From nature to culture

For different perspectives on this theme see the article on cultural evolution on this web site and also the same topic as discussed on Wikipedia.

Nature to culture

It was biological agency, not human agency, that provided the mindless tools that made possible the miracle of human bodies and human brains.

This was the historical playing out of the biological axiom over time, according to Darwinian principles, and it was this process that made subjectivity possible as matter became aware of itself. But it was the development of language and the mental tools of sociality and symbolic culture that enabled humans to dominate planet Earth.

We make an intuitive distinction between different forms of biological agency as listed in a crude way below:

• • 1. mindless & non-agential e.g. rock
    2. mindless but agential e.g. plant
    3. agential and sentient: can feel pleasure and pain but without symbolic languages & reason e.g. domesticated animals
    4. agential, sentient (conscious): can reason and use symbolic communication e.g. individual humans
    5. agential, sentient and self-aware (can reason & use collective learning to inform symbolic communication) e.g. human cultures, communities, religions, and moral codes

These phases represent agential changes resulting from the emergence of increasing evolutionary organic complexity.

Phases 1 to 3, since they do not express self-awareness, can be considered as forms of biological agency.

An organism may be behaviourally adapted to the conditions in which it lives, but without the flexibility needed to cope with change.

When considered in terms of biological agency the effect of these changes in agency has been to increase behavioural freedom and flexibility, that is, to facilitate individual autonomy. The advent of mobility, it would appear – given the biological axiom and the biological confrontation between individual autonomy and environmental variety – triggered the evolution of central control systems, one evolutionary outcome being the human brain.

Human minds have evolved the capacity for increased and more finely tuned behavioural flexibility. Four major behavioural drivers of human agency – built on shared evolutionary antecedents – have given humans more autonomy than any other species.

The simplification of biological agency into four graduated developmental phases:  mindless; minded but unconscious; conscious; to conscious and with shared collective learning communicated via symbolic language – provides a framework for the analysis of ‘mindedness’ as it exists across the natural world. Part of this mindedness is the capacity to experience pleasure and pain.

Much of our behaviour is, like that of mindless organisms, outside our control as, for example, physiological responses like sweating, breathing, and vomiting. But we now know that our minded responses may be unconscious, for example instinctive or intuitive responses like phobias etc. Then there is conscious individual deliberation (use of individual reason) and, superimposed on this, is the application of reason to the accumulated collective learning – our cultural heritage which includes the globally (universally accepted) accumulation of scientific knowledge.

Cultural norms are powerful determinants of behaviour. Of special significance is the cumulative collective learning that underpins communal decision-making. Consider the influence of your parents, education, the local community, church, and the law. It is the collective learning aspect of symbolic culture (especially its science) that has the potential  to maximize the attainment of the goals of the biological axiom: this potential for adapting to circumstance is made possible by communication using symbolic languages that permit the cumulative storage of information – in spoken, written, printed, and electronic forms.

The capacity to evolve, as an independent agent, arose with the first living organism and the biological preconditions required for life to persist – the necessity to survive, reproduce and flourish, as expressed in the biological axiom. It was these preconditions that made possible the eventual and unlikely evolution of subjectivity – of matter becoming aware of itself.

These preconditions for life entailed the propensity for increasing autonomy – the capacity for increasing behavioural flexibility in response to variable environmental conditions. This behavioural adjustment was achieved (mindlessly) over many generations through the miraculous accumulation within DNA of information about the environment that could be passed on to subsequent generations. This was a mindless exploration of ways in which autonomy could be increased and the constraints of environment reduced. But possibilities were also constrained by the physical form of the individual.

Cultural evolution is the uniquely human processing and accumulation of information in brains, transmitted through language, stored in information repositories as collective learning, and applied through the self-correcting mechanisms of symbolic and material culture. The proximate goals of cultural evolution are constrained by the ultimate goals of biological evolution.

Mindless agency

Living organisms, including humans, share many physical properties, perhaps most notably the physical continuity of DNA. And yet it is the autonomous agency of life as it passes through life’s phases that we identify with our own intentional behaviour, our human agency. The three biological goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing have the qualities of what, in human-talk, we would refer to as ‘values’ since a ‘goal’ is usually associated with an achievable target while a ‘value’ is more like an aspiration.

The mindless aspirations of the biological axiom provide us with a distinction between agential life and non-life. But there is no similar clear-cut distinction between organisms with minds and those without minds – those with biological agency and those whose biological agency has been supplemented by the use of minds which we refer to as human agency.

This is because, when considered from an evolutionary perspective, human agency is not separate from biological agency, but a minded extension of it. Biological agency and human agency are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Just as fishes manifest biological agency using the evolutionary physical development of fins, so humans manifest biological agency through the evolutionary physical development of brains.

Human minded agency evolved out of mindless biological agency and shares many of its characteristics.

This can be confusing. Indeed, both biology and philosophy have, since the Scientific Revolution, confused and conflated the distinction between biological agency and human agency – resulting in centuries of scientific, philosophical, and linguistic ambiguity.

It is only since the advent of Darwin’s theory of descent with modification from a common ancestor that it has been possible to view biological and human agency. But, by the mid 19th century, attitudes about purpose and agency in nature had hardened. 

Principle of like-mindedness  – the proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share grounding characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency

Biological agency is not a metaphorical creation of human agency: human agency is a real evolutionary development of biological agency.

Unconscious agency

Minded organisms have additional intuitive or instinctive responses that are mind-related, and over which they also have little control. For example, for humans there are the fears and non-rational responses that contribute to our moral psychology, many of which have formed the basis for collective codes of behaviour. This includes the intuitive or instinctive behaviour that, though it may not make sense today, we can understand followed an evolutionary logic . . . our quickness to violence, fear of snakes, love of sugar, and so on, many instinctive responses clearly being advantageous.

There are many aspects of our human survival, reproduction, and flourishing that proceed without our knowledge. Almost every part of our bodies is functionally structured to support overall individual goals (those of the biological axiom). The body metabolism that perpetuates our existence (respiration, digestion etc.) proceeds without our awareness. Then there are physiological responses like sweating and vomiting that have obvious biological functions controlled by a part of our brain over which we have little control, the autonomic nervous system.

These mindless responses are, in effect, an evolutionary relic of mindless biological agency at work in a minded body.

These unconscious responses are, in effect, an evolutionary relic of archaic minded behaviour.

Principle  – biological agency is expressed in both the quantitatively graded differences that occur between species, and the qualitative changes that have occurred in the course of biological and cultural evolutionary history

Principle  – human agency derives from a combination of four major sources: mindless biological agency (physiological function), unconscious behaviour (individual unconscious or instinctive response) behaviour;  individual conscious deliberation; the collective learning made possible by the use of symbolic languages

Principle  – human agency derives from a combination of four major sources: mindless biological agency (physiological function), unconscious behaviour (individual unconscious or instinctive response) behaviour;  individual conscious deliberation; the collective learning made possible by the use of symbolic languages

We cannot transcend our biological agency. Reason, it is often claimed, raises us above animal existence. But for all its undoubted and justly vaunted power, reason evolved in the service of our biology – as an evolutionary tool enhancing our agency. This is not to diminish its value but to place it within its scientific, rather than aspirational, context.

Writing poetry, playing chess, doing mathematics, composing music, and painting landscapes – all these seemingly have little to do with the biological axiom. But we would not do these things if they did not give us biological satisfaction or reward. We would not engage in sex if it gave us no pleasure.

Agency, teleology, normativity

Purpose in nature is discussed in detail in the articles on human-talk and purpose as bioteleological realism but summarized here.

Accepting the reality of biological agency changes our perspective on minded language. The following account of purpose in nature, is given as an example of the kind of argumentation that can be applied to the language of human intentional psychology in general. 

The contemporary question at the core of Aristotle‘s teleology asks: ‘Do organisms truly demonstrate purpose, agency, and design or is this a reading of our own human agency into nature?‘ Our response to this question relates strongly to how much significance we place on the distinction between the minded and the mindless, coupled with our traditional anthropocentric inclination to treat agency and purpose as being mental in character.

The argument against teleology runs, roughly, as follows:

The purpose, agency, and normativity that we see in nature is added by our own minds; it is a reading of our own intentional nature into non-intentional organisms. Put simply, the purpose we see in organisms is not their purpose (organisms cannot have purposes), it is our human projection. It is only ‘as if’ organisms have purposes and goals. The purpose we attribute to organisms is anthropomorphic metaphor: just a useful human way of thinking about nature . . . a convenient shorthand or façon de parler that makes nature seem somehow closer to ourselves. Viewing nature and organisms in this way is, at best, a useful heuristic device. Teleology, today, is mostly a convenient vehicle for modern-style religious belief and arguments about intelligent design – it is not there in reality.

But biological agency is all around us – it is hard to find anything in nature that does not have a purpose as a reason for its existence – a self-evident function. As Aristotle said, ‘nature does nothing in vain‘. The mindless goal-directedness of nature is as self-evident as human intention. So, what is going on here, and how are we to resolve this contradiction?

The argument against teleology is a victim of two logical confusions (the inversion and conversion of reasoning) the misapplication of a literary device (the metaphor fallacy), the historical misinterpretation of a linguistic tradition (the agency error), and a lack of understanding of the reasons why we are persuaded to use human-talk (anthropomorphism) that endows mindless organisms with cognitive faculties (the like-mindedness principle).

First, the inversion of reasoning. This is the mistaken conflation of what only exists in human minds with what can possibly exist: the unjustified conviction that purpose and agency are necessarily mind dependent. In other words, the claim that if biological goals can only be represented in human minds, then they only exist in human minds and are therefore a creation of human minds. But, biological goals existed in nature long before humans appeared.

Second, the conversion of reasoning, is the ignoring of the evolutionary development of human agency out of real biological agency while conversely claiming that biological agency is a fictitious creation of human agency.

Third, the problematic historical tradition of viewing the similarity between human (minded) agency and natural (mindless) agency through the as if lens of a literary device, the metaphor, thus removing non-human purpose and agency from the realm of reality. This I have called the metaphor fallacy. Biological agency is not conscious intention, but it is like human agency because it is evolutionarily connected – a real biological simile not a cognitive metaphor.

Fourth, the traditional and mistaken assumption that the agency we imply when using anthropomorphic language is the unique agency of humans rather than the universal biological agency that is present in all living organisms.

Fifth, our lack of understanding of the reasons why we resort to human-talk, that is, the reasons why we are strongly persuaded to use intentional language when describing agential but non-intentional organisms.