Chapter 7: Equivocation Fallacies

Chapter 7: Equivocation Fallacies

This chapter is a continuation of Chapter 6. The previous chapter outlined the process of adaptive hysteresis as substrate-flexible memory instantiation in complex adaptive systems. Chapter 6 also related how nervous systems and psychological behaviors may or may-not relate to each other. Chapter 7 will further elaborate how different scales of abstraction might not relate to each other. This chapter will propose two major fallacies that may occur when attempting to relate differentiated micro- and macro- scales (both within and between organisms). 

Scale invariance, as in fractal scaling or self-similarity, is a characteristic of self organizing complex systems. Scale invariant patterns scale-up fractally between evolutionarily-transitioned macroscales and their behavioral fields. This self-similar scaling effect involves separate emergence upon the relevant macroscale substrate, i.e. via inter-level emergence and inter-level scale invariance. Self similarity and separate emergence upon individuated micro- or macro- scales is consequent to the self-organizing characteristic of complex systems. Note that this inter-level scaling between evolutionary transitioned micro-macroscale orders (e.g. between a unicellular’s activity structures and eumetazoan behavioral structures) is a relationship of analogy in structure, and not one of direct identity nor isomorphism. 

Applying linear and narratively-causal thinking to complex adaptive systems (particularly self organizing systems with self similarity, scale invariance, multiple superimposed network layers, phase transitions, emergence, and transitioned microscales and macroscales) may result in two related fallacies:

1.  The inter-level scale-invariance equivocation fallacy

This fallacy involves equivocating inter-level scale invariant activity structures as identical or directly isomorphic.

2.  The inter-level emergence equivocation fallacy

This fallacy equivocates super-ordinally emergent patterns (on an abstracted macroscale) as caused by sub-ordinally emergent patterns (on an abstracted microscale). An example is to claim that psychological behaviors are caused by neurons. Instead, psychological patterns and neuronal patterns of activity emerge in their own right on their own abstracted scales within the same organism. These abstracted scales do not interact via direct causality nor direct isomorphism, but instead via interlevel constraint and enablement. 

The first fallacy involves falsely identifying inter-scale self similar activity structures as identical or isomorphic. Instead, each micro- and macroscale of abstraction has separate ontogeny on a subordinal microscale or a superordinal macroscale. Microscale activity structures (e.g. nervous system behavior, or unicellular organism behavior) and macroscale activity structures (e.g. psychological behaviors, or multicellular organism behavior) have different ontogenesis within different scales of abstraction. At first glance, these interscale activity structures convergently appear self-similar due to scale invariance or fractal scaling. However, they do not have intrascale isomorphic elaborations of nodes, edges, evolved system behaviors and evolved system competencies.

An example of the first type of fallacy is the inflationary equivocation of unicellular behavior and metazoan behavior. This would be to inflate unicellular ur-intentionality as directly isomorphic to the intentional-activity structures of evolutionarily transitioned multicellular organisms. Without making claims on existential phenomenology of each organism: the intentionality (directedness) for activity structures of the unicellular and multicellular organisms have gross self similarity due to scale invariance. However, they are not equivalently isomorphic. Each organism differs in evolutionary transition and differs in the qualitative dimensionalities of their intentionality. The difference may not be strictly one of kind (since they have convergently analogous self-similarity of activity structure), but the difference is wide with regards to the degree, dimensionality, and elaboration of intentionality.

The second fallacy is the closely related “inter-level emergence equivocation fallacy.” This fallacy is to erroneously assume that micro-scale abstractions cause the behaviors of macro-scale abstractions. In actuality, behavioral patterns emerge separately on different abstracted micro- and macroscale orders within a particular system, and relate to each other via inter-level constraint. 

An example of the second type of fallacy is seen in deflationary accounts of illusionism or eliminativism regarding personal level behaviors. These philosophies assume that the subpersonal micro level causes the behaviors of the macroscale. What follows from this fallacy is that the subjective experiences attributed to macro-scale phenomena are illusory since they can be reductively explained by micro-level phenomena.  For example, this is to assert that sociocultural intentionality and agency are mere illusions, and can be explained-away to apparently similar subpersonal level activity structures with an analogous “intentionality” that can “process information” and “infer” (i.e. via a fallacious application of the intentional stance). Instead, personal level behaviors can be understood to exist on a personal-level behavioral field, and cannot reduce mereologically to subpersonal system behaviors. Additionally, psychological level behaviors organize as wholes, and constrain the lower level abstractions of subpersonal “parts.” The top down relationship is interlevel constraint, and the bottom up relationship is nonlinear interscale co-ontogeny (i.e. dynamic co-emergence), not linearly causal intrascale mereology. 

The difference between these two related fallacies is subtle but distinct. The first fallacy would claim that psychological behavior is equivalent to neuronal behavior (whereas different self similar scales of abstraction do not have direct equivalence of isomorphism). The second fallacy would claim that psychological behavior directly emerges from neuronal behavior (whereas each pattern emerges separately within each scale of abstraction).

The dual fallacies lead to dual assertions. The first fallacy is to assert that personal-level behaviors are explainable on the level of subpersonal information-processing (i.e. to equivocate self-similar scales as directly isomorphic). The second fallacy is to assert that the emergence of personal-level behaviors is caused by the functions of subpersonal structures (to equivocate the emergence of a behavior on one scale of abstraction as being caused by the actions emerging on a separate scale). These fallacious assertions are common across cognitivist science. For example, these fallacies are implicit in the representationalist perspective in claiming that neural systems “represent” the objects of the world that are perceived via lived experience. These fallacies are also implicit in claiming that subpersonal neural structures store information, carry out logical operations upon contentful representations, and that neural systems carry out predictions for the outcomes of personal level experiences. Instead, personal level activity and neural substrates interact via macro-to-microscale constraint, micro-to-macro level enablement and mediation, and jointly via processes of general assimilation and memory instantiation (reorganization of a substrate following reiterated experiential loading, i.e. adaptive hysteresis). The micro- and macroscales are abstracted scales of processes within a whole, concrete organism undergoing operational closure. These scales of abstracted processes affect each other via dynamic co-emergence (circular, interdependent, nonlinear co-ontogeny).

To develop these ideas further, a deeper foray is needed into the topic of complex adaptive systems, with a comprehensive application to the self-organization of autonomous-autopoietic life systems. Specifically, the complex-systems principles of self organization, scale invariance, emergence, statistical mechanics, phase transitions, system adaptation and memory need to be developed and applied to living organism-environment systems. To illustrate this picture would be to better organize a framework of how inter-scale and intra-scale activities are nonlinearly co-ontogenetic and co-evolutionary. This would be to model a holistic perspective of a multi-tiered, multi-systemic, complex heterarchy for an organism. The answers are not found in fallaciously asking reductionist, linearly causal, and functionalist questions of how “the brain causes consciousness,” “how experience is represented in the brain,” or “how perception of the world is predicted by the brain.” Instead, the questions can be framed with reference to the holistic organism-environment system’s dynamic co-emergence (i.e. its dependent co-arising, nonlinear co-ontogeny or nonlinear co-evolution). This type of explanation includes processes of enablement, constraint, assimilation, sef-organization, circular causality, interdependency, differentiation with an integrated operational closure, complexity, adaptivity, and nonlinear co-ontogeny (dynamic co-emergence). 

What might a nonlinearly co-ontogenetic (dynamically co-emergent) relationship look like? 

“Second, most if not all neuroscientists accept that subpersonal neural underpinnings of perception are extremely plastic and can be tuned by (personal, social, and cultural) experience.”

Shaun Gallagher, Action and Interaction (p. 133)

For nervous systems, the nonlinear co-ontogenetic relationship involves the circular co-arising of “top-down” behavioral loading and constraint (NRP factor loading and selection; IDS search through state space) and “bottom-up” assimilation (governance, experience-sensitive neuroplasticity, neural reuse, attunement, paths-laid-in-walking). This is to recapitulate the adaptive hysteresis effect from Chapter 6.

Note that designations of top-down and bottom-up are metaphors referring to scales of abstraction within a concrete organism. This does not denote ontically real nor independent “levels of reality” within an organism. 

A potential list of relationships between nervous systems and psychological behaviors may include: 

Neural reuse, interactive differentiation and search (IDS), adaptive hysteresis and attunement, personal-level “neuroscientifically relevant psychological factors” (NRPFs) loading and historicizing subpersonal “transiently active local neuronal subsystems” (TALoNs), neuronal assimilation, and neuroplasticity. Memory can be processually mediated by adaptive hysteresis. For nervous systems, these reorganizational effects include long and short term potentiation, axonal sprouting, dendritic pruning, neurogenesis, and changes to volume transmission. 

These processes are not via linearly causality, genetic determinism, nor neural determinism. A passage from James Gleick illustrates this sentiment:

“With or without chaos, serious cognitive scientists can no longer model the mind as a static structure. They recognize a hierarchy of scales, from neuron upward, providing an opportunity for the interplay of microscale and macroscale so characteristic of fluid turbulence and other complex dynamical processes.

Pattern born amid formlessness: that is biology’s basic beauty and its basic mystery. Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.”

(Chaos: Making a New Science)