Organism

‘Whatever else organisms may be, what cannot be denied at an ontological level is that they are stable metabolic flows of energy and matter.’ … John Scott Haldane saw organisms as highly dynamic eddies of matter, which nonetheless had the power to remain stable over time – not things, but stabilised processes

McGilchrist argues that organisms must be understood ontologically as dynamic, stabilised processes — metabolic flows — rather than static structures, directly contesting the mechanical and substance-based model.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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‘Whatever else organisms may be, what cannot be denied at an ontological level is that they are stable metabolic flows of energy and matter.’ … ‘they are constantly taking up and giving off material of many sorts, and their “structure” is nothing but the appearance taken by this flow of material through them.’

The passage establishes the organism as an ontological flow whose apparent structure is a secondary abstraction imposed upon continuous material exchange.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Metabolism is the constant regeneration of an island of form amidst a sea of matter and energy. Metabolism establishes a self with an internal identity marked off from the outside world and whose being is its own doing.

Thompson, following Jonas, identifies metabolism as the constitutive process by which the organism achieves immanent teleology, selfhood, and normative identity — making purposiveness intrinsic to life itself.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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The relationship between organism and environment is dialectical in this sense. The organism cannot exist without the environment, it acquires its properties from its relation to the environment, and both it and the environment evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration.

Thompson articulates a dialectical model of organism-environment co-constitution, in which the organism’s very properties are generated through mutual, evolving interdependence with its surroundings.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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The idea that mind derives from the entire organism as an ensemble may sound counterintuitive at first… What I am suggesting is that the mind arises from activity in neural circuits, to be sure, but many of those circuits were shaped in evolution by functional requisites of the organism

Damasio argues that mind cannot be reduced to brain activity alone but depends on neural circuits shaped by the organism as a whole, requiring continuous representation of the body’s state.

Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis

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‘The astonishing plasticity of organisms contrasts with the brittleness of machines’, writes Nicholson, which tend to stop working when their parts break or are damaged.

McGilchrist deploys Nicholson’s contrast between organismal plasticity and mechanical brittleness to argue that the machine metaphor is fundamentally inadequate for describing living beings.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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‘The astonishing plasticity of organisms contrasts with the brittleness of machines’, writes Nicholson, which tend to stop working when their parts break or are damaged.

The organism’s capacity for self-repair and adaptive response to damage distinguishes it categorically from any machine, rendering mechanistic biology self-confuting.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Thus the form of the excitant is created by the organism itself. When my hand follows each effort of a struggling animal while holding an instrument for capturing it, it is clear that each of my movements responds to an external stimulation; but it is also clear that these stimulations could not be received without the movements

Thompson, via Merleau-Ponty, demonstrates that the organism actively co-constitutes the stimuli it receives, dissolving the simple stimulus-response model in favor of a circular, self-organizing causality.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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An organism, however, is not simply a purpose but a natural purpose. In this case, not only are the parts there for the sake of each other, but they also produce each other, repair each other, and generally exist by means of one another.

Drawing on Kant, Thompson distinguishes the organism from mere artifacts by its capacity for reciprocal self-production, establishing that teleology is intrinsic rather than externally imposed.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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In organisms the whole is also necessary for the functioning of the parts: the part is apparently able to access information about the whole, and act on it in service of the whole.

McGilchrist argues that organismal parts function as if in possession of holistic information, exemplifying a top-down causality that mechanical models cannot accommodate.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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As Whitehead pointed out, ‘it is notable that no biological science has been able to express itself apart from phraseology which is meaningless unless it refers to ideals proper to the organism in question.’

McGilchrist uses Whitehead to establish that biological language is irreducibly teleological and value-laden, pointing to features of organisms — coordination, wholeness, meaning — that resist mechanistic reduction.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Living organisms integrate their cellular communities by mingling their bodies and sharing their genes. In this way they can acquire learnt experiences from other organisms. The boundaries of species are, in reality, blurred.

McGilchrist argues that organisms are not discrete, bounded entities but permeable communities whose integration through gene-sharing and shared experience undermines rigid species boundaries.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Living organisms integrate their cellular communities by mingling their bodies and sharing their genes. In this way they can acquire learnt experiences from other organisms. The boundaries of species are, in reality, blurred.

The organism’s identity is shown to be relationally constituted and inherently open, challenging the discrete-individual model central to both genetics and evolutionary theory.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Consciousness is the rite of passage which allows an organism armed with the ability to regulate its metabolism, with innate reflexes, and with the form of learning known as conditioning, to become a minded organism, the kind of organism in which responses are shaped by a mental concern over the organism’s own life.

Damasio defines consciousness functionally as the transformation of a metabolically self-regulating organism into a minded one, in which the organism’s own life becomes the explicit object of concern.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object

Damasio locates the origin of core consciousness in the organism’s neural self-narration of its own state changes as it interacts with objects, making the organism the indispensable axis of subjective knowing.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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The primacy of the body as a theme applies to evolution: from simple to complex, for millions of years, brains have been first about the organism that owns them.

Damasio asserts the evolutionary primacy of the organism over the brain, establishing that neural function is fundamentally in service of bodily self-regulation rather than abstract cognition.

Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting

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it is a good question whether the distinction between organism and environment can ever be other than approximate.

McGilchrist questions the sharpness of the organism-environment boundary, drawing on symbiosis, affordances, and reciprocal enzymatic action to argue for their fundamental interpenetration.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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it is a good question whether the distinction between organism and environment can ever be other than approximate.

The passage challenges the discreteness of the organism as a bounded biological unit, situating it within webs of symbiotic and environmental reciprocity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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An organism dynamically produces and maintains its own organization as an invariant through change, and thereby also brings forth its own domain of interaction.

Thompson defines the organism through autopoietic self-production: it actively generates and maintains its own organization, simultaneously constituting the domain in which it operates.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Nervous systems began their existence as assistants to the body, as coordinators of the life process in bodies complex and diversified enough that the functional articulation of tissues, organs, and systems as well as their relation to the environment required a dedicated system to accomplish the coordination.

Damasio reframes nervous systems as evolutionarily secondary to the organism’s body, existing to coordinate homeostatic regulation rather than to generate autonomous mental life.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting

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The entire construction of knowledge, from simple to complex, from nonverbal imagetic to verbal literary, depends on the ability to map what happens over time, inside our organism, around our organism, to and with our organism, one thing followed by another thing, causing another thing, endlessly.

Damasio grounds all knowledge-construction in the organism’s temporal self-mapping, making the living body the narrative substrate of cognition from its most primitive to its most complex forms.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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An organism must be capable of a vast repertoire of available responses, and some of them, unbelievably enough, are invented by organisms ‘on the hoof’

McGilchrist highlights the organism’s generative novelty — its capacity to invent responses — as evidence that it operates at the edge of chaos, not as a fixed mechanical system.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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while an organism assimilates by diversifying, the crystal grows through the iteration of an addition of indefinitely ordered layers

Simondon distinguishes the organism from physical individuation by its mode of assimilation through diversification, linking vital individuation to information-reception across a scale of magnitude.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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psychical individuation is a dilation, a precocious expansion of vital individuation… if the living organism is called individual, the psychical leads to an order of trans individual reality

Simondon argues that the organism’s vital individuation is expanded and surpassed by psychical individuation, which opens onto a transindividual dimension exceeding the organism’s biological boundaries.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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sensing environmental conditions, holding know-how in dispositions, and acting on the basis of those dispositions were already present in single-cell creatures before they were part of any multicellular organisms, let alone multicellular organisms with brains.

Damasio traces the organism’s core capacities — sensing, dispositional know-how, adaptive action — to pre-neural life, establishing continuity between single-celled organisms and minded beings.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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genes being the paradigm replicators and organisms the paradigm interactors… vehicles constructed by and for the replicators, genes compete with each other by constructing vehicles (organisms but perhaps also colonies and populations) that mediate their interaction with the environment

Thompson presents the genocentric ‘vehicle’ model of organisms — as carriers for replicating genes — in order to critically interrogate its adequacy against more holistic, organism-centered evolutionary accounts.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Hans Driesch separated the two cells produced by the first division of a fertilised sea urchin egg and observed that each of these, which would normally have produced half of an organism, actually produced a c[omplete organism]

The Driesch sea-urchin experiment is cited as classical evidence of holistic self-organizing potential in organisms, where whole-form is not merely the sum of pre-specified parts.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Hans Driesch separated the two cells produced by the first division of a fertilised sea urchin egg and observed that each of these, which would normally have produced half of an organism, actually produced a c[omplete organism]

Driesch’s embryological finding serves to illustrate the organism’s irreducible wholeness and the inadequacy of any purely compositional, bottom-up account of biological form.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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The master organism maps describe a schema of the entire body with its major components — head, trunk, and limb — in repose. The movements of the body are mapped against that master map.

Damasio describes neurological ‘master organism maps’ as the brain’s continuous schematic representation of the whole body, forming the anatomical substrate for the protoself.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010aside

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Nervous systems and the organisms they served worked in full cooperation… there began the ability to map the objects and events being sensed.

Damasio traces the co-evolution of nervous system and organism, showing that representational mapping emerged as an extension of the cooperative relationship between neural systems and the bodies they serve.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018aside

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the object becomes salient as part of the relationship it holds with the knower organism

Damasio argues that objects acquire salience not intrinsically but through their relational status with respect to the knowing organism, making the organism the perspectival center of all conscious knowledge.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999aside

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conscious awareness varies in quality and quantity in relationship to the complexity of each organism’s nervous system, but not in the essential phenomenon itself.

Levine situates conscious awareness as a scalar property distributed across organisms of varying neural complexity, treating it as continuous rather than uniquely human.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010aside

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