Matching concepts and phenomena: A review of <i>Biological Autonomy</i>

This paper discusses Moreno and Mossio’s book Biological autonomy: A philosophical and theoretical enquiry. The book provides an up to date overview of the authors’ work within the organizational approach to mind and life, which is linked to the work of Maturana and Varela but which is here developed in new ways and with a strong focus on the autonomy of living systems. After an overview of the book, the paper focuses on the choice of the guiding concepts for this enterprise – autonomy, agency, organism and cognition – and discusses whether these notions are still up to the task of formulating the key issues to be targeted by the organizational approach

Drawing lessons from “CRISPR/Cas as a minimal cognitive system”:A commentary on Yakura

Hidetaka Yakura provides an interesting contribution to the discussion on minimal cognition. He develops the idea that the CRISPR/Cas immune system, as present in many bacteria and archaea, can itself be cast as a minimal cognitive system

Describing Atypical Instances of Intelligence:The Case of Habituation

Bonzanni, Rouleau, Levin and Kaplan (2019) provide a good example of extending and generalizing current descriptions of psychological terminology. In this commentary, I argue that their paper exemplifies the need to provide descriptions of the many newly discovered cases of atypical intelligence within the biological domain

Is “the brain” a helpful metaphor for neuroscience?

Brette criticizes the notion of neural coding as used in neuroscience as a way to clarify the causal structure of the brain. This criticism will be positioned in a wider range of findings and ideas from other branches of neuroscience and biology. While supporting Brette’s critique, they also suggest the need for more radical changes in neuroscience than Brette envisions

Bodily Complexity:Integrated Multicellular Organizations for Contraction-Based Motility

Compared to other forms of multicellularity, the animal case is unique. Animals—barring some exceptions—consist of collections of cells that are connected and integrated to such an extent that these collectives act as unitary, large free-moving entities capable of sensing macroscopic properties and events. This animal configuration is so well known that it is often taken as a natural one that ‘must’ have evolved, given environmental conditions that make large free-moving units ‘obviously’ adaptive. Here we question the seemingly evolutionary inevitableness of animals and introduce a thesis of bodily complexity: The multicellular organization characteristic for typical animals requires the integration of a multitude of intrinsic bodily features between its sensorimotor, physiological, and developmental aspects, and the related contraction-based tissue- and cellular-level events and processes. The evolutionary road toward this bodily complexity involves, we argue, various intermediate organizational steps that accompany and support the wider transition from cilia-based to contraction/muscle-based motility, and which remain insufficiently acknowledged. Here, we stress the crucial and specific role played by muscle-based and myoepithelial tissue contraction—acting as a physical platform for organizing both the multicellular transmission of mechanical forces and multicellular signaling—as key foundation of animal motility, sensing and maintenance, and development. We illustrate and discuss these bodily features in the context of the four basal animal phyla—Porifera, Ctenophores, Placozoans, and Cnidarians—that split off before the bilaterians, a supergroup that incorporates all complex animals

Beyond intuitions:A biological interpretation of cognition

How can the study of cognition become an ordinary science that is intrinsically connected to the other natural sciences? Since the cognitive revolution in and around psychology, cognition has become the standard term to refer to the processes that make us – humans – intelligent. The interpretation of this cognitive domain and cognition itself has however never become really clear. First, cognition is a mental concept that is conceptually linked with theories and ideas that are not self-evidently connected to the world as described by the natural sciences. In addition, cognition tends to remain a phenomenon that we recognize ‘on sight’ without the need for an explicit demarcation criterion, a ‘mark of the cognitive’. In this paper, I abandon this intuition-based demarcation of cognition and propose an unequivocal biological one. This biological demarcation does not build on our current intuitions concerning cognition and in any many cases will not be in line with them. As a consequence the direct conceptual connection between cognition and the traditional notion of ‘mind’ will be cut and the term ‘cognition’ will acquire a fundamentally different meaning. However, the term ‘cognition’ can and will be maintained as with its new meaning it still refers to the processes that make us humans – as well as other organisms – intelligent: It still covers the scientific domain that its original form was meant to cover, although now with some additional areas. The proposal states that cognition is to be interpreted as the interactions between organisms and their environments together with the organismal structures specifically involved in this interaction. This proposal gives a specific material foundation to cognitive phenomena, which can act as the empirical basis for existing and new cognitive theory formation that will place human cognition unequivocally in the wider framework of living organizations. Some of the implications of the proposal will be further illustrated by differentiating between agents and organisms. When organisms rather than agents form the focal point for cognition, better justice can be done to ongoing research on intelligence in bacteria, plants and fungi, as well as concerning the fundamental roles played by nervous systems in animals.<br/