Evan Thompson (University of British Columbia)
In 1892 Ernst Haeckel coined the term “biopsychism” to refer to the position that feeling is “a vital activity of all organisms.” He distinguished biopsychism from panpsychism, the position that “all matter is ensouled,” and from zoopsychism, the position that “real soullife,” by which he meant the separation of feeling and will, is the attribute only of higher animals and reaches its fullest development in the human being. In contemporary terms, biopsychism can be described as the thesis that all and only living systems are sentient. Clearly, this thesis depends on what “living” means.
One prominent family of theories addresses this question by trying to specify the organization that is necessary and minimally sufficient for a system to be living. Such theories include Tibor Gánti’s chemoton theory, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, Robert Rosen’s metabolism-repair (M,R) systems, Stuart Kauffman’s theory of autocatalytic sets, and Karl Friston’s free-energy principle. Central to these theories is an emphasis on metabolic self-production and adaptive self-regulation as the protypical characteristics of life. Combining this approach with biopsychism results in the thesis that all and only metabolically self-producing and adaptively self-regulating systems are sentient. A few biologists (notably, the late Lynn Margulis) have argued for this form of biopsychism. The philosopher Hans Jonas argued for it in The Phenomenon of Life (1966). I come close to advocating it in my book, Mind in Life (2007).
In this paper, I will formulate what I take to be the strongest current argument in favour of biopsychism and critically assess it. Central to this argument is both the insistence on not separating sentience, individuality, and agency (contrary to panpsychism), and the proposition that individuality and agency, which are instantiated already by minimal life, entail sentience. If these claims are correct, animal (metazoan) sentience is only one biological version of sentience. If these claims are incorrect, they may nonetheless be instructive in helping to narrow down the minimal requirements for sentience.
