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Origins of Mind pp 21–52Cite as

Organic Codes and the Natural History of Mind

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Part of the book series: Biosemiotics ((BSEM,volume 8))

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to show that organic codes played a key role in the origin and the evolution of mind as they had in all other great events of macroevolution. The presence of molecular adaptors has shown that the genetic code was only the first of a long series of codes in the history of life, and it is possible therefore that the origin of mind was associated with the appearance of new organic codes. This would cast a new light on mind and would give us a new theoretical framework for studying it. The scientific models that have been proposed so far on the nature of mind can be divided into three major groups that here are referred to as the computational theory, the connectionist theory and the emergence theory. The new approach is based on the idea that a neural code contributed to the origin of mind somehow like the genetic code contributed to the origin of life. This is the code model of mind, the idea that mental objects are assembled from brain components according to coding rules, which means that they are no longer brain objects but brain artefacts. The model implies that feelings and perceptions are not side effects of neural networks (as in connectionism), that they do not come into existence spontaneously by emergence and that they are not the result of computations, but of real manufacturing processes. In the framework of the code model, in short, feelings and perceptions are manufactured artefacts, whereas according to the other theories, they are spontaneous products of brain processes. This is relevant to the mind-body problem because if the mind were made of spontaneous products, it could not have rules of its own. Artefacts, on the other hand, can have such autonomous properties for two different reasons. One is that the rules of a code are conventions, and these are not dictated by physical necessity. The second is that a world of artefacts can have epigenetic properties that add unexpected features to the coding rules. The autonomy of the mind, in short, is something that spontaneous brain products cannot achieve whereas brain artefacts can.

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  1. Dipartimento di Morfologia ed Embriologia, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Via Fossato di Mortara 64a, 44121, Ferrara, Italy

    Marcello Barbieri

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    Liz Swan

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Barbieri, M. (2013). Organic Codes and the Natural History of Mind. In: Swan, L. (eds) Origins of Mind. Biosemiotics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5419-5_2

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