yuvaraj2

[yuvaraj2]

Vitalism vs. Biosemiotic Theory

Although both Vitalism and Biosemiotic Theory maintain that the unique features of Life and Mind cannot be explained in terms of a mere physical mechanism, they differ in some important ways:

Vitalism argues for a Platonic, disembodied source of living and mental phenomena. Biosemiotics develops a more Aristotelian notion of the Idea as always dependant upon, though not reducible to, material embodiment.

The vitalist Elan Vital, like the Spirit of Hegel’s Dialectic, is an animating force entering the physical world from without. As Marx did to Hegel, and Darwin did to the Great Chain of Being, Biosemiotics turns the vitalist notion on its head; what was the given as the explanation now requires explanation: how is it that living and mental phenomena emerge in a strictly material universe devoid of these properties?

Furthermore life and semiosis are far more than the transfer of “energy” of any sort of one point from another, which is why discussions on thermodynamic entropy are redundant (or at least they are only part of the story).

-J

[yuvaraj2]

If consciousness is an emergent property produced by biology to create an illusion of self so you have the desire to live and eventually pass on your genes, I must say it's doing a tremendously bad job at it. Though, not all biological functions of the body do their job properly, perhaps in being psychologically medicated we're trying to 'fix' our consciousness.