Chapter 11: Perception

Chapter 11: Perception

This chapter applies the previously discussed concept of the adaptive hysteresis effect as a general way to mediate memory in complex adaptive systems. The notion of posteriori-redisposedness serves as an embodied-enactive replacement for cognitivist prediction, data-storage, and rule-entailment. Adaptive hysteresis mediating posteriori re-disposedness is developed as a foundational means for mediating perception, perceptual memory, and perception as a process of affecting behavioral reorganization.

A challenge in analyzing perception is to first orient the subject, object, and the interface of perception. Another challenge is to form an enactive and world-involving (not an “in the head” nor representationalist) framework of perception. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The word perception indicates a direction rather than a primitive function. [...] It is like a net with its knots showing up more and more clearly.” (2002, pp. 13-14). Additionally, from Evan Thompson: “object in its etymological sense means something that stands before us.” (2010, p. 34). Thus, the orienting labels are already etymologically apparent in the prefixes and suffixes for each of the words subject, object, and perception. 

“Per” is the root for through

“Cept” is to take, receive, or catch (as in intercept, or capture)

“Sub” is the root for under

“Ob” the the root for toward, to, or against

“Ject” is to throw (as in projectile)

Hence “Per-cept-ion” is to catch through one’s disposition, thereby undergoing a behavioral reorganization. This imagery resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s visual metaphor of a net catching knots through its form, with increasing stability over reiterated use and development.

The sub-ject (the under-thrown), after interfacing with an ob-ject (the thrown-toward/against), catches the object’s energetic/material physical patterns through its being, and this passage-through reorganizes the being’s disposition. Importantly, the reorganization is affected by the being’s history in its environment, contingent on eco-evo-devo considerations. Such capture of passage-through (per-ception) is mediated by the system’s embodiment and attunement.

On an experiential timescale: per-ception is a transient/imminent example of an adaptive hysteresis effect. During hysteresis: an action loads upon-and-historizes the organization of a reactive and plastic governing/mediative substrate, and leaves stable remanence of substrate reorganization in its wake (posteriori re-disposedness). In this way, the hysteresis effect is a useful analogy to describe the formal processual structure relating the ob-ject, sub-ject, and the temporally lagging effect of per-ception. The technical term for the functional unit of a substrate undergoing  hysteresis is hysteron. 

The aforementioned concepts of assimilation and adaptive hysteresis (Chapter 6) apply to the current structural analysis of perception. This is clarified by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and their discussion of Piaget: 

“Note that for Piaget the environment is not a set of pre-existing stimulus conditions that effect the organism to produce a perceptual or cognitive effect. Only what can be assimilated into an existing scheme or sensorimotor coordination pattern (i.e., an action or operation of the subject) can be engaged with, and thus perceived.” (p. 86).

Therefore, an organism does not represent an observer-independent world. An autonomous organism frames its own normativity. The organism signifies a world (ümwelt) in coupling with an environment, perceiving its niche as a field of organism-and-history contingent opportunities-to-act and behavioral solicitations. Following such coupling and perceptual enactment, The effect of objectual loading remains in the subject's embodiment (embodied as a lived organization of plastic dispositions). This behavioral reorganization tensions the organism-environment system, now poised to act on this tension and unfold according to its redisposition. The displaced habitus and field relationship enables affordance of opportunities to act upon the changed perceptual field. Displacement from baseline norms enables the perception of opportunities to act. This relates to Piaget’s concepts of accommodation and equilibration: 

“The ongoing adaptation and transformation of sensorimotor schemes, according to Piaget, follows a logic of equilibration between two kinds of processes: assimilation and accommodation. These are the processes by which a challenged agent-environment coupling may be adaptively steered back into its normal or into a new way of functioning. [...]

By accommodation Piaget refers to the process by which structures in the agent that enable a sensorimotor scheme [...] are modulated or transformed to facilitate or encompass a not-yet-assimilated aspect of the environment. [...]Equilibration is the process by which a sensorimotor organization reaches a new form of stability as a result of maturational process or in the presence of changing environment or any internal sources of tension. [...]He hints at the fact that ultimately a cycle should be understood as the conservation of the conditions of viability of an organism or cognitive system as a whole [...] this is close to the enactive understanding of normativity.” (Ibid., p. 84-85, emphases added).

In the present terminology: the ob-ject (the thrown-at) loads biophysically relevant patterns through the sub-ject (the underthrown). Perception involves a transient dispositional thorough-capture. Initially, biophysical activity patterns load through the reactive, plastic, and governing/mediative embodied substrate. Consequently, the organism-environment system’s behavioral disposedness is re-organized via an adaptive hysteresis effect (i.e. equilibration). Thus, the organism’s dynamic state of disclosedness is in a continuous state of coevolutionary re-equilibration. That is, a co-attuning state of ongoing adaptive hysteresis. 

Disclosedness re-attunes following the most readily caught (assimilated) environmental patterns of physically ordered matter and energy. In this way, perceptual sequences lead to consequent displacement from previous equilibrations. This leads to still further consequent adaptive behaviors of accommodation and equilibration. The structurally coupled organism-environment system continuously coevolves in non-equilibrium, even as it actively moves to enact equilibration and accommodate its environment towards vital norms (against precarious breakdown). 

In generating coherent significations, perception-as-interaction involves a constant interactive movement-and-capture. Attention has both a genetic and spotlight role in generating a phenomenal field (see Chapter 12). The organism and environment interface together, with semipermeable borders, and with dialectical poles of individuation vs self-organization. 

Returning to the orientation of the structure of perception:

Per cept = “catching through”

Ob ject = the “thrown at”

Sub ject = the “under thrown”

This outline of perception has an analogous activity structure to the adaptive hysteresis effect (outlined in Chapter 6). Adaptive hysteresis is a process for instantiating dispositional memory in a complex adaptive system and can apply to perceptual memory.

In both perception and adaptive hysteresis: a mediative/governing substrate undergoes plastic reorganization following reactivity to an environmental activity-loading. Hysteresis thereby leaves, in remanence, immanent posteriori re-disposedness (immanent meaning internal). The O-E system is in a continuous nonequilibrium state of dynamic re-attunement (and likewise behavioral-reorganization). This translates existentially to the being’s experience of a continuously changing phenomenal disclosedness.

This activity operates on the transient experiential and sensorimotor time scales of phenomenal perception, but only coheres as the organism is able to holistically “afford.” Thus, percepts are not measured absolutely and with deterministic boundaries, i.e. they are not measured via the constancy hypothesis or the sensory core hypothesis (per Merleau-Ponty). Instead, percepts are made coherent relativistically, via the passage-through (per-cept) of caught, attended, and cared-for affordances. 

Orienting the life-world: 

The process of “spatiotemporal reattuning of re-disclosedness” interfaces the organism and environment. This interface is where the organism precariously extends itself into its ecology and transiently modulates its semipermeable boundaries. The O-E system sign-ifies a phenomenal field by discriminating between figure and ground, thereby enactively constructing a dynamic life world (lebenswelt). This involves a dialectic tension between signal and boundary and a closely related dialectic between self-organization and individuation. The perceptual field is both oriented from-, and originating with-, this semipermeable interface of signification. An organism’s perceptual coupling with its environment forms the interface between the organism’s immanent intensionality under operational closure and the environmental extensionality of patterned materio-energetic processes. The external physical patterns are facultatively incorporated into the organism’s closure, thereafter affecting its dispositional reorganization and disclosed experience. Physical patterns become biophysical patterns following their incorporation and incarnation into operational closure.

Interactively poised at this semipermeable signal-boundary interface, the sub-ject and ob-ject codefine themselves relatively, interactively and circularly. The subject and object thereby operationally dichotomize their “sub-” vs “ob-” -ject prefixes, relative to the movement and semipermeable co-constitution of an organism-environment system. However, the stances are relational and indeterminate as the organism’s semipermeable boundaries remain open to allow the organism to be changed/redisposed by signals. Again, this reflects the tensioned dialectic between self organization (openness) and individuation (closedness), leading to synthesis of perceptual signification and minimal sense-making. Thus, the subject and object are not absolute in their definitions and never complete in determination; the sub- vs ob- stances have to be synthesized, enacted, and made operationally relative. In this framework, perception is not a process of internally representing objective reality to a dualist and homuncular “mind’s eye.” Instead, perception is outlined as a genetic process of sense-making or enactive objectification.

Like how there is no absolute frame of motion in physics, there is no absolute way to define a static and completely determined subject and object; their relative motions and positions of thrownness have to be self-organized (autopoiesis, autonomy), enacted, and normatively signified. The phenomenal experience of the being occurs via the poised interface that structurally couples organism and enviroment. The reflective/scientific assessment made by the being cannot take a pure subject identity nor a pure object identity, but is constituted by the emergent interaction between subject and object. The organism feels its immanent organizational in-formation with the emanant environmental in-formation. The organism-as-subject feels itself with the objected targets, like a hand feels its shape by moving against surfaces or through a flowing medium. The sparks of collision at the signal-boundary interface illuminate a relief of subject-object positions to the organism. In order to define itself as the relatively subjected, the organism has to open its boundaries to the biophysical “thorough catching” of objected physical patterns. At the same time, it undergoes transient capture of the objected patterns. Ob-ject and sub-ject are two colliding trajectories, and at the signal-boundary interface (i.e. the organism-environment interface), poises the ever becoming phenomenal life-edge of existential experience, dasein as the “being that is able to have its condition be an issue for itself.” 

This “subject-object” dialectic is a polarized tension, not a true dichotomy. If stretched to its limits, the relative subject can objectify itself ecstatically and scientifically, but not in a purely objective manner. There are no purely dichotomized subjects nor objects under process ontology. 

The subject throws itself at its world, at ob-jects. Through interaction, it is able to undertake a “sub” position relative to the physical patterns of energy catching through its material body. Thus, “subject” and “object” denote relative positions and motions, not absolute positions. When a being takes the position of sub-ject, it has to deform (and reform) itself by opening itself to the passage-through-and-catching (the per-ception) of the thrown-against (the ob-jects). If the being becomes an object of itself, i.e. if it takes up an ecstatic vantage of its own closure and throws-itself-against-itself (reflective/recursive perception), then this being-in-time takes up tensions both of subject and object regarding itself. Stretched between both poles by its ecstasis, beings are unable to sever via a pure dicho-tomy (dicho- being the Greek root for two, and tomy the root for cut). Beings are unable to achieve knowledge via objective realism; i.e. the being can not cut away from its world to “represent” its physical environment independent from itself as an observer. The being is constrained to pragmatism, a type of knowledge-with and know-how. 

Ecstasis is a technical term used by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Ecstasis is etymologically derived from the Greek roots ``ec-” meaning out, and “stasis” meaning stance. Merleau-Ponty’s usage of ecstasis is operationalized as an organism-relative active transcendence, contrary to a representational depiction of perceptual knowledge. 

The positing of the object therefore makes us go beyond the limits of actual experience which is brought up against and halted by an alien being [the ob-ject], with the result that experience finally believes that it extracts all its own teaching from the object. It is this ek-stase which causes all perception to be perception of something. Obsessed with being, and forgetful of the perspectivism of my experience, I henceforth treat it as an object [...] from a relationship between objects.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 81, emphasis added). 

To take an ecstatic stance is to enact an objectification. This process does not equivocate with an ability to represent real objects as dichotomously separated from a subject, even if perception may feel this way to organisms asking themselves what they are doing when they perceive. The ecstatic process enables knowledge with stabilized patterns having correlational relevance to the organism-environment system’s norms under precarious closure. However, to propose an additional claim that ecstasis gives knowledge of represented real objects is reification. This reification is enabled by substance ontology and objective realism, wherein stable-substantial objects have real-and-representable boundaries and properties. Under process ontology, physical patterns can be coupled-with and signified relative to an autonomous organism’s enacted normativity. Such perceptual enactments may be stabilized via reiterations, but not reified as objects separated from subjects having observer-independent properties. 

Ecstasis is hence an outward stance or openness, a jump in vantage. The word usage of ecstasis in the present text refers to a constitutively tethered vantage achieved by a jumping-out-from.

Ecstasis is the being-world (organism-environment) system’s state of openness to its world, for the O-E system to act upon its environmental pole as a tensioned and polarized (but not truly severed, not decoupled) exteriority. This ecstatic openness of a being-in-a-world to its world is not one, not two. The ecstatic disposition is the being-world system asymmetrically acting upon its transiently-coupling world pole as its exteriority. Ecstasis is hence the disposition and self-comportment of openness to the world. Ecstatic openness is the being-world system acting asymmetrically upon the world pole as the exterior world. Ecstasic openness is vis-á-vis a constitutively asymmetrical openness-to-coupling, i.e. the disposition of selective semipermeability to coupling. Ecstasis is the being-world’s semipermeable and asymmetrical openness with its tensioned-but-not-decoupled world, structurally coupling in a procesual flow. 

The Heideggerian usage of ecstasis is a pragmatically tethered “know-how” and “knowledge-with.” The subject and object are transiently joined (desevered, or structurally coupled) in operational closure (e.g. within a semipermeable boundary) and thereby enable knowledge with each other following a signal-boundary interface and an iterated history together. 

For Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the subject can take an ecstatic stance regarding its inside vs outside poles, but these poles are still generated as leib (not beyond leib). In other words, dasein can stand back or out from its occurrence, but cannot constitutively stand apart or beyond itself as a self-organizing and individuating organism-environment system closure. Occurrence, or presence-at-hand (vorhanden), is preceded by pre-reflective skilled coping, or a readiness-to-hand (zuhanden). Restated: objectification of a vorhanden “enactive objectification” is abstracted from the zuhanden prereflective perceptual experience as a concrete, pre-objective totality. 

Even so, propositional and scientific practices enable people to treat and study objects as-if having reliable and verifiable observer-independent properties. The preceding consideration of ecstasis is important to place empirical knowledge-of objects in perspective. The preceding discussion also serves to provide distance from epistemological stances of empirical realism and objective realism. Empirical, intersubjective and scientific practices can enable sedimented knowledge-of objects, but this does not imply the ontological conclusion that objects have observer-independent properties or boundaries. Knowledge-of is ubiquitous even as it is derived from knowledge-with and know-how. Again, objects are not represented; processes are objectified with the norms of life. Life-contingent enactive sense-making replaces the notion of representing observer-independent sensible objects. Enacted objectifications can then be reiterated within one’s own developmental experience. Objectifications are further sedimentary (and potentially reified) via reiteration of intersubjectively shared (common) practices of referential communication. This enables empirical and scientific practices amongst those having shared (i.e. common, entangled, coevolving) embodiments, customs, instrumentalities, niches, etc. 

Empirical practices of knowledge can be regarded with a specific perspective under the present text’s framework. Under processual-enaction, the epistemic stance regarding empirical knowledge-of objects is closest to that of Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism (1994), although the word usage of ecstatic empiricism has more consonance. 

Deleuze summarized his differential, immanent and genetic position by the at first glance odd phrase of “transcendental empiricism.” This is cashed out in terms of two characteristics: (1) the abstract (e.g., “subject,” “object,” “State,” the “whole,” and so on) does not explain, but must itself be explained; and (2) the aim of philosophy is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the singular conditions under which something new is produced. In other words—and this is a pragmatic perspective from which Deleuze never deviated—philosophy aims not at stating the conditions of knowledge qua representation, but at finding and fostering the conditions of creative production. (Smith & Protevi, 2018).

Objectified reality is not outside experience. Instead, objectification-with a physical environment relies upon the differentiating process that underlies all experience. Reiterated experience yields reliability and stability for coupling with the objectifiable and differentiable world. Thus, ecstasis involves an organism-environment system perceiving and stabilizing new differentiations (but not representations) between inside-outside, figure-ground and signal-noise. These signification processes are genetic for an organism to generate its various lived fields. That is, sense-making processes underlie general onto-genesis, they are genetic for an open (ecstatically poised) but still integrated being-world system to differentiate its world pole. A world does not come populated with ready-made objects; the integrated being-world system developmentally and experientially differentiates its own world pole via a continuous onto-genesis. These fields are constructed pre-reflectively as the life world (lebenswelt). To treat these differentiations and fields as outside versus inside oneself, as extra and intra personal spaces is ecstasis and enstasis. Ecstasis is the generation of the perceptual extra personal space, to dialectically generate a field of outside oneself versus inside oneself. Synchronously, to treat intra personal space as inside oneself is enstasis. Ecstasis-enstasis is constitutively (always already, pre-reflectively) enacted via individuation as an O-E system self-organizes its semipermeable boundaries and second order contextual constraints. This is a tensioned dialectic between inside-outside that is constitutive for leib, but is not truly an ontically severed dichotomy. The organism does not represent the environment apart and separate from itself. Instead, the organism-environment system enacts extra personal field as the polarization of leib, and agentially interacts and signifies with the extra pole of its continuous lived embodiment. Leib has extra (ec) and intra (en) polarizations, and such fields are differentially signified (via ecstasis and enstasis); but the extra is not an a-personal space that is known via representation. This stance rejects observer independent objective realism and likewise rejects reifying the extra personal pole of leib as an a-personal space. To propositionally conclude that the extra personal is truly apart from the O-E system is to reify the extra personal space as beyond the lebenswelt. That is, to mis-characterize the extra personal field is an a-personal field without the organism. The extra personal space is still inhabited by the lived body (leib) as it is generated by senses such as vision, hearing, touch and chemoreception. The extra personal embodiment is via a differently accessed and agentially influenced biophysicality than the intra personal or peri personal embodiments. The extra personal space is still personal (lived in, constitutive of leib), and generated by sensory embodiments such vision, hearing, touch and chemoreception.

To reflect upon the extra and intra is to abstract the extra as separate from one self (and the intra as the self). Per Deleuze, to abstract is not to explain and the abstraction itself must be a target of explanation. For example, how can the extra personal be abstracted as a space separate to the self, even though extra personal space is constitutive for leib? This returns to the question of how enacted objectifications can be abstracted as observer independent objects. The answers, according to Deleuze and the processual-enactive approach, are not via explanations of representationalism and objective realism. Applied to the enactive approach, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism involves signifying differences and repeating these differences over an organism-environment system’s history, co-relative to its instrumental/vital norms. Objectifications of extra personal spaces are signified and enacted via the pre-reflective pragmatic processes of life. Abstractions of the “outside” pole of leib are via reflecting upon ecstasis (and abstractions of the inside pole of leib are via reflecting upon enstasis). Ecstasis and enstasis are pre-reflectivly constitutive for individuating leib’s polarization of in-out, and propositional reflections upon this are derived reflections (and potentially reifications). Abstracted propositions regarding invariants of enstasis and ecstasis are shareable via repeated intersubjective practices of referential communication with still further norms (and made methodologically rigorous by further evolved socioculturally and scientifically scaffolded practice). This methodologically rigorous practice of intersubjectivity sharing is repetition or empiricism. Hence ecstatic (and enstatic) empiricism is an enactive development upon Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. In short, ecstatic empiricism is enactive objectification with some reiterative methodology, including those with inter-subjective referential communication. Auto-subjective methodology will suffice if reflecting alone. This pragmatism is contrary to the idea of Bertrand Russel and early Wittgenstein’s correspondence theory of truth and logical atomism, in which the truth and falsity of representations is determined relative to the factual conditions of reality (Thompson, 2010). 

Pragmatic and instrumental know-how and knowledge-with objectifiable physical patterns involve a process of enactive objectification. Ecstatic empiricism is similar to Deleuze’s concept of transcendental empiricism in that this process involves pragmatic know-how and knowledge-with repeated differentiations, not a representational knowledge-of objects. Ecstatic empiricism is a perspective upon the general epistemic category of empirical knowledge-of, placing this type of knowledge as derived from pre-reflective know-how. The following ontological conclusion is that the boundaries of objects do not have observer independent existence, life must differentiate objects according to its own norms, histories, practices and perspectival stances. Life does not do so ex nihilo, but does so via coupling with an environment of constraining, patterning processes that are ontologically unsignified but potentially signifiable. The ways of coupling are likewise not free from constraint. Organisms couple to environments with highly constrained, embodied and intersubjectively sharable (common) pragmatics. Reiterating Stuart Kaufman’s idea, useful work is done for an autonomous system (enacting its own norms) by releasing ordered energy into constrained degrees of freedom. 

Adaptive Hysteresis and Perceptual Memory 

The overall analogy to describe the activity structure of perception is the adaptive hysteresis effect (Chapter 6), as explained earlier in this chapter. 

A specific example to compare with perception is the framework of neural hysteresis, adapted from Michael L. Anderson’s conception of neural reuse. 

Neuroscientifically relevant psychological factors (NRPFs) load-through transiently assembled local neuronal subsystems (TALoNS) and leave neuroplasticity effects in their wake (i.e. the hysteresis effect, attunement, posteriori re-disposedness of governing/meditative substrate, and neural assimilation). 

With analogy to perception: biosemiotically relevant environmental factors (ob-jects, the thrown-at) load-through (biophysically couple, per-ceive through) transiently assembled sensorimotor subsystems (the sub-ject’s embodiment, the under-thrown), and leave perceptual re-disposedness effects in their wake (i.e. per-ception, thorough-catching, and reorganization of the governing sensorimotor substrate as a dynamically attuning phenomenal field). 

The physical patterns of objects (the thrown-at) pass through (per-ceive) the subject’s (the under-thrown’s) plastic and reactive governing/meditative sensorimotor substrates. The hysteresis effect yields the remnant dispositional memory following this process of per-ception. Perceptual experience is enabled by this consequent posteriori re-disposedness. That is, an object’s physical patterns catch-through a subject’s embodiment, displacing its vital norms, enabling minimal sense-making. Biophysical patterns are “caught” via an adaptive hysteresis effect, i.e. an embodied dispositional memory of the governing sensorimotor substrate’s experience following the behavioral solicitations and experiential loading from its environment. Perception is phenomenally lived as this disclosed experiential dynamic, as a lived continuous reattuning of disclosedness and disposedness. Signification is relative to the organism’s continuously displacing vital norms, contingent on the O-E system’s histories together. Signification is also relative to the opportunities to act upon signified patterns relating the organism and environment. Enactive perception involves sense-making, affordance, and vital norms. 

Conclusions:

This chapter develops upon genetic phenomenology per Evan Thompson (2010). A genetic account is to outline the process of how perception comes-to-be; the concrescent becoming of perception precedes the abstracted beings of subject and object. This is to avoid false subject-object dichotomies, e.g. between subjects-in-themselves faced with representing objects-in-themselves. 

Unlike static phenomenology, genetic phenomenology does not take the already disclosed intentional object as its point of departure, nor is it content to stay at the level of analyzing formal and constitutive structures of experience. Instead, it investigates the genesis and development of those structures themselves. (Thompson, 2010, p. 40).

The general ontogeny (i.e. genetic phenomenology) of perception precedes the ontically abstracted categories of subjects, objects and percepts. Instead, subjects, objects and perception are understood as abstractions from a concrescent, holistic organism-environment system that facultatively incorporates physical patterns via transactions.

Under process ontology, perception is an interactive and co-relative process for a coevolving organism-environment system. By way of generative phenomenology and niche construction, the attractor landscape itself coevolves with the O-E system’s transactions within it. Likewise, the phenomenal field is an abstraction of stability from a genetic process. In this framework, objects are not stable substances with essential properties to be represented. Objects are abstractions enabled by an organism’s perceptual processes and perceptual-memory processes (i.e. adaptive hysteresis, and the stabilizing positive feedback loop between attention and perception). Representation of objects is hence replaced with a process of enactive objectification between figure and ground, signified contingent to an organism’s vital or instrumental norms. Perception and field are therefore not localizable “within” the subject (e.g. representationalism, neuro essentialism), nor “out there” in the real-world (realism). Mind is not “in the brain,” like flight is not “in the wings'' of a bird. Perception-as-action and field-as-genetic-process is achievable via a concrescent co-relational synthesis between all players, including: the relative subject (the underthrown), the object (the thrown-at) and the per-ception (the catching through). 

The orientation of perceptual experience processually emerges from the origin of this hysteretic trailing of perceptual memory, directly perceiving at an afforded opportunity to act. Intentionality as directedness follows from this direct interaction. Perceptual remanence can be reiterated in positive feedback loops, as attention uncovers perception, and perception enhances attention (see Chapter 12 regarding Dreyfus’ lectures on Merleau-Ponty). The emerging phenomenology of perception operationalizes a “for-itself” with vital normativity. 

Perceptual experience is not localizable in any one of these abstracted entities of object-subject-percept, like flight is not located in the wings of a bird, and the sound of a collision is not located in a projectile. Instead, perception is an emergent processual enaction by the holistic organism-environment system, changing with itself and coevolving over time. The perceptual O-E system has a phenomenological for-itself if the system is autopoietic and autonomous. 

What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the experience of a solipsistic subject perceiving? What is the existential significance of an object in-itself? Subject and object can be abstracted and oriented, but a false dichotomy is to reify these abstractions and propose that absolute subjects and objects exist in-themselves, as in the situation of a subject faced with representing objects with definitive properties relative to the validity-conditions of realism.

From a pre-reflective perspective, directionality and the co-relative prepositional statuses of sub-, ob-, per-, -ject, and -cept can be heuristically abstracted and operationally defined, in situ.

Orientative prefixes include:

Sub (under)

Ob (against)

Per (through)

Orientative infinitives include:

Ject (throw)

Cept (catch)

Intendo (directive orientation)

The significance of objects, subjects, and perceived patterns is accounted for by their incorporation within a living precarious operational closure, relative to instrumental or vital norms, and the etiological history of the O-E system’s genetic and generative history with its coevolving attractor landscape. This genetic account of perception relates to a pragmatic type of knowledge (a knowledge-with and know-how regarding physical patterns for a precarious autopoietic system), not a representational type of knowledge (a knowledge-of objects in themselves).

Postscript: The “Pre-Metric, Post-Metric Equivocation” Fallacy

This fallacy is to equivocate the determinately bounded objectual things of substance ontology with the processually-abstracted enacted objectifications of process ontology. Under pragmatism and process ontology, this fallacy is to claim that things-in-themselves are ontologically defined by measurements. Instead, metrics understood under process ontology are pragmatic interactions that enable one to abstract profiles of objectual “things,” contingent with specific practices. The results of these metrics reflect the practices and embodiment of the observer relating to its environment, relative to its contingent vital and pragmatic instrumental norms. This is contrary to the proposition of metrics uncovering “the true determinate nature of reality,” judged against the truth and accuracy norms of an objective realism. 

In substance ontology, objects are real things-in-themselves with stable properties and determinate boundaries. People gain determinate knowledge of these properties via various scientific metrics and empirically reproducible and validated methods. In process ontology, the physical world is not ontically composed of things, but of diachronic processes of flowing space, time, entropy and localized patterns of order imposed on material-energetic flow. Living observers embedded in scientific practice make abstracted temporal cross-sections of these physical processes, and then give them significance relative to their vital norms, and the norms of their sociocultural practices and contingent epistemological curiosities. With regards to philosophy of science: the epistemology of substance ontology relates to objective realism, and the epistemology of process ontology relates to pragmatism. 

This fallacy is another way of expressing “the map is not the territory,” in the words of Alfred Korzybski. This fallacy also relates to the false dichotomy between the subject and object, instead emphasizing their holistically circular co-ontogenetic relationship, and their dynamic co-emergence. This fallacy also touches on Heideggerian themes, that perception is not about representing objective realism. This would be to portray minds as reifiers.

A thing in itself is never a thing by itself for itself, but instead a processual activity pattern situated in an onto-genetically evolving (thermodynamically evolving) universe. An abstracted thing with stable characteristics can only be carved into figure-ground, signal-noise (i.e. enacted as an ontical thing with boundaries and properties) by co-interactive beings-in-time with their own internal dynamics. This being is engaged in a pragmatic relationship with these physical patterns. A being-in-time achieves this “knowledge-with” and “know-how” by “deseverance” with physical patterns. Severed means that the physical information patterns are not part of the organism-environment system’s operational closure, so the pattern remains heteronomous to the system. If desevered, this means that a sequence of physical patterns enables consequences within the autopoietic system’s precarious operational closure. This deseveredness enabled by the organism’s semipermeable signal-boundary interface. Through Dewey’s pragmatic notion of transactions (Gallagher 2017), extended physical patterns of the environment are facultatively incorporated into an organism-environment system’s precarious operational closure. Signification is contingent with vital normativity, and displacement from vital norms affects phenotypic disposedness, with directedness to an opportunity to act, having a specific history and situatedness. 

Living beings are signifiers and namers, their processual behavior involves figuring-out the “things they know'' from ground. The  organization of an umwelt is enabled by a process of “enactive objectification,” a process of abstracting stable and instrumentally-important patterns. Abstraction differentiates the “blooming, buzzing, manifold” of undifferentiated physical conscresence, relative to the organism’s vital norms and history. For example: beneficial patterns (attractors) are historically correlated with eutrophic processes, as in the free energy principle (FEP). Avoidance patterns (disturbances) correlate with harming a precarious operational closure. Finally, unsignified patterns correlate with patterns that have had no historical effect and thus no effect on attunement between in the O-E system’s interactive coupling. Alternatively, unsignified patterns relate to physical patterns that are not able to be embodied by sensory structures, either by pathology, developmental inexperience, or lack of evolved sensory morphology. Illusions occur due to the correlative relationship between physical pattern, vital norms, and history/memory of the O-E system. This is consonant with perception as a process of relational signification (as in process

ontology), instead of perception as the representation of objective realism (as in substance ontology). 

Enactive objectification has vital normativity to precarious operational closures, and is not to be confused with a propositional act of reification. The dialectic between autopoiesis and autonomy, and the dialectic between self organization and self distinction, enables synthesis of an ontogenetic and enactive activity structure. These processes are all operationally defining for an “organ-ism,” deconstructed as a literal “doctrine” (-ism) of instrumentalities (organon-).

The pre-metric, post-metric equivocation fallacy resonates with a sidebar from James Gibson, To Perceive an Affordance is Not to Classify an Object:

The facts that a stone is a missile does not imply that it cannot be other things as well[....] These affordances are all consistent with one another. The differences between them are not clear-cut, and the arbitrary names by which they are called do not count for perception. If you know what can be done with a graspable detached object, what it can be used for, you can call it what you please. The theory of affordances rescues us from the philosophical middle of assuming fixed classes of objects, each defined by its common features and then given a name. As Ludwig Wittgenstein knew, you cannot specify the necessary and sufficient features of the class of things to which a name is given. They have only a “family resemblance.” But this does not mean you cannot learn how to use things and perceive their uses. You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford. (1979, p. 134).

This passage applies to the problem of objective realism related to perception. By creating new tools and methods, science does not come closer to classifying the totality of objective reality in itself. Instead what happens is that scientists signify the environment in new ways. Noumenal objects are not being discovered closer to a complete set of objective truth conditions. Instead, methodological ways, instrumental prosthetics, norms and know-how for signifying with physical patterns are scaffolded and socioculturally shared. Science constrains and enables new ways of signifying with otherwise unframed (but potentially framable) physical patternings (novel know-how for framing (v), process ontology). However, science does not uncover the objective truth of pattern in itself (objectively real frames (n), substance ontology). Such signifying framing-processes are via enactive objectification; a noumenally framed object does not exist apart from an observer’s process of objectification. 

Observer independent objects-in-themselves are not represented via knowledge-of, against norms of the correspondence theory of truth. Instead, objectifications are made with physical patternings, objectification is a way of know-how, and normativity is contingent to the sociocultural practices and spatiotemporally embodied forms of life (ie vital and practic norms).

Science is not a practice of measuring the observer-independent reality of objects in themselves, framed according to veridical norms of truth-and-accuracy. Science is a pragmatic method of signifying with process in itself, framed by enacted and practic norms. Signification is a process, to valuate by truth making, not to evaluate against pregiven truths. This is to objectify, not to represent objects. 

If science, technology and sociality are scaffolded, then the first act of deconstruction is to recognize the scaffold, rather than simply live and operate upon the level of edifice. 

The framing problem is solved by autonomy. Framing involves an organism contingent process of enactive objectification. Objectification is a normative process of framing, not a representation of objectively framed objects. 

The frames (n) of observer independent objects are not noumenally pre given as ontically real; the framing (v) must be enacted. Framings of environmental patternings become objectified contingent to the normative significations from a processually and structurally-coupled organism. 

Frames are not static nor objectively real via observer independent truth conditions of objective realism. Frames (the determinate bounds of observer independent objects) are not knowable via representation of heteronomous information. This conception of information is anomalous, not autonomous. The symbol grounding problem prevents the framing problem’s solution in the absence of an organism environment system. Organisms autonomously enact framings (by signifying via vital norms) they do not represent frames (by categorizing against veridical norms of objective realism). This is to enact an objectification, a normative signification, a valuation, an autonomous framing (v) process. This is not a heteronomous uncovering nor induction of noumenal frames (n). Enaction of significance replaces induction of facts. Defination (v) replaces the assumption of pre given definitions (n). Ambiently patterning process-in-itself is potentially definable relative to contingent autonomously enacted norms, but the absolute frame of determinate boundedness is indefinite. Frames are potentially definable but their absolute set is indefinite. A rock or a screwdriver can always be exapted in a new way. The limits of the observer-independent frame are un-prestatable, to use Kaufman’s term (2019). 

Nihilism: there is zero (0)

Monism: there is one (1)

Dualism: there are two (2)

Multiplicities: what becomes defies absolute identity and quantity.

Multiplicity does not involve is or are (as in there is one, there are two), but involves becoming. Substances can be counted whereas processes become, thus determinate boundaries in substance ontology can be enacted but do not ontically exist. Multiplicities do not involve a definite quantity but an integrated complexity of differentiating, reiterating and radically-branching processes. To perceptively couple with- and know with- multiplicities involves a rhizomatic know how. Knowledge with multiplicities is for a living organization to signify with transiently coupled ontical processes co-relative to the organism’s enactive norms. In contrast, representational knowledge -of is needed for ontically quantified substances. A rhizomatic way of knowledge involves an ontically indefinite frame that rather becomes enacted via autonomous framing. Frames are indefinite and must be enacted via autonomy, i.e. a process of defination. This poses a framing problem for representational epistemology. However, process and enaction do not face the framing problem. Framings and sense-making (for normatively signifying with a world) are autonomously grown at root, like rhizomes into multiplicities of the ontically unsignified (but potentially signifiable) ambient patternings.