The Emergent Organism: Kielmeyer, Schelling, Röschlaub, Novalis (original) (raw)
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Organism, Self, Umwelt: A New Approach to Organismic Individuality (2020)
Published in: THAUMAZEIN 8, pp. 260-274., 2020
After the discovery of the DNA in the 1950´s, 20th century biology focused on the concept of the gene. In the 21st century, however, the concept of organism is regaining its primary role in biological thought. At present there is a rapidly growing literature verifying that living beings are able not only to deeply reorganize themselves but also to modify their genomes. The emergence of a theory of organism requires, however, first the elaboration of a logic of organismic causality that proceeds from organismic phenomenality. In the following I will attempt to outline what I label "logic of organisms." In order to achieve this aim I will first try to articulate a "logic of mechanisms" because it constitutes a sharp contrast to the "logic of organisms."
Complex emergence and the living organization: an epistemological framework for biology
Synthese, 2010
In this article an epistemological framework is proposed in order to integrate the emergentist thought with systemic studies on biological autonomy, which are focused on the role of organization. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the observer's activity, especially: (a) the different operations he performs in order to identify the pertinent elements at each descriptive level, and (b) the relationships between the different models he builds from them. According to the approach sustained here, organization will be considered as the result of a specific operation of identification of the relational properties of the functional components of a system, which do not necessarily coincide with the intrinsic properties of its structural constituents. Also, an epistemological notion of emergence-that of "complex emergence"-will be introduced, which can be defined as the insufficiency, even in principle, of a single descriptive modality to provide a complete description of certain classes of systems. This integrative framework will allow us to deal with two issues in biological and emergentist studies: (1) distinguishing the autonomy proper of living systems from some physical processes like those of structural stability and pattern generation, and (2) reconsidering the notion of downward causation not as a direct or indirect influence of the whole on its parts, but instead as an epistemological problem of interaction between descriptive domains in which the concept of organization proposed and the observational operations related to it play a crucial role.
Beyond Systems Theoretical Explanations of an Organism’s Becoming: A Process Philosophical Approach, 2014
This essay may be read as an application of one of the most central ideas in Whitehead's work: that the main task of metaphysical schemes of thought is to criticize scientific abstractions or, more specifically, to criticize the confusion of something abstract with something concrete in different sciences. This will be discussed in the context of a classical topic of natural philosophy, the equifinality of an organism's generation. This is a problem which has not adequately been considered by philosophers in recent decades. Instead, they focused their attention on supposedly more interesting issues, such as the evolution of the species, the generation of life and above all the nature of consciousness. Unfortunately, the choice of focus ignored the fact that the metabolism of even the simplest bacterium is more than just a very complex physicochemical system.This essay is divided into two parts. The aim of the first part is to show that thinking embryogenesis only in terms of efficient causation, which operates on the basis of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems, poses serious problems. Failing to recognize this would be a clear case of Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," meaning the confusion of the abstract with the concrete. In an attempt to overcome this problem, the second part of the article presents an alternative approach to teleology which I call "mentalistic teleology."
INTERLUDE ― Time, Dynamics, Life, and the Emergence of Complexity
Self published
This section considers the fundamental interactions of life and knowledge. The concept of autopoiesis (from the Greek “self” + “production”) as a formal definition as to what it means to be living, developed initially by Humberto Maturana and Franscisco Varela in the 1970’s, summarized in their 1980 book, is introduced. I argue that knowledge and autopoiesis are intertwined to the extent that one cannot exist without the other and show that autopoietic organization can emerge at several levels of complexity. These levels minimally include individual living cells, autopoietic organisms comprised of interacting cells, and autopoietic social organizations such as companies and other human enterprises comprised of interacting organisms such as people. The argument traces the emergence of knowledge-based autopoietic systems from foundation theories of physical time, dynamics and evolutionary epistemology.
In this contribution, I investigate the changes of focus in the philosophical concept of emergence in the nineteenth and twentieth century period, especially in connection with the problem of characterizing life and its origins. Since its early philosophical formulation in the nineteenth century, “emergence” has been applied to vital phenomena, but also to chemical compounds and mental states. In each case, the whole is said to be more than the sum of its parts: a higher level of organization appears to exhibit properties that are claimed to be non-deducible, non-predictable or unexplainable on the basis of the properties of its lower level components. In the early twentieth century, the concept of emergence was strongly stimulated by the wish to formulate a philosophical alternative to both vitalism and mechanism. The concept experienced a golden age that proved to be short lived as it encountered several scientific and philosophical setbacks in the mid- twentieth century. The concept somehow re-emerged in the late twentieth cen- tury, especially as it became a central topic in philosophy of mind, and as it also received the unexpected support of the science of complex systems. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, benefiting from a growing awareness of the complexity of biological phenomena, the concept of emergence re-emerges as a way of characterizing life and its origin, not so much as an alternative to vitalism, but as an alternative to reductive explanations of life. Its relevance remains a debated topic.
The Interactive Construction of Biological Individuality Through Biotic Entrenchment
'Inter-identities' in Life, Mind, and Society, 2019
In this article, we propose to critically evaluate whether a closure of constraints interpretation can make sense of biotic entrenchment, the process of assimilation and functional integration of environmental elements of biotic origin in development and, eventually, evolution. In order to achieve the aims of our analysis, we shall focus on multi-species partnerships, biological systems characterised by ontogenetic dependencies of various strengths between the partners. Our main research question is to tackle the foundational problem posed by the dynamics of biotic entrenchment characterising multi-species partnerships for the closure of constraints interpretation, namely, to understand for which biological system (i.e., the partners taken individually or the partnership as the encompassing system) closure of constraints is realised. Through the analysis of significant illustrative examples, we shall progressively refine the closure thesis and articulate an answer to our main research question. We shall also propose that biotic entrenchment provides a chief example of the phenomenon of interactive and horizontal construction of biological individuality and inter-identity. The characterisation of the criteria for the individuation of developing and evolving living entities is one of the main issues in the philosophy of biology and theoretical biology. From a Darwinian perspective, based on the notion of unit of selection, organisms represent just one individual amongst many possible types. This notion should be contrasted to that of physiological individual focused on functional integration 1. The autopoietic approach is an important instance of the latter. Autopoiesis, as its name suggests (a term with Greek etymology from auto = self and poiesis = production), is a theory characterising organismal life in 1 Physiological and evolutionary accounts are complementary and, sometimes, integrative. For instance, Queller and Strassmann (2016) characterise individuality as the achievement of functional adaptive coherence or "organismality, " a property of biological systems that is not categorical but continuous. Conversely, some physiological accounts take into account the evolutionary dimension of biological individuality, especially insofar as the origin of new organisations is concerned (Moreno and Mossio, 2015).
The Concept of the Organism in the Philosophy of Biology
The notions of selfhood, self-preservation, and the integration of the self have a central role to play in moral and political philosophy as well as in the philosophy of mind. Biologically, however, the notion of the living individual-the organism-is problematic. Although we have no difficulty in picking out, or picking up, or counting individual rosebushes or kittens, it is difficult to determine where the boundaries of such living things lie and what belongs to them. The essay discusses the apparent conflict between common sense and biology, whilst taking account of both Richard Dawkinss gene-centered perspective and the claims of philosophers who maintain that the organism is an indispensable concept in the life sciences.