Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

A central characteristic of living organisms is their agency, that is, their intrinsic activity, both in terms of their basic life processes and their behavior in the environment. This aspect is currently a subject of debate and this article provides an overview of some of the relevant publications on this topic. We develop the argument that agency is immanent in living organisms. There is no life without agency. Even the basic life processes are an intrinsic activity, which we call the (...) organismic level of agency. In addition to this we describe several further levels. These capture different qualities that occur or transform during evolution. In addition to the organismic level, we propose an ontogenetic level, a level of directed agency, directed agency with extended flexibility, and a level that includes the capacities to follow preconceived goals. A further property of organisms is their autonomy. It has been shown that the capacity for autonomy changed during evolution. Here we propose that the two organismic properties autonomy and agency are closely related. Enhanced physiological and behavioral autonomy extends the scope of self-generated, flexible actions and reactions. The increase in autonomy through the evolution of a widened scope of behavioral possibilities and versatility in organisms coincides with extended levels of agency. Especially the human organization, including the sophisticated brain, is the basis for an extended level of agency referring to the capacities to follow preconceived goals. However, it is important for the understanding of the phenomenon of agency not only to assume this latter form, but also to look at the different levels of agency. (shrink)

The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...) two ways: from a theoretical standpoint, exploring the centrality of the cognitive sciences in current theoretical biology; and from a historical perspective, examining the resemblance between the current state of theoretical biology and the Cognitive Revolution of the mid-20th century. Both inquiries yield affirmative answers, though important nuances will be emphasized. The cognitive sciences' explanatory framework is employed to elucidate the agentic characteristics of organisms, establishing a clear parallelism between the Cognitive Revolution and the present state of theoretical biology. (shrink)

There is growing evidence that plants possess abilities associated with cognition, such as decision-making, anticipation and learning. And yet, the cognitive status of plants continues to be contested. Among the threats to plant cognitive status is the ‘Representation Demarcation Challenge’ which points to the absence of a seemingly defining aspect of cognition, namely, computation over representation with non-derived content. Defenders of plant cognition may appeal to post-cognitivist perspectives, such as enactivism, which challenge the assumptions of the Representation Demarcation Challenge. This (...) points to an impasse in the debate over plant cognition as it collapses into perennial disagreements over the best way to conceptualise the very nature of cognition. I propose a path that allows us to bypass this quagmire by reconceiving the question of what is cognitive about ‘plant cognition’ in terms of a quest to map the many possible adaptive capacities and behaviours more-or-less associated with cognition, alongside their underlying processes and mechanisms. In turn, we can examine the degrees of similarity between plants and more paradigmatically cognitive creatures. The ‘piecemeal approach’ thus shifts attention away from the abstract and dichotomous question of whether plants are cognitive and towards a series of more precise questions about the many ways and extent to which plants possess features associated with cognition. Ultimately, I suggest, the value of viewing plants through a cognitive lens may lie less in determining whether they are bona fide cognitive creatures and more in guiding research into concrete abilities and their underlying causes. (shrink)

Origin of life studies have presented one of the most serious challenges to the mechanistic conception that life can be explained scientifically as a mere product of chemistry and physics. Hypotheses about the origin of life can be divided into two categories: (1) biogenesis – life comes from life, and (2) abiogenesis – life comes from non-living matter. The theory of the spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter had been held even by the ancient Greeks and by numerous scientists (...) well into the 19th century. The theory of abiogenesis poses many problems for understanding the origin of life on Earth, and the appearance of life early in Earth’s history. Numerous chemical, mathematical and informational problems arise which make random mechanical processes of cellular formation and function unlikely. Fossil evidence contradicts a gradualist evolutionary mechanism of development of life, especially the well-known Cambrian explosion, in which highly developed metazoan species suddenly appear in the geological column without intermediate predecessors. But the physical conundrums that mechanistic theories of chemistry and physics face are only one side of the problem. Along with a rising chorus of philosophers, Thomas Nagel, an atheist philosopher, has protested that essential questions about the origin of life, and features such as mind, intelligence and morality are completely left unexplained by mechanistic evolutionary theories. In Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel plainly lays out his argument that the modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain something so integral to nature as mind or consciousness, thereby threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture of biology, evolutionary theory and cosmology. [13] As an alternative he argues that at least natural teleological principles must be admitted to play a role in our view of science. He writes: “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” The Vedantic view of the Absolute as sentient conceives of Bhagavan as the conscious and consequently personal source of the universe. This view holds that life is fundamental, and not merely coextensive with matter. It is thus consistent with the law of biogenesis which is scientifically established in agreement with empirical evidence. Life is the basis of Nature, not matter, and Nature is a system in which the different species are nodes or niches, each possessed of variety and adaptability. Evolution is of consciousness, not of the bodies of organisms. The sedimentary fossils are the result of catastrophic deposits, and are thus not indicative of gradual evolution which is concluded only on the questionable assumption of uniformitarianism. (shrink)

Recent research on bacteria and other microorganisms has provided interesting insights into the nature of life, cooperation, evolution, individuality or species. In this paper, I focus on the capacity of bacteria to produce molecules that are usually classified as ’signals’ and I defend two claims. First, I argue that certain interactions between bacteria should actually qualify as genuine forms of communication. Second, I use this case study to revise our general theories of signaling. Among other things, I argue that a (...) plausible requirement for a state to qualify as a signal is that it is a minimal cause. (shrink)

A mark of the cognitive should allow us to specify theoretical principles for demarcating cognitive from non-cognitive causes of behaviour in organisms. Specific criteria are required to settle the question of when in the evolution of life cognition first emerged. An answer to this question should however avoid two pitfalls. It should avoid overintellectualising the minds of other organisms, ascribing to them cognitive capacities for which they have no need given the lives they lead within the niches they inhabit. But (...) equally it should do justice to the remarkable flexibility and adaptiveness that can be observed in the behaviour of microorganisms that do not have a nervous system. We should resist seeking non-cognitive explanations of behaviour simply because an organism fails to exhibit human-like feats of thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. We will show how Karl Friston’s Free-Energy Principle (FEP) can serve as the basis for a mark of the cognitive that avoids the twin pitfalls of overintellectualising or underestimating the cognitive achievements of evolutionarily primitive organisms. The FEP purports to describe principles of organisation that any organism must instantiate if it is to remain well-adapted to its environment. Living systems from plants and microorganisms all the way up to humans act in ways that tend in the long run to minimise free energy. If the FEP provides a mark of the cognitive, as we will argue it does, it mandates that cognition should indeed be ascribed to plants, microorganisms and other organisms that lack a nervous system. (shrink)

In the framework of materialism, the major attention is to find general organizational laws stimulated by physical sciences, ignoring the uniqueness of Life. The main goal of materialism is to reduce consciousness to natural processes, which in turn can be translated into the language of math, physics and chemistry. Following this approach, scientists have made several attempts to deny the living organism of its veracity as an immortal soul, in favor of genes, molecules, atoms and so on. However, advancement in (...) various fields of biology has repeatedly given rise to questions against such a denial and has supplied more and more evidence against the completely misleading ideological imposition that living entities are particular states of matter. In the recent past, however, the realization has arisen that cognitive nature of life at all levels has begun presenting significant challenges to the views of materialism in biology and has created a more receptive environment for the soul hypothesis. Therefore, instead of adjudicating different aprioristic claims, the development of an authentic theory of biology needs both proper scientific knowledge and the appropriate tools of philosophical analysis of life. In a recently published paper the first author of present essay made an attempt to highlight a few relevant developments supporting a sentient view of life in scientific research, which has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of life and its origin [1]. The present essay highlights the uniqueness of biological systems that offers a considerable challenge to the mainstream materialism in biology and proposes the Vedāntic philosophical view as a viable alternative for development of a biological theory worthy of life. (shrink)

The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for identifying, (...) from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

Resonance can trigger of a series of quantum events and therefore induce several changes related to consciousness at micro as well as macro level within a living system. Therapeutic effects have been observed in several religious meditative and healing practices, which use resonance in the form of chanting and prayers. A living system may have many resonant frequencies due to their degrees of freedom, where each can vibrate as a harmonic oscillator supporting the progression of vibrations as waves that moves (...) as a ripple within the whole system. A cell as an organism or cells in multicellular organisms act as resonating bodies that trigger of oscillation of oscillatory proteins of the cytoskeletal network. The resulting protein conformational changes generate a conscious moment that is regulated via electron tunneling, delocalization and superposition in space time geometry. Consciousness or sentience are phenomenal characteristics of every cell and even though we don’t know the “why” we surely can predict and hypothesize the “how” of consciousness to be quantum computed, which enables the cell to understand and judge perceptions giving it a prospect to behave as per will. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I contrast an ecological account of natural agency with the traditional Cartesian conception using recent research in bacterial cognition and cellular decision making as a test case. I argue that the Cartesian conception—namely, the view that agency presupposes cognition—generates a dilemma between mechanism, the view that bacteria are mere automata, and intellectualism, the view that they exhibit full-blown cognition. Unicellular organisms, however, occupy a middle ground between these two extremes. On the one hand, their capacities and activities are too adaptive (...) to count as mere machines. On the other hand, they lack the open-ended responsiveness of cognitive agents to rational norms. An ecological conception of agency as the gross behavioral capacity to respond to affordances, I argue, does not presuppose cognition and allows for degrees of agency along a continuum, from the simplest adaptive agents, such as unicellular organisms, to the most sophisticated cognitive agents. Bacteria, I conclude, are adaptiveagents, hence not mere automata, but notcognitiveagents. (shrink)

If the question ``What is a gene?'' proves to be worth asking it must be able to elicit an answer which both recognizes and address the reasons why the concept of the gene ever seemed to be something worth getting excited about in the first place as well analyzing and evaluating the latest develops in the molecular biology of DNA. Each of the preceding papers fails to do one of these and sufferrs the consequences. Where Rolston responds to the apparent (...) failure of molecular biology to make good on the desideratum of the classical gene by veering off into fanciful talk about ``cybernetic genes,'' Griffiths and Stotz lose themselves in the molecular fine print and forget to ask themselves why ``genes'' should be of any special interst anyway. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to explain why Charles Sanders Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics would not have seemed strange to its original 1890s audience. Building on the pioneering work of Andrew Reynolds, I will excavate the scientific context of Peirce’s Monist articles—in particular “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence,” both published in 1892—focusing on the relationship between protoplasm, evolution, and consciousness. I argue that Peirce’s discussions should be understood in the context of contemporary evolutionary and physiological speculations, many of (...) which were featured in late- 1880s issues of Open Court, sister journal to the Monist. (shrink)

In their recent book Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic minds without content, Dan Hutto and Erik Myin make two important criticisms of what they call autopoietic enactivism. These two criticisms are that AE harbours tacit representationalists commitments and that it has too liberal a conception of cognition. Taking the latter claim as its main focus, this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of AE in order to tease out how it might respond to H&M. In so doing it uncovers some reasons which not (...) only appear to warrant H&M’s initial claims but also seem to point to further uneasy tensions within the AE framework. The paper goes beyond H&M by tracing the roots of these criticisms and apparent tensions to phenomenology and the role it plays in AE’s distinctive conception of strong life-mind continuity. It is highlighted that this phenomenological dimension of AE contains certain unexamined anthropomorphic and anthropogenic leanings which do not sit comfortably within its wider commitment to life-mind continuity. In light of this analysis it is suggested that AE will do well to rethink this role or ultimately run the risk of remaining theoretically unstable. The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing theoretical development of AE by highlighting potential internal tensions within its framework which need to be addressed in order for it to continue to evolve as a coherent paradigm. (shrink)

Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mind lays the groundwork for critiquing the mind package view of minds. According to the mind package view, psychological properties travel in groups, such that an entity either has the whole mind package or lacks mentality altogether. Implicit commitment to the mind package view makes it seem absurd to attribute some psychological properties (e.g., preferences) to entities that lack other psychological properties (e.g., feelings). Contra the mind package view, we are psychologically continuous with plants, worms, and (...) bacteria: Our patterns of mindedness resemble theirs, even if such entities do not have the whole mind package. (shrink)

Synthetic biology, a multidisciplinary field involving designing and building with DNA, often designs and builds in microorganisms. The role of these microorganisms tends to be understood through metaphors making the microbial cell like a machine and emphasizing its passivity: cells are described as platforms, chassis, and computers. Here, I point to the efficacy of such metaphors in enacting the microorganism as a particular kind of participant in the research process, and I suggest the utility of employing metaphors that make microorganisms (...) a different kind of thing—active participants, contributors, and even collaborators in scientific research. This suggestion is worth making, I argue, because enabling the activity of the microorganism generates opportunities for learning from microorganisms in ways that may help explain currently unexplained phenomena in synthetic biology and suggest new experimental directions. Moreover, “activating the microorganism” reorients relationships between human scientists and nonhuman experimental participants away from control over nonhuman creatures and toward respect for and listening to them, generating conditions of possibility for exploring what responsible research means when humans try to be responsible toward and even with creatures across species boundaries. (shrink)

Numerous studies in microbiology, eukaryotic cell biology, plant biology, biomimetics, synthetic biology, and philosophy of science appear to support the principles of the epistemological theory inspired by evolution, also known as “Evolutionary Epistemology”, or EE. However, that none of the studies acknowledged EE suggests that its principles have not been formulated with sufficient clarity and depth to resonate with the interests of the empirical research community. In this paper I review evidence in favor of EE, and also reformulate EE principles (...) to better inform future research. The revamped programme may be tentatively called Research Programme for Distributed Biological Intelligence. Intelligence I define as the capacity of organisms to gain information about their environment, process that information internally, and translate it into phenotypic forms. This multistage progression may be expressed through the acronym IGPT (information-gain-process-translate). The key principles of the programme may be summarized as follows. (i) Intelligence, a universal biological phenomenon promoting individual fitness, is required for effective organism-environment interactions. Given that animals represent less than 0.01% of the planetary biomass, neural intelligence is not the evolutionary norm. (ii) The basic unit of intelligence is a single cell prokaryote. All other forms of intelligence are derived. (iii) Intelligence is hierarchical. It ranges from bacteria to the biosphere or Gaia. (iv) The concept of “information” acquires a new meaning because information processing is at the heart of biological intelligence. All biological systems, from bacteria to Gaia, are intelligent, open thermodynamic systems that exchange information, matter and energy with the environment. (v) The organism-environment interaction is cybernetic. As much as the organism changes due to the influence of the environment, the organism’s responses to induced changes affect the environment and subsequent organism-environment interactions. Based on the above principles a new research agenda can be formulated to explore different forms of biological intelligence. (shrink)