A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

5 : Life is self-referential

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Being a part of any scale of Life means that we are also both outside and inside a self-referential [1] loop.

The conscious/cognitive mind evolved as part of that loop and is meant to intelligently participate in it.

Every relationship – including the one you have with your body and the way various "parts" of your body relate to each other – is self-referential. There is a constant reflection of something back in a loop, which creates a sense of identity experienced both from the inside and the outside. The lover and the beloved reflect each other in their eyes and their actions. Two combatants locked in mortal combat are equally attentive to and reflective of each other.

All movement made by your body is self-referential because there has to be a sense of pushing against something (whether that be the ground or water) or moving though something, so the forces create a sense of the inside interacting with the outside (and vice versa). When you lift an arm, the rest of your body has to also act to support that motion, and so in normal movement there is no such thing as an isolated muscle, and almost always a whole-body gesture of force and counter-balancing force. Twisting one way with the upper body requires a counter-twist with the lower body. An embryo forms mainly through differential speeds of cell reproduction, so the internal gestural form is brought about by the areas of expansion pushing against/being pushed by areas that are relatively static and by the cells pushing against each other. Self-referentiality can be quite subtle – so when you go to bed at night, just like any animal that has a nest or a regular place to sleep, there is a memory of being there, there is a small familiar depression caused by repeated nights weight of the body, and perhaps even a smell of self. Every metabolic process or presence of a person in a community eventually comes back to affect itself though the effects it has caused to other parts of the body/community/ecosystem. Self-optimisation (including homeostatic regulation, evolution, etc.) is only possible within a self-referential (self-relational) system.

Self-referentiality is one of the forces that may either stabilise or escalate responses. In mechanics it is well known that self-reference (feedback mechanisms) can either be damped (and stable) or undamped (and so lead to extremes and instability) – a process exemplified by the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse in 1940. Escaping the imprint of a past experience requires that there is a homeostatic balance of self-referentiality in the here-and-now (hence Eckhart Tolle’s "The Power of Now") that "damps" the feedback loops sufficiently that it no longer feeds itself.

The necessity of this balance between feedback vs damping raises questions as to what – of all the possible signs of self we can be aware of – we should refer back to, and how much? Thinking about this (instead of just doing it) even a little too much has caused many problems because thinking allows wild deviations from reality to also be seen as perfectly reasonable options. Animals just don’t think about this topic at all – they just naturally exist in a balanced self-referential state. If you have a dog, you’ll notice it doesn’t look at its bed in confusion like a Greek philosopher, but simply lies in it.

Self-referentiality is the basis for movement, since movement requires coordination of a representation of the physical body relative to an internal sense of orientation to the world. Movement is Life, and it can be argued that the entire central nervous system of self-motile organisms is centred movement, predicting the future so there is a purposeful movement, organising metabolism around the need for movement, noticing the effects of movement, coordinating movement as a continuous stream of proprioceptive feedback, etc. There is no need for any external senses unless we can apply the information they provide by responding to the external world – through movement (also see section on "mirror Neurons").

Self-referentiality in particular underlines the central importance of relationality to all biological systems. All multicellular undifferentiated and complex differentiated organisms exist as a fractal hierarchy of relationship/relationality. It is accurate to say that the cells of a differentiated organism such as a human being are self-symbiotic, and evolved this way as a natural extension of previous symbiotic relationships. As such it is completely natural for the conscious/cognitive mind to also participate in that self-referential system – because what we think of as consciousness has co-evolved with the rest of the human organism and is meant to participate meaningfully in its workings.

I will describe this participation in its various guises, but in its simplest form we have an almost infinite number of feedback loops based on the idea of:

Input → Response

So for example, all of the inputs to your biological body create some kind of metabolic response which changes how the body "feels", which may then (to name just one possibility) be perceived as an emotion. The conscious mind then has a series of choices that – because of many social factors – are often not conscious at all. We can enter and reinforce that feedback loop, we can acknowledge it and consciously decide what is the best response and how to use the emotion (or not), we can choose to ignore it, or we may even be unaware of it if the response is fairly subtle. It is only the conscious recognition and choice that allows us to intelligently enter and participate in the self-referential body. All other responses end up with mental activity being to some degree de-coupled from somatic and metabolic levels of activity. Which may or may not be a good thing. It’s certainly useful at times. But a more permanent de-coupling of mind from body removes a relationality that is a vital part of how our entire organism evolved to optimise and regulate itself.