Contributions

1. Introduction Here, we present the free energy principle (FEP) in a simple manner to a broad audience. Alongside other cornerstones of mathematical physics—for instance, variational principles such as the principles of stationary action or the principle of maximum entropy—the FEP serves as the basis for a new class of mechanics or mechanical theories (in […]

If you look up the characteristics of life in any standard Biology textbook, you’ll likely find some list like this: reproduction, heredity, cellular organization, growth and development, response to stimuli, adaptation through evolution, homeostasis, and metabolism. What you won’t find is agency. The fact that living organisms can do things is arguably the most important […]

Introduction In his thesis entitled Agency and Organisation, Rasmus Haukedal highlights the remarkable mutual relevance of recent theoretical trends in biology and the dialectical approach to (living) nature as developed by Hegel, Engels, and others (Haukedal 2022). As Haukedal explains, a dialectical approach to the phenomena of life moves beyond the logic of binary thinking […]

I’d like to thank Tim Elmo Feiten for inviting me to present my Covid paper to Dialectical Systems. The paper can be found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.897215/full OVERVIEW I wrote the article in Spring of 2022, after ruminating for two years on a story that appeared in my local newspaper about the life and death of Shenetta […]

Introduction The last century saw two prevailing trends between dialectics and science. On one side, Western Marxism, which was defined by Lukács rejection of Engels’ philosophy of nature; on the other, those who embraced the dialectics of nature, the dialectical materialists (Foster 2020). While the former tended to conflate science with positivism and therefore ignored […]

Control and orders After the Second World War, some automatisms used for fire control, especially anti-aircraft, inspired a new “Theory of Control”. Norbert Wiener, one of the inventors of these “servo-mechanisms” then extended their theory, not only to original mathematics, based on differential equations of a physico-mathematical type, but also to a new look at […]

In my book, The Entangled Brain, I proposed that it is productive to view the brain and a complex, entangled system, one in which the parts dynamically assemble into coalitions that support complex cognitive–emotional behaviors (Pessoa, 2022a). An entangled system is a deeply context-dependent one in which the function of parts (such as a brain […]

Dialectical thinking has been pervasive in philosophy of developmental biology. After the paradigm of the “genetic program” (Jacob, 1970) according to which an organism is the expression of an authoritative program engraved in heredity, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have emphasized that biological systems result from a dialectical process taking place between genes […]

This post consists of excerpts from Juarrero’s forthcoming book, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (MIT Press 2023). In the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog the scorpion asks the frog to ferry it across the river safely. When the frog hesitates, fearful the scorpion would kill it, the scorpion protests that doing […]

From the Symbolic Species to Incomplete Nature Auguste Nahas  So it’s only in your first book, The Symbolic Species, that you came back to Peirce.  Terrence Deacon Yes. I was thinking about the evolutionary origins of human language. It was very clear to me that you just couldn’t talk about ‘pre-language’. Animals aren’t speaking in […]