musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Putat ergo est


When do we begin to think? There is evidence that it begins long before we are aware of it -long before we regard ourselves as a ‘we’; long before I am an I perhaps, although that may depend more on a religious belief, or abstruse philosophical questioning, than a physiological one. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a question even more difficult to analyse, is when did mind arise? Not ours, you understand, not the ability to do Sudoku, or understand quantum mechanics, but more the ability to be aware and react to stimuli from the outside -avoid things that might cause harm, and approach things that are perceived (somehow) as beneficial. When did action become purposive, in other words?

Of course, in this advanced Darwinian Age, the teleology seems obvious: those that don’t avoid danger, or don’t approach promising stimuli won’t live long enough to produce offspring with like proclivities. But, that’s not really what I’m asking either -that’s a result of the development of a proto-mind, not how or when it developed. And I’m not asking why it developed, either -that’s a question that will likely never be answerable without framing it the way we often respond to the persistent why questions of a three year old child: “Just because!” or more authoritatively as “Because I said so…!”

And no, I’m not so much concerned with a concept of the ‘mind’ being something localized in a brain, or lump of nervous tissue, as I am in the question of the ability of an entity to respond purposively to something in its environment (appropriate or not). A stone does not respond to stimuli, a plant does; even a bacterium can react to chemicals around it. But neither a plant nor a bacterium has an identifiable brain… So when did this ability to react, this intention arise? And, for that matter, did it obey the usual rules of evolution -that is to say, gradual changes with the more successful prototypes gaining ascendance?

I had no idea that the idea the development of Mind would be so complicated, or the various competing theories so embroiled in controversy and riven with emotional attachment; one might be forgiven for wondering if they might actually be religions instead. Perhaps they are…

To get a feeling for the fray, I decided to dip my toes into an essay by Pamela Lyon, at the time a research fellow in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in Adelaide. The essay was titled ‘On the Origin of Minds’ [i]– a title that promised at least some answers to my questions.

Alas, my toes, not to mention my mind found themselves in an unexpected maelstrom. Rather than the slow, if random, progression of purposive reaction to the world surrounding the organism, ‘The consensus was that, at some point in evolution (and we might never know when), cognition – poof! – somehow appears in some animals. Before that, behaviour – the only indicator of cognition available without language – would have been entirely innate, machine-like, reflexive. It might have looked cognitively driven but wasn’t.’ That didn’t seem right, somehow; maybe I was missing something -surely there was a progression. So, I read doggedly on.

Lyon, it seems, was also puzzled. And then she recalled a seismic shift, a paradigm shift that totally changed the thrust of scientific thinking at the time: the Copernican revolution in the middle of the 16th century which displaced the Earth as the center of the cosmos, and suggested the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun. All of the previously contrived epicycles and complicated explanations for the movements of the planets suddenly were seen as unnecessary. Mistaken.

‘Similarly, Darwin’s radical idea dethrones human and other brains from their ‘intuitively obvious’ position at the centre of the (Western) cognitive universe.’ It was a shift in perspective that seemed to elbow out Homo sapiens as the gold standard for comparisons.

Similar to what I have written in another essay[ii], Lyon suggests that ‘the particularity of the world constructed by an organism’s unique complement of senses and the value the organism imputes to elements of that construction, evolved in dependence upon how the organism makes a living…

‘Maturana’s Biology of Cognition (1970) [Humberto Maturana, a Chilean biologist and philosopher] made [Lyon] realise just how weird the living state is compared with any other physical system on Earth.’

Maturana felt that ‘life is self-producing, not merely self-organising or self-maintaining… cognition focuses on the organism’s need to interact continually with its surroundings… ‘This ‘domain of interactions’ between organism and environment is cognition.’ All well and good, I suppose, but no closer to the origin of Mind, let alone intention. Criteria and a clear method of identification of cognition were still required. A comparator might help; perhaps living itself is a process of cognition…

Lyon suggests that ‘evolution had laid a solid foundation of capacities typically considered cognitive well before nervous systems appeared: about 500-650 million years ago. Perception, memory, valence, learning, decision-making, anticipation, communication – all once thought the preserve of humankind – are found in a wide variety of living things, including bacteria, unicellular eukaryotes, plants, fungi, non-neuronal animals, and animals with simple nervous systems and brains.’

So, do you really need a brain (ie neural cells) to have cognition -on/off switches- or is that just Homo sapiens gold-standardizing itself again? Is cognition really like a computer… are we? In our search for ‘mind’ are we requiring the need for specialized individual cells to be connected in tightly knit bunches -like neurons transmitting chemical and electrical signals in our brains? What about chemical signals and the like which occur between randomly dispersed bacteria, say -is that not similar (even if less developed, although similarly purposive)? And is this process not compatible with evolutionary processes as we understand them? Bacteria (which are prokaryotes) don’t even have a nucleus to contain their genetic instructions (DNA), and bacteria -or variations thereof- were likely the first life on earth. So if ‘mind’ is interaction with some form of intention, haven’t bacteria fulfilled the criteria -even if their Umwelt would be unable to cede priority to human-driven gold standards?

Lyon goes into far more detail than I could handle in her discussion of the controversies and eligible contenders in the criteria for the development of ‘mind’, and I have to admit that I was impressed. And yet, in the end, perhaps we need to follow our own Umwelten, don’t you think? Mine votes for the bacteria… although there’s a special place in my heart for plants…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/the-study-of-the-mind-needs-a-copernican-shift-in-perspective

[ii] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2023/02/08/some-relish-the-saltiness-of-time/(opens in a new tab)

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