Introduction: Mentis Naturalis

Abstract

Part 1IntroductionThis special issue is an extension of a project begun in 2010 when I sent out a call forpapers forananthology dedicatedto exploringthebiological origins andevolutionarydevelopment of organic mindedness. I expected a dozen or so submissions andreceived over 60. Some of those were published in Origins of Mind (Springer2012), some appear in this special issue and more are forthcoming in a second specialissue dedicated to the topic. It became clear to me that the question of how minded-ness evolved or emerged in the natural world and why is important to researchersacross philosophy and the bio-, neuro-, and medical sciences. What I have aimed todo in the origins of mind project, which includes this special issue, is collect a varietyof novel, thought-provoking, and intuitively plausible accounts of the where, when,why, and how of organic mindedness in the natural world.An important historical fact of the history of philosophy is that the majority of 20thcentury philosophy of mind, dominated as it was by the analytic tradition, enjoyed arobust existence completely insulated from discoveries and insights generated in thebio-, neuro-, and medical sciences. It did, of course, engage with computer science inthat the then reigning philosophy of mind, functionalism, was based on comparisonsbetween machine functionality and human consciousness. Though artificial intelli-gence is an important historical paradigm that has generated insights into whatmindedness might be and what it is not, my own project in philosophy of mind hasbeen to work toward a naturalistic (i.e., consistent with evolutionary theory) accountof organic mindedness that will have implications for medicine, mental and physicalhealth, and our species’ understanding of itself.