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.

“Gaming the Trace” builds up the power of narrative structures from a consideration, first, of the trace – the event of minimal inscription – and next, of what is latent in the reception – that is, the construction – of the trace. I coin a word to capture this combination of grammatological event and observing process, semiolepsis, and relate these dynamics to an allegory of narrative reception. Metempsychosis, or the tale of the transmission of the soul from one body to another, comes forward as an allegory of the reception of the trace. From here the essay moves to an interrogation of the movie Avatar’s mise en scène of the avatar system – its telling, its design specs, and its phantasmagoric realizations of technological metempsychoses. It turns out that an actual media technology exterior to that frame feeds another digital “transmission of soul” back into the physiological metamorphoses of the storyworld. Relevance: The essay expounds as well as applies a broadly Luhmannian framework of systems differentiations. Its methodology throughout is an application of epistemological constructivism and second-order systems theory.

Cognitive science, as an interdisciplinary school of thought, may have recently moved beyond the bandwagon stage onto the throne of orthodoxy, but it does not make a favorable first impression on many people. Familiar reactions on first encounters range from revulsion to condescending dismissal – very few faces in the crowd light up with the sense of “Aha! So that’s how the mind works! Of course! ” Cognitive science leaves something out, it seems; moreover, what it apparently leaves out is important, even precious. Boiled down to its essence, cognitive science proclaims that in one way or another our minds are computers, and this seems so mechanistic, reductionistic, intellectualistic, dry, philistine, unbiological. It leaves out emotion, or what philosophers call qualia, or value, or mattering, or… the soul. It doesn’t explain what minds are so much as attempt to explain minds away.

Excerpt: From my perspective, there need not be a contest between religious faith and any scientific model – including the model of biological evolution that is perhaps the most comprehensive and successful one science has come up with. Any religious faith is a metaphysical attempt to pacify the soul. What science produces, in contrast, are rational constructs whose value resides in their applicability and usefulness. Believers may cling to what they are told or what they want to believe; scientific knowledge is of a different kind because it is tied to a method that involves experiential corroboration. Much of the fuel that keeps the controversy alive springs from the fact that many proponents of science cling to a conception of the scientific method that no longer seems tenable today.

This chapter introduces a psychoneurointracrine model of the embodied self and examines the interrelationship between psychological, neurological, and intracrinological processes forming a mind-brain continuum within the person. Psycho (psychological) refers to constructs variously referred to as psyche, self, soul, mind, and consciousness. Neuro (neurological) refers to the composition and reactions within the nervous system. Intracrine (intracrinological) refers to the intracellular biosynthesis of steroids, the binding of receptors, and the formation of enzymes that catalyze the creation of hormones within the cell. It is argued that self has neural correlates in the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axes of the body, which are responsible for enactive engagement and the development of meaning through their connections to the higher-order functions of the brain. Two theories of enactive cognition explore this hypothesis: (1) the theory of psychoneurointracrine autopoiesis examines how the regulation of a steroid’s receptor is modulated by the person’s perception of experience, and (2) the theory of emergent global states explains how corticolimbic projections from the HPG-HPA axes integrate prereflective, autonomic, and subliminal experience in the development of meaning and emergence of self. This model depicts the growth-oriented dimension of the person or neurophenomenological self.

Key words: autopoiesis, psychoneurointracrinology, neurophenomenological self, intracrine, existential-phenomenological state, prereflective, hpg-hpa axes, embodiment, sense of self, no-self, growth-oriented dimension of the person, mythopoesis.

Excerpt: If one considers sciences such as biology, psychology or sociology from the distance of an uninvolved observer one might conclude that biology has to do with life, psychology with the soul or consciousness, and sociology with society. A closer look makes it apparent, however, that these disciplines have characteristic difficulties with concepts intended to designate the unity of their object. The concept of autopoiesis is addressed directly to this problem. It was originally introduced by Humberto Maturana with respect to life, but it may well be applicable to consciousness and to society. It is, however, a concept which plays almost no role in the daily business of these disciplines, so that we are left with the question, why is there this particular problem of designating the unity of the object of these disciplines by a scientific concept.

In recent times, the progresses of the human sciences and neurosciences have shown that the body experience has a deep relationship with the emotional and cognitive processes. So, think of the human being as a fusion of body, mind and emotions, it offers the opportunity to explore new ways of giving value to the body experience of the child. Therefore, the dance education is a discipline appropriate to the world of childhood, it helps the rapprochement between body and mind: the language of the body in dance merges with the language of the soul. In an enactive perspective, dance can be compared to the flow of languaging and emotioning; language is not placed in the brain structure and is not a physiological phenomenon of the nervous system but it is an autopoietic process. The emotioning flow is conditioned by languaging, as well as languaging is complementary to emotioning. Dance, as an ethical possibility for man, is an example of languaging and emotioning, because with the body language humans create and convey emotions subjectively interpreted by the beholder. Therefore, dance can be considered an educational activity, like the other disciplines contributing the formation of personality, ensuring physical, mental and intellectual wellbeing. The dance education in schools may be proposed through the didactic laboratory, it represents a time and a space where you want to harmonize the child’s personality through the integration of thoughts, feelings, emotions, motor skills and physicality.

Key words: languaging, autopoiesis, emotions, dance, laboratory.

This paper attempts to put forward an aesthetic theory of nature based on a biosemiotic description of the living, which in turn is derived from an autopoietic theory of organism (F. Varela). An autopoietic system’s reaction to material constraints is the unfolding of a dimension of meaning. In the outward_ Gestalt_ of autopoietic systems, meaning appears as form, and as such it reveals itself in a sensually graspable manner. The mode of being of organisms has an irreducible aesthetic side in which this mode of being becomes visible. Nature thus displays a kind of transparency of its own functioning: in a nondiscursive way organisms show traces of their_ conditio vitae_ through their material self-presentation. Living beings hence always show a basic level of expressiveness as a necessary component of their organic mode of being. This is called the_ ecstatic_ dimension of nature (G. Böhme, R. Corrington). Autopoiesis in its full consequence then amounts to a view reminding of Paracelsus’ idea of the_ signatura rerum_ (C. Glacken, H. Böhme): nature is transparent, not because it is organized_ digitally_ as a linguistic text or code, but rather because it displays_ analogically_ the kind of intentionality engendered by autopoiesis. Nature as a whole, as “living form” (S. Langer), is a symbol for organic intentionality. The most fundamental meaning of nature protection thus is to guarantee the “real presence” of our soul.

Excerpt: In the current social and critical moment, perhaps no project is more overdue than the articulation of a posthumanist theoretical framework for a politics and ethics not grounded in the Enlightenment ideal of “Man.” Within postmodern theory, that humanist ideal is critiqued as forcefully as anywhere in the early and middle phase of Michel Foucault’s career, whose “genealogical” aim is to “account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in empty sameness throughout the course of history” by virtue of his – and it must be “his” – privileged relation to either the presence or the absence of the phallus, language, the symbolic, property, productive capacity, toolmaking, reason, or a soul. In Foucault, however, this call for posthumanist critique is more often than not accompanied, as many critics have noted, by a dystopianism that imagines that the end of the humanist subject is the beginning of the total saturation of the social field by power, domination, and oppression. And the later Foucault, as if compensating for his early dystopianism, evinces a kind of nostalgia for the Enlightenment humanism powerfully critiqued in his early and middle work but approached much more sympathetically in the History of Sexuality project.