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.


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