Is the Mind Cause or Consequence?

Philosophy of Mind
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In his 1970 book Chance and Necessity, the French biologist Jacques Monod stated what he took to be the central lesson of molecular biology with characteristic bluntness:

“The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man… Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”

This is the default assumption of modern scientific culture — what might be called neo-Darwinian materialism. Mind is the late arrival: matter comes first, life appears almost as an accident, and consciousness gradually emerges over aeons. It is always derivative, a product rather than a principle.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel, in Mind and Cosmos (2012), identified the structural problem with this picture. The physical sciences were defined from the outset by a crucial limiting step: the deliberate exclusion of everything mental — consciousness, meaning, intention, purpose — from their picture of nature. As Nagel put it, the physical sciences can describe organisms as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order, but cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears from their particular points of view. The objective account is not wrong; it is structurally incomplete.

This essay proposes that the mainstream account has the order of explanation inverted. Drawing on the phenomenological biology of Hans Jonas and the enactivism of Evan Thompson, it argues that consciousness is not what life eventually produces — it is what life, from the very beginning, already is.

The Phenomenon of Life

Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life (1966), traces a profound historical inversion. For ancient and pre-modern humanity, life was the norm and death the mystery. The question was not how life arose from inert matter, but how death — that strange negation of the natural order — was possible at all.

With the Copernican revolution and the rise of modern science, this picture was completely inverted. The vastness of cosmic space, almost entirely devoid of life, became the frame of reference. Nature was progressively stripped of vital features until what remained was pure matter, measurable and mathematical. As Jonas observes, life became ludibrium materiae — a subtle hoax of matter — and our thinking came to operate under what he calls “the ontological dominance of death.”

The Ontological Surprise

Jonas argues that in living things, nature springs what he calls an ontological surprise. For any non-living aggregate — a stone, a crystal, a drop of water — whatever unity it possesses is borrowed from our perception or from temporary physical forces. Nothing matters to a boulder. It does nothing to preserve itself.

But in living things something categorically different appears: systems that are unities for their own sake, sustained in existence by themselves. Form here is not the result of material organisation — it is its cause. The organism doesn’t simply have a form; it enacts form against entropy. Its existence is its own continuous achievement.

From this Jonas derives the concept of needful freedom — the organism’s dialectical relation to matter. It needs matter to exist but maintains an identity independent of any particular collection of matter, riding the wave of material change like the crest of a wave. And this active self-maintenance is the most primitive form of what Jonas calls concern — the bare structure of something mattering, of there being an inside from which existence makes a difference.

Life Knows Life

But how could we know whether primitive organisms have any inwardness at all? Evan Thompson’s answer in Mind in Life is simple and profound: life can only be known by life. As he writes, drawing on Jonas: “This inwardness or interiority is disclosable to us because we ourselves are living beings who experience our own bodily selfhood firsthand.”

We don’t infer inwardness in other creatures from behaviour alone, as we might infer dark matter from gravitational disturbance. We recognise it — because we share something with what we are observing.

Echoes of Aristotle

This recognition is not new. As Thompson observes, it was Descartes who drove a wedge between consciousness and life — conceptualising mind as inner experience and life as external mechanism. Before that rupture, in the Aristotelian tradition, life and mind belonged together under a single heading: soul — not as an immaterial substance, but as the formative principle of the living body. Soul and body are two sides of one single process of living.

Embodied cognition — the school of thought of which Thompson was a founding member — is in many ways a recovery of precisely this Aristotelian insight.

Conclusion

Life and mind are not separate substances inhabiting the same body. They are the formative principles of the body — the inside of which the physical organism is the outside. The mistake of physicalism is not that it describes the physical accurately, but that it takes that description as complete — when it has, by methodological necessity, excluded the subjective dimension from consideration at the outset.

And if this sounds like animism — well, look at the word. It shares its root with animal and animated. And living things are animated. Perhaps animism was not the credulous fantasy that modernity took it to be, but a recognition, from within the horizon of living experience, that life and mind are fundamental — as much cause as consequence.

The full essay, with footnotes and references, is published in Philosophy Today: [link]

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Nicely written, and a good corrective to the physicalist tendencies that insist that matter must be primary. (How’s that working out, by the way? – at the quantum level? :wink:)

The one bit I don’t quite understand is this:

To ask whether a primitive organism is indeed an organism – that is, whether it is alive – and to ask whether it has inwardness are surely two different questions. We can be quite certain that a blade of grass is alive, but question whether it has interiority. So I don’t see how the response, “life can only be known by life”, has anything to say about inwardness, one way or the other. How does my being alive give me an answer to the question about the blade of grass’s interiority?

It feels like there’s a missing step somewhere, to get us from our own experience of being a self in a body, to knowing or recognizing – strong words – that all other organisms have this same experience. I could just about believe that “life knows (or recognizes) life,” but “life knows interiority” is really a stretch. Do you truly believe you recognize interiority in primitive organisms? Or is that more of a deduction from general ontological premises?

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The question “is this organism alive?” and “does it have inwardness?” are indeed distinguishable. But Jonas’s point is more specific: the reason we can recognise inwardness in other living beings at all — however rudimentary — is that we have direct, non-inferential access to what it is like to be a living, self-maintaining, world-responsive body. Not through reasoning but through being one.

I’m reminded of the Evan Thompson essay we discussed last year, Could All Life be Sentient? You will recall that Thompson said the question couldn’t be decided. Perhaps this is an aspect of that question. But I think I can answer: the sense in which we know that we ourselves are alive is not speculative or conjectural. It’s not something we ascertain. It’s that any organism — ourselves, in this case— is aware of its own being at a level prior to discursive awareness. This shows up in instinctual actions — if you’re deeply asleep and there’s a loud noise or something touches you, the body will generally wake up because it senses something it has to respond to. Likewise there are all manner of somatic processes going on unconsciously at every moment that sustain your existence. You don’t know anything about them in a discursive or conscious sense but they nevertheless comprise your bodily being.

I think I could agree with that. As I’ve said above, know from the inside what it is like to be a self-maintaining, world-responsive organism. We observe that primitive organisms exhibit the same fundamental structure of self-maintenance and world-responsiveness. That’s not pure recognition — it has an inferential component.

But I don’t think it’s the same as a purely deductive inference from abstract premises. It’s more like analogical recognition grounded in our own embodied experience — closer to how we attribute experience to other humans and animals than to how we deduce a theorem.

In fact, it looks suspiciously like empathy.

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I’m cautiously starting to explore the convergence between Federico Faggin’s ‘Irreducible’ and Michael Levin’s biological Platonism. I will report back when I begin to understand it — but don’t hold your breath :wink:

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I agree. Reasoning is fundamentally social. In some blurry way, I implicitly address the consciousness of others even in my interior monologue, which is “essentially legible” through the immediate transcendence of the signs toward others and toward my future self. This is a big theme in Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena.

When I say “I,” even in solitary speech, can I give my statement meaning without implying, there as always, the possible absence of the object of speech—in this case, myself? When I tell myself “I am,” this expression, like any other according to Husserl, has the status of speech only if it is intelligible in the absence of its object, in the absence of intuitive presence—here, in the absence of myself. Moreover, it is in this way that the ergo sum is introduced into the philosophical tradition and that a discourse about the transcendental ego is possible.

Consider how “blindly” (without worry) thinkers like Kant and Descartes took their own “reality” to have the same structure as all possible human reality. Did Kant ever see through my eyes ? No. But he dreamed of speaking about the form of all possible human experience, including the experience of those unborn. Why was this dream so “easy” for him ? At the same time, he worried about “the problem of the external world,” wrote that it was a “scandal” that philosophers hadn’t solved this “problem.”

Likewise, Descartes presupposed that his logic was “transcendent” and our logic too. There is “one logic.” The “felt force” of this logic is expressed in a use of “I” — a conception of the subject — that is intrinsically a shared or communal subject.

The “we” is prior to the “I” — if there is anything like science or philosophy.

For signs to signify “properly,” they must be “present” for their perceivers, who must be “conscious” or have something that it is like to be them. This proper-ness of signification is their hearing and having the sign as I do, more or less.

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OK, perhaps I took him to be saying something different. You’re suggesting that when we recognize inwardness, it’s because we can recognize it in ourselves. You’re not saying that our recognition of our own inwardness automatically shows us which creatures have it and which don’t.

Perhaps we can recognize the properties of being self-maintaining and world-responsive, but such recognition isn’t going to tell us whether the organism in question has interiority – whether it’s “like anything” to be that creature. The fact that my type of self-maintenance and world-responsiveness includes interiority doesn’t mean it must be so for a blade of grass. So perhaps we should say, “We know from the inside what it is like to be one sort of self-maintaining, world-responsive organism” – the sort that requires consciousness. “The same fundamental structure” isn’t warranted – we can’t observe that, and indeed it seems unlikely based on what we can observe.

And yes, the whole thing is undoubtedly a mix of analogical recognition along with working out the implications of whatever ontological premises we start with.

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Agree. I suppose, now you put it like that, we should avoid anthropomorphic projection in considering this matter. The philosophical point that I’m trying to articulate is that at some rudimentary level, organic life already displays attributes which avoid reduction to the physical — there is another element in play, which is displayed in the requirement of the organism to stay alive. This happens even on the bio-molecular level in a way that it does not on the level of inorganic life.

This essay was prompted by the abstract of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, published in the NYT around the same time as the book (2012). The key section:

There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory.

‘Before we know what it’s like to be anything, we know what it is to be.’

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Yes, that’s the important issue. And I think the key word is reduction. We can place life within the natural world, perhaps even explain its supervenience on the physical, without reducing it to what is physical. We don’t want to back ourselves into the corner of what McDowell calls “rampant platonism” – a strict duality between the physical and . . . well, whatever the other realm is. McDowell advocates for “naturalized platonism”: “The structure of the space of reasons is not constituted in splendid isolation from anything that is merely human.”

McDowell is addressing the dualism of lawlike causes versus the spontaneity of reason, but I think this applies equally well to the lure of a dualism between what is only physical and what you’re calling “another element.” We make a mistake if we try to reduce the one to the other, as many physicalists do. But there’s nothing wrong with locating the “other element” in the same natural world we inhabit, and asking good questions about what grounds what.

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A learned man saith, “there are more books on consciousness/life than on any other subject, not because we understand it, but because we don’t.” Things that’ve been settled are laid to rest, in the biblical sense that is.

My modest conjecture is that the way funds are distributed, it doesn’t look like we’ll solve the riddle of life-mind any time soon or even in the foreseeable future.

I’m watching a video debate on God and the theist debater says, as I understood it, the nerve signals of perception and thought simply swirl around in the neural network of our brains, with no real destination discernible. The wave of neural signals isn’t random, obviously, but one can imagine oneself driving around the city in a fixed pattern … and suddenly one is aware of cars, trees, people on the sidewalk, and at the same time one is also planning on what to do once one gets home.

Life-mind
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This seems rather fanciful. I think you’re projecting? How exactly would hunting and gathering and sheltering and feasting fail to provide for a perfectly realistic understanding of human and animal mortality, and a naturalistic folk-physics?

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But from a naturalistic perspective, explaining everything mental by simply augmenting one’s picture of nature is what looks limiting and bar-lowering?

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I think it is more accurate to say that the world exists in mind, than that mind exists in the world. It is the accepted wisdom that mind is something that has evolved by natural selection that I’m arguing against (although here I tend to go further than the sources I’ve quoted.)

I’ll put it this way (although it’s not the argument made in the essay).

Biology understands the evolution of h.sapiens well enough. But, at some point in evolutionary history, presumably with the emergence of h.sapiens, humans crossed an evolutionary threshhold which differentiated them from other species. Language, tool-use, story-telling and art were the first indicators. Religion was also a part of this, as evidenced by ritual objects and burial rites preserved in the archeological record, as well as by cave art.

And I maintain that at this point, humans reach a threshold at which biological existence becomes self-aware and self-interpreting in a way that other species are not. It was in that context that the ‘myths of immortality’ that develop in ancient cultures. I’m open to the understanding that these are more than myth, that there is something in us, or about us, which is of a different order to the physical (although it’s important to acknowledge that Hans Jonas is critical of any kind of dualism.)

So - whether that is something that can be understood as ‘within’ the natural world is still problematic to me — but I’m inclined to say not.

I need more time with McDowell. Now you’ve started to mention that book, I’ll return to it.

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You make a consistent and plausible case. My response may sound wishy-washy, but it’s this: We just don’t know. Did h.sapiens cross an evolutionary threshold? Could be. We do a lot of things no other species can do. I’m not knowledgeable enough about evolutionary biology to know if this can be said of other species as well. The only topic here I’ve followed in any depth concerns language use, where the results are surprising. You may be familiar with the new information about possible language development in non-human animals, which raises questions about whether there is a firm boundary between sign- and symbol-use.

But what we mainly don’t know, IMO, is what the implications are of such a putative threshold for our understanding of “nature”, which is not really a scientific term, nor should it be. If one is not a physicalist – and neither of us are – then one should resist the idea that “physical” and “natural” mean the same thing or have the same extension. @bongofury 's point above is relevant here: We don’t succeed in explaining the mental (or spiritual) by merely expanding how we use the word “natural” in order to include it. That’s no explanation at all. But if we do offer an explanation, it may be placed within the natural world, and perhaps contrasted with an attempt at explanation that tries to reduce or deny the phenomena in question, a la physicalism. Recall that this is how Price begins setting out the problem – a “naturalism” that stretches the relevant items out of all recognition is not much use.

So I lean toward saying that there may be an acceptable naturalism that can include all the phenomena you care about. Or perhaps not; again, we don’t know. As our understanding of life and consciousness grows, we may discover that we simply have to abandon the idea of any kind of naturalism that can do justice to the facts – not a popular position at the moment. But that’s far from clear, from where I sit. People like Price and McDowell are raising all the right questions, and in time I hope we’ll get better answers.

I’d appreciate getting your take on Mind and World, though I recognize it’s not really your style of philosophy. But I think you’ll see that McDowell’s approach is even-handed, and that he’s trying to do something that we who are skeptical about naturalism also want done: offer an account of how we can make space for rationality (Kantian spontaneity) within the lawlike world that science tells us we inhabit. I’m not sure he succeeds, but my conversation with @Pierre-Normand and others on the “Philosophical Sentence” thread has been illuminating.

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Nice description. “Naturalized platonism” — the acknowledgement that what is discrete and sign-like in nature is “real” and not apart from certain hastily reduced conceptions of nature.

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Let me mention in passing, since you’re currently grappling with Mind and World, and both @j_j and @Wayfarer also have manifested interest with engaging or re-engaging with it, that, as I’ve found out only yesterday, a second expanded edition of Tim Thornton’s introductory book on the philosophy of McDowell — titled simply “John McDowell” — has been published in 2019. I had read the first edition and found it excellent, even better than the already fairly good introductory book with the same title by Maximilian de Gaynesford.

Here is Thornton’s presentation of his sixth chapter, titled “Mind and World and Perceptual Experience” in the introduction:

And here is a freely accessible review of both Thornton’s and de Gaynesford’s books jointly authored by Alexander Bagattini and Marcus Willaschek.

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I don’t see how it can plausibly be doubted. Tool use and fire go way back before h.sapiens, and the dating keeps getting pushed back - I’ve read recently of chipped stone tools going back over two million years to australopithicenes. But I think science generally recognises the major cultural shifts that accompany the wide-scale appearance of h.sapiens. We crossed the bridge from being creatures of nature to seekers and creators of meaning - the subject of another book I’m currently into:

The Symbolic Species, Terrence Deacon

Deacon adopts the semiotics of Peirce to argue that communication has three distinct levels, and humans are the only species to have fully broken through to the third:

  • Iconic: Communication based on resemblance (e.g., a moth’s wings resembling predator eyes).

  • Indexical: Communication based on direct physical or temporal correlation (e.g., dark clouds indicating rain, a dog barking at a door to go out, or a vervet monkey making a specific alarm call when it physically sees a leopard).

  • Symbolic: Communication based on a web of abstract relations, where words don’t just point to things in the physical world, but point to other words within a systematic network.

Animals are masters of iconic and indexical communication. But a symbol—like the word “justice”, “yesterday”, or “zero”—does not have a physical, indexical presence in the room. It only makes sense because of its relationship to other symbols in a cultural web.

It is the human ability to access and use these faculties in communication that marks us off from all other species according to Deacon. It is very much a complentary text to Hans Jonas and Evan Thompson.

There’s so much in this! The way I will approach it here, is in regards to how nature has been defined by ‘the natural sciences’ so as to methodically exclude or circumscibe certain subjects or ideas from debate — typically what is deemed religious. But then, to introduce those terms is automatically to change the register of the discussion.

As discussed above, I believe that humanity’s distinction from nature is both an anthropological and existential fact. I think naturalism overall tends to deprecate this distinction. I find in discussions of evolutionary biology, that there is an instinctive idea that evolution shows that we are not separate from nature, and that to say this is a kind of prejudice based on superseded Christian ideas of ‘man’s dominion over nature.’ What is ‘natural’ is now regarded as a kind of symbol of purity and renewal. To emphasise the ‘human condition’ is (often violently) rejected as ‘arrogance’.

The continuity of life that the essay argues for — from the simplest organism to human consciousness — doesn’t flatten the genuine threshold. The emergence of symbolic cognition in humans is as real an ontological threshold as the emergence of life from inorganic matter. To acknowledge it isn’t arrogance or a residue of Christian exceptionalism — it’s what makes moral responsibility, meaning-seeking, and genuine ecological ethics possible in the first place. A purely naturalist framework that dissolves human distinction tends to undermine that. In a way it’s an abdication of responsibility - we need to be responsible for the way in which we’re different to other species, rather than saying we’re just another of them.

Hans Jonas does get into these matters later in his book, although I haven’t really absorbed those chapters yet. It needn’t be in conflict with naturalism, but it has a different vision of humanity. I think this is more like the various forms of religious existentialism (Levinas and Kierkegaard come to mind, although I’m not well-read in either.)

All the more reason to like it !

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Very good OP but I disagree with your conclusion about physicalism/materialism.

Physicalism never excluded the subjective dimension of mind and body or consciousness anywhere during their campaign. The charge against them is that there’s a gap in their explanation of the subjective experience arising from the physical foundation, i.e. the brain.

This gap made all the difference in the world of philosophy because to date, the hard problem is still in the top ten blockbuster narratives of all time.

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But if the subjective were not excluded, then how come the gap?

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How can “natural” be defined such that mind and consciousness are not natural?

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This gets to the heart of it. See @Wayfarer 's thoughts on this, above. If it’s true that “nature has been defined by ‘the natural sciences’ so as to methodically exclude or circumscribe certain subjects or ideas from debate,” then we have a use of “nature” or “natural” that indeed defines mind, e.g., as not natural. Wayfarer doesn’t go on to say, though I think he would agree, that this physicalist version of naturalism either reduces or eliminates questionable elements such as mind. Object-naturalism, to use Huw Price’s phrase (similar to what McDowell calls “bald naturalism”), sees the fork in the road – if mind is not natural, then it’s either supernatural or non-existent – and chooses the latter. “Non-existent” may be a bit strong, in the case of a reductive explanation, but such an explanation does draw a picture of what mind “really is” that doesn’t at all resemble what we thought we were talking about.

So, that’s one way that mind and consciousness could be considered “unnatural.” Against that view, there’s the intuition which I think you’re expressing, which says that it hardly makes sense to label “unnatural” a phenomenon which pervades the natural world and appears to supervene upon it.

I share that intuition, but the task is daunting. What is the “natural” account of mind, of rationality, of ethics? We don’t want to take the other fork in the road, and return to a strict dualism, or at least I don’t. That’s why I’m expressing myself so tentatively here. There may well be a way to “place” mind and rationality in the natural world, but we’re still working on understanding how.

And BTW, this is where Price’s naturalist dictum that, in some cases, philosophy must defer to science, makes sense to me. Part of why we’re stymied on this topic, I believe, is that we lack a scientific account of what mind is. Until we get such an account, the attempt to place mind in the physical world will be speculative.

OK. I’m not sure we can help ourselves to a term like “evolutionary threshold” to describe this – it sounds like we’re trying to adopt the cachet of science – but in any case I understand what you mean, and agree that “meaning” is a preoccupation of h.sapiens. Suzanne Langer has a lot to say about this in Sign and Symbol.

Well, right, in a perfectly harmless way. Are we not animals? Don’t we live and die on the Earth? Didn’t our species evolve like all the others? I don’t think we should argue with anyone about whether it’s OK to think of “being natural” in this way. Of course it is; to deny it would be to fly in the face of accepted usage and, frankly, common sense. Even the most rigorous Christian dualism, for instance, acknowledges this aspect of humanity. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .

What you want to deny – and what is worth an argument – is that “being natural” in this way means that all other significant differences between h.sapiens and other animals (or between things with minds and things without them, for that matter) are “unreal” or at least unscientific. I think your beef is with “naturalism” construed in a certain way, not with the idea that humans, complete with minds, are part of the natural world in the sense of being placed within it, and nowhere else.