Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011 (hardcover, ISBN 978-0-393-04991-6;
Library of Congress 2011030827; xv, 602 pp. per the catalogue record).
Norton reissued it in paperback on 22 April 2013 (ISBN 978-0-393-34390-8,
624 pp. per the publisher). The catalogue record the Internet Archive keeps
dates the hardcover 2012. Wikipedia’s infobox gives “November 21, 2011” as
the hardcover’s release; published: uses that date, which no catalogue
record I reached confirms.
The brief’s citation (2011, W. W. Norton) is correct.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and a library contents note, not a reading. What follows is what those sources say.
- The publisher’s description (Norton, paperback page), verbatim: “As scientists study the minutiae of subatomic particles, neural connections, and molecular compounds, their attempts at a ‘theory of everything’ harbor a glaring omission: they still cannot explain us, the thoughts and perceptions that truly make us what we are. A masterwork that brings together science and philosophy, Incomplete Nature offers a revolutionary, captivating account of how life and consciousness emerged, revealing how our desires, feelings, and intentions can be understood in terms of the physical world.”
- The catalogue summary: “Examines the emergent processes that bridge the gap between organisms that think and have consciousness and those that do not and discusses the origins of life, information, and free will.”
- Contents (the catalogue’s contents note): Absence; (W)holes; Homunculi; Golems; Teleonomy; Emergence; Constraint; Homeodynamics; Morphodynamics; Teleodynamics; Autogenesis; Work; Information; Significance; Evolution; Self; Sentience; Consciousness; Epilogue.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, for the philosophy that tries to mark living, teleological systems off from merely dissipative ones. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Deacon” and the title found nothing.
Deferred because it was not read. This record files a book from its
publisher’s description and contents when no lawful text can be read, and
does not rebuild a book from what others say about it.
What the record already says about it, at second hand, from Nahas & Sachs (LIT-192, read in NOTE-094):
- The demarcation claim. NOTE-094 reports Deacon’s levels as morphodynamics, self-organizing dissipation, and teleodynamics, the coupling of mutually limiting morphodynamic processes that preserves a system’s integrity. The “autogen” model (Deacon, Srivastava & Bacigalupi 2014) realizes it. This is the book’s chapters 9–11 as the contents name them. If the account holds, it is the record’s candidate for a principled line between a candle flame (morphodynamic) and an organism (teleodynamic). That is unverified here.
- Its use in the naturalism debate. Nahas & Sachs report García-Valdecasas’s preference for teleodynamics over the organizational approach (Moreno & Mossio, LIT-536), and suggest Deacon for the philosophical project of placing mind in nature (NOTE-094, C5 and C7).
- The candle-flame case against autopoiesis. NOTE-093 and NOTE-094 report, from Nahas & Sachs, that Deacon and Cashman criticize autopoiesis (Thompson 2007) for lacking the tools to tell living teleology from dissipative self-organization. The source is identified here: Deacon, T. W. & Cashman, T. (2013), “Teleology versus mechanism in biology: beyond self-organization”, in B. G. Henning & A. C. Scarfe (eds.), Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back into Biology, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (ISBN 978-0-7391-7436-4), ch. 13. Nahas & Sachs’s bibliography gives pp. 290–311 and lists the editors as “Scarfe & Henning”; the volume’s editor page at Gonzaga lists Henning first. I did not see the chapter or the volume’s pagination, and found no lawful copy, so it is not filed. A later paper by the same authors, “Steps to a metaphysics of incompleteness” (Theology and Science 14(4):401–429, 2016, DOI 10.1080/14746700.2016.1231977), is also in Nahas & Sachs’s bibliography; I did not seek it out.
Where it would bear, once read: on the demarcation question (LIT-192), as the strongest claim in this batch that there is a line; on Friston’s Markov-blanket account (LIT-526), which names the candle flame and excludes it on statistical grounds where Deacon would use constraint; on Perunov, Marsland & England (LIT-518), which denies the line; and on Levin’s goal-pursuing Selves (LIT-439). Its chapters on information, self and consciousness also bear on the record’s consciousness readings, for instance Seth’s biological naturalism (LIT-135), and on THEORY-043’s question about minds made of parts.
Priority for a reading: high for the demarcation question. Chapters 8–11 are the ones to read first, and the Deacon & Cashman chapter is probably the shorter way in.
Access when seeded:
- Norton’s product page for the paperback (ISBN 9780393343908): the description above, the paperback publication date and the page count. The hardcover’s page served the same record.
- Internet Archive catalogue metadata for its scan (incompletenature0000deac): title, imprint, ISBNs, LCCN 2011030827, extent, summary and contents note. The scan is lending-only. lccn.loc.gov returned 404 for the MARC XML, so the Library of Congress record itself was not read.
- Crossref’s record of Nahas & Sachs’s references (DOI 10.1007/s11229-023-04147-w), for the Deacon & Cashman citations; and the Gonzaga page for Beyond Mechanism (editors, publisher, ISBN, chapter 13’s title and authors).