This paper attempts to establish a systems-semiotic framework explaining creativity in the design process, where the design process is considered to have as its basis the cognitive process. The design process is considered as the interaction between two or more cognitive systems resulting in a purposeful and ongoing transformation of their already complex representational structures and the production of newer ones, in order to ful?ll an ill-defined goal. Creativity is considered as the result of an emergence of organizational complexity in each cognitive system participating in the design process, while it is trying to purposefully incorporate new constraints in its meaning structures. The meanings generated in each system are identi?ed as the contingent and anticipatory content of its representations, and where self-organization is the dominant process in which they are continuously involved. Furthermore, Peircean semiotic processes appear to provide the functionality needed by the emergent representational structures in order to complete the cycle of a creative design process. Creativity originates in the abductive stage of the semiotic process, the fallible nature of which is maintained in the proposed framework by the fact that the respective emergent representations can be mis?ts. The nodal points of the framework are identified and analyzed showing that a cognitive system needs the whole interactive anticipatory cycle in order to engage in a creative design process.

Key words: Anticipations, Creativity, Emergent Representations, Peircean Semiotic Processes, Self-organization

Upshot: Time constraints, locked curriculums, strict management, and possible anarchy in the classroom are some of the themes that originated from the commentaries. I argue that these challenges should be viewed holistically in the broader picture. I also question the educator’s role in mitigating these obstacles. My advice: Do it anyway.

The notion of structural coupling plays a central role in Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition framework and strongly influenced Varela’s subsequent enactive elaboration of this framework. Building upon previous work using a glider in the Game of Life (GoL) cellular automaton as a toy model of a minimal autopoietic system with which to concretely explore these theoretical frameworks, this article presents an analysis of structural coupling between a glider and its environment. Specifically, for sufficiently small GoL universes, we completely characterize the nonautonomous dynamics of both a glider and its environment in terms of interaction graphs, derive the set of possible glider lives determined by the mutual constraints between these interaction graphs, and show how such lives are embedded in the state transition graph of the entire GoL universe.

Key words: autopoiesis, enaction, structural coupling, cellular automata, enactivism

Open peer commentary on the article “Enaction as a Lived Experience: Towards a Radical Neurophenomenology” by Claire Petitmengin. Upshot: The neurophenomenological project is too ambitious technically, but highly appealing on the philosophical level, as can be learned from the extremely high ratio between theoretical and empirical work concerning neurophenomenology accumulated thus far. While “radical” neurophenomenology could possibly create, in highly unique projects, “mutual generative constraints,” will the hard problem be dissolved? I argue that although using micro phenomenology, as long as experimental designs inspired by front-loading phenomenological insights are reviewed by the regular scientific mind, the question of validating the phenomenology with objective measures remains, and will keep blocking the outbreak in this promising field. Since “we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them,” it is timely for the scientific community to practice an attitude shift.

This paper is a practical guide to neurophenomenology. Varela’s neurophenomenological research program (NRP) aspires to bridge the gap between, and integrate, first-person (1P) and third-person (3P) approaches to understanding the mind. It does so by suggesting a methodological framework allowing these two irreducible phenomenal domains to relate and reciprocally support the investigation of one another. While highly appealing theoretically, neurophenomenology invites researchers to a challenging methodological endeavor. Based on our experience with empirical neurophenomenological implementation, we offer practical clarifications and insights learnt along the way. In the first part of the paper, we outline the theoretical principles of the NRP and briefly present the field of 1P research. We speak to the importance of phenomenological training and outline the utility of cooperating with meditators as skilled participants. We suggest that 1P accounts of subjective experience can be placed on a complexity continuum ranging between thick and thin phenomenology, highlighting the tension and trade-off inherent to the neurophenomenological attempt to naturalize phenomenology. We then outline a typology of bridges, which create mutual constraints between 1P and 3P approaches, and argue for the utility of alternating between the bridges depending on the available experimental resources, domain of interest and level of sought articulation. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate how the theory can be put into practice by describing a decade of neurophenomenological studies investigating the sense of self with increasing focus on its embodied, and minimal, aspects. These aspects are accessed via the dissolution of the sense-of-boundaries, shedding new light on the multi-dimensionality and flexibility of embodied selfhood. We emphasize the evolving neurophenomenological dialogue, showing how consecutive studies, placed differently on the thin-to-thick 1P continuum, advance the research project by using the bridging principles appropriate for each stage.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers, led by Francisco Varela, were proposing an alternative vision of the immune system main behavior and function. I was part of this group. This new vision saw the immune system not as behaving distinctively with self and non-self or according to any dichotomy imposed a priori and from outside (the self-recognition vision), but rather as behaving in a unique way. From this indifferent behavior, any external impact would progressively been treated in two different ways, reactive and tolerant, but now, consequently and from inside the system (the self-assertion view). This paper will recall, through a very artificial simulation, the difference existing between these two visions. Also at that time, we believed that, from an engineering perspective, this new vision, emphasizing more the adaptability and the need for endogenous constraints than the recognition and the defensive ability, although less obvious to accept than the classical defensive one, should be more beneficial. These last ten years proved that we haven’t been convincing enough, and in this paper I resume the crusade.

Biology gives us numerous examples of self-assertional systems whose essence does not precede their existence but is rather revealed through it. Immune system is one of them. The fact of behaving in order not only to satisfy external constraints as a pre-fixed set of possible environments and objectives, but also to satisfy internal “viability” constraints justifies a sharper focus. Adaptability, creativity and memory are certainly interesting “side-effects” of such a tendency for self-consistency. However in this paper, we adopted a largely pragmatic attitude attempting to find the best hybridizing between the biological lessons and the engineering needs. The great difficulty, also shared by neural net and GA users, remains the precise localisation of the frontier where the biological reality must give way to a directed design.

In this paper we provide some theoretical guidelines for the characterization of the specificity of biological systems in terms of organization and constraints. In the first place we advocate the view according to which a sound account of biological organization requires an appeal to emergent causation, and we propose a theoreti-cal justification of emergence against existing criticisms by consid-ering it as a causal power stemming from the relational properties of material configurations. Then, by interpreting constraints as a spe-cific form of this emergent causal power, we propose a distinction between the roles played by constraints in physical and biological systems. As a result we provide a possible definition of biological organization as a closed network of co-dependent and internally produced constraints.

Functional and pragmatic approaches to grammar, and to language more broadly, are well known. All of these approaches, however, accept a core aspect of sentences, or utterances, as consisting of encodings of propositions. They proceed on their functional and pragmatic explorations with this much, at least, taken for granted. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that the functional characteristics of utterances penetrate even to the level of the structure – the grammar – of supposed propositional encodings. More specifically, I argue that the structure that is taken as a structure of propositional encodings is not that at all, but is instead a structure of functionally organized action. Constraints on such structures, in turn – constraints on grammars – emerge as intrinsic constraints on that functional organization. My point will of necessity be made programmatically, since to fill it out completely would be to complete a functional version of universal grammar. The mere logical possibility of intrinsic constraints on the grammatical possibilities of language refutes attempts to construe grammatical constraints as logically arbitrary. Typically, because grammatical constraints are construed as being (logically) arbitrary, some additional explanation of the constraints is required should those constraints be shown or argued to be universal. That additional explanation is usually some equally logically arbitrary innateness postulate. I will show that the possibility of intrinsic grammatical constraints invalidates standard arguments for such innateness – specifically, that such a possibility invalidates the poverty of the stimulus argument. Grammatical constraints are not the only characteristics of language that are intrinsic to its nature. I also show how phenomena of implicature, the hermeneutic circle, and forms of creative language can be understood as being naturally emergent in the functional nature of language. Most broadly, then, intrinsic constraints constitute a rich realm for exploration in attempting to understand language.

Current cognitive science models of perception and action assume that the objects that we move toward and perceive are represented as determinate in our experience of them. A proper phenomenology of perception and action, however, shows that we experience objects indeterminately when we are perceiving them or moving toward them. This indeterminacy, as it relates to simple movement and perception, is captured in the proposed phenomenologically based recurrent network models of brain function. These models provide a possible foundation from which predicative structures may arise as an emergent phenomenon without the positing of a representing subject. These models go some way in addressing the dual constraints of phenomenological accuracy and neurophysiological plausibility that ought to guide all projects devoted to discovering the physical basis of human experience.