concept

environmental complexity thesis

Facts (10)

Sources

Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness | Biological Theory link.springer.com Springer Sep 14, 2022 10 facts

quoteDavid Spurrett proposes a friendly amendment to the environmental complexity thesis, stating: "The function of cognition is to enable the agent to coordinate its (possibly complex) capacities, which can include coordinating those capacities with environmental complexity."

referenceThe environmental complexity thesis, as discussed by Sterelny (2003), provides a useful coarse-grained abstraction for investigating the origins of desire-like states, despite Sterelny's earlier criticism of the thesis for linking adaptationism and externalism.

claimPeter Godfrey-Smith recognizes that the environmental complexity thesis is not driven by environmental complexity itself, but rather by the complexity that is faced by and matters to an organism.

claimGodfrey-Smith's (1996a) environmental complexity thesis is an externalist theory, meaning it explains organismal features through properties external to the organism rather than internal ones.

claimExplications of the environmental complexity thesis have historically paid little attention to the organism as a 'design and control architecture,' instead treating the mind as a mechanism that decides actions based on external states of the world, according to Spurrett (2020).

claimUnlike Herbert Spencer and John Dewey, who included consciousness in their explanations of mental complexity, Godfrey-Smith (1996a) restricted his environmental complexity thesis to explaining basic cognitive capacities while excluding subjective experience.

referenceGodfrey-Smith's (1996a) environmental complexity thesis attempted to reconcile earlier ideas from John Dewey and Herbert Spencer regarding the continuity between life and mind within the modern framework of evolutionary theory, positing the mind as a natural consequence of the evolution of biological complexity.

claimJohn Dewey viewed the complexity of the mind as something that evolved to address problems emerging from the dynamics between an organism and its environment, a perspective the author notes is closer to the pathological complexity thesis than to Godfrey-Smith's externalist environmental complexity thesis.

claimKeijzer and colleagues popularized an inverse version of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis in a series of publications.

claimGodfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis is incomplete because it fails to account for the strategy of becoming simpler to reduce pathological complexity in response to environmental heterogeneity.