CONCEPT
Life-Mind Continuity
Thompson's thesis that mind is continuous with life — that cognition is not a special capacity added to biological systems but an elaboration of the sense-making that begins with the first autopoietic cell.
The life-mind continuity thesis is the philosophical engine behind Thompson's claim that AI will never achieve human-level intelligence. The thesis holds that the capacities we identify as mental — evaluation, discrimination, adaptive response, eventually conceptual thought and consciousness — are not faculties layered onto a pre-existing biological substrate but continuous elaborations of the basic sense-making that every living system performs. Pull the thread of consciousness and life comes with it. Pull the thread of life and the minimal conditions for cognition come with it. The two cannot be separated without distorting both. This continuity runs both directions: mind reaches down into life, in that the cognitive capacities of the human brain are elaborations of capacities already present in simpler organisms; and life reaches up into mind, in that the features distinguishing living systems from non-living ones are the same features distinguishing genuine cognition from mere computation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thesis has an immediate consequence for the