Piero Scaruffi

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

The Universe is a Message To Life The picture painted by these researchers is almost opposite to the one painted by the logicians who worked on formalizing Logic: where the logician’s program is based on the assumption that reason is an abstract manipulation of symbols, the “biological” program is based on the assumption that reason is bodily experience grounded in the environment. The two views could not be farther apart. Implicit in the logician’s project were the assumptions that meaning is based on truth and reference, that the mind is independent of the body, that reasoning is independent of the mind (logic exists in a world of its own, regardless of whether somebody uses it or not), and all minds use the same reasoning system. The biological approach puts the mind back firmly in the body, the body in the environment and meaning in the relationship between them. The reasoning system we use depends on our collective experience as a species and on our individual experience as bodies. We are left to face the vast influence that the environment has on the development and evolution of the mental faculties of an organism, no less so than of its body. The development of an organism, an ecosystem, or any other living entity, is due to interaction with the environment. In a different world, the same genomes would generate different beings.  The universe is a message to life and to mind.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters