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In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis

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In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis entropy Article Where There Is Life There Is Mind: In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis Michael D. Kirchhoff 1,* and Tom Froese 2 1 Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong 2500, Australia 2 Department of Computer Science, Research Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems, National Autonomous University of Mexico, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +61-4221-5742 Academic Editors: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and Robert Lowe Received: 22 February 2017; Accepted: 11 April 2017; Published: 14 April 2017 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). Keywords: life-mind continuity; free energy principle; radical enactivism; autopoietic enactivism 1. Introduction 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). The FEP is argued to deliver an overarching rationale for brain functioning; to give a unified theory of perception, cognition, and action (and all other psychological capacities); and to suggest a framework by which to understand the relation between life and mind [1–3]. It states 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 [4,5] (By “state” we mean a state in a system’s state space. One of the states that a system expects to find itself in is “to be alive”. Thus, a system will seek to reduce the probability of finding itself in a non-anticipated state relative to its generative model. In other words, by minimizing free energy, on average and over time, the system will self-organize the parameters of its internal states to occupy a limited number of states, on average and over time ([6], p. 180)). Hence, to minimize free energy is to reduce disorder, in the sense of uncertainty. Entropy 2017, 19, 169; doi:10.3390/e19040169 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy Entropy 2017, 19, 169 2 of 18 We then 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”? Some free energy formulations answer this question negatively. We call this picture of the life-mind relation the independence view of life and mind. In the context of the FEP, it comes in at least two formulations, each of which has its own unique implications for thinking about life and mind, and their relation to one another: • The Cognitivist Free Energy Principle [6–8]. • The Overly Generous Non-Cognitivist Free Energy Principle [9,10]. The cognitivist free energy principle (cognitivist FEP) treats the relationship between life and mind as a contingent one. It is sometimes referred to as the self-evidencing brain hypothesis [7] or simply the predictive mind [6]. An independence view of this kind might still hold that some cognitive systems are living systems, but it will treat this particular relation as purely contingent, for example by associating minds with computational processes with semantic (i.e., contentful) properties, or by allowing for the possibility that minds could be realized wholly independently from life given the right kind of artificially supporting system. Such minds might be said to be epistemically secluded from the world, comprised of powerful generative models, which cannot be “necessarily wedded to biological organs” ([8], p. 7). The non-cognitivist free energy principle (non-cognitivist FEP) takes a very different starting point from the cognitivist FEP. The origins of the FEP were in thermodynamics, where non-equilibrium free energy theorems have been used to explain self-organizing dynamics in systems capable of remaining far from thermodynamic equilibrium [4]. In this sense the origins of the FEP have nothing intrinsically to do with life and mind, although it is now being directly applied to explain living and cognitive systems [2,9–11]. Overly generous non-cognitivist FEP is the view that all systems that maintain their variables within a limited range of values can be understood as having some form of mentality or proto-mentality given that the FEP casts any system that is able to maintain structural integrity in the face of a fluctuating environment as engaged in predicting its own future states. That is, retaining integrity rests upon processes the function of which is to maximize model evidence—i.e., these processes exhibit self-evidencing dynamics. Yet, this generous view of self-evidencing would appear to lead to some form of panpsychism. Other free energy formulations answer the question of whether the mind is restricted by life positively. These formulations are part of a more general picture of the life-mind relation we refer to as the dependence view of life and mind. There are different accounts in the literature, and common in all of these is that they subscribe to a much less generous but still non-cognitivist view of the FEP. We dub the possible accounts: • Non-Cognitivist FEP + Evolutionary Latecomer Views of Mind (e.g., [12]) • Non-Cognitivist FEP + Strong Life-Mind Continuity Views ([13,14] and this paper). Evolutionary latecomer views of mind emphasize discontinuities between mere living systems and cognitive ones, such that the properties of mind can be thought of as complexifications of the properties of life (see [15] for discussion of such views, yet in a slightly different context). For example, 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]. Hence, on this view, it is possible to be alive and yet not (necessarily) cognitive (Despite his defense of an action-oriented representational theory of mind, we place Clark [12] in the non-cognitivist FEP camp given his advocacy of the complementarity of FEP and predictive processing schemes with work in embodied, Entropy 2017, 19, 169 3 of 18 extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science. We will have more to say about Clark’s [12] view in due course). In this paper, we shall defend non-cognitivist FEP and a strong life-mind continuity view based on recent developments in embodied and enactive cognitive science. It is the classic premises of cognitivism, especially internalism and representationalism, which make straightforward applications of enactive approaches to the FEP problematic [1,16]. We are not alone in developing anti-cognitivist formulations of the FEP from the perspective of enactivism. Work by Bruineberg et al. [13] and Kirchhoff [14,17] set the stage. Here is a list of the points on which we agree with Bruineberg et al. [13]: (a) the Helmholtzian view of perception as unconscious inference is inherent to cognitivist formulations of the FEP; (b) there are good reasons to think that this Helmholtzian view of perceptual inference is incompatible with approximate Bayesian inference under a non-cognitivist formulation of the FEP; and (c) once viewed through the lens of enactivism, the FEP can address how life and mind share the same set of basic organizational properties. The main difference between Bruineberg et al. [13] and this paper is that while Bruineberg et al. ([13]; see also [18]) aim to establish that the function of generative models is to maintain a robust brain-body-niche system (see [17] for a metaphysical treatment), we directly target a strong life-mind continuity thesis, further developing recent arguments in [14]. We shall argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained and augmented by key ideas in recent radical and autopoietic enactive approaches to cognitive science [14,17,19–22]. Our argument has two steps. The first addresses the nature of basic minds as selected by evolution for intentional directedness without semantic content [21].
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