Dialectical Systems

Inspiring work by Denis Walsh on organism/ environment dialectic, along side @jonothingeb.bsky.social and Stuart Newman ! #ISHPSSB2025 is such a treat !

YouTube video by Originals Originals | Ezequiel Di Paolo: Linguistic Bodies and Sensorimotor Agency

Since its beginnings, the enactive approach has shown how autonomy is scaffolded across biological, sensorimotor, and social dimensions.

This new video interview with Ezequiel Di Paolo tells the story in an accessible way:

youtube.com/watch?v=y4Dz...

An enactive account of labor - Mind & Society This paper aims to build a theoretical bridge between the Marxist and enactive traditions by focusing on the concept of labor. While labor represents a central component of human experience, it remain...

Integrating dialectical insights into cognitive science has driven advances in the enactive approach. This new paper opens a dialogue between enaction and Marxism, highlighting labor as a form of an ecological and distributed cognition

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New edition of Principles of Biological Autonomy - Dialectical Systems Today, we celebrate the new publication of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) by MIT Press, now accompanied by a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson.Varela’s ideas cont...

Today we celebrate the new edition of Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) from MIT Press, with a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo & Evan Thompson, reconnecting Varela's legacy in cognitive science to his theoretical biology

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Embodied & enactive approaches aren’t just about individual cognition — they’re about society.

A new Mind & Society special issue brings enactivism into conversation with ethics, social theory & political philosophy.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Pictures of Varela’s Biological Autonomy book

Really excited to read the reprint of Varela’s Biological Autonomy annotated by @evanthompson.bsky.social. I really want to offer a special topics course focusing on it in an upcoming semester.

Leveraging participatory sense-making and public engagement with science for AI democratization Our paper explores new potentials for productive dialogue between public engagement with science (PEWS) and radical embodied cognitive science (RECS).…

Collin Lucken & Elmo Feiten use the enactive concept of participatory sense-making to ground public science engagement, showing how core ideas from embodied cognition can scale beyond motor coordination to illuminate social cognition in practice

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

Henry Potter and @wiringthebrain.bsky.social challenge reductive views in neuroscience by introducing richer, temporally extended notions of causality and arguing to re-center cognition and the organism as genuine causal agents in behavior

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The audio recording of our fantastic event with Kevin J. Mitchell and Anil Seth, FREE AGENTS: Did Evolution Give Us Free Will?, is now up on our website and Youtube Channel. Go take a listen now!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVr-...

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social

The media circus on the slightly modified wolf mixed with the nonsensical hype of de-extinction only highlights the need to greatly shift how we talk about genes and genetic "information" in popular discourse. Oyama's groundbreaking book and Lewontin's prescient forward should be a starting point.

Information and data will never deliver creativity | Hanne De Jaegher

Information and data will never deliver creativity
— Life, information, and the search for meaning

New piece over at @iai.tv

In which I quote Colwyn Trevarthen and David Bowie.

iai.tv/articles/inf...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c....

𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺: 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲
Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon: Join our discussion with @wiringthebrain.bsky.social
Apr 11 at noon EST USA time.
Here's the paper to get the discussion going:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Everyone welcome but register ->

The Philosophy of Adaptivity - Dialectical Systems At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical ...

Adaptivity is central to life, yet conceptually homeless. While adaptation is tied to selection, adaptivity is an ongoing organismal process—rooted in metabolism, not just evolutionary causation

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

Happy to share that our SI in Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B was accepted 😎

Hybrid Agencies - Crossing Borders between Biological and Artificial Worlds

Co-Edited with Shaun Gallagher and Takashi Ikegami

We have a fantastic line up of contributions coming up soon !

Can natural selection shape the ability to evolve?

New study shows bacteria evolving mutations that speed up adaptation—suggesting mutations are not purely random but can be biased toward adaptive outcomes

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Special Issue of the Journal for General Philosophy of Science) CALL FOR PAPERS: Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Special Issue of the Journal for General Philosophy of Science) Guest editors: Simon Lohse (Nijmegen) & Karim Bschir (St....

CFP: Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Journal for General Philosophy of Science)

Call for papers on comparative philosophy of science is out,, ed;: Simon Lohse and Karim Bschir. Submissions until 31 March 2025.

philevents.org/event/show/1...

Teleology for the twenty-first century: editorial introduction - Synthese Synthese -

Is teleology really obsolete? This special issue explores how goal-directedness remains crucial in biology, mind, and society—despite its exile from analytic philosophy.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#Philosophy #Teleology

New book: Hegel and Heidegger on Time - Dialectical Systems By Ioannis Trisokkas. Published open-access by Cambridge University Press. Summary: This Element discusses Heidegger’s early (1924–1931) reading and critique of Hegel, which revolve around the topic o...

A new study delves into Heidegger’s early critique of Hegel, analysing their divergent views on time and ontology. By examining their distinct conceptions of temporality, the work clarifies the essential differences between their philosophical systems.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

This new paper examines the concept of closure of constraints as a modeling tool. This interpretation clarifies the scope and applicability of biological autonomy, addressing common criticisms regarding the over-liberality of the framework

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New OA paper by Charbel El-Hani et al. explores how living beings are individuated as causal systems via biological autonomy, with closure of constraints as a distinctively biological causal regime that defines system boundaries.

🔗 taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-...

abstract of a philosophical talk

Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/e... - really looking forward to visiting University of Leeds on Friday to give this talk! If you're in the area, come along! 😊

Venice Summer School 2025: Emergence & Evolution of Multi-Level Regulatory Systems Biological systems comprise multiple levels of organization , from molecules, organelles, and cells, to the multi-cellular structures that form whole tissues, organisms, and ultimately societies and …

If you're interested in theory in biology, please consider applying for this EMBO|FEBS Lecture Course "Emergence & Evolution of Multi-Level Regulatory Systems", organized by @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy, @nrepina.bsky.social, and James DiFrisco. meetings.embo.org/event/25-mul... #philsci #evobio

Don't forget to submit your abstract for the European Philosophy of Science Association Conference #EPSA25. The CfP is closing this Friday, 31st Jan. philsci.eu/EPSA25/CfP

The Entangled Brain A new vision of the brain as a fully integrated, networked organ.Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cog...

Reintroduction...
I'm a neuroscientist interested in emotion-motivation-cognition interactions.
Interested in conceptual/foundational issues.
I also wrote a book for general audience readers called The Entangled Brain that is open access at MIT Press.
mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460...
#neuroscience

CFA: 1st International Conference on Anticipatory Systems & Rosennean Complexity

📅 May 22-23, 2025
📍 National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City

📝 Abstract Deadline: Feb 28, 2025
📢 Notification: Mar 10, 2025

🌐 anticipation.philcomp.org

And we draw on analogies with energy-based models to show how situations visually captured by Waddington's landscape can formally arise from such dynamical networks

CFA: Special Issue ‘Prospects for the Science of Enaction’ - Dialectical Systems CFA: Prospects for the Science of Enaction Guest Editors: Russell Meyer, Jodie Russell, Marilyn StenderaDeadline for Abstracts: January 27th The editors invite abstracts for contributions to the Speci...

📝 CFA: Prospects for the Science of Enaction

Special issue of Adaptive Behavior

Deadline: January 27th

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/cfa-s...

New paper by @leonardobich.bsky.social and Bill Bechtel reappraising the original notion of homeostasis, as developed by Bernard and Cannon, beyond the restricted interpretation conveyed to us by cybernetics

doi.org/10.1017/psa....

@leonardobich.bsky.social offers a fresh take on organizational accounts in theoretical biology, tracing their evolution from cybernetics & systems theory to autopoiesis and closure of constraints, with a groundbreaking view on regulation & biological control

www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

We are doing this today at 11.30AM at UNED.
If you are in Madrid, you can join us!
UNED, Edificio de Humanidades, Sala B
blogs.uned.es/metis/semina...