Identifying cognition with the full process of life—including perceptions, emotions, and behavior—and understanding it as a process that involves neither a transfer of information nor mental representations of an outside world requires a radical expansion of our scientific and philosophical frameworks. One of the reasons why this view of mind and cognition is so difficult to accept is that it runs counter to our everyday intuition and experience. As human beings we frequently use the concept of information and we constantly make mental representations of the people and objects in our environment.
However, these are specific characteristics of human cognition that result from our ability to abstract, which is a key characteristic of human consciousness. For a thorough understanding of the general process of cognition in living systems it is thus important to understand how human consciousness, with its abstract thought and symbolic concepts, arises out of the cognitive process that is common to all living organisms.
In the following pages I shall use the term “consciousness” to describe the level of mind, or cognition, that is characterized by self-awareness. Awareness of the environment, according to the Santiago theory, is a property of cognition at all levels of life. Self-
awareness, as far as we know, is manifest only in higher animals and fully unfolds in the human mind. As humans we are not only aware of our environment, we are also aware of ourselves and our inner world. In other words, we are aware that we are aware. We not only know; we also know that we know. It is this special
faculty of self-awareness that I refer to when I use the term “con- sciousness.”
Language and Communication
In the Santiago theory self-awareness is viewed as being tied closely to language, and the understanding of language is approached through a careful analysis of communication. This approach to understanding consciousness has been pioneered by Humberto Maturana. 1
Communication, according to Maturana, is not a transmission
information, but rather a coovdinatioti oj~ bchaviov among living organisms through mutual structural coupling. Such mutual coordination of behavior is the key characteristic of communication for all living organisms, with or without nervous systems, and it becomes more and more subtle and elaborate with nervous systems of increasing complexity.
Birdsongs are among the most beautiful kinds of nonhuman communication, which Maturana illustrates with the stunning example of a particular mating song used by African parrots. These birds often live in dense forests with hardly any possibility of visual contact. In this environment parrot couples form and coordinate their mating ritual by producing a common song. To the casual listener it seems that each bird is singing a full melody, but closer inspection shows that this melody is actually a duet in which the two birds alternatively expand upon each other’s phrases.
The whole melody is unique to each couple and is not passed on to their offspring. In each generation new couples will produce their own characteristic melodies in their mating rituals. In Maturana’s words:
In this case (unlike with many other birds), the vocal coordination of behavior in the singing couple is an ontogenic [i.e. developmental] phenomenon. . . . The particular melody of each couple in this species of bird is unique to its history of coupling. 2
This is a clear and beautiful example of Maturana’s observation that communication is essentially a coordination of behavior. In other cases we may be more tempted to describe communication in semantic terms—that is, in terms of an exchange of information that carries some meaning. However, according to Maturana, such semantic descriptions are projections by the human observer. In reality the coordination of behavior is determined not by meaning but by the dynamics of structural coupling.
Animal behavior may be inborn (“instinctive”) or learned, and accordingly we can distinguish between instinctive and learned communication. Maturana calls the learned communicative behavior “linguistic.” Although it is not yet language, it shares with language the characteristic feature that the same coordination of behavior may be achieved by different types of interactions. Like different languages in human communication, different kinds of structural couplings, learned along different developmental paths, may result in the same coordination of behavior. Indeed, in Maturana’s view such linguistic behavior is the basis for language.
Linguistic communication requires a nervous system of considerable complexity, because it involves quite a lot of complex learning. For example, when honeybees indicate the location of specific flowers to each other by dancing out intricate patterns, those dances are partly based on instinctive behavior and partly learned. The linguistic (or learned) aspects of the dance are specific to the context and social history of the beehive. Bees from different hives dance in different “dialects,” so to speak.
Even very intricate forms of linguistic communication, such as the so-called language of bees, are not yet language. According to Maturana, language arises when there is communication about communication. In other words, the process of “languaging,” as Maturana calls it, takes place when there is a coordination of coordinations of behavior. Maturana likes to illustrate this mean-
ing of language with a hypothetical communication between a cat and her owner. 3
Suppose that every morning my cat meows and runs to the refrigerator. I follow her, take out some milk, and pour it into a bowl, and the cat begins to lap it up. That is communication—a coordination of behavior through recurrent mutual interactions, or mutual structural coupling. Now suppose that one morning I don t follow the meowing cat because I know that I’ve run out of milk. If the cat were somehow able to communicate to me something like “Hey, I’ve now meowed three times; where is my milk? that would be language. Her reference to her previous meowing would constitute a communication about a communication, and thus, according to Maturana’s definition, would qualify as language.
Cats are unable to use language in that sense, but higher apes may well be able to do so. In a series of well-publicized experiments American psychologists showed that chimpanzees are able not only to learn many standard signs of a sign language, but to create new expressions by combining various signs. 4 Thus one of the chimps, named Lucy, invented several sign combinations:
fruit-drink” for watermelon, “food-cry-strong” for radish, and “open-drink-eat” for refrigerator.
One day, when Lucy got very upset upon seeing that her human “parents” were getting ready to leave, she turned to them and signed “Lucy cry.” By making this statement about her crying, she evidently communicated something about a communication. “It seems to us,” write Maturana and Varela, “that, at this point, Lucy is languaging.” 5
Although some primates seem to have the potential of communicating in sign language, their linguistic domain is extremely limited and does not come anywhere near the richness of human language. In human language a vast space is opened up in which words serve as tokens for the linguistic coordination of actions and are also used to create the notion of objects. For example, at a picnic we can use words as linguistic distinctions to coordinate our actions of putting a tablecloth and food on a tree stump. In addition, we can also refer to those linguistic distinctions (in other
words, make a distinction of distinctions) by using the word “table” and thus bringing forth an object.
Objects, then, in Maturana’s view, are linguistic distinctions of linguistic distinctions, and once we have objects we can create abstract concepts—the height of our table, for example—by making distinctions of distinctions of distinctions, and so forth. Using Bateson’s terminology, we could say that a hierarchy of logical types emerges with human language. 6
Languaging
Our linguistic distinctions, moreover, are not isolated but exist “in the network of structural couplings that we continually weave through [languaging].” 7 Meaning arises as a pattern of relationships among these linguistic distinctions, and thus we exist in a “semantic domain” created by our languaging. Finally, self-awareness arises when we use the notion of an object and the associated abstract concepts to describe ourselves. Thus the linguistic domain of human beings expands further to include reflection and consciousness.
The uniqueness of being human lies in our ability to continually weave the linguistic network in which we are embedded. To be human is to exist in language. In language we coordinate our behavior, and together in language we bring forth our world. “The world everyone sees,” write Maturana and Varela, “is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.” 8 This human world centrally includes our inner world of abstract thought, concepts, symbols, mental representations, and self- awareness. To be human is to be endowed with reflective consciousness: “As we know how we know, we bring forth ourselves.” 9
In a human conversation our inner world of concepts and ideas, our emotions, and our body movements become tightly linked in a complex choreography of behavioral coordination. Film analyses have shown that every conversation involves a subtle and largely unconscious dance in which the detailed sequence of speech patterns is precisely synchronized not only with minute movements
of the speaker s body, but also with corresponding movements of the listener. Both partners are locked into this precisely synchronized sequence of rhythmic movements, and the linguistic coordination of their mutually triggered gestures lasts as long as they remain involved in their conversation. 10
Maturana’s theory of consciousness differs fundamentally from most others because of its emphasis on language and communication. From the perspective of the Santiago theory, the currently fashionable attempts to explain human consciousness in terms of quantum effects in the brain or other neurophysiological processes are all bound to fail. Self-awareness and the unfolding of our inner world of concepts and ideas are not only inaccessible to explanations in terms of physics and chemistry; they cannot even be understood through the biology or psychology of a single organism. According to Maturana, we can understand human consciousness only through language and the whole social context in which it is embedded. As its Latin root— con-scire (“knowing together )—might indicate, consciousness is essentially a social phenomenon.
It is also instructive to compare the notion of bringing forth a world with the ancient Indian concept of maya. The original meaning of maya in early Hindu mythology is the “magic creative power” by which the world is created in the divine play of Brahman. 1 1 The myriad forms we perceive are all brought forth by the divine actor and magician, and the dynamic force of the play is karma, which literally means “action.”
Over the centuries the word maya —one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—changed its meaning. From the creative power of Brahman it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play. As long as we confuse the material forms of the play with objective reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya.
Hinduism denies the existence of an objective reality. As in the Santiago theory, the objects we perceive are brought forth through action. However, the process of bringing forth the world occurs on a cosmic scale rather than at the human level of cognition. The
world brought forth in Hindu mythology is not a world for a particular human society bound together by language and culture, but the world of the magic divine play that holds us all under its spell.
Primary States of Consciousness
In recent years Francisco Varela has been following another approach to consciousness that, he hopes, may add an additional dimension to Maturana’s theory. His basic hypothesis is that there is a form of primary consciousness in all higher vertebrates that is not yet self-reflective but involves the experience of a “unitary mental space,” or “mental state.”
Numerous recent experiments with animals and humans have shown that this mental space is composed of many dimensions— in other words, it is created by many different brain functions— and yet it is a single coherent experience. For example, when the smell of a perfume evokes a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, one experiences a single, coherent mental state composed of sensory perceptions, memories, and emotions. The experience is not constant, as we well know, and may be extremely short. Mental states are transitory, continually arising and subsiding. However, it does not seem possible to experience them without some finite span of duration. Another important observation is that the experiential state is always “embodied”—that is, embedded in a particular field of sensation. In fact, most mental states seem to have a dominant sensation that colors the entire experience.
Varela recently published a paper in which he sets forth his basic hypothesis and proposes a specific neural mechanism for the constitution of primary states of consciousness in all higher vertebrates. 12 The key idea is that transitory experiential states are created by a resonance phenomenon known as “phase locking,” in which different brain regions are interconnected in such a way that all their neurons fire in synchrony. Through this synchronization of neural activity, temporary “cell assemblies” are formed, which may consist of widely dispersed neural circuits.
According to Varela’s hypothesis, each cognitive experience is
based on a specific cell assembly, in which many different neural activities associated with sensory perception, emotions, memory, bodily movements, and so on—are unified into a transient but coherent ensemble of oscillating neurons. The fact that neural circuits tend to oscillate rhythmically is well-known to neuroscientists, and recent research has shown that these oscillations are not restricted to the cerebral cortex but occur at various levels in the nervous system.
The numerous experiments cited by Varela in support of his hypothesis indicate that cognitive experiential states are created by the synchronization of fast oscillations in the gamma and beta range that tend to arise and subside quickly. Each phase locking is associated with a characteristic relaxation time, which accounts for the minimum duration of the experience.
Varela s hypothesis establishes a neurological basis for the distinction between conscious and unconscious cognition, which neuroscientists have been looking for ever since Sigmund Freud discovered the human unconscious. 13 According to Varela, the primary conscious experience, common to all higher vertebrates, is not located in a specific part of the brain, nor can it be identified in terms of specific neural structures. It is the manifestation of a particular cognitive process—a transient synchronization of diverse, rhythmically oscillating neural circuits.
The Human Condition
Human beings evolved from the upright walking “Southern apes” (genus Australopithecus) around two million years ago. The transition from apes to humans, as we have learned in an earlier chapter, was driven by two distinct developments: the helplessness of prematurely born infants, which required supportive families and communities, and the freedom of the hands to make and use tools, which stimulated brain growth and may have contributed to the evolution of language. 14
Maturana s theory of language and consciousness allows us to interlink these two evolutionary drives. Since language results in a very sophisticated and effective coordination of behavior, the
evolution of language allowed the early human beings to greatly increase their cooperative activities and to develop families, communities, and tribes that gave them tremendous evolutionary advantages. The crucial role of language in human evolution was not the ability to exchange ideas, but the increased ability to cooperate.
As the diversity and richness of our human relationships increased, our humanity—our language, art, thought, and culture— unfolded accordingly. At the same time, we also developed the ability of abstract thinking, of bringing forth an inner world of concepts, objects, and images of ourselves. Gradually, as this inner world became ever more diverse and complex, we began to lose touch with nature and became ever more fragmented personalities.
Thus arose the tension between wholeness and fragmentation, between body and soul, which has been identified as the essence of the human condition by poets, philosophers, and mystics throughout the ages. Human consciousness has brought forth not only the Chauvet cave paintings, the Bhagavad Gita, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the theory of relativity, but also slavery, witch burnings, the Holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima. Among all the species, we are the only ones that kill their own kind in pursuit of religion, free markets, patriotism, and other abstract ideas.
Buddhist philosophy contains some of the most lucid expositions of the human condition and its roots in language and consciousness. 15 Existential human suffering arises, in the Buddhist view, when we cling to fixed forms and categories created by the mind instead of accepting the impermanent and transitory nature of all things. The Buddha taught that all fixed forms—things, events, people, or ideas—are nothing but maya. Like the Vedic seers and sages, he used this ancient Indian concept but brought it down from the cosmic level it occupies in Hinduism, connecting it with the process of human cognition and thus giving it a fresh, almost psychotherapeutic interpretation. 16 Out of ignorance (avidya), we divide the perceived world into separate objects that we see as firm and permanent, but which are really transient and ever-changing. Trying to cling to our rigid categories instead of
realizing the fluidity of life, we are bound to experience frustration after frustration.
The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self—no persistent subject of our varying experiences. It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhfyha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought.
Cognitive science has arrived at exactly the same position. 17 According to the Santiago theory, we bring forth the self just as we bring forth objects. Our self, or ego, does not have any independent existence but is a result of our internal structural coupling. A detailed analysis of the belief in an independent, fixed self and the resulting “Cartesian anxiety” leads Francisco Varela and his colleagues to the following conclusion:
Our grasping after an inner ground is the essence of ego-self and is the source of continuous frustration. . . . This grasping after an inner ground is itself a moment in a larger pattern of grasping that includes our clinging to an outer ground in the form of the idea of a pregiven and independent world. In other words, our grasping after a ground, whether inner or outer, is the deep source of frustration and anxiety. 18
This, then, is the crux of the human condition. We are autonomous individuals, shaped by our own history of structural changes. We are self-aware, aware of our individual identity—and yet when we look for an independent self within our world of experience we cannot find any such entity.
The origin of our dilemma lies in our tendency to create the abstractions of separate objects, including a separate self, and then to believe that they belong to an objective, independently existing reality. To overcome our Cartesian anxiety, we need to think sys- temically, shifting our conceptual focus from objects to relationships. Only then can we realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence. As Lynn
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THE WEB OF LIFE
Margulis reminds us, “Independence is a political, not a scientific,
. 9
term.
The power of abstract thinking has led us to treat the natural environment—the web of life—as if it consisted of separate parts, to be exploited by different interest groups. Moreover, we have extended this fragmented view to our human society, dividing it into different nations, races, religious and political groups. The belief that all these fragments—in ourselves, in our environment, and in our society—are really separate has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings and thus has diminished us. To regain our full humanity, we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life. This reconnecting, religio in Latin, is the very essence of the spiritual grounding of deep ecology.
Reconnecting with the web of life means building and nurturing sustainable communities in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations. For this task we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. To understand these lessons, we need to learn the basic principles of ecology. We need to become, as it were, ecologically literate. 1 Being ecologically literate, or “ecoliter- ate, means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (ecosystems) and using those principles for creating sustainable human communities. We need to revitalize our communities—including our educational communities, business communities, and political communities—so that the principles of ecology become manifest in them as principles of education, management, and politics. 2
The theory of living systems discussed in this book provides a conceptual framework for the link between ecological communities and human communities. Both are living systems that exhibit the same basic principles of organization. They are networks that are organizationally closed, but open to the flows of energy and resources; their structures are determined by their histories of
structural changes; they are intelligent because of the cognitive dimensions inherent in the processes of life.
Of course, there are many differences between ecosystems and human communities. There is no self-awareness in ecosystems, no language, no consciousness, and no culture; and therefore no justice or democracy; but also no greed or dishonesty. We cannot learn anything about those human values and shortcomings from ecosystems. But what we can learn and must learn from them is how to live sustainably. During more than three billion years of evolution the planet’s ecosystems have organized themselves in subtle and complex ways so as to maximize sustainability. This wisdom of nature is the essence of ecoliteracy.
Based on the understanding of ecosystems as autopoietic networks and dissipative structures, we can formulate a set of principles of organization that may be identified as the basic principles of ecology and use them as guidelines to build sustainable human communities.
The first of those principles is interdependence. All members of an ecological community are interconnected in a vast and intricate network of relationships, the weh of life. They derive their essential properties and, in fact, their very existence from their relationships to other things. Interdependence—the mutual dependence of all life processes on one another—is the nature of all ecological relationships. The behavior of every living member of the ecosystem depends on the behavior of many others. The success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of each member depends on the success of the community as a whole.
Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking—from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. A sustainable human community is aware of the multiple relationships among its members. Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships.
The fact that the basic pattern of life is a network pattern means that the relationships among the members of an ecological
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community are nonlinear, involving multiple feedback loops. Linear chains of cause and effect exist very rarely in ecosystems. Thus a disturbance will not be limited to a single effect but is likely to spread out in ever-widening patterns. It may even be amplified by interdependent feedback loops, which may completely obscure the original source of the disturbance.
The cyclical nature of ecological processes is an important principle of ecology. The ecosystem s feedback loops are the pathways along which nutrients are continually recycled. Being open systems, all organisms in an ecosystem produce wastes, but what is waste for one species is food for another, so that the ecosystem as a whole remains without waste. Communities of organisms have evolved in this way over billions of years, continually using and recycling the same molecules of minerals, water, and air.
The lesson for human communities here is obvious. A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste when they have consumed the products. Sustainable patterns of production and consumption need to be cyclical, imitating the cyclical processes in nature. To achieve such cyclical patterns we need to fundamentally redesign our businesses and our economy. 3
Ecosystems differ from individual organisms in that they are largely (but not completely) closed systems with respect to the flow of matter, while being open with respect to the flow of energy. The primary source for that flow of energy is the sun. Solar en- er gy> transformed into chemical energy by the photosynthesis of green plants, drives most ecological cycles.
The implications for maintaining sustainable human communities are again obvious. Solar energy in its many forms—sunlight for solar heating and photovoltaic electricity, wind and hydro- power, biomass, and so on—is the only kind of energy that is renewable, economically efficient, and environmentally benign. By disregarding this ecological fact, our political and corporate leaders again and again endanger the health and well-being of millions around the world. The 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, for
example, which killed hundreds of thousands, impoverished millions, and caused unprecedented environmental disasters, had its roots to a large extent in the misguided energy policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations.
To describe solar energy as economically efficient assumes that the costs of energy production are counted honestly. This is not the case in most of today’s market economies. The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production are not part of current economic models. 4 These costs are labeled “external” variables by corporate and government economists, because they do not fit into their theoretical framework.
Corporate economists treat as free commodities not only the air, water, and soil, but also the delicate web of social relations, which is severely affected by continuing economic expansion. Private profits are being made at public costs in the deterioration of the environment and the general quality of life, and at the expense of future generations. The marketplace simply gives us the wrong information. There is a lack of feedback, and basic ecological literacy tells us that such a system is not sustainable.
One of the most effective ways to change the situation would be an ecological tax reform. Such a tax reform would be strictly revenue neutral, shifting the tax burden from income taxes to “eco-taxes.” This means that taxes would be added to existing products, forms of energy, services, and materials, so that prices would better reflect the true costs. 5 In order to be successful, an ecological tax reform needs to be a slow and long-term process to give new technologies and consumption patterns sufficient time to adapt, and the eco-taxes need to be applied predictably to encourage industrial innovation.
Such a long-term and slow ecological tax reform would gradually drive wasteful and harmful technologies and consumption patterns out of the market. As energy prices go up, with corresponding income tax reductions to offset the increase, people will increasingly switch from cars to bicycles, use public transportation, and carpool on their way to work. As taxes on petrochemicals and fuel go up, again with offsetting reductions in income taxes, or-