ABSTRACT
The previous chapter showed that adaptive and autopoietic or constructivist approaches to cognition were not at variance. If it is true to a degree that organisms ‘bring forth worlds’ and also true to a degree that they are adapted, both autopoietic and environmental attractors are at work. They are not mutually exclusive at a formal level, though concrete conflicts are conceivable, even likely. It was also argued that the virtual, or synthetic, or ‘imaginary’ aspects of cognition are driven by the contingencies of environmental input, such as sense perception, vis-à-vis the relative autopoietic constancy of the organism. The term employed was ‘enrichment’. What we sought to exclude was the analytic inadequacy of mutual exclusion, the old dichotomy of synthesis versus correspondence. Further exposed was the widespread logical fallacy embedded in critical formalism of confusing the thing as it immediately presents itself with the thing as all the ways in which it might present itself, the thing ‘in itself ’, as it is sometimes put. This expression is wrong as the thing is nothing for itself in quite the opposite sense from Kant’s intention. It has no conceivable essence, merely a series of ‘appearances’ as or for. This does not simply mean appearances ‘for an observer’, far less a human observer. Rather, its reality is entirely relative to an environment. A tree may be a source of oxygen for the aerobic biosphere, a carbon sink in the Earth’s temperature maintenance systems, wood for a builder, a source of food or shelter for a bird, a component of the soil or unit of fossil fuel for a later time. It did not become fuel but merely a set of volatile molecules until we developed an appropriate technology. Its realities are radically local and temporal. The thing ‘in itself ’ is merely the semantic residue of the paradigm of external creation, bluntly, God. But the ontology presented here is one of self-organisation. This is to preclude the ‘in itself ’. Steven Hawking will not know the mind of God unless His authorship is strictly limited. It is time to choose one’s faith.
