The emergence of mind is a central issue in cognitive philosophy. The main working assumption of the present paper is that several important insights in answering this question might be provided by the nature of life itself. It is in this line of thinking that this paper compares two major philosophical conceptualizations of the living in the history of theoretical biology, namely those of Maturana and Aristotle. The present paper shows how both thinkers describe the most fundamental properties of the living as autonomous sustenance. The paper also shows how these theoretical insights might have a consequence upon our understanding of a specific constructiveness of human cognition, here referred to as enarrativity, if this can be considered in a structural as well as evolutionary connection with the structure of life as such. The paper finally suggests that the structural connection made here can be traced from the fundamental organization of self-preservation to survival behaviors to constructive orientation and action.

Key words: autopoiesis, soul, system theory, organism, cognitive philosophy, enarrativity, theoretical biology.

“Enactive knowledge” is distributed across all the interactions between an organism and its environment. When a human subject interacts with a computerized virtual environment, his motor acts determine sensory feedback from the machine, giving rise to sensory-motor dynamics. The traces of these interactions, which are readily retrieved from the computer, complete information concerning the user’s activities. The analysis of traces makes it possible to describe the sensory-motor dynamics, and to characterize the variety of strategies employed by the users.

This proposal is based on a view of the ASC as a system that consists of an organism that exists in, and operates purposefully on an environment. We propose changes to the organism and its environment. Our first proposal changes the structure of the ASC organism to make it explicitly and functionally second-order cybernetic. The second proposal changes the environment of influence of the ASC organism.

The emergence of general system theory is symptomatic of a new movement that has been developing in science during the past decade: Science is at last giving serious attention to systems that are intrinsically complex. This statement may seem somewhat surprising. Are not chemical molecules complex? Is not the living organism complex? And has not science studied them from its earliest days? Let me explain what I mean.

Radical embodied cognitive science is split into two camps: the ecological approach and the enactive approach. We propose that these two approaches can be brought together into a productive synthesis. The key is to recognize that the two approaches are pursuing different but complementary types of explanation. Both approaches seek to explain behavior in terms of the animal–environment relation, but they start at opposite ends. Ecological psychologists pursue an ontological strategy. They begin by describing the habitat of the species, and use this to explain how action possibilities are constrained for individual actors. Enactivists, meanwhile, pursue an epistemic strategy: start by characterizing the exploratory, self-regulating behavior of the individual organism, and use this to understand how that organism brings forth its animal-specific umwelt. Both types of explanation are necessary: the ontological strategy explains how structure in the environment constrains how the world can appear to an individual, while the epistemic strategy explains how the world can appear differently to different members of the same species, relative to their skills, abilities, and histories. Making the distinction between species habitat and animal-specific umwelt allows us to understand the environment in realist terms while acknowledging that individual living organisms are phenomenal beings.

Living agency is subject to a normative dimension (good-bad, adaptive-maladaptive) that is absent from other types of interaction. We review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centered perspective, identifying two central problems and their solution: (1) How to define the topology of the viability space so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure, and (2) how to relate both the processes that establish norms and those that result in norm-following behavior. We present a minimal metabolic system that is coupled to a gradient-climbing chemotactic mechanism. Studying the relationship between metabolic dynamics and environmental resource conditions, we identify an emergent viable region and a precarious region where the system tends to die unless environmental conditions change. We introduce the concept of normative field as the change of environmental conditions required to bring the system back to its viable region. Norm-following, or normative action, is defined as the course of behavior whose effect is positively correlated with the normative field. We close with a discussion of the limitations and extensions of our model and some final reflections on the nature of norms and teleology in agency.

Connections among Varela’s theory of enactive cognition, his evolutionary theory of natural drift, and his concept of autopoiesis are made clear. Two questions are posed in relation to Varela’s conception of perception, and the tension that exists in his thought between the formal level of organization and the Jonasian notion of the organism.

Open peer commentary on the article “Précis of The Philosophy of Affordances” by Manuel Heras-Escribano. Abstract: I question the notion that we need to understand affordances in terms of Rylean non-factualist dispositions. This is not because I disagree with Herlas-Escribano’s analysis; on the contrary, I consider it illuminating and essential. Rather, his analysis shows that affordances can be understood as originally defined by Gibson and elaborated by Stoffregen (i.e., as a particular kind of non-reductionist, non-physicalist relation between organism and environment. Translation into Rylean dispositions is therefore unnecessary.

Excerpt: The rejection of the notion of information, as ordinarily understood, in the theory of autopoiesis, presents problems to theories of organization rooted in ideas of information, control, system, and communication. But the rejection seems well founded if the idea of a self-producing organism is taken seriously. There are various ways of trying to resolve the issue. We can say that autopoiesis cannot be extended to “third-order unities” (societies and organizations), so that its strictures are irrelevant, even if the autopoietic account can be useful metaphorically. Luhmann’s solution is to work out a full-blown autopoietic account of social systems in which the selfproducing entities are not individual human beings but communications. This is elegant, but discards autopoiesis’s biological foundation and so breaks the connection with living in the world. A reworking of ideas of information and communication using theories from pragmatics takes us closer to the autopoietic view by switching focus from stored information and instructive interaction toward a cooperative search for meaning and relevance. Such an approach, however, remains epistemologically focused (on how knowledge is exchanged), while (as Dell suggests) autopoiesis is oriented ontologically (toward existing and what exists). A more radical reworking of the idea of information taken from Gibson’s perceptual theory has therefore been suggested as more compatible with autopoiesis. In terms of the design and interpretation of organizations and organizational systems, an autopoietic account, coupled with a pragmatic approach to communication and a Gibsonian treatment of information pickup, would shift focus (and effort) away from information storage, control, and abstraction toward richer forms of interaction and awareness. While the message of organizational closure from autopoiesis has been taken to mean that individuals and organizations have limited capacity for change (so perhaps need to be forced), the positive conclusion from the theory is that individuals and organizations are autonomous, not finally determinable nor controllable, and so are open, even within their structural constraints, to inexhaustible possibilities.

All organisms behave, but, as far as we know, only humans also explain behavior. Organisms routinely destroy other organisms for various reasons, but only humans ask why. One answer is “hatred.” Clearly it is not necessary to hate another organism in order to destroy it, but the idea is commonly invoked as an explanation for human violence. Has this always been the case with us humans? Or is “hate” (and other explanations of behavior) some kind of evolutionary adaptation? If so, what kind of evolution is involved in the development of explanations, and how might they serve to support individual and/or species survival? In other words, what are some of the epistemological roots of “hate” and what are some of the ontological’ consequences of constructing such an explanation?