Health, Consciousness, and the Evolution of Subjects (Preprint)

Abstract

The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to make sense of them both as natural phenomena.

Full text

Synthese (2023) 201:3
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03998-z
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Health, consciousness, and the evolution of subjects
Walter Veit1,2,3
Received: 17 January 2022 / Accepted: 2 December 2022 / Published online: 19 December 2022
© The Author(s) 2022
Abstract
The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the
core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core
problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we
look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-
based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the
agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to make sense of
them both as natural phenomena.
Keywords Darwinism ·Health ·Organisms ·Consciousness ·Pathological
complexity
1 Introduction
As the title of this programmatic paper suggests, the following pages were motivated
by the idea that when viewed through a Darwinian lens, we will see that health and
consciousness are two closely related natural phenomena. I will argue that the origin
and function of consciousness lie in the capacity to help complex but vulnerable
animals to deal with and evaluate the species-specific health challenges that arise from
the Darwinian problem of choosing the most adaptive actions among a set of alternative
actions, as well as the avoidance of pathological behaviour. I will also show that that a
biological science of consciousness must begin by appreciating the distinction between
healthy and pathological variations of consciousness. Furthermore, I will argue that a
This article belongs to the topical collection: Teleology for the 21st Century edited by Daniel Kodak,
László Bernáth, and Martin Pickup.
BWalter Veit
wrwveit@gmail.com
1Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
2Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
3Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich,
Germany
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naturalist understanding of this ‘biological normativity’ requires the development of a
Darwinian theory of the organism that will in turn allow us to make sense of organisms
as active agents and subjects, including their subjective experience as an integral part
of our biological understanding of what makes a bat a bat, a snake a snake, and a
healthy bee a healthy bee.1By looking at the core problems in both the philosophy of
medicine and philosophy of mind through the lens of the philosophy of biology, the
present article thus hopes to feed two birds with one scone and use the resources of
each debate to make progress on the other.
1.1 Article outline
This programmatic paper is structured as follows. In Sect. 2, I motivate the project
of this paper by discussing what it means to naturalize the notions of health and con-
sciousness. In Sect. 3, I draw on the history of the Darwinian revolution to highlight
the role of health in evolutionary thinking, discuss the endogenization of behaviour
within Darwinism, and draw a number of useful lessons for a similar extension of Dar-
winism to endogenize consciousness. In Sect. 4, I draw on state-based and behavioural
life-history theory to offer a means for a naturalization of health and consciousness
within what I shall argue is the best theory of the organism that modern biology has
to offer. Finally, I conclude the discussion in Sect. 5.
2 Health and consciousness
One immediate philosophical problem for any biological investigation of conscious-
ness and health is that the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘health’ are notoriously
ill-defined. The cognitive ethologist Frans de Waal (2016), for instance, notes that
he prefers “not to make any firm statements about something as poorly defined as con-
sciousness. No one seems to know what it is” (p. 23). Former zookeeper and animal
welfare expert turned philosopher, Browning (2020), similarly expressed skepticism
that health reflects “any naturally existing state”, instead of a mere cluster of different
phenomena (p. 164). If they are right, the motivation of my article seems to rest on
shaky ground; built to connect two natural phenomena that may not even exist.
But the absence of precise definitions for either should not stop us in our tracks. It
is true that both terms, as used by the public, may be vague, ambiguous, and resistant
to the analytical philosopher’s ideal of conceptual analysis. Indeed, if one’s goal is
to provide definitions for these terms that would cover their varied usages, one may
be tempted to conclude that we would be better off eliminating their folk concepts
altogether.2
But my goal is not conceptual analysis, it is conceptual explication (Carnap, 1950);
or as it has been called elsewhere, naturalist conceptual engineering (Veit & Browning,
1I borrow this phrasing from an important quote by one of the ‘fathers of ethology’, Konrad Lorenz—one
that will be discussed shortly.
2Wilkes (1984), for instance, has arguedso in the case of consciousness and Hesslow (1993) and Ereshefsky
(2009) in the case of health.
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 3 of 24 3
2020). I am trying to capture a phenomenon in nature, for which the neurophiloso-
pher Patricia Churchland (2002) suggests we should simply rely on common sense to
establish “provisional agreement” on a number of “unproblematic examples of con-
sciousness” (p. 133). There is no need to provide a philosophically satisfactory concept
of consciousness or health before we can begin to investigate them, any more than we
would need to define the concept of koala before we can learn about their enjoyment
of eucalyptus leaves.
Scientists routinely proceed to investigate phenomena that have so far remained
elusive, proving that vagueness need not be an obstacle to scientific inquiry (see
Neto, 2020). In this naturalist activity, it is ultimately nature, not intuition, that will
decide how we should understand consciousness, precisely because—as Figdor (2018)
argues—we “lack widely accepted theories and models that can organize and articulate
the pre-theoretic consciousness-related concepts we are using to guide our initial
investigations” (p. 10). Following Churchland (2002), we can confidently reply that
“we use the same strategy here as we use in the early stages of any science: delineate
the paradigmatic cases, and then bootstrap our way up from there” (p. 133).
There are plenty of paradigmatic cases of consciousness: pains, pleasures, smells,
visual experiences, tastes, a sense of one’s body, memories, alongside a whole other
range of subjective experiences. Similarly, we have some intuitive grasp of instances
of health and pathology in humans and animals alike, such as diseases, broken
bones, lesions, parasites, burns, poisons, maladaptive behaviour, and other ‘biolog-
ical wrongs’—even if we have struggled to derive something like a folk theory of
health. So it is perhaps unsurprising that we can also intuitively distinguish healthy
subjective experiences from unhealthy ones—such as major depressive disorder, anx-
iety disorder, aphantasia, synaesthesia, autism, schizophrenia, prosopagnosia, chronic
pain, and many more. Yet, many philosophers of medicine would still outright deny
that health is a purely natural phenomenon, which is why we should first look at this
opposition a bit more closely, before I begin with my naturalization project.
2.1 Resistance to naturalism in the philosophy of medicine
Despite the discussion of naturalist views by philosophers of medicine, their assess-
ment is largely negative, and most within the field now maintain that health reflects
personal evaluations or the values of society at large; a consensus that health is pri-
marily a normative concept, rather than ‘only’ an objective biological property of
organisms (Veit, 2021b,2021c).3
Georges Canguilhem (1991), for instance, argued that “[t]here is no objective
pathology. Structures or behaviors can be objectively described but they cannot be
called [‘]pathological[’] on the strength of some purely objective criterion” (p. 226).
Others like Lennart Nordenfelt (1995), who emphasize the concept of agency, have
argued that health cannot be understood in a reductionist naturalist way and instead
requires a more holistic conception, where it is understood as the ability to achieve
one’s vital goals. Phenomenologists such as Carel (2007) have similarly argued that
3See Dominic Murphy’s (2020) SEP article “Concepts of Disease and Health” for an excellent recent
overview.
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3Page 4 of 24 Synthese (2023) 201 :3
the “experience of illness cannot be captured within a naturalistic view” (p. 95). Such
strong assertions against the very possibility of a naturalist account are surely prema-
ture and yet can be found throughout the literature, effectively making naturalism a
‘bogeyman’ of the field.
Rarely has there been a philosophical debate in which naturalism has been so uncere-
moniously dismissed, so it is perhaps not so surprising that philosophers haven’t sought
to make sense of consciousness by linking it to health. Yet, this idea has been quite
attractive among evolutionary biologists, such as Darwin’s protégé George Romanes,
who speculated in some detail that pleasure and pain as sensations corresponding to
the biological values of alternative actions may be the key to understanding the place
of consciousness in nature:
Possibly, however—and as a mere matter of speculation, the possibility is worth
stating—in whatever way the inconceivable connection between Body and Mind
came to be established, the primary cause of its establishment, or of the dawn of
subjectivity, may have been this very need of inducing organisms to avoid the
deleterious, and to seek the beneficial; the raison d’être of Consciousness may
have been that of supplying the condition to the feeling of Pleasure and Pain.
—George John Romanes (1883, p. 111) [italics added for emphasis].
Evolutionary thinking naturally lends itself towards a view in which the mind is born
as a ‘device’ to track objective goods and biological wrongs and represent them in
terms of hedonic valence (i.e. good, neutral, or bad feelings)—or as it has been called
elsewhere: the evolution of sentient Benthamite creatures (Veit, 2022b). It does not
appear at all mysterious from a Darwinian point of view that organisms would evolve
to value states and behaviours that increase their own fitness and avoid those that are
detrimental to their health. So why is there such a deep opposition to the view that
health is a natural phenomenon?
The anti-naturalist consensus in the philosophy of medicine4can be usefully sum-
marized as an appeal to the ‘irreducibility’ of (i) the normativity of health and disease,
(ii) the loss of agency in health and disease, and (iii) the phenomenology or subjective
experience of health and disease. But who is to deny that these features can also be
part of a naturalist account of health and disease? Naturalist philosophers have long
worked on attempts to make these notions of normativity, agency, and phenomenal
experience safe for naturalism. Notably, what all of these anti-naturalists share is an
emphasis on subjectivity. Similarly to those who view naturalist explanations of con-
sciousness as deeply problematic, they argue that the very idea of a purely naturalist
account of health and disease is mistaken. They hold that one cannot account for
health and disease from the objective third-person perspective of science, since they
are phenomena at the level of a subject, not an object, and science cannot account for
the former—a view familiar from so-called ‘naysayers’ who assert the impossibility
of a scientific account of consciousness.5
4This is not to imply that there aren’t some philosophers who draw on evolution (e.g. Griffiths & Matthew-
son, 2018; Matthewson & Griffiths, 2017).
5Flanagan (1991) offers an excellent critique of these consciousness skeptics.
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This way of thinking about naturalism, however, is highly problematic regardless
of whether it takes place within the philosophy of mind or the philosophy of medicine.
Subjects aren’t some mysterious entities inaccessible to science: they are an evolu-
tionary product and as well as the more familiar case of humans, also include many
non-human animals (Godfrey-Smith, 2017). But the possibility of a Darwinian rec-
onciliation between a view of health as a property of the organism as an ‘object’ and
of the organism as a ‘subject’ has been given scant attention, precisely because non-
human health has been less than an afterthought in this debate (see Matthewson &
Griffiths, 2017).
As this article aims to show, the notions of health, pathology, and ‘biological
wrong-goings’ are not only perfectly naturalistic concepts, but they play a key role in
evolutionary biology, and will help us to extend the Darwinian revolution to include
consciousness.
3 The role of health in the Darwinian revolution
Whereas philosophers of medicine have been skeptical of naturalistic concepts of
health, it is perhaps unsurprising that evolutionary biologists happily talk of health,
pathology, diseases, damage, and other evaluative terms meant to refer to a perfectly
naturalistic or purely biological sense of normativity. If there is natural design, then
of course there are ways organisms ought to be and ways that things can go wrong
for them. The endorsement of such a ‘teleonomic’ view of life is perhaps at the core
of Darwinian thought, and yet it is often poorly understood or naively dismissed as
‘adaptationist’. Let us thus look directly examine the Darwinian paradigm.
3.1 Darwinism, teleonomy, and natural design
In trying to view health and consciousness through a Darwinian lens we have to clarify
what we mean by such a project, especially since I see the Darwinian approach in this
paper as providing a ‘teleonomic’ alternative to a false dilemma between ‘externalist’
and ‘internalist’ approaches to consciousness. Some clarifications of these terms are
in order before I proceed.
By ‘teleonomic’ I am employing Pittendrigh’s (1958) coinage of the term, as a natu-
ralistically unproblematic Darwinian replacement for older and mistaken teleological
notions about the purposefulness, design, adaptation, and normativity of life through
recourse to evolutionary theory. Further, ‘internalist’ explanations can be understood
as seeking to explain features of a system in virtue of other features of that system—of
processes, structures, organization, and development within it, rather than outside of
it. ‘Externalist’ explanations, on the other hand, aim to explain features of the system
by recourse to the external, i.e. the environment—Godfrey-Smith (2002) calls them
‘outside-in’ explanations (p. 30). This distinction is not only relevant for categorizing
different views of the mind, but also of life itself, since many (mistakenly) treat Dar-
winism as an externalist program, which I suspect is part of the reason why there is a
lot of opposition to evolutionary approaches to health and consciousness.
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Richard Lewontin has perhaps stated the alleged link between Darwinism and exter-
nalism the most forcefully, arguing that the success of the Darwinian project was due
to its disentangling of the internal and external forces that had previously been seen
as inseparable.6Darwin broke with what Lewontin called transformational theories
of the past, such as Lamarck’s (1984) theory of evolution that postulated change
to individuals within their life-histories arising from ‘subjective’ (or what we may
want to call ‘internal’) forces, such as will and striving. The Darwinian theory of the
organism made it the “object, not the subject, of evolutionary forces” such as natural
selection and random drift that are “autonomous and alienated from the organism as
a whole” (Lewontin, 1985, p. 85). To complete the Darwinian revolution, however,
Lewontin maintained that the internal forces—the subject-side of organisms—must
be re-introduced:
Darwinism cannot be carried to completion unless the organism is reintegrated
with the inner and outer forces, of which it is both the subject and the object.
—Richard C. Lewontin in (Levins & Lewontin, 1985, p. 106).
By this, Lewontin admittedly did not mean subjective experience, but rather how
organisms as agents actively ‘participate’ in their evolutionary path and ‘construct’
their environments, as an alternative to a traditional adaptationist view of life. These
notions of agency and construction have been highly influential in modern attacks on
Darwinism (Ho & Saunders, 1979; Laland et al., 2014; Noble, 2015; Müller, 2017), but
I am not here interested in the conceptual role of organisms as subjects for challenging
the theoretical modeling of evolution. My interest lies in subjects as an evolutionary
product, to allow us to make sense of the evolution of subjective experience. As
Godfrey-Smith (2017) notes in his discussion of Lewontin’s earlier paper, subjects are
not only a cause of evolutionary change, they are also its product.
In advancing a gradualist view of the evolution of consciousness, we can follow
Godfrey-Smith’s suggestion to employ theoretically less loaded terms like ‘agency’
and ‘subjectivity’ as useful tools for thinking about organisms as being more or less
subject-like: they “can realize subjectivity to a greater or lesser degree” (2017,p.1).
While subjectivity may appear as elusive as consciousness, it does not suffer similarly
from an overabundance of theoretical frameworks. We can, as Godfrey-Smith (2019)
notes, use it to bridge the gap between matter and mind: “[t]he history of life includes
the history of subjectivity, and subjective experience is the experience of a subject”
(p. 2). And in doing so we may be able to truly carry the Darwinian revolution to its
completion.
Unlike Lewontin, however, I do not see a conflict between adaptationism and an
explication of the subject-side of organisms. As this paper hopes to demonstrate,
it is precisely with a Darwinian view of organisms that we will be able to make
sense of ‘subjectivity’. This does not mean that we can’t recognize that evolutionary
biology has been dominated by externalist modes of explanation, with features of the
organism being explained in terms of their adaptive fit to their external environment.7
6See also Lewontin and Levins (1997).
7See Williams (1966), Gould (1977), Gould and Lewontin (1979), Endler (1986), Godfrey-Smith (1996,
2001,2002), Lewontin (1983), Mayr (1994), Walsh (2015), Chiu (2019).
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Evolutionary biologists readily admit that “[t]he suspicion of internal causes in the
dominant neo-Darwinian culture ran so deep that every internalist idea, no matter how
reasonable, was treated as an appeal to vitalism” (Stoltzfus, 2019, p. 46). But we should
distinguish the idealization choices made by modellers from a deeper commitment to
the necessity of an externalist view of adaptations. Indeed, it is a mistake to think of
adaptationism and externalism as a onepackage-deal. We can straightforwardly follow
Sterelny’s (1997) suggestion to decouple adaptationism from externalism and consider
the two separately.
Many of the arguments against adaptationism are really arguments against its exter-
nalist versions, those that use a so-called ‘lock and key’ model of the adaptation
between organism and environment; a criticism that need not apply to other versions.
Modern evolutionary biology recognizes plenty of feedback between organisms and
the species-specific environments in which natural selection takes place, such as Bran-
don’s (1990) notions of ‘selective environments’ and ‘ecological environments’, which
can be distinguished from an organism-neutral externalist view of the environment.
The external features that matter to the evolutionary trajectory of the organism are
themselves causally dependent on the organism. No longer do modern evolutionary
biologists see adaptations in the externalist design-sense such as that of the natural
theologist William Paley, who argued for the presence of telos in nature and in turn
used this as an argument for the existence of God as the designer.
As with many scientific concepts, the concept of adaptation came to be rede-
fined—or rather explicated—in a naturalistically unproblematic sense, referring to
whatever is produced by natural selection, even if such ‘design’ appears inefficient
and wasteful (Griffiths & Gray, 2001, p. 209). Much of the opposition from ‘Neo-
Darwinians’ to Gould and Lewontin’s (1979) criticism of ‘adaptation’ was based on
a mismatch between a usage of that term in its original pre-Darwinian sense and its
modern explication, which already included at least some of the features of feedback
between organism and environment that were alleged to be lacking in the modern
Neo-Darwinian view of life. We should not see Darwinism as an externalist theory of
organismal traits that replaced the previous vitalist and romanticist modes of thinking
that were confused between internal and external forces. Instead, we should see it as a
teleonomic rejection of a false dilemma between internalist theories such as Lamarck’s
and a strongly externalist view of organisms having been designed by a benevolent
God to fit their environments. It achieves this through providing us with an inherently
‘dynamic’ or ‘interactionist’ picture of the living world, as is also emphasized in the
field of evolutionary medicine (Nesse & Williams, 1998).
By understanding organisms as goal-directed systems or Darwinian agents evolved
to maximize their fitness, our understanding of health, just like our understanding of
adaptation and design, will come to be transformed. As I shall shortly demonstrate
here, we can build a theory of the organism as both an object and subject with the
tools of modern state-based and behavioural life-history theory, which does not—as
Lewontin objected to—treat organisms as machines with mosaic-like traits, but rather
as agents having to deal with integrated bundles of trade-offs in organismal design. As
I shall argue, it is precisely this teleonomic theory that will bring out the subject-side
of organisms.
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Furthermore, as I shall show in the next section, the work of the classical ethologists
nicely demonstrates how the Darwinian revolution only came to be extended towards
behaviour through an appreciation of the distinction between healthy and pathological
variations.
3.2 Ethology, health, and the Darwinization of behaviour
Sterelny and Griffiths (1999) once described ethology as “the study of animal behavior
under its normal ecological conditions (as opposed to unusual laboratory conditions)
and from an evolutionary perspective” (p. 385). And this is certainly how many now
think about it, as a tradition that stood in opposition to the lack of ecological and
evolutionary thinking shown by the behaviourists, and one that has now largely been
superseded by behavioural ecology. But there was a more philosophical conviction
that motivated its founders, one of a teleonomic view of life, and this has largely gone
unnoticed.
Both the ethologists and the behaviourists wanted to establish an objective science
of behaviour in which we rely on a bottom-up approach that emphasizes the study
of simple behaviours in order to understand more complex ones. But the ethologists
hardly saw the behaviourists as Darwinians at all. This is ironic, considering that
both the (early) behaviourists and ethologists used Darwin to motivate their approach.
However, we can readily resolve this puzzle. Whereas the behaviourists emphasized
the alleged externalist explanatory style of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, ethol-
ogists emphasized the theory itself, with its emphasis on function, survival value,
and evolutionary phylogeny as sources of mechanisms to deal with the environments
faced by organisms. This teleonomic perspective is nicely drawn out in a press release
from the Karolinska Institute, which described their approach as a Darwinian way out
of a dilemma between the behaviourist’s externalism and the vitalist’s insistence on
internalist forces:
During the first decades of this century research concerning animal behaviour
was on its way to be stuck in a blind alley. The vitalists believed in the instincts
as mystical, wise and inexplicable forces inherent in the organism, governing
the behaviour of the individual. On the other hand reflexologists interpreted
behaviour in an one-side mechanical way, and behaviourists were preoccupied
with learning as an explanation of all behavioural variations. The way out of
this dilemma was indicated by investigators who focused on the survival value
of various behaviour patterns in their studies of species differences. Behaviour
patterns become explicable when interpreted as the result of natural selection,
analogous with anatomical and physiological characteristics.
—Nobel Prize Outreach (2021) [italics added for emphasis].
Following the end of World War I, many psychologists - especially in Ameri-
ca—rejected the previously widely accepted idea of human instinct (Griffiths, 2008).
Instincts—in the sense of unlearned responses—came to be viewed with unease, due
to their teleological and internalist nature and their inability to yield themselves to
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physiological investigation (and thus likewise, causal explanation), in addition to their
being tied up with mistaken purposive and vitalist conceptions of life (Dunlap, 1919;
Kuo, 1921; Tolman, 1923; Griffiths, 2008). Whereas the likes of Darwin strongly
endorsed the idea of instincts, with the externalist turn of the behaviourists the notion
came to be seen as unscientific. Lorenz, however, resisted this response as something
that went too far in the opposite direction, maintaining that “it is hardly an exaggeration
to say that the large and immeasurably fertile field which innate behaviour offers to
analytic research was left unploughed because it lay, as no man’s land, between the two
fronts of the antagonistic opinions of vitalists and mechanists” (1950, p. 232). Indeed,
Lorenz simply tried to do for behaviour what Darwin’s naturalism had previously
achieved for a similar false dilemma between vitalists and mechanists on the nature
of life and organismic activity, i.e. to emphasize the teleonomic nature of animals:
[B]oth mechanists and vitalists were incurably inhibited by quite specific con-
ceptual errors and prejudices that were magnified by their clash of opinion. This
prevented them from initiating research into animal and human behavior at the
point where it should have begun, namely with straightforward, unprejudiced
observation of healthy animals living under normal conditions. They were quite
incapable of seeing behavior for what it is, that is, as an extremely complex,
organic systemic entity consisting of quite different components; one which, like
any organic system, owes its particular constitution to a quite specific historical
process of development.
—Konrad Lorenz (1997, p. 213) [italics in original].
To understand ethology as the mere opposition to work performed exclusively in the
laboratory would be to miss out on this most important observation: ethology was
intended as a teleonomic science (see also Thompson, 1986a,1986b). In claiming to
study learning in healthy organisms, the behaviourists did not recognize that it made
no sense to think of health outside of the ecological context that animals evolved in.
As Lorenz (1981) put it: “the pathologic can be defined only by having recourse to
ecological concepts” (Lorenz, 1981, p. 57).
Unfortunately, this philosophical insight of the ethological tradition has come to
be neglected, next to the more popular methodological slogan of studying animals in
the wild, despite the fact that it was precisely their teleonomic reasoning that made
them emphasize the importance of studying the lifestyles of healthy animals in their
natural environments. This is why Lorenz praised Oskar Heinroth as the real founder
of ethology as the comparative study of behaviour:
Accordingly, a finely developed sensitivity to the delicate and often diffuse
boundary between the not-quite-normal and the already pathological is perhaps
the most important talent that a scientific animal keeper must possess! On the
other hand, however, the keeping of animals in our sense is an apprenticeship
that renders one’s feel for the pathological just as acute as actual training in a
medical clinic. It is surely no coincidence that Heinroth, the outstanding master
of animal keeping as a scientific method, was, like the writer of this text, initially
trained as a medical doctor.
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—Konrad Lorenz (1997, p. 229) [italics in original].
The combination of observation and adaptationist thinking was inspired by the descrip-
tive natural history activity of Darwin and the taxonomic activities that made a
distinction between healthy and pathological specimens in order to describe what a
‘normal’ individual ought to look like. This was how the Darwinian revolution began,
and this was thus how Lorenz thought a biological study of behaviour must get off
the ground. It must be able to distinguish healthy from pathological behaviour, just
as physiology and taxonomy have distinguished healthy from unhealthy phenotypes.
This is why he emphasized early on that behaviour could be treated in just the same
way as any other adaptive phenotype:
What behaviorists exclude from the narrow circle of their interest is not only other
learning processes, but simply everything that is not contained in the process of
learning by reinforcement-and this neglected remainder is neither more nor less
than the whole of the remaining organism! […] What remains uninvestigated is
all that makes an octopus an octopus, a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, or a man a
man, and, most important of all, what makes a healthy man a healthy man, and
an unhealthy man a patient.
—Konrad Lorenz (1981, p. 71) [italics added for emphasis]
This is the basic motivation behind the ethologists’ Darwinization of behaviour and
it is unfortunately a lesson the science of consciousness has not yet learned. If we
are interested in making progress on the problems of consciousness within the next
century, we must follow the ethologists’ dictum to distinguish healthy from patholog-
ical variations of consciousness by thinking about their survival value in an ecological
context.
3.3 Carrying Darwinism to completion
Throughout this section, my goal has been to emphasize the need for a naturalist
approach to the place of consciousness in nature. By this I do not (only) mean the now
common understanding of naturalistic thinking as the need for a strong continuity
between science and philosophy, but rather the older meaning, of a natural history
approach that begins with the careful observation of the diversity of organisms in the
wild. It is in this intellectual tradition of taxonomic classifications and the mapping out
of the life-histories of different organisms, rather than in laboratory experiments, that
the Darwinian revolution began and changed biology forever. In order to understand
organisms, the natural historians began by meticulously describing the living world.
This led them to appreciate the distinction between healthy and pathological variations,
and eventually to a teleonomic theory to make sense of this biological normativity in
a naturalistically unproblematic manner.
Hence, it ought not to be all that surprising that the natural historian Alfred Russell
Wallace came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection independently from
Darwin, while suffering from a fit of malaria fever on his explorations (Meyer, 1895).
Convinced of the common origin of species, but lacking a process explanation, the
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 11 of 24 3
fragility of his own health and vigour made him realize that varieties within populations
would lead to differences in the adaptive fit of organisms to their environments and thus
change species in a “struggle for existence” (Darwin & Wallace, 1858,p.54).
8Further-
more, just as Heinroth began his studies in medicine—and was praised by Lorenz for
using his understanding of the difficult boundary between the normal and the patholog-
ical to advance the Darwinian revolution towards behaviour through his careful study
of the life-history of birds—Darwin himself pursued a degree in medicine. While
Darwin even grew up in a family of physicians, he eventually gave up on the pursuit
of medicine, due to his distaste for operations and his greater obsession for natural
history (Antolin, 2011). Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that an appreciation for the
healthy and pathological varieties of organisms did not leave an impact on his teleo-
nomic thinking about the appearance of ‘design’ in nature. After all, Darwin (1859)
himself maintained that we can comfort ourselves that despite the great destruction in
the struggle for life, “the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply”
(p. 29). Unfortunately, very little attention has been given to the deep link between
health, evolutionary theory, and natural history outside of the evolutionary medicine
movement and parts of ethology.9
In order to understand healthy organisms in their natural environments, ethologists
explicated the life-histories of organisms through observation and the creation of so-
called ‘ethograms’, which were intended as an objective description of an organism’s
behavioral repertoire during their lifetime. Just as the taxonomists and natural histo-
rians prior to Darwin distinguished normal from pathological organisms, ethologists
aimed to begin a Darwinian study of behaviour by understanding natural behaviour.
It will therefore hardly be surprising that ethograms are still a common tool for both
veterinarians and animal welfare scientists for detecting abnormal or pathological
behaviour in animals, such as tail-biting (Brunberg et al., 2011) and feather pecking
(Sherwin et al., 2010). Yet, this is not a theory of health; ethograms only constitute a
list of healthy and pathological behaviours.
It may thus not be surprising that many practitioners such as medical professionals,
veterinarians, and animal welfare specialists such as Browning confidently treat health
as something like a mere construct rather than a genuine integrated phenomenon in
nature. They grant that we can measure parasite load, lack of nutrients, cancer, and
presence particular diseases, among other vulnerabilities and dysfunctions, and that we
could rank an animal’s ‘health’ with respect to each, but they would deny that there is
some objective means of integrating them meaningfully into a single state. Something
more is needed to naturalize health as genuine whole-organism phenomenon in nature
and for this we unsurprisingly require a theory of the organism.
This insight has notably already been made by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Dar-
win, who was a very influential physician in a family of medical doctors and who
shared an acute interest in natural history. At this time, natural history was often
studied as a resource for medicine and he even anticipated some (unironically) ‘proto-
Darwinian’ ideas in his natural history treatise Zoonomia that set out “to reduce the
8In his biography of Wallace, Shermer (2002) offers an elegant recounting of how Wallace came to realize
the phenomenon of natural selection (pp. 112–118).
9Unfortunately, this also goes for evolutionary veterinary science (Veit & Browning, 2021).
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3Page 12 of 24 Synthese (2023) 201 :3
facts belonging to ANIMAL LIFE into classes, orders, genera, and species; and by
comparing them with each other, to unravel the theory of diseases” (Darwin, 1794,
p. 1).10 Such a theory was ultimately derived by Darwin, achieving his grandfather’s
goal of providing a “theory founded upon nature, that should bind together the scat-
tered facts of medical knowledge, and converge into one point of view the laws of
organic life” (Darwin, 1794,p.1).
11
While Darwin himself had little to say about health and pathology, his teleonomic
theory of evolution by natural selection was later used by the ethologists to likewise
synthesize our scattered knowledge about normal and pathological behaviour into
the very same evolutionary framework, casting their Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine in a particularly interesting light. Our folk understanding of ‘health’ as a
biological phenomenon is revised in the light of evolutionary theory, just like that of
‘design’. To advance the goal of a true biological science of consciousness, we must
similarly to the ethologists—make use of Darwin’s theoretical framework to synthesize
our scattered knowledge about healthy and pathological cases of phenomenological
complexity across the tree of life. This will allow us to integrate consciousness into
the Darwinian revolution and complete our understanding of organisms such as elec-
trosensing platypuses, echolocating bats, and infrared-sensing snakes. Or to borrow
the words of Lewontin: in order to carry Darwinism to completion we must understand
the organism as both an object and a subject.
Since I’ve repeatedly stated that state-based behavioural and life-history theory is
the key theoretical resource for this task, as the theory of teleonomic agency, I will
now move on to explain this theory in more detail and connect it to the foregoing
lessons about the Darwinian revolution.
4 A state-based behavioural and life-history theory of the organism
The twenty-first century equivalent of the ethologists’ attempt at building ethograms
of organisms is modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory. All organisms
go through a life cycle in which they are born, take in nutrients, grow, reproduce
(whether sexually or asexually), and ultimately die (if death doesn’t occur before the
completion of their life cycle). The diversity of life is essentially a diversity of different
life-history strategies, which life-history theory aims to explain, thus making it “the
integrative concept of organismic biology” (Kappeler, 2021, p. 34). In the design-space
of organisms, there is a seemingly limitless room for the combinations of different
traits that will lend themselves to different species-specific life-history strategies as
optimal design-solutions to the challenges they are faced with.
Unfortunately, philosophers of biology, with the exception of Griffiths (and his
recent collaborators), have given very little attention to this theory. Inspired by a
(2018) talk of his that urged us to use life-history theory as a theory of the organism as
a goal-directed system to solve the problem of distinguishing healthy from pathological
10 Darwin denied that his grandfather’s work had a major influence on him, but there are many similarities
between their views.
11 See also Nesse (2007).
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 13 of 24 3
traits, I aim to make progress here on the goal of developing a teleonomic theory of
the organism as both an object and subject. This will also provide us with an account
of health as a natural phenomenon by drawing on a modern extension of this theory:
state-based behavioural and life-history theory.
4.1 Life-history theory, agency, and adaptationism
Originally, life-history theory was largely concerned with fairly simple models (both
discrete and continuous) of the simultaneous optimization of the survival-probability
at different life-stages and the number of offspring produced in each in order to
maximize fitness across a lifetime (Stearns, 1992;Roff,1992; Morbeck et al., 1997;
Roff, 2002). State-dependent or state-based behavioural and life-history theory (Man-
gel & Clark, 1986; McNamara & Houston, 1996) is an important extension of this
theoretical framework, since it can then be used to make health and biological nor-
mativity naturalistically unproblematic notions by paying attention to the states of
organisms and their environments in formalizing their life history tradeoffs in the
optimization of fitness. To understand an organism’s teleonomic design is to under-
stand their species-specific trade-offs between costly investments of resources into
development, fecundity, and survival, with fitness providing an ultimate ‘common
currency’ for this economic decision-problem, or ‘game’ against nature. Hence, a full
understanding of an organism would be an understanding of their life-history strat-
egy. As McNamara and Houston (1996) nicely put it, life-history theory is a theory
“concerned with strategic decisions over an organism’s lifetime” (p. 215). It involves
a naturalistically unproblematic kind of goal-directedness, by treating the organism as
an agent whose traits have been shaped by natural selection to contribute to the single
goal of fitness-maximization:
In life-history theory, […] numerous aspects of an organism’s life-cycle, such as
the timing of reproduction or the length of its immature phase, can be understood
by treating the organism as if it were an agent trying to maximize its expected
number of offspring-or some other appropriate fitness measure-and had devised
a strategy for achieving that goal.
—Samir Okasha (2018, p. 10).
While adaptationism has often been criticized for atomistic thinking, life-history the-
ory is essentially a ‘holistic’ kind of adaptationism in which organisms are not treated
as a single adult phenotype, nor a mere robot-like bundle of traits as in Lewontin’s crit-
icism of the ‘adaptationists’, but a functionally complex and vulnerable life-cycle—a
dynamic process that is faced with trade-offs from birth to death, for which complex
optimality problems have to be solved. In short: a life-history.
It is within such a theory that we can bring out the subject-side of organisms and
satisfy Lewontin’s demand to bring Darwinism to completion by paying attention to the
“functional needs” of the organism (1985, p. 85). Notwithstanding that adaptationist
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3Page 14 of 24 Synthese (2023) 201 :3
thinking can at times be misleading,12this teleonomic theory of organismal agency
provides the ideal theoretical framework in which to think about the evolution of
subjectivity.
4.2 A teleonomic theory of organisms
It is perhaps surprising that philosophers of biology have given very little attention to
this theoretical framework, since it is here that we are provided with a teleonomic -
or for that matter, adaptationist—theory of the organism that enables us to distinguish
biological normativity and functioning from all the other causal processes operating
in living systems. No philosopher has made clearer the need for such thinking than
Millikan (2002), who maintained that to understand life we need a way to distinguish
the normative, functional, goal-directed processes within an organism from all the
other causal processes or mere ‘noise’:
Living chunks of matter do not come, just as such, with instructions about what
are allowable conditions of operation and what is to count as allowable input.
Similarly, they do not come with instructions telling which changes to count as
state changes within the system and which instead as damage, breakdowns or
weardowns. Nor do they come with instructions about which processes either
within the organism or outside it are to count as occurring within and which are
irrelevant or accidental to the system.
—Ruth Garrett Millikan (2002, p. 121).
To distinguish what matters to an organism, what is pathological, and what is part of
it, one must attend to the organism’s design and to the selective pressures faced by the
organism. It is only within such a teleonomic theory of the organism that we can make
sense of health and the subject-side of organisms. Physiologists may often succeed in
progressing our understanding of the organism without evolutionary considerations,
but once their work is intended to generalize they ought to recognize that the various
processes of the organism must be understood in “the light of life history theory”
(Griffiths, 2009, p. 23). Otherwise, we are inevitably led to make mistaken judgements
about which variations are healthy and which are pathological.
Morbeck et al. (1997) elegantly describe life-history theory as providing us with
“a means of addressing the integration of many layers of complexity of organisms
and their worlds” (p. xi). This makes it the ideal agential framework to explicate the
link between health and consciousness and make sense of the evolution of subjects
and their experience. In thinking about the ecological lifestyles of different species
it is thus not unreasonable to treat them as economic agents maximizing their utility
(i.e. fitness). Each individual within a species is fundamentally faced with a resource
allocation problem, though the solutions to this problem are admittedly more similar
within a species than across species (Kappeler, 2021, p.35). This is the economy of
nature.
12 For critical discussions of this kind of agential thinking common to evolutionary biology, see Okasha
(2018), Veit (2021a,2021b,2021c).
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 15 of 24 3
It is no accident that ecological and economic models share many similarities and
frequently borrow from each other. Under resource scarcity, there is a constant trade-
off between the parameters of reproduction and survival: “reproduction in the current
age class must be traded off against reproduction later; current reproduction must be
also traded off against growth, and against condition (the maintenance of structures
that have already developed); current growth or condition may trade off with survival to
later age classes” (Griffiths & Matthewson, 2018, p. 319). Boorse (1977) once argued
that one cannot build a theory of health from an evolutionary concept of adaptedness,
since “parents hardly become healthier with each successive child, nor would anyone
maintain that the healthiest traits are the ones that promote large families” (p. 548).
But Griffiths and Matthewson (2018) are right to note that this is a very superficial take
on evolution, insisting that there is a trade-off between offspring quality and offspring
number, as the British evolutionary biologist David Lack13 demonstrated with his
life-history work on optimal clutch size (p. 305).
It is unfortunate that philosophers have so far given scant attention to life-history
theory, since it is within the context of this theory that many puzzling philosophical
questions about the nature of organisms can be resolved, with fitness playing a crucial
conceptual role for thinking about trade-offs in organismal design. By ignoring this
framework—or for that matter, evolutionary biology at large—philosophers such as
Boorse have made biologically uninformed statements about the viability of an evolu-
tionary understanding of biological normativity. Let me thus now return to my promise
of explicating the concept of health in a naturalistically unproblematic manner.
4.3 Health and pathological complexity
Before we can think about what it means for an organism to be healthy, it is important
to note that fitness is not just the number of offspring, despite reproduction being
correctly identified as the ‘telos’ of the organism. Griffiths and Matthewson (2018)
grant that Boorse’s comment may have been “light-hearted” but note that “comments
such as this undoubtedly contributed to the premature rejection of evolutionary views
of dysfunction” (p. 305). Indeed, they gave aid to a sphere in which a serious engage-
ment with evolutionary theory could simply be waved away with a swift remark. But
fitness is ultimately the common currency for making sense of how one organism can
be healthier than another, when it comes to injuries, nutrient lack, or parasite load.
A judgement over which organism is healthier than another must not restrict itself
to only evaluating these dimensions individually. While the health of an organism is
made of of a vast range of different components, they do form a naturally existing state
that can be expressed in terms of life-history theory. The mere fact that health is made
up out of multiple components is no reason to deny its existence as a organism-level
phenomenon.
However, it is only by employing the Darwinian notion of biological fitness that we
are provided with a common currency for what I call the ‘pathological complexity’ of
different species, used to assess how badly (or well) things are going for an organism.
It is the computational complexity of maximizing fitness given a particular life history
13 See Lack (1947).
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3Page 16 of 24 Synthese (2023) 201 :3
strategy of a teleonomic living system, which can be mathematically expressed as the
number of variables and constraints in the fitness-maximization problem of any given
life-history strategy. So organisms within one and the same species can have a higher
pathological complexity dependent on the presence of predators and the heterogeneity
of the environment. Let me now address how we can use this notion to think about
health.
My motivation here is that the biological world is too messy for simple binary
categories, be that for consciousness or health, which is why I have proposed to
naturalize them both in terms of phenomenological and pathological complexity (Veit,
2022a,2022b,2022f). An organism is not simply healthy or unhealthy, given that
dysfunctions in complex teleonomic systems are unavoidable. Living systems are
constantly faced with trade-offs: avoidance of one danger comes at the cost of exposing
oneself to another, or entails foregoing some benefit. Health is simply a measure of how
optimally an organism deals with the pathological complexity trade-offs it faces during
its life cycle—or, to put it differently, how well an organism succeeds in its species-
specific life-history strategy. I would like to point out, however, that I am employing
the term ‘pathological complexity’ instead of the equally adequate terms ‘life-history
complexity’ and ‘teleonomic complexity’ not because I want to say that organisms
with more complex life history strategies are inherently less healthy, but because it
is only in understanding the fundamental design trade-offs that life-history theory is
meant to capture that we can distinguish pathological from healthy variations. This also
goes for variations within consciousness, or as I prefer to call it ‘phenomenological
complexity’ (Veit, 2022a).
As one of our reviewers noted, the way we usually think about health and fitness
does not treat them as one and the same phenomenon. My response is twofold. Firstly,
I am not here interested in how the concept of health is typically used in human
discourse. What I am interested in is health as the natural phenomenon of biological
design. Secondly, these notions are not intended to be the same, even if they are closely
related in my picture. Fitness is the ultimate measure of biological success, but health
is about how well an organism’s design achieves its life history strategy. All biological
life is faced with design trade-offs and fitness provides a common currency for natural
selection to ‘choose’ the best design. While this view of health may not fit the goals of
many normativists in the philosophy of medicine, this is of no concern to my project
here, which only aims to establish that there is a purely naturalist sense of health and
biological normativity that plays an important role in understanding the living world.
Trade-offs of pathological complexity can occur on a genetic level, with selection
pulling in different directions, and on a physiological level where—as Griffiths and
Matthewson (2018) note—nutrients can be allocated to either somatic or germ cells.
While these trade-offs can lead to health problems for organisms, my focus in this
paper will be the organism as an integrated agent. Ernst Mayr (1988) once said that
“the individual and not the gene must be considered the target of selection” (p. 101).
Whether this is a general truth is legitimately contested, but in thinking about the
evolution of conscious agency it is certainly the right approach. The reason organisms
do not start to reproduce instantly from their birth onward, is a lack of resources.
Analogous to the way in which a firm can be usefully treated as an agent, and must
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 17 of 24 3
first gather resources, equipment, and manpower before selling on a market, organisms
must first make an investment into growth before producing viable progeny.
Answering the question of how to solve this economic optimization problem under
constraints, has been the original motivation for life-history theory. Griffiths and
Matthewson (2018) point out that many organisms pursue a semelparous as opposed
to a iteroparous strategy, i.e. “they complete all their growth before engaging in a sin-
gle round of reproductive activity to which they commit all their resources” (p. 319).
They mention Australian marsupials of the genus Antechinus as a core example for
the death of males after a single breeding season, with one species even having all
females dying after the weaning of their offspring.14 While “such behaviour in males
may be seen as strikingly pathological, through life-history theory we can see that it is
not. Their best response to their species-specific pathological complexity is to invest
all their resources into reproduction in a single breeding season, and hence this not
pathological” (Veit & Browning, 2022, p. 57). This example nicely illustrates how our
folk understanding of health as a natural phenomenon of design ought to be updated
in the light of evolution.
However, the Antechinus example is perhaps not the best illustration of an organism
fine-tuned for a semelparous life-history, since the mammalian body-plan is relatively
unsuited to this strategy—due both to the requirement of high investment into off-
spring, as well as an investment into an adaptive immune system, which is sometimes
deliberately turned off during the breeding season, but lends itself to numerous repro-
ductive cycles.15
Better examples are found in insects, where many species engage in such life-cycles
because a semelparous strategy relies on relatively short lives, which is favoured by
a high rate of juvenile survival but a high probability of death in adulthood, with
bodies being discarded relatively quickly (Fritz et al., 1982). It is in this context that
insects are often claimed to not feel pain, because they would not benefit from carrying
such expensive equipment for their survival (see Godfrey-Smith, 2020). This could
certainly be one way to respond to the pathological complexity of insect life, though
I argue elsewhere against the notion that insects do not feel pleasure and pain (Veit,
2022c). It is true, however, that many insects play a so-called r-strategy as opposed to
K-strategy, in which quantity as opposed to quality of offspring is maximized. In the
extreme, there is only one reproductive season before the organism dies, sometimes
also called ‘big bang reproducers’ (Diamond, 1982). Importantly, these should not be
understood as binary distinctions, but rather as continuums along a single axis with
two extremes. Furthermore, whereas many mammals stop growing after reaching
a reproductive stage, many insects, fish, and reptiles continue to grow until death
(Griffiths & Matthewson, 2018). These are only some among many other dimensions
in which self-maintenance and reproduction can come into conflict, and it is only
by taking an evolutionary perspective that we can understand health as a question
14 The Brown antechinus (Antechinus stuartii) being a paradigm example (see Dobson, 2013).
15 However, these animals provide an excellent case for how we could evaluate not only species- but also
sex-dependent life-history strategies, including in humans: whereas female deviations from male ‘norms’
have historically been often labeled as ‘pathological’ in humans, an evolutionary understanding of their
different pathological complexity challenges can reveal such differences to be adaptive and thus healthy
(Veit & Browning, 2022).
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3Page 18 of 24 Synthese (2023) 201 :3
of optimality of organismal design. Similar life-history trade-offs can be observed in
plants, fungi, and even single-celled organisms, making pathological complexity a
universal design problem that emerged at the very origins of life as a set of teleonomic
problems under constraints that need to be solved simultaneously in order to maximize
fitness.
4.4 Pathological and phenomenological complexity
As I mentioned above, life-history models were originally fairly simple, assuming
that age, reproduction, and self-maintenance can be modelled independently (i.e.
that the individual differences between individuals at specific ages could be ideal-
ized away) (Pianka & Parker, 1975; McNamara & Houston, 1996). More recent work
has expanded life-history theory to incorporate the behaviour, physiology, and envi-
ronmental conditions of organisms, something that is now typically referred to as
state-based behavioural and life-history theory (Mangel & Clark, 1986; McNamara &
Houston, 1996). This gets us considerably closer in modeling pathological complexity
as the fundamental problem of organismal trade-offs, but the problem also becomes
computationally far more demanding.
To maximize fitness it is no longer just a problem of choosing a single strategy
across a life-time, but also of choosing strategies at any moment of one’s life-cycle,
depending on one’s bodily state and environmental conditions. The more degrees
of freedom there are in the behavioural option space,16 the higher the pathological
complexity of this fitness-maximization problem, since organisms have to make sure
to make the right decisions at the right time, a choice that depends on their current state
and that of the environment. Indeed, they are faced with a computational explosion
of complexity. This complexity only increases when we add fluctuating environments
such as changing weather conditions, food supply, risk of predation, and population
density (e.g. Metz et al., 1992; McNamara, 1997; McNamara & Houston, 2008) and
the frequency-dependence of optimal strategies, which has been extensively studied by
evolutionary game theorists (Maynard Smith, 1987). These increases in pathological
complexity become much harder to track for both the organism and the biologist, but
that is not to say it isn’t there. Pathological complexity is the fundamental teleonomic
challenge every organism has to deal with, and as I shall argue in a compendium article
(Veit, 2022b), it is precisely due to an explosion of pathological complexity during the
Cambrian that sentience became a worthwhile investment as an efficient capacity for
consciously evaluating these continuous life-history trade-offs in action-selection.
As Romanes speculated, the origins of mind plausibly lie in enabling organisms
to represent the biological normativity of their living situation to themselves: states
are evaluated as good and bad and accordingly felt, with pleasure and pain providing
something of a proximate common currency for animals to solve the trade-off problems
arising from alternative actions. Furthermore, it is in this context that varieties of
consciousness can be described as healthy and pathological, according to how well they
enable an organism to succeed at its life-history strategy. This is precisely what we need
in order to extend the Darwinian revolution towards consciousness and endogenize
16 To simplify a bit too much: how many alternative actions an organism can take.
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 19 of 24 3
it within the explanatory scope of Darwinism. A more detailed examination of how
this evolution of evaluative consciousness commenced is the subject of another paper
of mine (Veit, 2022b). My goal here was only to highlight that it is by understanding
health as a natural phenomenon, which requires us to develop a theory of the organism
as both an object and subject, that we will be able to emulate the success of the
ethologists and Darwinize subjective experience.
Lastly, those interested in the evolution of consciousness frequently talk of a special
lifestyle or mode of being—an animal way of life emerging in the Cambrian that has
given rise to minimal sentience (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019; Godfrey-Smith, 2020).
Using life-history theory will help us to naturalize this idea in terms of the patholog-
ical complexity of this new lifestyle, and to assess the phenomenological complexity
of animals around us here and now in terms of their distinct pathological complex-
ity challenges - which I have done elsewhere in the case of insects and gastropods
(Veit, 2022c). Indeed, what we can observe is that organisms with higher pathological
complexity are inherently more subject-like, having to make complex decisions that
address their conflicting functional needs. As I hope to have motivated in this pro-
grammatic paper, it is only within this evolutionary context of the optimal life-history
strategies of biological agents, that we will understand organisms as objects as well
as subjects, and be able to extend the Darwinian revolution towards consciousness.
Thinking about their life history strategies and pathological complexity challenges
will provide an excellent ecological and evolutionary lens to think about the possible
adaptive benefits of different kinds of minds and thus move us towards a bottom-up
Darwinian study of consciousness. While this kind of work may appear speculative
at first, this is precisely how the Darwinian revolution began: by careful observation
of the natural world and making a distinction between the healthy and pathological.
And as I have shown in a series of publications applying the pathological complexity
framework to think about the mind (Veit, 2022a,2022b,2022c,2022f), a thorough
ecological understanding of both human and non-human organisms will enable us to
progress towards a true Darwinian science of the consciousness.
5 Conclusion
This programmatic paper was inspired by both the Darwinian revolution and its
extension towards behaviour, which both began with an appreciation of healthy and
pathological variations in nature. By looking at the Darwinian revolution and its exten-
sion towards behaviour, I hope to have made clear that a similar approach is needed
to extend the Darwinian revolution once again to endogenize consciousness within a
Darwinian view of life.
In order to do this, I have argued that we should draw on state-based and behavioural
life-history theory as the 21st century equivalent of the ethologist’s ethogram; a teleo-
nomic theory of the organism that is able to help us naturalize the elusive normative
and teleological properties of organisms as goal-directed systems. It is here that we
find the best current biology to make these notions safe for naturalism and further
move the philosophy of biology, along with the philosophy of medicine and of mind.
In order to think about the mind from a teleonomic Darwinian perspective, life-history
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3Page 20 of 24 Synthese (2023) 201 :3
theory offers us the means for thinking about the role of the mind for the life history
strategies of different organisms and the pathological complexity challenges they are
faced with.
Many challenges lie ahead, but it is in this teleonomic theory of the organism
that we will be able to make significant progress. In future work, including a book-
length treatment (see Veit, 2022d,2022e) will use this framework in collaboration
with biologists, to develop a mathematical measurement of pathological complexity
to assess the health of organisms and help us to think about the trade-offs inherent to
biological design and behaviour. Additionally, the classification of varieties of mental
traits into disorders of consciousness or psychiatric conditions more generally is one
of the most challenging topics in the philosophy of medicine (and psychiatry). Using
life-history theory will offer us an elegant teleonomic theory of organismal agency with
which to apply the adaptationist lens of evolutionary theory, without suffering from the
narrow externalist adaptationist thinking that has been prevalent in past applications
of evolutionary thinking to the mind (see also Veit & Browning, forthcoming). It is
here that we are provided with a theory that accounts for organisms as subjects as
well as objects, thus bridging the gap between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ accounts
of health and pathology.
If the mind evolved to keep track of the objective ‘goods’ and biological ‘wrongs’,
there would be a straightforward link between sentience and biological normativity,
providing a new domain in which a mismatch between the design of an organism
and its goals may occur—further increasing pathological complexity—just as the
evolution of behaviour did. Such a synthesis may force us to rethink older ways of
understanding, but it is only in drawing on the best recent science that we can hope
to defend a naturalist picture of the teleology, normativity, and the minds of living
systems. Finally, I hope there is some truth in the synthesis of literatures I have offered
here, and that it will inspire future work on the teleonomic nature of life and mind.
Acknowledgements My thanks go out to Paul Griffiths, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Marian Dawkins, Samir
Okasha, Heather Browning, in addition to the Theory and Methods in the Biosciences team at the University
of Sydney for their feedback on my attempt to link health, consciousness, and evolution. Discussions of my
notion of pathological complexity in Sydney, Oxford, Munich, Lund, Georgetown, and Bristol also played
an important role in the development of this article. Lastly, I would also like to thank three anonymous
reviewers for helping me to polish the manuscript into its current state.
Funding This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Coun-
cil (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant No.
101018533) and was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme
(project number FL170100160).
Declarations
Conflict of interest No conflicts of interest to report.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
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Synthese (2023) 201 :3 Page 21 of 24 3
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/.
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