Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011) by Terrence Deacon is a ~600-page synthesis of physics, biology, and philosophy that argues the key to understanding life, mind, and meaning is not what is present in matter, but what is absent — constraints on physical processes.
Incomplete Naturebook by Terrence Deacon
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Core Argument
Deacon identifies a glaring gap in modern science: physics and chemistry can describe the material world but cannot explain ententional phenomena — meaning, purpose, value, consciousness, and intentionality — because these lack mass, charge, and location, yet clearly have causal power. His solution is a "figure/background shift" analogous to the discovery of zero: just as zero (an absence) revolutionized mathematics, recognizing absential properties (constraints) completes our picture of nature.
Three-Tier Framework
The book builds a nested hierarchy of dynamical processes:
Level | Domain | Key Feature |
Homeodynamics | Thermodynamics | Energy flow and dissipation; systems move toward equilibrium |
Morphodynamics | Self-organization | Far-from-equilibrium systems that generate and maintain form (e.g., turbulence, convection cells) |
Teleodynamics | Life & mind | Systems that are self-maintaining, self-correcting, and self-reproducing; acquire representational, functional, and normative organization |
Higher levels do not violate lower-level physics but depend on energy supplied by thermodynamic processes to sustain complex, far-from-equilibrium structures.
Key Ideas
Absentialism: What is not happening (constraint) is as causally potent as what is happening. Absences organize physical processes and generate properties like function, reference, and value.
Orthograde vs. contragrade causality: Living systems exhibit causal patterns that appear "inverse" to non-living systems — potential futures shape present behavior, not just past causes shaping present states.
Teleonomy: Biological purpose is real but not "intentional" in the human sense; it is end-directedness without a designer, explained through natural selection and self-organization.
Information redefined: Deacon extends Shannon information theory by weaving it with Boltzmann entropy to describe how information is not just transmitted but interpreted through teleodynamic work.
Against reductionism and dualism: The book rejects both "nothing but" (pure reductionism) and "something more" (dualism/mysticism), proposing instead "something less" — that ententional phenomena are real, natural, and grounded in constraints.
Structure
The book has three main parts: (1) the problems with current scientific paradigms regarding absence and teleology, (2) the emergent dynamics framework (homeodynamics → morphodynamics → teleodynamics), and (3) implications for neuroscience, consciousness, language, culture, and social systems. Deacon concludes that even human social systems — culture, language, economics, values — are teleodynamic, further constraints that reduce entropic dissipation.
The book was well received by figures like Daniel Dennett ("He's shaken up my thinking on several issues") and Stuart Kauffman, though it is noted for being dense and jargon-heavy.
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