How did minds first evolve out of matter?Could consciousness have evolved more than once?How can we tell which living things have minds? Is there something it’slike做一只螃蟹，过螃蟹的生活?这周我们要讲的是“心灵与物质”

头脑是一种奇怪的东西!我们是有血有肉的生物，但不知何故我们有意识经验。我们感知周围的世界，我们觉得自己是可以在世界上移动和行动的主体。像身体这样的东西是如何拥有我们称之为心灵的奇妙事物的?

I’m not going to attempt to solve themind-body problemin this blog, but I do think whatever the solution ultimately is,both思想和身体将用物理术语来解释。Minds and bodies are made of essentially the samestuff, and that goes whether we’re talking about an octopus mind or a human mind. Call the position that there is only one type of stuff in the world monism. Physicalism, the view that there is nothing above or beyond the physical world, is a type of monism.

Descartes famously proposed adualist theory of mind. He argued that minds and bodies are fundamentally different substances. Minds (or souls) are essentiallyimmaterial，纯粹的意识，由理性，而不是机械控制。Bodies, on the other hand, are essentiallymaterial, physical stuff that is pushed and pulled by natural forces in the world.

In her correspondence with Descartes,Elisabeth of Bohemia想知道如果思想和身体是如此的不同，它们怎么可能相互作用。想想笛卡尔提出的思想，作为一种纯粹的思考的物质，不能在空间中扩展(因此可能没有位置)，而且不受物理定律的约束。这很重要，因为这是解释自由意志的一种方式。However, bodies, as pure matter,dooccupy space andaresubject to the laws of physics. So, how do bodies have any effect on minds, and how do minds have any effect on bodies?

This was a problem that Descartes himself admitted he could never come up with a satisfactory answer to. He did have an account of the pineal gland as the locus of interaction or “union” between body and mind, but this doesn’t help unless we can first answer the “how possible” question that Elisabeth raises about the mind and body's interaction with one another.

There are other problems with Cartesian Dualism—Descartes had a very strange view of nonhuman animals, and claimed that they had no minds at all. The term he used to describe them was “fleshy automata.” Nonhuman animals were basically machines in his view, which meant that they had no moral standing either. (Human bodies were also like machines for Descartes, but they formed a union with the soul/mind, which is why in the mid twentieth century, philosopherGilbert Ryle将笛卡尔的理论描述为“机器里的幽灵教条”。)

我来大胆猜测一下，笛卡尔可能从来没有养过宠物。我觉得和狗呆在一起，很难不相信狗是有思想的生物，也许不完全像我们的思想，但是思想。事实上，世界上生活着各种各样的这样的生物，它们都有自己亲身经历的生活。There’s something it’sliketo be a dog and to live a dog’s life. I may never know exactly what that’s like, but that’s not to deny the dog’s subjective reality.

I don’t think it’s too controversial, even in 2020,to claim that mammals, at least, and maybe some birds, and some cephalopods, like octopuses, have minds, that they have experiences of the world. But what about fish? Or insects? Or a whole host of simpler life forms? Maybe Descartes was right aboutsomeanimals being more like “fleshy automata.” Does a fruit fly have a mind, for example? This is where, I suspect, we will start to find more disagreement.

In order to answer a question like this, we need to know what exactly a mind is and what would count as evidence of one. Let’s stick with the example of fruit flies for a moment. They can do amazing things, like navigate mazes and track a moving target along the hypotenuse. Surprisingly, they’re actually quite smart.

但是，把聪明归因于某事是什么意思呢?在一个有智能手机、智能电视和智能冰箱的世界里，“智能”并不能说明太多。We also talk about the intelligence of living things like plants, which can sense where the sun is and direct their growth in that direction, but that’s not to say plants haveminds或者任何类似心灵的东西。

So maybe what we really want to know about fruit flies is if they areconscious. Do they have subjective experiences of the world? Well, fruit flies, like us and unlike plants and cell phones, have brains. Teeny, tiny brains, of course, but brains nevertheless. So we might take this as evidence to consider. Maybe insects don’t have the kind of rich mental lives we humans have, but who’s to say there’s not something it’sliketo view the world the way a fruit fly does?

If we think the existence of a brain is important somehow, then we have to ask whether one isnecessaryfor consciousness. In other words, if something doesn't have a brain, can it still have a mind? And we also have to ask whether a brain issufficientfor a mind. Could members of a particular species have brains but still never have conscious experience?

我想你们很多人都认为大脑，或者至少是神经系统，是心智的必要条件。这是一个很自然的假设。毕竟，我们很容易发现，像我们这样的动物，比如黑猩猩，也有思想和内心世界。从进化的角度来说，它们和我们非常接近，所以我们认识到它们相似的生物和相似的身体形态，以及相似的社会习惯和情感反应。灵长类动物是我们的近亲，它们的大脑和我们非常相似。非灵长类哺乳动物是大家庭的一部分，只是不那么亲密，但最终我们都是从同一个遥远的祖先进化而来的，因此我们与他们有很多共同点。

But think about other creatures that are completely different from us, that are related to us so far back on the evolutionary tree we find it hard to find much family resemblance at all. Squids, tardigrades, sponges! Just because they’rereallyevolutionarilydistant doesn’t mean they can't have consciousness of some kind. Consciousness could have evolved more than once in the history of evolution, in different creatures with radically different physical forms, living in very different environments from us. We can’t simply assume that it didn’t anyway. And if that’s a real possibility, then we can’t assume that brains are necessary for minds, though they might be necessary forhumanormammalminds. I believe that if we keep an open mind about this possibility, there are potentially many exciting discoveries that await us.

我们本周节目的嘉宾是彼得·戈弗雷-史密斯，他是一位哲学家，花了很多时间在水下观察各种奇怪而奇妙的生物，有时还与之互动。He has a new book out calledMetazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind在这本书中，他讲述了许多关于这些经历的故事，并利用这些故事来总结关于心智进化的重要经验，以及作为一个对世界有主观经验的动物意味着什么。

Tune in this week for a great show!

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