We have to change our views about what we are and how we live. The beginnings of such a view can be found in the works of Stuart Kauffman, Terrence Deacon, Robert Ulanowicz and Harold Morowitz. The most prominent idea coming from the works of these eminent thinkers is the feedback-based mechanism of autocatalytic sets. To briefly state this idea, an autocatalytic set is a system of relations that support one another's continuous activity. Imagine A, B and C, chemicals. When A relates with B, it produces C. C then happens to produce A, which links all 3 chemicals together in a mutual feedback. With this idea in mind, we can make the bare, basic statement about life: all living processes are circular. From the molecules inside of us, to the things we think and the way we think them: its happening in loops of mutual interaction between the organism (autocatalytic network) and the environment it exchanges energy with.
The problem for psychology is to recognize what is relevant as causal factors. Phenomenology suggests, as the philosopher Axel Honneth expresses in his body of work, that "being recognized" by the other is the core psychological need of Human beings. Indeed, from modern relational psychoanalysis, to the modern field of interpersonal neurobiology, more and more mental health researchers and practitioners are recognizing the interpersonal process as the means to galvanize change in the clients way of being. Psychodynamics, also, has been restored to its proper status as the main way of understanding the functional logic of human feeling and behaving. It has only returned to its primary status because what was implausible and intuitively unjustified in Freudian psychoanalysis was jettisoned, while alternative fields such as behaviorism, entertaining the even weirder notion that mental events didn't matter in explaining human functioning, was clearly not right in how it understood humans.
A position I will advance in this book is consistent with the predictive processing account advocated by Andy Clark (2016), yet tries to see all this apparent "prediction" in terms of Andreas Weber's (2016) focus upon life being synonymous with evolving feeling. Other work in quantum biology (McFadden and Al-Khalil, 2014) gives credence to the notion of life tending to keep itself 'attuned' to whats needed for its survival at greater and greater levels of complexity. The "centripetality" (Ulanowicz, 2008) of this internal tendency implies to me that there is "something" in the core, or center, that is not sufficiently or adequately contained by physicalist interpretations (2015), yet nevertheless organizes and biases the phase space to maintain itself at "criticality' (Kauffman, 2008, 2016) that is, to attune to what is present in the "adjacent" possible, and select a forward action into the "unknown".
A further notion amenable to my theory building has been Gordon Burghardts (2006) work on animal play and his notion of 'surplus resource theory' in relation to the concept of the 'relaxed field'. To summarize, an animal tends to "test its limits" when it has a surplus of metabolic energy within its organic system. This appears in higher organisms as play and curiosity, but Burghardt has shown how a "primary process" version exists in the earliest vertebrates. Burghardt does not see play as fundamentally related to the nervous system as much as an expression of a "biological surplus" that the nervous system then gives expression to in its curious exploration of life within the adjacent possible.
So what does being recognized have to do with autocatalytic loops? As mentioned, I believe there is something in the "core" of autocatalytic systems that might not be explicable by math or probability theory alone. This tendency emerges and expresses itself more clearly and certainly when the conditions of life are "plentiful" - when the physics of its internal causation permits self-extension into the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is what is immediately within the organisms cognitive-grasp; but it gets there not through any act of "thinking", but of feeling its way forward. Exploration and play must always be couched in terms of "making meaningful" its immediate life-situation. The umwelt of the organism transitions smoothly into the adjacent possible when it exist in the "relaxed field". The relaxed field, indeed, is where the spiritedness of the organism "overcomes" the biomechanical repetition emphasized by the predictive processing account.
If it hasn't become apparent yet, the "core" of the autocatalytic system is the Self of human experience. The center of a galaxy, the center of a whirlpool, and the center of an autocatalytic loop intimate this structure, albeit, is refers to itself as an absence (Deacon, 2011). Yet, on the inside, as a human, does the self really feel like an absence? The notion of the core being an absence does not sit well with work in developmental psychology (Siegel, 2012, Schore, 2003; 2003) and traumatology (Van Der Kolk, 2014, Bromberg, 2006, 2011) which describes the Self that evolves in insecure environments as a deflated, dissociated, and fearful Self which often experiences itself as an "unreality". Richard Chefetz, (2015) a leading thinker on the subject of dissociation and trauma, describes the traumatized person as someone who "fears being real" as result of having felt, so strongly, the sting of "unreality". What does this mean for philosophy? If "feeling real" is interrupted in trauma, and the traumatized person, in his malaise, retreats from the world of relationships with Others as his stunned mind experiences the shock of his own depersonalization, this then entails that being with Others is what creates the feeling of "being real".
If we remember the concepts of autocatalytic loops, relaxed fields and "predictive processing", we can see that complex beings like ourselves repeat the very same processes, yet do so at multiple levels of activity. Emergence is, as understood by Kauffman, Ulanowicz, Deacon and Morowitz, the organization of complex phenotypic traits in terms of whats "behaviorally meaningful" to the organism. Thus, it is the umwelt, the "life-world" of the organism, that indicates the functional logic of its self-coherency. For humans like us, what matters, then, is not genes (As Dawkins and many cognitive-behaviorists still think) but meaning-images, forms of experience, and what those experiences say about our relatedness-to-other-humans. Some postmodern theorists (Rancier) have thought and some still think that there is no 'fundamental morality' by which we can organize our relations to one another. However, cognitive scientists like George Lakoff (1999) and Mark Johnson (2015) and psychoanalysts like Jessica Benjamin (1988;1998) and Donnel Stern (1997, 2015) have referred to the body to make sense of how humans make-meaning. The embodied cognitive science approach (Columbetti, 2014) has also stressed the body as the "background" from which cognitions emerge. The work of Allan Schore and Bruce Perry has stressed the importance of early-life relational experiences (and by implication, the life-world of the people they grow around) and with Jaak Panskepp and Darcia Narvaez, want to increase public awareness of the metaphysical and social significance of early-life relational interventions (2012) for people who are vulnerable. I also have the same interests. The work of developmental psychologists (Tronick, Beebe, Stern, Fonagy, Fogel) have revealed the immense potential for social and psychological change in the Human species. We just have to get our self-understanding in check, so that we recognize that what were most affected by - and thus, the reason we live - is for One-Another. I hope that my work can contribute to Axel Honneths conclusion in his "The Struggle for Recognition", that humans can come to understand one another with reference to knowledge about how the environment - early developmental contexts on critical phases of development - open and close our life-worlds, make living-with-others easier, or harder, and so, makes life worth-living, or full-of-suffering. That we are "cultures" made up of the meaning-images of our relations - and that we are all perched towards mental and neuroplastic growth, with potentials that are more or less the same (Doidge, 2015, Vincent, 2014) from conception, but become different because of our being "canalized" by different developmental settings - can become the "background knowledge" for a future society. Such knowledge is inherently moral - inherently about how we actually affect one another.
There is much potential for growth in us, because the world, and reality, in fact, is very different from what contemporary and historical human cultures have believed, and what contemporary researchers in psychology and biology still believe. Social processes, being inherently tinged with the force of pridefulness and phobias, can keep ourselves from recognizing what is, by having already entrained us, "recreated ourselves", in the shadow of the Other (Benjamin). If we really are beings structured by the very psychological-mental force of being "recognized by the Other", why is it so hard to see? If it enlivens us, and helps us be what our biological potential has become stabilized at (implying a punctuated equilibrium version of biological evolution), then why am I inclined to believe that everyone who doesn't share my conviction is wrong? Logically speaking, if the "Self" we experience is identical to the Self implicit in the "for-me-ness" of biological life (Merleau-Ponty) then it shouldn't be surprising that the nature of human awareness is as subtly structured by "for-me-ness" as the functionality of an amobea. Because life-begins before linguistic awareness allows us to record our own personal self-understanding, the pre-verbal, implicit-relational knowledge of affect and interpersonal presence already biases just how we begin to formulate the self-understanding so central to adult-functioning. The self-concept exists like a "kernel" around the life-essence of the roving Self. The kernel is not an illusion, at least not in its capacity to generate life, meaning and a sense of Reality (to self); but in the fixed way it characterizes the Self as a person, made up of certain essential characteristics, the self our society speaks about and reifies in its songs and stories, is indeed illusory.
The Moral of this story, of the human story, is, and has been from the very emergence of our species, our essential self-other equivalence (Tomasello). How we got there, the direction of the human organism to give preferential-treatment to the developing brain, will need to acknowledge the radical self-other symmetry implied by the Human-need-to-be-known, where developing and playing with a Self-concept entails needing the Other in order to feel real to yourself. The energy of neurological transformation, and therefore, the emergence of humans, is about the ever-increasing sensitivity of an Organism to the implicit "sacredness" of Being-For-Oneself. In early life, the circles are spread apart, hardly communicating, merely "becoming aware" of one another when they approach physical proximity, but even then, there is no cognitive-knowledge of the Other (Donald, 2001). With humans, a background context of ecology (trees, fruits, other animals, ecosystems, energy cycles in nature) has allowed one species to emerge with the capacity to feel excited and enlivened by a type of knowing that make the Self of the organism into a concept to be shared. The concept, made and constructed by an autocatalytic loop of Action-Perception cycles within one organism, coinciding and reconciling its own expectations and affectivity with the Action-Perception cycles of another, stimulated the emergence of a mental-reality world of increased knowledge-of the life-world of another creature - the life of the Human Other. Self-consciousness then, is irreducibly predicated on the "glue" of a common existential need, and the fundamental pleasure of "being known" positively by the Other.
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