The current thinking does not allow an understanding. But an understanding is possible, however it requires a change of thinking. That is the bottom line.

Habits belong to entities. — Pop

You tell me what you might mean by an entity. That’s a mighty vague term. I will watch with interest as you try to justify some epistemic cut to separate the living and mindful from the physics of dissipative structure.

Oh I forgot. You will just claim panpsychic dualism as the reason not to have to provide an intelligible mechanism for such a differentiation.

It's certainly a problem for physicalism, not so much for dualism or idealism. I mean, 'if the stuff of the world is mind-stuff....' — Wayfarer

It was a problem that got solved though. So physicalism prevailed.

Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-009-9064-2

This is the prevalent thinking that Barbieri and co are up against. — Pop

Hah. Barbieri has been changing sides. As a good careerist, he has snuggled up more closely with the acceptable mainstream. This is a nice commentary…

In contrast to much of the work in biosemiotics, Barbieri wants to stay within a mechanistic paradigm, assuming that “scientific knowledge is obtained by building machine-like models of what we observe in nature.” In 2012, Barbieri resigned as editor of Biosemiotics and founded the International Society of Code Biology, whose constitution committed it to using “the standard methods of science.” What he is trying to avoid is the more interpretive methods common in the humanities and social sciences. Barbieri does agree that information doesn’t speak for itself, and that it has to be given meaning through decoding processes. In addition to the genetic code, he describes numerous codes that biologists have discovered more recently, and he associates the appearance of each code with a major step in macroevolution.

Where Barbieri parts company with biosemiotics is in his understanding of decoding as a mechanical process rather than a process of contextual interpretation. He grants that humans and other brainy animals are subjects who experience, feel, and interpret signs and symbols. But aside from that, he regards decoding as a mechanical process governed by reliable coding rules, such that THIS information always translates into THAT result; for example, this genetic sequence translates into that protein. This makes the individual cell a “biological machine.” Hoffmeyer, on the other hand, rejects this context-free understanding of codes: “Modern semiotics…has abolished the conception of a code as a ‘simple mechanism for pairing of concept and reference.’”

To answer the biosemiotic contention that even simple organisms have context-dependent information and behavior, Barbieri maintains that this requires no more than a simple coupling of more than one mechanical coding process, such as genetic decoding PLUS transduction decoding. “It takes only two context-free codes, in short, to produce a context-dependent behavior.” Presto, no need for interpretation! I would have liked to see more discussion of how information from many coders using different codes, both digital (genetic) and analog, would be predictably combined, especially as the number and type of decoders expanded over the course of evolution. It seems to me that Barbieri jumps too easily from mechanical predictability at the single decoder level to mechanical predictability in the organism as a whole, at least until he gets to brainy animals. Given that any organism has to act as one, what is the logic by which a multitude of disparate information is synthesized to produce a predictable result?

Both Barbieri and Hoffmeyer say that the genetic code provides only part of the information necessary to construct an actual organism. For Barbieri, the coding rules supply the rest. But I didn’t see why a simple "this-information-equals-that-result" coding would supply the additional information. Hoffmeyer's theory of dual coding makes more sense to me. Analog-coded information throughout the cell provides the context in which the digitally-coded genetic information is interpreted. “Digital codifications…do not specify their own interpretation in the real world of spatio-temporal continuity. This is where living, analog codifications must take over.” In the end, life (not just the brain) requires an ongoing process of interpretation/unification within a living agent/interpreter, which distinguishes life from dead machinery. If that remains much more mysterious than our smartest machines, so be it.

You tell me what you might mean by an entity. That’s a mighty vague term. I will watch with interest as you try to justify some epistemic cut to separate the living and mindful from the physics of dissipative structure. — apokrisis

Am I understanding you correctly ? - YOU are the one arguing epistemic cut. Not me - hence I have a panpsychic understanding. The anthropic principle is the interpreter ( the integrated laws of the universe ) - it causes the information to integrate. At all scales, as far as I can see.

The anthropic principle is the interpreter ( the integrated laws of the universe ) - it causes the information to integrate. — Pop

So - the cosmological principle that theories of the universe are constrained by the necessity to allow human existence?

All you need to provide now then is an explanation of how Panpsychism is indeed “a theory” in the scientific sense. (And not pseudo-metaphysical hand waving.)

A clue. To be a formal model, it needs to be testable. And that involves an epistemic cut between model and measurement.

A clue. To be a formal model, it needs to be testable. And that involves an epistemic cut between model and measurement. — apokrisis

"Everything is information"

There you go. A falsifiable, thus scientific , theory in three words. Beat that! :lol:

And to refine it a little:

Everything is information from every perspective.

But to keep @Wayfarer happy:

We will never know the truth, we will only ever know information about it.

There you go. A falsifiable, thus scientific , theory in three words. Beat that! — Pop

What is your unit of measurement? You forgot something.

If it involves an atomistic notion of consciousness, well best of luck.

(Remember, you are claiming everything is panpsychist information.)

What is your unit of measurement? You forgot something. — apokrisis

You can falsify it, by providing something that is not information.

If it involves an atomistic notion of consciousness, well best of luck.

(Remember, you are claiming everything is panpsychist information.) — apokrisis

I'm claiming everything exists as a body of information. This "body of information" is what is evolving from every perspective. Our consciousness is the ultimate body of information that we are aware of.

That the quantum foam is information is doubtful. You can rest assured however that once we discover its secrets, these too will be information. Such is the nature of fundamental information.

You can falsify it, by providing something that is not information. — Pop

Sure. I’ll get right on to it just as soon as you provide the units of measurement.

Does it involve something like a stopwatch and ruler? Or is it more like waving your hands over an entity and going “woooo-oo”?

It was a problem that got solved though. So physicalism prevailed. — apokrisis

And yet:

In the end, life (not just the brain) requires an ongoing process of interpretation/unification within a living agent/interpreter, which distinguishes life from dead machinery. If that remains much more mysterious than our smartest machines, so be it.

weak And even weaker.

You do not have to believe this, cannot believe this, in one big gulp. But you can stop for a moment and admire its theoretical beauty, its simplicity and logic. I think Occum would be impressed. It is logically coherent and can be used to understand and predict situations.

The consequences of panpsychism is a belief system similar to Buddhism

Bhutan is the world’s only Buddhist country. They measure national happiness. They preserve 75% of the country to nature. They are carbon negative. Theirs is a sustainable lifestyle. Compare that to our western way of life, and when you do compare the happiness of a typical Bhutanese to a typical westerner. You have to do the legwork and make this call yourself. Then you can judge the theory of panpschism in a holistic way. It is the most provable of theories, and its social results are known - it has a good outcome in general. It is not a theory for the west of today, but for a future west that is suffering the effects of hot house earth, who knows?

The major prediction of this theory is that the combined laws of nature is what we feel to give us integrity. The feelings and emotions that we most deeply identify with are those laws affecting the body of information that we are - towards integrity. All bodies of information in this universe are affected by those same laws. So, it is not possible to lose touch with feeling in this universe ever.

which distinguishes life from dead machinery

Yep. You need to move past Barbieri and also Hoffmeyer to reach Pattee’s resolution.

Shannon reduced information to a binary code — apokrisis

Imhotep: The language of the slaves machines. I may have use for you. And the rewards...will be great!

What would be difference between a wood carver carving away his mental image in his brain into a woodspirit carving, and something taking physical shape in the universe via / caused by "information"? Could they not be simply described as the same form of manifestations? — Corvus

The difference is specific Intention versus general progression. Evolution is a process of enforming, by which general laws "select" the fittest forms from among those produced randomly. You could say that Nature "sculpts" new species from the raw material of old "stuff". Human intention (design) creates novelties much faster by eliminating most of the randomness. We "select" the best elements for our creations by applying personal values, rather than by rolling dice. Come to think of it, you might say that Natural Laws are the cosmic values that fashion turbulent amorphous matter into the stable natural forms that we know and love. :smile:

PS__If that sounds teleological, I'll just say that's one way to interpret the evidence. :joke:

This validates the view, that gnomon and myself have been advocating in our own way. That information is in the fundamental mix. — Pop

Information is not only fundamental to the universe, it is ubiquitous. In my view, it is the essence of both Energy and Matter . . . . and Mind. Some would interpret that datum as proof of a Universal Consciousness. But I prefer to remain agnostic about any "mind" that I can't converse with. Instead, I tend to use the less grandiose term : "Universal Enformation". That keeps me more grounded in empirical observations instead of unfettered speculation. Although, I can't help but conjecture from "what is" to "what if?" :smile:

Universal Consciousness (redirected, here, as Universal Mind) is a concept that tries to address the underlying essence of all being and becoming in the universe. It includes the being and becoming that occurred in the universe prior to the arising of the concept of “Mind,” a term that more appropriately refers to the organic, human, aspect of Universal Consciousness. It addresses inorganic being and becoming and the interactions that occur in that process without specific reference to the physical and chemical laws that try to describe those interactions. Those interactions have occurred, do occur, and continue to occur. Universal Consciousness is the source, ground, basis, that underlies those interactions and the awareness and knowledge they imply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_mind

In my view, it is the essence of both Energy and Matter . . . — Gnomon

Why do you think that?

What is your unit of measurement? You forgot something. — apokrisis

The unit of measurement is the human mind, as in "Man is the measure of all things". :smile:

To Measure : from Latin "mensura"; mens- (mind)

In my view, it is the essence of both Energy and Matter . . . — Gnomon
Why do you think that? — frank

Don't get me started. I have a webpage and a blog devoted to exploring that equation. Shannon defined his concept of Information in terms of the absence of energy (entropy). But the math works both ways. Here's a link, not written by me, that might point you in the direction I'm looking. :cool:

The mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

Shannon defined his concept of Information in terms of the absence of energy (entropy). — Gnomon

I don't think so.

"In information theory, the entropy of a random variable is the average level of "information", "surprise", or "uncertainty" inherent in the variable's possible outcomes."

It's not about absence of energy.

for me information is the product of contrast. Without two poles - without a binary interaction there is no information.
0 = nothing or no discernible “content” however -1 +1 is a contrast of equal opposites - a spectrum which can be appreciated from within itself and yet still equals zero.

You cannot have black without white or space without matter to occupy it. Information is difference.

Neuromodulating chemical signals that produce reciprocal states of response. One puts us in a cooperating state of mind - inclined to be sympathetic in terms of our empathic understanding of another’s state of mind. But high testosterone, low oxytocin, switches things. You employ your empathic skills to find the least sympathetic ways to undermine your competition. — apokrisis

Everything is a nested hierarchy of switches that delivers a self-balancing outcome - one that is both stable and yet dynamic, conservative and liberal, loving and hateful, habitual and attentional, or whatever other dichotomy has come to your notice as a nasty dualism that must be hammered flat by your brand of philosophical monism. — apokrisis

What I’m wondering here is how much of a role a sociobiological component plays in your model. Are these just general capacities for affectivity and motivation you’re ascribing to the nwueohormonal machinery , or do they specify content? If a series of mutations were to occur , could they wreak havoc with the motivational-affective system in such a s way as to reverse the poles of the dichotomy cooperation-competition , fight-flight, approach-avoid, love the insider-hate the outsider?

Piaget once debated Chomsky and Fodor , who were both innatists when it came to semantic content of language. Piaget’s positions was that the instincts play essentially no role i. human behavior , other than the Babinski reflex. The general organizing principles of cognition and affect ( assimilation , accommodation , progressive equilibrarion) belong to the general organizing principles of life( and he wanted to extend this back to physics ). Dan Dennett also disagreed with evolutionary psychologists who , along with Dawkins and Pinker, ascribed specific innate grounds for many behaviors. Dennett believes that human behavior is almost entirely explainable without reference to innate modules or other kinds of machinery , other than the general capacities required for goal-oriented cognition. Where do you stand on this?

Do we suspect the outside and embrace the insider because of arbitrarily tuned machinery or because we attempt to make sense of our world with the neural machinery we have and the alien is intrinsically unassimilable? That is , can’t a general notion of predictive sense-making encompass what you are delineating in terms of fine-grained switches, hormones , dichotomies? What is it this hardware detail is adding to our understanding of human behavior? Do we have to uncover a flow chart of arbitrarily patterned sequences of instructions in the individual , and coordinate the this with a large arbitrary social patterning , in order to understand human behavior?

When I interact with someone , like with you right now , I read every word that you write as belonging to a system of meaning that guides the sense of each word. I try to discern what that larger system is, what your overarching philosophical
presuppositions are , and I experiment with different versions to ‘try on for size’. I know I’m getting closer if I know that I can compose a response that you will find remarkably consonant with your thinking ( obviously that’s not what I’ve been aiming to do up
till now ). Thus, my goal is to better abs better anticipate the trajectory of your thinking , where your passion lies in the conversation. Again, how successfully I construe your larger worldview is not up to me to decide, it’s up to you to let me know by your assent or objections , by the fruitfulness of our interchange.

My subsuming of your construct system , or your subsuming of mine, is not the capturing of a dead thing. In every word exchanged between the two of us , your entire worldview is aight alight altered by exposure to my thinking, and so is my thinking changed by the interaction. When each of us go back to read each other’s posts, we find that the sens of each word has changed as a result of the effect of the previous interaction on both of our perspectives.


There is a reciprocal dialogic altering of thinking going on, but that doesn’t guarantee that our two approaches become more aligned with each other. That can only happen if either one or both of us manage to transform and expand our own thinking enough to accommodate what initially appears as the alienness of the other.


Norice that the only motive I presume here is sense-making , the need on the part of each of us to anticipate the events the others words express. There may be switches going off like nobody’s business and neurohormones up the wazoo, but the balance of integration and differentiation that is being sought via all this machinery is in the direction of replication of events, construing the most novel and strange future in terms of an aspect of the familiar past.

Tell me how you attempt to make sense of an interchange such as this. Let me put my subsuming skill to the test. Certainly you would construe my personalistic, individualistic bent (construct system ) as itself a narrative product of a social scheme. I convince myself there is something called a personal construct system because socially induced motivational mechanisms select for such a thinking.

At the organismic level, my notion of a functionally unified motivational telos would appear incoherent at best , or a relic of Romanticism. There would likely be a range of loosely correlated , motivational systems which
are the expression of evolutionary mechanisms, and thus could be other than what they are. In sum, a complex of contextually embedded semiotic codes ( my syntax, semantics and affectivity) denotes
the epistemic cut between the material and the informational.

Kant and Hegel, in different ways, recognized the absolute inseparability of form and content in understanding the real. Biosemiotics in all its varieties brings this insight into the realms of physics and biology.
I hadnt realized the influence writers like Partee and Peirce have had on people whose work I am familiar with (Bateson, Deacon). So this brings biosemiotics right up against the cognitive work on language I am familiar with. It seems to me that a cognitive semiotic can play the role of challenging remnants of traditional views still hiding within the various versions of biosemiotics. Certainly ,hermeneutical ( influenced by Gadamer and Heidegger) and Wittgensteinian pragmatical semiotics can help in this direction. I also think dialogical models inspired by Bakhtin and social constructionism ( John Shotter in particular) can help us leave behind computationalism on the plane of human language.

The unit of measurement is the human mind, as in "Man is the measure of all things". :smile: — Gnomon

Does that include madmen, fools and dreamers?

Seems legit, :ok:

If a series of mutations were to occur , could they wreak havoc with the motivational-affective system in such a s way as to reverse the poles of the dichotomy cooperation-competition , fight-flight, approach-avoid, love the insider-hate the outsider? — Joshs

My position on emotions is social constructionist and biological. One must build on the other.

So yes, we already know people have genetic variability in their basic biological affectivity. There is a natural economy of physiological preparedness that produces a pallet of feelings - the contrasts of the parasympathetic vs the sympathetic nervous system for a start. And some are more anxious or reactive than others. Some more dominating than submissive. Some are almost excessively agreeable and others psychopaths.

Where do you stand on this? — Joshs

Whenever academics argue for an extreme position on the nature/nurture divide, you know they are still mired in the culture wars of yesteryear. It is a sad sight to see so much time and effort being wasted on a false dichotomy.

Do we suspect the outside and embrace the insider because of arbitrarily tuned machinery or because we attempt to make sense of our world with the neural machinery we have and the alien is intrinsically unassimilable? — Joshs

No. That is just the general rationality of the Cosmos expressing itself. Seriously, Everything in Nature is the product of symmetry breakings, from particle physics up.

The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself. But then also inserts a self interested point of view into the map of this terrain. Hence Gestalt psychology. We experience an Umwelt which is symmetry broken into the figure and ground that has now a personal meaning. We highlight what matters to us as a point of view, and ignore everything else as peripheral detail.

And so we lump and split the world in terms of self and other, so as to construct ourselves as both an individual biological organism and a part of a larger social organism. That means reading self and other into any social situation,

This dichotomisation or symmetry breaking isn’t an arbitrary epistemic tactic. It always was the driving logic of a nature making itself intelligible - developing a rational structure. That’s Peircean pansemiosis 101.

Thus, my goal is to better abs better anticipate the trajectory of your thinking , where your passion lies in the conversation. Again, how successfully I construe your larger worldview now. it up to me to decide, it’s up to you to let me know by your assent or objections , by the fruitfulness of our interchange. — Joshs

Yep.

There is a reciprocal dialogic altering of thinking going on, but that doesn’t guarantee that our two approaches become more aligned with each other. That can only happen if either one or both of us manage to transform and expand our own thinking enough to accommodate what initially appears as the alienness of the other. — Joshs

Perhaps it is also hard for folk to paradigm shift if they haven’t first established a paradigm to shift away from? Often people don’t understand their own socially constructed belief systems, just like fish don’t know water.

To break out of a reductionist causal mindset, it is not enough to listen to a long lecture on organicism.

for me information is the product of contrast. Without two poles - without a binary interaction there is no information.
0 = nothing or no discernible “content” however -1 +1 is a contrast of equal opposites - a spectrum which can be appreciated from within itself and yet still equals zero.

You cannot have black without white or space without matter to occupy it. Information is difference. — Benj96

:up: You are on the right track, and I need help to define it @Daniel has disappeared. I'm looking for a definition of information befitting an enactive world .

So far I have: In the enactive world : Information is the interaction of form.. In the case of organic form, the interaction causes an internal physical change that entangles an organism into its environment.
( neural correlates )
Still a bit unwieldly, hoping to do better then this. Can you work with this to reduce it? Anyone?

It's not about absence of energy. — frank

For a communications engineer (Shannon), it wasn't about the energy. But for more recent information theorists, their topic has much broader applications & implications than just 1s & 0s. For physicists, it's all about the energy. :smile:

What is the relationship between forms of energy?
So when energy is exchanged between two systems, information is also exchanged (see Figure 1), but the dynamics of energy exchange does not uniquely determine the information exchanged. For the same amount of energy, different amounts of information can flow in or out of a system.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0501/0501014.pdf

The unit of measurement is the human mind, as in "Man is the measure of all things". :smile: — Gnomon
Does that include madmen, fools and dreamers? — apokrisis

Yes. They see the world as they are. :smile:

Perhaps it is also hard for folk to paradigm shift if they haven’t first established a paradigm to shift away from? Often people don’t understand their own socially constructed belief systems, just like fish don’t know water. — apokrisis

That’s true, but they do know when their paradigm is crumbling , because this is for Kelly the meaning of what are conventionally called negative emotions. Kelly did away with the dichotomy cognition-feeling-conation and instead made what we think of a a feeling the expression of the organizational status of our attempts at anticipating events . Anxiety , threat , guilt and hostility all have to do with a ‘paradigm’ , what he calls our superordinate system , running into trouble in its attempts to make sense of things. One can think of such feelings as anxiety as the experience of impending chaos , the near meaningless of a world that one cannot construe on the basis of similarities with what one already knows. One cannot move forward.

One can attempt to stave off such chaos for a while , constricting one’s world to simple routines and situations that are familiar( the ultimate constriction is suicide) and avoiding the situations one no longer cope with, but only a reorganization of one’s system ( a new paradigm) offers the possibility of moving forward again. In this regard, Kelly makes a distinction between aggression and hostility. Aggression is simply confident exploration of new situations, with no intent to harm or destroy.
Hostility is the attempt to force a round peg into a square hole, the recognition that one’s social
predication has failed ( one discovers one’s lover has cheated , violating one’s sense of trust in them). Rather than reconstruing the situation so as to determine how the other came to their behavior , one attempts to force the other back to the way we expected
them to act in the first place. Hostility and anger are thus impetuses of conformity. We blame the world for our failure to understand it, to keep up with the changing flow of events such as to discern replicating patterns.

Notably missing from Kelly’s treatment of affect is recourse to bodily sensation. He contradicts the classic view of feeling as instinctive , raw, primitive , bodilly, non-intentional , a force , surge, glow , energy.

That is just the general rationality of the Cosmos expressing itself.
The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself — apokrisis

Perhaps the ‘rationality’ of Kelly’s approach can be linked to this ‘rationality’ of the Cosmos.

The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself. But then also inserts a self interested point of view into the map of this terrain. Hence Gestalt psychology. We experience an Umwelt which is symmetry broken into the figure and ground that has now a personal meaning. We highlight what matters to us as a point of view, and ignore everything else as peripheral detail. — apokrisis

Is the brain’s inserting a self interested point of view necessary? Could it be imagined differently? Enactivists like Thompson argue that all living things have a point of view, a functional unity that makes them norm generating goal-oriented systems. As Piaget defined it, for an organism , ‘interest’ is simply the system’s actively pursuing a continuing pattern of interaction with its world, and need is the interruption of this cycle.

So it’s not simply that we ignore what doesn’t matter to us , we would disintegrate as organisms if we attempted to ‘assimilate’ what was not compatible with our current functioning and interests. I suppose one could put this in dialectical terms and say with Piaget that the interest-based equlibrarion of cognitive structures is progressive ,
the direction is from weaker to stronger structures. Put differently, self-interest, point of view and normativity produce new structure from older ones. Without relevance, mattering , interest there is no dialectical
progression of structural integration, only a mechanical reproduction or re-shuffling of pre-existing pattern.

I suppose that , rather than taking the individual
organism as focal point , one could take a broader ecological stance and put in question the coherence of biological ‘selves’. I don’t think that such an approach would alter the general features of the dialectic. It would merely identify the self as the totality , the world coming to know itself.

Yes. They see the world as they are. — Gnomon

Happy clappy bullshit. You wouldn’t believe the delusions of a schizophrenic. You wouldn’t think they had achieved some praiseworthy level of reality modelling.

Peirce got it right in defining truth as the limit of a community of rational inquiry. The units of measurement might arise from the point of view taken, but it is clearly situated in the pragmatics of being part of a collective social level of organismic existence. If units of measurement can’t be shared across the community of inquiry, there ain’t anything worth talking about.

One can think of such feelings as anxiety as the experience of impending chaos , the near meaningless of a world that one cannot construe on the basis of similarities with what one already knows. One cannot move forward. — Joshs

Note how you want to cloak the prosaic in the dramatic. You are romanticising anxiety as a cosmic existentialist drama - passionate man against uncaring nature.

And yet anxiety is part of the stress response - physiological readiness for fight or flight (or even the third strange choice of freezing). Noradrenaline in the brain goes up to change the signal-noise balance. We become less able to focus on endogenous/dopamimergic planning and more open to the exogenous/readiness response where we have no clear prediction of where the signals we seek might come from. So the brain as a whole is made readier to react to anything that might just normally be treated as peripheral noise.

Thus we shift the discourse from heightened Romanticism back towards the mundanity of information processing. Anxiety is just a machinery for paying better attention to the uncertain environment when that is the processing mode that makes better sense than remaining head down and focused on some narrow task or activity.

So it’s not simply that we ignore what doesn’t matter to us , we would disintegrate as organisms if we attempted to ‘assimilate’ what was not compatible with our current functioning and interests. I suppose one could put this in dialectical terms and say with Piaget that the interest-based equlibrarion of cognitive structures is progressive ,
the direction is from weaker to stronger structures. — Joshs

The general dichotomy that a learning and living system implements is that of plasticity-stability. An organism must be able to resist change to its structure of habits so as to persist as that functional set of habits. But the same organism must also have the plasticity to adapt as the world changes in ways it hasn’t encountered. It must have the attentional level of processing to complement the habitual. Paradigms need to be tweakable.

So any systems minded biologist or neuroscientist gets this. Existence for an organism is a dialectical balancing act in terms of staying the same and yet constantly adapting.

It is not a psychic drama. It is the intelligible basis of organismic being.

I suppose that , rather than taking the individual
organism as focal point , one could take a broader ecological stance and put in question the coherence of biological ‘selves’. I don’t think that such an approach would alter the general features of the dialectic. It would merely identify the self as the totality , the world coming to know itself. — Joshs

Or another way of putting it is that selfhood is pervasive and scalefree.

Life is Gaian in scale in that it eventually came to control the Earth’s chemistry. It produced a stable atmosphere and carbon cycle that favours life as an ongoing entropic project.

So we have bacteria that form communal biofilms. Even the smallest organisms make social collectives as higher level identities. Rainforests make their own rain - seeding the clouds with bacteria lifted into the sky by their own evapotranspiration. Life as a whole took control of the planet when it evolved the dialectic of oxygen-based respiration and CO2-based photosynthesis some 2.2 billion years ago (although it took a couple of snowball earth extinction events to secure the mature state marked by the Cambrian explosion of complexity some 600 million years ago).

So selfhood exists at every level of biology and neurology. It is anti-reductionist in that a point of view - an epistemic cut - is ubiquitous to every scale of organisation.