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Your body constantly reorganises itself by varying the degree of central control/adjustment vs local autonomy. Loose coupling is the equivalent of having trustworthy, loyal and self-motivated employees in a company – where you are the CEO and your body is the organisation.
One way that the body adapts is to vary the quantity and content of internal communication, thereby varying the degrees of coherence vs. local autonomy, making things more or less loosely coupled[1]. Simply put, this is how you can decide to walk (and be 95% oblivious to the fact of walking) – whilst looking at the scenery, holding a conversation, remembering your shopping list… Your legs just get on with walking because that’s what you "asked" (or willed or directed) them to do. Your legs and mind have temporarily de-coupled slightly from each other to provide more mental space to move your attention around – as your body moves itself around under your inattentive direction.
Thus, adaptation is a process of de-coupling some systems (to let them get on with their job as best they can) so that others receive priority. In this way, homeostasis is like an insect colony or a large multinational corporation – where individuals can be set off on a task they are competent at, and require a minimum of supervision. This total system creates a vast degree of adaptive flexibility while ensuring that critical internal homeostatic processes are adequately attended to (to keep you alive!) Life is so complex that any kind of hard-coupling between processes tends to generate stress because each process has its own logic and its own domain to tend. So the higher-order the organism the more loosely coupled must be its constituents so that they do not interfere with each others stability[2].
The same happens in well-managed organisations. The whole job becomes more efficient if people can exercise their own initiative, discretion and judgement, referring back occasionally to management or co-workers to make sure they are supported and on-track. Or in families – where (e.g.) one adult goes out to work and comes back again, or the cat goes out and then returns back through the cat flap. The family unit survives the temporary absence, which also serves a useful function.
Everything in your body may be connected together physically but nevertheless is functionally loosely coupled to varying degrees. For instance, your microbiome is very loosely coupled to most of your body because – what effect does wiggling a little finger or listening to a sparrow have on the intestinal environment? But nevertheless it is quite strongly linked to your emotional mood, to available energy levels (digesting food takes energy!) and to the immune system – though not so strongly that (in health) your food intake has more than a marginal effect on everything else. In humans the diaphragm is driven by a diaphragmatic muscle as well as the serratus and intercostal muscle, so (unlike a horse or other ungulate) your cardiovascular physiology, the rate your legs are working at, and your rate of breathing – are nothard-coupled to each other. This is one of several physiological adaptations that allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to be able to pursue and hunt animals that can run much faster than humans.
There have been attempts to translate the organisational system then enables the extraordinary adaptability and efficiency of Life – into human organisational management. Elinor Ostrom attempted to create an organisational system that mimics nature - by designing the "Common Pool Resource" (CPR) management system. Arthur Koestler [3] independently proposed the idea of a "Holon" - leading to a similar system ("Holocracy"). Donald Hoffman extended the idea of Gestalts into small entities that have a sentience of their own [4] when he proposed the idea of "Conscious Agents". Which also further extend Koestler's principle of Holons to account for the entire phenomenon of embodied consciousness.
CPR and Holocracy as management systems have rarely succeeded in real-world applications outside a few specific circumstances because
the necessary balance between communication and control is so delicate, somewhat equivalent to riding a unicycle whilst juggling and
there are inevitably inherent but unrecognised pathological contradictions – differences between corporate agendas and the needs of individuals and communities in 21st-century Western techno-industrial organisations - that do not exist within healthy living organisms.
References & Notes
1 There is some scientific work that points in the same direction as this loose coupling hypothesis. One of the foremost neurology researchers, Dr. Rodolfo Llinás has formulated the theory of Thalamocortical Dysrhythmia. Llinás, R. R., Ribary, U., Jeanmonod, D., Kronberg, E., & Mitra, P. P. (1999). Thalamocortical dysrhythmia: A neurological and neuropsychiatric syndrome characterized by magnetoencephalography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 96(26), 15222–15227. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.96.26.15222 Here, the thalamus and certain cortical functions lose their normal rhythmic/coherent connection, whilst other thalamocortical functions remain normal. Since the thalamus conducts/orchestrates cortical activity (it is a central organiser), the cortex can no longer communicate or receive sensory information freely. An interesting corollary of this research is that cortical (i.e. conscious) activity is largely orchestrated by midbrain (i.e. often non-conscious, mammalian) processing. Mae Wan Ho describes how living organisms have an integrating coherence that defines their thermodynamic state and allows highly efficient energy transfers between processes (and local energy storage) to take place. In particular, energy is coherent and cyclic – i.e. the body recognises a process and its location in that process. Furthermore, there appears to be a quantum-state control of coherence over large (in terms of molecular physics) volumes. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho (1995) Bioenergetics and the Coherence of Organisms. Neuronetwork World 5, pp 733-750, reproduced online at . http://www.i-sis.org.uk/prague.php
2 Heylighen, F., Beigi, S., & Busseniers, E. (2022). The role of self-maintaining resilient reaction networks in the origin and evolution of life. BioSystems Journal, 219, [104720]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2022.104720
3 Holons are "autonomous and self-reliant [sub-elements, that are] also dependent on the greater whole of which they are part". As such the whole (the Holacracy) is inseparable from the Holons from which it is composed, just as they are inseparable from the whole of which they are part. In an organisation there is always the option to add or remove Holons – one can hire and fire, change physical office space, provide IT, etc. In an organism this is not an option so far as the metabolic and homeostatic functions are concerned – except that organisms have done this! Single cells group into colonies, and then differentiate. Individual organisms can group together with their own species. They may form symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other species, such as the relationship between plant roots and mycorrhizae or the microbiome and virome that co-exists in and around all "higher" animals. Or they may use tools or clothing, or dig burrows. The fixity (e.g. an artificial limb or a lifelong partnership) or looseness (e.g. a commercial business partner in another continent who is contacted as a mentor once every few years) of relationship determines the Holocratic structure. Not only is a tool or piece of clothing itself a passive kind of Holon – because it can be picked up and then put down again. But also the capacity to use a tool (or a shelter or to enter a particular relationship) is a Holon, since this ability can be used or not, and when it is used it affects the workings of many other Holons. Clothing changes the energy balance of the body and the degree to which thermoregulation dominates daily activity.
4 Also described well by the idea of Unihipili (as in the writings of Max Freedom Long) – small immensely powerful semi-intelligent but also myopic and blinkered "headless beings" that organise the physical world, and particularly the world of human intention.
