Biological causality

This project lies at intersection of three innovative perspectives in philosophy of nature and biology. These perspectives share the common goal of re-examining biological causality in light of the science of dissipative systems (Prigogine) and the science of complex dynamical systems-two recent scientific paradigms that have significantly widened our understanding of nature. These three perspectives are: ecological psychology (Gibson 1979; Reed 1996; Dixon et al. 2016), enactivism (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Thompson 2007), and teleodynamics (Kauffman 2002; Deacon 2012, 2013). Having emerged independently of each other, these perspectives connect research projects in the fields of emergence, self-organised or autonomous systems, and naturalised phenomenology. Our goal is to integrate the most ground-breaking elements of these perspectives into a single and more profound view of the causality of living systems inspired by the said paradigms.

Research goals

- Explore new and alternative ways of analysing the causality of living systems

- More specifically, explore how theoretical approaches that have arisen in recent decades-especially ecological psychology, enactivism and teleodynamics-can jointly contribute to explain how organisms, understood as dynamical, nonlinear systems, which stabilise their constraints and prevent their own dissolution by generating a local source of work.

- Explore the ways in which the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production can be used to explain the existence and self-maintenance of far-from-equilibrium systems, as well as the limits of this Principle.

- Explore the connection between biological causality and the emergence of cognition, significance and value. Explore the viability of the life-mind continuity hypothesis in the context of the emergence of life from non-life.

- Explore viable definitions of minimal cognition, and of the kind of systems that achieve minimal cognition. 

- Explore the implications of diverse theories of mind and cognition for developing a naturalistic understanding of normativity and value.

This project is funded by the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra.

→ 10 February 2023
Emergence of end-directed behavior in dissipative systems
Jamis Dixon

→ 24 February 2023
Organisms and Levels of Autonomy
Pau Monzón (ICS, University of Navarra)

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→ 25 November 2022
Toward Biological Principles of Agency: Power and Purpose in the early integrated Agency of the Infant
Jonathan Delafield-Butt (University of Strathclyde)