Jeremy Sherman on Emergence

ChatGPT response · editorial edition

Key Terms and Definitions

1. Autogen: Deacon’s proposed minimal chemical system in which reciprocal catalysis produces shell components, and shells preserve catalysts for later regeneration. The whole open–closed cycle is the proposed self, not just the capsule. It is a model, not an organism shown to have existed on early Earth.
2. Autocatalysis: Catalysis in which reaction products promote further production of themselves, directly or through a network. In the interview’s simplified example, A helps produce B and B helps produce A. Continued growth requires reactants and suitable energetic conditions; catalysts do not create matter or energy.
3. Capsid molecule: The interview’s shorthand for a shell-forming molecular component, illustrated by proteins that assemble into viral capsids. An autogen would need compatible shell-forming products of its own chemistry; modern virus components do not establish their prebiotic availability.
4. Constraint: A limitation or restriction that governs the behavior and interactions of a system.
5. Dynamical depth: Deacon’s proposed approach to complexity through the organization and history of dynamical processes. Sherman invokes it to distinguish living intricacy from mere randomness; the interview does not provide its mathematical definition. It should not be treated here as a calculated score.
6. Emergent constraint: A restriction on possible interactions produced by the interactions themselves, such as traffic congestion narrowing the routes cars can take. The proposal asks how coupled constraints could regenerate each other; an isolated whirlpool does not already do that.
7. Information-first model: An origin-of-life approach giving an early role to replicating, sequence-bearing molecules, notably RNA. This does not by itself claim that a molecule has conscious knowledge or that fully modern genetic translation existed at the beginning.
8. Metabolism-first model: An approach emphasizing chemical reaction networks and energy use before a modern genetic system. Explaining persistence, reproduction, and heritable change remains part of the challenge.
9. Membrane-first model: An approach emphasizing compartments that concentrate and protect chemistry. Simple membranes need not have modern protein transport machinery; compartment formation alone also does not explain life.
10. Psychoproctology: Sherman’s humorous label for his work on destructive, self-protective certainty and absolutism. He explicitly says in the interview that he did not coin the term. It is not a clinical diagnosis.
11. Selective autogen: A proposed extension whose shell chemistry makes opening more likely in the presence of useful reactants. Rutt additionally suggests reduced opening in harmful conditions. These are hypothetical chemical sensitivities, not conscious choices or demonstrated sensors.
12. Templated autogen: A speculative extension in which a molecular scaffold helps organize the sequence of catalytic activity, potentially supporting more complex regeneration. The proposal seeks a route toward functional templates; it does not establish the origin of modern DNA, RNA, or translation.

Summary of the Content

Jim Rutt interviews Jeremy Sherman about Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves and the work of Terrence Deacon. The central question is how chemistry could become organized so that its activity maintains the conditions for its own continuation. Sherman distinguishes this from an externally sustained pattern such as a whirlpool. They develop the proposed autogen cycle, then selective opening and molecular templates. Rutt presses on residual reactions inside a new shell, the timing of rupture, and the availability of suitable reactants. The later discussion turns to redundancy, loss of redundant functions, and Sherman’s analogy between selective interaction and human confirmation bias. These social claims require evidence beyond the chemical proposal.

Assessment

Factual Accuracy:

• The underlying phenomena—catalysis, molecular self-assembly, and dependence on environmental supplies—are real. That does not establish that the particular proposed combination works. Living systems comply with the second law: local maintenance is possible through energy and material exchange while total entropy production remains nonnegative. Dormancy can slow degradation; it does not cancel thermodynamics.
• Read the publisher’s rough transcript cautiously. It contains apparent slips, including reversed wording about the number of ordered and disordered configurations and confusing molecular terminology in the template discussion. The relevant distinction is between a chemical possibility, a tested mechanism, and an account of what actually happened historically. None should silently substitute for another.

Logical Coherence:

• The central argument is intelligible: one process generates components that another process protects, allowing regeneration across interruptions. The important claim concerns the coupling, not a magical additional substance. Whether to call this minimal organization a “self” depends on the stated functional criterion; it does not imply consciousness.
• Rutt’s objections prevent the account from becoming a frictionless success story. A newly closed shell can contain reactants and continue reacting before becoming dormant; Sherman accepts this correction. Rutt also asks how shells can open at useful times in useful environments. Those requirements remain substantive conditions on the model.

Testability:

• A concrete test would specify catalysts, substrates, shell products, reaction rates, and energy sources, then measure repeated regeneration with appropriate uncoupled controls. Distinguish making a capsule once from repeated repair, production of viable descendants, and heritable variation.
• In this 2024 interview Sherman reports no in-vitro attempts and mentions computational modeling efforts already beginning. Those statements describe the interview’s date, not a verified September 2026 research census. A successful simulation would establish behavior under its assumptions, not by itself establish laboratory chemistry or prebiotic history.

The episode offers a useful research question and a conditional mechanism. Its evidential strength is the demand to explain how organization persists; its vulnerability is the unproved compatibility of the necessary chemistry. The social analogy is interesting but neither a consequence of the second law nor a substitute for psychological evidence.

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Profile of Jeremy Sherman

Name: Jeremy Sherman
Work: Writer and researcher connecting decision-making, the origins of agency, and human behavior; introduced in this interview as a strategic coach.
Collaboration: Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist whose theory Sherman explains for general readers.
Topics in this conversation:

• Origins of Life
• Autogen Theory
• Psychoproctology (study of destructive human behavior)

Books:

• Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves (Columbia University Press, 2017), with a foreword by Terrence Deacon.

Articles: In the interview, Sherman describes having written roughly a thousand articles for Psychology Today. This is a dated self-report, not an independently updated publication count.

Profile: Sherman presents himself as an interpreter and collaborator of Deacon, with much of his own work in the social sciences. His book explains the proposed emergence of selves and aims without introducing supernatural agency. His discussion of absolutism is his own application; he explicitly distinguishes it from Deacon’s more concentrated work on life’s origins.

Media Featuring Jeremy Sherman

1. Podcast: The Jim Rutt Show

• The Jim Rutt Show, EP 228: the interview discussed here. The archived publisher transcript is available when the live transcript is unavailable; the publisher calls it rough and unrevised.

2. Articles on Psychology Today

• Jeremy E. Sherman’s contributor page, for his writing about judgment and human behavior.

3. YouTube:

• Jeremy Sherman’s YouTube Channel

Sherman’s media page, including his linked YouTube videos on the origins of trying and on psychoproctology.

ChatGPT response · editorial edition

Deep Dive into the Primary Arguments

Argument 1: The Emergence of Life from Chemistry

Premise 1: An origin-of-life mechanism must explain persistent, regenerative organization, rather than assume a ready-made living agent.
Premise 2: The autogen proposal attempts this by coupling catalyst production to protective shell formation.
Conclusion: It is a candidate worth specifying and testing. Weaknesses in rival theories do not independently confirm it. The reconstructions below are editorial and conditional, not quotations or proofs supplied by Sherman.

Conditional reconstruction:

1. If an autogen implementation regenerates the organization required by a stated criterion for minimal self-maintenance, it satisfies that criterion.
2. Suppose experiments establish that a particular implementation does regenerate that organization under specified conditions.
3. Then that implementation satisfies the criterion under those conditions. This is a valid conditional inference; its second premise is a research requirement, not a reported result.

Argument 2: Autogen as a Self-Maintaining System

Mechanism: Reciprocal catalysis produces shell-building byproducts. Shells capture enough catalysts to reduce their dispersal. Internal reactants can first be consumed; if the catalysts remain usable, later rupture near fresh reactants can restart production. This preserves the correction in which Rutt challenges immediate dormancy and Sherman accepts residual reactions.
Qualification: Reaction and encapsulation rates must be compatible; a shell alone is insufficient.

Conditional reconstruction:

1. If preserved catalysts remain functional after rupture and encounter enough suitable reactants and energy, the stipulated catalytic network can restart.
2. Suppose a proposed autogen preserves those catalysts and encounters those conditions.
3. Then its catalytic network can restart. Repeated encapsulation and viable descendants require further conditions and evidence.

Argument 3: The Role of Emergent Constraints

Distinction: Flowing water sustains a whirlpool, but the pattern does not secure its own future water supply. In the proposed autogen, shells restrict catalyst loss while catalysis replaces shell components. Sherman’s explanatory claim concerns that reciprocal dependence. Traffic congestion illustrates a restriction arising from interactions, not biological self-maintenance.

Conditional reconstruction:

1. If a chemical organization regenerates the constraints needed for its continuation, it has a maintenance capacity that a merely externally sustained pattern need not have.
2. Suppose the proposed reciprocal coupling demonstrably regenerates those constraints.
3. Then that coupling has the specified maintenance capacity. This inference cannot replace evidence for the second premise or settle every definition of life.

Argument 4: The Importance of Selective Interaction

Proposal: Shell chemistry could make rupture more likely where useful reactants are present. Rutt suggests complementary inhibition of opening around harmful substances. Neither response requires choice or awareness. A survival advantage depends on environmental reliability, costs, and retention of the relevant differences across regeneration.

Conditional reconstruction:

1. If an inherited shell variant increases expected production of viable descendants in an environment, without offsetting costs, it has a reproductive advantage there.
2. Suppose reactant-sensitive opening gives a shell variant that net advantage and the variant is transmitted.
3. Then that variant can be favored by selection there. This does not demonstrate that such a variant existed or that selective opening is the only route to persistence.

Causal Chains

1. Emergence of Life:

• Available reactants and energy → reciprocal catalytic production → compatible shell byproducts assemble and capture catalysts → residual internal reactions subside → protected catalysts persist → rupture near suitable fresh reactants permits renewed production. Every arrow names a condition to test; the final step does not automatically follow from the first.

2. Maintenance of Order:

• Catalysis produces shell components → encapsulation restricts dispersal → surviving catalysts can later regenerate shell components. This proposed feedback operates within thermodynamics. Traffic congestion and whirlpools are analogies for constraints, not chemical intermediates in this chain.

3. Selective Interaction:

• Variation in shell chemistry → different conditional rupture rates → different chances of restarting in usable environments → different production of viable descendants → possible population change, if the relevant variation is retained. Automatic chemical response suffices; awareness is not assumed.

Augmented by Relevant Sources

1. RNA World Hypothesis:

• RNA has both sequence-bearing and catalytic roles, so the RNA-world proposal cannot be dismissed simply because it lacks modern proteins. The difficult questions include prebiotic synthesis, copying, strand separation, and integration with compartments. These are research problems, not an argument that only autogens could solve them. See the experimental contrast under “Membrane First Hypothesis” below.

2. Metabolism First Hypothesis:

• Reaction-network approaches must explain how productive chemistry remains connected and acquires heritable organization. Deacon’s How Molecules Became Signs (2021) develops simple, selective, and template-bearing autogenic models. It supplies a theoretical account to inspect, not a laboratory confirmation of the proposed cycle.

3. Membrane First Hypothesis:

• Mansy and colleagues (2008) experimentally demonstrated entry of activated nucleotides through model fatty-acid membranes and template copying inside. Protein transport machinery is therefore not always required for useful permeability. This result neither completes an origin-of-life account nor demonstrates an autogen; it corrects the original response’s overly dismissive comparison.

Summary

The basic model explains what a reciprocal maintenance cycle would need to do. The selective model adds environment-sensitive opening; the templated model adds a proposed scaffold for ordering catalytic activity. Sherman calls the overall capacity to regenerate the organization a “hologenic constraint.” His later “inverse Darwinism” discussion concerns redundancy permitting loss of individual functions and new dependencies, as a complement to selection. These extensions need separate mechanisms and tests. The transcript’s chemical terminology in the template passage is too loose to serve as a synthesis recipe; a nucleotide polymer and a polypeptide are different kinds of molecule.

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Assessment of Plausibility

Plausibility of the Arguments

1. Autogen Theory as a Plausible Alternative:
   • Strengths: The proposal puts the persistence of a functional whole at the center of the problem. Coupling production to protection is a concrete explanatory move: neither process alone secures repeated regeneration.
   • Support: Established catalysis and molecular self-assembly make the ingredients intelligible. Their existence separately does not establish the compatibility of one particular coupled implementation.
2. Self-Maintaining Systems:
   • Strengths: Alternation between exposed growth and protected dormancy could reduce the need for continuous metabolism inside a selectively permeable boundary. Rutt’s “two-cycle” analogy usefully emphasizes alternating phases, provided it is not mistaken for an engineered machine.
   • Support: Encapsulation can reduce dispersal in principle. A strong test would show retained catalytic activity after realistic delays and rupture. Dormancy slows some losses; it does not evade the second law or guarantee indefinite survival.
3. Emergent Constraints:
   • Strengths: Explaining what restricts possible reactions can illuminate organization without adding a mysterious life-force. The proposal specifies two processes that sustain the conditions for one another.
   • Support: Whirlpool and traffic examples make emergent restrictions understandable. They establish neither self-repair nor reproduction. Their usefulness is conceptual, and the chemical coupling must carry the evidential burden.
4. Selective Interaction:
   • Strengths: Environment-sensitive opening offers a possible bridge from indiscriminate exposure to functional responsiveness. Rutt’s inhibitor-sensitive variant also identifies a potential failure mode: food can be present alongside poison.
   • Support: Chemistry can be condition-sensitive without having intentions. What remains to show is a specific sensitivity that reliably improves regeneration enough to outweigh its costs.

Potential Weaknesses

1. Empirical Testing and Validation:
   • Weakness: At the time of the 2024 interview, Sherman reports no in-vitro attempts while describing early simulation efforts. The original response incorrectly excluded computational modeling altogether. This review does not establish the field’s present experimental status.
   • Impact: The proposal remains an experimentally unresolved account in the evidence considered here. Simulation can reveal whether stipulated dynamics work; chemical experiments must show that the stipulations can be realized.
2. Complexity of Chemical Systems:
   • Weakness: Shell formation must capture compatible catalysts without making reopening impossible or allowing rapid leakage and degradation. Products that inhibit reactions, unequal catalytic rates, and the capture of only part of a network can disrupt the cycle.
   • Impact: A persuasive demonstration must report a viable range of rates and concentrations, not merely a sequence of individually possible steps. A viable simple cycle would still leave the route to complex genetic life open.
3. Environmental Variability:
   • Weakness: Rutt asks how long shells should last and whether the surrounding “soup” contains usable reactants when they open. Drift into depleted or incompatible environments can terminate the cycle even if the chemistry worked once.
   • Impact: Vary rupture rates, substrate renewal, dilution, temperature, and inhibitors. Measure how often complete cycles yield viable successors; occasional reactivation is weaker evidence than a sustainable lineage.
4. Assumption of Self-Purging Mechanisms:
   • Weakness: Sherman proposes that non-reproduced contaminants are less likely to persist across regeneration. That does not establish complete error correction: contaminants can be reintroduced, and parasitic reactions may reproduce at the network’s expense.
   • Impact: Test contaminant dilution and persistence across multiple cycles. Separate removal of inert bystanders from suppression of chemical parasites and from faithful sequence copying.

Conclusion

Overall plausibility: I regard autogens as a serious conditional model of reciprocal maintenance, with insufficient evidence here to rank them as the likely historical origin of life. Its strength is explanatory specificity; its largest unresolved burden is demonstrating compatible chemistry across repeated cycles.

Potential weaknesses: These arise at the joins: production must support enclosure, enclosure must protect without permanently imprisoning, and rupture must allow recovery before dispersal. The selective and templated extensions add further requirements. Calling the system a “self” clarifies a proposed criterion; it does not supply missing experiments.

Future Directions:

• Empirical testing: Compare the coupled system with catalysis-only, enclosure-only, and disrupted-coupling controls under the same supplies. Measure catalyst retention, reactivation, shell production, and viable descendant yield.
• Intermediate steps: Specify how selective rupture and a functional molecular scaffold could arise without importing modern translation machinery. Test each extension separately before joining it to the basic cycle.
• Environmental studies: Examine whether required conditions can coexist and recur in a plausible setting, including transport into and out of favorable chemical regions.
• Mechanistic insights: Measure persistence of contaminants and parasites, and distinguish robustness through redundancy from proof that a historical evolutionary pathway occurred.

ChatGPT response · editorial edition

Quiz

1. What is the primary focus of Jeremy Sherman’s book “Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves”?
2. According to the 2024 interview, who had collaborated with Sherman for about 27 years?
3. What term does Sherman use for his study of destructive absolutism, and does he claim to have coined it?
4. What are the three traditional theories of the origin of life that autogen theory critiques?
5. Define “autocatalysis” in the context of autogen theory.
6. What is an autogen, according to Jeremy Sherman and Terrence Deacon’s theory?
7. Explain the concept of “emergent constraints” as discussed in the transcript.
8. How does the selective autogen model enhance the basic autogen concept?
9. What is a key challenge in validating autogen theory mentioned in the assessment?
10. Describe one potential weakness of autogen theory related to environmental variability.

Answers

1. The emergence of life from chemistry and how organisms struggling for existence emerged from non-life.
2. Terrence Deacon.
3. Psychoproctology. He explicitly says he did not coin the term.
4. Information first (RNA world), metabolism first, and membrane first.
5. A reaction or reaction network in which products promote further production of themselves. The simplified reciprocal case has A helping produce B and B helping produce A, given suitable reactants and energy.
6. A proposed open–closed chemical cycle coupling reciprocal catalysis with protective shell formation, intended to regenerate its own organization. It is not a demonstrated ancestral organism.
7. Restrictions on possible interactions produced by the interactions themselves. Traffic congestion illustrates the idea; autogens additionally require reciprocal regeneration of constraints, consistent with thermodynamics.
8. Its proposed shell chemistry makes opening more likely near usable reactants; Rutt also proposes reduced opening around inhibitors. These are hypothetical chemical responses, not conscious decisions.
9. In the interview, Sherman reports no laboratory implementation and mentions early modeling efforts. The coupling must be specified and tested across repeated cycles; this is a dated account, not a current research census.
10. A shell may rupture after drifting into a depleted or chemically incompatible environment, leaving preserved catalysts unable to restart before they disperse or degrade.

ChatGPT response · editorial edition

Discussion Questions

1. Which problems remain for RNA-first accounts, and what findings would distinguish an unresolved problem from a refuted mechanism?
2. Which gaps does the autogen proposal attempt to address, and which assumptions does it still need to demonstrate?
3. What can reciprocal catalysis maintain, and what happens when reactants are depleted or catalysts disperse?
4. What chemical and timing conditions would shell-forming byproducts need to satisfy to preserve a complete catalytic network?
5. How does a constraint produced by interacting parts differ from a wall imposed from outside, and what further step is needed for self-maintenance?
6. Under what environmental conditions would reactant-sensitive opening improve regeneration, and when might it fail?
7. How can local biological order persist while the combined organism and environment comply with the second law?
8. What do whirlpools and traffic congestion illustrate about constraints, and why do they not by themselves demonstrate living agency?
9. Why is selective interaction crucial for the survival and maintenance of early life forms?
10. Which controlled experiments could separate a one-off capsule from a regenerating autogen cycle?
11. What are some potential intermediate steps in the transition from simple autocatalytic systems to complex life forms?
12. How might the environmental variability of early Earth impact the plausibility of autogen theory?
13. Would non-reproducing contaminants necessarily disappear across cycles, and how would reproducing parasites change the problem?
14. Where is Sherman’s analogy between selective chemical interaction and confirmation bias useful, and where does it require independent psychological evidence?
15. What must persist across opening and closure for the proposed “hologenic constraint” to explain regeneration rather than merely rename it?
16. How could redundancy permit loss of individual capacities and new dependencies, and why need this complement rather than replace natural selection?
17. How does the proposed alternating open–closed cycle compare with experimentally studied permeable fatty-acid compartments?
18. What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of introducing new terms and neologisms in scientific theories?
19. How does Sherman distinguish managing confirmation bias from treating it as a solution, and what would make that distinction testable?
20. Which claims about human motivation might chemical-origin research inform, and which cannot be inferred from that research alone?