WST is a recently developed theory of cognitive systems (Jordan 2008, 2013; Jordan & Ghin 2006, 2007; Jordan & Heidenreich 2010; Jordan & Vinson 2012) that conceptualizes organisms in a different light than technological metaphors such as switchboards and computers, or dynamical metaphors such as Watt Governors and convection rolls. Rather, WST follows the lead of physicists (Schrödinger 1992), theoretical biologists (Kauffman 1995) and ecologists (Odum 1988), and conceptualizes organisms as multi-scale, self-sustaining energy-transformation systems. What is meant by self-sustaining is that the work of the system (i.e., the energy exchanges that actually constitute the system, such as the chemical work that constitutes biological systems) gives rise to products (e.g., other chemicals) that serve as a catalyst for the reaction that produces the product or some other reaction in the system. When a self-catalyzing system of work emerges, it is able to sustain itself as long as the proper fuel source remains available.
What is meant by multi-scale is that an organism can be coherently conceptualized as being constituted of different scales of self-sustaining work. Jordan & Vinson (2012) describe the notion of multi-scale, self-sustaining work in the following manner:
At the chemical level, self-sustaining work has been referred to as autocatalysis (Kauffman 1995), the idea being that a self-sustaining chemical system is one in which reactions produce either their own catalysts or catalysts for some other reaction in the system. At the biological level, self-sustaining work has been referred to as autopoiesis (Maturana &Varela 1980), again, the idea being that a single cell constitutes a multi-scale system of work in which lower-scale chemical processes give rise to the larger biological whole of the cell which, in turn, provides a context in which the lower-scale work sustains itself and the whole it gives rise to (Jordan & Ghin 2006). Hebb (1949) referred to the self-sustaining nature of neural networks as the ‘cell assembly’, the idea being that neurons that fire together wire together. Jordan & Heidenreich (2010) recently cast this idea in terms of self-sustaining work by examining data that indicate the generation of action potentials increases nuclear transcription processes in neurons which, in turn, fosters synapse formation. At the behavioural level, Skinner (1976) referred to the self-sustaining nature of behaviour as operant conditioning, the idea being that behaviours sustain themselves in one’s behavioural repertoire as a function of the consequences they generate. Streeck & Jordan (2009) recently described communication as a dynamical self-sustaining system in which multi-scale events such as postural alignment, gesture, gaze, and speech produce outcomes that sustain an ongoing interaction. And finally, Odum (1988) and Vandervert (1995) used the notion of self-sustaining work to refer to ecologies in general. (p. 235)
Conceptualizing organisms as being composed of multi-scale, self-sustaining work is consistent with coherentism (Lycan 2012). That is, the notion of self-sustaining work increases the coherence of our conceptualization of organisms (i.e., beliefs about organisms) because it reveals the dynamic homologies that transcend both the phyla and the nesting of multi-scale, energy-transformation systems that constitute a single organism. From plants, to neurons, to behavior, to persons, to human societies, increasingly complex systems of work (i.e., energy transformation) have evolved precisely because the work of which they are constituted is self-sustaining in that the work produces catalysts for either the work itself or some other level of work in the multi-scale system.
When we conceptualize organisms with technical metaphors such as switchboards and computers, we leave out these homologous, multi-scale, energy-transformation dynamics that living systems do not have in common with technological systems. This use of technological metaphors then forces us to generate explanations of the means by which our technologically inspired model of the organism is “connected” to the external context. To be sure, the issue is not unique to science. Descartes ran into the same problem when he divided humans into physical and spiritual substrates, and most scholars who have taken Descartes’s correspondence problem seriously have had to do something similar. Locke proposed causal connections between external events and internal impressions and ideas. Kant proposed a priori conceptions of space and time. Indirect realism proposed evolutionarily derived representations, and direct realism proposed evolutionarily derived “relations.”
Given its focus on multi-scale, self-sustaining homologies, WST is able to focus on that which is common across the internal and external contexts of an organism; namely, energy transformation. As a result, WST’s focus on internal/external homologies renders it consistent with the coherence approach to reality and truth. Specifically, its focus on internal/external homologies prevents WST from internal/external conceptualizations that lead to the connection problems experienced by correspondence-driven approaches. Within contemporary correspondence frameworks (e.g., indirect and direct realism), the external context tends to be conceptualized as physical. Historically, the concept physical has garnered its meaning from its dialectic relationship with concepts such as “mental” and “spiritual.” As a result, its usage implicitly intimates a correspondence relation and leaves us having to determine whether or not the internal context is likewise physical, mental, or something altogether different, as well as how it is that the internal context is connected to the external context.
Within WST, the internal and external contexts of an organism are both conceptualized in terms of energy transformation. Specifically, the external context is conceptualized as a self-organizing, energy-transformation hierarchy (Odum 1988; Vandervert 1995), while brains and organisms are conceptualized as multi-scale, self-sustaining energy transformation systems that are able to sustain themselves in the larger-scale energy transformation hierarchy because the work of which they are constituted produces its own catalysts. Inspired by this idea, Jordan & Ghin (2006) proposed that the fuel source dictates the consumer. This means that any system that sustains itself on a certain fuel source (e.g., plants on sunlight, herbivores on plants, or carnivores on herbivores) must be constituted such that it is able to address the constraints involved in capturing that fuel source.
Conceptualizing organisms as self-sustaining embodiments of the contextual constraints entailed within an energy-transformation hierarchy renders WST consistent with a coherence approach to reality and truth because an embodiment of context is necessarily “about” that context. By “necessarily” we mean that the system’s internal dynamics are phylogenetically and ontogenetically emergent from the energy-transformation hierarchy in which it sustains itself; it is an embodiment of the reality (i.e., context) within which it emerged. In short, it is reality within reality. The idea that organisms constitute embodiments of context is consistent with Friston’s (2011) assertion that organisms constitute an embodiment of an optimal model of their environment. Interestingly enough, Friston is led to this assertion for much the same reason WST is led to its notion of organisms as embodied contexts; specifically, because both begin with the idea of the organism as an energy-transformation system. As a result,
there is no epistemic gap between an organism and its environment. Organisms do not need to be ‘informed’ by environments in order to be about environments because they are necessarily ‘about’ the contexts they embody. Rather, what self-sustaining systems need do is sustain relationships with the contexts in which they are embedded in ways that lead them to sustainment. According to WST, meaning is constitutive of embodied context (i.e., bodies). As a result, living systems are necessarily meaningful (Jordan, 2000a), not because a body is alive or dead, because it is physical, or because it is biological. Living is meaning because it is sustained, embodied context. (Jordan & Vinson 2012, p. 9)
Given this lack of an epistemic gap between embodiments of context and the contexts in which they sustain themselves, WST dissolves the subjective-objective epistemic barrier created by the correspondence approach. Embodiments of context are naturally and necessarily “about” their context and, as a result, are inherently meaningful.
Our use of the word meaningful is not meant to imply that the evolutionary emergence of living systems simultaneously constituted the emergence of meaning into a reality that had been, up until then, meaningless. Rather, our equating the notion of embodied context with meaningfulness is meant to demonstrate the serious metaphysical consequences that emerge from our earlier description of reality as an internally related unity. If all phenomena are, in the end, contextually dependent, then part of what constitutes them is their relation with the rest of reality. In short, as was stated previously, self-sustaining systems are reality within reality. It is this irreducible, inherent relationality that we are conceptualizing as meaning.
Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it might seem as though we are asserting that embodied contexts (i.e., self-sustaining bodies) instantiate phenomenal properties. While this assertion is not incorrect, our concern with such an interpretation is the implicit, correspondence-driven assumption that phenomenal properties are subjective while other properties of the system are objective. Our take on this issue is that embodied contexts do not represent the emergence of phenemonology into reality as much as they represent the emergence self-sustaining relationality into reality. And it is this self-sustaining relationality that phylogenetically scales up to the phenomenon we refer to via terms such as consciousness and phenomenology.
Defining meaning in this way allows for meaning (i.e., embodied context) to be constitutive of what organisms are. As a result, phenomena traditionally referred to via concepts such as phenomenology, consciousness, meaning, and value, which tended to be relegated to the subjective/internal side of correspondence frameworks and had to be described as being emergent from, identical with, or fundamentally different from “physical” properties (Chalmers 1996), are considered phylogenetically scaled-up versions of the embodied meaning inherent in all embodied contexts. Jordan & Vinson (2012) describe why it is that self-sustaining embodiments of context entail meaning:
In a single-cell organism, the internal dynamics (i.e., the micro scale) and the organism as a whole (the macro scale) are coupled in such a way that changes in the micro-scale (e.g., low energy levels) give rise to changes at the macro-scale (e.g., behaviors such as swimming and tumbling) that recursively influence the micro-scale (i.e., give rise to energy intake) and, in the end, foster the sustainment of both levels of scale. In short, the micro-macro coupling is self-sustaining. In the case of a rock, the micro-macro coupling is not recursively self-sustaining. The coupling generates no dynamics that serve to sustain a particular aspect of either the macro or micro organization. (Jordan & Vinson 2012, pp. 11-12)
Jordan & Ghin (2006) refer to the embodied aboutness of a single-cell organism as proto-consciousness. They do so for the following reasons: (1) to acknowledge the meaning (i.e., embodied context) inherent in a single-cell (i.e., a small-scale, self-sustaining embodiment of context), and (2) to set the groundwork for an explanation of how the proto-consciousness of a single-cell system could possibly scale up to the full-blown self-awareness entailed in humans. As regards this scaling up, Jordan & Vinson (2012) say the following:
It was possible for self-sustaining systems to scale-up from the level of single-cell organisms to the level of human beings because their status as energy-transformation systems simultaneously rendered them a potential fuel source for any system that embodied the constraints necessary to sustain itself on such embodied energy. As an example, the emergence of herbivores gave rise to a context that afforded the emergence of carnivores. A significant constraint of being a carnivore, however, was the need to capture a moving fuel source. Doing so required, and still requires, anticipatory structures regarding the future location of the moving target. Jordan and Ghin (2006) assert that the embodiment of anticipatory dynamics in the neuromuscular architecture of organisms capable of propelling themselves as a whole toward anticipated locations constituted the phylogenetic emergence of anticipatory aboutness. That is, the self-sustaining dynamics of one system came to be ‘about’ the future dynamics of another system. WST equates such anticipatory aboutness with the traditional notion of mind, and proposes that phenomena that have received labels such as memory, thought, phenomenology, and self-awareness constitute evolutionary recursions (i.e., scale-ups) of the anticipatory dynamics embodied in self-sustaining systems. Given that all self-sustaining systems constitute embodiments of context and are, therefore, necessarily ‘about’ context, their anticipatory dynamics likewise entail ‘aboutness.’ Thus, as self-sustaining systems evolved and became increasingly abstract (i.e., about increasingly abstract events such as tomorrow, next week, and/or next year), meaning, too, became increasingly abstract. (Jordan & Vinson 2012, p. 12)
WST’s conceptualization of meaning as embodied context is consistent with Oakeshott’s (1933) coherence approach to reality and truth in that it does not assume that subjects and objects are independent and in need of connection. Rather, subjects (i.e., organisms) are considered embodiments of their context and are, therefore, internally related to their context. The contexts in which they are and have been embedded are constitutive of what they are. Said in a more familiar way, a thoroughgoing (i.e., maximally coherent), ontologically minded explanation of what an organism is must include all aspects of the organism as well as the contexts it embodies.
To be sure, WST is not the only approach to propose that (1) organisms constitute embodiments of their contexts, and (2) such systems necessarily entail anticipatory dynamics. As was stated previously, Friston (2011) makes a similar claim when he asserts that (1) organisms constitute optimal models of their environments, and (2) they utilize anticipatory coding as a means of optimally maintaining homeostasis. (See Andy Clark’s, Jakob Hohwy’s, and Anil Seth’s contributions to this collection for other approaches to cognition that posit a reliance on anticipatory coding.). A potential difference between WST and Friston’s position is the degree of metaphysical commitment WST makes to the assertion that reality constitutes an internally related unity. That is, while Friston’s view is consistent with the notion of embodied contexts, it is not clear he also agrees with the coherence approach to reality. As a matter of his fact, much of his explanation of how it is that organisms generate and maintain minimum free energy is couched in the epistemic language of external stimuli and internal representations. Though the use of these terms does not, in and of itself, indicate a commitment to direct or indirect realism, it does reveal, at the very least, a minimal, implicit commitment to a correspondence approach to reality and truth.
This comment on Friston’s position should not be construed as a critique of his framework, as much as it should be taken to constitute a means by which the unique metaphysical commitments of WST can be thrown into sharp relief. Friston’s goal is to provide a maximally coherent account of the causality underlying cognition. The goal of WST is to provide a scientifically informed approach to reality and truth that does not rely on the correspondence relation. The difference in these missions fairly thoroughly accounts for the differences between WST and Friston’s free energy approach, and the jury can still be out as to whether or not the free-energy principle constitutes a correspondence approach to reality and truth.
As was stated previously, a coherence approach to reality and truth assesses the degree of truth in experience and beliefs via the degree of coherence entailed in and across both. As was also previously stated, this coherence approach to truth differs from coherentism (Lycan 2012) in that the latter applies the criterion of coherence (i.e., lack of contradiction) to beliefs, while the former applies it to both experience (i.e., moment-to-moment contradictions in experience) and beliefs.
Given this notion of the organism as a self-sustaining prediction, WST is able to apply the coherence criterion to both experience and beliefs because it conceptualizes organisms as embodiments of context and avoids the correspondence relation. As a result, truth is not measured in terms of the degree of correspondence between the subjective and the objective. Rather, it is measured in terms of the degree of non-contradiction entailed within one’s moment-to-moment embodied context (i.e., phenomenology) and across the beliefs one derives from the moment-to-moment flows of embodied context. In Friston’s (2011) language, the degree of coherence in an embodied context might be taken to refer to the degree of prediction error minimization that has been achieved by the organism’s current model of reality. To make this work however, and to avoid the implicit epistemic gap implied by the notion of a “model of reality,” the meaning of the word model would have to be stretched to such a point that the organism itself constitutes a model of reality. To be sure, Friston intimates as much when he describes organisms as optimal models of their environments. To make this use of the word model simultaneously imply that the organism-as-model constitutes anticipation, the organism itself would have to be seen as constituting a prediction. While this use of the concept prediction seems strange, it is actually consistent with how Friston uses the term when describing the cheomotaxic behaviors exhibited by E. coli:
…by selective modulation of tumbling frequency, these bacteria show chemotaxis. This is a nice example of an itinerant policy based on the prior expectation (endowed by natural selection) that the organism will only change its motion through state-space when it encounters unexpected (costly) generalized states (here, a decrease in the concentration of attractants). (2011, p. 114)
What is at issue here is the degree of ontological commitment entailed in Friston’s assertion that natural selection endows organisms with prior expectations. Is he claiming that organisms are constituted of phylogenetically derived prior expectations, or is he simply presenting prior expectations as a productive way to model organisms? While his assertion that organisms constitute optimal models of their environments seems to favor the former interpretation, his later use of terms such as sensations and representations seems to favor the latter. Whatever the case, if Friston’s notion of minimizing prediction error is to be used as a description of what it means for there to be a contradiction in the flow of contingent context, then the concept prediction has to be used in a way that does not engender an epistemic gap. In short, the organism has to be conceptualized as a self-sustaining prediction.
In order to better clarify this admittedly abstract means of talking about truth, we offer certain arguments presented in the present paper as a case in point. As was mentioned previously, indirect- and direct-realist approaches to reality and experience rely on evolutionary theory as a means of connecting the subjective and the objective. In our critique of these views, we argued that they validated the correspondence relation by conceptually placing it within the assumed, larger-scale reality of the evolved physical world. WST, however, also makes use of an assumed, larger-scale reality, specifically, the self-organizing, energy-transformation hierarchy (Odum 1988). The difference between the two uses of evolutionary theory lies in what the two approaches are believed to reveal about evolution. To realists, be they direct or indirect realists, evolutionary theory is believed to reveal reality as it is, independent of observers. Within WST, evolutionary theory is definitely seen as being “true,” but in the coherence sense that it is the most coherent account of the existence of species yet given.
When describing the “truth” of evolutionary theory in coherence terms, it is important to remember that WST is not radically skeptical about whether or not the phenomena referred to via the realist notion of an evolved physical world (e.g., organisms, rocks, and plants) exist. To the contrary, it would be incoherent to deny our belief that such phenomena exist and do so outside of our skin. What is at stake is the issue of how something exists beyond our skin. In a correspondence framework, what is important about something existing on the other side of our skin is that it be observer-independent. Given this conceptualization, one has to explain how observer-independent and observer-dependent phenomena are connected. In the coherence framework, the existence of objects beyond the skin, as well as the idea that they exist as such without the presence of an observer, is conceded. However, defining their reality status in terms of their observer-independence is seen as being insufficient, for even though they may exist independently of the presence of an observer, such observer-independence in no way implies such objects exist independently of all context. No phenomenon, no matter how universal, exists as it does independently of all other phenomena. In short, all phenomena are context-dependent.
WST’s notion of embodied context implies that we should measure the truth status of claims made in cognitive science in terms of their degree of coherence, both within experience and across beliefs. Given that most contemporary cognitive scientists are direct or indirect realists, either explicitly or implicitly, they tend to assume the correspondence relationship (again, either explicitly or implicitly), which, in turn, makes it difficult for them to coherently address the reality of “subjective” phenomena such as phenomenology, meaning, and value. To be sure, by aligning itself with a coherence approach to truth, WST logically denies itself access to objective, intrinsic reality. But given that WST conceptualizes the notion of objective, intrinsic reality as an incoherent assumption derived from the coherence of moment-to-moment experience, WST, simply given its commitment to coherence, could not accept such a notion in the first place.
Given that WST is not designed to reveal intrinsic properties of objective reality, its beliefs about science are inconsistent with the correspondence notion that science is metaphysical. Let us recall that the slogan “science is metaphysical”, which was briefly mentioned at the beginning of the present paper, is just shorthand for the philosophical thesis that the goal of science is to overcome the objective-subjective divide and reveal the “real,” observer-independent, intrinsic properties of reality. By asserting that all properties are contextually grounded and cannot therefore be intrinsic, WST posits that science cannot reveal intrinsic properties. As a result, there is no final, thing-as-it-is essence to which any “experience” or “theory” can correspond. As a further result, there can be no correspondence test of reality. Science, therefore, cannot be metaphysical. This lack of belief in the metaphysical nature of science, however, is in no way anti-scientific. On the contrary, it is wholly consistent with Oakeshott’s (1933) contention that the practice of science constitutes a mode of experience. That is, if reality is an internally related unity, then theories are constitutive of that reality and can never “point to” reality as if to do so outside of it. They are, by definition, “in it” just as we are. Thus, they are, by definition, incomplete, what Oakeshott referred to as an arrestment of the whole (i.e., a mode of experience). As an example, WST’s scientifically inspired conceptualization of organisms as self-sustaining embodiments of context does assume a “larger-scale reality” within which organisms are nested, just as direct and indirect realism do. The different reasons for doing so are important. In WST, a larger-scale reality is assumed because it would be incoherent not to do so. That is, we would be contradicting both our experiences and our beliefs about those experiences if we claimed we did not exist within something larger than ourselves. From the correspondence perspective, a larger-scale reality is assumed, and it is believed to comprise observer-independent, intrinsic properties that science will ultimately reveal.
An immediate implication of coherence- versus correspondence-driven approaches to science is that while the latter conceptualizes science as inherently metaphysical (i.e., it reliably reveals intrinsic, observer-independent properties of objective reality), the former conceptualizes science as a method by which we are able to increase the coherence of our statements about that within which we are embedded (i.e., coherentism; Lycan 2012). Such coherentism is valuable because it affords us more influence over our context; that is, it affords us the ability to more effectively sustain ourselves.
To be sure, the idea that the value of science is pragmatic, as opposed to metaphysical, is not new. Dewey (1929) proposed much the same:
But the search does not signify a quest for reality in contrast with experience of the unreal and phenomenal. It signifies a search for those relations upon which the occurrence of real qualities and values depends, by means of which we can regulate their occurrence. To call existences as they are directly and qualitatively experienced ‘phenomena’ is not to assign to them a metaphysical status. It is to indicate that they set the problem of ascertaining the relations of interaction upon which their occurrence depends. (Dewey 1929, pp. 103–104)
Interestingly enough, Dewey espoused his pragmatic approach to science for much the same reason Oakeshott proposed his coherence approach to reality and truth—specifically, because they both believed that the realist, physicalist naturalism of their time was inspired by a logically incoherent correspondence framework that had been historically derived from dualism’s assumed split between spiritual and material reality. Dewey states,
The notion that the findings of science are a disclosure of the inherent properties of the ultimate real, of existence at large, is a survival of the older metaphysics. It is because of injection of an irrelevant philosophy into interpretation of the conclusions of science that the latter are thought to eliminate qualities and values from nature. This created the standing problem of modern philosophy:— the relation of science to the things we prize and love and which have authority in the direction of conduct. (1929, p. 102)
As regards cognitive science specifically, WST’s coherence approach to the meaning of science provides a way for cognitive scientists to experience their theories and models as pragmatic tools versus metaphysical tests. In addition, WST’s reliance on the concept of embodied context provides a means for cognitive scientists to discuss those phenomena traditionally associated with the subjective side of correspondence theorizing (e.g., phenomenology, value, and meaning) without relying on the subjective-objective correspondence relation. This is important, for as was mentioned in the latter half of the preceding quote by Dewey, by conceptualizing the practice of science as a means of overcoming the correspondence relationship, realist philosophers ultimately put the reality of the “subjective” at risk as more and more naturalists came to conceptualize the subjective in terms of inherently meaningless, physical properties (Gardner 2007). As was stated previously, by conceptualizing organisms as self-sustaining embodiments of context, WST renders properties that had been historically associated with the subjective, such as phenomenology, value, and meaning (see Jordan & Vinson 2012, for a thorough review of this issue), constitutive of what organisms are. As a result, cognitive scientists can avoid distracting arguments about such correspondence-driven issues as the grounding problem (i.e., how do concepts and symbols garner their meaning; Harnad 1990), or the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness. These issues are only experienced as important, hard problems within the conceptual confines of correspondence theory and the belief that the answer will be found via cognitive science.