Special issue: Pre ́cis and Commentaries on Veit’s ‘Animal Consciousness’ Abstract: Facing stress and producing stress responses are crucial aspects of an organism’s life and the evolution of both its species and of the other species in its environment, which are co-evolving with it. Philosophers and biologists emphasize the importance of environmental complexity and how organisms deal with it in evolution of cognitive processes. This article adds to these discussions by highlighting the importance of stress physiology in processes connected to (...) plant cognition. While this article supports the thesis that life means cognizing (i.e., sensing the environment, arranging internal processes according to that perception, and affecting the environment with its actions), it also emphasizes that there are various kinds of organisms. In this regard, plant cognition is not animal cognition. However, given both the variety and continuity in evolutionary processes and the similarities even between the distantly related organisms in the tree of life, I argue that it is usually useful to consider and compare physiological and molecular mechanisms in plants and animals as well as the concepts and research processes in animal and plant science. Although the “pathological complexity” thesis that Veit (2023) presents is fruitful in considering the evolution of consciousness and cognition, I argue that, when thinking of biological processes in relation to cognition, stress can be a helpful concept (maybe even as suitable as pathological complexity) in thinking of organisms’ responses to environmental complexity and their adaptation and acclimation processes. (shrink)

In a recent remarkable article, Froese (2023) presents his Irruption Theory to explain how motivations can make a behavioral difference in motivated activity. In this opinion article, we review the main tenets of Froese’s theory, and highlight its difficulty in overcoming the randomness challenge it supposedly solves, that is, the issue of how adaptive behavior can arise in the face of material underdetermination. To advance our understanding of motivated behavior in line with Froese’s approach, we recommend that future work should (...) endorse a multilevel pluralistic approach to causation and explanation in which motivations could genuinely play an irreducible role. Additionally, in line with the life-mind continuity thesis, we suggest that the best place to look for the interplay between motivations and nonmotivational physical, biological, and dynamical factors, may be at the level of the continuous feeling of being an embodied, living organism. (shrink)