It is here proposed that the evolution of life was destined to produce self consciousness out of physical matter just as surely as self-consciousness is destined to be produced by the build up of matter from the human zygote.
Our external vantage point allows us to see the process whereby an individual human matures from the point of conception We are in a position to witness all the stages in the life of individual humans. Activities such as birth, death, growth and decay go on all around us. Conversely on the grand scale of things, taking life as a whole, we are in the middle of evolving life and so we don’t have an overall, clear picture of the process.
In this video Sean B. Carroll states that:
…living things are occupying a planet whose surface is always changing. Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tectonic movement, ice ages, climate changes whether local or global, all of these keep changing the environments that species are in, they are running to keep up and most of the time they fail. So we have to think about earth’s history to understand life’s history. We have to understand what’s going on at any particular place to appreciate what’s going on with any particular species.
The same could be said for the cells in your body. Their environment is always changing and most of them do not survive as you change from embryo to adult. From an individual cell’s point of view there may not seem to be any direction.Some live some die, some change slowly, others change dramatically. But from the higher perspective of the whole body there certainly is direction.
It must be acknowledged that vertebrates evolve at the different rates. Coelacanths have been around for hundreds of millions of years. When animals within a group are compared, the ones that are deemed to be the most primitive are those that retain characteristics from the node of the group’s branch. So among vertebrates coelacanths are considered more primitive than humans even taking into account that they have had the same amount of time for their evolution.
Rational Wiki explains that:
Biologists have evidence that all life developed from a common ancestor that lived just under 4 billion years ago, and the concept is accepted by virtually all scientists working in the field.
If that is true then every single tetrapod alive today has an unbroken ancestry dating back to this common ancestor. Every amniote can trace their ancestry from a water existence to organisms that first set foot on the land, to fully air breathing, but still exothermic, organisms, and finally on to endothermic mammals and birds. At each stage these animals have become more detached from the external environment. I hope the following points will make this clear.
If we follow tetrapod evolution there is a progression from external to internal fertilisation, from eggs deposited in the environment to eggs protected from the environment by an outer shell and then on to gestation within the mother. Even after birth mammals do not take their sustenance directly from the environment but from the mammary glands of the mother.
And humans generally are not content to eat food taken directly from nature. It is altered by extracting, mixing, cooking and preparing so that much of the time the consumer does not even know where it originated.
We aim to nullify the effects of weather and seasons by the use of suitable clothing, We are able to eat food that is out of season by having it transported round the world or by preserving it, or dehydrating it or freezing it. We do not depend on the seasons for procreation and we are able assist conception when it doesn’t occur naturally. All of this serves to detach us more and more from our surrounding environment. Some people are not happy about this detachment and so they call for us to “get back to nature”.
But this separation is necessary for self consciousness to develop. An organism that does not feel itself to be outside of nature cannot have self consciousness.
There must be a feeling of “me in here against nature out there”. We humans are unique in considering our activities as contrasting with the natural world. We contrast natural with artificial. No other animal has separated itself from nature to the extent that humans have.
Humans can trace their ancestry back through reptile-like, amphibian-like and fish-like conditions, the latter three have obviously remained at an earlier condition than humans. This does not mean that they haven’t evolved since the split with the ancestors of humans. After all there are a multitude of ways of being a reptile, an amphibian or a fish. It just means that they haven’t grown out of the environment they find themselves in to the extent that humans have.
This separation from the environment can even be observed in each individual human looking from toe to top. We can be said to have our feet planted firmly on the earth. Gravity holds us to the earth and our legs support our weight and allow us to move about. Our arms are freed from this task and using the marvelous structures at the ends of them we can create out of the substances of the earth. Gravity plays a lesser part in their activities. Moving on up our brains, being suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, are even more free from earths gravity. Using our brains we create, not from the substances of the earth but out of our inner selves. Being encased in the skull separates our brains even more from the external environment.
Using our hands we mould earthly substance, using our brains we mould thoughts.
Evolution is a creative process and it has turned creatures into creators.
Yes, the differences between say two species of vole is due to differences in DNA. The differences between humans and chimps isn’t- or if it is no one has been able to make the connection.
And yes DNA is central. It just isn’t the determining factor. Assembly lines are central but they do not determine what they are assembling.
Do you realize that developmental biologists have switched DNA and either nothing fully develops or it resembles the egg donor.
Nonsense. There’s quite a literature on the connection.
What is it with creationists and analogies? The point is that changes in development during evolution result from changes in DNA. That’s the only thing we have any evidence for. Everything else comes from changes in DNA.
Can you cite some evidence that this is true?
Yes, but that’s a teleological process of individual human maturation. The fact that individual human maturation is teleological doesn’t support your claim that the evolution of sentience and the evolution of sapience from sentience is also a teleological process.
I don’t deny that teleology is a real feature of the natural world. My point is simply that the teleological structure of embryonic development doesn’t show us that evolution is also teleological. And it seems to me as if you want to claim that evolution is teleological, or at least that the evolution of consciousness is.
But the adaptive radiation of tetrapod limbs into wings (three different kinds), fins, and flukes as well as arms and feet doesn’t seem like a teleological progression. It’s far too “bushy”.
But there you’re already focusing on that particular trajectory. Are human hands less restricted and more generic because we cannot burrow with them (as moles do), or swim with them as cetaceans do, or fly (as pterosaurs, bats, and birds do), or effortlessly brachiate as the apes do? It seems like there’s just as much loss of function as there is gain.
“Space” is a concept, but the structure of space — spatiality, if you like — is (arguably) non-conceptual. Likewise for temporality.
I am not entirely opposed to this view.
In my estimation the best articulation and defense of this view is C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World Order (1929). Lewis argues that experience consists of two distinct elements, concepts and the given. All concepts, he argues, are guides to acting in some definite way. Different conceptual systems — including different logics — allow for different interpretations of the given. The given itself is the ‘bloom’, buzzin’ confusion’ of the consciousness of the infant — a completely unstructured, undifferentiated awareness. (It is not even awareness of anything, since to introduce the of-structure of intentionality is already to introduce concepts.)
Perhaps the more advanced stages of meditation allow the adult to experience the given as such, though Lewis never makes that claim.
The problem with the given is this: since we cannot conceptualize the given as such — since to apply concepts is to interpret it — the question arises as to how we know what the given is, or even how we know that there is any given at all. There’s also a question here of what exact role the given serves within our epistemology. Since it is wholly nonconceptual, it cannot play any justificatory role. Justification involves reasons, and it is hard to see how there could be reasons that lack all conceptual structure.
In short, the given cannot play the role of a foundation for knowledge, or even meaning.
John Harshman,
here is a paper to start with
Science
http://www.sciencemag.org
Science 21 December 2012:
Vol. 338 no. 6114 pp. 1587-1593 DOI: 10.1126/science.1230612
RESEARCH ARTICLE
I will print the abstract on the next comment.
John Harshman,
The Evolutionary Landscape of Alternative Splicing in Vertebrate Species
Nuno L. Barbosa-Morais1,2, Manuel Irimia1,*, Qun Pan1,*, Hui Y. Xiong3,*, Serge Gueroussov1,4,*,
Leo J. Lee3, Valentina Slobodeniuc1, Claudia Kutter5, Stephen Watt5, Recep Çolak1,6, TaeHyung Kim1,7, Christine M. Misquitta-Ali1, Michael D. Wilson4,5,7, Philip M. Kim1,4,6, Duncan T. Odom5,8,
Brendan J. Frey1,3, Benjamin J. Blencowe1,4,†
Author Affiliations
↵†To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: b.blencowe@utoronto.ca ↵* These authors contributed equally to this work.
+

ABSTRACT
How species with similar repertoires of protein-coding genes differ so markedly at the phenotypic level is poorly understood. By comparing organ transcriptomes from vertebrate species spanning ~350 million years of evolution, we observed significant differences in alternative splicing complexity between vertebrate lineages, with the highest complexity in primates. Within 6 million years, the splicing profiles of physiologically equivalent organs diverged such that they are more strongly related to the identity of a species than they are to organ type. Most vertebrate species- specific splicing patterns are cis-directed. However, a subset of pronounced splicing changes are predicted to remodel protein interactions involving trans-acting regulators. These events likely further contributed to the diversification of splicing and other transcriptomic changes that underlie phenotypic differences among vertebrate species.
John Harshman,
Nonsense as no one knows what makes a human a human nor a chimp a chimp.
At least ID has them and you don’t
There isn’t any evidence tat DNA determines the archetype. And obviously you cannot find any.
When I have time to look it up, again. Or you could do your own research
Kantian Naturalist,
First: I have very little education in philosophy so I have enjoyed reading your posts. The question I would propose to your above point is if there is teleological structure in embryonic development how would that teleology emerge from undirected processes?
Thanks, but what was that intended to support? I see nothing in that abstract, even if we believe it reports a real phenomenon (which is not generally accepted), that’s relevant to anything I have said.
A link or three: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7108/abs/nature05113.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867404011432
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030245
The first two are papers specifically on the effects of particular genetic differences between the two species, and the last is a very nice review on how developmental differences in general evolve. True, we don’t know everything; but neither do we know nothing, as you claim.
This is only an advantage if pointless analogies are a good thing.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as an archetype to determine. DNA determines the differences among species. This should be obvious, as it’s the only thing that’s stably inherited, a prerequisite for any such determination.
Not enough information to go on. I’ll wait here.
John Harshman,
Not one of those links says it knows what makes a human a human and a chimp a chimp. What’s wrong with you? And I never claimed that we know nothing. But it is true that we don’t know what makes a human a human or a chimp a chimp.
The analogy provided wasn’t pointless. Just because you didn’t understand it doesn’t make it pointless.
That’s one way to ignore the problem.
That is your opinion. But you cannot support it.
Nonsense. There is plenty in the egg that is also stably inherited
John Harshman,
You said the differences in species was based on DNA. This shows difference based on splicing sequences and shows that splicing sequences are dramatically different in vertebrae. So the spliceosome and alternative splicing codes are added differentiation to the specie biochemistry beyond the DNA codes. There is another paper I can send you on DNA expression differences between vertebrae but it is pay walled. I will print the abstract below.
John Harshman
Evolutionary dynamics of coding and non-coding transcriptomes.
Necsulea A1, Kaessmann H2.
Author information
Abstract
Gene expression changes may underlie much of phenotypic evolution. The development of high-throughput RNA sequencing protocols has opened the door to unprecedented large-scale and cross-species transcriptome comparisons by allowing accurate and sensitive assessments of transcript sequences and expression levels. Here, we review the initial wave of the new generation of comparative transcriptomic studies in mammals and vertebrate outgroup species in the context of earlier work. Together with various large-scale genomic and epigenomic data, these studies have unveiled commonalities and differences in the dynamics of gene expression evolution for various types of coding and non-coding genes across mammalian lineages, organs, developmental stages, chromosomes and sexes. They have also provided intriguing new clues to the regulatory basis and phenotypic implications of evolutionary gene expression changes.
colewd,
Yes, that is their only hope but one they cannot test. Heck they can’t even account for gene expression and regulatory networks.
Frankie,
The reality here is the biochemistry differences, it you count splicing and gene expression are the very large. The evidence here shows the biggest evolutionary leap in splicing and gene expression among all the vertebrate is the change from chimps to humans. Also splicing and gene expression appear to be much more relevant to specie change then DNA.
Good stuff. Thank you. However I have heard the “it isn’t new genes it is the same genes used differently” shtick from reading Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish” and Carroll’s books “Making of the fittest” and “Endless forms…”. It hasn’t panned out but it is their last hope
The links say some of what makes a human a human and a chimp a chimp.
So go on. How is DNA like an assembly line, other than being long and narrow?
What problem? And what do you think an archetype is?
I support it by pointing out that there is nothing else that can account for the differences. If you disagree, what else do you have in mind?
Name one. Everything except the genome is produced anew each generation (using instructions in the genome), not copied.
First off, the actual existence of these differences is dubious, except as errors in translation. Second, where there is known alternative splicing, its occurrence is controlled by proteins whose sequence and expression can be traced back to the genome. That is, differences in expression and splicing result from differences in DNA sequence somewhere in the genome (though not necessarily in the gene being expressed or spliced).
I don’t think you can support any of that, and I will remind you that differences in expression and splicing result from differences in genome sequences.
Have you ever thought about how differences in splicing and expression are inherited?
John Harshman,
It just shows the differences
Development is like an assembly line. The assembly line does not determine what will be manufactured.
And yet you have no idea if DNA can
microtubule arrays and membrane patterns. Then there are mitochondria and all of the other organelles
Epigenetic factors change gene expression and splicing
John Harshman,
Small molecules like vitamin d can control gene expression. Vitamin d is synthesized from the Sun and modified in the liver and kidney. The splicing codes are not well understood at this point.
It shows differences in sequences that have known effects on development.
Development is very little like an assembly line. It’s a process that involves all sorts of interactions. But the point is that changes in the interactions result from changes in the genome.
Of course I do. Again, we know quite a lot about what some changes in sequence can do, just not everything.
Nope, not inherited. The mitochondrial genome is inherited, but everything else is reconstructed each generation. The zygote begins with the egg’s cell membrane, but that cell membrane isn’t descended from the mother’s egg’s cell membrane, and differences among species in cell membranes are determined by differences in genomes. And so on.
Indeed they do. And those epigenetic factors can be traced back to the genome.
But do changes in vitamin D cause differences in species? No. Vitamin D is synthesized by a metabolism that results from enzymes coded by the genome. Response to vitamin D depends on the genome. This is all confusion about different levels of causation. When we’re talking about differences among species you have to look at what causes those differences to be there.
John Harshman,
I have already said they do.
No, you don’t. What changes to the chimp genome were responsible for our upright bipedal structure?
Nonsense. The egg’s microtubule array and membrane pattern is inherited. As are all of the organelles.
It is the mother’s egg cell membrane.
Bacteria refute your claim. Did DNA produce the first membrane? How and when did it gain control over it?
Epigenetic factors are outside of the genome, by definition.
Look John, I quoted a geneticist who actually did the work. He has this new book out that destroys your claims.
John Harshman,
No one knows what caused the differences between fish and amphibians, for example. You may think it is all DNA but you cannot test that claim. All you have is a desperate hope and you are clinging on to it as if your life depends on it.
Uknown claim at best, likely false at worst. As usual, a claim made in the absence of actual knowledge. We know very little of how biological systems work. It’s premature to be making such claims.
The cytoplasm may contain a lot of heritable information that we are unaware of. Put human DNA in a bacterium, does the bacterium start becoming a human? No. That’s because the DNA doesn’t have all the information! Plain as day to see.
DNA may give instructions how to make parts, but that’s not the same thing as instructions as how to put parts together.
A cytoplasm loaded with mRNA can reproduce without DNA. Enucleated zygotes without DNA can multiply up to the blasula stage. In contrast, one can’t just have DNA without a cytpolasm and expect the DNA to duplicate. This tells me the cytoplasm has more priority in terms of critical information.
Put a frog in a blender (OUCH). It will have lots of the proteins coded by DNA in the right proportion. Having expressed proteins from DNA in the right proportion does not an organism make!
This diagram shows some of the epigenetic differences between vertebrates and invertebrates. We don’t know how epigenetic marks are managed:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7534/fig_tab/nature14192_F1.html
To give you some idea of what I mean by periphery and formative forces, here is a quote from “Space and Counterspace” by George Adams:
My apologies for the length of it but I don’t feel I could have left any of that excerpt out. He goes on to explain his point in more detail.
To give an example of the two ways of thinking about these spaces, a straight line can be thought of as an infinite number of points, but it can also be thought of as the intersection of an infinite number of planes.
Thank you!
I do think that teleology is real, but I do not think of it as a kind of cause that is distinct from mechanistic causation. Rather, I think of teleology as a distinct kind of organization or structure, such that there can be true (or false) teleological explanations.
A dynamical system is teleological if characterizing that system in terms of “goals” and “purposes” is an indispensable vocabulary for successfully explaining the behavior of that structure.
The question then is, what kind of structure must a system have to be characterizable in that way?
The answer there, I think, is that the structure must involve self-constraint: the dynamics of the system over time tends to generate the parameters of the system itself. This sustains a degree of organizational closure: the system can be understood as a sub-system that is relatively or partially decoupled from the larger systems in which it is embedded. (I say relatively or partially because the sub-system must still be thermodynamically open to the larger system.) The sub-system, in other words, behaves so as to continually generate the boundary conditions of its own relative decoupling from the system. A sub-system with that kind of structure is then usefully characterized in terms of goals.
On this approach, the sub-system here is any organism and the systems in which it is embedded is the environment of that organism.
The question of abiogenesis is the question of how subsystems can emerge which display both organizational closure and thermodynamic openness with the systems in which they are embedded. This is an interesting question but I do not think it conceptually intractable. All that is required, at an absolute bare minimum, is an autocatalytic network of molecules (to continually generate the parameters of the system) and a semipermeable membrane (to sustain both organizational closure and thermodynamic openness).
As I see it, to say that abiogenesis cannot be naturalistically explained is to say one of the following:
(1) Naturalistic explanations cannot account for how an autocatalytic network emerged and/or became enclosed in a semipermeable membrane;
(2) An autocatalytic network enclosed in a semipermeable membrane may be necessary for life (i.e. teleological unities) but it is not sufficient.
I think that (1) and (2) are difficult (if not impossible) claims to sustain.
I understand from this analysis of teleology that you are considering subsystems from a philosophical viewpoint, rather than a scientific one.
A question that interests me is whether and how this subsystem understanding can be applied to other topics in the the philosophical discussion of mind.
In particular:
– if meaning is individuated externally, how can we understand the interaction of mental causation and meaning?
– are qualia best understood as part of a subsystem which is causally realized solely in the body?
– how rich are internal mental representations; how much of the subsystem which supports them can be separated from the world?
– are philosophical understandings of perception amenable to a subsystem analysis?
There is a philosophy of mind called “long-arm functionalism” (see last paragraph of this section ) which Putnam ended up with, I believe. I think the above issues could all be subsumed in a question of whether the causal network underlying that functionalism can be useful split up into interacting subsystems.
A couple of links that may interest you:
A conference on Mechanistic Integration and the Unity of Science. What caught my eye was this sentence in the conference description:
I have no idea if that is true. How does one measure a growing consensus? Anyway, if you are planning to be in Warsaw in June, you might want to check it out.
Brains blog is hosting Jaworski to discuss his book on How Hylomorphism Solves the Mind-Body Problem in May. I recall Hylomorphism interested you at one point. I think it may even be on topic for some of the discussion about teleological causation in this thread.
CharlieM,
Charlie, once again you present a useless analogy that has nothing to do with biology. This is not helping. Please just start answering some of the questions I have actually asked. I already know the difference between peripheries and centers as abstract concepts. What I don’t know is what you think those correspond to in biology.
stcordova,
Sal, we may not know exactly how epigenetic marks are managed, but we do know that the only thing stably inherited over many generations is the genome. Everything else is made anew rather than copied. Epigenetic inheritance decays over at most a few generations. This cannot account for the differences between species, including the differences in epigenetic marking.
Of course the genome doesn’t do everything on its own. It needs a working metabolism of the proper sort surrounding it. But that’s irrelevant to my point. That working metabolism is inherited over the short term, but over the long term its nature is determined by the genome contained within it. Nothing else is stable.
The archetype should not be thought of as anything existing in space and time as we experience it, but it works into space and time, The life of each individual organism can be thought of as the archetype concenrated in space and made manifest. Asking how it is accessed is to misunderstand what it is. Organisms don’t access it, they (organisms) are that facet of it available to our perception. Turn a cube in a certain way and it will appear to be a two dimensional hexagon. We don’t ask, “how is the cube accessed by the hexagon?” The hexagon is the cube, but a being which peceives in just two dimensions will not experience the higher dimensional quality of the cube, they will only see the hexagon.
That sounds very like the definition of non-existence.
How, exactly? And how do you know this? What evidence supports your claim?
I’ve been reading through the comments on this thread and I see nothing more than baseless assertions about this vaguely described “archetype”. Let’s see the hard evidence for it.
I ask again, what is this archetype? Etcetera. You respond with what it isn’t and a lame analogy, neither of which answers any of the questions I asked. If “access” is the wrong word, then how does an organism express the archetype? What archetype does it express, assuming there’s more than one, which you have never answered? In what way is an organism a facet; in other words, what in your analogy corresponds to anything in biology and how does that work? Please don’t explain your analogy by posting another analogy.
John Harshman,
From what I can find out archetype has always pertained to body plans. And the different archetypes are depicted by Linnaean classification. For example there is a basic animal archetype. And each Phyla represents another basic archetype that also includes the animal archetype. And so on down to Genus, with species being a variation on that. However some say it stops at the family level.
So there are archetypes within archetypes, and all “archetype” means is “what the organism looks like”. If some say it goes to genus level and others only to family, how would either side justify their claim?
Science presses on, John. Just because all of the answers are not at hand now doesn’t mean that will never be. The Creationist has to find out what the originally Created kinds were and you and yours have more difficulty with the alleged common ancestors, LUCA and before. Do you guys have all of your leaves, branches and trunks thoroughly filled in?
I was just telling you what I found out by searching and asking. Creationist orgs are helpful if you are friendly.
You have found nothing by searching and asking, apparently, other than contradictions with no means of choosing among them. Contrast creationism with mainstream biology: creationists have no means of discovering created kinds (and I see you have abandoned the fig leaf of “archetype”), while biologists have good methods for discovering the tree of life. (I’ve made a considerable study of baraminology, certainly much more than you have, and it’s clear to me that there is no there there.)
Yes, we do know most of the leaves, branches, and trunks. You make a big deal about the fact that we don’t know quite all of them and ignore the majority. The parts we do know transgress across anyone’s idea of “kind”, which is inconvenient for you. And of course no creationist has been able to delimit “kinds” at all, except that you all know humans are a separate kind. What a pity that the primates are a part of the tree that’s especially well “filled in”.
What do you mean “find out”? You already know, it’s in the Bible?
Are you a creationist Frankie?
John Harshman,
What contradictions? And who says there isn’t any way to choose?
The created kind is the archetype- well the final form given all of the higher levels
Opinion is neither evidence nor an argument
Yet you don’t have a testable mechanism and your “knowledge” is merely opinion based on the assumption there is a tree. It is all question-begging
What a pity that you don’t have a mechanism capable of producing primates
Frankie,
Might I suggest that you know absolutely nothing about phylogenetics and little more about baraminology?
Anyway, the particular contradiction that I’m talking about right at the moment is that some say the created kind is the genus, others the family. Would you agree that was a contradiction? As for there being no way to choose, you can show me wrong by telling me how one would go about deciding. How do you determine what species belong to the same kind or different kinds? (I ask this in the full knowledge that you have no idea and will evade the question.)
John Harshman,
Laughable
1- It all depends on which Genera and Families
2- It is just a matter of degree
Probably very similar to the way you decide, John. Creating clades and finding the CK seem to be very, very similar. But anyway and AGAIN, science marches on. No one has all of the answers at this time. The same goes for you
And so you show the truth of two of my assertions simultaneously. 1) “Might I suggest that you know absolutely nothing about phylogenetics and little more about baraminology?” and 2) “I ask this in the full knowledge that you have no idea and will evade the question.”
like shooting fish in a barrel
And thank you for proving that all you can do is BS your way through a discussion. So sorry that I gave you an honest answer and it is very telling that you couldn’t grasp it.
And unfortunately you still don’t have a mechanism capable of producing a tree of life starting from some much simpler biological replicator
John Harshman,
Seeing that you failed to grasp the implications the first time:
G. Simpson echoed those comments:
“Hardly any change in method” pretty much supports my answer, John
For example?
You have two major problems in that assertion. First, pre-evolutionary classifications are not attempts to discern “kinds”, which is what we’re supposedly talking about. The fact that groups are nested within groups should have given you a clue to that. “Kinds” by definition are not nested within other “kinds”. Second, methods in systematics have changed radically since the period Mayr and Simpson are talking about there. Quote-mining will not help you.
Except that the fish refuses to admit it’s been shot. More like fighting the Black Knight, really.
BruceS,
I like the connections you’re drawing between my attempt to think about the organism/environment relation as a subsystem/system distinction.
I suppose I think that everything is a subsystem of the total system, the Cosmos (Deus sive Natura). But more Deleuze than Whitehead. I prefer nested subsystems as a metaphor for understanding the relation of the quantum to the cosmic. But we lack a comprehensive fundamental physical theory, so my Deleuzean process ontology must remain a bit of speculative metascience (for the time being. I live in hope).
One nice objection that Wheeler raises against radical, anti-representationalist enactivism is that if the cognitive system is not functionally decomposable into components, the cognitive system would be too closely coupled to its environment to respond adaptively and creatively. I would even go a bit further and say that it is not clear how, under enactivism, a cognitive system could solve problems. Problem-solving seems to require representations.
Unfortunately, I don’t plan to be in Warsaw in June. I plan to be in my cabin in the mountains, unless I’m invited to a conference.
I did find hylomorphism intriguing, at least descriptively or phenomenologically. There seems to be something very helpful about the form/matter distinction. (It just now occurs to me that Ryle is probably much closer to hylomorphism than he is behaviorism.) But I don’t think that forms are fundamentally real — rather, I am of the intuition that the form/matter relation emerges from a local configuration of forces.