Ecology of Mind
Evan Thompson, University of Toronto
An edited transcript of remarks at Bucknell University’s symposium on “Region and Ecology” as part of a
university focus year on “Cultures at the Confluence: The Susquehanna Valley and the Environmental
Humanities”; Sept. 26, 2008
I'm a philosopher of mind and a philosopher of science, working mainly in the areas
of mind-brain science and trying to bring the mind-brain science perspective into
phenomenological philosophy and also trying to bring the phenomenological perspective
into mind-brain science. In my work, one of the things that I've been particularly interested
in is the relationship between mind and environment. And that's really what I'm going to be
talking to you about tonight. I want to present a number of different ideas under this theme
of mind in living environments, and wanted to start by referencing the work Gregory
Bateson. Some of you may know his work; for those of you who don't, he was an
anthropologist and cyberneticist, a very influential figure in the environmental movement in
the 1970s. And in one of his essays, he wrote that the individual mind is immanent but not
only in the body; it is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is
a larger mind of which this individual mind is only a sub-system. By larger mind, what he
had in mind here was, as he sometimes also called it, a pattern that connects the organism
and environment, a pattern that itself exhibits a kind of intelligence and adaptivity and selforganization. So he also wrote that the identity between the unit of mind and the unit of
evolutionary survival, the organism and the environment—not simply the organism or not
simply the gene, but the coupled system of organism and environment—is of very great
importance.
This pattern means that I now localize something which I am calling “mind” as
immanent in a large biological system, the ecosystem. So the guiding idea, then, that I'm
taking from Bateson as inspiration, is that the environment is not a container for mind, or a
nearby site where mind happens to be located, nor is mind limited to the confines of the
skull. Rather, mind is a relational pattern encompassing living beings and their environments,
and it thus extends beyond the skull and skin.
So that's the guiding idea, and what I would like to do, the task in my work and also what I
want to share with you, is whether we can characterize this relational pattern or mind in
more detail. And the approach that I'm going to take builds on work that really goes back to
the work of the neuroscientist Francisco Varela, now deceased, with whom I worked for a
number of years. In his work, his work by himself and also work we did in collaboration, in
the context of the brain and cognitive sciences, we proposed an approach that we called the
enactive approach. And the basic idea is that cognition isn't the internal representation of an
outside world. That's, if you like, a sort of “parachute” view of cognition, that you sort of
drop into an environment that's already there, your mind you already possess, it is internal to
you, and whether you are successful in getting around in this world or in solving the
problems that it poses really has to do with whether you have a good map, whether you have
a good set of internal mental representations. That's a standard representationalist view. So
we wanted to propose a different way of thinking about cognition, where cognition is, as we
called it, sense-making--the enacting of a meaningful environment through embodied action.
So environment and mind are integrated and mutually specify each other.
So what I want to do is share with you some ideas and illustrate them, ideas from the
enactive approach, and there are really four central ideas that I want to concentrate on
tonight. I'm going to go through these in some detail, but so that you see them up front, I
want to say some things about autonomy, which I'm going to mean in a particular way that
will become apparent. I want to say something relating autonomy to emergence. I want to
say something about this notion of sense-making;. And I want to end with some remarks
about embodiment.
So let's begin, then, with the notion of autonomy. Let's start with an environment in
which there are differentiated heterogeneous elements or processes that interact with each
other in various ways. . We can try to visualize this with clouds representing processes and
arrows representing conditioning relations, where one process conditions or affects the
other. Usually, the way a system is thought of is that we draw some boundary around
something that stands out and is of interest to us, and that appears to exhibit some kind of
causal interconnectedness. The classical example from physics and dynamic systems theory is
the solar system, the planets and their moving around the sun. So that's a normal way of
defining a system. But for certain types of processes that we can observe, the interactions
take on a particular form or form a particular pattern. So upon observation we may discover
that for certain elements, the conditioning arrows form a kind of closed network—that is, a
kind of interconnected network where everything in some sense eventually conditions
everything else. So there's a kind of operationally, organizationally closed system. It's not
closed in the sense of being not open to the environment, because of course there is a
conditioning relationship with the environment. But the idea is that there's a certain kind of
boot-strapping or interconnectedness that makes something, in a sense I want to specify,
generate its own identity, and in doing so co-specify an environment--an environment in the
sense of a meaningful place or region, if you like, for that particular pattern of
connectedness. And what I mean by autonomy, then, is this kind of self-emergent or selfgenerating system.
So more precisely, then, just to give you a more precise description, an autonomous
system is one that's made up of processes, and they take a particular form; they form, as I
said, a closed network. It is not materially or energetically closed—on the contrary, it has to
be materially and energetically open—but closed in the sense that the enabling conditions
for any process in this network or in this system always includes other processes in this
system. Because of that, there is the generation and maintenance or sustaining of an identity
in precarious conditions, in a shifting, changing environment, in an environment that's
subject to entropy and the laws of thermodynamics; and this generating and sustaining of an
identity also brings forth an environment in the biological sense of a niche--to use Jakob von
Uexküll’s terminology, a world of relevance for the animal--for thinking, perceiving and
enacting animals. I'll say more about animal life a little bit later on.
Okay, so, to illustrate this, let's take a kind of paradigmatic case, and this is the case
of the living cell; you can think of this as a kind of schematic rendering of basic processes
that make up a simple cell like a bacteria. So in this paradigm case of autopoiesis—
autopoiesis means “self-producing” and was the term introduced to characterize this
minimal biological form of autonomy. Imagine how inside a particular cell is a metabolic
reaction network of enzymes and auto-catalysis and so on, which produces a number of
different molecular components that determine or constitute a bounded system in the form
of a semi-permeable membrane that houses and generates that very network. So there's a
kind of closure in the sense that we have this interlocking of processes, where we have the
internal reaction network regenerating its own components, which includes regenerating the
boundary, which makes possible this very network because it provides a kind of protective
intra-cellular environment. And, of course, in all living cells that we know on Earth, this is all
subject to the very precise interactions of amino acids and nucleic acids. Okay, so this is
meant to illustrate the basic fundamental form of biological autonomy, and autopoiesis is a
concept that was introduced by Francisco Varela and his mentor Humberto Maturana.
So that's meant to give you some flavor of the notion of autonomy, and I think you
can already see how this notion relates to the notion of emergence, because in these systems,
precisely what we see is a certain kind of emergence—the emergence of a system that has a
certain identity and is related to the environment, in a way that brings forth an environment
that's relevant to it, in a precise way. So an emergent process is this co-definition of system
and environment. We have local interactions that give rise to a global pattern, so the cell is a
kind of global dynamic pattern produced by these local molecular interactions. But it's not
simply a bottom-up story. There is, as it were, the top-down side to it as well. Because the
global pattern constrains and regulates the local interactions. The local interactions happen
in the way that they do because they are in this context created by the global pattern. The
pattern of a hurricane provides a very dramatic example of this, or a tornado that is a huge
pattern of interacting air and water molecules, but the individual air and water molecules are
doing what they're doing because they're sucked into this global pattern.
So there's a kind of top-down bottom-up dialogue that's the basis for the identity of
this pattern that we call a tornado or that we call a hurricane, or that we call a living cell, or
that we call a human society, perhaps, or that we may call a biome or a region. These would
be questions as to whether we can take these kinds of concepts and use them in informative
ways for thinking about place and region and biome. And in that context it's worth noting
that emergence also generates nested hierarchies, where you can have emergent systems
arising out of emergent systems but conditioning them in turn. The multi-cellular organism
is an example of this, where the individual cells are subject to their own autopoiesis, their
own self-production. But the way that they do this is completely conditioned by how they
talk to each other in the context of the multi-cellular animal with an immune system and a
nervous system and an endocrine system, all creating their own kind of emerging patterns
that make up the kind of beings that we are.
Okay, so that's meant to illustrate what I mean by emergence. So what I would like
to do now is to relate these ideas to the notion of sense-making. In order to do that, let's go
back to autonomy again. Autonomy as a process. It's very important to think of it as a
process, not as something static. As a dynamic process, it defines a unity, for example the
cell, and what I would like to call a kind of norm. What's the norm? The norm is maintaining
and enhancing that unity in precarious conditions. So the cell does what it does in its
encounters with the environment, subject to the absolute norm of having to keep itself
going, and also subject to the norm of acting or operating so as to improve its viability or its
conditions of life and interaction with the world. This is so in adaptive systems in particular,
but even bacteria qualify as adaptive in this sense—interaction with the world is monitored
from the perspective of that unity and regulated by this norm. Because of this, the world
becomes a place of significance and valence for the system, and that's really what I mean by
environment as distinct from a world.
World, in the way that I'm using the term, you know we can put on the lenses of the
physicist and look out at the world and describe it physically; but when we do that, we won't
see, we won't be able to talk about the significance that certain physical events have for the
system, for the living cell, because of the way it's put together and the way its identity
emerges. So certain things in the world become significant because the cell will approach or
avoid them. They have a therefore kind of attraction-repulsion valence, and that makes the
immediate surroundings of the cell an environment and not simply a world. And sensemaking is behavior or conduct that is attuned to that environment, that is flexible and
adaptive and relates to the world, not as an indifferent world as described by physics, but as
a place of significance and valence, as an environment. And we see this even in the most socalled simple living systems like bacteria, motile bacteria that move along chemical gradients.
So if you have observed motile bacteria like E. coli in a gradient of sucrose, the
bacterium will tumble about until it hits upon an orientation in which the sucrose gradient
increases and it starts to swim up-gradient because it has receptors at the membrane surface
that can take up the sucrose and use it metabolically to move the flagella in a coordinated
motion that propels it along the gradient. So sucrose looked at from the point of view of
physics is just another chemical, but given this particular structure and organization of the
bacterium, sucrose is something significant and something that has a valence in the sense of
something that is attractive that the organism moves toward--whereas other things could
have a negative valence or repulsion that would repel movement away.
So I'd like to relate this to something that the phenomenological philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty said in his very first work, The Structure of Behavior. He wrote,
addressing the nature of life and its relationship to mind and to the physical, about how each
organism in the presence of a given milieu has its optimal conditions of activity and its
proper manner of realizing equilibrium. A living organism modifies its milieu according to
the internal norms of its activity. So an organism modifies the world into an environment
according to its structure and organization, and that creates a certain kind of normative
framework so that its world becomes a meaningful environment. So that in the most basic
biological form is meant to illustrate something of what is meant by sense-making—a kind
of conduct that's attuned to the environment or to place as an environment rather than just
an indifferent medium. So again, it's not as if you parachute into a world that's already there
and maybe you learn to get around because you have a map in your head. Rather, the
environment is what it is in part because of how you're put together and because of what
you can do in that setting.
Okay, so I'd like to relate this to embodiment by way of asking, well, if we think of
this in terms of development from single-celled organisms to Metazoan organisms, where
the cells that make up the multi-cellular body are interconnected thanks to special types of
cells that have these long projections, which are the neurons, what does the nervous system
add? So, first of all, let's just go back to our simpler case. What we've already seen is a
process of self-generation or self-constitution encoupling with an environment or
encoupling with the world such that an environment is also brought forth. When the system
has a certain kind of adaptivity—it's able to monitor and regulate its interactions, which we
see even in the simplest organisms like bacteria—there is a kind of agency, we could say.
There is, in the case of the motile bacteria again, a kind of self-organized movement. So in
the context of the nervous system, what the nervous system does is basically complexify that
dramatically. We have the constitution of a new kind of identity or a new kind of selfhood
that has to do with more complex anatomical structures or cellular structures--but also the
creation of dynamic patterns of activity among these cells, the neurons that are
interconnected among themselves and with the rest of the body.
So the nervous system makes movement possible in the animal form and perception
possible and the linkage of perception and action. It creates a kind of sensorimotor identity
or sensorimotor selfhood, we can say. So the autonomy, then—we're still in the domain of
autonomy, we haven't left it at all—but the autonomy is a kind of neuro-cognitive autonomy
in which we still have this closed kind of network or network that turns back upon itself like
a snake eating its tail as we saw on the autopoiesis case. But now it takes the form of there
being assemblies of these special types of cells, neurons, that interact with each other, and
they make possible the linkage of the sensory and the motor aspects of the organism, the
sensors and the receptors that enable the animal to move in its environment and to perceive
in its environment. But that linkage is constantly modulating the dynamic activity of the
nervous system that is generating these patterns that make possible the sensorimotor activity.
So, again, we have this type of network that gives the system a kind of autonomy. If
we then think of this in relationship to the environment, into what perceptual psychologist
James Jerome Gibson called the animal-environment system, well if we consider the
sensorimotor coupling with the environment that this makes possible, this effects the
environment in terms of what Gibson called affordances. So the environment is the place
where certain things in the environment afford certain things. They afford climbing up on,
or they afford picking up, or they afford moving around. So the environment is meaningful
in terms of what it affords the animal. And these affordances collectively as it were
constitute the niche, which affects the sensorimotor coupling and influences its development
if we think of this in terms of the life history of an organism, for example, like a baby
learning to walk. So autonomy should always be remembered in this broader context of
coupling forming the co-definition that makes up the animal-environment system.
Now, a really nice example of how this can give rise to different environments,
different niches, different meaningful domains of interaction with the world, is color vision.
This is something that I worked on a fair bit some years ago. Different kinds of animal
species have different types of color vision. Now, in our case, human color vision, a simple
way to think of it is that if you see renderings of the so-called color space where you have a
dimension of hue and saturation and lightness, so we can represent all of the colors that we
human beings can discriminate in a kind of three-dimensional space. In the case of the
honeybee, we can also do that—the color vision is three-dimensional in that sense—but it's
shifted towards an aspect of the environment that we can't see, namely the ultraviolet region,
so the whole three-dimensional space—the color-space, as it were—has a three-dimensional
structure like ours, but it's shifted down into the lower end of the spectrum so that
honeybees can see ultraviolet patterns on flowers, which we aren't able to discriminate. In
the case of the bird, the pigeon, and also fish like goldfish, the color vision system is actually
more complex than ours, in the sense that, if you wanted to geometrically represent the
colors and the ways that they can combine, you would have to move out of three dimensions
into four. So it's as if there are sort of novel primary colors that make up the color-space of
the goldfish and its aquatic environment. And in the case of the pigeon, it would probably be
five dimensions rather than four, with, again, novel colors and novel ways that those colors
combine to make different shades.
So this is a very beautiful illustration, I think, of the ways in which we all inhabit one
world—the honeybee, the pigeon, the fish, the goldfish, and us—there's a sense in which we
all inhabit the same world, but there's a sense in which we also inhabit different
environments that overlap in some ways and don't overlap in others. And evolution is really
about the drama of how these different organisms and environments emerge. And, in the
case of color vision, it's a particularly nice example because the ultraviolet patterns of
reflectance on the flowers and also on the bird feathers have evolved or are there because
there are animals to see them. And so there's a co-evolutionary story that you can tell about
the environment and its physical characteristics and the organisms that inhabit that
environment. So again, it's not as if the environment is there, ready-made, and you sort of
parachute into it, and you have a fancier retina, so you can see these patterns. Rather, there's
a co-evolutionary history on the environment side that makes the environment the way that
it is.
Okay, so, I would like to jump in our quick tour of some of these ideas to what
happens in the social domain. In mammalian life, particularly among the so-called “higher”
mammals—dolphins and chimpanzees and so on, but not restricted to them by any means—
the self-constitution that we see, thanks to the nervous system and the way that that is
adaptive and regulates behavior in relation to the environment, becomes complexified in the
sense that there is a social dimension of coupling where multiple organisms interact with
each other and change each other in their interactions. So we have the emergence of
complex forms of coordinated interaction. And this is really what I mean by social cognition.
So in this context we're no longer really dealing with “mere” sense-making as it were, but
particularly now in the case of, say, chimpanzees and dolphins and human beings, we're
dealing with a kind of participatory sense-making in social environments, where sensemaking changes itself thanks to the social dynamic.
A lot of different examples of this can be given from human social cognitive
neuroscience and social psychology and developmental psychology, from the sharing of
emotion or affective resonance. That's a familiar phenomenon in nurseries that where one
infant starts crying, other infants start crying, and you have a kind of, I don't like this term
actually, but emotional contagion is the term that's used. I prefer to think of it as a kind of
affective resonance. There's imitation and sensorimotor matching. And this is a really nice
example of that, where there's a coordination and matching of perception and action. You
can think of this when you're walking with someone, a tendency to coordinate your walking
with another person's. In neuroimaging, this has become a subject of great interest, because
it's been discovered that the patterns of neural activity involved in perceiving someone
perform an action and generating that action yourself are similar, involve similar neural
structures and similar patterns of activity. And similarly for the perception of an emotion in
someone else and the generation of that emotion in oneself, these areas of activation overlap
considerably. So there's a sort of common format for self and other in the human brain and
in the primate brain for that matter.
A lot of other different examples of this kind of participating sense-making that we
can point to are from etholog: For example, consolation behavior where a juvenile chimp
comforts or consoles an adult who's just been defeated in a fight. So the idea is that there is
an understanding, an implicit understanding of the predicament of the other that's
exemplified in this kind of consolation behavior. There's the phenomenon of shared
attention or joint attention. There is an example that I particularly like, a painting by
Rembrandt where you have an object of attention, an object that's the shared attentional
focus of two individuals and a monkey, and the phenomenon is one in which there is an
understanding of this object as what's being attended to by the group. So it's a kind of
collective participatory interactive phenomenon that exemplifies what I mean by
participatory sense-making. In developmental psychology, there is the phenomenon where
human infants already at birth have an immediate sense of others as like themselves. This
can be seen in facial imitation studies. And then with the emergence of attentional abilities
and particularly at around the sort of nine-month period, the infant can come to understand
herself as the object of attention of the caregiver.
So it's not merely that there's an understanding of the attention that is shared, say, on
a toy, when the mother's eyes move to the toy and the baby's eyes also move to the toy. But
the baby understands herself as what is being attended to by the mother. So there's a kind of
reiteration of the perspective of another back onto oneself. And this phenomenon is
something that was of particular interest to the phenomenological philosophers. They talked
about this under the heading of empathy. This goes back to the work of Edmund Husserl
and his student Edith Stein, who wrote what I think is actually still the best philosophical
work on empathy—it was published in 1916, called The Problem of Empathy, her doctoral
dissertation. Empathy in this context means the experience of the other or of another from
the second-person perspective: experiencing another as a living being or as a lived body
expressive of experience. And this includes, particularly as we just saw in the developmental
context, being able to experience the other's experience of oneself. And that plays an
essential role in making up one's own sense of self. One understands oneself as seen by
others. And one's sense of self is tied to that intersubjective participatory sense-making.
So I'm going to come to the end now. Let me remind you of where we began. We
began with the idea of mind as a relational pattern encompassing living beings and their
environments and therefore extending beyond the skull and the skin, and where we've
arrived in this very quick tour of some of these ideas is—and we knew this at the beginning,
of course—that the relevant environment isn't only physical and ecological, it's also social.
So mind is immanent not only in the ecosystem but in the social environment. Human
subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, and no mind is an island.