Organisms construct themselves within the constraints. Organisms exist within the constraints, the enabling and the constraining framework provided by evolution, provided by natural selection, provided above all always by context, by environment, by the framework within which they are both choosing, developing, and expressing themselves.
The living world consists of processes, not of things. And living systems are, of necessity, constantly both being and becoming.
Richard Dawkins used once the metaphor of trying to reconstruct an aeroplane in mid-flight. You can’t do it. The extraordinary feature of living organisms is that they can actually both be and become. They’re constantly reconstructing themselves.
When you came into the room earlier on, I recognized you, you recognized me immediately. And yet, you and I know—and every biologist knows—every molecule in our body has turned over many hundreds of millions of times in the period since we last met. So the issue that we have to confront is: what provides the unity of me, of Evelyn, and of everyone else in this room? It is not a unity given by the existence of static molecules. It is unity given by process.
Unity and coherence are provided by process. They’re not a rarefied thing.
The meaning is embedded in our experience, and is embedded in some way in the ways in which we transform information in particular contexts. And it’s created, therefore, by living people in interaction with their own history and culture. And that, essentially, is why minds cannot be simply in brains. They must be embedded within the context of the brain and the mind.
Mind is a verb. It’s not a noun, it’s an action statement. It’s not a thing. Minding is what brains and bodies do. And minding is a hybrid. It’s not a thing, it’s a relationship between an individual and the physical, social, cultural, and historical world in which they are embedded.
We are free to make our own futures, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.
Stasis in living systems is death.
Organism and environment interpenetrate. That is: the boundaries between an individual—even an amoeba, a single cell—and its environment are always fluid and are always open.
I’m committed to the view that we live in a unitary material universe: there ain’t anything else operating there. But we live in a world of epistemological diversity. And one of my own concerns about the reductive spirit within which a lot of biology is operating at the moment, is to insist on the elimination of those other ways of knowing.
