Chemical Organization Theory and Autopoiesis

E-mail communication of Francis Heylighen on 29 May 2018:

Inspired by the notion of autopoiesis (“self-production”) that Maturana and Varela developed as a definition of life, I wanted to generalize the underlying idea of cyclic processes to other ill-understood phenomena, such as mind, consciousness, social systems and ecosystems. The difference between these phenomena and the living organisms analysed by Maturana and Varela is that the former don’t have a clear boundary or closure that gives them a stable identity. Yet, they still exhibit this mechanism of “self-production” in which the components of the system are transformed into other components in such a way that the main components are eventually reconstituted.

This mechanism is neatly formalized in COT’s notion of “self-maintenance” of a network of reactions. I am not going to repeat this here but refer to my paper cited below. Instead, I’ll give a very simple example of such a circular, self-reproducing process:

A -> B,

B -> C,

C -> A

The components A, B, C are here continuously broken down but then reconstituted, so that the system rebuilds itself, and thus maintains an invariant identity within a flux of endless change.

A slightly more complex example:

A + X -> B + U

B + Y -> C + V

C + Z -> A + W

Here A, B, and C need the resources (inputs, or “food”) X, Y and Z to be reconstituted, while producing the waste products U, V, and W. This is more typical of an actual organism that needs inputs and outputs while still being “operationally” closed in its network of processes.

In more complex processes, several components are being simultaneously consumed and produced, but so that the overall mixture of components remains relatively invariant. In this case, the concentration of the components can vary the one relative to the other, so that the system never really returns to the same state, only to a state that is qualitatively equivalent (having the same components but in different amounts).

One more generalization is to allow the state of the system to also vary qualitatively: some components may (temporarily) disappear, while others are newly added. In this case, we  no longer have strict autopoiesis or [closure + self-maintenance], i.e. the criterion for being an “organization” in COT. However, we still have a form of continuity of the organization based on the circulation or recycling of the components.

An illustration would be the circulation of traffic in a city. Most vehicles move to different destinations within the city, but eventually come back to destinations they have visited before. However, occasionally vehicles leave the city that may or may not come back, while new vehicles enter the city that may or may not stay within. Thus, the distribution of individual vehicles in the city changes quantitatively and qualitatively while remaining relatively continuous, as most vehicle-position pairs are “recycled” or reconstituted eventually. This is what I call circulation.

Most generally, what circulates are not physical things but what I have earlier called challenges. Challenges are phenomena or situations that incite some action. This action transforms the situation into a different situation. Alternative names for such phenomena could be stimuli (phenomena that stimulate an action or process), activations (phenomena that are are active, i.e. ready to incite action) or selections (phenomena singled out as being important, valuable or meaningful enough to deserve further processing). The term “selections” is the one used by Luhmann in his autopoietic model of social systems as circulating communications.

I have previously analysed distributed intelligence (and more generally any process of self-organization or evolution) as the propagation of challenges: one challenge produces one or more other challenges,  which in turn produce further challenges, and so on. Circulation is a special form of propagation in which the initial challenges are recurrently reactivated, i.e. where the propagation path is circular, coming back to its origins.

This to me seems a better model of society than Luhmann’s autopoietic social systems. The reason is that proper autopoiesis does not really allow the system to evolve, as it needs to exactly rebuild all its components, without producing any new ones. With circulating challenges, the main structure of society is continuously rebuilt, thus ensuring the continuity of its organization, however while allowing gradual changes in which old challenges (distinctions, norms, values…) dissipate and new ones are introduced.

Another application of circulating challenges are ecosystems. Different species and their products (such as CO2, water, organic material, minerals, etc.) are constantly recycled, as the one is consumed in order to produce the other, but most are eventually reconstituted. Yet, not everything is reproduced: some species may become extinct, while new species invade the ecosystem. Thus the ecosystem undergoes constant evolution, while being relatively stable and resilient against perturbations.

Perhaps the most interesting application of this concept of circulation is consciousness. The “hard problem” of consciousness asks why information processing in the brain does not just function automatically or unconsciously, the way we automatically pull back our hand from a hot surface, before we even have become conscious of the pain of burning. The “global workspace” theory of consciousness says that various subconscious stimuli enter the global workspace in the brain (a crossroad of neural connections in the prefrontal cortext), but that only a few are sufficiently amplified to win the competition for workspace domination. The winners are characterized by much stronger activation and their ability to be “broadcasted” to all brain modules (instead of remaining restricted to specialized modules functioning subconsciously). These brain modules can then each add their own specific interpretation to the “conscious” thought.

In my interpretation, reaching the level of activation necessary to “flood” the global workspace means that activation does not just propagate from neuron to neuron, but starts to circulate so that a large array of neurons in the workspace are constantly reactivated. This circulation keeps the signal alive long enough for the different specialized brain modules to process it, and add their own inferences to it. Normally, activation cannot stay in place, because of neuronal fatigue: an excited neuron must pass on its “action potential” to connected neurons, it cannot maintain activation. To maintain an activation pattern (representing a challenge) long enough so that it can be examined and processed by disparate modules that pattern must be stabilized by circulation.

But circulation, as noted, does not imply invariance or permanence, merely a relative stability or continuity that undergoes transformations by incoming stimuli or on-going processing. This seems to be the essence of consciousness: on the one hand, the content of our consciousness is constantly changing (the “stream of consciousness”), on the other hand that content must endure sufficiently long for specialized brain processes to consider and process it, putting part of it in episodic memory, evaluating part of it in terms of its importance, deciding to turn part of it into action, or dismissing or vetoing part of it as inappropriate.

This relative stability enables reflection, i.e. considering different options implied by the conscious content, and deciding which ones to follow up, and which ones to ignore. This ability to choose is the essence of “free will“. Subconscious processes, on the other hand, just flow automatically and linearly from beginning to end, so that there is no occasion to interrupt the flow and decide to go somewhere else. It is because the flow circulates and returns that the occasion is created to interrupt it after some aspects of that flow have been processed and found to be misdirected.

To make this idea of repetition with changes more concrete, I wish to present a kind of “delayed echo” technique used in music. One of the best implementation is Frippertronics, invented by avant-garde rock guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frippertronics

The basic implementation consist of an analogue magnetic tape on which the sounds produced by a musician are recorded. However, after having passed the recording head of the tape recorder, the tape continues moving until it is read by another head that reads and plays the recorded sound. Thus, the sound recorded at time t is played back at time t + T, where the interval T depends on the distance between the recording and playback heads. But while the recorded sound in played back, the recording head continues recording all the sound, played by either the musician(s) or the playback head, on the same tape. Thus, the sound propagates from musician to recording head, from where is is transported by tape to the playback head, from where it is propagated in the form of a sound wave back to the recording head, thus forming a feedback loop.

If T is short, the effect is like an echo, where the initial sound is repeated a number of times until it fades away (under the assumption that the playback is slightly less loud than the original sound). For a longer T, the repeated sound may not be immediately recognized as a copy of what was recorded before given that many other sounds have been produced in the meantime. What makes the technique interesting is that while the recorded sounds are repeated, the musician each time adds another layer of sound to the layers already on the recording. This allows the musician to build up a complex, multilayered, “symphonic” sound, where s/he is being accompanied by her/his previous performance. The resulting music is repetitive, but not strictly so, since each newly added sound creates a new element, and these elements accumulate so that they can steer the composition in a wholly different direction.

This “tape loop” can be seen as a simplified (linear or one-dimensional) version of what I called circulation, where the looping or recycling maintains a continuity, while the gradual fading of earlier recordings and the addition of new sounds creates an endlessly evolving “stream” of sound. My hypothesis is that consciousness corresponds to a similar circulation of neural activation, with the different brain modules playing the role of the musicians that add new input to the circulating signal. A differences is probably that the removal of outdated input does not just happen by slow “fading” but by active inhibition, given that the workspace can only sustain a certain amount of circulating activation, so that strong new input tends to suppress weaker existing signals. This and the complexity of circulating in several directions of a network may explain why conscious content appears much more dynamic than repetitive music.

Individuation of Social Systems

Lenartowicz, A., Weinbaum, D., Braathen, P. . The Individuation of Social Systems: A Cognitive Framework . Procedia Computer Science (Elsevier), vol. 88 (pp 15-20) . Doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2016.07.400 . 2016

Abstract

Starting point is formed by the Theory of Individuation (Simondon 1992), Enactive Theory of Cognition (Paolo e.a. 2010) and the Theory of Social Systems Luhmann 1996). The objective is to identify how AI integrates into human society.

1. Introduction

Social systems influence cognitive activities. It is argued that social systems operate as cognitive systems: ‘.. autonomous, self-organizing loci of agency and cognition, which are distinct from human minds and manifesting behaviors that are irreducible to their aggregations’ [p 15]. DPB: I like this (in bold, to end all others) way to formulate the behavior specific to the whole, as opposed to the behavior specific to the individuals therein. It is argued here that these systems individuate in the same way, and their mode of operation is analogous to, other processes of life. This paper does not follow some others that take a narrow approach to cognition starting at the architecture of the individual human mind; instead it presents a perspective of cognition that originates from a systemic sociological view, leading to a socio-human cognitive architecture; the role of the individual human being in the establishing of networks and their operation thereafer is reduced. The theory if based on the view of Heraklitus that ontologically reality is a sequence of processes instead of objects and with Simondon’s theory of individuation: ‘This results in an understanding of social systems as complex sequences of occurrences of communication (emphasis of the authors), which are capable of becoming consolidated to the degree in which they start to display an emergent adaptive dynamics characteristic to cognitive systems – and to exert influence over their own mind-constituted environment’ [p 16]. DPB: this reminds of my understanding of the landscape of Jobs, where Situations and Interactions take place as sequences of signals uttered and perceived.

2. Individuation of Cognitive Agents

The basis is a shift from an Aristotelian object oriented ontology to an Heraklitian process oriented ontology (or rather an ontogenesis); not individuals but individuation are the center-piece; no individual is assumed to precede these processes; all transformations are secondary to individuation: ‘Individuation is a primary formative activity whereas individuals are regarded as merely intermediate and metastable entities, undergoing a continuous process of change’ [p 16]. In this view the individual is always changing, and ‘always pregnant with with not yet actualized and not yet known potentialities of change’ [p 16]. DPB: His reminds me of the monadic character of systems: they are very near completion, yet never quite finished and always ready to fight the previous war. Local and contingent interactions achieve ever higher levels of coordination between their constitutive elements; the resulting entities become ever more complex and can have agency. Cognition can be seen as a process of sense-making; cognition can facilitate the formation of boundaries (distinctions). This is explained by the theory of enactive cognition that treats sense-making as a primary activity of cognition (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1992; Stewart, Gapenne &Di Paolo 2010; De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007). This idea is radicalized in this paper: sense-making is assumed to be bringing forth distinctions, objects and relations; sense-making precedes subjects and objects and it is necessary for their emergence; sense-making precedes the existence of consolidated cognitive agents to whom the activity itself would conventionally be attributed. DPB: this firstly reminds me of the phrase ‘love is in the air, even if there is nobody there yet’; ‘processes of individuation constitute a distributed and progressively more coherent (as boundaries and distinctions are formed) loci of autonomous cognitive activity’ [pp. 16-7]; also the process of individuation precedes the process of autopoiesis: the latter cannot exist as a work in progress, but individuation occurs also without autopoiesis; and so autopoiesis can only be a design condition of a process that has already individuated. In this way individuation is taken from its narrow psychological context and projected to a general systems application: ‘Sense-making entails crossing the boundary between the unknown and the known through the formation of tentative perceptions and actions consolidating them together into more or less stable conceptions (emphasis by the author)’ [p 17]. DPB: this is a useful working definition of sense-making; these processes are relevant not just for psychic and social processes, I believe they have their root (and started in some form once) as chemical and physical processes, for which the above terminology does not seem fully suitable; from that point on, these multitudes of elements ‘grew up’ together and became ever more complex. ‘Individuation as an on-going formative process, manifests in the co-determining interactions taking place within the heterogeneous populations of interacting agents. These populations are the ‘raw materials’ from which new individuals emerge. The sense-making activities are distributed over the population and have no center of regulated activity of synchrony. Coordination – the recurrent mutual regulation of behaviors is achieved via interactions that are initially contingent. These interactions are necessary for the consolidation of any organized entity or system’ [p 17].

3 Social Systems as Cognitive Individuals

By a social system is meant any meta-stable form of social activity. DPB: but what is meant with meta-stable. This is the Luhmann understanding of a social system. This paper demonstrates 1. the individuation of social systems and 2. identify social systems as the metastable individuals. Events that are the building blocks for social reality happen as single occurrences of communication, each consisting of: 1. a selection of information, 2. selection of the utterance, and 3. the selection of the understanding. DPB: this is as per my Logistical Model. If and only if the three selections are combined do they form a unity of a communicative event, ‘a temporary individual’. ‘This means that it distinguishes itself from its environment (i.e. any other processes or events) by the means of three provisional boundaries, which the event sets forth: (a) an ‘information-making boundary’ between the marked and the unmarked side of the distinction being made (Spencer Brown, 1994), i.e. delineating the selected information (marked – M) and the non-selected one (unmarked – Un-M), (b) a ‘semiotic boundary’ (Lotman, 2001) between the thus created signified (SD) and a particular signifier selected to carry the information (SR), and (c) a ‘sense-making’ boundary between thus created sign (SGN) and the context (CX), i.e. delineating the understanding of information within its situation (Lenartowicz, Weinbaum & Braaten, 2016)’ [p 17]. DPB: I am not sure what to do with those three selections; I have not used them and instead I am working with selection of some piece of information, while it is uttered, and while it is also perceived (made sense of). I must figure out whether (and how) to use this. Maybe ask ML to clarify how they connect to my logistical model, and especially the E and the B operators. It is important because it is a chain-link in a chain of events: ‘The three selections and corresponding boundaries of an event make the communication available to interact with or to be referred to by another communicative event constituted by another triple selection’ [p 17]. DPB: all this sounds a bit artificial and procedural and mechanical: how can this process come about in a natural way? Once recorded and remembered these elements become available for endless re-use independent of space, time and context (frame). In closed networks of communication, however, they have a tendency to converge into recurrent self-reinforcing patterns, such that the become established and difficult not to be associated with, even if in a negative form or critique. From the associations of these selected simple forms can arise complex individuated sequences, social systems. Through their interactions these systems gain and maintain coherence; as they recur the probability that the same pattern is repeated is higher than the probability that a completely new pattern is selected. Initially contingent boundaries become self-reinforced and stable. ‘On account of their repetition, a social system can be said to develop perceptions (i.e. reappearing selections of information and understanding), actions (i.e. reappearing selections of utterance) and conceptions (percept – action associations) that dynamically bind them. Each such assemblage thus becomes a locus of identifiable cognitive activity, temporarily stabilized within a flux of communication’ [p 18].

4. The Role of Human Cognition

The (three) selections individuating social systems are performed by other cognitive individuated systems. In a social system that is individuated to a level of stability and coherence, emerging patterns in that system further orient the selections made by people. And reciprocally the the psychic environment of the people facilitates the individuation of the social system by selecting new instances of communication that somehow fit the existing parts. Human beings are indispensable for the continuation of communication and hence for the maintenance of a social system, but they are incapable of influencing the social system in the sense that one seedling is incapable of influencing the amount of water in a lake. Only when a social system is at the early stages of its individuation and taking shape can it be influenced by individual people: a pattern of a large social system is confirmed by many other communications and also one different communication, that does not follow the pattern, doesn’t hold sufficient weight to change its course. ‘Taking into account a variety of powerful factors that guide all the linguistic activities of humans: (a) the relative simplicity, associative coherence, frequent recurrence of the cognitive operations once they become consolidated in a social system, (b) the rarity of context-free (e.g. completely exploratory and poetic) communications that is reinforced by the density and entanglement of all “language games” in which contemporary humans are all immersed in, and (c) the high level of predictability of human selection-making inputs observable from the sociological standpoint; it will be reasonable to set the boundaries of our modeling of he general phenomena of human cognition in such a way, which delineates the dynamics of two different kinds of individuating cognitive agencies operating at different scales: the human individual and the social system. Instead of reducing all cognitive activities to the human individual we can clearly distinguish cognitive agencies operating at different scales’ [p 19]. DPB: I like the three arguments above for the likelihood of patterns to appear in communication and also that human cognition is to some extent built with the(extensive) help of social systems, such that human cognition cannot be fully reduced to the individual itself, but also to the social systems in the environment of the individual.

Individuation of Social Systems

Lenartowicz M, Weinbaum DR (Weaver), Braathen P . Global Brain Institute, Free University Brussels . Social Systems: Complex Adaptive Loci of Cognition . Emergence: Complexity & Organization, 18(2) . 2016

Abstract

Human social systems are concrete non-metaphorical, cognitive agents operating in their self-constructed environments. This theory is an integration of social systems theory (Luhmann) with enactive cognition theory (Di Paolo) and theory of individuation (Simondon). It is marked by a number of shifts in thinking about social systems: 1. becoming rather than being, 2. three-layered understanding of the environment where identities of social systems individuate, 3. a reactive rather than a responsive approach to adaptiveness and 4. social systems are cognitive systems. Social systems are complex individuating communicative interactions that together constitute cognitive agencies. DPB: the text says: ‘sequences of communicative interactions’: from the network perspective, the interactions will most probably not be sequential; they might be from the perspective of the individual agents; they surely are from the perspective of the individual unities of communication (which go ‘from hand to hand’). The discussion about individuation should be in interaction EINT? The relation of these agents with their environments (including other such agencies) can be clarified through the Hayek-Hebb-Edelmann perspective and the Maturana-Varela perspective of perturbation-compensation. The theory is demonstrated by an example of a NASA communication showing how ‘.. a social organization undergoes a process of individuation from which it emerges as an autonomous cognitive agent with a distinct and adaptive identity’ [p 1].

Introduction

Social systems are seen as complex in the sense that they consist of many parts that interact in a non-simple way (such that it is not trivial to infer the behavior of the whole from the properties of the parts). They are seen as adaptive, because they operate in their environment maintaining a set of their characteristics invariant. But they are not seen as cognitive: 1) the cognitive capacity of the human mind is typically involved, which can be viewed in a black-box manner (to encompass the supposed cognitive qualities of the social system) and 2) when invoked for an entire social system there is a risk of using it in a mystical sense. DPB: would cognition not also be seen as requiring physical sensory machinery, and so where cognition is invoked and individual people, then, given that they avail of the machinery, it must be them providing the cognitive functionality? But this paper supports the claim that social systems are indeed cognitive; this is approached through a re-conceptualization of the concepts of complexity and adaptiveness. Social systems are seen as sequences of complex, individuating sequences of occurrences of communication (events); their operating is approached from the perspective on systems adaptation of Hayek-Hebb and from Maturana-Varela, each revealing a different and complementary facet of the operation of the system, resulting in an integrated abstracted model of individuating, autonomous, and distributed cognition.

Concept 1: Components

It is often assumed that the basic component of social systems is the human being. Luhmann however proposes that social systems consist of sense-making, meaning-processing communications. Properties of human beings (the contents of her mind) play a role only when they are expressed socially, else it remains in the social system’s environment. The Heraklitian shift from being to becoming was elaborated by Nietsche, Simondon, Deleuze, DeLanda, Bergson to emphasize that not objects but processes are the basic elements of systems (‘even the most solid objects are networks of processes’ [p 3]); if this is the case then much of the fabric of reality is overlooked by delineating objects; and we are looking at what is happening within them and among them; looking at actions instead of agents implies looking at differences in states instead of fixed states. From this perspective the agent is left out of the observation, not treated as a component but as a catalyser: ‘an aspect or part of a state that is necessary for the action to occur’ (Heylighen, 2011:8)’ [p 3]. If the ontology is changed from agents to actions then, in Luhmann’s approach, the focus is on communication and not on humans, a communication as a difference-making selection process: 1. selection of information, 2. selection of the utterance, and 3. selection of the (mis)understanding of information and the utterance (Luhmann 2002:157). Only if all three are present communication occurs. DPB: this is how i’ve modeled it and this is also how I have come to understand Luhmann. It is quite different from what I understood form the article Individuation of Social Systems. That difference is important and I must discuss it with Marta. With regards to the NASA example: this illustrates the emergence of a unit of communication; what would be a valid and illustrative example concerning the operations of a firm? The three selections are in this example made by (subjective and changeable) human minds, but this selection can be deferred to objects, machines, AI &c; the selective processes take place regardless the properties of the substrate (chemical physical &c.). When the three selections have taken place then the event of a communication has taken place: ‘Nothing is transferred – Luhmann claims – Redundancy is produced in the sense that communication generates a memory to which many people can lay claim in many different ways (2002:160)’ [p 5]. Operation of these three selections is often imprecise, ineffective, associative, incomplete and inadequate: it is in other words more often than not made up of just-so stories. Given that these communications events interact between them (and via human beings) then their properties are different from those of human agents. Examples of the effects between the selections are: 1. the selection of understanding in one communication event will constrain and be conserved in the following ones, 2. the selection of an utterance in one event will be retained, refused or refined in the following, and 3. adhering to a shared form (utterance) will prompt selection of understanding in a coherent way. These selections lead to sequences that may under the influence of individuation lead to pattern of which a few examples are: organizations, languages, nations, organizations, discourses, &c.

Concept 2: Individuation

Individuation is a primary (to what) formative activity, where individuals are always intermediate, temporarily stable entities, undergoing ongoing change: ’Individuation is a process where boundaries and distinctions that define individuals arise without assuming any individual(s) that precede(s) them. The nature of distinctions and boundaries is subtle: inasmuch as they separate subject from object, figure from background, and one individual from another, they must also connect that which they separate. A boundary, therefore, is not only known by the separation it establishes but also by the interactions and relations it facilitates’ [p 7]. DPB: perhaps another way to formulate this brings a different perspective: ‘A boundary is established by the interactions and relations it’s component’s properties facilitate through their attractions to some and repulsion from properties of other components’ in their environment and within the system itself. In this sense the boundary is a resultant from the myriad attractors and repellers that may exist all along the outer surface of the system. And that outer surface also has an important contribution to the capacity of the system to be distinguished by other systems’. For him (Simondon), the individual is a metastable phase within the a continuous process of transformation, ever impregnated with not yet actualized and not yet known potentialities of being. .. a plastic entity, an on-going becoming’ [p 7]. DPB: this is my monad; but I have never defined the ontogeny of a monad and a individuation process does that. How can this network of communications form an assemblage (DeLanda, 2006) of interacting components? Communication (three elements) results in temporary boundaries: 1. information selection: marked-unmarked (information), 2. semiotic: signified-signifier (utterance), and 3. sense-making: sign and context (understanding). DPB: I am still not sure about the use of these kinds of boundaries, but between brackets the link to the three selections.

Concept 3 Environment

An environment of people is topological, an environment of communications is semiotic. A tentative definition of a communication event is: ’Whatever the communication refers to and is being referred to’ [p 11]. The environment is not the surroundings of the communication process, but the semiotic space delineated by the three meaning-creating selections (utterance, information, understanding). The nouns in an utterance describe (or characterize) the environment of a communication. Once a communication event has taken place, any future event may refer to the initial one as its environment: The environment is not only what it refers to or what is being referred to, but also all the communications that perform the referring. The possibilities for a communication to be referred to are, in ascending order: gestures, speech, writing, social media. ‘Since all communications are endlessly available to be referred to, also the environments that they delineate become available endlessly. Each such an environment has a potential of becoming evoked by a following occurrence of communication and thus, by the means of repetition of such occurrences, has a potential of becoming more or less stabilised’ [p 13]. DPB: reference to the mechanism of the process of individuation, where it produces temporarily stable entities. When communications interact they individuate and become more entangled and so do their (partly shared) environments; and the more a shared environment, the other communications (hetero-reference) and the communication itself (self-reference) are referred to by the various communications, the more stable they can become. As a consequence some communications belonging to each other and they belong to a particular environment: ‘Thus, the whole socially constructed reality (Berger & Luckmann, 2011) comes into existence’ [p 13]. DPB: this is an important argument in the formation of a stable pattern as a system. ‘At some stage of the process of individuation, the locus of control over the boundary between the environment and the individuating sequence of communications (which at this point can be called a system) has started to be positioned within it. This way the Luhmannian social systems arise, which ‘have the ability to establish relations with themselves and to differentiate these relations from relations with their environment’ (Luhmann 1995 Social Systems:13) (emphasis by the authors’ [p 16-7]. DPB: the ontogeny of an assemblage of parts individuating up to the point that they become a system in the sense that they self-organize and then at some point they (it) may get to the point that they (it) become(s) autopoietic: assemblage > self-organized system > autopoietic system. I am not sure about the term assemblage, because it sounds a kind of designed (an assembly is put together), whereas it should be thrown onto a heap such that they come to stick into a group.

Concept 4: Adaptability

Social systems self-maintain their own coherence and identity through their own operations: when a change in the environment occurs, the systems adapts. According to the theory of Hayek-Hebb the system responds and according to Maturana-Varela the system reacts to a change in its environment. The responsive approach claims that the system develops a model of its environment as per a pattern in internal interactions; but this is known not to exist (perhaps something in a functional and abstracted way). The theory of reactive adaptation claims that the system is operationally closed: the operational responses only depend on internal processing and hence on the internal structure of the system, in turn depending on its internal states. If the environment changes then the state may change and the reaction at the next click changes.’It follows, that the system-environment interactions take place only in a way that allows just that: the system’s recursive production of its own identity pattern under ever-changing conditions. Whenever a change in the environment forces an internal shift in the system, the shift is compensated by some other internal changes’ [p 18]. DPB: not very new but well worded. The choice is for the reactive model, given its relevance for biological systems but its controversial status concerning its application for social systems. The center stage position for human beings is no longer required after the Luhmannian explanation of communication; the concept of systems autonomy is a sufficient theoretical justification for the perturbation-compensation mode of adaptation to be derived for social systems: ‘What is needed for such an application is merely understanding the dynamic of systems as structurally defined i.e. that they will not be able to produce any consequent behavior which is not not encoded already in their current structure and state’ [p 19]. DPB: disagree, there is n need for that, it has been shown to not be required.

Concept 4.1 Responsive adaptation

In terms of the Hayek-Hebb responsive adaptation model, the system’s internal model gets updated as a result of a change in the relations between the system and its environment: some get stronger, others weaker. The problem with this approach is that it takes the boundary between system and environment as a given, whereas that boundary can change because of the changes in the environment (the relation between the map and the mapped territory, the interaction between the map and the mapped &c.). The Hayek-Hebb theoretical approach does not allow tracking of the emergence of the boundary between an individuating sequence of occurrences of communication and its multi-layered environment.

Concept 4.2: Reactive adaptation

The ‘reactive adaptation’ approach posits that operational responses of a system in relation too external changes (perturbations) depend only o the inner structure and the state of the system and can only induce further changes to its inner structure and state’ [p 24]. In order to observe a reactive adaptation in sequences of communications, one observes how a communication X points at a previous communications Y using its selections as a rationale to understand how the systems refers to a perturbation in the environment. So, the reference of X to Y reflects the reaction of the system to the change in the environment. X and Y being related as per some criterion, ‘belong’ to the same sequence of communications. DPB: perhaps this is the sequence with the hooks between the events (as a commonality of flavor) that Marta mentioned to indicate the relation between memes and (the individuation of) communication? This theory predicts that a change in the environment leads to a sequence of communications. DPB: this reminds of the Wagensberg model, where a change in the environment leads to changes in the complexity of the system and/or of the complexity of the environment and also to an increase in the amount of information at the boundary. What needs to be addressed is how it can be known whether communications X and Y ‘belong’ to the same sequence of communications: this can be known by the signifier selecting the communications in the entire sequence. The above method of observation using the signifier renders the reactive adaptation method takes a more relaxed stance towards the signifier (someone claims that..), and hence it is much more suitable for the process ontology of social systems. ‘Should a pattern of reactive adaptation be detected in such a fluid realm, this may imply (prove) a temporary existence of an individuated sequence, coherent enough to display an adaptive behaviour’ [p 26]. DPB: I like this, it is a spot-on explanation of the way a firm can be start (while not yet founded) and already takes shape and represents a body of thought. ‘The fluid, processual milieu populated by various occurrences of communication is exactly where the boundaries of the individuating assemblages are formed. It happens by distinguishing between the communications that belong to or are owned by a specific system and those which do not’ [p 27]. DPB: this can explain more specifically how a firm is formed, namely that the ideas belonging to the organizing of the specific production plan are owned by the owners of the firm.

Concept 5: Cognition

This final argument is that social systems áre cognitive systems, and so the argument goes beyond a mere metaphor: ‘a communication-constituted social system is a cognitive system and its on-going constitution is a process of cognitive development (emphasis by the author)’ [p 28]. The argument is 1. that all individuating processes are cognitive processes (following the enactive cognition approach of DiPaolo e.a. 2010) and 2. this approach is used to ‘explicate the intrinsic cognitive nature of communication constituted social systems’ [p 28]. The activity of cognition is ‘naturally associated’ with agents in environments whose operation can be described as an on-going problem-solving activity. But how does this set-up of agents, objects and their relations in an environment emerge? Even though they might be vague and not (yet) fully clear, determined and they can merge or even disappear completely: ‘Crossing this, often unseen, boundary between the unknown and the known, the unformed and the formed is what we call sense-making. Sense-making is the bringing forth of a world of distinctions, objects and entities and the relations among them. Even primary distinctions such as ‘objective-subjective’ or ‘self – other’ are part of sense-making. A relatively new appearance on the sage of cognitive science, the so-called enactive cognition approach, regards sense-making as the primary activity of cognition. The term ‘enactive’, synonymous with ‘actively bringing forth’, makes its first appearance in the context of cognition in the book “The Embodied Mind” (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1992) and has since been the subject of many developments and debates (Stewart, Gapenne, and Di Paolo, 2010; Thompson, 2007; Di Paolo, 2006; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). A guiding idea of the enactive approach is that any adequate account of how the body (i.e. any embodied system) can either be or instantiate a cognitive system must take into account the fact that the body is self-individuating: […] By saying that a system is self-constituted, we mean that its dynamics generate and sustain an identity. An identity is generated whenever a precarious network of dynamical processes becomes operationally closed.[…] Already implied in the notion of interactive autonomy is the realization that organisms cast aa web of significance on their world. […] This establishes a perspective on the world with its own normativity [.] (Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher, 2010, pp. 38-9, 45). The enactive theory of cognition therefore incorporates the idea of individuation rather naturally as it asserts cognition to be an on-going formative process, sensible and meaningful (value related), taking place in the co-determining interactions (i.e. communications in our case) of agents and their environment (Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher, 2010)’ [p 28-9]. The concept of sense-making means 1. cognition as a capability of an already individuated system and 2. the individuation of cognition as intrinsic to cognition itself [p 29]. DPB: I believe this is all the same thing: it can have started with fluids or even gases that found themselves to cluster around certain attractors (and away from repellers) and to then form clusters of ever more complex molecules with regulating functionalities to form cells, small organisms &c. But before anything else the elements in each of the clusters must ‘make sense of’ their environment such that they can manage to be attracted by this or repelled by that. The formation of their regulatory functionalities = their organization = their self-individuation = their cognition. Concerning point 2 above: ‘The latter meaning of sense-making is the one corresponding to the acquisition and expansion of concrete cognitive capacities and it also generalizes the concept of cognitive development beyond its psychological context (Piaget, 2013) and makes it applicable to general individuating systems (Weinbaum & Veitas, 2014). Furthermore, in the broadest sense, every individuation process where boundaries, distinctions and relations are progressively determined, is a sense-making process and therefore is cognitive’ [p 29]. DPB: I fully agree. This is an important element in the understanding of the emergence of organizations and firms. Now I know how they come to be, and I already knew how they come to ‘pass away’. But the million dollar question is Why, what is the relation of these events of emerging and dying to the production of information on a cosmic scale, what is its utility? The theory of enactive cognition assets that a relatively stable and autonomous individual is required for sense-making: ‘In contrast, we argue that the broader understanding of cognition as sense-making precedes the existence of systems as already individuated identities (cognitive agents) and is actually a necessary condition to their becoming. Only that at this pre-individuated stage there is still no one for whom sens is being made’ [p 29]. DPB: this is a crucial argument. It is somewhat mistaken (or misleading), because it tacitly assumes that consciousness is required for the sense-making to take place. If the next step is also taken (or what is stated above is followed on) then the sense making is just the processing information in general; if it is about conscious systems, then that has the sense of the processing of the communication events by the mind. In other cases, it is the processing of information, such as the figuring out what to do by some chemicals leading up to the Beloesov-Zhabotisnsky reaction after a shock is administered, having found out that other chemicals are in the vicinity. ‘Our understanding of cognition derives from the broader sense of social systems as individuating systems that enact sense-making via on-going communications. .. Even more importantly, if cognitive development is intrinsic to cognition as argued by Weinbaum & Veitas (2014, 2015), cognizing is not only a core activity of social systems but also a vehicle for their evolution. Embodiment can be understood as a combination of the ‘raw material’ constituents, in our case communications instances, and their coordinated organization, in our case the way communications are related and associated reflecting complex distinct structures. The situatedness of a social system can be understood as the totality of its immediate interactions over already established boundaries. In other words, the situation of the system is the immediate circumstances of enacting its sense-making. Of course for social systems both embodiment and situatedness are distributed and fluid’ [p 30]. DPB: this reminds me of the Situations of the Logistical Model: I had defined them as the change of one meme in the mind of a person. If the sentence in bold above can be taken to mean the forming of a thought (for a person) then the meaning of the two definitions might not be far removed, because to enact its sense-making means to use a ‘tool for thought’ to make sense (process information) of the immediate environment (circumstance?). ‘In a communication-constituted operational domain, the process of individuation may be initiated by a difference of strength of association between a few contingent communications (see also (Weinbaum & Veitas, 2015, pp. 19-23)). A recurrent set of occurrences of communication which are more or less consistent and coherent constitutes a semiotic boundary or part of it’ [p 30]. DPB: this reminds me of my model of the associative relations between memes, connotations. This above does explain that they are contingent, and so there is no certainty or anything goes; it does not explain how these associations can gain strength &c.