Evan Thompson draws from the disciplines of biology, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to bring about a wide and varied discussion of one of the most significant philosophical questions or our time called the explanatory gap--the gap between our subjective experience and the laws of nature. "Exactly how are consciousness and subjective experience related to the brain and the body?" How is it that our subjective experience of the world sets us apart from our environment, when our environment and life are intricately coupled? Thompson contends that there can be no dualistic separation between the organizational properties of life and mind. In fact, Thompson says in the preface: "...the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life." To understand mind it is necessary to understand life. And to these ends, Thompson references the great philosophical and scientific thinkers past and present in an attempt to sort out questions of what constitutes life and consciousness, and he carefully and respectfully points out what he believes could be the strengths and weaknesses of each hypothesis.
Since it is necessary to understand life in order to comprehend mind, it isn't surprising that the philosophical methodologies used to explaining life are similar to those used to explain mind. From my understanding of Thompson's work, it seems that there are two philosophically divergent paths that researchers have pursued to explain these concepts. One path, which encompasses the fields of cognitive science, computation, and genocentrism, is mechanistic, reductive, dualistic, and materialistic in nature. The other more meaningful and holistic path favored by Thompson encompasses principles including dynamism, autonomy, autopoiesis, and enactive evolution.
The theory of genocentrism supposes that the organism is merely a vehicle which the "selfish gene constructs and controls for purposes of its own survival. Genocentrism as a theory of life and evolution is similar to the view of computationalists in respect to the mind and the brain. Both incorporate the dualistic notion of hardware vs. software, matter vs. information and body vs. mind. Just as the genocentrist views the genes inside the cell as the software that controls everything from phenotype to evolution, so the computationalist views the mind as the controlling software inside the head. The author summarizes this idea by stating that "The view that life is essentially a matter of the genes inside the cell nucleus is homologous to the view that the mind is essentially a matter of a computer brain inside the head" (173). The main problem with the genocentrist view is that the theory presupposes that the apparatus of the cell is already in place for the DNA and RNA replication process. DNA and RNA are not self-replicating and are entirely dependent upon the self-replicating cell to establish an environment for the process of protein synthesis and reproduction. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the coding of the genes and phenotypic expression. In fact, while it was once believed that it took one gene to produce one protein, it has since been discovered that one gene can code for many proteins and the expression of these proteins is dependent upon quantum processes that allow individual proteins to fold into as many as a thousand different configurations to carry out their specific tasks. The multitude of processes that are carried out by the membrane and various organelles of the cell in their totality are what provide the milieu for the function of the genetic material. As Thompson states: "This notion of information as something that preexists its own expression in the cell, and that is not affected by the developmental matrix of the organism and environment, is a reification that has no explanatory value. It is informational idolatry and superstition, not science." (187)
Thompson details the shortcomings of genocentrism and espouses the viability of the inactive approach to explain mind and life. The author states that self-organization and natural selection are not mutually exclusive, but, are in fact, complementary aspects of a unified process of enactive evolution. The enactive approach takes into account the intentionality of life as well as the emergence of mind in the self-organizing processes that interconnect the brain, body, and the environment. The expression of life is not merely a matter of information, but a complementarity of information and meaning--an idea thoroughly explored in my book, "Confronting the Quantum Enigma, Albert, Niels, and John." (2011)
Thompson's assumptions hinge on the many researchers who have attempted to define life. The consensus view is that for something to be alive is must be "autopoietic". Autopoiesis is defined as a dynamic, self-organizing, self-replication system. Several researchers including Maturana and Varela contend that all autopoietic systems are also cognitive systems. Thompson states that if autopoiesis and cognition are what distinguishes life from non-life, then the process of understanding life and understanding mind are continuous.
This dense book of five hundred pages took me several months to plod through, but the effort was worth it. Evan Thompson left no stone unturned in his quest to understand life and mind in this well-researched masterpiece.
Review by David Kreiter, author of: Confronting the Quantum Enigma: Albert,Niels, and John.(2011--Available on Amazon). And Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.
