Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Information Flow The brain is in the body, and the body is in the world. No living being can live in a vacuum. Life in a vacuum is an oxymoron. Life needs an environment. Life is transformation, and, without an environment, physical laws forbid transformation. Transformation requires energy from an external source. Life is a continuously changing equilibrium between an organism and its environment. Even the most remote organism is connected to the rest of the biosphere via the air, which is the way it is mainly because of the metabolism of living beings (the atmosphere contains far more methane and other gases than chemical reactions alone would create). From a biological perspective, the mind is one of the many organs that help an organism survive in the real world. Ultimately, from a biological perspective, the mind belongs to a body. The mind conceives a world that is the outcome of the body’s experience.  The German biologist Jakob von Uexküll  defined the “umwelt” of a species as the set of all possible stimuli from the environment that the species can perceive plus all possible actions that the species can perform in the environment. A species’ reality is confined in its umwelt. Each species grasps reality differently because it lives inside a different umwelt.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters