Reason value knowledge

                                                                  An attempt by AI to summarize this article

This article is one of a series investigating biological agency and its relationship to human agency. These articles include: What is life? – the crucial role of agency in determining what it is to be alive; Purpose – the semantic link between agency and purpose, and the history of teleology; Biological agency – a description of what it is to be a biological agent; Human-talk – the application of minded and human terms to non-human organisms; Being like-minded – the way our understanding of minded human agency is grounded in mindless biological agency; Biological values – the evolutionary grounding of human values in mindless behavioral orientation, Agency & evolution – the evolutionary development of human agency out of biological agency; Morality – moral naturalism as the grounding of human morality in biological normativity; and plant intelligence as an example of language attempting to capture the reality of biological agency with the use of cognitive metaphor.

For a summary of the findings and claims made in these articles see the key points Epilogue at the end of this article which claims that many of the words we associate with human intentional psychology and human agency become more scientifically coherent when applied more generally in biology; also the narrative summary of claims that is given in the article biological desiderata. Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world. 

Introduction

Is there any connection between our subjective capacities to reason, evaluate, and accumulate knowledge and our biological nature? Can biology inform our understanding of these three intellectual pillars of our humanity?

Reason value knowledge: these are foundational concepts in philosophy, psychology, and human life – they comprise a trio of categories with their own academic specialties that we know as epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics (the study of value and the principles that govern behavior), and logic (as the principles of reasoning).

The great philosophers of ancient Greece gave these three categories of mental activity pride of place and they have stood the test of time, which suggests that they are not just labels of convenience – they are more like archetypal features of the mind that are embedded in our human nature . . . innate characteristics.

As properties of the mind, these mental attributes are regarded as uniquely human ‘higher’ cognitive faculties. But how are they to be explained: how did they evolve, and could they be related to ‘lower’ biological phenomena?

Functional equivalence

The multiplicity of physical structures we encounter in the community of life evolved under the influence of a limited range of selection pressures. These are the factors that influence the survival, reproduction, adaptation (and therefore evolution) of every organism. Adaptations that enhance an organism’s fit within its habitat improve its chances of survival and reproduction. These are mostly external factors (e.g. predation, competition, disease, environmental change) and the existing structures of the organism will constrain possible evolutionary outcomes.

In this way selection pressure shapes the evolution of life, influencing the traits that become prevalent in populations based on environmental challenges and opportunities. Understanding these pressures illuminates patterns of biodiversity and the convergent pathways that organisms follow when faced by similar ecological challenges.

We understand how bird wings and butterfly wings, though they evolved in different ways, did so because of the advantages afforded by flight. Though, in evolutionary terms, these wings are unrelated, in functional terms they are equivalent – they serve the same functional role.

Across the vast diversity of life, there are common functional uniformities due to shared selection pressures that have shaped organisms in similar ways (convergent evolution, similar physiological mechanisms, niche adaptation).

These principles, while usually applied to physical structures, are equally relevant to mental phenomena. The selection pressures that drove the evolution of human cognition were biologically universal selection pressures that different organisms resolved in different ways.

What, then, are the biological functional equivalents of human cognition?

While recognizing the uniqueness of human subjective experience we can understand cognition in a broader biological sense by, as it were, reducing mental states to their biological functional equivalents – by biologizing psychology.

There is no universally accepted definition of human cognition but definitions refer to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. This encompasses a wide range of processes, including perception, attention, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This involves the integration of sensory information and the application of prior knowledge to navigate and interpret the environment. It also includes the abilities to think abstractly, understand complex ideas, learn from experience, and adapt behaviors based on new information.

While human cognition has several uniquely defining features, most of its characteristics have functional equivalents in other organisms that perceive, process, and respond to information about their internal and external environments. These include functional equivalents of sensory perception, memory, learning, reason, decision-making, knowledge, value, and other factors that influence the behavior of all organisms through their objective and ultimate propensity to survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve. These universal functions and purposes are manifest throughout the range of biological structures found in the community of life. They are a critical part of the functional integration of all biological agents.

This mode of cognition does not occur in inanimate matter and, while the physical structures of human cognition (e.g. brains and nerves) did not evolve out of the physical structures of biological cognition (e.g. chemical sensing systems in plants or amoeba ), in functional terms, it is clear that human cognition is a highly evolved form of biological cognition.

Biological cognition

Biological cognition is a universal property of biological agents that has a functional equivalence to human cognition. It includes equivalences of reason, value, knowledge, memory, learning, communication, perception, experience, sentience, even subjectivity, and more. It refers, for example, to the way organisms adaptively interpret and prioritize sensory data, allowing them to perceive and respond to their conditions of existence. It considers how organisms access, store, retrieve, process, prioritize, and communicate information; how they and their parts use various forms of reasoning or problem-solving. Collectively these properties provide the adaptive functionality that integrates organismal proximate and ultimate goals and distinguishes organisms as the primary autonomous biological agents.

Describing goal-directed behavior

The universal goal-directed behavior of organisms is an objective fact and it is this biological agency that distinguishes the living from the inanimate and dead.

This website recognizes human cognitive agency as a limited and highly evolved form of this more general biological agency. Are there different kinds of goal-directed behavior displayed by the world’s organisms and, if so, what words do we use to describe them?

The language of human agency has a rich vocabulary of descriptive terms, mostly those of intentional psychology, like ‘want’, ‘need’, ‘like’, ‘prefer’, ‘interest’, ‘strategy’, ‘goal’, ‘love’, ‘deceive’, ‘consider’, ‘desire’, ‘know’, ‘learn’, ‘remember’, and so on . . . the list is a long one. These words denote human intentions and, significantly, these intentions may be either conscious or unconscious.

We know that all organisms share the universal propensity to survive and reproduce. This means that all organisms share the same general needs although, for humans, these needs are expressed in cognitive form.

All life depends on water if it is to persist. This need for water can be described in cognitive terms as ‘thirst’. However, in biological terms the need for water is biologically universal but we cannot say that a plant is ‘thirsty’ because ‘thirsty’ is a strictly human word that implies a cognitive process. So what word do we use to describe the ‘thirst’ of a plant?

There is no vocabulary for the many different kinds of pre-cognitive agency, and so we resort to the rich vocabulary of human intentional psychology that describes cognitive human agency in all its differentiated variety.

An intuitive taxonomy of this minded vocabulary (the language of intentional psychology) reveals three word clusters. The conceptual focus of these three clusters expresses the core ways in which human minded agency is differentiated from its grounding biological agency. That is, the language of human intentional psychology revolves around the three central ideas of reason, knowledge, and value.

This might, at first, appear an arbitrary and personal selection of categories, but it is one reinforced both by superficial and more in -depth examination, and its emphasis in many areas of human life, not least of which is the long-standing philosophical distinction between logic, epistemology, and ethics.

It is also supported by the preconditions necessary for the biological axiom to apply. It is the information (knowledge) contained in DNA, subjected to environmental feedback (reason), on a (behaviourally orientated i.e. evaluating) agent, that makes life possible.  Thus, in the course of evolution mindless information, subjected to environmental feedback in goal-directed  individuals has become differentiated into minded knowledge, reason, and value (also present mindlessly in minded organisms).

Reason – vocabulary would include: ‘deliberation’, ‘consideration’, ‘strategy’, ‘plan’, ‘calculation’.
Knowledge – vocabulary would include: ‘knowing’, ‘learning’, ‘remembering’, ‘recognizing’.
Value – vocabulary would include: ‘want’, ‘prefer’, ‘like’, ‘attract’, ‘need’

These three core aspects of human agency are like the minded and differentiated evolutionary developments of less differentiated (more generalized, primitive, or ancestral) and grounding biological agency.

If we want to understand human agency – what is needed for humans to function in a uniquely human way – then we must look beyond consciousness to these three elements of our mindedness. Reason, knowledge, and value are our most informative general summary concepts for human agency.

To comprehend human agency in an evolutionary sense we must understand both its relationship to other forms of biological agency – through the grounding characteristics expressed in the biological axiom – but also its uniquely defining and refined emergent minded characteristics of reason, knowledge, and value.

Of necessity, the human capacity to reason, evaluate, and accumulate knowledge evolved out of the more generalized shared goals of the biological axiom? But what form do these concepts take when linked to mindless nature?

This needs closer scrutiny.

A closer glimpse of links to biological agency comes with the realization that purpose, reason, knowledge, value, and agency can be present in humans in unconscious forms: they are not necessarily related to conscious minds.

Cognitive evolution

It seems intuitively obvious that questions about cognition cannot go back further in evolutionary time than the origin of brains and nerves, while ‘higher’ cognitive faculties, like this trio of reasoning, valuing, and knowing must be linked even more strictly to the conscious mental activity of Homo sapiens.

Current speculation about the evolution of cognition^[2] engages discussion about a possible ‘cognitive revolution’ about 300,000 years ago (various other dates have been suggested), the use of symbolic and recursive thinking, creative imagination, abstract thought, sociality, the development of language, the use of foresight and hindsight, and other mental faculties that we assume are largely confined to our own species. The assumption is that these mental properties emerged when the mammalian brain attained the particular degree of organic complexity and organization that is only found in humans.

This is the mainstream biological view. But could uniquely human mental faculties, as a matter of biological necessity, also bring along some evolutionary baggage – echoes of evolutionary history – some grounding properties that are shared with the broader community of life?

This article investigates human minded agency as a highly evolved form of mindless biological agency. It suggests that mental faculties we conventionally regard as uniquely human are highly evolved evolutionary characteristics that are built on a biological bedrock that reaches back to the origins of life.

Similarity & difference

Organisms are products of evolution, and to understand any organism (or, for that matter, its structures, processes, and behaviors) in evolutionary terms requires a knowledge of not only those characteristics that make the organism or feature unique, but also the additional necessarily associated characteristics that indicate evolutionary relationships – characteristics that are shared with other organisms.

The unique characteristics we use to identify particular organisms and define biological features are theoretical points of distinction but they do not exist in the world in isolation – they bring along with them evolutionary baggage as additional characteristics that are shared with other organisms. In the real world uniquely defining features are combined with features that are shared with other organisms as a result of common ancestry. It is this combination of similarity and difference (shared and unique characteristics) that makes it possible to establish evolutionary relationships.

The simultaneous manifestation of similarities and differences when comparing organisms and their structures can be both counterintuitive and confusing but it is cleverly captured in the scientific system of binomial nomenclature. While Homo sapiens is a unique species, the genus name Homo establishes its broad evolutionary context of shared characteristics – the ‘family resemblance’ that facilitates comparison. The specific epithet, sapiens, added to the genus name indicates difference by designating what is unique. The significance of this quirk of evolutionary biology will become obvious shortly.

Novelty emerges from the evolutionary process in a graduated way because it is built on, and limited by, its antecedent conditions.  Think of, say, diagrams of the evolving horse or human, and the different structures (fins, wings, arms & legs) that all have a pentadactyl ground plan.

We accept as uncontroversial the fact that we can, for example, provide a uniquely defining description of the human heart while at the same time considering features of the human heart that are shared with other species. But, transposing these ideas to the realm of mental attributes attracts a barrage of philosophical, methodological, and cultural resistance.

Why, say, can’t ‘reason’ exist in nature in this way – in a uniquely human form that also shares some properties with other species?

The answer seems simple and straightforward. Reason is a useful concept precisely because it excludes other species, because it is a uniquely human mental capacity – that is what we mean by ‘reason’.

But, while we don’t talk about the ‘arms’ of whales, we are prepared to make an evolutionary scientific comparison between our arms and the fins of whales: we recognize that there is a real biological relationship between the two.

However, to make a similar claim for ‘reason’ seems preposterous. Reason is so deeply embedded in our cultural tradition as a ‘minded’ concept that any suggestion otherwise is soon denied or ignored.

It is obvious that we are never going to accept, seriously, any talk of, say, ‘plant reason’ other than as metaphor. But could there be some scientific truth in the claim that human reason has evolutionary antecedents in other organisms? We know that our inherited color vision, body structures, even our fear of spiders and snakes, pre-date the emergence of Homo sapiens in evolutionary time. Why can’t reason have some evolutionary baggage?

Let’s look more closely at our scientific understanding of ‘reason’ in the broad context of evolution, beginning with those characteristics that all living organisms have in common.

Agency

What is it that makes life special and different . . . how do we distinguish life from non-life?

An answer to the question ‘What is life?‘ seems a long way off, but this website claims that the simplest and most obvious characteristic of life – what distinguishes living organisms from inanimate objects like rocks – is its agency.

Living organisms are autonomous biological agents acting on, and responding to, their conditions of existence. They display flexible goal-directed behavior and their structures, processes, and behaviors function in support of the propensity of the organism, as a whole, to survive, reproduce, and flourish. These biological goals are objective, universal, and ultimate: objective because they are a mind-independent fact; universal because they are expressed by all living organisms (in the sense that they are the necessary preconditions for life); and ultimate because they are a summation of all proximate goals. Without a behavioral disposition, the notions of goal-directed behavior and agency are incoherent. 

Biological agency is not a metaphor, nor is it ‘agent-like’ . . . and it is not just a convenient way of representing life – a useful heuristic. These biological goals are real, and they endow all living organisms with real agency. Human minded agency did not invent biological agency as a convenient metaphor or figurative creation; real biological agency made human subjectivity and human agency possible.

If you accept that the word ‘agency’, as outlined above, is being used in a scientifically and semantically legitimate way, then you might be surprised by a necessary but perhaps unexpected consequence . . . that agency can be expressed by mindless organisms.

It was this mindless agency, operating through evolution for about 3.5 billion years, that eventually produced human subjectivity as just one species-specific expression of biological agency. In other words, human agency is biological agency as expressed in a uniquely minded human form. Real biological agency ‘created’ human minded agency: human agency did not invent biological agency as a mental metaphor.

Universal conditions of biological agency

Each species expresses the universal conditions of biological agency (survival, reproduction, flourishing) through its own particular combination of structures, processes, and behaviors. Some of these characteristics are species-specific and therefore unique, while others are shared with other organisms as a result of common ancestry.

While the agency of an organism is expressed through the actions performed by structures and processes, it is the universal conditions of agency that establish the limits and ends of processes: it is the goals that are prior. Structures evolve in response to the requirements of agential goals and, in this sense, action and process precede structure (constrain structural possibilities). Many different structures (the world’s organisms past and present) can satisfy the same universal agential conditions, but it is the goals that ultimately determine and limit the structures engaged.

This is sometimes treated as being problematically teleological.

What are biological goals?

The goals of organisms are the uncomplicated limits or ends to natural processes that follow conventional causal pathways. Having goals does not require or imply the presence of supernatural forces, the reading of human intentions into nature, or backward causation acting like a mysterious pull from the future; nor are they just a convenient heuristic device. 

Only when the goals of whole organisms are known can their necessitating conditions be understood. Thus, biological ends have explanatory priority (hence the ‘final cause’ associated with teleology) but they do not challenge the natural order of cause and effect: they are first in explanation, and last in causation.

Biological goals are real in nature (open to empirical investigation). Teleological explanations are therefore a feature of biology that distinguishes it from physics, chemistry, and explanations of the inanimate world. It is also why, for example, it makes sense to ask what biological structures, processes, and behaviors are ‘for’, while not asking the same question of rocks and the moon.

Behavioral orientation

Having goals entails a behavioral orientation that makes some outcomes more probable than others. This gives biological agency a ‘direction’ that in human terms would be called an ‘attitude’, ‘perspective’, or ‘point of view’. 

In its highly evolved and human minded form goal-directed behavior is treated as an expression of value. This is what underpins but does not determine, moral behavior (see biological values).

Evolutionary selection pressure depends on the effectiveness of structures, processes, and behaviors in attaining the universal goals of biological agency.

Universal traits of biological agency

Is it possible to establish the universal traits that are necessary for the universal goals of the biological axiom to be attained?

Selection pressure, in evolutionary biology, refers to the factors that determine which individuals within a population are more likely to survive, reproduce, and flourish. This is natural selection as a process that leads to the adaptation and evolution of species over time.

The biological concepts of adaptation, natural selection, and fitness maximization relate to the necessary conditions of biological agency. Without the presumption of agency, these ideas become incoherent since they infer that conditions of existence can facilitate or impede the attainment of real goals – whether these goals are minded or mindless.

Adaptation, as a mindless process, is neither deliberate nor conscious but it is goal-directed and therefore agential. Furthermore, all biological structures, processes, and behaviors are subordinate to the universal, objective, and ultimate conditions that constitute the unity of purpose for every living organism.

Life is therefore more about processes than structures. Universal goals are attained by means of universal agential traits that are the preconditions for biological agency.

These critical agential traits have never been formalized in biological science because we do not willingly regard organisms as agents. These traits – the underlying agential traits that all organisms must possess – can be determined, not by experiment, but as a matter of biological necessity.

These are not the goals themselves, as stated in the biological axiom, but the essential biological agential ingredients needed to achieve these goals . . . the basic principles of biological agency.

This article and the article discussing biological agency refer to the following conditions:

. the demonstration of agency through behavioral autonomy – the capacity to act on, and respond to, the conditions of existence in an individually flexible way

. the capacity to act in a manner that facilitates the attainment of goals (the capacity for adaptation (‘self-correction’)

. the demonstration of a specific behavioral disposition (orientation or perspective) – as the propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish (biological axiom)

. the capacity to store, retrieve, process, and exchange, information

Though these conditions may be formulated in various ways, we intuitively recognize these universal traits as core characteristics that we humans share with all other organisms.

Humans, as biological agents, must share with all other organisms these universal traits of agency. However, as highly evolved organisms they are expressed not only in this biological grounding but also in its highly evolved and differentiated minded form that is also represented in language.  The four conditions listed above are (more or less) represented in human language as ‘self’, ‘reason’, ‘value’, and ‘knowledge’. However, human language has differentiated these core ingredients to include related ideas like  ‘communication’, ‘learning’, ‘memory’, ‘consciousness’, ‘cognition’, ‘intelligence’, ‘problem-solving’, and so on.

It is not coincidental that the essential general traits of biological agency listed above correlate with the human cognitive traits of knowledge (information, epistemology), reason (self-correction, adaptation, logic), and value (behavioral disposition, orientation, or mental perspective).^[1]

Human agency evolved out of biological agency and therefore shares many of its grounding characteristics.

Expressing agency

Each species of organism, as a matter of biological necessity, expresses biological agency using the means at its disposal – that is, by using the structures, processes, and behaviors bequeathed to it by its evolutionary history. We dismiss biological agency as instinctive, reactive, mechanical, and devoid of cognitive processing in contrast with human agency which uses foresight, symbolism, abstraction, cultural interaction, and ethical decision-making. In so doing we ignore the universal goals and conditions that humans and other organisms have in common.

Humans can use their minds as agential tools to help them achieve their universal biological goals: but minds and brains are just an evolutionary feature, or tool, like any other. Birds use their acute sight to help attain universal biological goals while fish use their capacity to live underwater, and oak trees use their own unique structures, processes, and behaviors to achieve the same universal ends.

Our human mental motivation – the source of the agency that drives our behavior – can be reduced to three key elements.

. Our biological needs and desires (will or appetite) simplified under the heading of values.

. What we know (knowledge) – what we understand about our conditions of existence – our beliefs.

. The facility to respond flexibly, to adapt, and to self-correct by using our reason.

Human history is, in a strong sense, a testament to the interaction between the core mental faculties of values, beliefs, and reason.

While it is clear that human values have a strong and inherited biological component, what about reason and knowledge?

We can trace the evolutionary antecedents of physical structures to their, mostly, simpler origins. But does it make sense to look for the evolutionary precursors of these major minded characteristics of human agency? Could these, like physical structures, be present in nature by degree? How could an oak tree possibly demonstrate knowledge, or values – surely that is nonsense?

Perhaps biological agency, and its uniquely human modes of expression, are like sexuality. We accept that sexuality exists almost universally across the community of life, even though it is expressed in a diversity of behaviours and physical forms. Simply because human sexuality is expressed in a uniquely human way does not mean that only human sexuality is real, and that the sexuality of other organisms is only sexual-like. An oak tree expresses value through the physical and behavioural means of its own unique form of agency. This is nothing like human value, but it is connected to human value through the shared characteristics of biological agency.

Such a proposal triggers a cognitive dissonance because we can both confuse (fail to distinguish between) and conflate (treat as being the same) the universal, objective, and ultimate values of biological agency, and the uniquely minded values and goals of human agency.

We both confuse (fail to distinguish between) and conflate (treat as being the same) the universal and objective ultimate values of biological agency, and the uniquely minded values and goals of human agency.

Since there is no technical terminology to describe the expression of biological values we fall back on the human vocabulary of intentional psychology.  And, since many organisms do not have minds, this human-talk (anthropomorphic language) is understandably dismissed as cognitive metaphor – which ignores its evolutionary grounding in biological agency. We make a clear

In other words, we mistakenly presume that biological agency must be minded agency, like human agency – that mindedness is a precondition for agency in living organisms. It is probably for this reason that we mistakenly infer that the unreality associated with the application of minded language to mindless organisms (cognitive metaphor) translates comfortably into the unreality of biological agency. That is, we conflate the simple distinction between the minded and the mindless with the complex distinction between biological agency and human agency. It is not that biological agency is a subjective creation of the human mind (cognitive metaphor or heuristic), rather that the proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency.

The evolution of inherent purpose in mindless organisms created minds: minds did not create purpose.

Human agency is described using the language of intentional psychology but there is no technical terminology to describe biological values. Biological values are therefore described using the language of intentional psychology, which is therefore reasonably dismissed as cognitive metaphor – that mindedness is a precondition for agency in living organisms. Thus, we conflate the simple distinction between the minded and the mindless with the complex distinction between biological agency and human agency. It is not that biological agency is a subjective creation of the human mind (cognitive metaphor or heuristic), rather that the proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency. The inherent purpose expressed by the goal-directed behaviour of mindless organisms created minds: minds did not create purpose.

Philosophical context

This website argues that biological agency is not a subjective human creation – a convenient fiction or metaphor – instead it is part of the empirical fabric of the world.

While human conscious intention is clearly different from mindless and mechanical genetically determined goal-directed behavior it is, nevertheless, a product (an evolutionary development of) the same universal biological agency.

The characteristics that we believe most closely define our human nature – our mental capacity to reason, value, and know – evolved out of the universal antecedent agential characteristics of living organisms.

We recognize biological agency in the autonomous and flexible goal-directed (purposive) behaviour that is displayed by all living organisms as they act on and respond to their conditions of existence. Organisms are not passive like rocks. We see agency in the orientation of leaves towards the sun, a fish darting from a predator, humans shopping in a supermarket. Goal-directed behaviour is a universal, ultimate, and objective characteristic of living organisms.

Only humans (and possibly other sentient animals) are consciously aware of this agential and purposive behaviour, and certainly only humans can represent it in words. But that does not mean that agency and purpose only exist in human minds – that they are a creation of human minds.

Living organisms are agents, they are not merely agent-like. The fact that most do not have minds does not somehow dissolve their agency. What does make human agency unique is its capacity to use language as a way to describe inner states.

The behavior of all organisms is a consequence of inner processing but only humans use words to describe their inner states – which they do using the language of intentional psychology.

What more can be said about this strange connection between mindless biological agency and the biological agency that is expressed by humans in minded terms?

Human behavior & human nature

When investigating the difference between biological agency and biological agency in its minded human form, we are confronted by the problem of human nature.

There are a surprisingly large number of answers to the question ‘What is it that makes us uniquely human?‘  Answers to this difficult question can come from many disciplines but, for the biologist, the answer must engage our evolution because we are ‘the way that nature made us’ and, while we emphasize our uniqueness and difference, there is much that unites us with the community of life.

Before considering our unique mental characteristics an abbreviated list of physical characteristics can set the scene, they include: blushing; the smiling and laughing associated with a sense of humour; having little body hair; large brains relative to other animals (1200-1400 cc) which require supporting muscles, a protective cranium, and high energy use (25% total); bipedal gait with improved vision and hands freed for tools (but resulting in back problems and narrowing of the hips and birth canal) with more deaths in childbirth than other primates resulting in premature birth and soft skull; children dependent on parents for longer hence a prolonged period of learning and socialization; opposable thumbs (thumbs can touch ring and little fingers facilitating use of tools; a descended larynx, originating c. 350, 000 BP and probably related to speech and language; living beyond reproductive age; use of fire, notably for cooking foods.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has dedicated his life’s work to the study of human nature, provides a definition of the mental aspects of our human nature as the innate abilities and predispositions as, ‘the totality of our universal patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour‘ (The Blank Slate), and on his website as ‘ . . . the sum of the innate or potential behaviors and mechanisms in the mind that are typical of the human species, arising from the interaction of the genome and the environment over evolutionary time’.

The set of evolved psychological traits and capacities that are universal to the human species include: language; a capacity for social interaction and cooperation; emotions, and various other cognitive abilities. Evolutionary psychology, Pinker points out ‘ . . . has documented hundreds of universals that cut across the world’s cultures . . .’  Included in the list of universal human psychological traits must be those universal biological characteristics out of which these psychological traits evolved and on which they depend. Unique human psychological traits are necessarily biologically inseparable from their shared evolutionary baggage, the universal characteristics of biological agency. Pinker himself points out that ‘ . . . many psychological traits (such as our taste for fatty foods, social status, and risky sexual liaisons) are better adapted to the evolutionary demands of an ancestral environment . . .‘.

Features we associate with human mental capacity include: social cooperation that extends beyond our own relatives; the use of language to communicate information; a highly developed capacity to explain, predict, control and make use of complex technology. One way of expressing this is to point out that only humans use culture as a form of cumulative collective learning that has developed synergistically with other mental attributes incorporated in spoken, to written, printed, and electronic forms. We have a creative intelligence that allows us to reflect and communicate not only about the past and future, but also abstract ideas that engage reflexive and recursive thought. Our use of reason gives us a unique rationality that can override our intuitive behaviour as codes of behaviour (morality).

We can list and separate universal human psychological traits into a convenient theoretical package, but in practice – in reality – this package is inextricably locked inside the much larger evolutionary bag of universal biological agency.

We assess agency primarily by behavior, even among humans who can communicate their inner states through language (actions speak louder than words). We are familiar with our own inner states and the language that is used to describe them but we know little about the inner states of other species although we know that they must exist. Our denial of biological agency is an acute form of anthropocentrism.

We humans are selves with knowledge, values, and the capacity to self-correct. Our behavior – in so far as we can reduce it to simple terms – is a product of the interaction between our reason, beliefs, desires, and our conditions of existence.  This is what makes us tick. But because other species do not have the same (mental) internal drivers of behavior as us humans does not mean that they have no internal drivers.

All living organisms demonstrate the universal traits of biological agency: autonomy, information processing, behavioral orientation, and adaptation. Human agency is just one evolutionary (minded) manifestation of a more general and universal biological agency.

Internal processes

Let’s put humans aside for one moment.

We assign agency to an object or organism because of its behavior. We, and other organisms, would treat a rock behaving like an animal as a biological agent.

Though we judge agency by behavior, we know that the source of the behavior – what powers behavior, gives an organism its motivation, drive, or vitality – arises internally. Though the stimulus for activity may be external to the organism, all behavior – as the response of a biological agent to its conditions of existence – is a consequence of internal processing.

Biologically we know that internal processing – like all structures processes and behaviors in living organisms – has an ultimate unity of purpose . . . the goals of biological agency which are the necessary preconditions for life.

The multiplicity of structures, processes, and behaviors that we see in the community of life – the different ways of processing information and adapting –  are simply different solutions that use the same behavioral orientation to in the face of the same problem of existence. Humans are no exception.

Returning to humans.

From this universal biological perspective, human internal processing is just one of nature’s many ways of addressing the problem of existence. The brain is just one highly evolved organ facilitating the attainment of the goals of biological agency.

However, this situation is complicated by several factors. Firstly, we are humans and therefore take a special interest in our own internal processing. Second, we have the capacity for language and can therefore communicate with one another about our internal states directly, rather than through the medium of behavior (although speech is a form of behavior).

Though the power of the brain has allowed us to pursue goals and ambitions loftier than those of the biological axiom, the goals of our biological agency remain a minimum necessary requirement for life itself. All organisms demonstrate internal processes that motivate their behavior towards the same universal, objective, and ultimate ends.

The fact that one segment of human internal processing is both conscious and intentional, is insignificant in principle, though critical in practice.

There are many ways to measure the ‘success’ of an organism, but the ultimate biological test, the test of life itself, is the degree to which a species or group has shown the capacity to survive, reproduce, or flourish. If sheer biomass is a significant measure then plants, which make up 82% of global biomass, win hands down.^[3,4]

This forces us to consider the possibility that, in confronting the problem of existence, plants have been highly successful. And we know that, for this to be the case, their internal processing must also have been extremely effective.

Human-talk

The article on human-talk discussed the various reasons why we use anthropomorphic language. Does human-talk provide any insights into the relationship between biological agency and human agency and the core universal biological traits of information processing, adapting, and behavioral orientation?

The use of the language of cognitive psychology to describe non-mentalistic phenomena is contentious because there are no uncontroversial rules about word usage. If we say, for example, that ‘the heart wants to pump blood‘ we are clearly being anthropomorphic. The heart cannot possibly ‘want’ things in the way that we ‘want’ things; so this is blatant as if metaphor. But when we say ‘the purpose of the heart is to pump blood‘ though you might still regard this as metaphor, the conceptual association with human conscious minds is not so clear-cut.

There are many examples like this. We might accept that an animal, like a unicellular paramecium, with light sensitivity can ‘see’, in a loose sense, but not in the same way that we do . . . it can only ever be as if the paramecium and plants ‘see’ because the plant has no nervous system or eyes.

Viewed through the prism of our consciousness, we humans seem very different from non-sentient organisms. But in a more general sense we have much in common.

Today’s living organisms have persisted in evolutionary time by developing structural and functional adaptations to their historical surroundings. From this biological perspective consciousness is just another functional adaptation, albeit a very effective one.

Consciousness-talk is a specialist vocabulary within a more wide-ranging language that encompasses the general interactions that occur between all organisms and their surroundings. Explanations of the inanimate tend to answer the question ‘How does it work?’ while mindless biological agency prompts the question ‘What is it for?’ When talking about sentient animals we ask ‘How does it feel?’, and when considering human mental events we ask ‘What was the intention?’

All organisms demonstrate, through their behavior, the universal goals of the biological axiom which they express in their real and universal agential traits of information processing, adaptation, and behavioral orientation. The fact that only humans have the language that allows them to describe, share, and critically reflect on their own internal states does not mean that only humans have these internal states.

Of course, the physical manifestation of information processing, adaptation, and behavioral orientation in nature is different depending on the variety of species-specific structures, processes, and behaviors employed.

The goals of biological agency, which are universal and mind-independent, are expressed by means of physical structures, processes, and behaviors that are evolutionarily graded in complexity. We do not have an agential vocabulary that captures this evolutionary gradation. Instead, we have adopted anthropomorphic words that are, by convention, of greater and lesser acceptability in scientific discourse. Human-talk (anthropomorphism) is our best attempt (what we use in desperation) to capture the reality of mindless agency.

There are several reasons why we use human-talk:

. anthropocentric cognitive bias
. genuine metaphor
. lack of appropriate vocabulary
. absence of convincing referents (e.g. not knowing the consciousness of a fish, or reasoning of an owl).

Without adequate vocabulary we inevitably revert to human-talk, which generates semantic and conceptual confusion, and scientific imprecision.

Human-talk will not go away, even in science, because (mostly) it attempts to represent similarities that exist in nature, not just in human minds.

Conceptual gradualism

In the course of cosmic evolution, physical structures, including their properties and relations, increased in number and complexity. This was a process of emergence as everything evolved from a point source. A fundamental change occurred with the emergence of life when the same universal, objective, and ultimate goals and agential traits of biological agency were manifest in an increasingly diverse range of structures, processes, and behaviors as evolution generated (mostly) increasing complexity.

One of the best examples of gradation in a mental attribute is that of consciousness. Not long ago the idea of consciousness extending beyond humans would have been considered ridiculous, if not, blasphemous. Today we have adjusted to the idea of evolutionary gradation and many scientists would be prepared to acknowledge consciousness as existing in lowly organisms – perhaps any organisms with central nervous systems, however simple.

On this understanding, consciousness exists in nature not as present in humans, and absent in all other organisms – but as present in a range of organisms in graduated form – by degree.

This raises a question about semantics and science. We could, for example, be living in a time when the everyday usage and meaning of ‘consciousness’ relates strictly to humans, while the scientific understanding extends to other organisms.

This website argues that the conceptual gradation we now associate with ‘consciousness’ is applicable to other concepts once regarded as restricted to human intentional psychology. These include ‘purpose’, ‘reason’, ‘knowing’, ‘remembering’, ‘intelligence’, ‘learning’, and ‘evaluation’. While common usage might suggest that all these concepts are strictly minded properties, there is a scientific sense in which they are part of the real graduated fabric of biological agency.

If we accept this scientific claim, then we are left with a problem of scientific terms. Do we accept that the word ‘consciousness’ is as appropriately applied to the worm CNS as to the human brain – or do we develop a new terminology? This is all rather complicated so, in practice, we resort to our familiar use of human mental terms and, in effect, deny biological agency by referring to this language as ‘metaphor’.

Rather than acknowledging the universal evolutionarily shared real attributes of biological agency we use ‘as if’ language that denies their existence. This is a strange inversion of reasoning that has caused untold biological damage as we conflate non-human agency with non-existent agency. By dismissing agential similarities in this way, we are not just diminishing their significance, we are denying their reality.

Intentionality

When we understand the way that causal chains proceed we talk about ‘reasons’. So, for example, if we understand the scientific context of the moon orbiting the Earth, we say that there are reasons why this is so.  For simplicity, we might call this kind of reason a ‘natural reason’.

We often choose a different terminology when talking about the actions of living organisms. It seems that this is partly because reasons in nature can confer what we construe as benefit. Rather than saying the ‘reason’ for eyes is to see, we say that the ‘purpose’ of eyes is to see. That is, we understand organisms as agents whose goals can be helped or hindered and that is why we don’t say that the ‘purpose’ of the Moon is to orbit the Earth. We recognize that the reason birds have wings is to fly, we have eyes to see, and our hearts pump blood – in all these cases the semantically appropriate word is ‘purpose’ rather than ‘reason’.

But science is still uneasy about ‘purpose’ in nature.

It is conventional to speak of examples, like those given above, as functional adaptations and to restrict the word ‘purpose’ to instances of human intention with ‘purpose’ reserved for ‘minded’ occasions.

Like natural reasons, functional reasons (as purposes) are not metaphorical purposes (the reading of subjective human intention into nature) but functional reasons locked into the genetic and biological character of all organisms.

This illustrates the problems that arise when real but mindless agency is ignored or denied and the complications that arise when trying to find a solution. This is essentially the confusion that results from the fact that human minded agency is a specialized form of mindless biological agency – a factor that complicates the distinction between minded and mindless agency.

One possible way of simplifying, but not solving, this situation is to describe mindless agency as pre-conscious agency.

The mentalistic classification into non-conscious, pre-conscious, and conscious categories suggests that words like ‘intention’, ‘purpose’, ‘adaptation’, ‘selection’, ‘function’, and ‘design’ are sometimes used in relation to pre-conscious functions and sometimes to conscious intentions, hence their ambiguity and resulting semantic demarcation disputes.

The correlations information/knowledge, behavioral disposition/value, and adaptation/reason seem unlikely. What could possibly be the real-world connection between mental states and the mindless behavior of non-human organisms? All we know for sure is that human bodies and brains evolved out of their evolutionary antecedents.

It is now time to consider each of these cases in more detail.

Adaptation (reason)

For any agent to address goals there is a requirement for behavioral flexibility as the capacity to distinguish between those circumstances that can facilitate or impede (help or hinder) the attainment of goals. Expressed in simple terms an agent must have the ability to self-correct or adjust in relation to changing internal and external conditions (the conditions of existence) and in biological science this flexible behavior is generally known as adaptation. This is expressed in human minded terms as the capacity make choices, have preferences, and make decisions.

As already pointed out, this is a universal and critical condition for all organisms  (a precondition for life) since without it life would soon cease.

With a universal requirement for each autonomous organism to ‘self-correct’ the actual method by which this is achieved is unimportant, although its efficiency certainly will. Part of the human means of self-correction (there are many other means) is the mental process of reasoning.

Though we place great emphasis on human reason, its biological significance lies in how efficiently it facilitates the attainment of goals. Though reason, by and large, appears to have advanced the human cause, it can be used to advance any ends.

The close link between knowledge, value, reason/information, behavioral orientation, adaptation is evident in a recent definition of reason and rationality by prominent intellectual Steven  Pinker, as

‘ . . . the ability to use knowledge to attain goals‘ (Rationality, 2021, p. 36)

This sentence neatly implies not only information as a more generalized form of knowledge, but the behavioral orientation that is a necessary part of any goal-directed behavior.

Universal goals are, of course, achieved by many different but graded means as organisms have, in general over evolutionary time, become more complex, conscious, and comprehending. As a philosopher, Dan Dennett has pointed out, pre-conscious (mindless) goal-directed behavior makes organisms ‘competent without comprehension’.

But, surely, conscious human intentions and deliberations are very different from the genetically-bound mechanical behavior of mindless organisms?

Reason representers

We humans are able to represent, in our minds, the reasons for events and behaviors. We can also talk to one another about them by using symbolic languages.  That is, we are reason representers.

It is important to acknowledge that reasons pre-dated reason-representation. There are reasons why the moon orbits the Earth and why spiders build webs, even though the Moon and spiders have neither human-like consciousness or spoken language. The reasons why cacti have spines (their purpose) existed long before human consciousness emerged in evolutionary time. 

The fact that only humans can consciously represent reasons and purposes in language and in their minds does not mean that reasons and purposes only exist in human minds – that the reasons and purposes we see in nature are created by our minds – that they are merely metaphors.

Behavioral disposition (value)

The relationship between the universal behavioral disposition of all living organisms and human values and ethical decisions is discussed in detail in the article on biological values.

Autonomous biological agents demonstrate their autonomy by behaving in a particular way. Their behavior is not arbitrary or random, it has a particular orientation, propensity, tendency, or direction. It is as though, as expressed in human terms, they have a particular ‘attitude’, ‘perspective’, or ‘point of view’ in relation to their conditions of existence. This ‘point of view’ is the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish.

These foundational biological goals, being universal, are shared by humans, but humans express them in a highly evolved and minded form. Manifest in this minded form we call them ‘values’ but in their mindless or pre-cognitive form they are treated as mindless objective behavior. It is this minded behavioral disposition, moderated by reason, that underpins human morality.

Since this behavioral orientation in non-human organisms eventually gave rise, evolutionarily, to value-driven human agency it requires some recognition in biological science.  The solution suggested on this website is that the evolutionary connection be acknowledged through the expressions ‘biological values’ or ‘pre-cognitive values’.

For many the clash of the combination of the concepts ‘mindless’ and ‘values’ will be too much to accept. But the facts of biological agency cannot go scientifically unrecognized. The words we associate with human intentional psychology and human agency become more scientifically coherent when applied more generally in biology. Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world. 

Information processing (knowledge)

We generally understand stimuli in simple physical terms – the prick of a needle, a sudden sound, the sight of a spider. And we tend to think of this as stimulating our brain to send out electrical signals to parts of our body that then respond accordingly. However, it can be more insightful, scientifically, to reduce this complexity to simpler terms by treating what is going on as information processing.

The regulation of organic processes into flexible behavior with a unity of purpose is a complex process, even on the smallest organic scale. If an organism is to attain goals then its parts must be highly coordinated in their behavior.

Though organisms express a high degree of autonomy they are still part of the continuum of the universe. Agency, as part of their nature, entails a constant process of adjustment (short- and long-term adaptation) in relation to the internal and external circumstances that constitute their conditions of existence. Behavior is therefore a consequence of both internal and external stimuli that have been subjected to internal processing.

This entails information processing on a scale that includes: reception, storage, retrieval, communication/transmission, and translation. These are crucial biological processes with universal functions that have evolved in many different ways.

Reception

Before information can be coordinated it must be received. We asssociate the reception of information with internal and external sensory systems of varying evolutionary complexity.

Each organism exists in its own umweldt (those conditions that are limiting in relation to the attainment of goals given the life-form of the organism and its ecological niche). Among the many commonly encountered factors that can be significant are: light, sound, chemicals, temperature, and other organisms. The complexity of information receivers varies enormously. Protozoans have simple light receptors while humans have complex eyes.

Storage

Information becomes especially valuable if it can be stored ready for future use. We think immediately of the storage of memories and information in human brains but there are more generalized mechanisms available in biology, most notably the information that is encoded in DNA. Every organism is the outcome of a mindless ‘learning’ process that goes back to the dawn of life: it is a consequence of what ‘worked’ in evolutionary time.

Information is stored in processes, structures, and learned behavioral patterns that depend on the organism’s evolutionary history. Perhaps the most obvious is the genetic information of DNA which in the sequence of nucleotide base pairs encodes the instructions for the development, functioning, and reproduction but RNA has a crucial role in gene expression and protein synthesis with messenger RNA (mRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA), and ribosomal RNA (rRNA) storing and transmitting genetic information in various forms. Some information is stored in the structure of proteins that change shape and perform specific functions based on their amino acid sequences.

However, there are also: epigenetic influences such as chemical modifications to DNA and histone proteins; in the nervous system information is stored in the connections between neurons where synaptic strength and the pattern of connections between neurons store memories and learned behaviors; some organisms store information as behavioral patterns and learned experiences as they adapt both short- and long-term; social organisms convey information through vocalizations, chemical signals, body language and other means while social and intelligent animals like humans and dolphins use the cultural transmission of by traditions and learned behaviors and humans use recorded information as collective knowledge across generations; some cells in multicellular organisms retain memory of their specialized functions as a molecular and epigenetic profile retained through cellular differentiation; others store information about their environment and available resources through symbiotic relationships with other species such as mycorrhizal fungi that can store information about soil nutrients for plants.

Communication

A coordinated behavioral response requires the communication of information between all parts of the organism. In human terms, we can think of extremes such as, on the one hand, the unconscious internal signals needed to maintain and adjust the rhythm of our heartbeat and, on the other, the communication of information in the sounds of words exchanged between two people.

Electrical signals are transmitted along nerves byut there are many other modes of communication in the biological world.

the words human rain might be the most miraculous substance in the universe – matter that has become aware of itself – but the in-principle universal biological requirement of information is exactly the same for a plant as it is for a human. It is just that a brain achieves the same biological ends in a physically more complex way.

The fact that plants now make up over 80% of the Earth’s biomass indicates that they have been successful in achieving universal agential goals. This means that we have vastly underestimated the efficiency of plant communication systems. This would appear to be an open, exciting, and potentially highly productive field for biological research.

Of course, the genome is a vast repository of information storing the evolutionary history of each individual species right back to the origin of life. Plants and humans both use DNA and genes as ‘instructions’ for development, growth, and general functioning, the same essential mechanism used to translate the information stored in DNA into functional proteins, to control cell division, transcription (RNA synthesis), translation (protein synthesis), epigenetic modification, and metabolism. Many genes have homologous counterparts in both humans and plants and modes of genetic communication about basic biological functions are well-conserved across the tree of life.

Some aspects of this evolutionary agential homology are discussion in the article on plant intelligence.

Translation

When information is transferred it must be decoded and converted into an appropriate behavioral response.

Organisms use many ways to translate information the information that is used to coordinate their behavior including: chemical signals such as pheromones or hormones;  visual Signals like body language, color changes, or displays; sound and vocalizations, notably frogs and birds; touch, as in grooming, nuzzling, and clinging plant tendrils; electrocommunication uses electric fields to communicate and navigate; mimicry in form, behavior, chemicals or other is used in many different ways; all organisms respond to environmental properties like temperature, humidity, or light; social hierarchies elicit relations of dominance and submission; genetic programming generates instinctual responses; learning and memory; cultural transmission through social learning; symbiotic relationships align behavior to benefit both parties. For example, cleaner fish provide cleaning services to larger fish in exchange for food.

Coordination

We humans have a strong sense that our destiny is a consequence of the rational consideration of our beliefs and desires all generated within our brains. Our brains are the control room for our bodies.

Evolutionary selection pressure has ensured that those organisms most effective at attaining agential goals have persisted. In animals, the coordination needed to achieve these goals involves the interaction of genetic factors (predispositions, instincts etc.), learned behaviors, the nervous system and brain, hormones, and environmental factors – essentially the integration sensory information, nervous system function, and physiological processes.

The complexity of the animal world (mostly a consequence of their mobility) does not overshadow their total dependence on plants which make up more than 80% of the world’s biomass. Plants too coordinate their growth, development, and reproduction with the aid of photoreceptors, hormones, chemicals, biological ‘clocks’, touch, and interaction with other organisms such as mycorrhizae and abiotic factors in their environment.

Principles of biological agency

This website has identified universal characteristics of biological agency. All organisms have the behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish as ends that are demonstrated through the universal properties of information processing, behavioral orientation, and adaptation. These universal goals and properties are manifest in the infinite variety of individual structures, processes and behaviors that we see in the community of life, with each species demonstrating its universal properties in its own unique way.

Human agency is expressed through many unique properties of structure, process, and behavior, as they occur both singly and in combination. However, it is mindedness and conscious intention that is conventionally regarded as a defining feature of human agency.

We know that these uniquely minded characteristics must coexist with the universal characteristics shared by all living organisms, and out of which uniquely human features evolved.

The following list of words demonstrates how uniquely human cognitive states are connected to the universal conditions of biological agency. It first lists the uniquely human word meaning before its broader meaning, as it relates to biological agency, is provided in italics.

This illustrates well how the meanings of human cognitive terms can be extended into the realm of biological agency. How, for example, the word ‘purpose’ can vacillate between its uniquely human meaning and its more general application within biological agency.

Adaptation – for some reason we accept that plants can ‘adapt’ both short-term by responding to their conditions of existence, and long-term by genetic alteration. For example, in the short-term they respond to light direction and intensity in a way that maximizes sunlight absorption. This is driven by a genetic program, and not conscious understanding. These strategies could be thought of as a type of accumulated knowledge that has been encoded in their genetic makeup.
Agency – The human capacity to act in an autonomous way by, for example, making independent moral judgments. The exercise of autonomous goal-directed behavior.
Biological agency – The capacity to act on, and respond to the conditions of existence in an autonomous and flexible goal-directed way that expresses the universal, objective, and ultimate propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish
Cognition – The human mental processes and activities related to acquiring, processing, storing, and using of knowledge. The processes and activities related to acquiring, processing, storing, and using of information by a biological agent.
Consciousness – The human awareness of immediate experiences. Also, the entire range of mental processes, including cognitive functions such as self-awareness, introspection, reasoning, memory, imagination, and the capacity for abstract thought. The totality of an individual’s subjective experiences and mental life. The capacity of a biological agent to orientate itself in relation to space, time, & its conditions of existence
Communication – The exchange of knowledge between humans by both verbal and non-verbal means. The exchange of information
Experience – event(s) that a human goes through or encounters, often characterized by being special in some way – by, say, uniqueness or personal involvement; sometimes the totality of life events, knowledge, emotions, and perceptions and overall comprehension and awareness of the world. The event(s) that a biological agent goes through or encounters in its umweldt including the way these are processed as information.
Human agency – A specialized form of biological agency that uses language and cognition.
Intelligence – The ability to acquire, understand and apply knowledge and reason to solve problems and adapt to new situations.
The capacity to acquire and process information that facilitates adaptation to the circumstances of existence and the attainment of goals.
Intention – The conscious attitude towards the effect of actions. Behavioral orientation
Knowledge – All forms of human awareness and comprehension of the world, including both subjective and objective aspects of our understanding. Information accumulated by an agent about its conditions of existence
Learning – The ability for personal growth and development through the processes of acquiring knowledge and skills. The capacity to process and accumulate information that may facilitate adaptation to the circumstances of existence and the attainment of goals.
Memory – The ability of the mind to store and recall information, experiences, and knowledge. The capacity for information storage and retrieval.
Perception – the human processing of sensory stimuli through the sensory system that includes the five traditional senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but sometimes including cognitive factors like mental processes, beliefs, desires, reason and their role in experience. The processing of the full range of experiential information (the umweldt) of a biological agent.
Reason – the mental faculty that enables individuals to think, analyze, and draw conclusions logically and rationally – to make sound judgments based on evidence and a structured thought process. The capacity to process information in a way that facilitates the attainment of goals.
Value – The word ‘value’ can be used as both a verb or a noun. When used in a human context it refers to the importance or significance attached to something based on emotional, objective or other factors. Values can include moral, ethical, cultural, and personal principles that guide behavior and decision-making. A behavioral propensity or disposition (towards).

Commentary

Agency in biology is most obviously demonstrated by autonomous organisms. We assess agency through the medium of behavior, and while the stimulus for behavior – the conditions of existence – might arise from inside or outside the organism, all behavior is the outcome of internal processing.

Since everything in the universe is connected, all explanations concerned with specific phenomena must entail simplification and reduction. One of the tasks of science is to provide the most economical but efficacious accounts of phenomena – the most obvious example being those equations of physics that can express universal phenomena in a few symbols. Perhaps biological agency will one day be expressed in a neat mathematical formula but, for the moment, a succinct verbal definition will have to do.

This website has identified a parsimonious and productive way to explain biological agency.  conditions needed to explain biological agency. Biological explanations engage three key biological phenomena: structures, processes, and behaviors. In autonomous organisms it these three phenomena, in combination, that express universal, objective, and ultimate goals and conditions as a unity of purpose. These goals are manifested in the propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish as a behavioral orientation entails information processing and adaptation.

That is, the community of life has evolved a wide range of structures, processes, and behaviors that engage information processing, and adaptation in a mindless behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. Humans and plants have each evolved their own individual and distinctive structures, processes, and behaviors to achieve the same ultimate goals by using the same ultimate means.

As humans, our natural inclination is to describe nature in human terms by using the language usually reserved for our uniquely human mental states. But it was nature that created humans through the process of evolution: humans did not create nature. The challenge, then, is not to look in nature for what is human but to understand what it is in organisms that made human subjectivity possible.

We are scientifically justified in speaking of biological agency because organisms, like all agents, are goal-directed. They act according to the universal, objective, and ultimate goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing, these goals being our most parsimonious way of stating the necessary conditions for life. Importantly, these goals are not mysterious forces, they were not planted in organisms by God, they are not metaphorical creations of the human mind, and they do not exert a causal pull from the future – they are objective because they are empirically evident in the behavioral disposition of every organism in the present.

To attain these universal and objective goals certain preconditions must be met. While these (like the goals of life) may be expressed in various ways using various categories, they are most parsimoniously described here under the three categories of behavioral orientation, adaptation, and information processing, and referred to here as universal agential traits. Expressed in more general terms, the specific goals of biological agency give organisms a behavioral disposition or perspective on their existence. For these goals to be realized requires flexibility of behavior as the capacity to adapt to the circumstances of existence. To meet all conditions of life there must be communication of information in a manner that is not found in the inanimate world.

It is out of these universal agential traits that human agency – as minded (conscious) intentions – must have evolved.

In attempting to describe, as succinctly as possible, the features that most effectively describe our mental life, philosophers have identified three distinct mental realms: knowledge (epistemology), value (ethics), and reason (logic). From the time that this tripartite distinction was established, it has been found useful, suggesting that it is more than a convenient categorization; it corresponds to something real in our human nature.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is hardly surprising that there is a correspondence here between universal biological agential traits and the highly evolved human manifestation of these universal traits.

Information                      =          knowledge
Behavioral disposition   =          value
Adaptation                        =          reason (self-correction)

When we make the anthropomorphic statement, ‘That oak tree wants water’, instead of looking in nature for something uniquely human we can now look in nature for what it is that gave rise to this uniquely human sentiment.

An oak tree expresses reason, value, and knowledge in a crude and generalized form when compared to the highly evolved form in which they are found in humans. But these traits are nevertheless present in primordial (primitive, ancestral) form as universal and necessary agential conditions of life . . . a behavioral disposition, information processing, and adaptation.

Clearly, oak tree reason, value, and knowledge are vastly different from uniquely human reason, value, and knowledge. The point, however, is that there is a real-world evolutionary connection (not a metaphorical likeness) between the two.^[7]

Organic complexity

The increase in complexity that we see in the organic world (especially that resulting from improved mobility and the advent of minds) is associated with an increase in the behavioural flexibility that marks individuality and independence.

The agential matter of living organisms expresses behavioural flexibility that is not present in the behaviourally constricted world of inorganic physics (see the biological axiom). And minded organisms demonstrate increasing degrees of behavioural freedom via an increasing capacity to learn, and which culminates in the flood of behavioural opportunities (degrees of behavioural freedom) made possible by human reason.

This may be seen as a process of increasing autonomy as, during evolution, individual organic agents became increasingly differentiated from their environments. Simple life which, in the early stages of evolution, was highly vulnerable to environmental influences, in the later stages gathered the organic complexity that allowed it to overcome, and even dominate, their environments.

This increase in behavioural freedom is amply demonstrated by humans as evolution’s greatest expression of individuality, acting collectively to disperse and dominate planet Earth in the Anthropocene.

Evolutionary increase in organic complexity is, in part, associated with an increase in individual behavioral freedom and independence. The behavioral flexibility of life over non-life is stated in the biological axiom, but further flexibility was added with the possibilities and opportunities opened up by the advent of mobility, the mind, learning, reason, language, and cooperation between individuals.

In general, the increasing autonomy of an organism (as it exists within the relationship of the organism-environment continuum) depends on its capacity to adapt – expressed as increasing behavioral flexibility.

Expressed in human-talk this relates to the organism’s accumulated ‘knowledge’, capacity to ‘learn’, and ‘innovate’ when confronted with novel circumstances. This is not, however, a recipe for evolutionary success since evolutionary diversification is subject to the path-dependent constraints of existing physical forms and environments. The apparent evolutionary success of highly autonomous and complex humans must be considered alongside the evolutionary success of insects, microbes, and plants.

The key characteristic of life lies not so much in the variety of its functions, processes, and material composition but that, collectively, these factors display a unity of purpose. Biologists, of necessity, investigate the parts of organisms in terms of their contribution to the integrity of the whole as a unified agent. In the absence of purpose and agency biology is just a collection of dissociated facts about the world with organisms treated in the same way that we treat inanimate matter.

First published on the internet – 1 March 2019

. . . 24 September 2023 – revision including evolutionary connections between biological and human agencies
. . . 26 September 2023 – ongoing revision