第一章_生命与能动性
Chapter 1 Life and Agency: Re-posing the Question of Consciousness
In the history of philosophy, the question of consciousness has been repeatedly packaged as:
- Mind-body dualism (Descartes: mind and matter are two distinct substances)
- Information-theoretic consciousness (IIT, Global Workspace Theory: consciousness is the product of information integration)
- The problem of subjective experience (the question of "what it is like")
These approaches each have their insights, but they share a fundamental blind spot: they all discuss consciousness in detachment from life.
Dualism treats the mind as an independent entity; information theory equates consciousness with an abstract flow of information; phenomenology is obsessed with describing experience itself, yet fails to inquire into the causal origins of that experience.
Yet, a most basic fact has been ignored:
Consciousness has never existed in detachment from life.
Minerals have no consciousness, rocks have no consciousness, and though crystals can persist for a long time, they do not possess agency.
Consciousness is consciousness precisely because it belongs to systems that metabolize, maintain their own structures, and survive and reproduce within an environment.
Therefore, the core thesis of this book is:
The essence of consciousness is the structural expression of the agency of life.
"Agency" here is not an empty philosophical term; it has strict biological constraints:
- It depends on concrete material structures
- It arises from metabolic maintenance and dissipative structures (see: Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures)
- It is preserved and complexified through selection pressures
- It does not exist prior to structure
- There is no such thing as "lifeless consciousness"
Consciousness is not a mist floating in the universe, but a part of the way living structures operate.