Contemporary debates over plant cognition, slime mold learning, and bacterial behavior share a common dysfunction: biological observations are held hostage to terminological verdict. Before a phenomenon can be understood, it must first be judged — does it qualify as cognition? Does it rise to the threshold of consciousness? This paper argues that the dysfunction is not empirical but conceptual,...
Current debates surrounding concepts such as “basal cognition,” “minimal cognition,” “plant intelligence,” and “consciousness” are deeply mired in terminological demarcation and phenomenological description, with each side entrenched in its own position and consensus elusive. This paper proposes a meta-theoretical framework based on the “Sentient Principle,” shifting the focus of cognitive...
This book proposes and systematically elaborates the "Sentient Principle," a novel paradigm for life sciences. The Sentient Principle traces back to Robert Whytt's (1751) insight into the essence of life, was deepened through Ivan Sechenov's theory of "Systemic Feelings," and achieves theoretical integration on the foundation of Gerald Edelman's Neural Darwinism. The core thesis of the Sentient...
Contemporary mind science has reached an impasse over the "hard prob-lem" of consciousness, facing the predicament of data-rich yet theoreti-cally fragmented. This paper proposes the "Generative Theory of the Sensation-Behavior Cycle," achieving a fundamental paradigm shift: from abstract speculation about "consciousness" to the study of life itself as a generative process of the "Youjue...