In the last article, we have argued for the potential for life to emerge into something with purpose rather than abiding by the mere rule of material existence (existence proceeding…

We concluded the last article by defining the problem of locating meaning in the first instances of biological life. While biological aims and patterns are present, they are not resolved…

In the last article, I made the argument that living beings exist with inefficiencies that make cognition flawed. That is a necessity because that is nature’s only path to adaptation…

We’ve defined cognition in terms of preserving organization, but the chaotic world requires that the organization changes so that it can be preserved if the environment changes. Thus, we are not made for a perfect match to our environment, but as a hypothetical new adaptation, which is inefficient but adaptable.

Article #85. This article discusses how evolutionary processes caused autopoiesis to require higher goal for the organism. The requirement for life to have evolutionary aims, beyond the self-organizing ones, caused adaptation to integrate the need for genetic survival into the knowledge, or relevant assumptions of the world, that continually allow the organism to self-organize. This has implications on how we conceptualize what is essential and how aiming at beyond a goal is a precondition for hitting that goal, even if the outcomes are subtle.

We are, in a real sense, still a single-celled organism: we abide by the rules for which that unity came to exist, how it continues to exist, and what it means to exist. Autopoiesis is the term used for a self-making unity. From the very beginning there has been something which we can call the seed of cognition. This is how the organism is structurally and dynamically in relationship to the environment, and knowledge is how it has adapted to be better coupled, more resilient to variables. The continued existence of the organism relies on the accuracy or truthfulness of these couplings, which are doomed to myopia, just as we are doomed to mortality. The exploration of the biological origins of cognition can have profound implications for how we define knowledge and its purpose, and how we sin or “miss the mark.”