When an obfuscating terminology hampers scientific progress

One can see very clear signs of how modern science, especially neuroscience and biology, and the cognitive sciences are becoming increasingly aware of their failure to explain what mind, consciousness, and life are in terms of a reductionist and mechanistic approach that tried to cram it into a mere bioelectric activity of tiny cellular networks.

3D representation of a living cell during the process of mitosis.

What is now in fashion (or returned into fashion) are terms like enactivism, extended-, embodied-, or distributed cognition, self-referential, non-linear self-organizing complexity, feedback loops, resonances in dynamical systems, autonomous self-regulating systems, etc. All fascinating concepts and processes that take place not only in our brains, but as the result of the interaction of that wet gray matter in our skull and the rest of our body and the environment. That is, from a bottom-up reductionist way of seeing the world, we are now expanding our vision in terms of system dynamical thinking to broader domains that contemplate the famous “whole that isn’t reducible to its parts.” This is what seems to enchant people, and certainly is a step forward compared to the conventional Cartesian way of seeing the world. It helps us to relax that reductionist view that has conditioned so much our understanding of the world and is so characteristic of our species.

However, I don’t think this approach will be much more successful than the past ones, such as the cybernetics of self-controlled systems of the 1950s, or the theory of autopoiesis of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and that they introduced about half a century ago with their famous book “Autopoiesis and Cognition”. Their approach to life didn’t really produce the expected breakthrough. And, I think, it couldn’t be otherwise. Because deep down it remains a mechanistic perspective that still hopes to explain life in terms of gears, cogwheels, and clockworks, expanding it to networks, and dressing it up with non-linearity, complexity, dynamic interactions, self-X, self-Y, and a bit more of wholistic thinking, but not much more than that. This should have led us to the naturalization of life, with all its psychological dimensions, as emerging from dead matter constituents and their interactions. My impression is that, despite its failure, this intellectual instinct is recently gaining new ground.

After all, what are we doing by trying to explain the emergence of life by adopting this perspective? We are trying to expand our cognition, mind, life, and consciousness seemingly embracing a wider perspective that includes the environment and complex non-linear processes to explain… well… cognition, mind, life, and consciousness itself. Deep down, it is an oxymoron. It isn’t really surprising that, in scientific terms, when it comes to the question of the true nature of cognition, consciousness, and the origins of life, these remain unexplained more than ever, since the times of Descartes.

Perhaps, also in the sciences with all its analytic thinking, we should learn to see the world going beyond mere mental constructions and learn to perceive the Spirit that is at work behind the appearances. Then, all these questions might appear in a completely new light, and all the world’s processes with those apparently so mysterious phenomena like mind, life and consciousness, would reveal themselves not as “emergent” phenomena of matter, but rather as “manifestations” in and through matter. The question is not so much what we should do, but how we should see, feel, and perceive Nature and the World. Also, what should we allow ourselves to assume? Perhaps, if we allow ourselves to assume the unspeakable, we might make a more decisive step forward, than clinging on to paradigms that reframe the old way of seeing and perceiving with only some shifts in terminology. It is about allowing ourselves to perceive, apprehend and comprehend something that goes beyond our ordinary sensory and analytic awareness, and then see where it leads us.