Chapter 6: The Adaptive Hysteresis Effect

Chapter 6: The Adaptive Hysteresis Effect

Introduction: The Adaptive Hysteresis Effect as a Ubiquitous but Underrecognized Form of Memory

The hysteresis effect can be used as a general analogy for the embodiment of memory in an organism and the embedding of memory in a niche. This analogy draws upon the framework of neural reuse as elaborated in After Phrenology by Michael L. Anderson. The analogy of adaptive hysteresis as memory applies flexibly to the coevolutionary relationships between variations of habitus and field. This is to orient how memory becomes operationalized as the reorganization of a plastic and governing embodying substrate following reiterated experiences of behavioral loading. The term “embodying substrates” refers to microscale “substrates” or “functional units” of genetic, epigenetic, neuronal and sociological systems. These substrates genetically assimilate a reorganization in their form. This is an effect induced by the loading of relevant behavioral stimuli from macrocale fields upon microscale substrates, for which the microscale substrate is reactive, plastic, and governing/mediative. Gen-etic assimilation is used in a deconstructed and general sense (not limited to the application of genes) as the assimilation of organizational change by a gen-erative substrate. This is to reuse the concept of genetic assimilation as a modality-flexible activity structure. This analogy can apply flexibly to the many different substrates and fields that embody an organism (also see Chapter 10). 

This conception of general genetic assimilation is supported by Di Paolo et al. (2017) on Piaget’s notion of assimilation: 

Following the standard interpretation, by assimilation we refer to a process by which an environmental aspect (a perturbation, a new object, or a novel situation, etc.) is integrated, coupled, or absorbed into an existing physiological (metabolic, neuromuscular, etc.) or cognitive/behavioral (sensorimotor, perceptual, and reflective) supporting structure in the agent. This is one way of saying that the agent and environmental sides of a sensorimotor scheme are in agreement according to the relevant norm.” (p. 84).

As the organism changes its environment, the environment changes the organism, therefore both leave their remanence within each other’s plastic organization. These traces of remanence yield co-attunement between habitus and field, i.e. the reorganization of the governing substrate’s dispositional state to the history of a field’s behavioral solicitations and constraints. This reorganization instantiates a memory effect of posteriori-redisposedness (a path-laid-in-walking). Following reiterated behavioral loading, the substrates reorganize, and the habitus and field co-evolutionarily re-attune over a history of reiterated interactions upon each other. A modality-flexible (substrate-flexible) and scale-invariant processual structure of memory embodiment will be operationally defined in this chapter as the adaptive hysteresis effect. Hysteresis is a form of memory originally studied in ferromagnetism and later applied to many disciplines including engineering, mathematics, computer science, neuroscience (e.g. Isaak Mayergoyz) and sociology (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu, elaborated in Chapter 9). 

In this chapter, the adaptive hysteresis effect will be illustrated as a common and substrate-flexible process of instantiating memory. Adaptive hysteresis will be applied as an analogy to uncover and relate common patterns of memory processes across different organism substrates and different forms of ecological stimuli (e.g. natural selection for a germ line, epigenetic memory for a somatic line, neural plasticity and reuse and sociocultural assimilation of a plastic habitus or memetic substrate). This will involve bringing together multidisciplinary concepts from neuroscience, genetics, epigenetics, sociocultural evolution and narrative practice. Applications will be made to the relationship between general gen-etic assimilation, niche construction and attunement. Overall, this will work towards operationally defining a form of embodied memory mediated by the hysteresis effect, operationalized as the posteriori-redisposedness of a reactive, plastic, and governing/mediative substrate. Hysteresis as a form of memory works alongside other forms of memory including positive and negative feedback loops. In the field of neuroscience, hysteresis (as a posteriori reorganizational effect) can be mediated by classic concepts including long term potentiation, short term potentiation, axonogenesis, neurogenesis, pruning, etc. In this way, the analogy of adaptive hysteresis subsumes and relates seemingly disparate forms of memory and situates their roles within a common overarching activity structure. The adaptive hysteresis effect is not a “grand unifying theory” of memory, but is instead a very ubiquitous memory process that can interrelate other memory processes. The hysteresis effect spans beyond ferromagnetism (its original field of application) and is applicable to a diverse range of multidisciplinary sciences. This chapter aims to explain how adaptive hysteresis works as a common activity structure for memory. This substrate-flexible analogy is applicable to different forms of embodiment, across different microscales and macroscales of bodily substrates, across different scales of evolutionary transition and relative to different environmental stimuli. 

Living organisms can be modeled as self-organizing complex adaptive systems (cas). Characteristics of complex adaptive systems include coevolution, emergence, self-similarity, scale invariance, memory and evolutionary transitions. It follows that self-similar, fractally-scaling patterns of memory-instantiating processes will self organize and emerge between the evolutionarily transitioned scales of a complex organism. The inter-scale emergence of self-similar memory processes can seem complicated, but the hysteresis analogy helps to organize a conceptual framework. This heuristic illustrates how memory works in situ. It also illustrates how separate micro- macroscale orders within the same organism relate to each other and change each other. This framework relates how different orders of evolutionarily transitioned substrate affect each other both evolutionarily and ontogenetically within the same organism. This serves to debunk myths of bottom-up genetic determinism (e.g. genetic determinism, neural determinism and cultural determinism). This framework also debunks top-down reductionism that equivocates macroscale behaviors as reducibly instantiated within mere microscale orders (e.g. the hard problem of consciousness and neural reductionism). This rest of this chapter will explain and elaborate. 

Hysteresis: Original and Recent Applications

In its original application, the hysteresis effect modelled the memory of a ferromagnetic substrate. First, a magnetic field is passed through a dipole magnetic substance. The dipoles of the iron atoms inside the substance realign to the loaded field after a temporal delay. The realignment is retained in the ferromagnet substrate for a stable duration. The technical term “hysteron” refers to the functional units that organize the substrate undergoing hysteresis. A network of hysterons will reorganize their interactive alignment following a loaded stimulus. These stable, lasting effects are called “remanence” (another technical term from the study of hysteresis). A major class of hysteresis is “rate-independent” hysteresis, which means that the remanence effects organize and persist regardless of time. Systems with rate independent hysteresis have a persistent memory of the past that remains after the transients have died out (Visintin 1994, p. 13). Hysteresis is modeled and graphed as a nonlinear mathematical function. One of the most commonly studied mathematical models is the Preisach model, a nonlinear loop which looks like a horizontally distorted rectangle.

The hysteresis effect is responsible for magnet memory in a hard drive. One of the unsolved projects of circuitry science is to engineer a “memristor,” a fourth type of resistor that has its own analog “embodied” memory and path-dependency from its past stimuli. Engineered chemical substances within the resistor would enable the circuit to have hysteresis-based memory from prior experiences. This would enable a type of analog path-dependency for memory and could mediate training effects. In this chapter’s word usage, the memristor would be said to have a reactive, plastic, and governing/mediative substrate (the engineered chemical substance) that adaptively reorganizes in the wake of reiterated stimuli. This would leave memory in the memristor as a posteriori-redisposedness and would re-attune the memristor’s dynamic state adaptively to contextually imposed demands. This is not the typical rule-entailed memory as a form of “data storage” for mechanistic, digital, binary algorithm-crunching. Adaptive hysteresis is a form of memory involving the reorganization of an embodied governing-substrate’s disposition. Memory conceived this way is analog, unentailed, pragmatic and posteriori. This form of memory has utility contingent to the pragmatic purposes of an organism able to act-with and practice-with such a re-trained disposition. In contrast: memory conceptualized as “data storage” within a machine is rule entailed and deterministically pre-dictive. That is, the outcome of such memory will be algorithmically entailed a priori. 

Other recent applications of hysteresis range from modeling memory in neural systems (Mayergoyz) to sociology (Bourdieu). Hysteresis has broad applications beyond its origins in ferromagnetism. 

Heteronomous Data Storage vs Autonomous Embodied Memory

Computers store memory as data for the information processing needs of their operators, whereas organisms embody memory by reorganizing their dispositions to act. Computer memory is heteronomous to the computer’s intrinsic organizational purposes. This is because computers do not have their own purposes, having been designed and engineered by an other for the other’s operational purposes (hence, heteropoietic and heteronomous). In this way, computer memory is used as a tool for the decoupled tool user, which designed it as a deterministically entailed machine. In contrast, organism memory is embodied as a continuously reorganizing attunement of their poised, plastic dispositions to act. Organisms are poised and disposed to act, directed at the opportunities-to-act within their fields. Embodied memory is concresecent within an autopoietic and autonomous organism’s precarious operational closure. Memory (as the reorganization of poised, plastic dispositions-to-act) is used relative to the organism’s autonomously enacted normativity and historized over reiterated experiences. Evan Thompson elaborates how heteronomous memory as data-storage in a hard-drive differs from autonomous memory processes in organisms with endogenous activity dynamics: 

Autonomy and heteronomy literally mean, respectively, self-governed and other-governed. A heteronomous system is one whose organization is defined by input-output information flow and external mechanisms of control. Traditional computational systems, cognitivist or connectionist, are heteronomous. For instance, a typical connectionist network has an input layer and an output layer; the inputs are initially assigned by the observer outside the system; and output performance is evaluated in relation to an externally imposed task. An autonomous system, however, is defined by its endogenous, self-organizing and self-controlling dynamics, does not have inputs and outputs in the usual sense, and determines the cognitive domain in which it operates. (2010, p. 54).

The conception of memory as “data storage” is a heteronomous conception of memory. Computer memory involves information-processing algorithms. The computer metaphor for memory as heteronomous “data storage, data retrieval, and deterministic functional output” is not a good analogy for how memory is embodied in living, autonomous organisms. The adaptive hysteresis effect is a better analogy to describe autonomous memory instantiation and embodiment in organisms.

An organism differs from a computer in that an organism is autopoietic and autonomous. Further, the organism’s embodied substrates are themselves composed of autonomous and living hysterons, under the same organism closure (i.e., cells themselves are living organizational closures within the higher-order operational closure of a metacellular organism). Likewise, the organism has an autonomous and pragmatic “for-itself” usage of its memory, relative to the organism’s enacted normativity. For organisms, memory has a pragmatic and dispositional utility. Memory involves the lasting reorganization of its behaviorally-governing substrates and poised dispositions-to-act. Memory operationalized as adaptive hysteresis is the retained remanence within the poised dispositional organization of a behaviorally-mediative substrate. Restated, the organism’s embodied substrates are redisposed following experience, and this reorganizational effect is retained for long durations (as in rate-independent hysteresis). Over time, the dispositionally reorganized substrate becomes attuned to reiterated experiential loading from environmental solicitations to act. The organism-environment system becomes adaptively poised to act over reiterated experience in a stable niche, thereby pragmatically attuning the organism-and-environment. 

Memory in an organism is an autonomous and embodied form of memory, utilized relative to the organism’s norms, its histories of coupling with environments and its past situated experiences. This memory has a posteriori temporal orientation of its effects, left in the wake of loaded experience. Memory is remnant, left as a reorganizational effect upon the poised disposition of a governing, embodied substrate. Memory works by reorganizing an organism’s plastic behavioral dispositions in the posteriori direction. Future actions are influenced by the embodied memory of past redipositions. Organism memory is not via priori oriented predictive processing. Autonomous memory attunes poised dispositions-to-act via posteriori re-disposedness, it does not store informational data that enables predictive processing via priori information processing. The cognitivist directionality of memory involves priori sensing- modeling- planning/predicting- and acting. Thus, adaptive hysteresis is not an example of predictive processing, it is an example of posteriori re-disposedness. Walking a path in life is more probaballistic than probabilistic. 

Organism memory is unentailed and open-ended in its unfolding, because memory is utilized pragmatically as the attunement of an organism’s poised dispositional stances to act. The organism’s dispositions-to-act unfold together with the open-ended agency of the organism and the open-endedness of a coevolving environment (coevolving implies that the agent’s actions shape the environment even as the environment shapes the agent’s actions). The environment itself is typically composed of other agents with open-ended dispositions to act. The attunement (not entailment) of an organism’s poised dispositional stance enables (not determines) a behavioral coupling between habitus and field. This coupling thereby interfaces the organism’s behavioral habitus with the environmental opportunities-to-act of an open ended, indeterminate field. 

Applying Terminology from Dynamical Systems Theory

A collective variable describes a high-level or global characteristic of a system that emerges as a coherent and ordered pattern from the interactions of the system’s components. This macrolevel pattern is also known as an order parameter because it reduces the degrees of freedom of the system’s components by organizing them into a coherent and ordered pattern. [...] [P]hase transition occurs at a certain critical [...] “control parameter” for the system. The control parameter does not dictate or prescribe the collective variable or order parameter (the emergent pattern of relative phase). Rather, its changing values lead the system through a variety of possible patterns or states. (Thompson 2010, p. 52, emphasis added). 

A macroscale personal-level behavior can be considered as an order parameter, emerging from the self-organizing dynamics of microscale systems.

Having memory as historically attuned dispositions-to-act, the order parameter allows the organism to unfold action via a “variety of possible states.” The action is not deterministic, but agential and open ended. Ultimately, the agent chooses an action (an order parameter) that couples its various forms of habitus (poised, plastic dispositions to act) with its field (that presently solicits various affordances as possibilities to act).

Autonomous memory processes in organism-environment systems are not priori determined by rule-governed input-output information processing algorithms. System behavior coevolves, bifurcates and transitions open-endedly and non-deterministically over potential paths through state space with autonomy and agency. In contrast to autonomous organism-environment systems, memory in a computer is rule-entailed, heteronomous, and is used by a decoupled tool-user. Heteronomous memory is input into information processing algorithms as “the rule-governed transformation of one such static structure into another.” (Ibid, p. 53). Memory in an organism is dispositional, pragmatic, and autonomously embodied for-itself. Memory’s direction, as embodied adaptive hysteresis, is oriented posteriori. “The delayed return to a previous state is known as hysteresis.” (Ibid, pg. 52). Loaded experiences reorganize the poised stances of pragmatic substrates, leaving remnant effects in the wake of experience with temporal persistence. In contrast, memory in a computer has priori/prospective temporal orientation, having deterministic outcomes resulting from processing information via an algorithmic input-output program. Memory in a computer is a mechanistically written-and-read tool for an organism. Memory of an organism is an embodied reorganization of its pragmatically poised stances in relation to an indeterminate world of opportunities-to-act. 

Memory of a computer is heteronomous to itself. Data-storage can only be used by the external purposes of an autonomous computer user, thus the normativity and utility of memory is decoupled from the used machine. Memory of an organism is autonomous and has a quality of “for-itself.” 

A Substrate-Neutral Analogy for Memory

To illustrate the activity-structure of adaptive hysteresis, first begin with a reactive, sensitive and plastic substrate as a medium. This type of medium can apply to ferromagnets, the subpersonal nervous system (Michael L Anderson’s concept of TALoNS, i.e. Transiently Activated Local Neuronal Subsystems), the genetic germ-line subsystem, the epigenetic somatic-line subsystem, or a socioculturally evolved narrative framework. The latter can be conceived as one’s abstract embodiment of cumulative culture. This relates to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a reproducing and evolving habitus, or a neo-Darwinian concept of a memetically evolving and replicating network for “ways of doing things.” 

Second, load activity/behavioral factors through the sensitively reactive, organizationally plastic, and meditative governing-substrate. Reiterate this loading over time, i.e. continue to couple the analogous forms of habitus and field and load field-solicited behaviors through the habitus-mediating substrate. Such loaded behaviors relate to the magnetic field, Anderson's NRP factors (Neuroscientifically Relevant Psychological Factors), natural selection-relevant phenotypic factors, methylation-relevant epigenetic behavioral factors, or sociocultural behaviors that are relevant to cultural assimilation within one’s habitus. 

Third, the relevant behaviors historize the reactively sensitive and plastic medium/substrate. Reorganizational effects are left following a temporal delay, and are stably retained with rate-independent remanence. During this time delay, the substrate reorganizes through a general gen-etic assimilation effect. General genetic assimilation applies to any generative medium that embodies memory as a lasting change in dispositional states relative to prior experiences (not exclusive to genes), as in Piaget’s aforementioned concept of assimilation. General genetic assimilation occurs as the organization of hysterons (as the abstract functional units of the hysteresis-substrate) assimilate behaviors by taking up a re-disposed organizational stance. Thus, assimilation involves the re-disposition of the embodying substrate following a loaded experience, thereby training or attuning the network structure to reiterated experiences. With further reiteration, the behavioral-substrate system “lays a path in walking,” thereby coevolving and co-developing the organism with its environment over relevant time scales. This serves to couple and attune the organism’s habitus and field over time, and various analogous forms of habitus and field can be illustrated (not limited to the domain of sociology). 

All of these substrates (genetic, epigenetic, neuronal and sociocultural) are interdependently entangled within the concrete organism. Each abstracted substrate embodiment changes on different time scales. Additionally, each substrate changes with specific sensitivity to a particular behavioral modality. Analogous examples include: natural selection on an abstract substrate of gene frequencies, developmental experiences leaving epigenetic methylation, NRPFs loading on TALoNS, or a field that leaves cultural assimilation upon the “substrate” of a sociocultural habitus. 

In general, the hysteresis effect is a helpful analogy to illustrate how organisms (modeled as complex adaptive systems) evolve, develop, and retain memory in their governing substrates. Substrates coevolve with their environment as they historize and attune over time with reiterated behaviors. In turn, organisms historize their reactive and plastic environment via niche construction. This enables a circular positive feedback loop between general habitus and field, thereby self-stabilizing and self-attuning the closure between organism and environment. Organism and environment, habitus and field self-organize via dynamic co-emergence. This process enables holistic organism-environment system coevolution. Adaptive hysteresis is a useful substrate-flexible analogy for memory, adaptation, learning and training within complex adaptive systems. 

Additional consideration is made for the relationship between macro-scale psychological behaviors and the micro-scale neuronal subsystem. This relationship involves a personal-level activity structure loading upon a reactive, plastic and governing/mediative subpersonal-level substrate. Psychological behaviors thereby historize a reorganization of the neuronal substrate. The relationship is not a type of direct and linear causality, but a relationship of dynamic co-emergence (or nonlinear co-ontogeny). This is consequent to the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. This relationship is contrary to perspectives of neural determinism and contrary to neural reductionism. These perspectives equivocate psychology as an effect of nervous systems, making the category mistake of identifying neural tissue as cause and behavior, experience or consciousness as effect. 

Profiling Concrete Examples

The general process of adaptive hysteresis has a modality-flexible (substrate-flexible) activity structure. Hysteresis has analogous applications across the various abstracted bodily substrates of an organism. Each bodily substrate can be abstracted in its local manner and timescale. 

The memory-instantiating process of adaptive hysteresis has a general activity structure of: 

1. Behavioral-loading through a reactive, plastic and governing/mediative bodily substrate (loaded behaviors are solicited by the relevant environment or field)

2. Reorganization of the substrate’s poised and plastic dispositions (defined alternately as posteriori-redisposedness, attunement or a “path laid in walking”)

3. The temporally delayed effect of general genetic assimilation, i.e. the stable remanence of dispositional reorganization following reiterated experiences. For the class of rate-independent hysteresis, remanence is stable over extended time until disturbed again. 

To summarize: adaptive hysteresis has a substrate-flexible activity structure of: 

1. Behavioral Loading from the Environment, 

2. Re-Disposedness of a Substrate 

3. General Genetic Assimilation 

For genetic germ-line systems, this involves natural selection over reproductive time. For epigenetics, this is generally via methylation related to developing acquired traits during an organism’s developmental lifetime, but is not transmitted via reproduction. For nervous systems, this is via general processes of neural plasticity including neural reuse with interactive-differentiation-and-search (IDS) (per Michael L Anderson), long term potentiation, short term potentiation, axonal sprouting, dendritic pruning, and neurogenesis. Additionally, epi-neuronal ways of mediating memory (e.g. changes to volume transmission) are highly relevant but usually overlooked (Anderson). For narrative frameworks, the hysteresis analogy can be separately considered during different interactions between social habitus and field. 

In application to sociology: the reactive-and-plastic habitus culturally-assimilates the behavioral challenges imposed by a field. Note that Bourdieu’s original conception of hysteresis is considered to be maladaptive, i.e. memory takes the form of outdated baggage following gross displacement between field and habitus (see chapter 9).

In application to a neo-Darwinism perspective: sociocultural evolution would be conceived as occurring through the reiterated loading of sociocultural selection-factors. Reiterated selective-loading would reorganize a habitus of selectively-replicating memes, i.e. pragmatic ways-of-doing-things. 

With regards to biology and ethology, memory is needed in order to enable social effects such as local enhancement and observational learning among both animals and humans (Chapter 14). These socio-practic forms of attunement involve a coevolution between the organism and environmental niche, i.e. the habitus and field. The organism-environment system continuously coevolves together under organizational closure. In a circular positive-feedback loop, the organism’s sensitive and plastic habitus is modulated by the niche, even as the plastic niche is transduced and constructed by the organism’s habitus. 

The relationship between the personal-level of behavior and the subpersonal-level of neural substrate is a circular dynamic co-emergence (nonlinear inter-scale co-ontogeny between microscale and macroscale). The relationship is neither genetic determinism, neural determinism, nor cultural determinism. 

General Genetic Assimilation

The process of general genetic assimilation has a substrate-flexible activity structure. General genetic assimilation refers to the temporally delayed plastic reorganization of a behavior-mediating substrate following reiterated solicitations-to-act from the environment. Hysterons are considered abstractly as generative functional-units for a substrate undergoing hysteresis. Genetic assimilation can be applied analogously to different substrate embodiments, including DNA networks (traditional genetic assimilation), neuronal networks (neuroplasticity, neural reuse with IDS i.e. neuronal assimilation), and narrative frameworks (sociocultural appropriation or assimilation).

Genetic assimilation is analogous to neural reuse with interactive-differentiation-and search (IDS). Both processes are part of an analogous eco-evo-devo hysteresis effect mediating genetic assimilation and “neural assimilation.” This analogy also can map onto narrative frameworks. For this, processes of “cultural appropriation” and stable “self-ing,” involve the adaptive hysteresis effect applied to loading narrative practice upon plastic narrative frameworks over the sociocultural development of one’s self. 

Conclusions

To summarize, a potential process to mediate complex system adaptation and memory is the adaptive hysteresis effect. In this processual structure, activity loads upon and historizes a sensitive and plastic governing substrate, leaving rate-independent remanence. Following the temporally-delayed wake of behavioral loading, reorganization effects are assimilated by the substrate’s organization of hysterons (resulting in remnant memory as posteriori re-disposedness, genetic assimilation). Over reiterated experiential loading, the organism’s modulated substrate and the co-transduced niche become attuned.

Here, the word usage of sensitive means: that the loaded activity (e.g. loaded psychological factor/NRPF, loading of natural selection, loading of critical developmental stimuli, loading narrative practice) and the substrate (plastic neuronal subsystems/TALoNS, plastic germ line genetic system, epigenetic methylation system, plastic narrative framework) are co-ontogenetically and co-evolutionarily co-reactive. In this way, natural selection historizes the reactive and plastic body of gene frequencies, psychological behaviors historize the mediative-neuroplastic nervous system, and sociocultural practice historizes plastic narrative frameworks and habitus.

Returning to the initial example from ferromagnetism: the magnetic field is reactive with the iron magnet’s polarity, and the loaded field historizes the orientation of its iron atom’s dipoles. The memory effect is stable over time in rate-independent remanence, and the networked organizations of its hysterons are thereby redisposed. The differences between substrates of iron magnets and the substrates of organisms are many fold. Organisms involve complex adaptive systems, are autopoietic and autonomous, their hysterons themselves have autonomy, and organisms involve multiple entangled autonomous bodies in heterarchy, under one holistic precarious operational closure. Organisms have memory for themselves, unlike tools, machines and computers which are heteronomous and heteropoietic, built and used for others. The memory processes at play on each abstracted level of nested-hierarchy and transitioned-macroscale are relevant to their own behavioral reactivity, operating on differentiated timescales. The organism is an integrated and differentiating concrescence with different parallel processes of memories continuously at play, entangled and interpenetrating over its life. 

The relationship between the abstracted orders of heterarchy and transitioned micro-macroscales is a relationship of nonlinear co-ontogeny and coevolution (dynamic co-emergence). Examples of inter-level relationships include processes of adaptive hysteresis, feedback loops, genetic assimilation, bottom-up governance (mediation), top-down behavioral loading, substrate (habitus) modulation, and transduction of niche (field) construction. This framework refutes notions of general bottom up genetic determinism, top-down mereological reductionism, and equivocation of inter-scale behaviors as directly isomorphic or linearly causal.

A few examples of analogous hysteresis effects or “paths laid in walking” were outlined as magnetic memory, genetic assimilation, epigenetic methylation, neural plasticity, and sociocultural appropriation. A property of complex adaptive systems is their ability to instantiate memory via changes in networked organizations of interactions (edges) and agents (nodes), as they coevolve dynamically over time. Memory as adaptive-hysteresis is a temporally-delayed (posteriori) effect of general genetic assimilation regarding the reorganization of networked hysterons, forming a plastic, reactive substrate. This embodied and embedded memory is historized by loaded environmental conditions, stabilized by positive feedback loops, and pressured by externalities. 

A major difference between ferromagnets and living sensitive-plastic substrates (such as genes, brains and cultures) is that the latter involve complex adaptive systems, while magnets do not. Living memory involves the coevolution of agents (nodes) with interactions (edges) over reiterated activity loading. The holistic complex system’s embodied memory is plastically retained via this hysteresis effect (genetic assimilation, neural plasticity, narrative appropriation). 

Hysteresis as adaptive memory re-attunes and stabilizes an organism-environment system’s interactive coupling. The next time a behavior loads through its reactive substrate, the system’s disposedness will have already been pre-reflectively attuned from past experiences. This can broadly relate to explaining the development of Gibsonian attunement, Merleau Ponty’s praktognosia, Bourdieu’s habitus, or Dreyfus’ skilled coping. Hysteresis is similar but different from Bayesian updating of priors, as predictive processing is a rule-entailed and prospective (pre-dictive) process. Hysteresis is not rule entailed, and is a posteriori process involving a temporal delay as a governing substrate assimilates changes to its dispositional organization of networked hysterons. In short, Bayesian updating-of-priors functions prospectively and pre-dictively as part of a function of a heteronomous tool (a computer program), for a decoupled tool-user. Embodied memory via hysteresis is a process that leaves remanence within the dispositional poised-state of a behaviorally-mediating substrate. The output is not an algorithmic probabilistic prediction for a decoupled tool user that wants to forecast a planned action. Instead, the output is a pragmatically poised, probaballistic behavioral choice upon a perceptually-indeterminate opportunity to act. This, in short, is the difference between the heteronomous memory of a computer used as a tool, and the autonomous memory of an organism with utility under concrescent operational closure. 

The abstracted memory products of adaptive-hysteresis include genetic assimilation and attunement between the organism’s habitus and environmental field. This process of memory as a reiterated attunement thereby couples the organism-environment system together, self-stabilizing as it reiterates back into the system as a positive feedback loop. This net abstracted effect of hand-in-glove attunement between the organism-and-environment accounts for a general way to prevent or address types of anthropic-principle confusions and poverty-of-stimulus type problems. Evolved and developed adaptations, morphologies, behaviors, niches and environments are explainable and relatable in situ, relative to an eco-evo-devo ontogenetic history, not dis-situated nor reduced. 

Finally, interscale relationships are in dynamic co-emergence. This is a circular relationship of nonlinear co-evolution and co-ontogeny and occurs over different time scales relevant to the operationally defined system under abstracted consideration. Subpersonal substrates do not linearly “cause” personal level behaviors, and emergent personal level behaviors do not isomorphically equivocate at the scale of subpersonal systems. All of these systems (genetic, epigenetic, neural, psychological, sociocultural) are together in co-ontogenetic concrescence with each other, under the same organism-environment being’s closure, in situ. 

Under the framework of processual-enaction, the question of “How does the subpersonal level processes produce personal level experience?” is inverted. The reverse question asks, “In what ways can subpersonal levels be abstracted from concrete wholes?” The former question is more appropriately framed for considering machines with parts, designs, heteronomous functions, and operators. The latter question is framed for considering organisms with autopoiesis, autonomy, and holistic concrescence. For an organism differentiating-and-integrating under operational closure, the whole is precedent, and abstracted “parts'' are retrospectively describable and contingent upon heuristic framing. For a machine, parts are precedent, wholes are assembled, and functions are resultant. So-called explanatory gaps and hard problems of consciousness are thus artefactual from inverting the directionality of concrescence-to-abstraction into the directionality of parts-to-whole. This would be the misapplication of reductive mereology on an organism with holistic concrescence. This is to confuse the parts-into-whole relationship and directionality of assembling heteronomous machines, versus the whole-into-abstractions directionality for considering autopoietic-autonomous organisms.