Whitehead and a Biology of Intentionality process philosophy

Whitehead and a Biology of Intentionality process philosophy and autopoiesis

Nature Alive! • "The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe. "

The Problem • "Scientific reasoning is completely dominated by the presupposition that mental functionings are not properly part of nature. . As a method this procedure is entirely justifiable, provided that we recognize the limitations involved. " (911)

The Problem – 1. ". . . this sharp division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature. ” – 2. ". . . we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature. ” – 3. ". . . we should reject the notion of idle wheels in the process of nature. Every factor which emerges makes a difference, and that difference can only be expressed in terms of the individual character of that factor. " (911) – 4. ". . . we now have the task of defining natural facts, so as to understand how mental occurrences are operative in conditioning the subsequent course of nature. " (912)

Philosophy and Cognition • Whitehead's metaphysics re-establish the relationship between philosophy and cognitive processes long obscured by the hostility in its regard by behaviorism and analytic philosophy during the twentieth century. (A Psychology for the Ecosystem, Liliana Albertazzi 275)

The Importance of Metaphysics • “even scientists who denied making metaphysical assumptions did just that in the course of conventional scientific inquiry. Moreover, they both noted that these implicit assumptions were the more significant just because they were denied. Since they precondition what scientists think they are 'discovering' in reality it is vital to be aware of them. " (Pickering, 144) • Example: “Naïve Seriality”

Circular Organization/Autopoiesis • It is the circular organization that makes a living system a unit of interactions, and it is this circularity that it must maintain in order to remain a living system and to retain its identity through different interactions. . A living system defines through its organization the domain of all interactions into which it can possibly enter without losing its identity, and maintains its identity only as long as basic circularity that defines it as a unit of interactions remains unbroken.

Structural Coupling

Structural Coupling • structure-determined (and structure- determining) engagement of a given unity with either its environment or another unity. The process of engagement which effects a ". . . history or recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems" (Maturana & Varela, 1987, p. 75). It is ‘. . . a historical process leading to the spatio-temporal coincidence between the changes of state. . ’ (Maturana, 1975, p. 321) in the participants. As such, structural coupling has connotations of both coordination and co-evolution

Structural Coupling • "(conservation of adaption) is not particular to living systems. It is a phenomenon that takes place whenever a plastic composite unity undergoes recurrent interactions with structural change but without loss of organization, which may follow any changing or recurrent structural configuration of its domain of interactions • (medium). structural coupled to medium that "selects its path of structural change. " (xxi)

Autopoiesis • "An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. " (Maturana, Varela, 1973, p. 78) • "[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is selfcontained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection. " (Maturana, Varela, 1973, p. 89)

Autopoiesis • The living system must distinguish itself from the environment, while at the same time maintaining its coupling; this linkage cannot be detached since it is against this very environment from which the organism arises comes forth. • An autopoietic system depends on its physicochemical mileu for its conservation, otherwise it would dissolve back into it.

Intentionality (definition) • the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. • Philosophy the quality of mental states (e. g. , thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs.

Intentionality (Varela) • “Whatever is encountered must be valued one way or another–like, dislike, ignore–and acted on some way or another–attraction, rejection, neutrality. This basic assessment is inseparable from the way in which the coupling event encounters a functioning perceptuo-motor unit, and it gives rise to an intention. (Varela, 1991 12)

Whitehead & Intentionality • ". . . the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment. This must mean a certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical process of nature. . I have, in my recent writings, used the word 'prehension' to express this process of appropriation. Also I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an 'occasion of experience. ' I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging into the creative advance. " (907)

Intentionality (Whitehead) • Prehensions are prior to any form of individual consciousness. Prehension reproduces features of actual entities, exhibiting their most concrete elements (colours, sounds, etc. ). In their reference to the outside world, prehensions are vector feelings, in the sense that they involve emotions, evaluations and causation (as subjective forms).

Intentionality and Prehension • By feeling Whitehead means both phenomenal sensing (positive prehensions) and a primitive emotion of contact with reality … which precedes every further form of representation and, especially, every form of representational consciousness. • ". . . although the from the physical view causal events occur independently of each other, from the point of view of prehensions … perception constitutes the outside world as a continuum, in its potential for extensive division and not in its atomicity. " (282)

Perception • "Since what for Whitehead is effectively real in the metaphysical sense is the relational complex of events grasped in perception, theory of perception and the mind's relation with the organism, body and surrounding environment become essential for explanation of ontological structures. " (280)

Perception & Theory of Psychic Additions (delusions) • "perception should not be viewed as the grasping of an external reality, but rather the specification of one. " • ~no distinction is possible between perception and hallucination in a closed nervous system (xv) • Interneurons & impossible origin

The Cognitive Process • Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system. (nervous systems extend the cognitive domain) • If a living system enters into a cognitive interaction, its internal state is changed in a manner relevant to its maintenance, and it enters into a new interaction without loss of its identity.

Time • "The nervous system always functions in the present, and it can only be understood as a system functioning in the present. The present is the time interval necessary for an interaction to take place; past, future and time exist only for the observer. "

Function • The way the nervous system functions is bound to its anatomical organization. . . in general, the organization and structure of a living system define in it a "point of view, " a bias or posture from the perspective of which it interacts, determining at any instant the possible relations accessible to its nervous system. …since the domain of interactions of the organism is defined by its structure, and since this structure implies a prediction of a niche, the relations with which the nervous system interacts are defined by this prediction and arise in the domain of interactions of the organism. "

Representation • "The anatomical and functional organization of the nervous system secures the synthesis of behavior, not a representation of the world. "

Conduct • “To an important extent, behavior is the regulation of perception. ” (Varela 1991, 9)

Action and Perception • "For organisms with 'primitive' nervous systems, perception and action are not separable. The very act of identifying an object of interest (food, enemy, or a mate) is bound up with the appropriate action (e. g. , consummatory behavior, approach/avoidance). . But this ‘triggering’ can be seen as only a convenient–if arbitrary– way of separating a continuum into seemingly separate temporal units from the perspective of an outside observer. From the perspective of the organism there is no such distinction. "

Conduct • "Thus all conduct, as controlled by the nervous system, must (necessarily due to its architectural organization) lead through changes in the effector surfaces to specific changes in the receptor surfaces that in turn must generate changes in the effector surfaces that again. . . and so on, recursively.

Conduct • Conduct is thus a functional continuum that gives unity to the life of the organism through its transformations in the latter's self-referring domain of interactions. The evolutionary subordination of the architecture of the central nervous system to the topology of the sensory and effector surfaces appears as an obvious necessity. " (Maturana, 25)

Conduct • "In the organization of the living systems the role of the effector surfaces is only to maintain constant the set states of the receptor surfaces, not to act upon the environment, no matter how adequate such a description may seem to be for the analysis of adaptation, or other processes; a grasp of this is fundamental for the understanding of the organization of living systems. " (51)

Perception and Action • "In this sense, an object is the exteriorized interactions with the environment and the accommodative changes in the nervous tissue which the organism has undergone. Furthermore, the more complex the nervous system, the more opportunity exists for articulating the environment into finer and finer distinctions, i. e. , objects (cf. Maturana & Varela, 1987)" (Schweiger, 106)

Action in Perception • The basis of perception … is implicit practical knowledge of the ways movement give rise to changes in stimulation. • Perceiving is a way of acting. • Perception is not something that happens to us or in us; it is something we do. • Ex: habituation, or sensory adaption

Whitehead on Philosophy • "Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding. . Existence is activity ever merging into the future. The aim of philosophic understanding is the aim at piercing the blindness of activity in respect to its transcendent functions. " (921)

References • Humberto Maturana. Biology of Cognition. 1970 • Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality. 1991 • Alva Noë. Action in Perception. 2005 • Riffert & Weber (eds) Searching for New Contrasts Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in Neurophysiology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind – Lilianna Albertazzi. A Psychology for the Ecosystem. – Josh Pickering. Psychology Moves Towards Whitehead. – Avraham Schweiger. The Common Origins of Perception and Action: A Process Perspective