Chapter 10: Autonomous Bodies

Chapter 10: Autonomous Bodies

This chapter will discuss the enactive concept of autonomous bodies as established in the book Linguistic Bodies by Elena Clare Cuffari, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Hanne De Jaegher. This discussion will lead to an enactive account of imagination and prospection to replace their conception under cognitivism and representationalism. These topics will continue development in Chapters 11-12, discussing issues related to perceptual phenomenology. 

Two important terms used in this text are abstraction and concrescence (i.e. concreteness). The authors of Linguistic Bodies define and deconstruct the words “abstraction” and “concretization” for a specific technical usage:

Abstraction is derived from the roots ab- (away or out), and trahere (to pull). Hence, to abstract means to pull or draw away from, to remove. “Abstraction [is] to be synonymous with isolation, decontextualization, or separation from a set of relations.” (Cuffari et al, pg. 145). 

Concretize or concrescence is derived from the roots con- (with) and crescere (to grow). Hence, concrescence or concretize mean to grow together. “Concretizing involves the opposite move of examining something by considering it increasingly embedded within a network of relations.” (ibid. pg. 145). 

Concretize means to “grow together” and abstract means to “pull apart.” The abstract and the concrete contribute two different perspectives for understanding.  

Autonomous bodies grow together in holistic concrescence, as emphasized by the authors: 

“The bodies (organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective) are entangled with each other, there is historicity to them, and great diversity. Bodies always care, bodily self organization is precarious, and the dimensions of bodily organization are not distinct from one another, nor superimposed one on top of each other, but they interpenetrate in complex constraining and enabling ways.” 

To heuristically differentiate between the classes and bounds of autonomous bodies within a concrescence requires a move of abstraction. The authors’ word for this is anchoring.

“[W]e could say the bodies are anchored to each other, or they share an anchoring. The organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies do not fully coincide, but are anchored together; not a solid, fully coherent floor and ever stable center, but to a relatively softer process of path dependent enactments.”

The authors of Linguistic Bodies replace the phrase “language is embodied” with the phrase “bodies are linguistic.” This is to emphasize the concrete role of language as a bodily way of being and becoming, rather than linguistics as an abstract, codified set of syntactic rules. 

In the conventional framework of cognitive linguistics: bodily habits and structures constrain and shape language use and its change. Cognitivist linguistics emphasizes the universality of the body, hence the stance language is embodied.

The authors of Linguistic Bodies present an alternative perspective. The continuously developing usage of language enables, constrains, and even constitutes a particular bodily mode of existence. Autonomous bodies are considered to be processual, diverse, unfinished, and enacted bodily becomings. These authors emphasize the concrete universality of linguistic autonomy, hence the perspective that “human bodies are linguistic” instead of “language is embodied.”

Autonomous bodies, including the linguistic body, involve a self-organizing thrownness of growing-together, a conscrescence with an already co-attuning totality and historicity. The qualifier of already means prior to the abstraction of scientific analysis. The denotations of already and thrown are Heideggerian concepts applied to the concrescence of development. Language should  be as a totality. Language isn’t a faculty that gets added on to a person’s bodily abilities, but an interdependent way of being that co-develops via concrescence. The relationship isn’t that of parts forming a whole (different independent sensorimotor and linguistic bodily abilities aggregating during development), but rather that of a concrete, integrated unity that differentiates. Language isn’t embodied as an independent faculty. Languaging is a way of being (becoming) a lived-body. 

Relationships Within and Between Autonomous Bodies

Autonomous bodies concretize together, differentiated into metabolic operational closures (the organic autonomous body), sensorimotor closure (the sensorimotor body), and linguistic closure (the linguistic body). These are different ways to heuristically anchor abstracted types of bodies immanent to a holistic organism. 

“This moving anchor can be experienced as the changing vantage point that comes to the fore in different situations.” (Linguistic Bodies, pg. 127).

Organisms have pluralities of nested, heterarchical, interpenetrating, entangled, and obligate operational closures. Multiple perspectives can be taken regarding the open-ended question of an organism’s being or process of becoming. Organisms can be abstracted as having linguistic bodies, differentiated from sensorimotor embodiment and metabolic/organic embodiment. Each of these bodies can be said to take on its own life and autonomy, albeit they are entangled in heterarchy and obligate closure with each other. Abstraction occurs on different time scales, spatial scales, and orders of evolutionary transition. The plurality of these concrescent bodies act with differentiated autonomy, taking on differentiated lives, but remain continuously and interdependently nested within an obligately enclosed whole organism. 

Between the micro-macroscale orders of a differentiated heterarchy, the coevolutionary relationship is one of inter-scale nonlinear co-ontogeny/coevolution, i.e. dynamic co-emergence (see Chapters 6 and 7). For example, this relates to neural plasticity, neural reuse, genetic assimilation, bottom-up governance and enablement, and top-down constraint and behavioral loading. This perspective is contrary to the stance of general genetic determinism, i.e. the stance taking generative/governing microscale units as deterministic for the production of macroscale/personal level behaviors. An autonomous linguistic body is not gen-etically determined by its neuronal and sensorimotor bodies. This framework is also contrary to the reductionist approach of defining personal level behaviors as instantiated in the microscale subpersonal level (Chapter 7). The behaviors of autonomous linguistic bodies are not reducible to the behaviors of neuronal and sensorimotor bodies. The relationship is one of heterarchy, of nonlinear co-ontogeny and coevolution. 

For the holistic conscrescent organism, the experiential relationship between its enclosed autonomous bodies is that of interdependent differentiation within an integrated closure. Different scales have different interactions relative to each other. The inter-scalar interaction for a linguistic body is enhanced via the practice of introspection. For example, the linguistic body may constrain the organism’s sensorimotor (prelinguistic) way-of-being via enacting a self-reflexive linguistic intentionality. Similarly, the sensorimotor body may constrain its organic form of organization via sensorimotor intentionality. 

Adaptive Hysteresis as a Process for Instantiating Memory within Autonomous Bodies

As outlined in Chapter 9, Pierre Bourdieu develops the concepts of hysteresis, habitus and field within his framework of sociology. Bourdieu mostly refers to hysteresis as a lagging and inertial effect. Bourdieu discusses hysteresis as a maladaptive form of memory following gross habitus-field displacement.

Hysteresis can also be considered as an adaptive form of memory. Chapter 6 previously developed the adaptive hysteresis effect as a general process of embodying and embedding memory in a complex adaptive system. Adaptive hysteresis  instantiates assimilation of reorganizational changes within the governing (behaviorally or dispositionally mediative) substrates of an organism or habitus. It also instantiates transduction of reorganizational changes in the coupled niche or field. Together, adaptive hysteresis instantiates a re-attunement or posteriori-redisposition of the organism-environment (habitus-field) coupling. In complex adaptive systems, memory is usually credited to forms of feedback. Distinctly, the adaptive hysteresis effect might be an under-recognized effect for mediating memory in a complex adaptive system, including systems of autonomous bodies. The authors of Linguistic Bodies allude to this:

“[E]ach body is an ongoing achievement, a history of path dependent adaptations and compensations of incorporations and environmental modifications that span the three dimensions of embodiment without being fully determined by any single one of them” 

The process of adaptive hysteresis can be applied to the framework of autonomous bodies via historized path dependent incorporations and niche transductions. This spans instantiation of both memory embodiment and embeddedness. Adaptive hysteresis is a substrate-flexible process that spans autonomous bodily substrates and their coupled environmental fields relevant to their experiential modality and time scale. Memory is historized via posteriori reorganization of the organism’s experientially-plastic, behaviorally-governing and dispositionally-mediative embodying substrates. The reactive, plastic and governing/mediative bodily substrates re-attune in the wake of reiterated solicitations of behaviors and experiential loading, as may be frequently encountered in a stable niche. In turn, the niche is reorganized following the effects of an organism’s behaviors. 

The substrates that embody memory via adaptive hysteresis effects are organized by the abstract functional units of hysterons. Thus, in an organism with concrescent autonomous bodies, abstracted hysterons are autonomous functional units capable of dispositional reorganization following iterated behavioral loading. Adaptive hysteresis effects mediate embodied memory via redisposing an organism’s hysterons, abstracted from their autonomous bodily substrates. For a nonliving and heteronomous machine like a computer, hysterons are likewise heteronomous. The form of memory as data-storage or record-keeping is only usable as a process for a tool user with its own separate autonomy. Machines, record keeping substrates, and computers do not have memory for their own purposes. These heteronomous substrates have memory for the purposes of an other, i.e. the tool user that wrote on it, programmed it, or coded it. Heteronomous data storage mediums do not instantiate memory as a “for-itself,” this data storage has a “for-the-user.” Computers do not remember, their users remember. The point is that data storage and record keeping are heteronomous memory processes, and are disanalogous to autonomous memory processes.

A processual and enactive account of memory will be disanalogous to data storage and retrieval, and the authors of Linguistic Bodies provide a relevant passage: 

“Most natural systems are already the result of processes of concretization, often to the point that the relevant properties we identify in one of its parts are hardly ever intrinsic to it, but have become causally and constitutively relational. For this reason, concretization may also be understood as an embodiment (not a record) of history.” 

Organism memory is embodied via dispositional change, not via storing a record of information. Within an organism, memory embodiment is dispositional via re-organization following experiential loading. Memory involves the posteriori re-disposedness of an organism following reiterated behavioral challenges, thus dynamically re-attuning its behavioral disposition to its historically reiterative environments. 

Contrary to cognitivism, the processual conception of memory is not instantiated via data storage, representation and information processing. The cognitivist conception of memory as data-storage within the brain belies commitment to substance ontology and heteronomous data storage. Memory is considered to be a functionality of the form of highly organized neural networks, albeit a massively distributed functionality across a highly differentiated form of evolved/developed substance. Memory is intrinsically stored and massively distributed across the substantial arrangement of neural network structures. Memory is defined as data in CNS substances, stored as engrams, and retrieved during information processing. Memory is data to be predictively processed with, modeled with, used to compute an action plan, and finally to execute action by sending this plan to effectors. The processual-enactive account of memory rejects this heteronomous data storage-and-retrieval story, and rejects the substance ontology story of memory as a stable functionality of substantial forms. Memory is not a stored-retrieved property in a substance, but an enactive process. Memory involves the re-disposition of an organism poised to act within its stable niche; this niche itself embeds memory via the reorganizational changes left by a history of reiterated organism actions. Actions are not “planned” by a central controller, but involve the open-ended unfolding of poised dispositions with an indeterminate environmental field. 

Memory is a pragmatic bodily re-disposition, the brain is incorporated as one of many governing substrates. The brain is in holistic interdependent operational closure with other substrates. The brain contributes to dispositionally re-dispose the organism (as a plastic, governing and mediative substrate), to constrain and enable behavior with a changing world. The brain does not have a special status of organ-dualism with mental powers of data-storage-and-processing, representation, planning and predicting. The brain is dispositional as the rest of the organism’s embodiment. Holistically, the organism, the environmental opportunities to act, and the brain as one of many behaviorally guiding substrates are all in a continuous co-attuning flux. This is contrary to memory under substance ontology, i.e. cognitivist memory as data storage in the brain as a substance, retrieved as fodder for information processing and other functions. 

For autonomous bodies: memory is not cognitivist data-storage within a predictive substance. Instead, memory is a pragmatic re-disposition of a governing substrate following reiterated experiential loading; memory is a dynamic re-attuning of a processually changing body in a processually changing niche. 

Adaptive hysteresis, as a processual activity structure, can be a substrate-flexible way of instantiating embodied and embedded memory in a situated complex adaptive system. An embodied attunement remains following changes wrought by reiterated experiential loading. Adaptive hysteresis is also wrought upon ecological changes (e.g. niche construction), as the field itself gets co-transduced. The organism-environment system’s ensuing behaviors are thus posteriori re-disposed and attuned, in the continuous wake of past experiential loading and behavioral solicitations. Adaptive hysteresis mediates memory as embodied remanence in the organizational changes of an organism’s governing substrates (e.g. neural network hysteresis, (epi)genetic network hysteresis), and remanence in the change between organism-environment system coupling (e.g. habitus-field coupling). In this way, processual memory is a continuous activity of pragmatic posteriori redisposedness, contrary to the cognitivist notion of knowledge-storage and retrieval in a substance.

Living autonomous bodies with different scales of abstracted autonomous closures (organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective, and linguistic closures) have nested, reactive, plastic, governing/meditative substrates capable of undergoing adaptive hysteresis effects. In contrast to the hysterons comprising nonliving/abiotic substrates that can undergo hysteresis (e.g. ferromagnets or heteronomous magnetic hard drives), the hysterons comprising living/biotic substrates are organized into autonomous operational closures (e.g. constraint closure, catalytic task closure, work task closure). Non-living substrates are heteronomous.

Adaptive hysteresis mediates memory in living systems for their own autonomy. Experiential loading though their governing substrates therein reorganize the dispositions of constituent hysterons. For abiotic systems (e.g. magnetic hard drive substrates), these hysterons are not autopoietic nor autonomous. Memory as written in non living data-storing mediums is heteronomous to the medium itself, and is instead used for the autonomy of the tool user. In contrast, the hysterons of biotic systems are incorporated for-and-by-means of autonomous closures involving organic, sensorimotor, and linguistic bodily substrates. Heteronomous memory is not a good analogy for autonomous memory.

Importantly, the substrate, once behaviorally loaded, becomes attuned to its field, and attunes its field in turn (i.e. via “modulation” and “transduction,” respectively). This coevolves an eco-evo-devo history (a path laid in walking). Once the mediating substate has been co- historized, it has “remanence,” i.e. embodied memory of its posteriori re-disposedness. This historical re-attunement of bodily disposition (via modulation), coupled with the with reorganizational effects enacted upon the environmental niche (i.e. transduction), forms a coupled embodiment and embedding of memory. This is to define intuition as a prereflective attunement of an organism-environment system’s poised, dispositional coupling. This is not a cognitivist concept of intuition via stored memory.  This is not a predisposedness (i.e. by means of a rule-entailed cognitivist prediction), but a posteriori redisposedness, by means of an embodied praktognosia to stable and historical (reiterable) lifeworld situations. 

Imagination and Prospection

Processes such as imagination, prospection, prediction, projection, and future planning are exemplified by organisms including scrub jays, orangutans, and humans. At root and base, imagination and prospection are still scaffolded from processual memory as posteriori redisposedness and feedback, but these processes organize upon an evolutionarily transitioned habitus and field. 

This section will propose a processual-enactive account of imagination and prospection. Imagination can be operationalized as an organism taking up an auto-intersubjective stance with its plurality of autonomous bodies, re-enacting via dispositional traces. Thus, memories re-conceived as pragmatic traces are argued to be dispositions (embodied-and-embedded attunements between habitus and field) that can be enacted in situ, or re-enacted apart from coupling with the originating situation. Consequently, this auto-intersubjective trace re-enactment reorganizes the organism’s behavioral stance relative to present and past conditions. “Reorganization” is for the presently poised autonomous bodies to redipose themselves, consequent to their present re-enactment of what is otherwise absent. The virtual presence of what-is-absent is embodied and embedded in the present autonomous bodies’ traces. In absence of a particular situation, a trace is re-enacted in virtue of embodied dispositions while decoupled from those disposition’s originating situational embeddedness. In re-enactment of dispositional traces, bodies take up an auto-intersubjective stance between their autonomous bodies that are in actual presence and autonomous bodies that have been previously re-disposed by virtue of the originating/imagined situation. Imagination is an auto-intersubjective interaction between present bodily dispositions and the dispositions associated with a currently decoupled situation. Imagination is a recoupling of habitus in absence of its originating field. 

Imagination is the re-enactment with one’s dispositionally embodied traces in the absence of presence, for an autonomous body taking a recursive intersubjective stance with its immanent embodied traces. The auto-intersubjective bodies thereby re-enact to redispose their poised stance relative to present conditions, affected by past conditions. Re-disposition for poised autonomous bodies is consequent to the re-enactment of absence via traces; absence is still remnant via traces in memory as dispositionally embodied presence. In this way, an autonomous body can abstract its history by the process of becoming an auto-intersubjective body, and allow this abstraction to reorganize its disposition relative to environmental opportunities. 

In this way, the practices of imagination, remembering or prospecting are reconceptualized not in terms of a scaling-up between different types of low-level and high-level cognitive processes. Instead, these practices are understood as differentiating between abstract versus concrete practices of thinking. This is to reconceptualize imagination, remembering and prospection as practices of abstraction, and to reconsider these practices away from their portrayal as a scaling-up problem. Shaun Gallagher, in his commentary on Goldstein and Scheerer, frames this shift in perspective: 

‘Although the normal person’s behaviour is prevailingly concrete, this concreteness can be considered normal only as long as it is embedded in and codetermined by the abstract attitude. For instance, in the normal person both attitudes are always present in a definite figure-ground relation. (Goldstein and Scheerer 1964, 8) 

Notice that this is not a scaling-up problem—we don’t move from a concrete attitude to an abstract one by going ‘up’ to higher-order thinking; we shift perspective within a figure–ground relation. [...]

The idea is to think of specialized and more abstract cognitive activities, not as higher-order accomplishments, located at the higher points on a hierarchy of cognitive acts, but as integrated with perception and action in an ongoing dynamical pattern, Gestalt or figure–ground relation.

(Gallagher 2017, pp. 181-191).

To ask how organisms can become capable of abstractive practices like imagination and future planning, the questions become, “What kinds of autonomous bodies are under adaptive hysteresis and feedback?” “How are organic, sensorimotor, intersubjective, and linguistic bodies evolutionarily transitioned?” “What kind of continuity between organisms exist with respect to degrees and dimensionalities of imagination and prospection?” Processual-enactive imagination and prospection can be profiled as an activity structure with several dimensions. These may include progressively scaffolded and transitioned capabilities of: minimal intersubjectivity, a recursive agency (auto-regulation), episodic memory traces, and minimal intelligence defined as “metapraxis with situational reuse.” In this way, processual-enactive imagination and projection can be operationalized. These modality-flexible activity structures self-organize across a continuity of organisms, as they progressively elaborate in pragmatic dimensions including: intersubjectivity, recursive/introspecting agency, episodic memory traces, and minimal intelligence (operationalized in Chapter 14 as an activity structure of metapraxis with situational reuse). What seems clear is that prospection and prediction do not come ready-made and hardwired on the level of nervous systems, contrary to the reductionism and substance ontology belied in cognitivist and predictive-processing models. 

These spatiotemporally and episodically projective processes have to do with an intersubjectivity between one’s presently poised self and one’s re-enactment of presently embodied trace dispositions. This is a process of the historized effects of dispositionally-embodied memory actively rediposing the poised organism in the face of present conditions and opportunities to act. This involves an auto-intersubjectivity with one’s own plurality of autonomous bodies and their historized traces. Projection is enabled by re-enacting the process of self-ing both spatiotemporally and episodically. An autonomous body at present time abstracts by re-enacting its constitutive bodies’ trace histories with the world, and this stance redisposes behavior to presently act. In this way, a re-enactive concept of imagination would be to take up a stance with one’s own self-history as an other, and then re-enact a perceptual trace from this history in the absence of presence, enabling a behavioral reorganization relative to the present environmental condition.

In this way, projection and imagination are re-enactments of trace dispositions by an auto-intersubjective stance of autonomous bodies, in the absence of present dispositions. Processes of imagination and prospection re-enact trace dispositions. Imagination and projection involve the skilled enactment of an “auto-intersubjective body.” 

Through this introverting metapraxis, an auto-intersubjective disposition takes up a virtual behavioral field. The past, operationalized as remnant, trace dispositions, becomes “disclosed” to the agent, and then this agent is “disposed” to act on its historized state of being. That is, it can now better decide with agentive choice on past dispositions with a future/elsewhere intention presently in mind. Moreover, it could have agentively done otherwise, it could have alternately re-disposed itself, from its historized repertoire. 

Traces

The term “trace,” as in the previously used phrase “re-enactment of trace dispositions,” needs elaboration in order to operationally define an enactive concept of imagination and projection. This section will draw upon the concept of trace per Jacques Derrida. 

The present word usage of trace pertains to the French usage, as track, mark, path or tract. Already, this has compatibility with an enactive and processual account of memory being based in a path laid in walking, and memory as the remanence traces from the adaptive Hysteresis effect enabling re-diposedness. 

From this account, imagination can be operationally defined as the re-enactment of perceptual traces. This usage contributes towards a non-representationalist account of imagination. The organism-environment system enacts stabilization of perceptual memory through both adaptive hysteresis effects applied to the process of perception (Ch. 11), and via positive feedback loops between genetic attention and perception (Ch. 12). Imagination and projection are based in re-enacted perceptual traces, while taking a stance of auto-intersubjectivity (i.e. recursive interaction with one’s own re-enacted dispositions, in absence of the original field coupling). Traces are defined under an enactive usage as remanence from paths laid in walking, and neither as cognitivist representations nor information storage. Remanence and traces are processually historized in the underlying dispositional substrates of autonomous bodies, and via their reiterated interaction with the attuning environment. 

Jacque Derrida’s technical usage of his word “trace” is instructive for the processual-enactive framework. For Derrida, trace is the mark of the absence of a presence. Trace is the always already absent presence. Thus, trace is an always contingent abstraction of a presence. To mediate stability of memory for a perceptual trace, one process is the adaptive hysteresis effect applied to perception, leaving remanence of posteriori re-disposition (Ch. 10). A second way for stability and memory of a perceptual trace is via positive feedback loops between genetic attention and perception (Ch. 11). Prospective future planning is the skill of agentively regulating selective and situational reuse of trace re-enactment. This involves the auto-intersubjectively regulative application of episodic memory (i.e., the skilled reuse of re-enacted dispositions, in the absence of their coupled field). In this way, minimal intelligence can be operationally defined as a type of agentive metapraxis with situational reuse (Ch. 14). The direction of intentionality when re-enacting traces is an auto-intersubjectivity. This is an introverted reflective recursion, i.e. to take agency upon oneself as a body of historized dispositional couplings between habitus-and-field. 

Derrida’s concept of trace is highly compatible with the process ontology and the enactive approach. Trace involves the re-enactment of dispositions in the absence of their originating field-coupling. This is possible in considering that a lived-body is a historized incorporation of prior habitus-field couplings, re-disposed over its lifetime in the style of paths-laid-in-walking. To re-enact an imagination is to re-enact one pole of the habitus-field coupling; to re-enact the habitus-pole of a perceptual disposition in the absence of the originating field-context.  To enact a skill of prospection is to situationally re-use such re-enact dispositions while simultaneously taking up an auto-intersubjective dispositional stance. The concept of trace defined in this fashion refutes the cognitivist-representationalist notion of trace as informational data storage.