By Rodrigo Cáceres Riquelme This essay is an attempt to refine Mark Pharoah’s synthetic framework (2018) that provides an objective account of the emergence of subjective experience. My interpretation of his argument is a chronology of emergence of phenomena occurring in the following order: (1) autopoietic units or living organisms in continuous structural change due to interactions with their environment bring forth an emergent interface that unites both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the organism-environment couple in a same place or space . We usually denote this interface as ‘mind’, but since theory of mind in western philosophy is plagued by a container-object understanding of mind (as we shall see below), I will refrain from using this concept in order to avoid misunderstanding, and prefer to use the concept of interface. (2) The first aspect that characterizes the construction of this interface through biosemiotic processes is the bringing forth of qualities or qual...

In this post I would like to briefly comment a couple of things about the relationship between representationalism and conceptual frame theory. In a previous post I was explaining how in my years of education in the economics' faculty, I was not able to question the use of concepts within economic theory, specifically regarding the destructive kind of human-nature relationship that it was portraying on its textbooks and equations. In retrospective, I can explain this because, on the one hand, I didn't have the intellectual knowledge to be able to notice the limits of economic theory and how, for example, many cultures establish relationships with their environment that have little to do with exploitation, pollution and destruction, but rather with positive values such as care, respect, reciprocity, interdependence and harmony, all of these usually mediated by a profound ecological knowledge of species of plants and animals in the local environment, treated not as objects to be ...

By Rodrigo Cáceres This article aims to articulate and develop an immediate consequence of the mesological perspective ( Uexküll’s Umweltlehre, Watsuji’s fûdogaku, Berque’s mésologie ) concerning the concept of partiality and its correlates of inclusion and exclusion. Introduction The mesological perspective is a paradigm or epistemological perspective that attempts to go beyond the dualisms that characterize western modernity in order to recosmize our place within mediance , i.e. the structural moment of our human existence. In other words, its purpose is to reintegrate the unity of the dynamic coupling and concrescence (growing together) of the individual with its surroundings. This mesological horizon appears as a deep criticism of the notion of an ‘objective universe’ of objects ‘in themselves’ which has taken hold of the western imaginary since the scientific revolution. The same development towards abstraction has also taken place from the side of the subject, mainly thr...