A Supertheory: Linguistic Networks and Semantic Ethics of Lifelines
Abstract
This chapter develops a supertheory of social systems by integrating embodiment, epigenetic inquiry, and linguistic intentionality. It introduces linguistic epoché, homeodynamic lifelines, and epigenetic research in dialogue with neurodynamic theory of meaning field and the Global Neuronal Workspace. Through this synthesis, the chapter reorients public theology toward a shared ethics of lifelines—an ethics attentive to effective history and the vulnerability of human and nonhuman beings.
Introduction
Niklas Luhmann develops a supertheory of social systems. He defines it as “networks of productions of components that recursively, through their interactions, generate and realize the network that produces them and constitute, in the space in which they exist, the boundaries of the network as components that participate in the realization of the network.” [1]
Before entering the technical discussion, it may help to see this chapter as an attempt to understand language not merely as a symbolic tool but as a living geometry of meaning that links biological, ecological, and cultural processes.
Luhmann constructs a grand theoretical architecture centered on self‑organization, functional differentiation, and the system–environment distinction. His supertheory aspires to universal explanatory reach, extending its scope across diverse domains of complexity. Yet this ambition brings his project into tension with Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. The latter locates meaning, normativity, and social integration in intersubjective practice rather than systemic differentiation. This debate is not simply theoretical; it concerns the deeper question of where meaning actually arises in human life.
In this chapter, the lifeworld expands beyond human consciousness to become an ecological field where biological and cultural histories intertwine. Against this backdrop, I reexamine Luhmann’s account of evolution, phenomenology, and systems communication through the lens of a semantic autopoiesis. The lifeworld is understood here as the ecological horizon of meaning where natural and cultural histories intersect, enabling mutual reconstruction and structural adjacency.
Francisco Varela’s work helps us move from systemic abstraction to an account of meaning grounded in embodied interaction and biological life. To develop this framework, I draw on and strengthen Varela’s reflections on language and meaning through the neurodynamics of meaning. Linguistic intentionality can be redefined not through Habermas’s Ideal Speech Situation but by a critical theory of linguistic epoché. Merleau‑Ponty and David Bohm help clarify how diverse linguistic networks emerge, especially when recognizing non‑Western languages and forms of life.
Meaning emerges through neurodynamic, embodied, and ecological interaction—arising not from abstract representation but from the recursive coupling of organism, environment, and linguistic gesture.
Neuronal activity within homeodynamic lifelines can be understood through the Global Neuronal Workspace, while the coordination among consciousness, percepts, and meaning is explained by embodied and associative neural networks. Lifelines and resilience converge at both micro and macro levels, where semantic ethics of shared lifelines must be developed to protect environments that have been degraded by the crises of the Anthropocene.
Supertheory, Evolution, and Phenomenology
To understand why Luhmann’s theory becomes so expansive, it helps to see how he uses evolution as a universal template for all complex systems. For him, Darwin marks a decisive shift: evolution is no longer grounded in fixed unities or first causes but in the unity of a difference—the structured interplay of variation and selection. This evolutionary model, anticipated in the autopoietic notion of structural drift, is expanded by Luhmann into a general schema for complex systems. Communication, accordingly, becomes the autopoietic element of social systems.[2]
A supertheory operates through guiding distinctions—binary conceptual codes such as system/environment, variation/selection, legal/illegal, effective/ineffective, good/bad. These distinctions help systems organize and manage complexity through recursive self-reference.[3]
In this sense, Luhmann’s systems theory integrates biological, sociological, and epistemological insights—especially autopoiesis and functional differentiation—as mechanisms for reducing the overwhelming complexity of the world. Luhmann also draws on Husserl’s phenomenology of sense, meaning, and horizon, reinterpreting it within a cybernetic framework. Central to this move is his redefinition of intentionality. Luhmann reduces intentionality to the positing of a difference—an operation that generates meaning (Sinn) by distinguishing the actual from the possible.
He writes, “The form in which consciousness executes its operations is called by Husserl (in connection with Brentano) intention.” Luhmann redefines this term in purely functional terms: “Intention is nothing but the positing of a difference.”[4]
This example shows how Luhmann abstracts intentionality away from lived experience and into a formal horizon of possibilities. Luhmann’s reduction of intentionality to Sinn departs from Husserl’s lifeworld‑grounded intentional arc, which remains rooted in embodied experience.
Self‑Reference and Other‑Reference
Luhmann’s systems theory treats evolution as a universal schema for complex systems. By translating Darwin’s variation–selection dynamic into a general grammar of binary distinctions—system/environment, self‑reference/other‑reference, legal/illegal—Luhmann constructs a supertheory that explains how systems maintain themselves through recursive operations.
Yet this abstraction comes at a cost. When intentionality is reduced to the mere positing of a difference, meaning collapses into a functional horizon rather than a lived, embodied relation.Such reduction obscures the biological, experiential, and epigenetic conditions that make communication and meaning possible in the first place.
Systems do not mirror an external reality; rather, they generate meaning through self‑referential operations, producing their own elements internally while distinguishing themselves from an environment they continually respond to. The central theoretical challenge for Luhmann is therefore how closure generates openness: how systems remain operationally closed while simultaneously incorporating environmental complexity into their own operations.[5]
To address these limitations, I turn to an autopoietic theory of linguistic intentionality within the epigenetic landscape—one that restores embodiment, temporality, and biological inscription to the very processes through which meaning and communication emerge.
Structural Coupling, Meaning, and Language
Francisco Varela becomes crucial here because he reconnects autopoiesis to lived experience rather than abstract systems. Varela’s work not only shaped Luhmann’s systems theory but also opened a pathway beyond its abstractions toward an embodied, enactive account of meaning.
Varela defines neurophenomenology as “a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thus placing [itself] in the lineage of the continental tradition of phenomenology.”[6] This approach investigates the structural relationship between mind and consciousness through lived experience while engaging cognitive science via network‑based models of cognition.
Autopoiesis means that a system lives by producing itself, yet its self‑production is always modulated by a history of interactions. Autopoietic systems are operationally closed, guided by internally determined and self‑referential processes.Still, this closure never occurs in isolation; it unfolds through continual coupling with other systems and with the environment.
As Maturana notes, if organization or adaptation is not conserved, the composite unity of the organism begins to disintegrate. Structural coupling thus refers to the conservation of adaptation across recurrent interactions, where no loss of organization occurs even as the system undergoes continual structural change. [7]
“Autopoiesis in the nervous system unfolds through metastable attractor dynamics, epigenetic modulation, and recursive structural coupling that together sustain the organism’s homeodynamic coherence. Within the theory of brain rhythm, no constructive or ‘real‑world’ functions can emerge unless the brain continually adjusts to the external world.
As a complex system, the brain exhibits nonlinear relations among its constituents, history dependence, boundary formation, and amplifying–damping feedback loops.The rhythm of the brain, as emergent self‑organizing autopoiesis, imposes contextual constraints on its neuronal components. At the synaptic level, attractor basins function as the biological matrix of incipient emergence: they gather past firing histories, epigenetic modulation, and structural coupling into coherent patterns that can suddenly reorganize into new semantic structures. Thus, the brain does not merely process information; it generates meaning through the nonlinear stabilization and transformation of synaptic attractors.[8]
In self‑organization within attractor networks, the system is capable of adaptively evolving its structure and function through learning. It goes through a self‑directed process of development, learning, and meaning‑pattern formation. Self‑organizing attractor networks provide a natural way to formalize the individuation of ‘self,’ while the blanket states mediate all interactions necessary for boundary identity to be well‑defined—namely, the external, internal, sensory, and active states of the living system.[9]
This biological–ecological approach shows how the self emerges as semantic individuality, forming its boundary identity through processes of stabilization and canalization.
It extends autopoietic phenomenology by integrating time‑complexity, perturbation theory, and the punctuated theory of evolvability, while opening the supertheory of systems communication beyond the limits of operational closure.
The neurodynamic generation of meaning forms the biological basis of languaging and expands into social meaning networks through mutual structural coupling. Neurodynamics advances Varela’s theory, which did not include a neuronal meaning‑operator.
Maturana’s notion of “languaging” restores this relational dimension by showing how meaning arises from shared histories of interaction. Maturana understands communication as the coordination of behavior through recurrent mutual interactions among living organisms—that is, through mutual structural coupling. This coordination arises through languaging, the ongoing network of structural couplings that link living beings to one another.
Consider a simple example: every evening my dog runs to the kibble container near the refrigerator and looks back at me. I follow her, take out some kibble, and place it in her bowl. This is communication—coordinated behavior shaped by recurrent interactions. If I fail to follow her, she barks as if to say, “Where is my kibble?” That response exemplifies languaging: communication about communication, emerging from our shared history of structural coupling.
This simple example shows that communication begins as relational coordination long before it becomes symbolic representation. Languaging is not symbolic representation but the relational coordination of meaning, the medium through which living beings bring forth a shared world. [10]
Linguistic Network and Suspension
The coordination of behavior arises through mutual interaction, and linguistic behavior becomes its most distinctive expression of meaning. What is unique about human life is our capacity to continually reweave the linguistic networks. We are embedded, engaging one another through recurrent patterns of coordination and shared meaning.
Through language, we bring forth a shared world. Human consciousness is therefore fundamentally social—constituted through linguistic interaction and situated within broader relational and cultural contexts. This perspective strengthens intersubjective communication and resists reducing linguistic practice to the internal codes of a functional subsystem.
To understand this, we must foreground the speaking subject rather than the system’s codes. Linguistic behavior highlights the significance of the embodied speaker. Merleau‑Ponty writes that “language is present in the speaking subject as a system of differentiations between signs and between significations, and that speech operates, in one gesture, the differentiation in these two orders.” [11]
His formulation shows that language is not an abstract code but an embodied act of differentiation—an intertwining of sign, signification, and gesture. Meaning is enacted in the moment of speech, not stored in the system.
Examining the relation between signifier and signified reveals that differentiation occurs at the level of speech acts, which continually modify the existing system of distinctions. Speech acts resemble system language yet are never reducible to it, for system language tends to sediment the signified.
This leads to a linguistic epoché—a suspension of what is taken for granted in system language. Linguistic epoché invites us to pause habitual speech so we can rediscover how language first opens a world. It brackets historically transmitted and culturally sedimented forms of speech in order to return to the originary, embodied act of speaking in relation to the world. Meaning arises in the gesture of speech itself, shaped by the speaker’s embodied situation and relational engagement with others. [12]
At this point, David Bohm’s notion of soma‑significance becomes important, especially when read through Merleau‑Ponty’s ontology of linguistic intentionality. Bohm describes a reciprocal movement in which somatic processes and significative unfolding continually shape one another—a dynamic that fits naturally within embodied phenomenology.
The implicate order is not a cosmic metaphysics but a phenomenological account of how meaning is organized within soma‑significant relations. Each somatic unfolding generates further layers of significance, culminating in intentional action that emerges from the whole meaning of a situation. [13]
Bohm addresses the relation between the physical and the mental by revealing the “unknown whole” within the field of reality. In the ongoing web of soma‑significant and signa‑somatic activity, structural coupling becomes the basis of social life; communication is this activity. His proposed rheomode—a flowing mode of language—resists the fragmentation of the subject–verb–object pattern by showing how each expression belongs to a wider contextual movement. Because every act of perception involves grasping a totality, language must reflect this holistic flow. [14]
The whole significance of a situation gives rise to intention, grounding linguistic intentionality in embodied meaning. This dynamic aligns with Merleau‑Ponty’s view that perception is always oriented by meaning and that intention is inseparable from the embodied horizon in which meaning appears. Linguistic epoché thus becomes an autopoietic skill that foregrounds speech acts as loci of differentiation within diverse linguistic networks.
As a result, language becomes a site where historical wounds, memories, and possibilities surface. Meaning does not hide behind the signifier; the signified does not stand behind it as deferred meaning. Instead, meaning emerges through the signifier itself within the relational field of appearance. This becomes especially clear in non‑Western linguistic worlds, where the signifier carries the density of the lived world itself—its historical trajectories and cultural practices—and cannot be reduced to a position within a Western symbolic order.
Linguistic Intentionality and the Ideal Speech Situation
Drawing on Merleau‑Ponty’s account of linguistic intentionality, I argue that Luhmann’s systems theory must undergo a linguistic suspension whenever communication risks undermining the embodied significance of the speaking subject within the system. This perspective challenges Habermas’s Ideal Speech Situation, which seeks universal consensus through rational, coercion‑free argumentation. Habermas envisions communicative rationality as a counterforce to the colonization of the lifeworld by systemic imperatives such as bureaucracy, the economy, and mass media.[15]
While Habermas aims to protect democratic discourse, his model cannot fully account for the plurality of language games or the unequal linguistic and social conditions that shape real communication. Linguistic epoché foregrounds effective history, power, and displaced narratives, becoming an ethical practice that allows marginalized voices to re‑enter the communicative field.
A critical theory of suspension—understood as a method of opening and integration—draws on genealogy to rewrite the present through effective history and anamnestic reasoning, as articulated by Walter Benjamin. [16]
The archeological skill of transposition concerns temporality as an adjacency between past and future, where time becomes vivid through radical reflection and its retroactive effect. The structure of time involves the intentionality of language, which is oriented toward the future; prolepsis becomes a future‑laden linguistic act that rewrites the present in fidelity to the past. In this movement, the past stands in relational adjacency to the present—not as revision but as ethical proximity. Proleptic language prevents the repetition of injustice and clarifies the flow of time from the future, drawing the present forward through immanent critique and a project of emancipation. Within this circularity, the Ideal Speech Situation becomes provincialized, for it obscures linguistic intentionality, power relations, and cultural stratification.[17]
Autopoiesis and Temporality within Homeodynamic Lifelines
Language never separates itself from the contexts in which it is used and formed. Linguistic activity is always embedded within a form of life. Its intentionality is grounded in the dynamic interplay among lifelines that are distributed and stratified across society, culture, and ecology. These lifelines—autopoietic, epigenetic, ecological, and cultural—form the relational matrix that makes communication possible, enabling interaction between organisms and their environments across developmental and historical time.
Varela conceptualizes the nervous system as a recursive network embedded within an autonomous, self‑regulating, homeodynamic organism. Steven Rose’s Lifelines parallels this view by rejecting genetic determinism and emphasizing homeodynamics over static homeostasis. In both accounts, living systems exist in continuous, dynamic flow, intrinsically coupled with their environments. Autonomy, plasticity, and embodiment replace mechanistic models of fixed responses.
Together, Varela and Rose illuminate autopoiesis within homeodynamic lifelines: living systems bring forth meaning through recursive neural activity, embodied action, and ecological embeddedness. This provides the biological and phenomenological grounding for a relational emergent ethics—one that understands linguistic intentionality, communication, and responsibility as rooted in the lifelines that sustain and co‑constitute life. [18]
The neurodynamic perspective shows that meaning emerges at the synaptic level, where repeated synaptic crossings generate attractor basins. These basins are not fixed structures but virtual, metastable patterns formed through millions of recurrent crossings within the peri‑synaptic space between adjacent neurons. As these patterns stabilize, they function as proto‑semantic operators—dynamic constraints that shape the brain’s autopoietic organization and enable the emergence of meaning. [19]
A lifeline, understood as an organism’s developmental trajectory, emerges from the continuous interaction among genes, cells, bodies, and environments in the ongoing generation of meaning. This dynamic view resonates with autopoiesis, structural drift, and relational theories of meaning and language.
Rose’s concept of the lifeline provides the biological grounding for this dynamic: systems maintain coherence not by remaining the same but by continually reorganizing themselves within shifting ecological and developmental conditions. Homeodynamic lifelines are influenced by epigenetic mechanisms that are themselves shaped by social–ecological resilience. Resilience describes systems that persist through change by navigating patterned landscapes of attractor basins, where identity is conserved, reorganized, or transformed. [20]
In other words, social–ecological systems can persist through nonlinear change, navigating thresholds and tipping points without losing coherence. Yet disturbances such as fires or floods can push a system into a new basin of attraction—often through shifts in biodiversity and connectivity with surrounding areas—permanently altering its trajectory. Lifelines are temporally structured within cybernetic resilience, where irreversibility intertwines with punctuated evolvability in the quest to restore lost time, allowing lost life to be repositioned within bursts of innovation at a higher level. Time itself is in search of meaning.
My biological theory of time does not recover lost time by returning to the past. Instead, the victims of the past and the extinction of species are re‑positioned within emergent life through stabilization in attractor basins, where their lost trajectories are rearranged and rediscovered as meaning. This is the very movement of evolution.
Neuronal Theory and the Meaning Field
Neurons form lifelines through their specialized morphology—cell bodies, dendrites, and axons—creating pathways for synaptic communication that integrate sensory input, motor coordination, and interneuronal processing. Synapses serve as the structural sites of this communication, linking neural activity to embodied action in the construction of meaning.
The Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) offers a functional expression of this autopoietic organization. Conscious access emerges when distributed neural assemblies ignite into a globally coordinated pattern across the associative cortex. [21] This ignition is not an abstract computational event but is rooted in the organism’s embodied lifeline, and GNW is best understood as a functional articulation of processes grounded in the homeodynamic geometry of life and meaning.
Walter Freeman’s neurodynamic theory deepens this account. Coordinated action potentials across divergent pathways allow percepts to integrate past experience, current context, and future expectation. In this process, “Percepts re‑shape the attractor landscapes and update them. This comprises a neural mechanism for the construction of meaning.”[22]
The cortex itself is a vast network of modules, with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. As neural networks adapt through learning by matching features, modular networks form collections of episodic memories by modifying synaptic strengths. These memory structures are sustained by long‑range axons that link cortical modules. [23]
Percepts do not simply enter a pre‑given neural structure; they participate in forming and modulating the attractor landscape or basin, which functions as a field of meaning. The landscape is a long‑term product of learning and experience—a neural form of life—yet it is continuously reshaped in the milliseconds before new input arrives.
Bernd‑Olaf Küppers has argued that biological information is inherently semantic, concerned with how molecules acquire meaning within contextual biochemical environments. Genetic instructions are expressed through interactions between the genome and its physical and chemical surroundings, and the genetic code mediates the translation of genotype into phenotype. The concept of information was introduced into molecular biology to describe this interplay. [24]
My semantic field theory, however, begins at the neuronal and embodied levels, engaging autopoietic phenomenology and its lived horizon. It extends beyond molecular biology into a multilayered geometry of life, integrating epigenetic lifelines stratified across biological, ecological, cultural, and symbolic domains together with information geometry.
Meaning is generated from local mean fields of dendritic activity within mesoscopic and macroscopic neuronal populations. It spreads through the neuronal field like a wave, propagating into the internal global network through conscious access. Coordinated synaptic activity produces phase transitions that activate attractor landscapes within adjacent neural assemblies. These landscapes are formed by the synaptic connectivity matrix as their structural scaffolding, and meaning is expressed in population‑level oscillatory or amplitude‑modulation (AM) patterns. These neuronal signatures of collective activity and synchrony are observable in electroencephalograms (EEG). [25]
Perception unfolds through the selection of goal‑directed actions, expressed in motor commands that project into the brainstem and spinal cord, completing the perception–action loop. Meaning derives from intention, which is the brain’s creation and projection of alternative future states—whether desired or feared. [26]If meaning arises from the projection of alternative future states, it retains a temporal structure within consciousness, extrapolating from the unfulfilled horizon of the lifeworld within the vivid present toward its adjacent possibilities through perception, embodiment, and looking forward direction.
Neuroepigenetics and Semantic Ethics of Lifelines
Semantic realism explains the emergence of consciousness, perception, and meaning through attractor dynamics, arguing that this meaning field provides the basis for global broadcasting. Neuroepigenetics shows how lived experience reshapes neural architecture, revealing the biological depth of meaning making. Varela’s epistemological orientation recenters the organism as the locus of cognition and meaning making, resonating deeply with Steven Rose’s theory of lifelines. [27]
Both thinkers advance a relational and developmental view of life, highlighting how epigenetic processes shape human experience across individual development and evolutionary time. Rose, drawing on C. H. Waddington’s pioneering work, shows that genes do not operate in isolation; Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape” illustrates how developmental pathways shift under the combined influence of genetic potentials and environmental pressures. Varela reinforces this relational view by showing that genetic information functions only within the organism’s metabolic network: “It is clear, however, that DNA triplets are capable of predictably specifying an amino acid in a protein, if and only if they are embedded in the cell’s metabolism, that is, in the thousands of enzymatic regulations in a complex chemical network.” [28]
Neuroepigenetics extends this relational view into the nervous system. DNA methylation, histone modification, and chromatin remodeling shape how neurons grow, adapt, and form the dendritic structures essential for learning and memory. The epigenome becomes the interface between brain development and lived experience, modulating gene expression in response to physiological and environmental demands. [29]
Hormonal signals further modulate these processes, leaving lasting marks on the brain’s stress‑response systems and influencing emotional regulation, memory, and resilience. Experiences—whether nurturing or traumatic—reshape dendritic architecture and synaptic plasticity, and some epigenetic modifications can even be transmitted across generations. Neural development thus emerges from the organism’s ongoing structural coupling with its environment.
This leads to what I call the autopoietic–epigenetic constellation, or epi‑autopoiesis. Epi‑autopoiesis forms the structural backbone of this geometry of life, with epi‑poietic naming its generative mode. Here, sympoiesis is not an alternative to autopoiesis but a relational modality within epi‑autopoiesis.[30]
Semantic realism emphasizes a scientific and hermeneutical scope for epi‑autopoiesis, requiring a genealogy of multiple realities—biological, social, ecological, and political—each embedded within stratified lifelines. This framework offers a biologically grounded account of evolution while calling for an ecological ethics of lifelines, situating biological integrity within the wider context of social and ecological crisis.
Extending this insight, a shared ethics of lifelines becomes essential for social–ecological resilience, especially for those whose lifelines are rendered vulnerable or foreclosed. Because lifelines are unequally protected and valued, such an ethics affirms the interdependent web of life and the moral responsibility to sustain the conditions that allow all lifelines to flourish.
Such an ethics advances ecological anthropology and an epigenetic ontology at the interface of history and nature, where human and nonhuman trajectories co‑evolve. Symbiotic life and renewed empathy emerge as ethical imperatives for sustaining the shared lifeworld of the Anthropocene—a shared ethics of lifelines capable of sustaining planetary epigenetic autopoiesis in an age of ecological disruption.
Coda
An autopoietic theory of lifelines articulates a semantic ecology and advances an embodied dialectics of linguistic intentionality and epoché, suspending Luhmann’s supertheory, which rests on an abstract and irreversible distinction between system and environment. Autopoietic–epigenetic theory reframes linguistic intentionality as a relational and emergent process within structural coupling grounded in embodiment, ecological inscription, and cultural stratification—dimensions that Habermas’s procedural model cannot accommodate.
Linguistic suspension now stands in structural resonance with Rose’s lifeline and Folke’s resilience theory: the former discloses the geometry of life, while the latter reveals the geometry of ecological transformation. Together they form the core of semantic realism and a public theology of living systems.
Linguistic intentionality is foregrounded in a neurobiological theory of meaning, pointing to a pre‑discursive and embodied field in which meaning arises through gesture, structural coupling, and the differentiation of signifier and signified. A semantic model of linguistic intentionality exposes the embodied, stratified, and culturally differentiated conditions of speech and communication that precede and exceed procedural norms.
From a neurodynamic perspective, meaning precedes language: it emerges within synaptic attractor basins long before symbolic communication arises. The countless stabilization processes of synaptic crossings constitute the microscopic structure of time within neurodynamics. A structural theory of living systems brings together autopoiesis in neural networks and the dynamics of a self‑regulating, homeodynamic organism. Lifelines are therefore not only biological but also social, ecological, and political; they are unequally supported, unequally threatened, and unequally repaired.
For humans, time acquires an ontological character through perception, becoming meaningful rather than merely sequential. When the future enters the present, consciousness becomes futurized, generating new forms of life within the punctuated temporality of the attractor basin. In this movement, time is woven into the structure of meaning, shaping the innovation of life. Time fluctuates with external perturbations, co‑creating resilience and meaning as it unfolds.
What ecosystems undergo through dissipative innovation and punctuated transitions is mirrored in the nervous system at the level of synaptic attractors. Here, epi‑autopoiesis, structural coupling, and the lifeline converge, revealing that the same basin‑shifting dynamics that shape ecological systems also unfold within the synaptic field, where new patterns of life and meaning are brought forth.
In sum, a semantic theory of autopoiesis provides the conceptual architecture through which epigenetic lifelines, ecological interdependence, and effective history can be interpreted as dimensions of embodied agency and a shared ethics of lifelines for a public theology of living systems and its semantic individuality grounded in the life‑field.
[1] Luhmann, Social Systems, xx.
[2] Ibid., 230–250.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Cited in Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems, 182.
[5] Luhmann, Social Systems, 9.
[6] Varela, “NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 4, (1996), 330-49.
[7] Maturana, et al., Autopoiesis and Cognition, xxi.
[8] Buzsáki, Rhythms of the Brain, 13-14.
[9] Tamas Spisak and Karl Friston, “Self‑orthogonalizing attractor neural networks emerging from the free energy principle,” 1–3.
[10] Alexey Kravchenko, “How Humberto Maturana’s Biology of Cognition Can Revive the Language Sciences.” Constructivist Foundations 6, no. 3 (2011): 352–362.
[11] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 183. See James Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism, 108.
[12] Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 114-116.
[13] Ibid., 166.
[14] Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 46.
[15] Habermas, “Truth Theories.” In On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke, 21–22.
[16] Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed., Hannah Arendt, 253–264.
[17] Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 305–399.
[18] Varela, et al, The Embodied Mind, 96–162.
[19] Freeman, “A neurobiological theory of meaning in perception…” International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos 13 (2003):1-28.
[20] Folke, C., et al. Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability (Ecology and Society 15(4):20.
[22] Freeman, “A neurobiological theory of meaning in perception…” 21.
[21] Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain.
[23] Ibid., 8.
[24] Küppers, The Language of Living Matter, x.
[25] Freeman, “A neurobiological theory of meaning in perception…” 13-14.
[26] Ibid., 3-4.
[27] “An Interview with Francisco Varela,” Wild Duck Review (2000).
[28] Valera, et al., The Embodied Mind, 101.
[29] Catherine J. Peña, “Epigenetic regulation of brain development, plasticity, and response to early-life stress,” Neuropsychopharmacology (2026) 51:5–15.
[30] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58–98.