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Individuality, subjectivity, and minimal cognition

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Abstract

The paper links discussions of two topics: biological individuality and the simplest forms of mentality. I discuss several attempts to locate the boundary between metabolic activity and ‘minimal cognition.’ I then look at differences between the kinds of individuality present in unicellular life, multicellular life in general, and animals of several kinds. Nervous systems, which are clearly relevant to cognition and subjectivity, also play an important role in the form of individuality seen in animals. The last part of the paper links these biological transitions to the evolutionary history of subjective experience.

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Notes

  1. Thanks to Gáspár Jékely, Fred Keijzer, Jean-Francois Moreau, Maureen O'Malley, Thomas Pradeu, and Derek Skillings for comments on this material.

  2. See also Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995), and the papers in Bouchard and Huneman (2013). These discussions are much older within botany. My paper in the Bouchard and Huneman collection (2013) charts some of the history.

  3. Thomas Nagel, a pessimist about biological approaches to the mind, concurs. "The main question, how anything in the world can have a subjective point of view, remains unanswered" (Nagel 1986, p. 30).

  4. I said above that I understand life in terms of a combination of metabolism-related and reproduction-related properties, and this passage suggests that growth and development are secondary. That is how I think of it, but this might be revised in the light of further analysis. In Godfrey-Smith (forthcoming a), reproduction is broken down into a combination of the more basic phenomena of recurrence and production, and within an approach of that kind the roles of development and metabolism might be reconceived.

  5. "An autonomous system… defined by its endogenous, self-organizing and selfcontrolling dynamics, does not have inputs and outputs in the usual sense" (Thompson 2010, p. 43).

  6. The early discussions of autopoiesis did not make much use of thermodynamic ideas, which are surely immensely important in thinking about the boundedness and self-producing character of living systems. I have heard it suggested that this was due in part to a desire to keep the framework clear of the ideas of Ilya Prigogine, and other very ambitious uses of thermodynamics characteristic of that time. Recent work by those influenced by Maturana and Varela has in several cases moved away from a self-contained, un-ecological conception of organisms, but the retention of the notion of "autonomy" as a guiding concept seems to me to point away from the essential connection with thermodynamic concepts and the importance of organism/environment traffic.

  7. Some of what counts as behavior in animals makes use of glandular secretions. When muscle contraction (coordinated motion of parts) is the means for this behavior, it does not require adding an extra category, but muscle contraction is not always the means (Jékely et al. 2015).

  8. See Arnellos and Moreno (2015, 2016), Moreno and Mossio (2015). Bich and Moreno (2015) sketch a somewhat different approach.

  9. See also Skillings (forthcoming) on this issue, with particular reference to corals.

  10. This is discussed in Godfrey-Smith (2013) as a possible "exclusion principle" applicable to organism status in part-whole hierarchies.

  11. Hooker (2009) also emphasizes that within an autopoietic framework, it's a wrong move to see the properties of multicellular organisms as some sort of recapitulation of the same properties that are important at the cellular level.

  12. For the case of fungi, see Booth (2014).

  13. This spatial constraint might have exceptions, but all are in contested ground: ant and bee colonies have been seen as organisms, some modular organisms (see below) can have separated parts (are they still parts of one individual?) and bacteria of various kinds have been seen as multicellular even when they are not forming clumps or connected colonies.

  14. The characterization above does not restrict bodies to animals. Keijzer and Arnellos do focus entirely on animals, and I am not sure whether they intend bodies to be present outside them.

  15. Sexual dimorphism is another qualification, but not a problem as in this case there are two standard forms.

  16. Octopuses are an interesting special case. They have a fixed form in some senses (a fixed topology), but the overall observable shape is vastly changeable.

  17. Sponges are sometimes said to be modular organisms, though others deny this: Ereskovskii (2003).

  18. Some think that plants are "post-cellular" in these respects. See the comments on syncytia and similar forms at the end of Sect. 3.

  19. Here I discuss only interactions between spatial parts of an organism, not temporal stages. Things are interestingly different in the case of signaling across temporal gaps (also known as memory).

  20. See Levy (2011) for an analysis of information-based and communication-based talk in these parts of biology.

  21. Thanks to Derek Skillings for this point – in plants, "multicellular agents" can be smaller than the whole plant.

  22. The reasons palms are special are relevant here, too; see Avalos and Sylvester (2010): being "morphologically constrained by the lack of secondary meristems," "[t]o afford attaining canopy heights, woody palms need to show a high degree of phenotypic integration, shaping their growth and allometric relationships to match spatial and temporal changes in resources. Palms have a specific need for more integrated developmental processes.

  23. See Alpi et al. (2007), especially, in which 35 plant biologists object to the idea of “plant neurobiology.”

  24. This is a functional characterization that Jékely, Keijzer, and I considered when writing our joint paper (2015).

  25. The quotes in this paragraph are from Barandiaran and Moreno (2006), p. 176. Moreno and Mossio (2015) do discuss some of the features of nervous systems I emphasize here – the changes they make to patterns of connection within a body. They see these features as secondary to the "decoupling" that is treated as central, though.

  26. For further steps, see Godfrey-Smith (forthcoming b, c).

  27. Almost impossible: some protists seem to have image-forming eyes, and there is even a candidate in an cyanobacterium: Nilsson and Colley (2016).

  28. Keijzer (2015) also argues that reafference, in early animals, may have been a resource, rather than a liability, in the task of sensing environmental structure. An array of active contractile tissue might function as a large-scale sensor, given that the consequences of its activity are conditioned by what is present in the animal's environment, in a way that may register in the ongoing activity of the array.

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  1. CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA

    Peter Godfrey-Smith

  2. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Peter Godfrey-Smith

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Godfrey-Smith, P. Individuality, subjectivity, and minimal cognition. Biol Philos 31, 775–796 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9543-1

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