Thompson’s Mind in Life

Philosopher Evan Thompson heralds “the deep continuity of life and mind.” His foundational idea is “Where there is life there is mind, and mind in its most articulated forms belongs to life,” and his organizing principle is “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, he says, “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” (Thompson, 2007; Maturana & Varela, 1980).^[1]

From this perspective, Thompson sees mental life as bodily life and as situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, he says, “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 Explanatory Gap

With this framework, Thompson seeks to reduce (if not bridge) the so-called “explanatory gap” between consciousness and world, mind and brain, first-person subjectivity and third-person objectivity (i.e., the hard problem of consciousness). He works to achieve this (to oversimplify) by having the same kinds of processes that enable the transition from nonlife to life to enable the transition from life to mind. (I'd think he would rather eliminate the concept of “transition” altogether and consider life-mind as a unified concept—perhaps like, in cosmology, the once apparent independent dimensions of space and time now unified by a single physical concept, spacetime

As a pioneer of enactivism, Thompson posits that “the enactive approach offers important resources for making progress on the explanatory gap” by explicating “selfhood and subjectivity from the ground up by accounting for the autonomy proper to living and cognitive beings.” He extends the idea with "embodied dynamism,” a key concept that combines dynamic systems and embodied approaches to cognition. While the former reflects enactivism, the latter is the enhancement (Thompson, 2007).

Dynamic Systems Approach

According to Thompson, the central idea of the dynamic systems approach is that cognition is an intrinsically temporal phenomenon expressible in “the form of a set of evolution equations that describe how the state of the system changes over time. The collection of all possible states of the system corresponds to the system's ‘state space’ or ‘phase space,’ and the ways that the system changes state correspond to trajectories in this space.”

Dynamic-systems explanations, he says, consist of “the internal and external forces that shape such trajectories as they unfold in time. Inputs are described as perturbations to the system's intrinsic dynamics, rather than as instructions to be followed, and internal states are described as self-organized compensations triggered by perturbations, rather than as representations of external states of affairs” (Thompson, 2007).

To make real progress on the explanatory gap, Thompson says, “we need richer phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience, and we need scientific accounts of mind and life informed by these phenomenological accounts.” My aim, he says, “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.”

Naturalizing Phenomenology

Calling on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed by others, primarily Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thompson seeks to “naturalize” phenomenology by aligning its investigations with advances in biology and cognitive science and to complement science and its objectification of the world by reawakening basic experiences of the world via phenomenology. His main move is for cognitive science “to learn from the analyses of lived experience accomplished by phenomenologists …. which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the experimental sciences of mind and life” (Thompson, 2007).

The deeper convergence of the enactive approach and phenomenology, Thompson says, is that “both share a view of the mind as having to constitute its objects.” He stresses that “constitute” does not mean fabricate or create, but rather “to bring to awareness, to present, or to disclose.” Thus, “the mind brings things to awareness; it discloses and presents the world. Stated in a classical phenomenological way, the idea is that objects are disclosed or made available to experience in the ways they are thanks to the intentional activities of consciousness.” Thompson argues that weaving together the phenomenological and neurobiological can “bridge the gap between subjective experience and biology, which defines the aim of neurophenomenology, an offshoot of the enactive approach” (Thompson, 2007).

Footnote

[1]. Personal note: Evan Thompson's father was social philosopher and cultural critic William Irwin Thompson, who had great influence on me [RLK]—especially his books, At the Edge of History (1971) and Passages about Earth (1974). The influence would help lay the foundation for Closer To Truth.