VI. Life’s Cerebral Faculties Become More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

D. A Creative Union of Free Personal Agency in Reciprocal, Supportive Societies

Buss, Leo. The Evolution of Individuality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. A prescient attempt to expand the modern evolutionary synthesis beyond an emphasis on genes and/or organisms to sequential levels of the selection of whole “individuals.”

Life is hierarchically organized because any given unit of selection, once established, can come to follow the same progression of elaboration of a yet higher organization, followed by stabilization of the novel organization. (172)

Cabell, Kenneth and Jaan Valsiner, eds. The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality. Berlin: Springer, 2014. Clark University and Aalborg University, Denmark editors gather to date and introduce an essay collection from environmental to biologic, psychological and cultures to advance the importance of personal self-making (autopoietic, semiopoietic), catalytic agencies are in life’s quickening emergence. Select chapters include Systematic Systemics: Causality, Catalysis, and Developmental Cybernetics as an Introduction by the editors, Catalysis and Morphogenesis: The Context Semiotic Configuration of Form, Function and Fields of Experience Picione, Raffaele and Maria Freda. Breaking the Arrows of Causality: The Idea of Catalysis in the Making by Jaan Valsiner, and Semiotic Scaffolding: A Biosemiotic Link between Sema and Soma by Jesper Hoffmeyer, see Abstracts below.

Theoretical models of catalysis have proven to bring with them major breakthroughs in chemistry and biology, from the 1830s onward. It can be argued that the scientific status of chemistry has become established through the move from causal to catalytic models. Likewise, the central explanatory role of cyclical models in biology has made it possible to move from the idea of genetic determination to that of epigenetic negotiation as the core of biological theory. Basic history of the idea of catalysis is outlined in this chapter, and the need to overcome the use of simple cause–effect notions in psychology is recommended. (Valsiner)

While organic life arises from myriad biochemical processes, it is usually not noticed that additional dynamic forms serve to integrate of all these processes into real living creatures. Here we point out that these organizing agencies are not so much biochemical as evolutionarily tailored as a communicative or semiotic (sign theoretical) logic. Such a biosemiotic reframing of biological thinking need involve an informed sensory version open to novel approaches of integrating life and cognition. A recent concept of structuring and enabling principles across the developmental levels of life is called semiotic scaffolding, which relates to psychological catalyses in interesting ways to be explored. (Hoffmeyer)

calcott, Brett and Kim Sterelny, ed. The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Reviewed more in A Quickening Evolution, wherein several contributors observe a central, regnant trajectory of Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality.

Clarke, Ellen. A Levels-of-Selection Approach to Evolutionary Individuality. Biology & Philosophy. Online October, 2016. An All Souls College, Oxford University philosopher of biology continues her endeavors to show how natural selection acting at different hierarchical levels can lead to and trace a regnant personal identity within relative communal groupings.

What changes when an evolutionary transition in individuality takes place? Many different answers have been given, in respect of different cases of actual transition, but some have suggested a general answer: that a major transition is a change in the extent to which selection acts at one hierarchical level rather than another. The current paper evaluates some different ways to develop this general answer as a way to characterise the property ‘evolutionary individuality’; and offers a justification of the option taken in Clarke (J Philos 110(8):413–435, 2013)—to define evolutionary individuality in terms of an object’s capacity to undergo selection at its own level. In addition, I suggest a method by which the property can be measured and argue that a problem which is often considered to be fatal to that method—the problem of ‘cross-level by-products’—can be avoided. (Abstract)

Collier, John. Self-organization, Individuation and Identity. Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Vol. 29/No. 228, 2004. In an issue on complex systems (most articles in French, check journal website), the University of Natal systems scientist first clarifies how ‘selves’ organize and emerge from interacting agents whom are guided by information and infused with energy. This creation of autonomous entities is then seen to have an affinity with self-referential autopoietic systems, which has previously been subject to discussion.

I will…discuss how these requirements entail that self-organizing systems are both self-producing and self-maintaining in a clear and important sense: the very process of self-organization implies individuation of the entity formed. (152) Self-organization occurs when the properties of a system allow it to take on a more ordered state through the dissipation of energy (production of entropy), some of which goes into the newly formed structure. (152)

De Monte, Silvia and Paul Rainey. Nascent Multicellular Life and the Emergence of Individuality. Journal of Biosciences. 39/2, 2014. Institut de Biologie de l’École Normale Supérieure, Paris and Massey University, Auckland, evolutionary biologists consider one more way that life’s integral complexity could arise from a genetic insistence to form beneficial collectives.

Feinberg, Todd. Altered Egos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The brain is arranged in the same nested hierarchy as all biological systems. From this structure emerges the unified self.

Ferner, Adam and Thomas Pradeu. Ontologies of Living Beings. Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology. Volume 9, 2017. An introduction to a special collection of this University of Michigan online journal about a deep evolutionary trend toward life’s emergent individuation. Amongst its entries are Evolution of Individuality: A Case Study in the Volvocine Green Algae by Erik Hanschen, et al with Richard Michod (abstract below), Large-Scale Modeling in Systems Biology by Fridolin Gross and Sara Green (search), and Modularity, Parthood and Evolvability in Metabolic Engineering by Catherine Kendig and Todd Eckdahl.

While numerous criteria have been proposed in definitions of biological individuality, it is not clear whether these criteria reflect the evolutionary processes that underlie transitions in individuality. We consider the evolution of individuality during the transition from unicellular to multicellular life. We assume that “individuality” (however it is defined) has changed in the volvocine green algae lineage during the transition from single cells, to simple multicellular colonies with four to one hundred cells, to more complex multicellular organisms with thousands of differentiated cells. We map traits associated with the various proposed individuality criteria onto volvocine algae species thought to be similar to ancestral forms arising during this transition in individuality. We find that the fulfillment of some criteria, such as genetic homogeneity and genetic uniqueness, do not change across species, while traits underpinning other aspects of individuality, including degrees of integration, group-level fitness and adaptation, and group indivisibility, change dramatically. We observe that different kinds of individuals likely exist at different levels of organization (cell and group) in the same species of algae. Future research should focus on the causes and consequences of variation in individuality. (Hanschen Abstract)

Fisher, Roberta, et al. Group Formation, Relatedness, and the Evolution of Multicellularity. Current Biology. Online June, 2013. Together with “A Conceptual Framework for the Evolutionary Origins of Multicellularity” Eric Libby and Paul Rainey in Physical Biology (10/3, 2013), reviewed more in Multicellular Organisms, this major transition from eukaryotes to complex creatures is again considered as an evolutionary advance of relative individuality. In regard, the sequential scale from genetic biomolecules to human societies might be appreciated as a ramification of personal enhancement, but always set within and fostered by reciprocal group settings.

Fitch, Tecumseh. Nano-intentionality: a Defense of Intrinsic Intentionality. Biology and Philosophy. 23/2, 2008. The University of St. Andrews psychologist and linguist finds an evolutionary propensity at every scale for an organism’s proactive motivation. But as immersed in, and inhibited by, science’s conceptual paradigm, such phenomena remains a mechanical materialism, cells are “just a machine.” We are getting closer and but still unable to witness a cosmic genesis manifestly growing in personal volition. An aim of this website is to change the subject and universe.

I suggest that most discussions of intentional systems have overlooked an important aspect of living organisms: the intrinsic goal-directedness inherent in the behaviour of living eukaryotic cells. This goal directedness is nicely displayed by a normal cell’s ability to rearrange its own local material structure in response to damage, nutrient distribution or other aspects of its individual experience. While at a vastly simpler level than intentionality at the human cognitive level, I propose that this basic capacity of living things provides a necessary building block for cognition and high-order intentionality, because the neurons that make up vertebrate brains, like most cells in our body, embody such capacities. (157)

Folse, Henry and Joan Roughgarden. What is an Individual Organism? A Multilevel Selection Perspective. Quarterly Review of Biology. 85/4, 2010. Within the theoretical revision and expansion of life’s evolutionary course into sequential, nested “transitions” and whole stages, Stanford University biologists ponder a persistent tendency toward enhanced individualities.

Most biologists implicitly define an individual organism as “one genome in one body.” This definition is based on physiological and genetic criteria, but it is problematic for colonial organisms. We propose a definition based instead on the evolutionary criteria of alignment of fitness, export of fitness by germ-soma specialization, and adaptive functional organization. We consider how these concepts apply to various putative individual organisms. We conclude that complex multicellular organisms and colonies of eusocial insects satisfy these three criteria, but that, in most cases (with at least one notable exception), colonies of modular organisms and genetic chimeras do not. While species do not meet these criteria, they may meet the criteria for a broader concept—that of an evolutionary individual — and sexual reproduction may be a species-level exaptation for enhancing evolvability. We also review the costs and benefits of internal genetic heterogeneity within putative individuals, demonstrating that high relatedness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for individuality, and that, in some cases, genetic variability may have adaptive benefits at the level of the whole. (Abstract, 447)

Freeman, Walter. How Brains Make Up Their Minds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. A life’s work is reviewed in this synthesis of nonlinear dynamics and experimental neuroscience. Freeman’s view of self-organized brain hierarchies and thought processes leads to a strong advocacy of intentional actions and free will. From an evolutionary context, a progressive vector of manifest intentionality, with a nod to Thomas Aquinas, can then be appreciated. As a result, neural activity, personal behavior and the consequent social fabric seek to maintain a balance of semiautonomous individuals and a consensual group stability.

Individual minds, with their isolated meanings, assimilate to each other and create transcendent social entities that enhance and empower the individuals. Some people like to call these entities “group minds.”….The model I propose for social self-organization is an extension of the micro-meso interactions we saw between neurons and populations and between meso-populations and macroscopic, global AM (amplitude modulation) patterns. In each level, the individual retains autonomy but accepts constraint in respect to the embedding surround. (142-43)

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