THE THEME OF THIS BOOK is the deep continuity of life and mind. Where there is life there is mind, and mind in its most articulated forms belongs to life. Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational properties, and the formal or organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. More precisely, the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. The self-producing or “autopoietic” organization of biological life already implies cognition, and this incipient mind finds sentient expression in the self-organizing dynamics of action, perception, and emotion, as well as in the self-moving flow of time-consciousness.
From this perspective, mental life is also bodily life and is situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and environment. Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head.
The chapters to come elaborate these ideas using material drawn from three main sources—biology, phenomenological philosophy, and psychology and neuroscience. The book as a whole is intended to bring the experimental sciences of life and mind into a closer and more harmonious relationship with phenomenological investigations of experience and subjectivity.
The principal motive behind this aim is to make headway on one of the outstanding philosophical and scientific problems of our time—the so-called explanatory gap between consciousness and nature. Exactly how are consciousness and subjective experience related to the brain and body? It is one thing to be able to establish correlations between consciousness and brain activity; it is another thing to have an account that explains exactly how certain biological processes generate and realize consciousness and subjectivity. At the present time, we not only lack such an account, but also are unsure about the form it would need to have in order to bridge the conceptual and epistemological gap between life and mind as objects of scientific investigation, and life and mind as we subjectively experience them.
In this book, I offer no new or original theory or model of consciousness, no new conceptual analysis of physical and phenomenal concepts, and no new speculative metaphysical synthesis to unify consciousness and nature. My aim and approach are different. To make real progress on the explanatory gap, we need richer phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience, and we need scientific accounts of mind and life informed by these phenomenological accounts. Phenomenology in turn needs to be informed by psychology, neuroscience, and biology. My aim is not to close the explanatory gap in a reductive sense, but rather to enlarge and enrich the philosophical and scientific resources we have for addressing the gap. My approach is thus to bring phenomenological analyses of experience into a mutually illuminating relationship with scientific analyses of life and mind.