Abstract
The strong version of the life-mind continuity thesis claims that mind can be understood as an enriched version of the same functional and organizational properties of life. Contrary to this view, in this paper I argue that mental phenomena offer distinctive properties, such as intentionality or representational content, that have no counterpart in the phenomenon of life, and that must be explained by appealing to a different level of functional and organizational principles. As a strategy, and following Maturana’s autopoietic theory of cognition, I introduce a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition. I argue that cognition corresponds to the natural behaviour that every living being exhibits in the realization of its existence, and that, viewed in that way, cognition is a dynamic process of structural coupling that, unlike mental phenomena, involves no representational contents. On the basis of this distinction, I try to show that while life suffices for cognition, it does not suffice for mind. That is, that the strong continuity is not between life and mind but between life and cognition.
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Notes
This thesis presupposes a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition that is not usually made, but that proves to be, I believe, necessary and coherent within the theoretical framework that I present here.
There are also some philosophers, such as Fodor (2009), who stress this semantic (language-like) feature by using the word intensionality (with an ‘s’).
For a different interpretation see Fodor (2008).
Note that the aphorism is unidirectional and does not entail any ontological parity between the terms. It just says that to live is to know, but it does not entail the reciprocal “to know is to live”, nor does it present ‘cognition’ as having the same ontological (i.e., natural) status as life. Reading the aphorism as entailing identity (life = cognition), or as implying that ‘cognition’ is a natural category similar to the category of ‘living beings’, leads to a series of confusions or pseudo-problems that, though interesting, we cannot address in this paper. Authors who have, I think, fallen in this kind of pseudo-problem are, for example, Bourgine and Stewart (2004), Bitbol and Luisi (2004).
As it is clear now, Maturana’s autopoietic theory only establishes a strong continuity between life and cognition. Yet it is a common mistake to interpret this thesis as implying a strong continuity between life and mind. As an example of this misinterpretation see Godfrey-Smith (1996), chapter 3.
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Special Issue “Origins of Mind” edited by Liz Stillwaggon Swan and Andrew M. Winters
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Villalobos, M. Autopoiesis, Life, Mind and Cognition: Bases for a Proper Naturalistic Continuity. Biosemiotics 6, 379–391 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9174-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9174-8