NON-MECHANICAL ONTOLOGY IN THE EXPLANATION OF ORGANISM AND EVOLUTION

摘要

The definition of life and organism must account for not only its physical properties andrnprocesses but also for what is experienced by living organisms. We therefore combine therntraditional perspective of an outside observer of life with that of a participant. We argue,rnfrom the perspective of autevolution ("evolution of the self, and the role of that self inrnevolution"), that organisms are, aside from their physical form, experiential entitiesrnentailing function and meaning; and that experience is non-reducibly causal in bothrnecology and evolution. The special form of autevolution can be described as an expansionrnof the Baldwin effect and modeled in terms of the relational biology of Robert Rosen.rnThis modifies the otherwise passive model for evolution, suggesting instead, meaningfulrn(semantically entailed) pathways. To pursue a general theory, we suggest that experiencernitself is a fundamental aspect of complimentarity in nature, which results in a quantumrnsuperposition of multiple opportunities. We argue that the problem of formulatingrnexperiential reality (or psyche/consciousness) lies beyond mechanistic science and isrnindistinguishable from that of formulating quantum “reality.” The quantum mind theoryrnof Hameroff and Penrose may provide a theoretical and epistemological basis forrnaccepting psychological causation as a general postulate. In living organisms thisrnlogically results in a complimentarity (as in quantum physics) between form and functionrn(Rosen 1996). Both are subject to evolution, with genes encoding form and thernenvironment serving as the encoding medium for function. The general theory suggests arndefinition of life as the phenomenon of fundamental causality and organism as the selfevolvedrnmanifestation of that phenomenon over time.