Only by everything, from subatomic particles, to bacteria, to humans enacting with the world, in an embodied way, can they be afforded getting to know it. Enactivism is the primary foundation of our knowledge, our morals, and what connects us to the whole of the living world...and from an emanating/emergence dynamic. Life is meaningful and precious that way. No machine will ever be able to do that nor have a comparable human understanding of it.

The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different.

Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle the problem of relevance. It must turn ill-defined problems into well-defined ones, turn semantics into syntax. This ability to realize relevance is present in all organisms, from bacteria to humans.

It lies at the root of organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness, arising from the particular autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings.

In this article, we show that the process of relevance realization is beyond formalization. It cannot be captured completely by algorithmic approaches.

This implies that organismic agency (and hence cognition as well as consciousness) are at heart not computational in nature.

Instead, we show how the process of relevance is realized by an adaptive and emergent triadic dialectic (a trialectic), which manifests as a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic.

To be alive means to make sense of one’s world. This kind of embodied ecological rationality is a fundamental aspect of life, and a key characteristic that sets it apart from non-living matter.

“Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses.”

They can only mimic (emulate, or simulate) partial aspects of a large world: algorithms cannot identify or solve problems that are not precoded (explicitly or implicitly) by the rules that characterize their small world (Cantwell Smith, 2019). In such a world, everything and nothing is relevant at the same time.

This is why the way organisms come to know their world fundamentally differs from algorithmic problem solving or optimization

Aristotle, in “De Anima,” considered the soul as the distinguishing principle of living systems—their characteristic formal cause that sets them apart from the non-living (Lennox, 2000, 2021; Shields, 2020). This conception is entirely naturalistic: Aristotle’s “soul” (unlike Plato’s) is neither immortal nor transcendental. Instead, it is immanent in the peculiar organization (form) of living matter

Aristotle separates living beings into three discrete categories, according to the structural complexity of their animating principle: (1) All living beings have “nutritive” vital functions, which are required to keep themselves alive, to grow and reproduce. (2) In addition, animals’ souls have an aspect that Aristotle called “sensitive,” associated with their ability to move around and actively perceive the world. (3) Finally, he ascribed “rational” capabilities to humans alone: the capacity of deliberative imagination, and the ability to make rational choices

One needs not practice those capabilities to be human, but having them is what demarcates us from all other living beings.

The animating principle of living systems is now fully naturalized, without reducing it completely to the fundamental laws of physics. We can describe it as the peculiar hierarchical and self-referential organization of the processes involved in autopoiesis

Instead, the dynamics of living systems are radically contingent and (at least to some degree) generated from within their organization itself.

THIS...SELF-ORGANIZATION

Rather, organismic autonomy resides in biological organization, represented by a trialectic interplay of subprocesses—which is collectively impredicative, continuous, and concurrent—each dynamic aspect of the process constantly requiring the other two to be present at all times for its continued existence.

This kind of dynamic and emergent self-constraint is what imbues a living system with agency: the ability to self-manufacture, to set intrinsic goals and pursue them through the choice of appropriate action, and to explore and exploit one’s arena through dynamics that emanate from within the organism’s own organization.

agential emergentism (

THIS...AGENTIAL EMERGENTISM. COGNITIVE ENACTIVISM.

agential emergentism

AGENTIAL ENACTIVISM...COGNITIVE ENACTIVISM.

Seen from this perspective, relevance realization offers itself as the unifying core activity that allows agents to delimit and thereby enact their arena, the part of their large world that matters to them, that enables them to survive and thrive.

Agential emergentism implies that mechanistic explanations are not sufficient to explain all the phenomena of life or its evolution. It accepts that the behavior of an autonomous living agent is characterized by a kind of finality, and therefore calls for some kind of teleological explanation.

EMINATING FROM 'PURPOSE' NOT FROM A CAUSE.

While causal explanations account for how an effect is generated by its immediately preceding causes, naturalistic teleological explanations account for why an organism acts to attain a certain goal. The two are complementary—not the same kind of explanation at all.

CLASSIC + QUANTUM PHYSICS CO-EXIST IN A COMPLEMENTARY WAY.

As argued in section “5 Basic biological anticipation,” anticipation means “pulling the future into the present” through internal predictive models (Louie, 2012, 2017b; Rosen, 2012). These models, and the expectations they represent, are fully actualized at the current moment in time. Second, naturalistic teleological explanation does not presuppose intentionality or cognitive capabilities in organisms that have none. Predictive internal models can be based on simple evolved habituation.

To live, to evolve, means to be engaged in infinite play (Carse, 1986). Infinite play means constantly changing the rules of the game. The evolving universe cannot be captured by a fixed set of elements or properties. This is why algorithms cannot predict radical emergence.

The space of its possibilities—the configuration space of the universe—is constantly co-evolving and expanding with its actual state. It is a large world we live in, not a small one, precisely because we are fragile and limited living beings. The possibilities inherent in our world are indefinite—potentially infinite. And we have a say in what is happening: as agents, we co-construct our arena (and thus our opportunities) as we live our lives and evolve (see also Lewontin, 1983).

This co-constructive dynamic enables the emergence of further higher-level organization (see section “7 To live is to know”). Unlike Aristotle, we do not subdivide the domain of the living into a specific number of discrete categories (or subsystems). Our approach is more gradual, processual, piecemeal, and open-ended. While the first three levels of living organization (autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation) arise directly at the origin of life, additional levels of dynamic organization emerge later as major transitions during the course of evolution

Interesting candidates for such emergent levels are provided by animal cognition and the phenomenon of consciousness in humans and other highly complexified animals (see section “7 To live is to know”).24 This suggests that natural agency, cognition, and consciousness may have evolved along a common theme, each a successively more complex elaboration on its predecessors. At the heart of this emergent evolutionary process lies relevance realization.

Our evolutionary account of relevance realization states that all organisms—from the simplest bacteria to the most sophisticated humans—are able to realize what is relevant in their experienced environment, to delimit their arena. In other words, organisms (through their self-manufacturing and adaptive organization) actualize the process of relevance realization. We have outlined why this process lies at the core of natural agency, cognition, and consciousness. We have also argued that this process cannot be algorithmic or computational in nature. Limited beings in a large world must first define their problems before they can solve them by rule-based inference.

Only living beings can perform it, since it requires autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation. Algorithms, in stark contrast, never even encounter the problem of relevance, since they exist in perfectly well-defined small worlds, where there is only one possible frame and choosing a perspective is never an option

It is the integrated, multi-scale process of adaptation—physiological, behavioral, and evolutionary—that provides the means by which relevance can be realized in a non-algorithmic manner

This kind of opponent processing is the fundamental principle underlying relevance realization

Such adaptive dynamics are neither internally coherent, logical, or rational by default, nor do they require a well-defined (algorithmic or heuristic) approach to problem-solving or optimization (cf. section “3 Relevance realization”). When an organism successfully realizes what is relevant to itself, it always builds on its previous idiosyncratic and contingent history and experience. This is the only way a limited being can make sense of a large world.

In this sense, agential emergentism is closely aligned with the attempt of explaining relevance realization in terms of predictive processing (Andersen et al., 2022). Both see the solution to the problem of relevance in terms of evolutionary, meliorative, and contingent adaptive processes. However, our argument goes further than that.

While predictive processing keeps an open mind toward aspects of large worlds that cannot be formalized, strongly (pan)computationalist approaches to agency and cognition (see, for example, Baluška and Levin, 2016; Levin, 2021; Bongard and Levin, 2023) fail to acknowledge or address the basic insight that relevance realization cannot be of an algorithmic nature.

Basically, these approaches only work within small worlds, where (as we have established here) there is no problem of relevance. This fundamentally limits their applicability and usefulness in the large world of actual organismic experience. While computational explanations (such as those based on predictive processing) can be effective, and there is little doubt that they have led to impressive empirical success, they fail to be properly grounded in light of the deeper philosophical issues discussed in this article.

This sheds important light on current debates about rationality in humans (Riedl and Vervaeke, 2022). Specifically, it lends strong credence to the notions of embodied heuristics (Gigerenzer, 2021) and embodied bounded rationality

Rationality, in the broadest sense of the term, can be defined as “knowing how to do the appropriate thing” in a particular situation (Riedl and Vervaeke, 2022, and references therein). Contra Aristotle, we do not consider humans as a uniquely “rational animal.” “Knowing how to do the appropriate thing” is not limited to human beings. Instead, human rationality can be seen as a powerful cognitive tool that gradually evolved from less intricate forms of natural agency to solve particularly multifaceted problems situated in a particularly complex natural and social environment.

The “embodied” part of rationality means that, in order to solve problems through logical inference, we must first turn ill-defined large-world problems into well-defined small-world ones. And this is what relevance realization does, not only in humans, but in all living organisms: it generates the predictive hypotheses and models we need to be able to engage in abduction.

Computational rationality—with its view that rational reasoning means formal optimization under certain cognitive resource constraints—is no longer sufficient as a basis for general intelligence. Instead, it is just one of many facets that contributes to our ability to understand the world

The problem Frankfurt describes is strikingly similar to that of relevance realization. What we care about, of course, is what is relevant to us. Only if we care about something can we choose the appropriate kind of action. Only by acting in the world can we get to know it. This is the very foundation of our knowledge and our morals. It is also what connects us to the rest of the living world. Life is meaningful and precious that way. No machine will ever understand that.