Biosymbols: Symbols in Life and Mind

Abstract

The strong continuity thesis postulates that the properties of mind are an enriched version of the properties of life, and thus that life and mind differ in degree and not kind. A philosophical problem for this view is the ostensive discontinuity between humans and other animals in virtue of our use of symbols—particularly the presumption that the symbolic nature of human cognition bears no relation to the basic properties of life. In this paper, we make the case that a genuine account of strong continuity requires the identification of some sort of correlate of symbol-use in basic life properties. Our strategy is three-fold: 1) we argue that examples of proto-symbolism in simple living systems would be consistent with an evolutionary trajectory that ultimately produced symbolic cognition in humans; 2) we introduce Gordon Tomkins’ biological notion of ‘symbol’ as something that represents to the organism a feature of its environment that is significant to its survival; and 3) we employ this biological understanding of symbol-use to suggest that the symbolic nature of human cognition can be understood as an enriched version of the basic symbolic properties of life, thus preserving life-mind continuity in this context.

Appendix

Thus our working hypothesis is this: since evolution did in fact produce language-using organisms (us), and language is an enriched version of symbol-use, we should expect to find examples of proto-symbolism in simpler living systems. There is some evidence that Godfrey-Smith is amenable to such a hypothesis. He explains, “First, in humans we find not just first-order representation use, but a framework used to talk and think about representations. The empirical phenomenon of language and thought includes the existence of a framework that we use to describe, predict, influence, and manage the representation use of ourselves and others” (Godfrey-Smith 2006). This statement suggests that ‘first-order representation use’ is common to all life and that language is a unique human way of manipulating those (first-order) representations. Thus the use of first-order representation is important to many life forms including humans, and although humans may have a unique way of manipulating such representations, human language is not an anomaly in the natural world. And also: “The precursors of thought in non-human animals involve a low-level and comparatively “shallow” pattern of adjustment and transformation of environmental conditions. With the advent of language, the causal reach of these capacities is greatly extended and focused’ (Godfrey-Smith 2006). Human language use is seen as an enriched version of the ‘precursors of thought’ found in all life, in that it enriches our interaction with the world in ways unavailable to non-human life. Although (in the passage quoted in “Life-Mind Discontinuity”) Godfrey-Smith claims that life is “not ”proto-linguistic (Godfrey-Smith 1996b), we read the set of quotations above as suggesting that in fact certain “proto-cognitive” features in non-human life are to be understood as the biological precursors to human language use.