Sunday 31 March 2019

On one of the many motives, not to believe in grammar


by Teresita Pumará

1. In the fifth paragraph of “Reason in Philosophy”, the second essay of Twilight of the Gods, Nietzsche concludes:
“I fear we will not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar.”

Out of context as it is quoted, this sentence arises two questions. Why should we get rid of God, and what has the belief in grammar to do with this? All of you good readers of Nietzsche may laugh at these questions. Nevertheless I feel the need to answer them once again by trying to follow Nietzsche’s path in that essay.

2. According to Nietzsche two things characterise philosophers. The first one is their disgust of change -and so of becoming, transforming, and death as intrinsically entangled with life. This disgust of change leads to the rejection of the senses as means to explore and produce knowledge. The senses are seen by philosophers as the great betrayers, because they insist on the continuous change and multiplicity of reality. We cannot grasp the truth through the senses. But then how? Where is it then, this truth? We all know the answer. Things change, so say our senses. Words and the meaning we give to them, apparently not. So, there must the truth lie. In the idea, in the thin, the empty concept. Among all the concepts, the philosophers’ favourite is this idea of God, which is in fact, writes Nietzsche, the thinnest, the emptiest. Not only do philosophers find in the idea of God the soothing eternal truth, moreover they see in it the self-caused reason for everything there is. This for two motives: Because this is the way our reason works, it seeks causes and consequences everywhere. And because, writes Nietzsche, every word speaks for this Eleatic argument, as, alas, we speak.

3. Therefore and back to the initial quote: we cannot get rid of the empty idea of God, of the sterile idea of a “truly real” world of “pure eternal” Forms from which the insufficient physical world of appearances derives, as long as we still believe that the structure of our language is a pure, transparent reflection of that world of Forms. In other, plainer words: that the world is actually organised in subjects (causes, substances) and predicates (consequences, accidents), just to mention the most important grammatical category.

4. But aren’t we already there? Haven’t we got rid of God and the platonic world of Forms? So, it seems at times. But not surprisingly people are readier to accept that truth is either relative or what is collectively accepted as such at a moment in time (and so susceptible to change) than to reject grammar or at least suspect of it. Even the most liberals and libertarians get all heated up when it comes to discuss, for example, the way people write in chats or social networks. In this sense I think Nietzsche, as frequently, hits the nail on the head. Because there is, lightly said, a truth contained in language, but it points rather to us, to the way we process the world. The rejection of life, of its richness and irreducibility will not come to an end as long as we believe in grammar. I insist on the word believe, because the problem does not lie in grammar itself but on defending it against all irregular uses of language.

5. What actually motivates me to write this, the reason it called my attention so strongly is a discussion we currently have in Spanish, my native language, regarding the sexist aspects of its grammatical rules. In Spanish nouns and articles, singular and plural are classified in masculine and feminine. Adjectives must also carry the mark of the gender of the noun they modify. But to refer to a plural group where a plurality of individuals may be found, the masculine form of the article, adjective and noun must be used. Let’s imagine we are speaking about a group of scientists:
If they are all female, we say: las científicas.
If they are all male, we say: los científicos.
If they are male, female, transgender, genderless we must anyway say: los científicos.

I used to think of this as not such a big problem. I have changed my mind. Language teachers, linguists and members of the academy of language argue that the gender of words has nothing to do with the gender of their reference. This now sounds to me not only as an excuse. I can find Plato here, Plato, Christianity, and every kind of Dualism. The belief on language as a pure essence unaffected by the actual world it tries to render comprehensible. Denial and resistance to change.

6. There has been and there are different proposals to, for example, replace the “o” in the third case above explained, either for other vocal (“e” and “i” are the most popular) or for characters such as “@” or more recently “x”, but these last have the problem that they are not quite suited for the spoken language. Others try simply not to fall in that kind of generalisations in order to avoid the omission of variety. As a writer and a writer of fiction I am struggling with all these possibilities, only to discover with frustration, at the end of the day, that the only possibility that actually (aesthetically and practically) pleases me is the “o”, only because so it is, only because I have been using it and reading it my whole life. Only to discover that I still believe in grammar.

7. At the end, and coming back to Nietzsche, the only real struggle is the one that takes place in oneself. But I also believe there is no belief that is eternal, unchangeable. I already see a lot of people struggling like me, each in their one way. And I see how, slowly, the belief in the old uses of language start to crumble. After all they have a birth day and as everything under the sun they will expire. It will take a lot of time, more perhaps than I like to think of. Because nothing happens through the will alone of a group of intellectuals, but through the constant undermining of oppressive structures, but through daring to play with the many possibilities, and showing we can still produce knowledge and art and we can still communicate and the world does not come to an end because we dare to speak and write in different ways. If the world comes to an end I dare say it will be rather because we listen to the fanatical seekers of purity and their maniac final solutions to stop what is unstoppable.


Wednesday 27 March 2019

Inscriptions: Issue 2


Our second issue of Inscriptions, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to philosophy, psycho-analysis and the arts, is now available at https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/.
Featuring articles in the traditions of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, this issue of Inscriptions interrogates approaches to the term unconscious in contexts such as petroleum-driven culture, the 9/11 memorial in New York, the relation between art and society on the work of Bjarne Melgaard, and our current era of a global internet and social media culture. We also feature art by Stefan Chazbijewicz, a filmmaker, poet and visual artist based in Poland, who seeks to establish a mystic space of what he refers to as “salvaged reality” in his work.
Inscriptions is an open access journal made entirely by volunteers. Support us by encouraging your library to subscribe to our printed edition, or subscribe yourself.

Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions: Torgeir Fjeld

Sunday 24 March 2019

Integration and Autonomy in Brain Organoids Holistic Ethics and the Study of Human Brain Fragments


by Denis Larrivee & M. Farisco

Background and Thesis: Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics of Parts, and Privileging the Whole
Can a brain organoid be considered a whole? Do brain properties confer moral compulsion in isolation? Can brain fragments acquire normative status from their relation to the whole brain/individual? These are several of an array of questions emerging from the intersection of the metaphysical domain of parts and wholes and the domain wherein the human brain is normatively privileged. Such questions are uniquely raised by current research into human brain organoids, three-dimensional tissue culture preparations of human brain fragments, hence parts of whole brains. Classically, extending backward to Aristotle at least, the metaphysical question traces its origin to the recognition of the unity and independence of individual things. This understanding views the universe to be individuated, composed of entities that are embedded in the framework of space-time. Definitionally, entities are such because they a) have a unique spatio-temporal location, 2) are the subject of the predication of properties, and 3) are distinguished by qualitative properties from all other entities [Esfeld 2004]. Parts thus emerge as a subdomain not coextensive with the entity. This, still dominant, perspective is of significant contemporary interest in philosophy of science circles in so far as how physical composition is conceived, where notions like emergence and reductionism, or the constitution of systems, are broadly debated across scientific disciplines [Gillett 2016]. For brain organoid cultures, the metaphysical question intersects with normative issues due to the privileging accorded to human beings, and, by extension, to their brains and nervous systems. Aristotelian thinking, for example, denies that a hand can be so regarded when it no longer functions for the good of the whole individual. That the view we select on part, property, and whole critically determines the ethical practice we adopt in organoid use will be argued here.

Figure 1A
Nextbigfuture.com


Figure 1B
Sciencemag.org

Introduction: Scope of Contending Issues
Brain organoids are a readily available experimental source of neural tissue made from human pluripotent stem cells (Figure 2A, B). Because they are developed from human cells they possess a full complement of the human genetic repertoire; they are expected, therefore, to closely mimic physical properties of the brain’s neural operation. Their increasing sophistication and wide ranging experimental scope (Figure 3), including likely attempts to develop higher order properties, raise the possibility that they will soon pose significant ethical issues.
Which properties, how much these properties resemble those of humans, and which level of brain operation they reflect are matters typically impinging on their ethical valuation. However, because they are observed in tissue fragments, it is uncertain how such normative qualifications may apply.

Figure 2: Pluripotent stem cell production. Somatic cells from ectoderm are transfected
with Sox (Yamanaka) transcription factors to induce neural differentiation.

Functionalism: Can a Property be Privileged Alone?
Contemporary notions of brain properties are most often equated with functions [Levin 2018], where a function denotes a mental capacity. Functionalist models prevail, for example, in conceptions about the mind, like Extended Mind Theory (EMT), that equate the reality of the mind with the mind’s functioning Levy 2011], e.g., recollection, and that include operations conducted beyond the brain. Hence, functionalist models challenge the metaphysical reality of ‘wholes’, and so also value contingency in discrete entities alone. Accordingly, functionalist models tend to a permissive praxis in organoid use. A classical, individuated approach human brain, by contrast, views properties as existing only when present in a source. Properties, in this understanding do not predicate in isolation. Consistent with this view properties in nature emerge from systemic realities, like the embodied brain. Indeed, living systems appear to characterize all of natural reality, and to embrace mental function, which does not exist in their absence. This suggests that organoids must constitute systemic entities in their own right, in order to acquire a normative status that would preclude experimental manipulation.

Figure 3: Brain Organoids can be used for a wide variety of experimental purposes. 



Integration: Can a Part Acquire Normative Status?
Organoids, however, are most easily understood as parts of organisms and so possess only some, but not all, properties that accrue to living systems. This organismal perspective raises the question of whether organoids can constitute lesser entities, with quantitatively smaller or qualitatively different subsets of properties from those of whole organisms. That is, can a human brain organoid constitute a whole according to criteria used for a human organism? This question concerns two issues: first, whether a subset of properties constitute a viable whole, a philosophical issue significant for its use in the context of death determinations for humans, and second, whether a subset of human properties can be regarded as human. The first question is anchored in the particular notion of integration used, like that formulated by the 1984 Swedish Committee on Death Criteria that is premised on coherency and coordination [Swedish Committee on Death and Dying 1984]. Clinical ethics for death determinations conclude that in the absence of coherency and coordination a human being does not exist. By extension, organoids that are not integrated, according to this definition, would not exist as integral wholes. Conversely, should this notion of integration obtain, can the presence of a subset of properties then distinguish the organoid as human? Classically, the absence of one or more human properties would distinguish an organoid from a human entity [Esfeld 2004]; according to this understanding, only a full complement of human, organismal properties (which predicate from the whole) possess normative status, a state not achieved in organoids. By either reasoning research on organoids would be broadly permissible.

Autonomy: Which Properties Confer Normative Status?
Are there properties which are so distinctive as to be normatively valued? Some, like self consciousness, or at least sentience, seem so unique as to ethically preclude intervention. This perspective would suggest that some property subsets are ethically probative; hence, in these circumstances a classical understanding of distinct entities with a unique set of properties would appear inadequate to normatively distinguish an organoid from a human being. In this case both organoid and individual appear to be qualified by the same normative distinction; indeed, to be both human. The possession of a partial complement of higher order human properties seems unlikely, however; rather, higher order properties appear to occur only in unison. The ‘natural’ evidence suggests, in fact, that in the evolutionary patrimony living systems are purposed to autonomous existence [Mossio Moreno 2015], a circumstance requiring all properties together. Much evidence indicates that this purposing cannot occur by the nervous system in isolation, but requires a systemic embodied dimension to elicit them. Indeed, key organismal properties appear to emerge from the body’s association with the brain to generate higher order activity and to sustain autonomy [Damasio 2012]. Moreover, a consensus global state that is self identifying appears to lack sufficient representational content in the absence of the body, demonstrated, for example, in cases of sensory deprivation [Wiesel Hubel 1963]. Hence, organoids appear destined to remain parts, incapable of progressing to human wholes.

Caveats: Cloning and Property Proximity
Nonetheless, the human being remains specially privileged and the use of a full genetic complement seems to portend access to avenues of exploitation. Developmental paradigms, which address the many biological details yet unresolved, have the potential for manipulation of the whole human, a prospect Kant identified as morally offensive. Current experimental approaches that approximate cloning (akin to parthogenesis) [Kao et al 2010] and that initiate developmental trajectories equivalent to those undertaken for the whole human appear, thus, to be distinguished from the study of brain parts and will likely require close ethical oversight. The generation of whole systems, albeit over time, raise the corollary of property proximity and when a variant is sufficiently different to no longer be seen as human.

Figure 4: Cloning procedure from induced pluripotent stem cells.

This seems to suggest that while the ethical terrain of organoids may be governed by metaphysical principles on parts and wholes, which are revealed by their expression in the natural world, new insights on the nature of the whole will likely be required. Concepts like spatiotemporal trajectories, higher order integration, and integral development appear especially pertinent. That is, a new conception of the whole, and the relationship of the part to it, appears to be needed, one that is not merely static, but systemic, ontological, and dynamic.

Concepts

  • The development of ethical guidelines for organoid manipulation is intimately linked to the metaphysical concepts of parts and wholes and their relation to contingent value
  • However, a static conception of the whole and how higher order cognitive properties are integrated into it will likely require revision to a new systemic and autonomous account of the nature of integration
  • These lacunae may also need addressing by a spatio-temporal dynamic that underpins the metaphysical understanding of the whole.
  • Experimental manipulation infringing on such physically instantiated wholes may be deemed probative.


References
Esfeld M (2004). Quantum Entanglement and a Metaphysics of Relations. Studies Hist Phil Mod Phys 35: 601–617.
Gillet C (2016) Reduction and emergence in science and philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Levin J (2018) Functionalism Stanford Encyc Phil
Levy N. (2011) Neuroethics and the Extended Mind. In Handbook for Neuroethics. Sahakian B, Illes J (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kao et al (2010) Mice cloned from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) Biol Reprod 83(2):238-243.
Moreno A, Mossio M (2015) Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical inquiry. Springer Publishing, Dordrecht
Wiesel TN, Hubel DH (1963) Single cell responses in striate cortex of kittens deprived of vision in one eye. J Neurophys 26:1003-1017
Swedish Committee on Defining Death (1984) The concept of death. Summary. Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs.
Damasio A (2012) Self comes to mind: constructing the conscious brain. Pantheon Books, New York.

Wednesday 6 March 2019

CFP: Kierkegaard: decisionality and betrayal


Inscriptions, a journal of contemporary thinking on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art, invites contributions to our upcoming issue on Søren Kierkegaard, decisionality and betrayal. We are looking for well-crafted and skillfully written scholarly essays and literary fiction (poetry, aphorisms, short stories, fables, literary essays, etc.) that engage our mandate and the theme of this issue.
To Søren Kierkegaard God’s injunction that Abraham was to murder his son served as both an obstacle and a key to faith. Was Abraham struck by madness when he set out to obey the words of a God only he could hear, and did he return to his senses when he decided not to kill Isaac? In Kierkegaard’s view our access to the ethical domain is premised on a leap from a purely aesthetic existence. To jump, and perhaps fall, into the religious domain constitutes a second, more fundamental leap, where, to put it in the words of Slavoj Žižek, the only temptation that remains is the ethical: if Abraham were to disobey his God and not slaughter his son it would be in conformity with the laws of ethics, and yet it would be nothing less than a betrayal of the gravest kind – a betrayal of his own, most deeply constituted truth and being.
Jacques Derrida extracted a different, elemental knowledge from Kierkegaard’s treatment of Abraham: we fear and we tremble, Derrida noted, not when God is with us, but when he is not present. It is when we are thrown out to our own devices that we must truly grapple with our own salvation. For Derrida, and later Žižek, the gift of faith is to betray our own. The duty, and therefore the gift, is absolute.
In this upcoming issue of Inscriptions we will investigate terms such as decision and betrayal against a background of Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. While we can refer to decisionality as the ability to make decisions, we also claim that there is a sense in which decisionality signifies the moment in which what is right or true is constituted on the level of decision. In health care decisionality is an inquiry into when and how subjects can make decisions about care for themselves and others; in the political domain we believe that decisions mark the endpoint of deliberation and, ultimately, philosophy: when we reach a decision no further argument is required or wanted; from then on loyalty to the decision will be enforced.

Key questions relevant to our inquiry include:
  • What is the relation between faith and betrayal in general, and how specifically do we decode these terms in philosophy after Kierkegaard?
  • How do we approach the notion of a “leap of faith” today, in political, social, ethical, and human terms?
  • In what senses can terms such as decisionality and the end of philosophy become meaningful in the contexts of care and dialogue?

Submission instructions:
Academic essays should be 3,000 to 4,500 words. We also seek scholarship in the form of interviews, reviews, short interventions, opinion pieces, etc., and in these cases we also seek shorter texts. Inscriptions adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (footnotes and bibliography). For other instructions, please see our website. We encourage potential authors to submit proposals for review prior to their writing/submitting entire full-length manuscripts. Include title, proposal (150 words), short biography, and institutional affiliation in your preliminary submission. All academic essays undergo double-blind peer review.
We also accept submissions of literary fiction (poetry, aphorisms, short stories, fables, literary essays, etc.), to be reviewed by our Fiction Editor Monika Zagar.
Submit proposals, essays and literary fiction on or before March 15.


Monday 4 March 2019

The Humanum Suppositum and Ontological Integration

An excerpt from 'Framing Neuroethical Praxis: Wojtyła’s Metaphysical Subject and its Modernist Cartesian Variants' in Logos i Ethos; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15633/lie.2555.

by Denis Larrivee
As a metaphysical structure that precedes all acts that are its manifestation the humanum suppositum enters into every physical act, sustaining it by virtue of making present an integral order that it confers on the person.[1] Through its entry into these acts, therefore, it is also a dynamical participant in them. What is of even greater significance is that by entering into these various dimensions, the metaphysical subject shapes them according to an expressed personal subjectivity; hence, it also molds the neural architecture, which expresses this manifestation corporally. Wojtyła is therefore able to claim that the human body


has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it[2]

that is, the human body physically manifests an originary, metaphysical reality subsisting in a unitary and personalist subjectivity that is ordered to the performance of the good. Value contingency in the metaphysical and personalist subject is thereby linked to the corporal form that manifests it.

Transference of the Metaphysical Subject into Visible Reality
For a neuroethical praxis, the humanum suppositum is a reality accessed first through the phenomenal subject’s objective, corporal manifestation,[3] that is, it is first understood at the epistemological level of the phenomenal subject, and only then at the metaphysical one. Significantly, its dependence on the epistemological level does not imply its absence in the order of being. If so, the phenomenal subject would be reduced to one manifestation among a collective, consisting of a variety of dynamisms, and not linked to an overall unity. The epistemological understanding of the subject is thus revelatory for the Wojtyłan metaphysical conception, which thereby situates within its sphere the corporal form of the neural dynamic. This dynamic, consequently, is understood to be shaped according to the pattern of the humanum suppositum to yield, that is, to transfer into physical reality, the uniquely human subject; hence, it identifies the neural dynamic as a normative terrain to be “charted” for probative concerns.
Metaphysically, the humanum suppositum is seen, first, in its evocation of the human entity, that is, the neural architecture is unified operatively. As a metaphysical prior of the phenomenal subject, therefore, this evocation elicits the adoption by the corporal form of an organizational order characterized by operational confinement and underpinned by a systemic and dynamical configuration that is needed for autonomous living. This unitary dynamic, for instance, is a fundamental feature acted upon by evolution. As evolutionary philosopher Cliff Hooker points out[4] it is the activity of the whole organism that interacts with the environment and the whole organism that is molded by evolutionary pressures, which thereby acquires behaviors that are good for it. Likewise, such self initiated actions presuppose a holistic organizational order, that is, a source for their emergence. Philosophers of biology Maturana and Varela[5] and Moreno and Mossio[6] propose, in consequence, that the autopoetic capacity of living organisms – understood as the organismal ability to produce themselves – can be present only if organisms are purposed to autonomous existence as integrated, operational, and topologically distinct wholes. They evidence this purposing in pointing to the recursive restructuring used to sustain autonomy in the face of ongoing thermodynamic constraints. Autonomy, thereby, constitutes a capacity for existence that can only be exercised as an entity.
However, since autonomy is also a condition of state, it can be exercised only through certain dispositions, which act, therefore, as qualifiers for autonomous entities. For humans, these include self governance, agency, and a behavioral repertoire enabling a capacity to resist constraints imposed by one’s environment. These dispositional qualifiers therefore evidence, secondly, the contribution of the humanum suppositum to the ontological shaping of the phenomenal subject and the neural architecture that sustains it. The consolidation of a neural architecture underlying the self percept, for example, illustrates a metaphysical conformity of the whole ontological dynamic to the unity transcendental. Contingent properties that emerge from the neural architecture, including those that contribute to the phenomenal subject, such as reasoning, consciousness, agency, and identity, predicate from the self, that is, they display independent manifestations and so possess neural circuitries distinguishable from that of the self, though nonetheless subsumed to its oversight.
The subject’s corporal manifestation is thus not autonomously determined but is shaped by an extrinsic order that is determinative for its expression. Indeed, the natural biological order shares this subordination to an immaterial prior, an observation often used to explain why living processes assume unique configurations rather than merely how they do so, that is, explananda classed as design principles.[7] Such principles are useful for explaining the metaphysical contribution to cognition. They explain, in the first place, why only certain organizational arrangements enable cognitive operation, that is, they explicate the need for cognition to adopt a particular order. Kelso,[8] in a prescient commentary, remarks that while nature’s forms are abundant, its principles are few, and carefully preserved, meaning that the design of living systems is neither arbitrary nor haphazard. Indeed, numerous studies now document the adoption of such design principles in the construction of complex biological systems, an illustration that only certain preferred operational forms can be used, and so are, necessarily, widely adopted. For example, gene regulation networks in cells are constructed of a handful of recurring circuit elements, each of which can carry out specific dynamical functions autonomously,[9] or, similarly, cases of cellular networks that resonate in unison in a performance space.[10] What these studies emphasize is the apparent universality of the deployment of successful designs. Design principles, accordingly, are instantiated by living organisms because they constitute valid principles of operation on which the dynamic order of living organisms needs to be grounded for successful performance.
By extension, such principles help to explain why cognition needs to exhibit a unified operation and why its qualifying properties, in turn, need to be configured as predicates of an autonomously directed entity. The instantiation of attractor motifs in neural network operation, for example, constitutes a revealing design feature for brain activity since it shows that such motifs are linked to the system wide, neural network activity of the brain; hence, it reveals the presence of constraints that subsume these motifs within a holistic form. Friston makes the pertinent comment here that

our exchanges with our environment are constrained to an exquisite degree by local and global brain dynamics and that these dynamics have been carefully crafted by evolution, neurodevelopment, and experience to optimize behavior.[11]

A significant issue raised by these explanations is then how the biological order depends on such extrinsic influences, that is, how metaphysical constraints influence the materially manifested form seen in the neural architecture. Explanatory accounts for cognitive order, accordingly, need to be concerned with the nature of this relationship, both its origin and the manner by which constraints on the instantiated order are imposed. Michael Morange[12] offers one explanation, arguing that the imposition of such constraints is due to physical laws that establish limits on outcome. He points, for instance, to allometric scaling laws that establish physical dependencies between different properties of an organism such as metabolism and size. Yet Morange’s physical explanation begs the question for the existence of such a physical ordering; thus it cannot be the sole basis on which to explain the why question for the order of neural operation. This explanatory insufficiency can be seen, for instance, in Yi et al’s study of integral feed back, which shows that only this type of recurrency can achieve resonance.[13] While Yi’s study demonstrates a physical and causal effect mediated by one element on another, it also shows that the effectiveness of this operation is not itself solely a consequence of a physical dimension. What is critical here is the presence of feedback connections and an organized composition in which the elements are circularly arranged. These latter features are abstract, that is, they are non-physical characteristics that nevertheless have a bearing on performance. By extension and for this reason, recurrency in neural network operation, among other cognitive features, has at once both a physical and an immaterial dimension.
Non-physical influences are also evidenced in the large scale formal order of cognition, like the brain’s integrated performance amidst the complexity of the neural architecture, as well as in small scale order, like the dynamical attractors mentioned by Friston. Because the material order is subsumed to these immaterial features the latter can be regarded as a supraphysical influence effecting their material instantiation. The act of instantiation thus means that the material dimension, in a formally causal sense, is subordinate to an influence that is universally pertinent, exteriorized, and supraphysical and so is determinative for the adopted topology.[14] It is in the context of this supraphysical influence on cognition that Wojtyła’s introduction of the humanum suppositum is relevant. That is, it is only through the metaphysical order that the neural architecture is shaped according to the ontological form of the phenomenal subject. This shaping is not merely a matter of the neural architecture adopting one among a variety of forms, that is, the adoption of an arbitrary hylomorphic expression, but it is the specific acquisition in the epistemological order of the phenomenal subject, as Wojtyła points out. This metaphysical association thus anchors the objective reality of the phenomenal subject in an immaterial one that is ontologically generative. Indeed, the phenomenal subject shares with the humanum suppositum its relational orientation toward being, seen, for example, in the evolutionary trend toward knowledge acquisition and dynamical freedom.[15]




[1] Cf. G. Holub, The Human Subject and its Interiority…, op. cit., p. 47–66.
[2] Cf. John Paul II, Pope, Man and Woman…, op. cit., passim.
[3] Cf. G. Holub, The Human Subject and its Interiority…, op. cit., p. 58.
[4] Cf. C. Hooker, Interaction and Bio-cognitive Order, “Synthese” 166 (2008), p. 513–546.
[5] Cf. H. R. Maturana, F. Varela, De maquinas y seres vivos. Autopoiesis: La organizacion de lo vivo, Santiago de Chile 1979.
[6] Cf. A. Moreno, M. Mossio, Biological Autonomy: a Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry, Berlin 2015.
[7] Cf. P. Braillard, Systems Biology and the Mechanistic Framework, “History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences” 32 (2010) no. 1, p. 43–62.
[8] Cf. S. Kelso, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior, Cambridge 1995.
[9] Cf. U. Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology, Design Principles of Biological Circuits, Boca Raton 2007, p. 1.
[10] Cf. Y. Hart, Y. Antebi, A. Mayo, N. Friedman, U. Alon, Design Principles of Cell Circuits with Paradoxical Components, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” 109 (2012) no. 21, p. 8346–8351.
[11] Cf. K. Friston, Free Energy and Global Dynamics, in: Principles of Brain Dynamics, eds. M. I. Rabinovich, K. J. Friston, P. Varona, Boston 2013, p. 269–292.
[12] Cf. M. Morange, Les Secrets du Vivant: Contre la Pensee unique en Biologie, Paris 2005.
[13] Cf. T. M. Yi et al., Robust Perfect Adaptation in Bacterial Chemotaxis Through Integral Feedback Control, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” 97 (2000), p. 4649–4653.
[14] Cf. C. Gillett, Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy, Cambridge 2016, p. 2.
[15] Cf. N. Clark, Person and Being, Marquette 1993, p. 36.