Chapter 5: A Foray into Profiling Animal Worlds

Chapter 5: A Foray into Profiling Animal Worlds

One way to address the question of “what is it like to be an other mind?” is to profile the biophysical dimensions of perception and sensorimotor contingencies. This chapter suggests a possible heuristic by relating biophysics and ethology (the study of animal behavior). This heuristic provides an organized way to qualify questions of animal perception, sensorimotor contingencies and phenomenology. First, perception under the frameworks of ecological psychology and enaction is briefly considered in order to lay out assumptions and intended word usage. 

Compatibilism between Affordances and Sensorimotor Contingencies

The concept of affordance from ecological psychology has an analogy with the concept of sensorimotor contingencies developed in the enactive approach of Di Paolo et al (2017). These authors define four classes of sensorimotor contingency: sensorimotor environment (closest to the original notion of affordance from ecological psychology), sensorimotor habit, sensorimotor coordination and sensorimotor scheme. 

Affordance is defined as an opportunity for action between an organism and its environment. Within the framework of sensorimotor contingencies developed by Di Paolo et al (2017), an affordance space is analogous with the sensorimotor environment. The sensorimotor environment is the abstracted set of relationships between a body and the environment, considered apart from an organism’s internal dynamics and normative framework. 

The Gibsonian usage of affordance is analogous to the sensorimotor environment. For this scale of description, an embodied organism is said to directly perceive invariant patterns in the environment as opportunities for action. An enactive appropriation of affordances does not contradict direct perception, rather it elaborates upon direct perception by relating an organism’s internal activity, sensorimotor coordination and norms. 

Expanded categories of sensorimotor contingencies include the sensorimotor habit, sensorimotor coordination, and sensorimotor schemes. Whereas a sensorimotor environment only interrelates body and environment, the sensorimotor habit interrelates environment, body and internal activity. Sensorimotor coordination interrelates body, environment, internal activity and contextual tasks. A sensorimotor scheme further interrelates body, environment, internal activity, contextual tasks and normative frameworks (ibid.). 

The specific word usage of affordance in this chapter deviates from its original formulation under ecological psychology. Affordances are qualified within the enactive framework of sensorimotor contingencies as defined by Di Paolo et al. (2017), most directly analogous to the notion of the sensorimotor environment.  Whereas ecological psychology traditionally associates affordance with relationships between a body and an environment apart from the internal activity of the organism, the off label-usage of affordance under the enactive approach alludes to the organism’s internal activity, contextual task, and normative framework. In this chapter, an off-label usage of affordance is meant to be synonymous with Di Paolo’s concept of sensorimotor environment, abstracted from other dimensions of internal activity, contextual task and normativity. 

Profiling Sensorimotor Environments  

Sensorimotor environments can be profiled under scientific studies of perception, biophysics, ecological psychology and ethology. Various dimensions of sensorimotor environments can be profiled on a spectrum. As a heuristic tool, this spectrum can have different abstracted dimensions and degrees flexible to the perspectives of specific scientific and philosophical domains. Suggestions include profiling the dimensions and degrees of: 

1. Types of biophysical sensory modalities, 2. Sensorimotor dimensions (i.e. the elaborations that can be differentiated within a given modality), 3. Sensorimotor bandwidth, 4. Spatiotemporal granularity, 5. The integration vs differentiation of a sensorimotor modality 6. The scale or order of evolutionary transition 

As concrete wholes, organisms are qualitatively different relative to variance in: a) sensorimotor embodiment, b) niche embeddedness, c) eco-evo-devo history and experientially learned history and d) the possible space of affordances as opportunities-for-action. Special implications are made for pathologies, atypical development and atypical experiential encounters like illusions. 

This spectrum is used as a heuristic tool to profile an organism’s sensorimotor environment. These six topics will be elaborated and interrelated in turn. 

As a prior disclaimer, while perceptual phenomena may be abstracted and heuristically profiled, sensorimotor environments are concrete, holistic organizations. This framework uses abstraction for heuristic purposes, but does not reify these reduced dimensional categories as antecedent to perceptual phenomena. Different categories can be substituted in this heuristic depending on the specific perspectives of a particular field of inquiry. The holistic activity structure of perception is emphasized as an integrated-and-differentiating synopsis, not as a synthesis of abstracted partes extra partes.

1. Type of biophysical modality. Biophysical modalities can include electromagnetism, heat, chemoreceptors, mechanoreception, light, airwave displacement, etc. This is heavily contingent upon the creature's morphology, its sensorimotor habitus and field, its sensorimotor embodiment and sensitivity. Crucially, this point is contingent on the organism’s embedded physical medium (e.g. air, water, subterranean dirt) and the spatial and temporal scales of its existence (e.g. Brownian motion is important for single celled organisms, electrostatic forces are dominant for the world of insects, and macroscale forces like gravity become dominant for eumetazoa animals). 

Embodiment is holistically coupled with physical context, i.e. niche, ecology and environmental embeddedness. Different sensorimotor contingencies are possible with the same biophysical energy pattern, but with differing organs and environmental medium. For example: varied couplings between mechanoreceptors and different physical mediums of a noche can enable the different sensorimotor contingencies in different animals. This includes audition via ears engaged in the medium of air, spatial echolocation via the specialized dorsal bursae organs of whales and dolphins in water, spatial echolocation via the ears of bats in the air, sensation of the spatial movement of ocean currents via the lateral-line organs of fish in water, or ground vibration affording spatial location via an arthropod’s specialized sensory hair organs (trichobothria). In this example considering just the single sensory organ of mechanoreceptors, the same modality of mechanical displacement upon microscopic sensory hair cells is shown to enable dramatically varied forms of sensorimotor contingency and embodiment. Mechanoreception can be patterned in various ways in various organisms, manifesting as distinct modalities of sensorimotor contingency. The world is inhabited via mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, and takes shape relative to the specific sensorimotor embodiments of an animal and the specific niche and medium that this animal is structurally coupled-with and attuned-to. 

2. Sensorimotor Dimensionality: given a single sensorimotor modality, sensorimotor dimensionality refers to the differentiated elaborations that can be abstracted within that modality. For example: light can have increasing dimensional profiles of color, ranging from light-dark sensitivity in organisms (having photosensitive eyespots), to dichromats, to trichromats, to tetrachromats of birds with ultraviolet (UV) dimensionality. Another example includes the dimensionalities of spatial orientation, from linear approach-avoidance chemotaxis, to three dimensional spatial orientation of jellyfish, to 3D plus angular orientation of animals with simple vestibular systems, to spatial and angular velocity and acceleration dimensions enabled by the differentiated utricle, saccule, and semicircular canals.

3. Sensorimotor bandwidth: this describes the range of sensitivity within a given sensorimotor modality. For example: does electromagnetism range from infrared (IR) to ultraviolet (UV), or a more narrow bandwidth? Does audition range from ultrasonic (mice) to infrasonic (elephants)? Through the use of technology, people make use of expanded electromagnetic bandwidths ranging from ultra-short gamma rays to ultra-long radio waves. The single modality of electromagnetic waves takes on different patterns of sensorimotor contingency when involving different bandwidths matched with different technologies and practices. In this way, the expanded bandwidth of electromagnetic waves is not limited to a visuospatial sensorimotor contingency. For example, bandwidths of electromagnetism coupled with technology can be utilized as expanded visuospatial sensorimotor contingency (visual fields including lightwaves, ultraviolet imaging, thermal imaging), sound and communication (radio waves), or thermal/tactile heat (infrared waves, microwaves). Restated: the enactment of sensorimotor contingencies and phenomenal fields is co-relative to the coupling between sensorimotor embodiment and niche, the coupling between habitus and field, the history and attunement between the organism embodiment and environment, and opportunities for action therein. Perception of affordances are opportunities for action between an organism-environment.

Thus, perception is not absolute in nature nor deterministic, but relative and correlative. The environment is not a stand-alone, organism-independent context that the organism is “parachuted” into (per Varela). The organism’s world is a field that the organism inhabits (per Maurice Merleau Ponty) and enacts via mastery of embodiment, motor intentionality, body schemas, sensorimotor contingencies and normativity. 

4. Spatiotemporal granularity: this refers to the acuity or resolution of a sensorimotor modality.  Several examples are provided to illustrate the consequences of spatial granularity and temporal granularity. 

Spatial resolution: visual examples include the high acuity visuospatial map of an eagle’s binocular camera-eye, to the low granularity of a planarian eyespot. A tactile example includes the differentiated spatial tactile map enabled by a star-nosed mole’s fleshy nose moving through a dark subterranean environment. An auditory example includes the bat's airwave-based echolocation spatial map. Olfactory spatial maps are enabled by the high surface area of a bloodhound’s specialized vomeronasal organ. Mice and marine birds (Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way) similarly can afford olfactory based spatial maps due to the spatiotemporal patterns of lingering chemical diffusion trails. Electrical based spatial maps are afforded by rays and the platypus. A platypus uses its wide bills to find crustaceans and other prey in the dark riverbed muck, and rays use electroreceptive organs in a similar niche to locate and suck-up prey from the ocean floor. All these examples are mediated by granularity of spatial resolution in different dimensions, degrees, ecological context, behavioral context and specific pattern of sensorimotor contingency. Through mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, an organism inhabits a world. This includes mastery of sensorimotor contingencies with different spatial and temporal granularities. 

Temporal resolution examples include high flicker-fusion rates of bee-eater birds and hummingbirds. Low temporal resolutions apply to plant sensori-metabolic/growth behaviors (e.g. heliotropism, insecticide excretion, the sensitive growth direction of roots). 

An important general example is the temporal resolution of retrospection, prospection memory systems and embodiment. This is formative for the temporal granularity and scale of an organism’s experience. When a fly is cooled, its metabolism slows and its reaction times slow; the speed, granularity and “frame rate” of metabolic and sensorimotor processes influences the temporal granularity of lived experience. Through processes of embodiment and movement, an organism inhabits and temporalizes a world; an organism does not “parachute” into an organism-independent stream of time. The experience of time is relative to how an organism’s embodiment inhabits time and space; time is relative and not absolute. 

Another example of temporal granularity is the temporal bandwidth (frequency, kHz) enabling sonic echo/sonar waves for dolphins and whales. High frequency/short wavelength sonar waves enable spatial mapping and affordance of objects like fish. Slow frequency/long wavelength sonic waves enable affordances of social communication, and whales can send these songs to pods many miles across the ocean. 

Overall, temporal granularity affects the organization of sensorimotor environments in various ways. At a low temporal density, affordance is thinly temporalized, manifesting and penetrating over a longer time scale. Sensorimotor contingencies are smeared across time and space if the organism inhabits a low spatiotemporal granularity. At high temporal density, affordance is densely temporalized, manifesting on a rapid/short time scale. The organism inhabits a high spatiotemporal granularity that is relatively dense (or over-stimulating) in physical patterns. Temporal granularity can affect the timescale that signals are afforded on. Further, as in dolphin sonar, temporality can affect the spatial dimensions and distance that physical patterns can travel and penetrate. Additionally, temporal granularity can contribute to the organization of directional poles of memory (retrospection and prospection). 

Through mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, an organism inhabits a world. Sensorimotor environments organize as integrated and concrete wholes, not from aggregations of sense data nor the representation of physical information. Dimensions and facets are then abstractions from the already-concrete as it undergoes differentiation under integrated operational closure and organizational continuity. This holistic synopsis organizes an integrated and holistic totality, from which abstractions can be heuristically derived. These heuristic abstractions may include: spatial dimensions, temporal dimensions, granularity, bandwidth, coherence of integration, type of biophysical modality, ecological medium, and the physical size of scale.

*Note that the word usage of “mapping” in this section is intended as nonrepresentational. “Mapping” (v.) refers to the organism’s spatio-temporalizing enactment of its phenomenal field. Space is inhabited (v.) per Maurice Merleau Ponty, not represented as a map (n.).

5. The integration or differentiation of a sensorimotory modality; or alternatively: the degree of multi- sensory binding vs segregation within a sensorimotor modality

The following excerpt from the biologist Herbert Spencer helps to motivate this overall heuristic framework, and particularly this present point.

In the progress from an eye that appreciates only the difference between light and darkness, to one which appreciates degrees of difference between them, and afterwards to one which appreciates differences of colour and degrees of colour—in the progress from the power of distinguishing a few strongly contrasted smells or tastes, to the power of distinguishing an infinite variety of slightly contrasted smells or tastes […] in all those cases which present merely a greater ability to discriminate between varieties of the same simple phenomenon; there is increase in the speciality of the correspondence without increase in its complexity. […] But where the stimulus responded to consists, not of a single sensation but of several; or where the response is not one action but a group of actions; the increase in speciality of correspondence results from an increase in its complexity.” (Spencer, 1855, pp. 445-446). 

This passage from Spencer was used by Michael L. Anderson in his book After Phrenology to emphasize the relationship between an organism’s degree of integration within operational closure, and the degree of its evolved/developed differentiation. Integration can act as an enabling constraint to stabilize evolutionary/developmental differentiation within an organism-environment (O-E) system’s closure (2014).

Building on Anderson’s point, this section’s heuristic for profiling animal behaviors on a spectrum can elaborate how an organism both integrates and differentiates within its operational closure. 

Multisensory coherence refers to the integration of multiple sensorimotor modalities, i.e. sensorimotor binding. Under the present framework’s perspective, “binding” is not a process of aggregating independent sense experiences (refer to this chapter’s prior disclaimer). Instead, “binding” is the process of an integrated whole incorporating multiple sensorimotor contingencies within a coherent habit. The integrated whole differentiates and parts may be heuristically abstracted, however the abstracted parts did not precede the whole. Differentiated sensorimotor modalities can be abstracted, however the form of a multi-sensorimotor contingency self-organizes holistically. The multi-sensorimotor contingency is not organized by “binding” independent sensory modalities; the apparent independence of sensory modalities is an abstraction. The gestalt form of a holistic behavior self-organizes and “parts” are abstractions; aggregate sensory parts do not “bind” together to form a sensorimotor whole. Further, all sensorimotor contingencies are already multi-sensorimotor. Senses do not act apart from each other in independent isolation, then later come together via “binding.” Senses are always-already interdependent, enclosed within the operational closure of a whole organism’s sensorimotor embodiment. These points recapitulate the thesis of Maurice Merleau Ponty’s book, The Structure of Behavior.

Binding (understood as multisensory integration) is consequential from a) the degree of cohesive integration under holistic sensorimotor operational closure and b) the quantity of sensorimotor modalities being integrated. The issue of multi-sensory integration addresses the questions of “how many types of differentiated sensory modalities are being integrated?” and “what is the extent of integration and cohesive coordination under sensorimotor operational closure?” I.e. “What and how many senses self-organize together to coordinate a specified behavior, and how are they cohesively interdependent under sensorimotor operational closure?” In the words of  Michael L Anderson: "Organisms evolve and develop by becoming at one and the same time more differentiated and more integrated or coordinated in both structure and behavior.” (Michael Anderson, After Phenology p. 290). 

Note that sensory segregation (differentiation) is the opposing dialectical pole to that of sensory binding (integration). Both dialectical poles of sensory integration and segregation can be adaptive for sensorimotor contingencies in different ways. Sometimes multiple types of sensorimotor modalities need to be cohesive together, for example a primate needs to integrate rapid visuo-spatial field movement with vestibular and proprioceptive modalities. These primates need to skillfully move-through and navigate three dimensional space in an arboreal fine-branch niche as they jump through the treetops. Sometimes biophysical information needs to be segregated, as mediated by the multiple differentiated visual areas in primate cortex, enabling highly specialized and differentiated visual phenomenal fields in its arboreal fine-branch niche. These visually specialized primates can enact a discrimination of the color of ripe, red fruits against a green background of foliage. Another example of visual segregation for fine-branch niche primates relates to discriminating the slow, small and subtle movements of their camouflaged insect prey against the foliage background. The primate simultaneously enacts, discriminates, develops and masters a phenomenal field as its sensorimotor habits unfold within its coextensive niche. Discrimination between red vs green colors is governed/mediated by evolutionarily novel bodily differentiations, including CNS pathways, thalamic nuclei, and cortical areas. Perception and sensorimotor behaviors are embodied, and mediative bodily substrates include specialized neurological substrates. 

Thus, sensorimotor segregation can enable the discrimination of significant patterns. Sensorimotor segregation does not necessarily imply the decoherence of multi-sensorimotor modalities. 

A further example from dogs is the sensory segregation enabled by the vomeronasal organ (also known as the Jacobson’s organ). Two fluid filled sacs at the bottom of its nasal cavity enable the dog to taste and smell simultaneously with distinct olfactory and gustatory patterns of sensorimotor contingency. 

This differentiation in dogs is enabled by a bodily (embodied) peripheral nervous system differentiation, whereas the primate visual area example is a bodily (embodied) central nervous system differentiation (thalamo-cortical and cortico-cortical morphologically differentiated governing/mediative pathways). Both examples of specialization are governed through differentiation in morphological embodiment, as the PNS and CNS are still bodily. In agreement with the philosophical perspectives of radical embodied cognition and radical enactive cognition (REC), this framework understands the nervous system to have a constraining (governing) role in action (governing references cybernetics, derived from the Greek root kubernēsis, meaning to govern). Constraints may enable  and/or restrict action. Nervous systems provide highly elaborated sensorimotor constraints that are not possible without its highly differentiated and interconnected morphology and physiology (thus governing, constraining, enabling and restricting a highly evolved space of possible behaviors and agentiality). This perspective is against the cognitivist view of nervous tissue, giving it the power to perform “cognitive operations upon representations” and “information processing.” In the perspective of radical embodied cognition, no “magic boundary” is drawn around nervous tissue to imbue it with the special dualist power of the res cogitans. The nervous tissue is no less bodily, no less embodied and no more mental than the rest of the body. Nervous systems constrain, govern and enable a transition of sensorimotor life, but it does not have a magic power of thinking or cognition en soi. The whole organism thinks and experiences, and nervous tissue is abstracted as a specialized differentiation of its embodiment. 

Segregation enables differentiation (i.e. signification, sense-making, enactive objectification, enactive polarization of figure-from-ground and signal-from-noise) of biophysical patterns otherwise left undifferentiated, unsignified. Binding enables integration, adaptive in its own way. 

Many situations would be interesting to profile under this heuristic framework. For example, heat (infrared radiation) is electromagnetic energy. The same range of electromagnetic energy contributes distinctly to multiple types of sensorimotor contingencies. This includes both thermal touch on skin and the high resolution visuospatial mapping of pit vipers (or night vision goggles). Infrared radiation is also used in concert with the viper's chemoreceptors (olfactory spatiotemporal mapping via its tongue), together with its vestibular orientation and proprioceptive sense. Sensory binding is definable as integration within sensorimotor operational closure, and sensory segregation enables differentiation.

UV radiation is electromagnetic energy, but it can contribute distinctly to various sensorimotor contingencies and experiences. One example is its inclusion in the visual color spectrums of birds, mediating an aesthetic experience. Birds can see UV patterns of color on each others’ plumage. This further contributes to sexual selection of plumage, amongst other morphological and behavioral patterns (Richard O. Prum). UV light can be afforded by bees looking for flowers with signs of readiness for pollination, or to arctic reindeer seeing the UV colors reflected off an otherwise camouflaged white Arctic wolf against the white snow. 

Overall, this heuristic is helpful to profile concrete, real world examples of unique animal affordances, sensorimotor contingencies, phenomenal fields and the lived experience of worlds (ümwelts). These profiles are all informed by empirical science and examples from the domains of ethology and biophysics. 

6. The scale of evolutionary transition at play: This dimension helps to profile the sensorimotor contingencies present on the orders of unicellular, multicellular, eumetazoan, social/intersubjective, and linguistic scales of organism closure. For example, behaviors can be profiled on the scale of sensorimetabolic closure (e.g. plants, fungi, slime molds, unicellulars), sensorimotor closure, inter-subjective closure and linguistic closure. This point can help differentiate between different types of sensorimotor contingencies across evolutionarily and developmentally transitioned organisms. Additionaly, this point emphasizes a continuity of mind, life, evolution and development across the spectrum of organisms, albeit a unique type of continuity.

The continuity of life and mind is emphasized, while simultaneously avoiding the fallacy of equivocating behavioral structures that emerge distinctly between inter-scale orders of evolutionary transition. This fallacy of equivocating the emergence of inter-scale behavioral structures should be avoided both within an organism’s micro- macro-scales, and across evolutionarily transitioned species. For example, a unicellular bacteria’s behavior of motor intentionality (chemotaxis) is distinct from a motor intentionality that emerges on a multicellular scale, despite the self-similarity or scale-invariance of both self-organizing behaviors. While scale invariant in superficial appearance, these behaviors are evolutionarily transitioned relative to each other, and thus are not to be equivocated as identical behaviors (in neither experience nor detail of sensorimotor contingency). The scale-invariant behaviors organizing on transitioned micro-macro scales of organism closure are relatable via analogy, not via identity (this would be a fallacy of equivocation).

The relationship between abstracted orders of microscale-macroscale closures (within and across organisms), is not directly linear nor isomorphically equivalent. The continuity is nonlinearly co-ontogenic and coevolutionary (i.e. dependent co-arising, or dynamic co-emergence). For example, the behaviors of the personal level do not equate nor reduce to the subpersonal level, and the behaviors of eumetazoa do not isomorphically equate with behaviors of unicellulars (again, isomorphism and scale invariance yield a relation of analogy, not identity). This “nonlinear co-ontogeny” is inter-penetrating, entangled, and involves holistically concrescent bottom-up and top-down directionality; no level or scale is privileged. These processes operate on different rates and time scales relative to each other, relevant to the abstracted/anchored macroscale substrate under question. Nonlinear co-ontogeny or nonlinear coevolution are considered synonymous with dependent co-arising and with Evan Thompson’s concept of dynamic co-emergence. “Dynamic co-emergence means that a whole not only arises from its parts, but the parts also arise from the whole. Part and whole co-emerge and mutually specify each other.” (2010, p. 49).

Due to the co-ontogenic and coevolutionary feedback between these organizational scales (under interdependent operational closure), the relationship and interactions between micro-macroscale organizations is best modeled with the tools of complexity science. Coevolution within complex adaptive systems (cas), modelled as networks, means that the connected nodes change the state of the system’s interactions/edges, and the state of the edges changes the state of the interconnected nodes. Micro- and macroscales of an organism are organized in a concrescent, interpenetrating, interdependent and interacting heterarchy. A model of coevolution between orders of microscales and macroscales can be graphed via a layered network model (Thurner, Hamel, Klimek 2018). When modeled as dynamic complex adaptive systems, organism networks are not only layered, but nested in hierarchy. In this way, an organism’s coevolving micro-macroscales involve macroscale nodes that are not only layered upon microscales, but each macroscale node itself is constitutively continuous with the microscale networks that layer underneath. Each nested, layered order integrates and coevolves with macro- or micro- transitioned scales via different processes and timescales of constraint and interaction. An example process involves top-down macroscale behaviors loading-upon reactive, plastic and governing microscales. Another example is general bottom-up genetic assimilation mediating system memory (in temporal delay following reiterated behavioral loading). The main point is that organism systems can be modelled as complex adaptive systems with transitioned, differentiated, and integrated microscales and macroscales, and these organizational orders may be layered, nested, and coevolutionary.

Between transitioned macroscales, examples of coevolution include downward causality, constraint of microscales from macroscale states, behavioral-loading (macroscale behaviors or loading-upon and constraining microscale substrates), governance, general genetic assimilation (the reorganization of microscales from past incidents of macroscale constraints, thereby “assimilating” history via redisposing microscale reorganization), plasticity of microscale substrates to past incidents of constraint/loading, enablement of new macroscale states via reiterated reorganization of microscales (a path laid in walking), and plasticity via processes of memory embodiment (mediated by feedback loops and adaptive hysteresis effects). 

The top-down relationship of macroscale “behavioral loading” upon microscales is enabled by the governing constraints of microscale substrates. A bottom-up relationship is the morphological development of macroscale organizations. Another bottom-up relationship is the microscale organizations’ governance/mediation of loaded macroscale behaviors. Related to this is the relationship of bottom up plasticity and reuse. 

The microscale substrate has sensitivity and plasticity of form. Thus, microscale substrates reorganize their formal disposition in the wake of behavioral loading, for which the substrate has sensitivity, and for which the substrate is capable of behaviorally-loading and governing. This crucial concept of post hoc re-organization (posteriori re-disposedness) is the adaptive basis for memory embodiment and attunement in the wake of reiterated behavioral loading. A specific example is the adaptive hysteresis effect, i.e. reorganization of substrate form in temporal delay following reiterated behavioral loading. The reorganization of substrate hysterons (abstract functional units of a hysteresis medium) remains in remanence. Hysteresis is a well studied substrate-flexible form of mediating memory, with applications to ferromagnets loading magnetic fields, magnetic substrates such as computer hard drives, and is even applicable to autonomous neuronal substrates. Hysteresis has a characteristic of rate independence, meaning that effects remain for long durations over time, hence “independent to rate.” (Mayergoyz, 2019).

An important example of dynamic co-emergence, i.e. “interscale nonlinear co-ontogeny and coevolution,” includes the relationship between neuroscientifically-relevant psychological  behaviors and neuronal subsystems. This relationship is outlined by Michael L. Anderson’s concept of neural reuse and IDS (interactive differentiation-and-search) in his book After Phrenology (2014). Another important and analogously similar activity structure is the relationship between evolutionary-relevant phenotypic behaviors and genetic subsystems, related to the topics of genetic assimilation and the Baldwin effect (Kaas, 2009). 

To recap point 6:

Inter-scale micro-macroscale continuity is inter-penetrating, entangling, circularly bottom-up and top-down, and under obligate operational closure. To propose mereological reduction between these continuous-but-transitioned macroscales is a fallacy of reductive physicalism. Additionally, the fallacy of inter-scale equivocation applies to proposing isomorphic equivalence between behaviors emerging upon transitioned macroscale orders. The relationship is not identity, but analogy. An example of this fallacy would be to claim behavioral/experiential equivalence between unicellular organisms and eumetazoan animals. The formal similarity of these organisms’ behavioral structures (e.g. intentionality and ur-intentionality) is more due to analogy via scale-invariance and self-similarity, not due to isomorphic equivalence in qualitative identity. Scale invariance is a characteristic of self organizing complex systems, e.g. fractal symmetry of patterns. Scale invariance leads to formal similarity and analogy, but not formal equivalence (i.e. strict isomorphism). The apparent isomorphisms between cell behavior/intentionality and animal behavior/intentionality is best used as analogy, not as equivalence. 

As a useful heuristic tool, the authors of Linguistic Bodies suggest that one can perspectivally “anchor” on an abstracted order or scale of metabolic, sensorimotor, intersubjective or linguistic operational closure. The crucial disclaimer is that prior to heuristic and perspectival abstraction, the autonomous bodies are in concrete, holistic interdependency with each other as a totality and unity (2018). 

Conclusions and next steps:

The heuristic outlined in this chapter serves to profile sensorimotor environments on a dispositional spectrum. This heuristic enables a consistent way to explicate an organism’s perceptual world relative to its specific embodiment (metabolic, sensorimotor, etc), affordances, niche, habitus and field. Each variation of an animal sensorimotor environment yields a different dispositional profile in a vast spectrum of possible animal worlds. This heuristic provides a way to consistently profile and empirically support a description of an animal’s sensorimotor environment. This is a foray into an other-world of an animal in the spirit of Jakob von Uexküll. A disclaimer: prior to abstraction, each concrete example is only experientially coherent as holistically enacted by an organism with-and-in a situated environment (in situ). Organism worlds are not assembled from aggregated dimensions as partes extra partes, and dimensions should not be reified as such. 

Further topics of investigation include application to illusions and indeterminacy (to define these terms within an enactive and non-representational framework) and application to cases of neuropsychology. 

Perceptual indeterminacy and illusions are consequent to the correlative nature of perceptual significance. Perception involves co-relation between an organism’s vital norms, opportunities for action between an organism-environment (affordances) and the O-E system’s co-attunement (e.g. niche construction). Experiential blindness is an example consequence of a species-atypical poverty of developmental stimulation between an organism and its environment (e.g. the enucleated kitten studies from neuropsychology). This relates to neuro-divergent phenomenology and to the “phenomenology of dyscontrol” (Robert Karol, 2003).

Another potential topic of investigation is to compare a plant’s mode of being as perspectivally anchorable in a sensori-metabolic order of operational closure, comparable and contrastable to a eumetazoan animal’s field as anchorable in sensorimotor operational closure. This chapter’s heuristic can be helpful to profile various plant activities, e.g. behaviors discussed in the “root brain hypothesis,” behaviors of insectivorous plants, heliotropism, or differentiated growth relative to sonic airwaves (correlating sensorimetabolic contingencies with ecological conditions conducive to growth).

The other-worlds of animals can be operationally defined, compared and contrasted on different scales of operational closure and different orders of evolutionary transitioned macroscale. This application could develop conceptions of sensorimetabolic contingencies (behaviors of unicellulars, plants and fungi), sensorimotor contingencies (eumetazoan animals), intersubjective contingencies (social animals) and sociocultural and linguistic contingencies. The latter could involve animals with some continuity of cumulative culture, animals with referential communication, vocal learners, auditory learners, proto-language (e.g. chickadee syntax, chimpanzee gestural communication) and human language.