Mind is Literally Life-like

I came across this great quote from Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy at Harvard:

"Life and mind have a common abstract pattern or set of basic organizational properties. The functional properties characteristic of mind are an enriched version of the functional properties that are fundamental to life in general. Mind is literally life-like."

Godfrey-Smith, P. (1996)
Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


In other words, if we could ascertain the organization properties of nature, we could perhaps also apply these to cognition. While I want to investigate further 'environmental complexity theory', the issue for me is that of course the mind evolved in response to a complex environment, and that the environment has helped to shape it, but this doesn't really explain the unique qualities of the human mind. Animal minds, too, evolved in response to a complex environment, and yet animals don't (to our knowledge) share our language, memory and predictive abilities. So there must be more to this story. I suppose I'm more interested in determining HOW our minds are organized, their intrinsic structures, rather than finding out WHY they evolved at all. Asking WHY we have minds is something else entirely.

Another quote I've always loved is from Back to Methuselah, by George Bernard Shaw (which I first read in 1983):

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. "

George Bernard Shaw Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 - 1950)

This quote eludes to Lamarckian theory
1. Evolution can occur as a consequence of the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics'
2. A property of life is that it generates increases in the complexity of organization

Searching on 'self-organizing complex systems in nature' returned something to the effect that such a system would be non-linear with a stochastic driver (fractal statistics, chaotic behavior, localized, bottom-up, additive, cumulative -- makes me think about ant-behaviour; communication only with your nearest neighbour).