The Sensing-and-Acting Loop

The sensing-and-acting loop is the deepest root of mind in Peter Godfrey-Smith's evolutionary account. Before there was anything recognizable as cognition, there was the loop: an organism that could detect features of its environment and adjust its behavior accordingly. A bacterium sensing a chemical gradient and swimming toward food. A simple animal detecting light and moving. These are not minds, but they are the substrate from which mind evolved, because they establish the fundamental circuit that all cognition elaborates: the loop in which an organism takes in information about its world and uses that information to do something that matters to its survival. What distinguishes this loop from mere information processing is that it is closed around a life. The sensing serves the acting, and the acting serves the organism's persistence. Information, in living systems, is never free-floating: it is always information for an organism,