Chapter 2: The Organism and Environment

Chapter 2: The Organism and Environment

Process ontology is highly compatible with enactive philosophy. Enactive processes include autopoiesis, autonomy, agency, precarious operational closure, vital normativity, and sense-making (Cuffari et al., 2018). An enactive and processual account will be used to formulate an operational definition for the term organism. Organism will be defined as a specific pattern of processual organization with obligate precarious operational closure. Concrete organism-environment systems can then be profiled on a spectrum with differing dimensions and degrees of 1. integrated closure, 2. differentiation and 3. evolutionary transition. The second half of this chapter will relate process ontology, enaction and the processual conception of organisms to the issues of perception and knowledge.

Reviewing Process Ontology

Process ontology is a metaphysical stance. Beings and things are best realized as flowing processes with order and patterns forming on different temporal and spatial scales. In contrast, substance ontology is a metaphysical stance that things are best realized as static substances with properties.

It is a mistake to suppose that processes require underlying things, or substances. This commonly held belief corresponds, unsurprisingly, to the original meaning of the term ‘substance’, which derives from the Latin word substantia—literally, that which stands under. In opposition to this view, we take nature to be constituted by processes all the way down. This represents a reversal of the substantialist position described above. Instead of thinking of processes as belonging to things, we should think of things as being derived from processes. This does not mean that things do not exist, even less that thing-concepts cannot be extremely useful or illuminating. What it does imply is that things cannot be regarded as the basic building blocks of reality.  What we identify as things are no more than transient patterns of stability in the surrounding flux, temporary eddies in the continuous flow of process. (Dupré & Nicholson, 2018, p. 13).

The ontical “things” of process ontology are hence abstractions from continuous processes. The granularity and scale of temporal abstraction relate to the time scale under observation. Processes that are slower than an experiential time scale intuitively appear to be relatively static, stable and substantial. 

The metaphysical assumption that ontical beings are best realized as substances with essential properties is replaced with a processual perspective. Apparent things are abstractions from processes that enable relatively stable patterns to be imposed on flow. Stability obtains on different scales of space and time relative to an observer. Instead of being built from aggregate things with functions and properties, the mind is realized as a specific organization of processes, deeply continuous with life. As these processes of life and mind obtain greater closure and integration, their constituent processes may obtain greater diversity of differentiation. In this stance, the res cogitans and res extensa are no longer ontically realized as thinking things and extended things, i.e. things with the essential functions of thinking and things with the essential properties of extension. The mind (cogitans) is ontically realized from processes that enable thinking. The physical (extensa) is realized from processes that enable imposition of extended patterns. Scale, stability and pattern of physical extension are contingent on the perspective and sense enacted by an observer. The patterns of physical processes are otherwise chronically unsignified, albeit potentially signifiable by a coupled organism.

Regarding the organism as a pattern imposed on flow, imposition is via processes of active self organization, autopoiesis and autonomy. The imposition of life as a pattern upon flow involves autonomy and agency, whereas the imposition of a standing wave upon flowing water does not. Further, autonomous patterns are not strictly imposed on flow (in a static way) but actively imposing on-and-with flow. Likewise, the activity structures of imposition vary across specific organizations. These distinctions are made by Johannes Jaeger: 

The organizational account of organismic agency relies on material, efficient and formal (be)causes— mechanistic and relational explanations— which complement each other. Organizational closure, achieved through the closure of constraints, is the defining relational property of living systems. It is a formal (be)cause. However, it is not simply imposed on the material flows constituting the organism. Instead it is continually regenerated, constantly (re)emerging over time through the dialectic dynamic interactions of material processes and the constraints they generate. (DiFrisco, 2014; DiFrisco & Mossio, 2020). These processes represent the efficient and material (be)causes of the organism. (2020, p. 30). 

In process ontology, persistently ordered forms are conceptualized as metastable patterns imposing on flow. A persistent and ordered activity structure as a “processual formal cause” is a metastable pattern imposing on flowing “material cause.” Strictly speaking, specific activity structures can be substrate-flexible to material flow, but not truly substrate-neutral. Certain material-energetic flows constrain, govern and enable the possible space of emergent formal patterns. Formal patterns will dissipate if their continuity of material flow ceases, as during equilibrium. The instantiation of formal patterns is contingent upon its historical organizational continuity of material flow, and is enabled and constrained by the specific substrate materiality of the flow. In far from equilibrium thermodynamics, localized ordered forms can persist if free energy input feeds into the open system. Enabling constraints allow for the energy to do work for the open system, i.e. useful work is operationalized as free energy flows into a few constrained degrees of freedom. If these forms are specifically life forms, then persistence involves active autopoiesis, autonomy and agency. 

Reductionism, Holism and the Organism

The organism can be understood via reductionism and holism. If reductionist models are reified, then the organism is taken to be an assemblage of partes extra partes, in contrast with the holistic view of an organism as a whole system obtaining under interdependent operational closure. The persistence of the organism as a processual life form involves its active autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and its operational closure taking a developmental trajectory with organizational continuity (in active structural coupling with its environment). The relation between part and whole for an organism is thus not one of independent parts coming-together to develop and form a whole life form. The relation is one of a precedent operational closure with organizational history that obtains differentiation over the course of its developmental trajectory. Parts are thus differentiated processes that are abstracted from the precedent concrete whole of the organism’s integrated operational closure.

The authors of Linguistic Bodies provide a helpful definition of the abstract and the concrete: “abstraction [is taken] to be synonymous with isolation, decontextualization, or separation from a set of relations[....] Concretizing involves the opposite move of examining something by considering it increasingly embedded within a network of relations.” (Cuffari et al., 2018)

The word abstraction derives from the roots ab- and -trahere: to pull or draw away from, to remove. Concretization derives from con- and -crescere to grow together. 

Holism considers the concrete whole as precedent, and parts are abstractions of differentiations that obtain within the interdependent, integrated closure of the whole. In contrast, mereology is the study of independent, separate mere parts and how they come together to form wholes. 

Mereology relates to reductionism. Parts remain apart, i.e. they are not in precarious operational closure with each other. 

In a holistic perspective of an organism, differentiations (parts) exist for-and-by-means of the concrete integrated whole, not as partes-extra-partes. Interactions self-organize and differentiate continuously together, obtaining under precarious operational closure. Examples of operational closure include constraint closure, work task closure and catalytic task closure (Stuart Kauffman).

From Nicholson (2018):  “[B]iological order does not come pre-formed in a static ‘order-from-order’ structure (as Schrödinger famously conjectured), but rather emerges progressively, through an epigenetic ‘order-from-disorder’ process. By restating this thesis [...] in biology, order does not entail design.” Related to the enactive approach, order from disorder relates to autopoiesis. Order from order relates to heteropoiesis, e.g. design, construction, tool use and the programmed rule-entailment of computers. “Organisms, unlike machines, are autopoietic, they persist as a result of their own activity” (ibid). 

Normativity

Autopoiesis enables precarious operational closure and organizational normativity. Heteropoiesis relates to heteronomy and heteronormativity, i.e. Hume’s aphorism that “an is does not imply an ought.” Autonomous systems generate norms, whereas heteronomous equipment lacks normativity in itself (apart from its facultative incorporation into an autonomous tool user’s practice). A piece of equipment or a practic tool does not have purpose nor meaning for-itself, but for the tool user that facultatively and intermittently incorporates the tool into its operational uses. Without precarious operational closure of organization, maintenance and heritable reproduction, equipment lacks normativity and functionality in-itself.

Whereas abiotic equipment and physicality lacks normativity in itself (apart from the coupling and praxis of an organism), autonomous systems generate a normativity intrinsic with their life processes. While an abiotic “is” may not imply an ought, life does imply a vital normativity. Di Paolo et al. explain “the enactive understanding of normativity” as follows: “the conservation of a precarious self-sustaining circular organization is proposed as grounding certain kinds of vital norms” (p. 85). Minimal operational normativity is enabled by a self-organizing process’ precarious operational closure. Change relative to vital norms enables minimal sense-making (Evan Thompson), i.e. signification of figure from ground and signal from noise. This tension is generative for a phenomenal field as the organism-environment system continuously moves, interacts and coevolves, over time. Through movement, an organism generates a world. 

Operationally Defining the Organism 

The Greek root “organon” translates to “instrumental,” from which the words organ-ization and organ-ism are derived. “Ism” is a suffix denotating “doctrine.” Doctrine here implies an obligate relationship, as opposed to a facultative relationship. Hence, the word organ-ism can be deconstructed literally as an “instrumental doctrine,” that is, an obligate and precarious organizational closure. Precarious organizational closure and autonomy enable an organism’s normativity. 

Nomos is a Greek root for “law” or “legislating,” hence auto-nomy relates to self-governance, and hetero-nomy relates to other-governance (Thompson, 2010). Autopoieis enables processual autonomy as distinct from heteronomy, via a dialectic between self-organization (openness) and individuation (closedness). Autopoiesis is Francisco Varela’s technical term for “self organization,” from the Greek “poiesis.” The organizational structure of precarious operational closure enables instrumental (organizational) normativity for an autopoietic organism, and displacement from this normativity enables sign-ification, i.e. minimal sense-making. This enables minimal agency for organism-environmental coupling, with behaviors including taxis (e.g. chemotaxis), and praxis (behavioral practices). Agency is enabled by an organism-environment (O-E) system’s direct actions upon the interactions that couple the O-E system, as clearly diagrammed by Ezequiel Di Paolo, et al. (2018). 

Organism can be operationally defined as an instrumental (organizational) doctrine of obligate, precarious operational closure with organizational continuity. Obligate means that life temporarily obtains with active continuity of its organizational closure, and dissipates if this closure ends (thus, operational closure is precarious and must obtain organizational continuity in its persistence). Referring to the organism as an instrumental (organizational) doctrine implies that the bounds of instrumental (organizational) closure are obligate in their coherence (here, doctrine implies obligate). Obligate means that these processes are vital to closure, i.e. they are not facultatively optional, and are not able to be separated from operation without collapse (i.e. equilibrium, death, decoherence). 

In this framework, perception is not a process of a “thinking thing” representing “physical things,” with representational content bearing accuracy- and truth- conditions to the factual, observer-independent properties of real things (substance ontology, representationalism). Instead, perception involves a processually flowing organism enacting sense via structural coupling with its processually flowing world (process ontology, enaction). In perceiving, organisms enact sense and normativity with their coupled environmental flows. Basic consciousness is a non-thetic, pre-reflective “know-how” and a “knowledge-with.” Under substance ontology: organisms represent real objects with observer-independent norms and properties. The content of representations has norms relative to the truth-conditions of objective realism. Basic consciousness is a reflective “knowledge-of.” 

Perception involves sense-making (enactive objectification). Objective realism is taken to be a reifying stance. The philosopher Tim Elmo Feiten writes “There is no way a space of reasons can come into being except by growing out of the seed of life.” 

Profiling Organisms as Processual Forms

"Organisms evolve and develop by becoming at one and the same time more differentiated and more integrated or coordinated in both structure and behavior. It is from these parallel developments (and not from either acting alone) that the increasing complexity of organisms emerges over time.” (Anderson, 2014, p. 290).

Organisms can be profiled as metastable, processual patterns imposed on flow in dynamic equilibrium. This profile can include different heuristic dimensions:

1. With different degrees of integration in operational closure (e.g. coherence, interconnectedness, stability). As the highest defined scale of operational closure grows tighter and closer-knit, the lower scales are increasingly stabilized. This enables further integration and differentiation of lower-scale orders of constituent operational closure. 

2. Upon different orders of evolutionarily transitioned macroscale (e.g. unicellular to multicellular to social). Generally, constituent processes on lower microscale orders have greater stability due to having greater obligate entanglement in transitioned macroscale orders (e.g.  metabolic processes to sensorimotor processes to linguistic processes).

3. With different degrees of concrescent differentiations of their processual organization. These differentiated specializations can be abstracted as “parts” on different spatiotemporal scales. Under process ontology, “specialized parts” of an organism should be considered shorthand for “differentiated constituent process.” Within a concrescent operational closure, self-differentiation increases under conditions of a) increasing the size of an operational closure, b) imposing stability on lower-order scales of constituent closures (e.g. via frequent operational reuse/entanglement/redundancy), and c) increasing the pressures/demands upon a closure.

Elaborating on point 3: Large, stable and pressured closures can be expected to have highly differentiated concrescent specializations on their lower orders of constituent processes. Highly stabilized, specialized and differentiated processes are more easily abstracted as “unique parts” to an observer (e.g. organelles in a large eukaryotic cell, termite members in a mega colony, specialized work roles in a large organization or assembly line). Less-stabilized and less-differentiated processes are less-easily abstracted as “unique parts.” Smaller, weaker and less pressured closures usually involve more generalists and homogeneity. The constraints and trade-offs to increasing the stressors on a closure, or a closure’s size, include the upper limits to the closure’s internal coordination, wiring problems, circulation problems, metabolic demands, and error catastrophe.

To identify “parts” can be a useful heuristic abstraction, but to claim that the whole develops from an assemblage of parts is a reification of processes into substances. Contra genetic determinism: Genes did not make life bottom-up; life self organized, evolved and developed genes as processual differentiations. Genes now remain obligate to life’s precarious operational closure. Scientists then abstract the spatiotemporal stability of genes, contingent to the time scale of their epistemological questions. However, genes are not to be reified as spatiotemporally crystallized, static objects, i.e. mere “substances with properties.” Analogous claims can be made for neural determinism, and gen-etic determinism of generative units, in general. 

To expand point 2 (different orders of evolutionarily transitioned macroscale): Organisms profiled as a metastable patterns imposed on flow involve an entanglement of processes in operational closure. More specifically, organisms are processual patternings that agentially impose on flow. These processes are entangled in their concrescence, and this recapitulates the idea of “autonomous bodies” from the book Linguistic Bodies (Cuffari et. al, 2018). Processes can be abstracted/anchored on different orders of evolutionarily transitioned scale of organization (metabolic closure, closure of sensorimotor schemes, closure of linguistic autonomy). This abstraction of “anchoring” allows for the conception of autonomous organic, sensorimotor, and linguistic bodies. Abstraction of the organic/metabolic closure enables conception of an autonomous organic body. Abstraction of the sensorimotor closure enables conception of an autonomous sensorimotor body. Abstraction of sociocultural and linguistic closure enables conception of an autonomous linguistic body. These closures are holistic but heterogeneous, heterarchical, specialized, operating on different time scales, and have different scales of informational access, behavioral constraint and agency relative to each other. Autonomous bodies are organized in heterarchies. They are inter-penetrating and entangled in precarious closure (Chapter 10).

All these interpenetrating autonomous bodies are nonlinearly co-developing, coevolving, and co-enabling in concrescent operational closure. The different types of “bodies” organize upon different macroscale orders of evolutionarily transitioned substrate. Therefore, one emergent scale does not “reduce” to another. The hard problem of consciousness (HPC) asks “how does qualitative experience reduce to the scale of neurons?” This question is artefactual of substance ontology, and process ontology does not pose this question. The HPC turns into a reductio ad absurdum argument against substance ontology. Depending on one’s contingent epistemic line of questioning, the “anchoring” can be shifted between scales to help abstract out different details of autonomous bodies. This is an illuminating heuristic tool, but prior to abstraction, autonomous bodies are holistic and concrete in their operational closure and heterarchy. The HPC wrongheadly takes the scale of physico-biological abstraction for granted as the privileged level of explanation, that is, to explain how experience reduces to neurophysiology. However, no scale of abstraction is more or less privileged, nor more or less pragmatically contingent than another. 

Additionally, an organism’s operational closure is penetrated by trans-organism closures such as reproductive closures, evolutionary closures, and ecological niche closures. These trans-organism processes span beyond the individual’s intra-organism operational closures. Processes spanning trans-organism closures may be obligate to the cycles and hypercycles that perpetuate with trans-generational stability (e.g. phylogenesis, a food web hypercycle, a sociocultural hypercycle). In other words, both the organism’s originating reproductive event (its birth) and the reproductive events perpetuating a trans-organism operational closure (birth of progeny) are obligate to trans-generational closures, as they both intra-penetrate the organism’s closure and go beyond the individual. However, any given individual by itself is not obligate to a broader transgenerational closure; the flow (birth, development, reproduction and death) of organisms is what enables imposition of a trans-organism pattern (such as a species or a reproductive cycle). The organism’s obligate closure is also concrescent with tangentially penetrating apo- / epi-organism closures and processes, e.g. facultative symbiosis, parasitism, viral infection. These processes are tangential to the organism’s obligate closure and tangential to the organism’s trans-generational closures. 

To elaborate on points 1-3 together: 

A tighter degree of coherence on the organism’s highest macroscale order of operational closure enables greater stability of lower order entangled/enclosed microscales. Greater stability of closure, size of closure, entanglement, frequency of reuse, and pressure upon microscale constituents enables greater specialization and differentiation. The higher orders of macroscale processes heavily recycle and entangle the lowest constituent microscale orders. Lower order operations are obligate to higher order operations, and higher orders stabilize the lower orders due to redundancy and frequency of their reiteration. Behavior on higher order scales may also constrain the behavior of lower order scales (e.g. emotional behaviors constraining biochemistry, or volitional motor intentionality constraining the physiology of the musculoskeletal system). 

The lower microscale order is reused, exapted and adaptively tweaked over experiential, developmental, and evolutionary time scales. These reactive-plastic and governing/mediative microscale substrates are subjected to different types of processual loading (e.g. natural selection for germ line genetic substrate, developmental experience for epigenetic substrate, behavioral loading for neural substrate). The microscale order is reused, recycled, stabilized and differentiated until their temporally cross-sectioned processes look like cells with highly differentiated menageries of organelles, or highly elaborated nervous systems with menageries of organs and intricate paths, or differentiated termite colonies with specialized soldiers, workers, and reproductive caste. These abstracted processes are stabilized, canalized and stereotyped both in space, morphology, and in time; i.e. they retain their conceptually continuous morphology (a metastable pattern imposed on flow), and persist in time. 

Additionally, further differentiation and further meta-orders of agency are enabled by this processual scaffolding. Per Di Paolo et al, minimal agency has dimensions of individuation, asymmetrical interaction with the environment, and normativity. Agency may manifest as a direct action upon the interaction that couples the organism-environment system. Further agency would be defined as increasing orders of these meta-actions. To restate: minimal agency is operationalized as a meta action, i.e. auto-regulatory action upon an organism-environment system’s interactive coupling. This has dimensions of individuation, asymmetrical coupling, and normativity. Minimal “meta-agency” is hence a higher order auto-regulatory action upon this auto-regulatory action; a meta-auto-regulatory action upon the O-E system’s interactive coupling. These behaviors can recursively scaffold growing orders of meta-agency, and stability of lower-order types of agency. 

Agency occurs when skilled (practic) behaviors constrain unskilled behaviors, and further higher-order behaviors may still develop to constrain skilled behavior (meta-praxis). Endogenous activity patterns may develop central pattern generators, CPGs develop regulatory behaviors, and upon these develop increasing orders of scaffolded meta regulatory behaviors. This is analogous to a fractal self organization of behavioral processes comprising the O-E system. Agency involves growing and differentiating meta behaviors, unto the limits of ontogenic coherence of closure and enabling constraints. Minimal agency, as a substrate-flexible activity structure, can be conceptualized in various macroscale orders, e.g. organic/metabolic minimal agency, sensorimotor agency, intersubjective agency, sociocultural agency and linguistic agency. 

The behaviors coevolve, codevelop, and co-attune their reactive-plastic, governing/mediative substrates, on entangled and heterogenous timescales (while remaining in operational closure). Autonomous bodies are always in a state of becoming, concrescence, status nascendi, and equilibrium implies cessation and decoherence.

The nervous system can be profiled as an example of a concrescent instrumental specialization. The nervous system gets increasingly specialized, centralized and differentiated under increasing spectrums of higher-order organism coherence (i.e. spectrums of higher order macroscale closure coherence). This enables the nervous system, its morphology and connectivity to continuously  evolutionarily transition over deep time. 

The field of Evolutionary Neuroscience gives many instructive examples to profile (Kaas, 2009). Relative to metabolic-dominant organisms (e.g. single cells, plants, fungi, sponges, sessile adult sea squirts, bryozoa), sensorimotor  dominant organisms (motile invertebrates, e.g. cnidarians, echinoderms, worms) have novel nervous system processes and morphology. As do intersubjective- dominant organisms (social insects, octopi, various vertebrates), to linguistic and protolingusitic organisms (vocal learning birds, vocal learning dolphins, gestural apes, humans). Cognition is embodied and processual, and the types of autonomous bodies that enable and mediate cognition will vary according to the bodies’ eco-evo-devo history, over time, in situ. 

Overall, a clearer ontological picture begins to form towards defining and profiling the “organism.” An organ-ism (an instrumental-doctrine as an obligate precarious organizational closure) can be operationalized on different transitions of macroscales. The coherence of the operational definition of an organism relates to the spectrum and degree of: 1. Integration and stability of its closure, 2. the highest order of transitioned macroscale upon which obligate closure operationally coheres, 3. specialized differentiations of its organizational closure. This explains why organisms can be operationalized on the unicellular macroscale order, to colonies of unicellulars, to multicellulars and to eumetazoan animals. This also explains why an organism is not “coherent” on the activity structures with facultative closure e.g. swarms, social groups, hives, ecosystem webs, etc. Using this heuristic, the dispositions of concrete organism structures can be profiled on a spectrum, in situ.

To reiterate, closure must be obligate on the highest macroscale order for an organism to be operationalized/definable as cohering on this scale. If closure is only facultative, then the organism activity structure is not coherent on this scale. For example, a swarm is not an obligate closure, and the organism structure can only be used as an analogy/metaphor (a so-called superorganism). Daniel J Nicholson uses an example of a biofilm as a unicellular swarm. Swarms do not have holistic reproductive closure (heredity), among other differences (2018). 

Further, as defended by Argyris Arnellos in his paper in Everything Flows, the “monogenomic differentiated cell lineage” (MDCL) should not be equivocated as a sufficient definition of the organism. The MDCL is a putative abstracted quality that most organisms seem to share, but is not the sole defining “mark of the organism.” (2018). 

To operationalize and define an organ-ism on a higher order/evolutionarily transitioned macroscale, the organism must obtain and maintain obligate closure on this order. It is not sufficient to have facultative closure. Closure that can decohere-recohere temporarily can have looser obligate closure, as in a colonial organism such as a Portuguese Man-o-War. However, with lessened degrees of obligate closure, the colonial organism is profiled on a weaker end of the spectrum, albeit its individuated colonial organisms are still highly differentiated and interconnected. 

The organism defined as a “processual instrumental-doctrine with obligate precarious operational closure” is operationally definable on the highest order of evolutionarily transitioned macroscale in which it maintains obligate closure. The higher the macroscale and stronger the closure, the more stabilized, differentiated and specialized are the lower-order processes. Conversely, the highest order of closure is most precarious, least stabilized and least specialized. Additionally, higher order processes that only have facultative closure with the organism are not strictly definitive for organismal closure.

Overall, the concrescence of operational closure delimits the ontical bounds of an organism. Operationally defined: the “organism” is bounded by processes with obligate precarious operational closure. Organisms can be profiled on a spectrum with differing dimensions and degrees of coherent integration in obligate closure, concrescent differentiation, and evolutionarily transitioned macroscale order. In the enactive view, life involves complex adaptive systems that are both enabling of- and enabled by- autopoiesis, autonomy, instrumental normativity, and agency. This circularity of enablement foreshadows positive feedback loops, attractors, emergent order and local stability-over-time in the face of global entropy; all characteristics of complex adaptive systems. 

Process, Enaction, Perception and Knowledge 

The “is'' of a substance ontology does not imply an ought. Restated, norms are not enacted without precarious operational closure. Norms in a pure substance ontology start heteronomously and remain heteronomous. In a process ontology, a physical pattern previously decoupled or heteronomous to an organism can facultatively signify instrumental normativity for an autonomous equipment-user. This is through the Heideggerian notion of deseveredness, i.e. transient and facultative structural coupling of a perceptual pattern into the autonomy of the organism (Maturana, Varela 1987). 

A subjected stance relates itself to an objected physical pattern, and the consequent processual changes that redispose the organism and the organism-environment (O-E) system is referred to as perception. An objected physical pattern is made normative for a subjected agent by the process of physical patterns “passing through” (per-) operational closure, and “catching” (-ception) by reorganizing the closure’s disposition. Objected patterns transiently reorganize and catch-through the subjected organism’s operational closure. The significance enabled by the objected physical pattern is made contingent to the tool user’s precarious operational closures, and deviations from vital norms and baseline levels of endogenous activity. Restated: the perceptual process occurs by the autonomous organism transiently and facultatively incorporating the objectified environment via operational deseverence. Hence, “severed” means that the physical pattern does not have inclusion into operational closure relative to the autonomous organism, so it remains external and unsignified to the organism-environment system closure. Desevered means that the physical pattern is transiently and facultatively affecting and reorganizing the organism’s closure.  

Deseverence as in structural coupling can allow a previously severed, decoupled environmental process to transiently and facultatively reorganize the organism’s organizational and phenotypic dispositions, a posteriori redisposedness following some behavioral loading. The environmental patterns are “taken into'' the autonomous vital closure of the organism via changing the organization of its governing autonomous bodily substrates. The governing/meditative bodily substrates are adaptively re-attuned to reiterated behavioral experiences during its lifespan, as memory is embodied via remanence (this is the adaptive hysteresis effect as a type of memory, see Chapter 6). The autonomous bodily substrates are “trained,” like training a machine-learning artificial neural net (except that a heteronomous machine is not autopoietic, autonomous, nor auto-normative). These loaded patterns redispose the organism’s various autonomous bodies (metabolic, sensorimotor, linguistic) and substrates, remanent and persisting in wake of such activity loading. Consequently, the O-E system’s pragmatic disposition is redisposed, affecting operation of its taxis (e.g. chemotaxis), praxis (e.g. various phenotypic skills, habitus) and pragmatics. 

Perceptual significance is enabled by a displacement from an organism’s resting state, displacement of vital norms and reorganization of the organism’s precarious organizational closure. The organism’s phenomenal experience is altered due to continuous displacement of its vital norms. This occurs as the organism moves and structurally couples with its environment via perception and motor intentionality, thereby enacting a world of normativity, significance and valence. Crucially, perceptual experience varies and has different experiential and developmental implications during situations of passivity, during intentionality (directedness) and during agency. 

Anti-Representationalism

Note that this framework has made no appeal to cognitivist representation. Under process ontology, the statement “perception is a sensory representation of objects,” is replaced with “perception is a process of enactive objectification (sense making),” enabled by an organism’s continuous autopoiesis, autonomy, instrumental norms, and agency. 

An example thought experiment can demonstrate the problems underlying substance ontology, objective realism and representationalism. Try to explain how to obtain objective, observer-independent “knowledge-of” the sun under substance-ontology. To do so, no final reference is allowed to phenomenology (how you relate to it with bodily senses and experience). Further, try not to explicate the objective, observer-independent nature of the sun by grounding scientific measurements with any final contingency of sociocultural practice. Metrics like mass, degrees Kelvin, luminescence, gravitational force (etc) are all typically related to either by imagining some sensory relation (like heaviness, brightness, heat, bodily weight), or a practical relation. Metrics are typically “scientifically known” with some contingency to pragmatics, like how long it would take to reach the sun in a rocket, how much energy it radiates to the Earth, or how gravity keeps the Earth in orbit. Additionally, metrics are typically “scientifically known” in a sociocultural field of asking and answering questions due to some sociocultural epistemic curiosity embedded in fields of language games, math games, and science games. Objective realism, despite claims otherwise, ultimately relies heavily on observer contingent pragmatics. The semantic significance of symbols can not find ultimate ground in a veridical reduplication of an observer-independent reality. Reality lacks any significance and normativity without the patterns imposed by a living observer. Normative significance has to be enacted via an autonomous organism. Perceptual knowledge is via an organism’s enactments of sense-making, not via representation of observer-independent objects having stand-alone meaning and bounded normativity. 

A map is not the territory; a model should not be confused with reality. Perception enacts a world of observer-contingent patterns; perception is shaped by the moving, sentient sensorimotor body of an organism. A signified physical pattern is only sensible when enacted by an organism, otherwise it remains non-sense (potentially signifiable but chronically unsignfied). Thus, an observer-independent object cannot be perceived via a process of representation, because to represent the unsignified (non-sense) is a non-starter. Sense must be made (enacted) contingent to an organism’s normativity. Objects are observer contingent; objects (n) are not represented, instead physical patterns are objectified (v) by an organism’s enactive process of sense making.

A map-territory fallacy is to claim perception as a process of accurately representing an objectively verdicial, observer-independent reality. To claim that perception is a matter of representing observer-independent objects is to claim that the map (reified objectifications) stand apart from the organism. Organisms make sense of a world; the world does not have sense prior-to and apart-from the organism. Thus, “observer-independent objects” are reifications of an organism’s enactments of sense making. An organism does not perceive via representing observer-independent objects in the same way that a cartographer does not chart a map of routes that were never laid in past travels. The map should not be reified as the territory. 

Returning to the previous thought experiment: To have complete knowledge of a star against the correspondence theory of truth would be to recreate all the physical information of a star. However, this “knowledge” would neither have normative significance nor meaning in itself, it would just be a twin star. Even in a symbolic form, the information would not be grounded in semantic meaning as data-in-itself without the contingent norms of significance enacted by a coupled organism. As non-living physicality, stars cannot enact their own norms of significance. Physical patterns of non life are neither autonomous nor heteronomous, but anomalous, unnamed, unsignified. If a star burns in space with nobody to see it, does it have hotness or brightness? What would these metrics signify? An is does not imply an ought per Hume. A further map-territory fallacy is to describe reality with a model, then derive reality from the model without further observation. This fallacy is implied by the metaphysical claim that nature is written in the language of math. Not even mathematical formulae in-themselves can have semantic significance in-themselves; math is a methodologically rigorous practice, not a representation of the observer-independent meaning of stars. 

“Knowledge-of” can and does exist, but it is scaffolded at fundamental root-and-base from know-how and knowledge-with. This applies both to scientifically scaffolded knowledge-of, and perceptual knowledge-of. Perceptual knowledge-of is via the aforementioned enactive objectification process, during both everyday pre-reflective perception and during reflective/meta-attended perception. To use Heidegger’s terminology, an “authentic” being-in-time (dasein) knows the world via readiness to hand (zuhanden), and presence at hand (vorhanden) is derivative upon reflection or breakdown of skilled coping in action.

The actual significance and normativity of an objectified structure must be enacted by an existential being engaging in some relational interaction of signification between figure and ground. The conception of enactive objectification is contra objective realism and substance ontology, considered to be a propositional reification.

Things-in-themselves, Processes-In-Themselves and Perception

Under process metaphysics, the noumenal thing-in-itself is better qualified as a process-in-itself. A process in-itself (more accurately, a process decoupled from a self) remains potentially signifiable but chronically unsignified and meaningless. 

The world-in-itself is in a state of normative unrelation. Without a life form or organism to enact relational normativity, the world-in-itself stands as potentially relatable, but as-of-yet unrelated. Without the pathos, logos and ethos of organisms, this world-in-itself is a-pathetic, a-logical and without ethic. 

To attempt understanding of a world-in-itself is paradoxical. This is to relate to unrelation or to reflect on unreflection. The world-in-itself exists, but it remains normatively undifferentiated, unenacted and without any of the vital normativity, reliability and validity from the organisms that remain chronically absent. Organism-environment systems are sense makers and norm enacters, and when life is absent, life-related sense and normativity is likewise absent. For an organism to inquire about the sense of a world-in-itself is an organism inquiring about the sensibility of senselessness. The as-of-yet unsensed is potentially sensible, however the normative significance of senselessness itself is not sensible. 

The world-in-itself (the environment decoupled from an organism) is potentially relatable and potentially signifiable, but remains chronically unsignified and without norm in the absence of a structurally coupled organism. The figure and ground of a field is as much a property of an organism as it is a property of the environment, as a coupled organism-environment system. 

Representationalism of an “objectively” real world-in-itself is then a non-starter for an organism’s processes of sense making. Instead, the organism must relationally valuate and enact with a world via its active and precarious operational normativity and various nested histories. This is knowledge with an environment via a pragmatic know how, not a representationalist knowledge of. 

Etymology is instructive for considering the relationship between subjects, objects and perception. Sub-ject derives from thrown (ject) and under (sub); ob-ject derives from thrown (ject) and at (ob); per-ception derives from catch or caught (cept) and through (per). The supposedly “objective” world-in-itself is not ob-jected at all if it remains by-itself. This is because there is no co-relative sub-ject to create a relative frame of reference and motion. An object is not an ob-ject without a relatively sub-jected organism that may per-ceive physical patterns.

Just as motion in physics is relative and not absolute, a thrown-at body (literally an ob-ject) needs a relatively thrown-under body (sub-ject) with caught-through (per-ceived) physical patterns in order to be operationally definable as such. An object is only such in relation to a subject, and object-subject systems are dynamically codetermining as they transiently structurally-couple. Potential normativity and per-ceived sense are enacted relative to the precarious operational closure of a processual life-form.

Objects are not definable in-themselves in the same way that there is no absolute frame of motion in physics; there is no absolute ob-ject, no absolute sub-ject, and no absolute per-ception. Such frames of motion are co-relative and contingent upon situated dynamics of organism-environment systems as they actively couple, interact and decouple. Objects are not definable in themselves, analogous to how an absolute velocity or direction of motion of a body is not definable in itself. 

The normativity enacted by precarious and historized life forms makes-sense with the physically patterned processes of reality, enacted with a particular know-how. Such patterns are otherwise chronically unrelated to any norm of significance, but remain potentially relatable. 

Extrapersonal Space is Still Personal 

Perception is like breathing in that both actions are constitutively involuntary processes that directly couple an organism-environment system.

Respiration involves breathing air which contributes to forming a living organic body, while perception breathes ecological patterns to form a lived sensorimotor body of significations. Respiration helps form metabolism. Perception in-forms phenomenal fields, affordance spaces and poises dispositions to act. Perception can also skillfully reorganize dispositions via embodying memory. Perception enables sensorimotor actions to leave changes upon the environment in a process of niche construction (paths laid in walking). 

Both processes of breathing and perception are involuntary but modulated by attention, structurally couple the organism and environment, contribute to embodiment and poise disposition to live and act. Perception directly couples an organism-environment system as it self-organizes and individuates. 

Perception affects agency. An organism’s perception and movement enacts a world, including the tensioned poles of an intrapersonal space and an extra-personal phenomenal field. The organism then takes agential action upon the significations that it perceptually carves, polarizes and designates as extra-personal. The organism’s perception changes its actions on its extrapersonal field, and the changed field reciprocally changes perception, which changes the organism’s action in circular return. The organism-environment system dynamically coevolves its poles of intrapersonal space and extra-personal phenomenal fields. This agential, asymmetrical action upon extrapersonal space occurs even as the extrapersonal pole remains continuous with the whole organism as an organism-environment system (a being-in-a-world). The organism acts upon and changes its phenomenal field, designated as extra-personal space, even as the organism is pre-reflectively enacting this field as the context of its lived being. Thus, perceptual extra-personal space is neither a space separate from the lived body nor a space apart from the living body. Extra-personal space is coextensive with the lived-body. The phenomenal field and extra-personal space are still personal. The extra-personal space is not an a-personal space. The lived body inhabits space (per Maurice Merleau Ponty) and enacts extra-personal space via embodied sensorimotor intentionality as it transiently couples with physically patterned processes. The enactment of extra-personal space may rely more on visual and auditory organs of eyes and ears, but extrapersonal space is no less embodied than intrapersonal and peripersonal spaces (enacted via organs of skin and interoceptors). The abstracted pole of extra-personal space is coextensive with the lived-body even if it is perceived/disclosed and accessed/influenced differently than intra- and peripersonal spaces. 

Both processes of breathing and perception directly couple a specific embodiment with a specific niche. Respiratory organs interface air with lungs or water with gills to oxygenate blood. Perceptual organs directly couple a sensorimotor embodiment with ambient ecological patterns, coupling a dynamic world with attuned sensorimotor organs and niche-specific behaviors. 

One process forms metabolism, the other pre-reflectively in-forms an affordance space, phenomenal field and poises dispositions to act.

This process involves in-formation of the phenomenal field and pragmatic in-formation of an organism’s poised disposition relative to the coupled environment. Enactive perception differs from cognitivist perception conceived as processing heteronomous information-as-data. Perception-as-action is to dynamically enact a phenomenal field and to affect an organism-environment system’s poised disposition to act. Posed dispositions interface an organism’s situated embodiment with opportunities to act. Such poised, plastic dispositions are historically reorganized on different time scales (via evolution, development, niche construction, reiterated experiences and various forms of memory).

Like breathing which is a constitutively involuntary action that helps form an organism’s metabolic embodiment, perception is a constitutively involuntary action that informs an organism’s lived-body. Both actions may also be facultatively voluntary (under agential constraint). This perceptual in-formation helps to pre-reflectively enact a phenomenal field. Perception also affects the poised disposition of an organism-environment system’s pragmatic coupling. Breathing constitutively, involuntarily and pre-reflectively forms an organic body’s metabolism; perception likewise in-forms a lived body’s phenomenal fields. Perception helps to form a sensorimotor body. 

Extra-personal space is treated like an environmental externality; intra-personal space is treated like an organism’s internality; peri-personal space is treated like a semipermeable boundary. Prima facie, the organism and environment are separated in these ways, but the dichotomies are false. All intra-, peri- and extra-personal perceptual spaces are still personal and interdependently enact the lived body. The organism (as a structurally coupled organism-environment system) can not truly transcend its unity to achieve observer-independent knowledge of an a-personal space. Such a claim would involve reification of the extra-personal space as an observer-independent space. All signified knowledge is thus always-already imbued with a structure of vital normativity and care. An a-personal space is nihilistic and lacks normative significance. 

To propose extra-personal space as a truly separate, observer-independent environment is a reification enabled by objective-realism. This claim of reification may be counterintuitive as organism-environment systems cannot pre-reflectively treat extra personal space in any other way but as an external environment. However, extra-, intra- and peri-personal experiences are simultaneously embedded, embodied and interdependent. This is inextricably so, as in a figure-ground relationship. A figure-ground relationship is one which lacks background-independence between the form and its context, like the wave to the ocean, or a gestalt. The relationship between the organism and its environment is non-background independent. Likewise, the relationship between the organism-environment system’s intra- and extra-personal spaces is non-background independent. 

Organisms and environments are not dichotomies, they are structurally coupled unities (wholes), albeit they are polarized unities. They are also transiently and facultatively coupled, as a flowing organism couples with an environment that is also in flux. However, an organism that no longer couples with a flowing environment is one that is dying or dead. Semipermeability means that organisms have selective agency over their coupling, self-organization, and polarized individuation of in-out. Moreover, organisms are not identical to environments, so they can be disposed to act upon patterned environmental processes that change and reorganize an O-E system disposition. This lived activity is definitive for agency as the organism’s processes of normative and asymmetrical action upon its coupled environment. 

We perceive extra personal space and easily reify it is an independent externality, but extra-personal space is not independent. It is simultaneously embodied and environmental. We perceive intra-personal space and reify it as an individuated internality, but intra-personal space is not internal. It is simultaneously embodied and environmental.

As a socially pragmatic practice, science can study shared extra-personal spaces amongst conspecifics. Scientific practice can referentially describe intersubjectively reliable and normatively valid expressions of such dynamic patterns. Science can also wrongheadedly reify an observer-independent reality. Such norms of validity are contingent upon the lived embodiment, experiences, and social scaffolding of scientific practitioners. 

Reality is differentiated to the figure-ground significations of a structurally coupled organism in a holistic organism-environment system. If decoupled, signal and noise are no longer actively signified to the norms of a processual life form. Normative significance is precariously organized with circular histories of niche construction, evolution, development, and experience.  

Extra personal space and related socio-scientifically shared descriptions (no matter how rigorously reliable or contingently valid) is not an organism-independent background. Extra personal space is an enacted, embodied, embedded and lived perceptual-phenomenal field. This field is treated differently than the intra- and peri-personal spaces because it is embodied and embedded differently. However, consciousness is holistic to all fields on differentiated and integrated scales of space and time. Norms are contingent to the precarious closure of the organism-environment system, its eco-evo-devo histories, learned experience, and socioculturally scaffolded histories. Such fields are complex, dynamic and coevolving as the O-E system coevolves over different scales of operational closure and with different forms of structural coupling. 

In these ways, extra-personal space can be a misnomer if it implies a space separate and decoupled from the person, its embodiment, and operational closure. Under the enactive approach, extra-personal space is polarized but still coextensive with the lived body, its phenomenal field and affordance-space. Extra-personal space is incorporated and enlived as a differentiated polarity of the lived-body. Extra-personal space is differentiated through different modalities of embodiment than intra- and peri-personal spaces, but it is embodied nonetheless. In short, extra-personal space is not a person-excluded space. 

Illusionism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness 

Commitment to illusionism belies a problematic normative criteria of objective veridicality and accuracy. Illusionism belies a commitment to the correspondence theory of truth. That is, a claim of illusion is a claim that one did not accurately represent a fact of observer-independent, objective reality. However, processes of perception, normativity and sense-making are enacted by the autonomy of life, they are not fact checked against the finality of an observer-independent reality. Experience and consciousness are not illusions. Illusory perception may occur for an organism in a surprising circumstance, however the norms are “fact checked” against the organism’s own idiosyncratic sensorimotor repertoire of habits, its peculiar embodiment, niche-embeddedness and developmental-experiential history. The norms are not those of observer-independent realism per the correspondence theory of truth. 

Furthermore, consciousness and phenomenal experience itself are not illusions. Illusionism might draw this conclusion due to implicit commitments to substance ontology and reductive physicalism. The inability for reductive materialism to explain subjective experience is supposed to imply that subjective experience itself is an illusion. Process ontology asserts that this exercise is wrongheaded. Experience does not need to be explained on the “privileged” level of physical, material, mechanical reduction because these are assumptions that result from implicit commitment to substance ontology, i.e. that substances with properties are responsible for everything including life and mind (or the illusion of subjective mindedness). Claims of consciousness and subjective experience being illusions are inappropriate and follow from a fallacious metaphysical grounding in substance ontology and reductive physicalism. 

The illusion is not subjective experience, but the implicit framework of substance ontology itself. Substance metaphysics, essentialism, and reductive materialism should all be the focus of contention, not the validity of having a subjective experience. To assert that experience (a pattern imposed on flow) is illusory because it lacks the identity of “physical substance” is irrelevant under process ontology. 

A more radical uprooting is needed to resolve illusionism’s claim, that “subjective consciousness is illusory because subjective experience cannot be explained by reductive physicalism.” Since illusionism assumes a grounding of substance ontology, it is an inappropriately grounded claim under process ontology. A stronger move is needed than simply denying that subjective experience is substantial because it does not make sense under substance ontology. Instead, the solution is to radically reject substance ontology, adopt a different metaphysical perspective and to develop a positive account of existential experience. Processes of experience are misqualified if labeled as illusions.

The concept of qualia is indeed incoherent as originally formulated under assumptions of reductive materialism and substance ontology. However, illusionism is an inadequate philosophy of mind and an inadequate response to the conceptual problems of qualia, because illusionism operates within the same misgrounded metaphysical assumptions. Illusionism is an attempt to disqualify qualia, but fails because it operates under the same substance-based metaphysical grounding. The problem is deeper rooted and requires a more radical revision. By adopting process ontology and rejecting substance ontology, both the proposal of qualia and the refutation of illusionism are discarded. 

The hard problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem is reframed as a body-body problem under the enactive approach. If the body as a scientific object (körper) is an abstraction from the lived body (leib) as a concrete organism-environment system, then leib does not reduce to körper. The issue shifts to explaining how the existentially precedent lived body (leib) relates to abstracted models of the living body (körper). Hence the body-body problem (Thompson, 2007). 

Leib is not an illusion; leib is existentially precedent and concrete, körper is scientifically derived and abstracted. Life and mind are continuous; mind does not reduce to the scientific objects abstracted from experience. Subjective experience is the means by which our world (and the objects of our study) show up to begin with; it is not an illusion. Phenomenal experience is the field by which all facts (as models of experience) may be enacted and intersubjectively shared and veridically correlated. The delineation of objects does not precede subjective experience, thus subjective experience cannot be deemed an illusion when it is not totally subsumed by a model of physical reductionism. In other words, the territory is not its map, nor is the territory an illusion simply because a map cannot explain the territory in all of its open-ended totality.

Needful Freedom : Organism-Environment : Being-In-The-World : Figure-Ground 

The becoming of being precedes the being of being. Specifically, processual becoming (taken as ontologically fundamental) precedes the abstraction of stable beings or things with properties (ontics) as signifiable by a living organism capable of enacting norms. 

Thrown into existence, an organism can couple-with and signify its environment via vital norms (related to its historicity and precarious operational closure), thereby enacting a meaningful and valenced world. In perception, an organism enactively objectifies (v.) a world through sense-making, it does not represent objects (n.). The organism enacts stability of significance regarding patterned processes as it develops and interacts with them. This enables the organism to take up an objective-stance, i.e. the abstraction of stable thing-like objects from patterned processes that the organism historically couples-with and is capable of signifying. Normative significance relates to the organism’s precarious closure, situated with-and-in a coupled environment of flux. A living processual form (organism) couples with a processual flux penetrating but otherwise outside its operational closure (the environment) and enacts significance (a world) relative to its vital normativity. The organism objectifies (v.) a world, the organism does not represent an environment of objects (n.) with observer-independent properties.

Normativity relates to an organism’s precarious operational closure and its condition of needful freedom per Hans Jonas. The organism has capability to asymmetrically act upon an environment with evolved degrees of freedom, even as the environment is materio-energetically constituting the organism in its totality. Significance relates to the organism’s capability to perpetuate itself in a non equilibrium state— the organism’s perpetuation as an ordered form against entropic dissipation into thermodynamic equilibrium. The self-individuating organism is an autonomous driven-dissipative system that has capabilities of interacting asymmetrically and normatively upon the conditions of its becoming (agency). 

The organism is a pattern imposing on flow, a non-background-independent form that is actively imposing itself both upon, from and with ground. The figure has both freedom from its ground (in that it can asymmetrically act upon its conditions), and dependency on its ground for its own physical generation (like a wave imposing itself on-and-with the ocean, if a wave could be a living form). Specifically, the organism is an operational closure of processes, individuating itself from-and-with a processually patterning materio-energetic flow. What does this mean? The organism is a processual form of precarious operational closure, one that is materially open to the flux of matter/energy but operationally closed upon itself. The process of individuation occurs as the organism lifts its non-background- independent gestalt form from-and-with its material constitution, thus semipermeably organizing a boundary between self and non-self. Individuation enables the organism to asymmetrically interact upon its physical grounds, with which it is structurally coupled and continuous. 

The living form achieves degrees of operational freedom from its ground whilst being always constitutively dependent upon the environmental flow for material-energetic grounding. This is the concept of needful freedom per Hans Jonas. An organism individuates itself as a pattern actively imposing itself upon and with a physical flow, not without a physical flow. Thus an organism is not background-independent from the environment, hence its status as an organism-environment system. The organism holds a gestalt relationship with its environment, thus the organism is a processual form imposing itself from-and-with a processual ground of physical process (in a figure-ground relationship). The life form is apart from ground, but is still a part of this ground. Form emerges from ground, but form is still dependent on ground for the need of a substrate to actively constrain its form with. 

The organism as a life-form holds a relationship of figure-and-ground with the environment. The organism is operationally closed upon itself whilst constitutively dependent upon environmental flux via a semipermeable openness to material-energetic flow. The poles of individuation (closedness) and self organization (openness) hold a dialectic relationship. This is a tensioned dialectic between poles of operational closure and selective, semipermeable material-energetic openness. Closure of form and openness to the flow of material ground yields the organization of a life form as a figure-ground gestalt. The gestalt of life is an asymmetrical form with degrees of liberation from ground and with degrees of dependency on ground for its constitution (a relationship of non-background independence). The thesis-antithesis between the pole of formal closure (a self-patterning figure) and the pole of openness to the flux of materio-energetic substrate (a flowing ground) yields an asymmetrical relationship of needful freedom. An influx is needed to perpetuate the generation of life’s metastable form (its onto-genesis), and life is able to asymmetrically regulate its coupling in ways that abiotic driven-dissipative forms cannot, i.e. via dimensions of normativity, autonomy and agency. Through the dialectic between openness and closedness yielding a precarious condition of driven-dissipative individuation, life is able to signify its conditions. The poles of formal closure (figure) and material flow (the flux of ground) account for the organism’s condition of needful freedom. 

In summary, the concrete dialectic between figure-ground pertains to life as it individuates itself from-and-with an environment. Life is a form lifting itself from-and-with its flowing material ground of physical process. Life can facultatively and asymmetrically couple-with its constitutively co-extensive environment, and thereafter it can signify a world with norms and valence. The processes of individuation, coupling, and normative signification are together concrete and holistic dimensions that are always-already constitutive for an organism’s process of becoming. These abstracted dimensions do not exist as separate processes that aggregate to form a whole. 

Analogous to how a living organism is constitutively continuous with its environment as a holistic organism-environment (O-E) system, an existential being-in-the-world (or rather, a becoming-in-the-world) is constitutively continuous with its world as a holistic being-word (B-W) system. To reformulate the analogy: the flux of a material environment is constitutive for the concretion of an O-E system as a pattern imposed on flow. Similarly, the flux of signification (the flux of a virtue-al world) is existentially constitutive for the concretion of a being-world system as a pattern imposed on flow. A being lifts gestalt forms of coherent meaning from a flowing “blooming, buzzing confusion” per William James, or a flowing “sensory manifold,” per Kant. The being gradually imposes (enacts) coherent forms via sense-making with a sensorimotor flow. Over a developmental trajectory, these forms become relatively stereotyped and sedimented with reiterated experience and embodied, pre-reflective feedback via lived norms and valences. Through movement, a being constructs a world. Leib lifts its form as a figure from the flowing ground of pre-differentiated sensorimotor life. Over developmental and experiential timescales, and via reiterated skilled experience, the gestalt figures of leib become more sensible and practical. The figure of leib rises from-and-with practice in handling the flowing ground of embodied sensorimotor flux, and further differentiates this individuation via reiterated developmental experience. This is the practice of sense-making depicted as constitutive for a developing lived-being as a leib (specifically in leib’s anchoring as a lived-body of sensorimotor schemes). 

An organism individuates itself from-and-with openness to environmental flow and imposes its form as an O-E system. An existential being individuates itself from-and-with perceptual openness to the flowing signification of a world, and imposes its form as a being-world system. An organism-environment (O-E) system’s life-world is pre-reflectively experienced as that of a Heideggerian being-in-a-world (B-W) system. In the same way that the lived body (leib) is existentially precedent to the living body (körper), the B-W system is existentially precedent to the abstraction of an O-E system. Körper is an abstraction of leib, and the mind-body problem is reframed as a body-body problem between the existentially precedent lived body and the abstracted living body. Similarly, the organism-environment system (körper) is a model of the being-world system (leib). The flux of a world (a flow of sense-making) is concrete to the self-organization of a being-world system, just as the flux of an environment (a flow of matter and energy) is concrete to the self-organization of an organism-environment system. The objectification of an external world (independent from the being) is an abstraction pole of the concrete being-word system. Likewise, the objectification of an external (observer-independent) environment is an abstracted pole of the concrete O-E system. Apart from an organism, the environment has no arbited bounds of normative significance in-itself. The abstracted observer-independent environment is not nothingness inasmuch as it remains unsignified without any organism-contingent norms and boundaries for things regarding scales of space, time or embodiment. Normativity becomes abstracted from a being-in-a-world whenever one attempts to naturalize and explain normativity in itself, i.e. decoupled from the lived being. If the being-world system gets equivocated as identical to the O-E system (whereas the latter is an abstraction of the former), normativity can get dispelled as illusory. Normativity is pre-reflectively constitutive for a being-in-a-world as the environment is constitutive for an organism-environment system.