PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM: A VIEW FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE THEORY OF SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY

Punctuated equilibrium is regarded as the state of natural and social systems manifested in occasional intense, quick bursts of activity. Within the framework of the theory of self-organized criticality (SOC), punctuated equilibrium can be formalized as pink noise. SOC theory, having been developed by the end of 1980s, was originally intended to explain natural science phenomena. However, soon after its presentation, it began to spread across the social and humanitarian field of knowledge. Critical state is one on the brink of a bifurcation point. It turns out that some systems can stay in a state of permanent choice for a fairly long time. The author presents the examples of punctuated equilibrium revealed in computer experiments with artificial societies, as well as through empirical observation (particularly, in the dynamics of voting patterns, internet activity, and protest movements in the past and present). The key concepts of SOC theory and tools for pink noise identification are laid out. The sandpile model has been given special attention. Certain papers have been analyzed in which SOC theory was applied to gain some political science knowledge. According to SOC, in certain cases, there is no need to search for some significant extraordinary factor to shed light on explosive social transformations (including revolutions and other bursts of social and political activity). Social transformations can be induced by quite ordinary - and thus undistinguished - properties of systems, micro-level pro- cesses, and local impulses. SOC theory, therefore, refocuses the attention of researchers from the search for direct causes of events to the identification of states of the subject that generates these events.

DISCOURSE, LANGUAGE (LANGUE), LANGUAGE ACTIVITY (LANGAGE)

We suggest a new approach to discourse, according to which it is analyzed as a research construct that emerges when language is described as a process in functioning and language structures considered in relation to text / statement. At the same time, the conditions due to which these correlations are possible, and these relations themselves are explicated. These conditions and procedures can be designated as a discourse. As relationships or functions, they combine various aspects of speech activity. Since these aspects are not material entities, but abstractions, the relations between them can be represented in the form of such an abstract object as a semiotic borderline, defined by analogy with the mathematical one - as a set of lines whose points belong to both adjacent sets. But this analogy can also be interpreted biologically - then this borderline appears as a membrane, and the relations between different domains become lines not only of the connection but also of the interpenetration of the elements and rules of one area into another. An observer, being located on this border, can be simultaneously transferred both to language, to the world, and to speech, he / she is able to detect domains connected through this border. So in the process of description, it becomes possible to represent the discourse in the form of an observable object and substitute relations (discourse) with its constituents (arguments) - language, world, speech, text, life form). Hence, such definitions as «text in the context of its actualization», «language in real time», «speech immersed in life», «person in language», may appear, where the discourse is identified through the members of the relationship that it connects.

AN ESSAY ON STUDYING POWER AT THE INTERFACE OF POLITICS AND BIOLOGY

The article addresses the problem of Cartesian dualism, understood as an attempt to separate and interconnect «mind» and «body» and related to the idea of continuity between biological and social, as well as between animal and human. As an example of how complex research of human sociality can help us to find a «bridge» between «mind» and «body», and to highlight their interplay, we describe an experience of the biopolitical research and the reconceptualization of Political Authority. The results and outputs of the research can be put in use in the field of political science: «body»-verifications are giving us new arguments to support the traditional normative «mind»-theory of Democratic Authority, we can empirically clarify the terminology and concepts, and also bring on a template to research other classical «problems» of political philosophy, testing them with the new data.

CARTESIAN MOMENT. NEW DISCOURSE ON STYLES AND METHODS IN THE OLD-FASHIONED MANNER OF DESCARTES

The author explains the purport of the article. He intends to emulate the style of Descartes to the extent possible in the contemporary setup. In his 10 meditations the author attempts to grasp vital capacities of Descartes’ method and to that effect to better understand his intellectual achievements and their current relevance. Cartesian moment or creative impact of Descartes upon dynamics of intellectual advancement is a key moment (point in time) that separates old scholastic ways of reasoning from modern ones as Martin Heidegger amply affirmed in his «The Age of the World Picture». Modern way not only relies on ratio but also on individual creative abilities and personal authorship of an investigator. Hence the author explores creative capabilities of a modern researcher typified by Descartes. The author defines Cartesian methodological practice (style, manner) as distinctly personalized and to that effect subjective or self-centered. This novel methodological artifice of Descartes is coupled with typically modern distinction between subjective (personally biased) and subjectival (pertaining to an independent agency of emancipating personality or subject). Investigating self of Descartes intentionally exploits typically modern cognitive and social property of being a free cognitive agent. It may be called cognitive agency or subjectness ( субъектность , subjectnost’ ) as a counterpart to subjectivity ( субъективность , subjectivnost’ ). Respectively Heidegger while discussing unique Cartesian achievement introduces along a casual notion of subjectivity self-coined terms of Subjektsein (subject-object relations, Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung) and Subjektität (resolute self-awareness, unbedingtes Sichwissen). It is characteristic that Heidegger carefully discriminates spontaneous personally biased Ichheit and Egoismus from consistently individually conceived Ichhaft. The article examines two epitomes of subjectness: the initial Cartesian archetype and recent Wittgensteinian prototype. While Descartes instrumentally uses it to reshape scholastic thought into a modern metaphysics (cf. «Meditationes de Prima Philosophia» of 1641 or its authorized French translation of 1647 «Les méditations métaphysiques» ), Wittgenstein respectively elaborates his own brand of philosophy of logic (cf. « Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung » of 1921). With Descartes his actual person is nothing but ‘being on his own’ ( ens per se ). Pragmatically this difference transmutes into operation of the actual whole self of the researcher ( me totum ) with development of polar metaphysical abstractions of non-bodily and non-extensive res cogitans and bodily and non-thinking res extensa . With Wittgenstein the equally pivotal personality of researcher reduces into an intermediator (border, Grenze ) between the world and the transcendental logic. As a result, metaphysical subject (metaphysisches Subjekt) or solipsist me (Ich des Solipsismus) shrinks into a non-extensive dot (Punkt) or eye (Auge) observing the world from outside. While new-born Cartesian cognitive agent has to split within itself into res cogitans and res extensa Descartes’ disciples and followers simply ignore bodily dimension. They radically reduce the investigating self to a detached all-powerful Reason turning subjectival Cartesianism of its founder into a non-subjectival version of Cartesianism, supposedly objective and rational. Wittgenstein helps the investigator (his personal self) come back again but at the expense of limiting himself to a border between the logic and the world able to reconstruct both the logic and the world with incessant language games. In his fifth meditation the author emulates both the style and the way of reasoning typical for Descartes. He remembers his student years in Moscow Lomonosov University. First he has mastered phonological principle of distinctive features and then successfully extended its use beyond linguistics into social studies and political science. Being taught dual - fast and slow reading he learnt to skip and then to restore details. The third personal cognitive discretion utilized in investigation of any scholarly issue is the focus on its emergence, further metamorphoses and evolution. The first two have clear Cartesian formation, while the third helps them both to gain dynamism and discretions. Next meditation deals with Descartes’ idea of the (definite article) method and specific rules for applying inherent inventiveness ( rēgulae ad directionem ingenii ). This Cartesian link implies essential affinity between universal instrumentality (organon) of scientific exploration and fundamental (primeval and primitive) cognitive abilities of humans and other species. Such a polarized dual distinction has helped the Center of advanced methodologies to identify three complex transdisciplinary organons (metretics, morphetics and semiotics) rooted in the elementary cognitive abilities to tell intensity of sensations, to recognize patterns and to grasp functional relevance, potentially meaning. Simplex-complex transformations devised by the Center are instrumental in linking the utmostly complex phenomena to equally simple ones through the range of intermediate manifestations and forms. The results of the analytical transformations can be revealed in the sequences of modules related to a master prototype model. The concluding two meditations deal with cognition and its modes as well as the issue of overcoming of Cartesian dualism. The author insists that cognitive scholars’ ambitions to overcome Cartesian dualism are vain. It is Descartes’ method and style - as far as we can grasp them - that can help to overcome fatal schemes ascribed into notorious mind - body problem. The core of Descartes’ thinking is the continuous preoccupation with embodiment of the rational and emotional aspects of his whole self (total me) and disembodiment of its material aspects.

БЕРНАРДО КАСТРУП: Я БЫ ПОСПОРИЛ С ДЕКАРТОМ - ДУАЛЬНОСТИ ДВИЖУТ ВСЕЛЕННОЙ, НО В МЕТАФИЗИЧЕСКОМ ДУАЛИЗМЕ СУБСТАНЦИЙ НЕТ НЕОБХОДИМОСТИ

В разговоре с Бернардо Каструпом участвовали главный редактор ежегодника МЕТОД Михаил Ильин и научный сотрудник ИНИОН РАН Иван Фомин . Беседа состоялась в Эйндховене 25 октября 2019 г. Публикуется с исправлениями и дополнениями.

REVOLUTIONARY BIOSEMIOTICS IN MOSCOW (VERY SUBJECTIVE NOTES FROM A TARTU GRADUATE STUDENT)

This essay is dedicated to my impressions and reflections on the two conferences in Moscow in which I participated in 2019. The first of them is the 19th Gathering in Biosemiotics. The second conference was called «Evolution of Human Capacities to Know and to Act». Both events demonstrated groundbreaking, revolutionary shifts emerging in biosemiotics.

INCOMPLETE NATURE AND SELF - BODY PROBLEM: EMERGENTIST TRANSCENDENCE OF THE DUALISM OF SPIRIT AND MATTER

The article presents an overview of the key arguments of Terrence Deacon's theory of how mind emerged from matter. Deacon’s emergentism is analyzed as a way of refocusing the «hard problem» of consciousness. He suggests considering the phenomenon of consciousness as a dynamic coupling of mutually constraining processes. Such coupling is the defining feature of the subjective self and other teleodynamic phenomena. So self cannot be found as something embodied in existing material substrates. Consciousness is not present in such substrates themselves, but in the way different processes unfolding in these substrates constrain each other. Deacon shows that even looking at the simplest forms of life (autogens) one can observe that in them each part, interacting with other parts, creates the whole, and the whole as a synergetic complex makes possible the reproduction of its parts. The same principle underlies the organization of subjective consciousness, as subjective consciousness is hierarchically entangled with other levels of sentience. Thus, Deacon's emergentism is an attempt to take seriously the problem of the interrelation of spirit and matter by not simply to disregarding explanations that refer to the spiritual substance, but by offering the models of consciousness, sentience and purposiveness that could convincingly solve fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness in an alternative way. It is also an attempt to avoid the «naturalistic dualism» of David Chalmers, which involves splitting material information into physical and phenomenal aspects. According to Deacon, in explaining subjective self, one can do without both Cartesian spiritual substance and Chalmers' phenomenal information, but then what is necessary is to acknowledge the significance of absential phenomena (the phenomena that are intrinsically existing in relation to something missing, separate or nonexistent).

Descartes' thesis about the separation of mind and body is usually quite severely criticized in the modern cognitive science in general and philosophy of mind in particular. This thesis serves as an important starting point for the development of the conception of embodied and enacted cognition, which has gained extraordinary popularity to date. This article substantiates that the solution to the mind - body problem proposed by Descartes is not at all so unequivocal and categorical, his position is much more subtle and sophisticated than it often seems to us. The article discusses the Descartes’ arguments both in favor of the «great separation between mind and body», and against it. It is shown that Descartes’ thoughts about the mutual influence of the states of the body and phenomena of mind, about the close coupling of mind and body and their unity, about the connection of mind with bodily action are in line with the modern conception of embodied and enactive cognition and may well be considered as a forerunner for its development. Descartes' deep analytical mind, which allowed him to create a method and which gave scientists an attitude to doubt everything in search of scientific truths, allowed him to carefully evaluate his own theses, carrying out various, including opposing, argumentative lines of thought. The understanding the real contribution of Descartes is essential for the further development of the conception of embodied and enactive cognition, which has considerable methodological strength in various fields of social and humanitarian research.

Descartes' thesis about the separation of mind and body is usually quite severely criticized in the modern cognitive science in general and philosophy of mind in particular. This thesis serves as an important starting point for the development of the conception of embodied and enacted cognition, which has gained extraordinary popularity to date. This article substantiates that the solution to the mind - body problem proposed by Descartes is not at all so unequivocal and categorical, his position is much more subtle and sophisticated than it often seems to us. The article discusses the Descartes’ arguments both in favor of the «great separation between mind and body», and against it. It is shown that Descartes’ thoughts about the mutual influence of the states of the body and phenomena of mind, about the close coupling of mind and body and their unity, about the connection of mind with bodily action are in line with the modern conception of embodied and enactive cognition and may well be considered as a forerunner for its development. Descartes' deep analytical mind, which allowed him to create a method and which gave scientists an attitude to doubt everything in search of scientific truths, allowed him to carefully evaluate his own theses, carrying out various, including opposing, argumentative lines of thought. The understanding the real contribution of Descartes is essential for the further development of the conception of embodied and enactive cognition, which has considerable methodological strength in various fields of social and humanitarian research.

REPRESENTATIONS: RICH OR PARTIAL?

This article focuses on how the idea of mental representations is understood in an influential modern research program in cognitive science - the program of predictive processing or predictive coding. It is pointed out that, as with earlier programs of classical cognitivism and connectionism, the idea of mental representations is also a crucial element of the program of predictive processing. According to the key assumption of this program, cognition is based on a rich internal generative model of reality that produces predictive perceptual and motor representations of what the organism can interact with at the next moment. The article considers possible challenges to this understanding of mental representations, coming from research in modern vision science and externalist approaches to memory, both in perception and in human practices, mediated by special intellectual artifacts. It is argued that there are no fundamental contradictions between these frameworks, which opens up opportunities for their interaction and integration.