Abstract
The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction.
Highlights
IntroductionSymbioses are cooperative heterospecific associations in which each symbiont partner mutually benefits from (e.g., gaining nourishment, shelter, etc.) the presence of the other partner(s)
Symbioses1 are cooperative heterospecific associations in which each symbiont partner mutually benefits from the presence of the other partner(s)
The idea that cognizers may have other cognizers as nested constituent parts is an idea that seems to run counter to our folk-psychological intuitions about what it is to be a cognizer. This concern I noted reiterates a similar worry for the physiological account of biological individuality: the hierarchically nested ontology of physiological individuals in physiological individuals flouts out folk-biological intuition that an organism cannot be a constituent of another organism
Summary
Symbioses are cooperative heterospecific associations in which each symbiont partner mutually benefits from (e.g., gaining nourishment, shelter, etc.) the presence of the other partner(s). Putting these ideas together the following question arises: if mind is an enriched version of life and some symbiotic associations qualify as physiological individuals, is there any reason to think that some of these living associations might themselves be enriched enough so as to qualify as bio-cognizers?2 This is not merely a question regarding a possible application of the extended mind thesis (i.e., the idea that cognitive processes can loop outside of a cognizing agent to envelop the use of external artefacts as scaffolding) (Clark and Chalmers 1998) Rather, this is a question about the kinds of physiological individuals that we can reasonably ascribe the term “cognizer” to. To support the notion of symbiotic minds and the notion of nested biological cognizers that falls out of it, this paper will develop and deploy the notion of reciprocal multiscale integration from within the Free Energy Principle. In showing how the notion of a symbiotic mind can be supported by reciprocal multiscale integration within FEP, this paper contributes to the philosophy of cognitive science, demonstrating that our folk-psychological conception of what cognizers are require rethinking. This paper concludes when some brief remarks addressing the problem of nested-cognizers
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