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  1. Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Timescales.Matthew Sims - 2023 - Biological Theory 1 (2):114-133.
    Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...)
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  • Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Timescales.Matthew Sims - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (2):114-133.
    Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...)
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  • A continuum of intentionality: linking the biogenic and anthropogenic approaches to cognition.Matthew Sims - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-31.
    Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify (...)
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  • Unlimited plasticity of embodied, cognitive subjects: a new playground for the UAL framework.Michael Levin - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-5.
    Birch, Ginsburg, and Jablonka lay out a very convincing case for an important transition marker: unlimited associative learning. Especially welcome are the empirical predictions. I focus here not on the question of how to infer phenomenal consciousness from this behavioral metric, but on possible novel applications of this useful and fundamental framework. Specifically, I highlight two aspects of biology that are often not considered in philosophy of mind approaches that focus on natural species and evolutionary time scales. These are the (...)
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  • Revisiting Burr and Northrop’s “The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life”.Michael Levin - 2020 - Biological Theory 15 (2):83-90.
    Harold Saxton Burr was a biologist working throughout the 1930s–1950s on an important set of problems related to biological organization and the origin of complex living forms. He was a profound thinker, suggesting a complementary focus on field concepts in addition to the emphasis on particle models and integrating concepts from physics and philosophy in his work. He developed innovations in electrophysiological technique and used them to perform a wide experimental survey of bioelectricity in normal and pathological growth. Here, I (...)
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  • Scale‐Free Biology: Integrating Evolutionary and Developmental Thinking.Chris Fields & Michael Levin - 2020 - Bioessays 42 (8):1900228.
    When the history of life on earth is viewed as a history of cell division, all of life becomes a single cell lineage. The growth and differentiation of this lineage in reciprocal interaction with its environment can be viewed as a developmental process; hence the evolution of life on earth can also be seen as the development of life on earth. Here, in reviewing this field, some potentially fruitful research directions suggested by this change in perspective are highlighted. Variation and (...)
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  • How Do Living Systems Create Meaning?Chris Fields & Michael Levin - 2020 - Philosophies 5 (4):36.
    Meaning has traditionally been regarded as a problem for philosophers and psychologists. Advances in cognitive science since the early 1960s, however, broadened discussions of meaning, or more technically, the semantics of perceptions, representations, and/or actions, into biology and computer science. Here, we review the notion of “meaning” as it applies to living systems, and argue that the question of how living systems create meaning unifies the biological and cognitive sciences across both organizational and temporal scales.
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  • On the Genesis, Continuum, and the Lowest Bound of Selves.Reshma Joy - 2024 - JOLMA - The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind, and the Arts 4 (2):243-270.
    In the history of philosophy, the concept of self has been perennially elusive. The philosophical quest to understand the self is rife with phenomenological and metaphysical analyses, often overlooking other kinds of selves present in the biological realm. To systematically explore this question of non-human selves, I categorize the literature on philosophical and biological notions of self into the biogenic, the zoogenic, and the anthropogenic approaches to self. This article attempts to chart the genesis, the continuum, and the lowest bound (...)
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