“The Sower” by Vincent Van Gogh (1888)
In his essay, “Consciousness is a Form of Life,” Robert Hanna argues that in order to understand the nature of conscious mind in general and rational human conscious mind in particular, we need radically to re-think what Alfred North Whitehead so aptly called our concept of nature itself, radically re-conceiving nature as inherently processual and purposive, running from The Big Bang Singularity forward, via temporally asymmetric or unidirectional energy flows, to organismic life, and then on to conscious mind in general and to rational human conscious mind in particular, which in turn entails including radically re-conceiving the mind-body relation, free agency, and emergence. In a nutshell, Hanna’s thesis isthat there’s a single, unbroken metaphysical continuity between The Big Bang Singularity, temporally asymmetric/unidirectional energy flows, organismic life, conscious mind, and free agency. For convenience and simplicity’s sake, Hanna calls this the forms-of-life thesis. More precisely, however, in Embodied Minds in Action, Hanna and Michelle Maiese claim that the mental-physical relation in minded living organisms like us is nothing more and nothing less than (i) a synthetic a priori two-way necessary complementarity relation, and also (ii) a neo-Aristotelian hylomorphic relation, that is, a mental-to-physical and also physical-to-mental entangled necessary equivalence of “fused” inherently activating irreducible formal or morphetic mental properties on the one hand, and complex non-equilibrium thermodynamic material or hyletic biological physical properties on the other, such that, (iii) as minded animals, i.e., as conscious living organismic animal bodies, we’re an indissoluble and physically irreducible form-matter composite, by virtue of which we’re always “minding our bodies,” that’s (iv) inherently poised for causally efficacious intentional action, spontaneously initiated and creatively guided by our synchronous acts of desire-based willing. In short, our minds are physically irreducible forms of animal life and we’re essentially embodied minds in action; and this is what Hanna and Maiese call the essential embodiment theory of the mind-body relation and mental causation.
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