Abstract
This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there is no singular interpretation of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some FEP formulations express what we call an independence view of life and mind. One independence view is a cognitivist view of the FEP. It turns on information processing with semantic content, thus restricting the range of systems capable of exhibiting mentality. Other independence views exemplify what we call an overly generous non-cognitivist view of the FEP, and these appear to go in the opposite direction. That is, they imply that mentality is nearly everywhere. The paper proceeds to argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic).
Highlights
How are life and mind, respectively, characterized, and how are their relations to one another best conceived?In this paper, we start by examining this question from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP)
It is precisely for this reason that we argued that cognitivist FEP
We suggest a way by which to positively rehabilitate the above problem, and we do this by showing that non-cognitivist FEP is in line with autopoietic enactivism, enabling us to weave the origins of life together with the origins of mind (This account is a further development of the line of argument pursued in [14])
Summary
How are life and mind, respectively, characterized, and how are their relations to one another best conceived?. We argue that there is no singular account of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind (Or, minimally, there is no existing agreement on how best to interpret the properties of variational free energy for thinking about life and mind, and their relationship to one another) These different perspectives on the life-mind relation can be brought into view by considering the answer one would give to the following question: “Are mental phenomena restricted to living systems”?. Mentality, but not life, requires the existence of sophisticated generative neural machinery that is not present in simple forms of life such as single-celled organisms [12] On this view, it is possible to be alive and yet not (necessarily) cognitive We arrive at a strong view of life-mind continuity, and we avoid the cognitivist position of no-continuity between life and mind, while, at the same time, remaining far removed from the kind of mental bloat associated with overly generous FEP interpretations of the place of mind in the natural world (For other related but different articulations of the strong life-mind continuity thesis, see [23,24,25,26], especially [27])
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