Piaget’s Paradox: Adaptation, Evolution, and Agency

Abstract

Piaget’s <i>Behaviour and Evolution</i> (1976) sought to reconcile the view that organismal adaptiveness – in the form of equilibration – could contribute to human behavioural, cognitive, and epistemic evolution with the prevailing evolutionary orthodoxy of the time. He was particularly concerned to demonstrate that human behaviour, cognition, and knowledge acquisition could be drivers of human evolution. Piaget hypothesised constructive role for organisms in evolution was significantly at variance with the prevailing modern synthesis orthodoxy of his time (and ours). He looked to Conrad Hal Waddington’s genetic assimilation as a model for how equilibration could generate evolutionary novelties which become fixed by subsequent evolution. I make two claims. Firstly, that Piaget’s appeal to Waddington fails to reconcile his views of human evolution with the modern synthesis. Secondly, the newly emerging agential conception of evolution, in which the purposive activities of organisms are the principal causes of evolution, offers strong support to Piaget’s model of “organisational” evolution.

Self-improvising Memory: a perspective on memories as agential, dynamically-reinterpreting cognitive glue

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Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue

“…Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. "-Chuang Tzu This work is a continued exploration of classical ideas in which the construction of the mind and that of the body are tightly linked [56,57,[273][274][275][276][277]. Future work will explore further the implications of this perspective for the ontology of patterns as agents [29,30], for efforts to unify semantic information and agency in a physics framework [246,[278][279][280][281][282], and for panpsychist views of the mind-matter relationship [283,284].…”

A Systematic Approach to Autonomous Agents

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