Abstract

The biocognitive theory presented in this paper offers an alternative to the attribution of cause perpetuated by the life sciences in our western culture. Historically, biology has based its epistemology on physics to understand life, whereas cognitive science has grounded its ontology in a convergence of biology, physics, and philosophy to provide models of self that range from a passive acceptance of an outside world to the active creation of an inner world. While Newtonian physics has served us well in the physical sciences, the life sciences continue to embrace the limitations of its reductionism without advancing to the more inclusive concepts offered by complexity and quantum theories. As long as the biological and cognitive sciences remain married to Newtonian physics and Cartesian philosophy, mind will be relegated to an epiphenomenon of biology that will continue to separate cognitive processes from biological functions. Rather than choosing between upward causality that explains cause from the simplest level of the organism and downward causality that explains it from the most complex to the simplest, biocognitive theory offers contextual coemergence where the simultaneous resonance between fields of bioinformation is the genesis of cause. In this model of coemergent causality, cognition, biology, and cultural history are viewed as biocognitions that communicate within a bioinformational field that has both linear processes in Euclidian geometry and non-linear processes in fractal geometry. Because of the simultaneous and reciprocal nature of mind and body communication, it is argued that biology creates thought and thought creates biology. Just as mind and body cannot be separated, to attempt a separation of mind and world would create an artificial split between observer and observation that assumes we can “step out” of the world we are attempting to observe