Evan Thompson argues that life and mind are more deeply continuous than cognitive science usually allows: the self-organizing processes that make a cell a living, sense-making system already contain the rudiments of what later becomes cognition and consciousness. Drawing together phenomenology, biology, and the enactive approach he helped found, he traces a single thread from a bacterium’s basic self-maintenance to selfhood and subjective experience.
For questions about machine minds, the book sets a high bar. If mind is rooted in the self-maintaining, precarious activity of being alive, a system built from inert components manipulating inputs and outputs may be missing the very ground consciousness grows from, however sophisticated its behavior looks.
