Abstract
What is mind? This question is the single unifying force behind all efforts in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. When put in the context of biosemiotics and the broader life sciences, the question becomes, what is the nature of organic mindedness in the natural world? How did it evolve and why? Is it unique to humans or shared by other animals and even simpler forms of life? Is it peculiar to earthly life or is it part of the fundamental fabric of the universe?
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Notes
- 1.
As Henry Plotkin (2004) explains, though one could identify the official beginning of psychology as a science with the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 and Darwin’s 1859 publication of The Origin of Species as the first formal and popularized articulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the two branches of science were not synthesized in any real way until the emergence of the late twentieth century sciences of ethology and sociobiology and, later still, evolutionary psychology.
- 2.
See Brook (2004) for the full story.
- 3.
BTM is similar to John Searle’s biological naturalism, according to which human consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis or digestion (his examples). My view differs from his, however, with regard to the nature of the relationship between mind and brain; specifically, he sees the relationship as causal, whereas I see it as isomorphic. We don’t say that plants cause photosynthesis or that digestive tracts cause digestion and neither, I argue, should we say that brains cause minds; rather, the “mind” can be thought of as the brain as experienced by the agent. This mind-brain conceptualization is very similar to that presented in Fingelkurts et al. (2010).
- 4.
For an excellent summary of the application of dynamic systems theory in cognitive science, see van Gelder and Port (1995).
- 5.
Fingelkurts et al. (2010) present a masterfully rich account of how the actual spatial-temporal structure of the physical world is presented to and experienced by the individual as phenomenal space-time in virtue of the brain’s physiological operations, which are also spatial and temporal in nature. Their research breathes new life into Kant’s theory that the particular structure of the human mind determines how we perceive the world.
- 6.
For an example of applying neuroscientific insights to the problem of mental representation, see Swan and Goldberg (2010).
- 7.
- 8.
This movement, known as eliminative materialism, is most closely associated with Patricia and Paul Churchland. For example, see Churchland (1999).
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Swan, L. (2013). Introduction: Exploring the Origins of Mindedness in Nature. In: Swan, L. (eds) Origins of Mind. Biosemiotics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5419-5_1
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