Cognition: from the cosmos down to molecules – and back

Abstract

The evolution of life, cognition and eventually human culture is not improbable but an inevitable result of the increasing entropy of the universe.

The path of European philosophical thought, a cradle of modern science, would have been different had its prominent protagonists Plato and Aristotle not dismissed as irrational the assumption of the “ancient Darwin” Empedocles that life is a process of fortuitous variations and selection from variants. Instead, the founding upon which Western civilisation was erected, was the creed of inherent rationality and the purposefulness of Nature. Its basic tenet was that the Logos (reason) of human mind can understand the world because it is isomorphic to the Logos of Nature—and, later, according to Christian interpretation, because they both had been created by God.

The idea of variations and selection reappeared in the 19^th century in the writing of Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. Their contemporary naturalist Richard Owen was ready to admit that the work of Darwin, presented in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859, would be comparable to Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun—if only Darwin were able to account for the origin of the variations. But he could not: their physical nature, the second law of thermodynamics (SLT) and the concept of entropy were publicised 6 years later in 1865 by the physicist Rudolf Clausius. Still worse, the second law itself was subject to an amazing misinterpretation for almost a century, focusing on the destructive implications of ever‐increasing entropy (Kováč, 2015). As late as in 1970, the prominent biologist Jacques Monod referred to that law when he argued that “for modern theory evolution is not a property of living beings, since it stems from the very imperfections of the conservative mechanism which indeed constitutes their unique privilege”.

Evolution is not a consequence of imperfect stabilising mechanisms to prevent inevitable decay, but it is a process of generating increasingly complex structures and self‐organisation.

The driving force of entropy

Monod's contemporary, chemist Ilya Prigogine was one of the first who stressed that the sword of the second law is double‐edged: entropy functions both as Destructor and Constructor. Evolution is not a consequence of imperfect stabilising mechanisms to prevent inevitable decay, but it is a process of generating increasingly complex structures and self‐organisation. Other scientists during the second half of the 20^th century extended this idea and came up with the principle of maximum entropy production (MEPP). The SLT rules a process called “energy dissipation”: the quantity of energy in the universe remains constant but its quality—its capacity to perform work—diminishes over time. According to the MEPP, energy dissipation tends to increase at the fasted possible rate to end in a state called “thermodynamic equilibrium”. The universe is like a wind‐up watch the spring of which unwinds as quickly as the constraints allow it.

The most efficient way to dissipate energy is by “structuring work”: as time is running out, the results of energy dissipation are novel and ever more complex structures. If the arrow of time of the universe is directed towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the arrow of life is inverted: living structures are moving further away from thermodynamic equilibrium. The appearance of Life on Earth was not an extremely improbable event, as Monod had surmised, but inevitable in the chain of accelerating energy dissipation. According to biophysicist Arto Annila (2020), living entities compete with each other and the ones that dissipate energy faster than the others will be selected.

The appearance of Life on Earth was not an extremely improbable event, as Monod had surmised, but inevitable in the chain of accelerating energy dissipation.

In contrast to inanimate formations, which disappear once their source of energy is exhausted, living organisms are ontotelic systems: they struggle for survival. To maintain their self‐identity, or onticity, they continuously perform “ontic work” on their environment. In addition, they also perform “epistemic (cognitive) work”: they recognise sources of energy and nutrients and search for new ones, and they record threats to survival to evade them. This may have inspired the pioneers in research on the biology of cognition, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in the 1970s to the statement that life is cognition. It implies that evolution of life is also the evolution of cognition. As life evolved to speed up dissipation of energy, the growth of cognition comes at the expense of usable energy. Distinction from the environment and discrimination between its constituents equals departure from the thermodynamic equilibrium. As Ilya Prigogine aptly noted, matter far from equilibrium is creative. Evolution‐driven increase in knowledge, implicated by the second law of thermodynamics, may thus be called the epistemic principle.

As life evolved to speed up dissipation of energy, the growth of cognition comes at the expense of usable energy.

The evolution of cognition

Darwinism obviously raised a question about the position of humans and human cognition within the evolution of life. During the first half of the 20^th century, Sigmund Freud used Darwinian biology as a foundation of his theory of psychoanalysis, assuming that human behaviour is the result of a few basic animal drives produced and shaped by natural selection. Freud had little or no effect on another approach to understanding humans and mind, behaviourism, despite the fact that its main protagonist, psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner, was also inspired by Darwin. Skinner noticed an analogy between Darwinian evolution and operant conditioning of behaviour. For him, behaviour is the only objective outcome of selection, internal processes are not publicly observable, and if we want to understand cognition, we need to study behaviour. He dismissed idle speculation about mind and soul that go back to 17^th century's Descartes dualism of matter and mind.

As a reaction to the orthodoxy of Skinner's behaviourism, the “cognitive revolution” in the middle of the 20^th century gave birth to cognitive science or, as one of its protagonist George Miller preferred to call it in the plural, cognitive sciences. At that time, cybernetics and information theory became available and it appeared appropriate to conceive cognition as “information processing” by the brain; in the words of Miller, as its “structural and functional realization”. In other words, the mind is software working on the hardware of the brain.

This “mind's new science” as Howard Gardner called it, may be seen as a return to the ancient concept of rationality, but in its modern form of computation, dispensing with Darwin's contribution. On the other hand, two different approaches to cognition, evolutionary epistemology and cognitive biology, are consistently built upon Darwinian insight (for review, see Lyon et al, 2021 and Sarto‐Jackson, 2021).

Hierarchies of life

Accelerating energy dissipation by creating structures results in the generation of ever more complex living beings. Life is “written” in the language of chemistry and chemistry is the science of emergence. Darwin could not know it, as biochemistry did not exist at his time. The extant life consists of structures ranged in nested hierarchies from cells through organisms, groups, societies and up to the cosmos. The cell is the basic ontotelic system, the basic Darwinian subject. Monod proposed that cognition can take place even at the lowest level of the hierarchy, at the level of protein molecules. Proteins are unique chemicals: their shape can be modified by their environment and they can reciprocally change their environment. Indeed, a protein molecule can be considered as the basal cognitive tool of a cell. It binds specific ligand(s) and in this way discriminates between myriad of entities in its environment.

The analysis on this elementary level allows a general understanding of the nature of cognition with its implications for all higher levels of hierarchy. Cognition of a protein consists of sensing a ligand as part of the environment, of valuing the ligand with respect to its importance for the cell as a subject, and of acting on the environment—thus, cognition is a triad of functions. Why is the protein able to do this? Because this molecule carries the embodied knowledge gained in the evolutionary past of the subject in a process called epistemogenesis. This triune aspect of cognition has often been implied by theories of sensory‐motor coupling that enables an organism to receive sensory data and use them in appropriate motor actions.

It is important to distinguish between the notions of cognition and epistemogenesis. Cognition is the “daily business” of cells and organisms. Epistemogenesis is a lengthy process of gaining new knowledge by variation and selection, protracted over many generations of cells and individuals. The species as a whole accumulates new knowledge and carries it in its cellular memory as a blueprint of the species‐specific apparatus for cognition. Individual organisms are just more or less accurate copies of this knowledge and function as “fumbling fingers” of the overall species. Different species compete for effective dissipation of energy; the losers end up in a deadlock and new and more complex living forms move ahead in an epistemic maze.

Human consciousness

On Earth, the human species is the one that has advanced the most in the maze of evolution. Yet, its epistemic success is ambiguous, due to the peculiarity of its evolutionary past. Homo sapiens is one of about seven million animal species belonging to the kingdom Animalia, which may have evolved around 800 million years ago. Animals act on their environments by actively moving in space and time. To do this, they are equipped with a brain. An important change during animal evolution was the emergence of consciousness—we still do not know when it may have happened—with sensory and emotional qualia.

The genus Homo appeared at the scene about 2.3–2.4 million years ago and one of its species, H. sapiens probably just 0.5 million years ago. As life on Earth may have arisen about 4.2 billion years ago, the short existence of the genus Homo represents but a single “blink of an eye” in terms of evolutionary timescales. It was, however, a period of important innovations. Minor anatomical changes between humans and their closest relatives, the great apes, made humans bipedal mammals. Bipedalism freed the forelimbs from walking and opened the way for making and using tools, which in turn led to enlargement and fine‐tuning of the brain. The forelimbs evolved into hands, which Darwin considered as essential organs for human domination of the world. Soon, the tools operated by the human hand became “exo‐somatic organs”, as the mathematician Alfred Lotka called them, that enabled humans to modify their environment and exploit it.

As the evolution of humans was accelerated by the evolution of artefacts, the triune character of cognition, sensing and acting, changed. Acting on the environment—mechanical work, moving and rearranging objects—has continuously been internalised, reduced to pretended actions, transformed into internal virtual manipulation of objects. The final achievement of this ever‐growing abstraction may be abstract motor behaviour, which the ethologist Konrad Lorenz described as “das Hantieren im Vorstellungsraum” (handling in the imagination space), and the basis of thinking.

Acting on the environment—mechanical work, moving and rearranging objects—has continuously been internalised, reduced to pretended actions, and transformed into internal virtual manipulation of objects.

The most dramatic event in the evolution of life—if not the cosmos—was the moment when humans became aware of their own existence. Human self‐awareness transforms a considerable part of emotions into feelings: an individual can experience an emotion as his/her own feeling. What may have felt our first self‐aware ancestors, amazed by the strangeness of the world? Fear, anxiety, awe. To mitigate these feelings and to comprehend the world, humans became mythophilic animals. They knew little, but thanks to myths they “knew” everything. Self‐awareness of negative emotions may have been complemented by the self‐awareness of positive emotions. The latter evolved into attractors of behaviour: humans became hedonophils, craving for pleasure. Appropriate artefacts amplified this lure.

Artefacts and symbols

Artefacts became the third category of memory carriers in addition to the genome and the brain. Gradually, the world of artefacts became enriched with qualitatively novel objects: symbolic artefacts. Humans, biologically selected to live in small non‐anonymous groups of cooperating individuals, have been forced to live in ever larger groups. Specific kinds of artefacts, social institutions, such as religion, morals, customs, political organisations, schools, art and science, emerged and with them norms, rules, laws, social rewards and punishments. Humans, animals artefaciens, have turned into symbolising animals.

Artefacts became the third category of memory carriers in addition to the genome and the brain.

The precondition for the emergence of the symbolic world was the capacity to speak. Researchers have long debated on the origin of language in humans. Their estimates of the date range from as late as fifty thousand years ago to as early as the very beginning of the genus Homo. We may tentatively link the genesis of language with the emergence of self‐awareness and the outset of human mythophilia. It allows to identify the critical date when artefacts that were material in their substance may have become symbolic in their function. Religion, with its creed in preserving the human soul after physical death of the body and all behaviours associated with it, may be considered as a first manifestation of symbolisation. Early ritual burials—which could be interpreted as the earliest evidence of religion—have been dated to hundred thousand years ago. Art, in particular cave painting, may have appeared as part of religious rituals. This date may thus mark the simultaneous origins of human self‐awareness, the capacity to speak and to communicate and the birth of human culture.

Human nature after the pleistocene

In the early 1930s, psychologist Lev Vygotsky accorded “symbolic activity a specific organising function that penetrates the process of tool use and produces fundamentally new forms of behaviour”. He was aware that humans carry a primate brain shared with their non‐human relatives. How, then, could this primordial brain have “absorbed” and accommodated all the changes and novelties brought forth by cultural evolution? According to neurobiologist Stanislas Dehaene such inventions are too recent for natural selection to have evolved specific brain mechanisms to handle them. He suggested that in order to accommodate, the novelties co‐opt or “recycle” evolutionary older circuits with a related function and thus enrich, without necessarily replacing, their domain of use.

98% of the “age of human artefaction” has taken place during the so‐called Palaeolithic Era, the Stone Age. It corresponds roughly to the geological epoch Pleistocene that lasted from 2.6 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago. According to evolutionary psychology, human brains were moulded essentially during the Pleistocene to solve the specific problems that our ancestors faced as hunters and gatherers. It was this specific “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness” (EEA) in which the “universal human nature” was established.

Humans can do too much, but their capacity to understand and control events is restricted by their biological nature.

The two post‐Pleistocene geological epochs, Holocene (11,700 years ago‐1950?) and Anthropocene (perhaps starting in 1950) have been too short to perceptibly change human biological nature. Yet, the environment in which we live now differs substantially from the original EEA. As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, “our modern substantially skulls house a Stone Age mind”. This incommensurability of human nature and modern civilisation is the reason why the human epistemic progress is ambiguous. Humans can do too much, but their capacity to understand and control events is restricted by their biological nature. The human species may end in a deadlock. As economist Nicholas Georgescu‐Roegen put it in 1975: “Perhaps, the destiny of man is to have a short, but fiery, exciting and extravagant life rather than a long, uneventful and vegetative existence. Let other species—the amoebas, for example—which have no spiritual ambitions inherit an earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine”.

Notwithstanding whether humans will be around for longer or not, the second law of thermodynamics and the epistemic principle will continue to hold. The possible demise of humanity on Earth would be just a trivial episode in the grand story of the evolution of cognition in the cosmos.

Supporting information

Review Process File

EMBO reports (2023) 24: e57263