As the example of the viceroy butterfly shows, it’s impossible to fully
understand living processes by reducing them to their constituent ele-
ments and treating them separately from their contexts. Even in the
cloudy realm of quantum physics, many scientists now doubt that the so-
called fundamental particles of matter are in fact fundamental. Instead,
scientists like Ilya Prigogine and David Bohm believe that there is an
“implicate” order enfolded into even the lowest levels of matter. John
Wheeler asserts, “Physics is the child of meaning even as meaning is the
child of physics.” Paul Davies in The Cosmic Blueprintsuggests that in
a sense nothing—not even an elementary particle—exists independ-
ently, unaffected by downward causation:In principle, all particles that have ever interacted belong to a single wave
function—a global wave function containing a stupendous number of cor-
relations. One could even consider (and some physicists do) a wave func-
tion for the entire universe. In such a scheme the fate of any given particle
is inseparably linked to the fate of the cosmos as a whole, not in the trivial
sense that it may experience forces from its environment, but because its
very reality is interwoven with the rest of the universe.Returning to the human realm, Davies goes on to describe how,
although mental events represent quite a high level of organization in the
cosmic scheme, there exist above them still higher ones. Using Karl
Popper’s classification system, he divides the human and natural orders
into three “Worlds.” Material objects are defined as World 1 entities,
mental events as World 2, and societal and cultural events as World 3.
Davies then describes how downward causation operates in a way that
applies directly to literature and writing: “Thus an artistic tradition
might inspire a sculptor to shape a rock into a particular form. The
thoughts of the sculptor, and the distribution of atoms in the rock, are
determined by the abstract World 3 entity ‘artistic tradition.’”
As we’ve seen, it’s perilous to discuss literature by referring only to
its lower levels of organization. The literary tradition not only provides
the context in which literature is read, it operates in a top-down manner
to help shape it as well. As with other symbol systems, literature is cre-
ated jointly by complex human brains, language, and artistic traditions.
In addition, each skill we bring to reading and writing is itself—in
Holland’s words again—“an implicit model—or more precisely, a huge,
interlocking set of standard operating procedures that have been
inscribed on our nervous system and refined by years of experience.” We
are able to encode and extract real meaning from literary texts because152 Paul Lake