Cell phenomenology: The first phenomenon

Abstract

As a broad academic discipline phenomenology may be summarized as the study from a first person point of view of what appears to subjective human conscious experience. As a historical philosophical movement phenomenology was often motivated by the belief that subjective human experience is the proper foundation of all philosophy. I explore phenomena from a broader evolutionary and physical point of view. I consider a phenomenon as the subjective consequence of a physical interaction with an individual organism. In physical terms, a phenomenon requires some form of detection or measurement. What is detected is determined by the organism, and is potentially functional for the organism as a self or subject. The concept of function has meaning only for living organisms. The classical human mind-body problem is an ill-defined complicated case of the more general epistemic subject-object problem, which at the origin of life I reduce to the primitive symbol-matter problem. I argue that the first memory-based self-replicating unit, like a cell, is the most primitive case of a necessary symbol-matter distinction. The first phenomena, which include all forms or sensing, detection, and measurement, require a subject-object distinction, called the epistemic cut. It is only because of such a subject-object distinction that populations of individual subjects can selectively adapt to their environment by heritable variations. This basic evolutionary process requires distinguishing the individual's subjective phenomena from the objective events of inexorable physical laws.