This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified by the Heraclitean metaphor of the stream of life. This alternative conception is explored in its various historical formulations and the extent to which it captures the nature of living systems is examined. Following this, the chapter considers the metaphysical (...) implications of reconceptualizing the organism from complex machine to flowing stream. What do we learn when we reject the mechanical and embrace the processual? Three key lessons for biological ontology are identified. The first is that activity is a necessary condition for existence. The second is that persistence is grounded in the continuous self-maintenance of form. And the third is that order does not entail design. (shrink)

Nel nostro universo, qualunque cosa, dalla più piccola particella alla più smisurata galassia, esiste in un qualche tempo e in un qualche luogo. Ma cosa significa esistere in un qualche tempo? Il fenomeno dell’esistenza temporale gioca un ruolo fondamentale nella comprensione dell’universo e di noi stessi quali creature temporali. Eppure è un fenomeno profondamente misterioso. L’esistenza temporale è da intendersi come una relazione? Che legami ha con l’esistenza dell’ontologia? L’esistenza temporale e la localizzazione spaziale sono due fenomeni essenzialmente differenti o (...) due istanze di un’unica relazione? Tutto ciò che esiste nel tempo esiste nel tempo nello stesso modo? Tutto ciò che è nel tempo è anche nello spazio? (shrink)

The Aristotle-Kant tradition requires that autonomous activity must originate within the self and points toward a new type of causation (different from natural efficient causation) associated with teleology. Notoriously, it has so far proven impossible to uncover a workable model of causation satisfying these requirements without an increasingly unsatisfying appeal to extra-physical elements tailor-made for the purpose. In this paper we first provide the essential reason why the standard linear model of efficient causation cannot support the required model of agency: (...) its causal thread model of efficient causation cannot support the core requirement that an action is determined by, and thus an expression of, the agent’s nature. We then provide a model that corrects these deficiencies, constructed naturalistically from within contemporary biology, and argue that it provides an appropriate foundation for all the features of genuine agency. Further, we provide general characterisations of freedom and reason suitable to this bio-context (but that also capture the core classical conceptions) and show how this model reconciles them. (shrink)

Cognitive science depends on abstractions made from the complex reality of human behaviour. Cognitive scientists typically wish the abstractions in their theories to be universals, but seldom attend to the ontology of universals. Two sorts of universal, resulting from Galilean abstraction and materialist abstraction respectively, are available in the philosophical literature: the abstract universal—the one-over-many universal—is the universal conventionally employed by cognitive scientists; in contrast, a concrete universal is a material entity that can appear within the set of entities it (...) describes, of which it represents the essential, paradigmatic case. The potential role of concrete universals in cognitive science is discussed. (shrink)

There is a famous passage in chapter six of James’ Principles of Psychology whose import, many believe, deals a devastating blow to the explanatory aspirations of panpsychism. In the present paper I take a close look at James’ argument, as well as at the claim that it underlies a powerful critique of panpsychism. Apart from the fact that the argument was never aimed at panpsychism as such, I show that it rests on highly problematic assumptions which, if followed to their (...) logical consequences, are just as inedible to contemporary critics of panpsychism as they are to its present-day supporters. Hence, a naïve employment of the argument, as a critique leveled by physicalists against panpsychism, is counterproductive and even self-defeating. After examining the metaphysical shortcomings undermining James’ position , I conclude with some reflections on what needs to be done in order to obtain a better perspective regarding the explanatory prospects of panpsychism as an alternative approach to mainstream physicalism in the study of conscious phenomena. (shrink)

For advocates of critical realism emergence is a central theme. Critical realists typically ground their defence of the relative disciplinary autonomy of various sciences by arguing that emergent phenomena exist in a robust non-ontologically, non-causally reductionist sense. Despite the importance they attach to it critical realists have only recently begun to elaborate on emergence at length and systematically compare their own account with those developed by others. This paper clarifies what is distinctive about the critical realist account of emergence by (...) comparing it with an alternative. Critical realism and interactivism are shown to independently converge on the same general process (or constraint) view of emergence and develop complementary accounts of particular emergents. (shrink)

The term ‘information’ is used extensively in biology, cognitive science and the philosophy of consciousness in relation to the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘causation’. While ‘information’ is a term that serves a useful purpose in specific disciplines, there is much to the concept that is problematic. Part 1 is a critique of the stance that information is an independently existing entity. On this view, and in biological contexts, systems transmit, acquire, assimilate, decode and manipulate it, and in so doing, generate (...) meaning. I provide a detailed proposal in Part 2 that supports the claim that it is the dynamic form of a system that qualifies the informational nature of meaningful interactive engagement, that is, that information is dependent on dynamic form rather than that it exists independently. In Part 3, I reflect on the importance of the distinction between the independent and dependent stances by looking specifically at the implications for how we might better interpret causation and emergence. (shrink)

This paper is a methodological and theoretical meditation on how some research has approached the question of the evolution of human cognitive traits. I discuss views that explicitly or implicitly endorse a view of human cognition as originating from a cause that can be singled out. Following Ross and Ladyman (2010), I suggest that this “singling-out” strategy correlates with a “container” metaphor that doesn’t fit with the interactive process-ontology of modern physics (Campbell 2009). Instead, Ross and Ladyman as well as (...) Campbell recommend the metaphor of ‘emergence’. The logic and ontology of emergent systems finds resonance with developmental systems theory in biology. I suggest in agreement with Stotz (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9(4), 2010) that we view the origins of human mindedness within such a framework. (shrink)

Ancient philosophy has been a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophy in recent decades. An outstanding example is the renaissance of hylomorphism in the field of philosophy of biology. For the philosophy of mind, hylomorphism has been little discussed so far. Therefore, ancient models in the philosophy of mind are still of interest. This article argues that Plato’s Phaedo can act as a source for contemporary debates. As a starting point, Simmias’s objections to the immortality of the soul are analyzed. (...) Plato does not simply reject these objections, but introduces conditions for a hylomorphistic understanding of the soul in Socrates’ reply. These conditions are the following: (A) the mind supervenes on the body; (B) this supervenience must allow the strong emergence of the mind; (C) the mind comprises causal powers; (D) teleological explanations are a necessary ingredient of a suitable model for the mind-body problem. With these conditions, Plato already introduces central components that are present in contemporary philosophical debates, but have not yet been unified into a hylomorphistic concept in the philosophy of mind. The present article proposes this unification. (shrink)

In 2020, M. Summa developed a promising approach to understanding the concept of illness. This approach combines a theory of organisms with Responsive Phenomenology to gain a concept of illness. Following on from this, the present article shows that the normative presuppositions can be further explicated and justified by drawing on the theoretical resources of Aristotelian naturalism as propounded by Michael Thompson. Aristotelian naturalism does provide a theoretical option to grasp the normative foundations of human life. However, this article argues (...) that Aristotelian naturalism requires another criterion besides human nature to make the concept of illness intelligible. Following John McDowell’s critique of Aristotelian naturalism, it will be shown that this criterion consists in the capacity for autonomy. From this a concept of illness is developed which describes an impairment of the self-regulated and autonomous realisation of the human form of life. (shrink)

Contemporary process metaphysics has achieved a number of important results, most significantly in accounting for emergence, a problem on which substance metaphysics has foundered since Plato. It also faces trenchant problems of its own, among them the related problems of boundaries and individuation. Historically, the quest for ontology may thus have been largely responsible for the persistence of substance metaphysics. But as Plato was well aware, an ontology of substantial things raises serious, perhaps insurmountable problems for any account of our (...) epistemic access to such things. Physical things are subject to change, and as such, they are poor objects of knowledge—if knowledge is to be more reliable than mere opinion. There is a reading of Plato’s Theaetetus on which knowledge may be understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and a logos, where logoi are intrinsically dialectical, and where dialectic is a kind of intersubjective activity. Insofar as this epistemology may be attributed to Plato, the project of this paper is Platonic in spirit. It is also, in a sense, Kantian, in that it divorces ontology from the search for things-in-themselves, redirecting our attention from things to objects: epistemic objects. Such objects can be understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed, as shared by multiple subjects by virtue of their participation in an intersubjective world, constituted by what Shaun Gallagher calls participatory sense-making. On an epistemology constructed in this way, the fact that both epistemic objects and their subject are mutable is no obstacle to knowledge. Far-from-equilibrium systems are forever mutable; at thermodynamic equilibrium, there would be neither subject, nor object. Epistemic objects, on this picture, are metastable loci of interactive potential. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is twofold. First, we are interested in assessing the validity of one version of Kim’s argument against genuine higher level causation. Second, we discuss Wilson’s proposal to consider a weaker notion of emergence as genuinely metaphysical and compatible with Non-Reductive Physicalism. Our conclusion is that both proposals fail: the first in preempting genuine (strong) emergent causation, whereas the second in ensuring a genuinely metaphysical status to weak emergence. After all, Wilson’s proposal strongly depends on (...) the success of Kim’s, not only because it takes it as valid but, also, because in pursuing its own weaker model it shares the presuppositions that led Kim’s to failure. At the end of the day, Wilson’s conception of genuine weak emergence either breaks causal closure or is merely stipulative, namely confined at the descriptive level. (shrink)

The turn of the twenty-first century was a period of intensified research on the description of the world as a complex structure built of dynamical systems occurring at different levels of reality. Such systems can be described as bundles of processes. Therefore, the most empirically adequate ontology turns out to be processualism. In this paper, I describe a contemporary version of processual philosophy, which I refer to as processual emergentism. Within the proposed position, the classical formulations of processualism and emergentism (...) are revisited. Both elements complement each other – emergence describes constant, radical novelty as the basic feature of nature, while processualism employs the category of a process, which replaces the classically understood substance.The approach to emergence developed here is ontological and diachronic. I discuss classic determinants of emergence and propose a discussion on the category of supervenience, which in the light of the adopted assumptions turns out to be insufficient to describe the relationship of the dependence of the emergent on its base. Finally, processualism is reconciled with moderate structuralism and strong emergentism. (shrink)

The development of a defensible and fecund notion of emergence has been dogged by a number of threshold issues neatly highlighted in a recent paper by Jaegwon Kim. We argue that physicalist assumptions confuse and vitiate the whole project. In particular, his contention that emergence entails supervenience is contradicted by his own argument that the ‘microstructure’ of an object belongs to the whole object, not to its constituents. And his argument against the possibility of downward causation is question-begging and makes (...) false assumptions about causal sufficiency. We argue, on the contrary, for a rejection of the deeply entrenched assumption, shared by physicalists and Cartesians alike, that what basically exists are things (entities, substances). Our best physics tells us that there are no basic particulars, only fields in process. We need an ontology which gives priority to organization, which is inherently relational. Reflection upon the fact that all biological creatures are far-from-equilibrium systems, whose very persistence depend upon their interactions with their environment, reveals incoherence in the notion of an ‘emergence base’. (shrink)

Standard semantic information processing models—information in; information processed; information out —lend themselves to standard models of the functioning of the brain in terms, e.g., of threshold-switch neurons connected via classical synapses. That is, in terms of sophisticated descendants of McCulloch and Pitts models. I argue that both the cognition and the brain sides of this framework are incorrect: cognition and thought are not constituted as forms of semantic information processing, and the brain does not function in terms of passive input (...) processing units organized as neural nets. An alternative framework is developed that models cognition and thought not in terms of semantic information processing, and, correspondingly, models brain functional processes also not in terms of semantic information processing. As alternative to such models: I outline a pragmatist oriented, interaction based, model of representation; derive from this model a fundamental framework of constraints on how the brain must function; show that such a framework is in fact found in the brain, and develop the outlines of a broader model of how mental processes can be realized within this alternative framework. Part I of this discussion focuses on some criticisms of standard modeling frameworks for representation and cognition, and outlines an alternative interactivist, pragmatist oriented, model. In part II, the focus is on the fact that the brain does not, in fact, function in accordance with standard passive input processing models—e.g., information processing models. Instead, there are multiple endogenously active processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales across multiple kinds of cells. A micro-functional model that accounts for, and even predicts, these multi-scale phenomena in generating emergent representation and cognition is outlined. That is, I argue that the interactivist model of representation outlined offers constraints on how the brain should function that are in fact empirically found, and, in reverse, that the multifarious details of brain functioning entail the pragmatist representational model—a very strong interrelationship. In the sequel paper, starting with part III, this model is extended to address macro-functioning in the CNS. In part IV, I offer a discussion of an approach to brain functioning that has some similarities with, as well as differences from, the model presented here: sometimes called the predictive brain approach. (shrink)

The interactivist model has explored a number of consequences of process metaphysics. These include reversals of some fundamental metaphysical assumptions dominant since the ancient Greeks, and multiple further consequences throughout the metaphysics of the world, minds, and persons. This article surveys some of these consequences, ranging from issues regarding entities and supervenience to the emergence of normative phenomena such as representation, rationality, persons, and ethics.

Recent literature concerning laws of nature highlight the close relationship between general metaphysics and philosophy of science. In particular, a person's theoretical commitments in either have direct implications for her stance on laws. In this dissertation, I argue that an ontic structural realist should be a realist about laws, but only within a non-Whiteheadean process framework. Without the adoption of a process framework, any account of laws the ontic structural realist offers will require metaphysical commitments that are at odds with (...) ontic structural realism. In arguing towards this aim, I adopt an attenuated methodological naturalistic stance to show that traditional substance metaphysics, of the sort neo-Aristotelians endorse, is problematic and that we have naturalistic reasons for further developing process metaphysics. I then apply this framework to develop a processual account of mereological structures and show how we can understand structures as being stable processes. In the final section, I argue that these are the kind of structures with which the ontic structural realist concerns herself. By adopting a realist account of laws the ontic structural realist can explain how these structures enter into modal and causal relations. (shrink)

Biological research has the capacity to inform ethical discussions. There are numerous questions about the nature of sexual orientation, intelligence, gender identity, etc., and many of these questions are commonly approached with the benefit of implicit or explicit biological commitments. The answers to these sorts of questions can have a powerful impact on social, ethical, and political positions. In this project I examine the prospect of naturalizing ethics under the umbrella of developmental systems theory (DST). If one is committed to (...) DST, then those ideas involved in DST that steer biological research will also have implications for ethics. There has been much debate over whether certain human traits or attributes are the consequence of nature or nurture. This kind of question tends to be articulated in dichotomous terms where the focal point of the discussion is over which opposing causal mechanism asserts the most power over the development of these attributes. The debate places particular importance on such distinctions as that between gene and environment, and biology and culture. DST seeks to dismiss such dichotomous accounts. In this sense, DST is an attempt to do biology without these dichotomies. In the process, DST articulates a reconceptualized notion of "the natural." I am interested in how DST’s reconceptualization of the natural can inform a naturalistic approach to ethics. Thus, the aim of this project is to examine the ramifications of taking DST as a guiding principle in the naturalization of ethics. (shrink)

I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics. The framework I develop is internal perspectivalist. That is to say, it counts agents as real in a perspective-dependent way, but not in a way that depends on an (...) external perspective. Whether or not something counts as an agent depends on whether it is able to have a certain kind of perspective. My approach differs from many others by treating possession of a perspective as more basic than the possession of agency, representational content/vehicles, cognition, intentions, goals, concepts, or mental or psychological states; these latter capabilities require the former, not the other way around. I explain what it means for a system to be able to have a perspective at all, beginning with simple cases in biology, and show how self-contained normative perspectives about proper function and control can emerge from mechanisms with relatively simple dynamics. I then describe how increasingly complex control architectures can become organized that allow for more complex perspectives that approach agency. Next, I provide my own account of the kind of perspective that is necessary for agency itself, the goal being to provide a reference against which other accounts can be compared. Finally, I introduce a crucial distinction that is necessary for understanding human agency: that between inclinational and committal agency, and venture a hypothesis about how the normative perspective underlying committal agency might be mechanistically realized. (shrink)

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the (...) view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, I explain both cognitive and social agency under the single explanatory framework provided by Dynamic Systems Theory. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, "embodied, "extended", "embedded", "enactive", and "ecological" approaches to cognition, as well as the conceptual resources of Dynamic Systems Theory, I construct a theory of agency that sees cognitive and social agents as far-from-equilibrium, open, recursively self-maintenant dynamic systems. Depending on the specifics of concrete circumstances, such systems, which I call "Dynamic Embodied Agents", may develop and possess emergent capacities for error-detection, flexible learning, normative behavior, representation, self-reflection, various modes of pattern-recognition, a temporal sense of self, and even moral responsibility. Some such systems are also sensitive to perceived social influences ; while reciprocally constituting and causally affecting them. (shrink)