When we meet a professional fortune-teller who promises to use his art to reveal our future, we generally have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the idea appeals to us that someone can look into our future by looking at our hands and relying on a determinism that is inscrutable for us but decipherable by him. On the other hand, we resist the idea that we are determined, explainable, and predictable beings. We cherish our free will and want to be beyond determinism. But at the same time, we want the doctor to cure our diseases by treating us as structurally determined systems. What does this tell us? What relation is there between our organic being and our behavior? Our purpose in this chapter and the next ones is to answer these questions. To this end we shall begin by examining more closely how we can understand a behavioral domain in all its possible dimensions.

This chapter deals with reproduction and heredity. There are two compelling reasons for this. One of them is that as living beings (and, as we shall see, as social beings), we have a history: we are descendants by reproduction, not only of our human forebears but also of very different forebears who go back in the past more than 3 billion years. The other reason is that as organisms, we are multicellular beings and all our cells descend by reproduction from the particular cell formed when an ovule united with a sperm and gave us our origin. Reproduction is therefore inserted in our history in relation to ourselves as human beings and to our individual cell components. Oddly enough, this makes us and our cells beings of the same ancestral age. Moreover, from a historical standpoint, this is valid for all living beings and all contemporary cells: we share the same ancestral age. Hence, to understand living beings in all their dimensions, and thereby understand ourselves, we have to understand the mechanisms that make living beings historical beings. To this end, we shall examine first the phenomenon of reproduction.

Excerpt: This whole book is a sort of invitation to refrain from the habit of falling into the temptation of certainty. This is necessary for two reasons. On the one hand, if the reader does not suspend his certainties, we cannot communicate anything here that will be embodied in his experience as an effective understanding of the phenomenon of cognition. On the other hand, what this book aims to show, by scrutinizing the phenomenon of cognition and our actions flowing from it, is that all cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in his biological structure. There, his experience of certainty is an individual phenomenon blind to the cognitive acts of others, in a solitude which, as we shall see, is transcended only in a world created with those others.

Excerpt: We saw in the last chapter that when two or more organisms interact recurrently, they generate a social coupling. In that coupling they are reciprocally involved in attaining their respective poieses. Behaviors that take place in these domains of social coupling, as we said, are communicative and they can be inborn or acquired. Both instinctive and learned behavior can appear to an observer as coordinations of action, and both can be described by an observer in semantic terms as if what determines the course of the interaction were the meaning and not the dynamics of structural coupling of the interacting organisms. These two kinds of communicative behavior differ, however, in the structures that make them possible. Innate behaviors depend on structures that arise in the development of the organism independently of its particular ontogeny. Acquired communicative behaviors depend on the particular ontogeny of the organism and are contingent on its peculiar history of social interactions. In this latter case, the observer can easily make a semantic description, claiming that the meaning of the different communicative behaviors arises in the ontogeny of the participant organisms, contin-gent on their particular history of coexistence. We call such learned communicative behavior a linguistic domain, because such behaviors constitute the basis for language, but they are not yet identical with it.

Excerpt: As in the case of cellular interactions in metacellulars, it is evident that from the standpoint of the internal dynamics of one organism, the other represents a source of perturbations indistinguishable from those that come from a “nonbiotic” environment. It is possible, however, for these interactions between organisms to acquire in the course of their ontogeny a recurrent nature. This will necessarily result in their consequent structural drifts: co-ontogenies with mutual involvement through their reciprocal structural coupling, each one conserving its adaptation and organization. When this happens, the co-drifting organisms give rise to a new phenomenological domain, which may become particularly complex when there is a nervous system. The phenomena arising from these third-order structural couplings will be the subject of this chapter and the next.

Excerpt: Ontogeny is the history of structural change in a unity without loss of organization in that unity. This ongoing structural change occurs in the unity from moment to moment, either as a change triggered by interactions coming from the environment in which it exists or as a result of its internal dynamics. As regards its continuous interactions with the environment, the cell unity classifies them and sees them in accordance with its structure at every instant. That structure, in turn, continuously changes because of its internal dynamics. The overall result is that the ontogenic transformation of a unity ceases only with its disintegration.

In this chapter we shall go over some topics that arise from the foregoing chapters, to understand this organic evolution in a general and global way, for without an adequate understanding of the historical mechanisms of structural transformation there is no understanding of the phenomenon of cognition. Actually, the key to understanding the origin of evolution lies in something which we noted in the earlier chapters: the inherent association between differences and similarities in each reproductive stage, conserva-tion of organizations, and structural change. Because there are similarities, there is the possibility || of a historical series or uninterrupted lineage. Because there are structural differences, there is the possibility of historical variations in the lineages. But, more precisely, how is it that certain lineages are produced or established and others are not? How is it that, when we look around, fish seem to us so naturally aquatic and horses so naturally adapted to the plains? To answer these questions, we must look more closely and explicitly at how interactions occur between living beings and their environment.

In this chapter we wish to examine in what way the nervous system expands the realms of interaction of an organism. We have already seen that behavior is not an invention of the nervous system. It is proper to any unity seen in an environment where the unity specifies a realm of perturbations and maintains its organization owing to the changes of state that these perturbations trigger in it.

Our starting point has been the awareness that all knowing is an action by the knower, that is, that all knowing depends on the structure of the knower. And this starting point will be the signpost to our conceptual journey throughout these pages: how is knowledge brought forth in “doing”? What are the roots and mechanisms that make it operate in this way? In the light of these questions, the first step along our journey is as follows: knowing is the action of the knower; it is rooted in the very manner of his living being, in his organization. We hold that the biological roots of knowing cannot be understood only through examining the nervous system; we believe it is necessary to understand how these processes are rooted in the living being as a whole. Therefore, in this chapter we are going to discuss a few things about the organization of living things. This discussion will not be an ornament of biology or a kind of crash course for those who lack biological training. In this book it is a key feature to help us understand the phenomenon of cognition in all its facets.

Excerpt: If the reader has followed seriously what was said in these pages, he will be impelled to look at everything he does – smelling, seeing, building, preferring, rejecting, conversing – as a world brought forth in coexistence with other people through the mechanisms we have described. If we have lured our reader to see himself in the same way as these phenomena, this book will have achieved its first objective. Doing that, of course, will put us in a circular situation. It might leave us a bit dizzy, as though following the hands drawn by Escher. This dizziness results from our not having a fixed point of reference to which we can anchor our descriptions in order to affirm and defend their validity. In effect, if we presuppose the existence of an objective world, independent of us as observers and accessible to our knowledge through our nervous system, we cannot understand how our nervous system functions in its structural dynamics and still produce a representation of this independent || world. But if we do not presuppose an objective world independent of us as observers, it seems we are accepting that everything is relative and anything is possible in the denial of all lawfulness. Thus we confront the problem of understanding how our experience – the praxis of our living – is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories.