| | I point out it's not necessary to plead to vitalism to explain the nature of the mind nor life itself.
Consider things that seemingly are 'alive.' Fire, hurricanes, and pyrite all pretty much seem 'alive' in one respect or another (growth, reproduction, and consumption/survival). Yet, it's pretty clear not one of them is alive like a human, or any other living thing know. They don't have DNA to transmit genes by. They don't have something like cell walls to contain their mechanisms (especially fire has no border between other fires). And they don't seem to show any ordered response to radically different changes in environments (hurricanes keep moving until they hit a bad patch of cold water and fizzle out. And pyrite keeps growing until it hits something that nullifies its growth.).
So, what makes these three things seem alive? Well, the simple answer is that many of the features of life come from matter itself, in the respect that matter allows them as an option to be exercised, and easily so. It follows then that other complex systems, as they evolve in the environment, will come along to exploit these options, and it just happened that the mechanisms of life (DNA and its predicessors) did that. Also, life, like the other three examples of somewhat life-like phenomena, are emergent, in that no one compositional structure defines the full behavior of the entity/phenomena in question. Water doesn't define the full behavior of a hurricane, but it does give it physical flexibility in its motion. The elements that allow pyrite to exist also give it its property to grow, but it doesn't stop it from growing and mixing into other elements, thus altering their shapes as well. And the fuel that allows fire, may define what a fire entails, but it doesn't stop it from spreading to other kinds of fuel if available.
That's the key point here, life is emergent. It comes from seemingly simpler components to give rise to new features of behavior not implicitly or explicitly defined by the components themselves. DNA doesn't define how animals would evolve, it doesn't have the structure to exclude the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. It doesn't have the structure to explain the evolution of the human species. All DNA has is the ability to reproduce itself, and possibly sustain itself within a specific framework of the environment. Even genes don't explain the whole story. They can tell you what sorts of proteins come into the formation of an animal, but not what kind of animal. It can regulate the production of proteins, but not define what every protein is always for (since many proteins are used just everywhere in the body for many processes). So, this suggests that many features of life as we know it come about as it becomes more complex, which includes the human mind.
Millions of years of evolution for the primates, inevitibility driven by the drying of Africa through the ice ages, lead to the possibility of a perceptual engine giving way to a conceptual one, in that the first animals to evolve to contain the capacity of perception laid down the foundation from which a mind could be produced upon. It just happened the species related to humans were the ones to reap the benefit of having a mind, an ability to work on things remembered and to learn, to make new memories based on thinking and not just experiecing. This process requires no etheric soul. It only requires that perception evolved from the species in the animal kingdom, through natural selection, and that no one given component to life excluded it explicitly/implicitly. From this context, it makes it clear why we have minds, and why we're alive, without soul, and without mysticism.
-- Brede
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