Context: South African public universities are currently undergoing a transitional period as they traverse the sensitive road of curriculum redesign that achieves an inclusive approach to education for the goal of the decolonisation of knowledge. Problem: Many classrooms have students from several cultural backgrounds yet in these spaces there is often a single dominant discourse on offer. An ethical question is raised in terms of what content should be addressed in the classroom. Method: An approach to curricula design as a conversation is presented. The philosophical aspects underlying shifts in epistemology are presented following an eclectic approach to curricula design that embraces second-order science in achieving the ongoing goal of decolonisation. The method used to achieve this goal is conversational heterarchical curriculum design assuming non quidem tabula rasa. Students can act as reference points (Nunataks) for curricula design, thus reducing the abstraction in the syllabus. Results: A heterarchical conversational approach offers a platform whereby social justice may be addressed in the classroom by providing a means by which the students’ own epistemology is embraced within the curriculum as the students provide the trajectory for the course content based on their own epistemology. A dynamic curriculum is then available that has immediate use in the communities that the students reside in. Students demonstrate understanding of the content as it is tied to their own way of knowing. Implications: The benefits of this approach include moving away from defining science according to a realist view. Educators may accept the idea that knowledge is not impartial and that method is tied to epistemology. When the observer is included in science, an awareness arises that theories (at least in the social sciences) affect what is studied, which in turn affects society. Constructivist content: The approach builds on von Foerster’s ideas on reflexivity. Pask’s conversation theory is a vehicle for the attainment of reflexive conversational teaching and learning.

Key words: Adaptation, curriculum design, conversation theory, cybernetics, decolonisation, ethics, heterarchy, nunatak, reflexivity, second-order science, ubuntuism.

The functional organization of the nervous system is discussed from the standpoint of organizational closure and regenerative process in order to draw parallels between life and mind. Living organization entails continual regeneration of material parts and functional relations (self-production). Similarly, dynamic stability of informational states in brains may entail coherent self-regenerating patterns of neural signals. If mind is the functional organization of the nervous system, then mental states can be seen as switchings between alternative sets of stable, self-regenerative neural signal productions. In networks of neurons, signaling resonances can be created through recurrent, reentrant neural circuits that are organized to implement a heterarchy of correlational operations. Neural representations are dynamically built-up through an interplay between externally-impressed, incoming sensory signals and internally-generated circulating signals to form pattern-resonances. Semiotic aspects of resonance states involve semantic sensori-motor linkages to and through the external environment and pragmatic linkages to evaluative mechanisms that implement internal goal states. It is hypothesized that coherent regenerative signaling may be an organizational requirement for a material system to support conscious awareness. In this view general anesthetics and seizures abolish awareness by temporarily disrupting the organizational coherence of regenerative neural signaling.

Abstract: By introducing us into core concepts of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, Elena Esposito shows their relevance for contemporary social sciences and the study of unsettled times. Contending that society is made not by people but by what connects them - as Luhmann does with his concept of communication - creates a fertile ground for addressing societal challenges as diverse as the Corona pandemic or the algorithmic revolution. Esposito more broadly sees in systems theory a relevant contribution to critical theory and a genuine alternative to its Frankfurt School version, while extending its reach to further conceptual refinement and new empirical issues. Fueling such refinement is her analysis of time and the complex intertwinement between past, present and future - a core issue that runs throughout her work. Her current study on the future as a prediction caught between science and divination offers a fascinating empirical case for it, drawing a thought-provoking parallel between the way algorithmic predictions are constructed today and how divinatory predictions were constructed in ancient times. Keywords: Algorithms, communication, critical theory, future, heterarchy, Luhmann, paradox, prediction, semantics, sociology, subsystems, systems theory, time.

The Cambridge (UK) Declaration on Consciousness, proclaimed on July 7, 2012 at a Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, states that there is natural intelligence, and by implication, mind in nature. The declaration marks a significant shift from portraying animal agency through a mechanistic lens. Many years before Bateson had argued that the key to eliminating animal-human dualism lies in an understanding of communication processes, that is, recognition and investigation of an implicate order without which animate existence would not survive. The first part of this article will discuss how communication yields real world patterns to which natural intelligence responds. Bateson is supported in this argument by Ruth Garrett Millikan, the founder of Biosemantics, who also demonstrates how the grasping of natural signs in recursive relational patterns generates meaningful interactions. The second part of this paper concerns mapping of multiple levels of organic existence and how a notion of heterarchical order is linked to communication processes in and between these multiple levels. This important switch of reference stems from Bateson transposing Warren McCulloch’s ideas about distributed memory. Bateson transforms McCulloch’s technical (computer-oriented) insight into a means for mapping redundancy in levels of communication feedback. Recent publications by scholars influenced by Bateson’s approach explain how communication processes coordinate non-transitive distribution of multiple layers of organization into heterarchies rather than hierarchies (Bruni & Giorgi, 2015, 2016). They show why the importance of the notion of heterarchy, with its dynamic synchronicity, has grown in recent years, especially in respect of the way in which genetics interrelates to microbiotic, epigenetic and environmental levels of organization. In addition, Nomura, Murunaba, Tomita, & Matsuno (2018) argue that synchronicity requires an altered understanding of temporality in the plant kingdom. An important addition to our understanding of time concerns the inter-subjective timing of organisms, as they negotiate localized coordination. The perspectives of inter-subjective time is one which extends beyond its usual correlates of subjectivity and objectivity, and modifies these perspectives that, until now, have fostered dualism. A final consideration is Bateson’s move to diminish dualism through an understanding of holographic coding. Its resonance of downward causation permits communication to be informative in the whole econiche, so permitting re-entry of ecosystemic form in order to resist fragmentation and competition among its parts (Harries-Jones, 2016a). Wohlleben (2016) provides an empirical example of this Gaia-like performance.

Key words: analog-digital consensus, circadian clocks, heterarchy, holographic coding, intersubjective time, millikan’s natural signs, proto-cognitive appraisal, redundancy, synchronicity

This chapter proposes a general model of social systems and – by doing so – shows that despite widespread prejudices sociological theory can and has to include epistemological questions. As a result of this insight, the traditional alternative between individuals (in the sense of psychology) and “the social” can be left behind. To achieve this goal the understanding of components and their relation to individuals are as central as the concept of organization. The argument of the paper is structured by a number of theses together with commentaries. They are intended to show the continuity of the issue (social systems both as constructs and as construing “actors”) at least since Durkheim. The chapter focuses on social systems in a constructivist theory of the social. To underline the specificity of social systems that function “as entities” because of similarities between their interacting participants (who therefore become “components”); it is proposed to characterize social systems as “synreferential.” The importance of the organization of social systems to explain the way systems function is finally made explicit with reference to the selectivity of the organization (the hierarchy versus heterarchy-problem, self-organization).