Abstract
Living things are autonomous agents distinguished from nonliving things in having the purpose to actively maintain their existence. All living things, including single-celled organisms, have certain degrees of freedom from physical causality to choose their actions with intentions to fulfill their purpose. This circumstance is analogous to that of human intention-actions guided by mind, and points to the ubiquitous presence of the dimension of mind in the living world. The primordial form of mind in single-celled organisms eventually evolved into the human mind by virtue of the adaptive value of mind for survival. Life seems to have originated from nonliving matter in processes that are continuous. Thus the dimension of mind must extend to the nonliving world, and the origin of mind should be taken to relate to the origin of matter. Inasmuch as matter exists in a hierarchy of levels of complexity extending from quarks up to the whole universe, mind must also be presumed to exist in a hierarchy of levels of complexity associated with matter.
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Notes
There does not seem to be a clear-cut definition of “umwelt” that is generally agreed upon. Originally, von Uexküll defined it to be the subjective world that is specific to a given living species, implying that it is common to the members of any given species. Some people consider that the umwelt of an organism includes the organism itself, in contrast to my view. Including the organism itself in the notion of umwelt is a view, I believe, that reflects the perspective of an outside observer, which is suited for a scientific, objective approach to the problem. However, to better understand the nature and workings of an individual living organism as a subject, I think we need to separate the umwelt from the organism itself, thus allowing for a view from the inside. It may be added that my view of the umwelt leads to the notion that each individual has an idiosyncratic umwelt, which changes with time as long as it lives.
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Drs. Sidney E. Grossberg and Liz Stillwaggon Swan for their encouragement and careful editing of the text.
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Special Issue “Origins of Mind” edited by Liz Stillwaggon Swan and Andrew M. Winters
Appendix
Appendix
A comment is in order here on my frequent use throughout this essay of the words in “teleological” and “anthropomorphic language”, which many readers may consider to be scientifically unwarranted.
Recent remarkable developments in biology seem to strongly support the mechanistic view of living things; but on the other hand, no scientist can deny the existence of purpose in living things. Purpose is something that natural science cannot deal with because of its postulate of objectivity. Monod (1970) famously pointed out that admitting the existence of purpose in the biological sciences is a flagrant epistemological contradiction, which, to my knowledge, has not been resolved by anybody. Purpose is an essential feature of living things, so the appropriate teleological language is indispensable to describing and understanding the living world.
Natural science with its postulate of objectivity is a valuable means to obtaining reliable knowledge about the world. It tends to lead one to consider that physical studies of matter should eventually explain everything objectively without recourse to anthropomorphic conceptions, and knowledge about anything in the world must be based on a physical understanding of the system in question. But such a view is merely a subjective belief or a postulate not guaranteed to result in truthfulness, especially for phenomena involving life and mind. Living things require for their life not only matter but also semiosis, which is outside the realm of physical science. Actually, anthropomorphic concepts and terms are used abundantly in biology and play an essential role in a systematic understanding of the living world, as also noted in the section, “Birth of Life: Continuity from Non-life”. For example, the word “information” is one of the central terms in biology, especially in molecular biology, and cannot be replaced by physical terms because it involves, as its essence, meaning for a living system. Meaning, like purpose, cannot be studied physically. These anthropomorphic terms are usually taken to be metaphors, but actually they often represent literal truths; I use them here mostly as literal truths to approach the reality of living things.
Since I believe that matter and life are continuous, I sometimes use anthropomorphic terms also for nonliving things, but of course I do not claim that those anthropomorphic characters are directly detectable to us. I only note that the inability to detect something does not necessarily entail its absence, and we don’t have proper means at present to detect and study the dimension of mind in general.
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Kawade, Y. The Origin of Mind: The Mind-matter Continuity Thesis. Biosemiotics 6, 367–378 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9172-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9172-x