When one surveys modern biology, the confluence of facts makes it clear that based on physical evidence, a Sense Of Self, (not to be mistaken with introspection) is an inherent component of living organisms.
It started with the formation of the first single-celled creatures, and exploded with the development of the eukaryotic creatures , that made all complex life possible. Why? Because without a Sense of Self we could not cope with a complex world and simply could not survive. Because here on our evolving Earth something smarter was there to eat you soon as you were born.
The science has become pretty clear that the best way to think about consciousness is as the inside reflection of your body communicating with itself. The full details of the folds within folds of interwoven complex systems are still beyond full understanding, but all the strands of evidence are there and internally consistent.
I would suggest the biggest most glaring philosophical blindspot comes down to philosophers dealing with humans as discrete beings that popped into existence — and forgetting all about the half a billion years worth of generational exploration, development, refinement, culling, that was required to organize and build the near countless systems that keep our complex bodies going, unfolding one day at a time, and moment by moment.
So what’s the problem.
Is it as simple as our human ego driven unexamined Mind is convinced of its exceptionalism (if not godliness) - and Descartes-Nagle-Chalmers presented a more titlating storyline that keeps human self aggrandizement at the center of everything? “It’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”
Sadly in my experience philosopher types refuse to discuss the biological aspect of understanding Mind preferring to ignore the implications with the simple label - “Uninteresting”.
Preferring the easy response: I’m the problem.
It has nothing to do with centuries of our dancing around the May Pole of Human Exceptionalism and a base disregard for all other living creatures.
There are philosophers from a broadly naturalist position, Epicurus/Lucretius, David Hume, Peter Singer, Dan Dennett and others. They dont see humans as exceptional.
I dont necessarily agree however that consciousness or the ability to feel pain generates rights. Its a common assertion. But Im not philosophically persuaded by rights theory. If it’s not a good basis for human morality, it’s unlikely to be a good basis for a wider concern.
One of my own inspirations is John Rawls who developed a number of contractarian political philosophies which treat people as moral agents but not animals. He was nonetheless in later life a vegetarian which he claimed was a personal decision
We may however be making progress. Its difficult however to undo the neglect of the subject especially as its been dismissed by all the major religions as irrelevanf.
Sense Of Self does not exist in single-celled organisms. In multicellular organisms, it develops gradually, reaching the point of introspection in humans.
Not before that? Life began far simpler than a single celled creature. Mitochondria are a life forms on their own. Do they have a sense of self?
Likewise, eventually a small number of cells clustered together in groups, hanging on to each other for mutual benefit. Is this a collection of individuals, each fighting to survive? At what point do the collection obtain its own sense of self? Does my kidney have a sense of self separate from a lung? Do all my cells still have such a sense, and if so, why are they so willing to die, to take one for the team? If not, where did that sense go? Likewise, the cell might just be a commune of separate individuals with a protective wall around the community.
What am I that the collection of cells is not? I feel pain, but does any cell feel that? Some of them certainly are involved in my feeling. I stub my toe. Do some of the cells there feel distress? Does the pain exist only there, or in the brain? Are brain cells in pain then?
Not in the human way of course.
We can quibble about the term, but so far as awareness of the difference between inside and outside, what excrete what to ingest, how to react to varying stimulus, all of that requires an awareness of self, and outside reality - even if we humans can’t conceptual it. The fact remains, the behaviors are being observed.
If it interests you, I’m not the one to listen to!
Take an hour to listen to this lecture by Arthur Reber
Then come back and lets discuss what’s happening in eukaryotes cells and various single celled creatures (that Reber gets into).
Such as where between single celled creatures and multicellular organism arise and why? Reber does touch on this.
Why is there so little interest in discussing the intellectual bridge between philosophy and biology?
For example, I appreciate the thought, still what am I supposed to do with a pdf of some book covers? When it’s discussion I’m seeking?
Incidentally, I’m happy to report I have read the book by Arthur Godfrey-Smith, with much joy & sense of vindication (after all my knowledge is science based).
Thompson, I’m slightly familiar with and Jean Piaget not at all, though the over-view of his theory seems right up my alley.
So my question transforms,
why is there such an aversion to discussing these facts within the philosophical community?
I use the term aversion because of how often I end up with little more than an uppity attitude and dismissal, when I simply wanted to discuss this very real discrepancy between philosophy and observed physical reality.
I think you’re depiction of philosophy is uninformed and inaccurate. No philosopher worth their salt would deny the relevance of biological evolution to human self-understanding. Obviously Descartes had no knowledge of modern evolutionary theory as he pre-dated it by centuries, but Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers can be expected to be fully apprised of the facts of evolutionary biology, and neither of them say anything like humans ‘popping into existence’.
I’ve read some of the essays you have linked about your ideas on the relationship between evolution and philosophy, and you’ve said something like philosophy is the product of ‘the inflated egos of philosophers’ and that the only route to self-understanding is through biology. But they’re separate subjects, and there need be no conflict between them.
The conflict is between biological or evolutionary reductionism and philosophy:
Evolutionary Reductionism (in philosophy of mind) is the view that all mental phenomena—consciousness, intentionality, reason, and subjective experience—can be fully explained by, and reduced to, biological mechanisms shaped by natural selection.
In short: the mind is nothing over and above a set of evolved biological adaptations (or evolutionary byproducts) optimized for survival and reproduction.
It is preached by popular intellectuals, notably Richard Dawkins and the late Daniel Dennett, but is also a strong current in popular culture, one side of the ‘culture wars’ between evolutionary biology and bibically-motivated ‘intelligent design’ on the other.
Thomas Nagel’s book on the controversy, published 2012, is called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False:
Nagel writes that mind is a basic aspect of nature and that any philosophy of nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally misguided. He argues that the standard naturalistic view flies in the face of common sense.
Nagel’s position is that principles of an entirely different kind may account for the emergence of life, and conscious life. Consciousness could be founded by principles that are teleological, rather than materialist or mechanistic. He stresses that his argument is not a religious one (he is an atheist).
David Chalmers says that whilst scientific naturalism is perfectly adequate to the objective description of the attributes and functions of consciousness (such as discrimination, integration of information, and the control of behavior) it cannot capture or convey the felt nature of lived experience, which is irreduccibly first-person.
The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
So - your complaints about the absence of an ‘intellectual bridge between biology and philosophy’ is a strawman. There is a great deal of debate and discussion about it, including many of the books already mentioned in this thread.
Biology studies the brain and philosophy studies the mind. Both study life. This isn’t classified information. Anyone can pick up a book from a library and edify himself on the topic.
Aristotle was also a biologist, having written on the subject.
Thank you Wayfarer for taking the time to offer a response.
Nagel: "… 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."
There is a natural law that no two objects can possess the same space at the same time.
I don’t comprehend the complaint - that I can’t get inside the skin (or “mind”) of another being?
So, why does that reality make science become inadequate to describe creature mental processes?
Yes, the difference between a collection of cells and a living whole is connections. Everything is (i.e. can be seen as) a network, as we often say in software design. (And many other fields too, I suspect.)
The “collection of cells” reference refers to a half-network, where a ‘half-network’ is nothing at all. A network cannot exist without both of its essential and necessary components: nodes and connections. The cells are the nodes. The connections are what is missing from @noAxioms’ question.
The complexity of a human brain is overwhelming when we consider only the gazillions of neurons. But when we consider the connections between the neurons, even infinities start to seem inadequate to describe them. The human ‘connectome’ is frightening in its complexity, I find.
So “what am I that the collection of cells is not?” A whole; a connected, functioning, network of life.
Edited to add: My apologies. My words, that I stand by, seem to consider only internal connections, ignoring the “interaction with the world out there beyond my body” that @CitizensChallenge rightly and correctly (IMO) mentions. I did not intend this neglect. The point about connections, literal and figurative, is that get everywhere, pretty much. They aren’t just internal, or just external either. I hope this clarifies as I intend that it should…
This is just part of the points you were/are making, and I apologise for that. But it seems to me that you might be slightly hampered by the binary thinking going on here?
For example, is this really a clash between “biological or evolutionary reductionism” and “philosophy”, or is there a great deal more to it — I think there is, and maybe you do too? — than just one ‘versus’ the other? Are there not many more possibilities, not just two?
But then I’m someone who’s has a life long love, and interest in proactively learning about deep time and the parade of adaptations in the face of the ongoing, ever changing, challenges that created the Earth I was born into and that is disappearing at a frightful pace, thanks to our unexamined human sense of exceptionalism and disregard for all but our own perceived interests.
It’s that destroying our world my kids and grandkids are going to depend on that has me on edge. So unnecessary. Like the jealous dog crossing the river bridge with his juicy bone, and it will not end well.
Saying how long it took (It took about 10x that time) doesn’t answer my question, which was essentially 'When does a collection become at being?". Your comment about ‘success’ implies a goal. There is no goal. It remains to be seen if humanity evolves into something, or is quickly eliminated as unfit.
I am my body and its interaction with the world out there beyond my body.
You stick two humans together with Velcro. Is it now a third being, separate from the two individuals that comprise it? If not, why not? Why was the answer yes for two cell beings (each with that cellular kind of ‘sense of self’ you describe in your OP) but not for two humans? That’s my question. So why are you not just a community of separate beings?
PatternChaser at least engages with the quesstion:
The two people with Velcro are connected. They also communicate, and like any community, work for mutual benefit. So is a community a living being? It kind of is for bees and ants. Early multicellular life forms hardly had brains or other nervous connections, so it isn’t the nerves that make it a being rather than just a collection.
Once it is a being, are the components (each a living cell) no longer each with a ‘sense of self’ as the OP puts it?
