Goal seeking, willing, rule-following, knowing, desiring—these are just some of the things we do that we cannot make sense of in causal terms. We cite intentional phenomena all the time, attributing them the kind of causal efficacy we attribute to the more mundane elements of nature. The problem, as Terrence Deacon frames it, is that whenever we attempt to explain these explainers, we find nothing, only absence and perplexity.

“The inability to integrate these many species of absence-based causality into our scientific methodologies has not just seriously handicapped us, it has effectively left a vast fraction of the world orphaned from theories that are presumed to apply to everything. The very care that has been necessary to systematically exclude these sorts of explanations from undermining our causal analyses of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena has also stymied our efforts to penetrate beyond the descriptive surface of the phenomena of…