms.  Think about Darwin’s natural selection.  It explains, from a bird’s eye view, whole-to-parts, why organisms and all their parts behave as they do.  The why, the purpose, is survival and reproduction.  The weakness in the story of natural selection (which is true for all whole-to-parts analysis) is that it doesn’t translate to mathematics, nor even probabilities, and it doesn’t give clean, mechanical causation.  But said weakness is a strength, because it explains the purpose of things in a common-sense story.  The next time I see someone confronted with a mystery of human behavior, I’ll pause for a moment to give him time to think up some half-baked selective advantage to tell the why story, top-down, whole-to-parts.  Why are there liberals and conservatives, usually in a 50/50 split?  I once heard the great Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe, say that the tribe needs the diversity of both ends of the political spectrum to maintain cohesion in the middle, which enhances the survival of group DNA.  Makes sense to me.

 

For Aristotle, form organizes the material parts and makes them intelligible within the whole.  I talk about this a lot in my next series, Self.  It’s a top-down, whole-to-parts story, and like natural selection, it must be true.  Something must make the center hold in a living being that has trillions of internal parts moving around and changing, in an environment that’s also changing.  In fact, the whole is less variant than the parts, because the parts morph radically for the purpose of maintaining the greater constancy of the whole.  Roger Scruton put it thus, “the essential nature of an individual thing is given by the concept under which its parts are gathered together in a unity” (essay, My Brain and I, from The New Atlantis, Spring 2014).

 

In sum, we have two images: 1) the universe begins with individual and separate material parts, which then combine according to physical laws of nature to make all things, and/or 2) the universe begins as one whole, which separates into lesser wholes and into parts, and everything fits within a higher whole (until we reach the ultimate whole).  The first image explains the material how of things, and the second explains why.  Aristotle said we should use both images, not either/or.  He said that all things are built up from material parts and organized top-down by forms.  I think Aristotle got it right.

 

I propose that we use the parts-to-whole perspective for simple, closed systems.  Parts-to-whole can tie material particles to physical and chemical laws to derive a mathematical prediction of cause and effect with exact quantities of input and output.  We should use the whole-to-parts perspective for complex systems where it’s a cacophonous mess of everything talking to everything else all the time and we can’t trace a clean cause and effect.  We make sense of the mess by looking at the whole and its qualitative nature.

 

As to the question of life and death, I leave the next-to-last words for Steven Talbott:

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“The coordination, the ordering, the continual overcoming of otherwise disordering impacts from the environment so as to retain for the whole a particular character or organized way of being, expressively unique and different from other creatures — this is the ‘more’ of the organism that cannot be had from the mere summing of discrete parts. The center holds, and this ordering center — this whole that is more than the sum of its parts — cannot itself be just one or some of those parts it is holding together. When the organism dies, the parts are all still there, but the whole is not.” 

 

Just before and just after the moment of death, the body has the same particles in the same places, but life is gone.  Therefore, the difference between life and death isn’t in the material particles.  The difference is me.  Once I’m dead, my self is gone, and the doctors can operate on my corpse but it won’t raise Lazarus....  Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.