Will Self-Organizing Complexity explain Consciousness, Mind, and Life?

One can see clearly how modern science, especially cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and biology, are becoming increasingly aware of their failure to explain what mind, consciousness, and life are in terms of a reductionist and mechanistic approach. The attempt to explain consciousness and cognition as an epiphenomenon emerging from a mere bioelectric activity of tiny cellular units, didn’t meet the expectations.

What we are now becoming aware of is that a more complex and comprehensive view is necessary to understand these things. That’s why we are assisting in a revival of complexity theories that take a more holistic view of life, mind and consciousness. Terms like ‘non-linear self-organizing complexity,’ ‘self-referential feedback loops,’ ‘resonances in dynamical systems,’ ‘radical emergence,’ ‘adjacent possibles,’  ‘enactivism,’ ‘extended-, embodied-, or distributed cognition,’ ‘non-computable,’ ‘impredicative,’ ‘unformalizable’ or ‘unpredictable autonomous self-regulating autopoietic systems,’ etc., have become commonplace.

Scientists are switching their way of seeing from a bottom-up reductionist to a more comprehensive top-down perspective, and that considers the interaction of the parts with the whole and the organism with the environment.  The perspective has been extended from microscopic processes that take place at the cellular or network level, to a wider standpoint that takes into account not only the parts but also the interactions and their functions, inside a cell or in the brain, together respectively with the environment and the rest of our body as well. That is, 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 certainly 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 of our understanding of the world and is so characteristic of our species. A fascinating viewpoint, and suggestive of a new way of seeing life and cognition.

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 Norbert Wiener in the 1950s, or the theory of autopoiesis of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, which they introduced about half a century ago with their bestselling book “Autopoiesis and Cognition”. Their approach to life didn’t really produce the expected breakthrough. Nowadays, these theories have been refined further in the light of new findings and go through a new renaissance.

But, in my view, adding that “cognition is ultimately the result of a homeostatic process”, or that “it is not the brain but the whole organism that is conscious,” or that “cognition must be seen as the relationship between the organism and its environment drawing boundaries between self and other, and from which all higher levels of cognition ultimately derive,” are all insights that haven’t much explanatory power from a philosophical standpoint. The good old ‘hard problem of consciousness’ remains hard, inflexible, and untouched by these complexity paradigms, more than ever.

And, I think, it couldn’t be otherwise. Because deep down these theories maintain a mechanistic perspective that still hopes to explain mind and life in terms of gears, cogwheels, and clockworks. Extending it to networks, functions, or more abstract levels of conceptualizations, eventually dressed up with ‘non-linearity,’ ‘self-organizing complexity,’ ‘enactive dynamic interactions between the environment and the organism,’ ‘dialectical systems between parts and wholes,’ ‘self-X,’ or ‘self-Y,’ with a bit more of holistic thinking, enlarges the descriptive level, not much the explanatory one. Pointing out that Nature is ‘non-computable’ or ‘undecidable’  underlines that it is conceptually irreducible, but does not change the background ontology which remains (more or less unconsciously) a materially reductionist and strictly mechanistic conception of Nature, life, and cognition. It is yet another attempt of the human mind to cram everything into a naturalistic explanation, trying to avoid at any cost metaphysical speculations. Should this finally lead us to the naturalization of life with all its psychological dimensions, as something emerging from dead matter constituents and their interactions? I don’t see any reason why extending and generalizing the philosophically failing approach of physicalism from a bottom-up to a top-down perspective, should lead us to deeper insights that could answer the ultimate question of what consciousness, mind, and life really are. These conceptual frameworks may eventually tell us something more about how life and the mind work but, so far, I couldn’t see anything that could convince me that they have any chance to shed more light on what life, mind and consciousness are, let alone why they are. When it comes to the question of the true nature of cognition, consciousness, and, eventually, the origins of life, these remain unexplained more than ever, since the times of Descartes, and I doubt that these trends in cognitive science will make an exception.

Perhaps, also in the sciences with all its analytic thinking, we should learn to see the world going beyond mere mental (and ultimately anthropocentric) 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 conceptual shifts that don’t capture reality deep enough.  It is about allowing ourselves to perceive, feel, apprehend, and comprehend something that goes beyond our ordinary sensory and analytic awareness, and then see where it leads us.