How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integration
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How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integration Matthew Sims1 Received: 11 March 2020 / Accepted: 14 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multicellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction. Keywords Free energy principle · Active inference · Symbiosis · Nested Markov blankets · Multiscale integration · Cognitive evolution · Emergence · Physiological individuals
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Matthew Sims [email protected] School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, Scotland, UK
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Synthese
1 Introduction Symbioses1 are cooperative heterospecific associations in which each symbiont partner mutually benefits from (e.g., gaining nourishment, shelter, etc.) the presence of the other partner(s). These associations have presented an interesting problem case for the notion of biological individuality. What it is to be a biological individual refers to what it is that makes a living system a well delineated whole. Symbiosis raises the ontological question of whether beyond classifying each symbiont as a biological individual, there is a non-arbitrary manner of classifying the symbiotic assemblage itself as a well delineated biological unit. And if so, how can this non-arbitrary manner be spelled out? Answering this question is particularly important for at least two reasons; the first being that symbiosis is ubiquitous in nature; getting clear on the conditions under which a symbiotic association qualifies as a countable biological individual allows biological explanations to parse the world up in ways that ontologically cohere with the kinds of entities that po
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