![]() Clearly doing so, if feasible at all, would require a radical expansion, along with a capacity for scaling, of our current concept of normativity. Beyond thematizing it as a problem (a worthy endeavor in itself, I claim) I will want to explore the role of “normativity” in hominin/human integration and toy with the idea of normativity being a force of nature. Lest there be any doubt, I do not aspire to overcome the problem of integration tout court in this paper. Footnote 2 Perennial claims by biologists to have solved the problem of the origins of life have either been projections based upon the largely uncritical metaphysics of informational idealism (masquerading as consensual science), or based on the largesse of liberal promissory notes fueled by commercial marketing interests. The fact that a natural bacterial chromosome could be successfully replaced by an artifactual chromosome only further testifies to the irreducible importance of a naturally integrated unit, the bacterial cell, as the prior condition of possibility for any molecular configuration, natural or artificial, to be a chromosome. ![]() If merely conventionally mechanistic associations of parts outside of parts ( partes extra partes) Footnote 1 were sufficient for creating a living unit, it would have been achieved long since. If we assume consciousness is a physically based phenomenon, and that it draws upon the activity of various parts of the brain, let alone constituent cells, then we must face our deficits in understanding how the experience of a unified consciousness is realized at the level of an integration of some cells but not others albeit in the absence of evident, non-arbitrary, physical boundaries.īoth more fundamental than the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and more expansive in scope, the problem of integration/unification is also central to the problem of the origin(s) of life. Nor would even an understanding of how subjectivity could be resident to a single cell tell us how consciousness could become an integrated unity across many cells. Granted, how a natural entity can have interiority, i.e., subjectivity, is a hard problem, but if the question of integration and unification is not identical to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (Chalmers 1995) it is also inseparable from it and surely a presupposition of the very possibility of interiority. Indeed, it is perhaps the hard problem of the philosophy of life and mind. The problem of natural integration, or perhaps unification – the constitution of a unity – is a truly hard problem that has seldom if ever been addressed as such. In so doing we claim to have made an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalist framework, to have provided philosophical anthropology with a new (post-individualist) point of departure, and at least playfully, to have given some naturalistic grist to Hegel’s proclamation that spirit (Geist) is the truth of nature. ![]() Following this line of enquiry, we argue that the first expression of a fully, normatively-integrated life-form is neither a spoken language user nor for that matter an individual but rather the neoteny-based, Homo erectus Group. The paper introduces and explores the idea that normativity, embedded in a wide-ranging theory of natural detachment, can be considered an emergent force of nature that is requisite to accounting for levels of integration beyond that which is explicable in terms of the four fundamental forces of physics. Surely, the emergence of “entities” (i.e., life-forms) that position themselves in relation to their surround marks a decisive transition in relative levels of detachment and some would say “autonomy.” It would follow, with no less force, that where and when entities can be seen to be normatively integrated, and indeed to be the agents of their own normativity, that another threshold of detachment has been crossed. Helmuth Plessner made a powerful case for the onset of “positionality” constituting one of the major transitions in nature. If we take it that the universe begins as an integral unity (the singularity referred to as “the cosmic egg”) and explodes into progressive stages of internal detachment, then we can also fathom the idea that eddies of relative detachment becoming increasingly integral. However, from a naturalistic perspective, accounting for anything more integral than the attachments and attractions that are explicable in terms of the four fundamental forces of physics has been anything but straightforward. From a subjective point of view, we take the existence of integrated entities, i.e., ourselves as the most unproblematic given, and blithely project such integrity onto untold many “entities” far and wide.
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