Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains—Part Two

What makes a system—evolved, engineered, or hybrid—describable by teleological and mentalistic terms such as intelligent, goal-directed, cognitive, and intentional? In this two-part article, we review classical thought on teleology in the life sciences and defend a new approach to goal-directedness that stems from an emerging field—diverse intelligence. This field seeks to characterize what all active agents, regardless of their composition or provenance, have in common. Our approach emphasizes: (1) empirical testability (not philosophical commitments to linguistic categories), (2) fecundity in discovery of new capabilities (not just reductive mechanistic explanations of results after they are made, but worldviews that facilitate and enable novel research), (3) operationalization of terminology by reference to conceptual and empirical toolkits shown to be effective for a given system (cognitive and teleological claims are really hypotheses of optimal interaction protocols), and (4) continuity of human goal-directedness with our unicellular origins (which implies a need for models of scaling of cognition). In Part One, we reviewed historical and contemporary debates about teleology in biology and described some ground-breaking experimental results from morphogenesis, synthetic biology, and other areas of research involving the coordination of cellular behavior by means of bioelectric networks. In Part Two, we argue that current approaches to goal-directedness in biology cannot accommodate these results in a manner that helps us better understand how these systems work and fruitfully guides experimental work and practical applications in these areas of research. What is needed, therefore, is an approach to teleology in biology, informed by mentalistic concepts, such as intelligence, cognition, and intentionality. We describe and explain our mentalistic approach in greater depth, show how it can be applied to specific cases, and address some important objections to our view. By abandoning the reductionistic aversion to mentalistic concepts in biology in favor of principled and testable frameworks for understanding diverse minds embodied in the physical world, the plasticity and problem-solving competency of the agential material of life can provide fodder for advances in philosophical thought, as well as for biomedical and bioengineering applications.