ACADEMIA Letters

Life and cognition. A postscript

Arturo Carsetti

For Monod, the living being is a teleonomic object endowed with a project realized in its struc-
ture and through the influence of its performances, an object which reproduces itself invariant.
Teleonomy, autonomous morphogenesis and, invariance are, therefore, the characteristics of
this object whose expression and realization is its own structure. But for each expression of
structure, there is necessarily a definite amount of information associated with it. An ex-
pressed information, in turn, presupposes a “broadcaster”, a broadcaster which, for Monod,
is an object identical to the first according to the laws of invariance. The teleonomic project
is nothing other than the transmission of the content of invariance defined, precisely, as that
quantity of information that, transmitted from one generation to another, ensures the conserva-
tion of the structure. This is the kingdom of Necessity in which Chance comes to creep in, thus
seizing, each time, the opportunity for adequate selection. It is in such a frame of reference
that Nature finally appears to Monod (in accordance with his reinterpretation of Democritus)
as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization (1).
However, while Monod was obliged to incorporate his brilliant intuitions into the frame-
work of first-order cybernetics and a theory of information with an exclusively syntactic char-
acter such as that defined by Shannon, research advances in recent decades have led not only
to the definition of a second-order Cybernetics but also to an exploration of the boundaries
of semantic information. As H. Atlan states, on a biological level “the function self-organizes
together with its meaning”. Hence the need to refer to a conceptual theory of complexity and
a theory of self-organization characterized in an intentional sense. There is also a need to
introduce, at the genetic level, a distinction between coder and ruler as well as the opportunity
to define a real software space for natural evolution. The recourse to non-standard model the-
ory, the opening to a new general semantics, and the innovative definition of the relationship
between coder and ruler can be considered, today, among the most powerful theoretical tools

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Arturo Carsetti, a.carsetti@gmail.com

Citation: Carsetti, A. (2021). Life and cognition. A postscript. Academia Letters, Article 2648.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2648.

1
at our disposal to correctly define the contours of that new conceptual revolution increasingly
referred to as Metabiology (2). In the light of this new scientific paradigm, Nature appears
to “speak” by means of mathematical forms: we can observe these forms, but they are, at the
same time, inside us as they populate our organs of cognition.
It is precisely along this bumpy path of research that Monod’s successors in the direction
of the Pasteur Institute, F. Jacob and P. Kourilski came to identify in “circularity” one of the
keystones of the organization of the living. Actually, the genome expresses itself into a given
phenotype in a complex way. At the basic level, the genome sequence codes for its own trans-
lating machinery. It determines the birth of cellular machinery responsible, in turn, for gene
regulation and expression. A particular gene, for instance, codes for RNA polymerase whose
function is to transcribe the genes into messenger RNA. Without RNA polymerase there is no
messenger RNA, we are faced with the absence of cellular life. However, RNA polymerase is
necessary for its very synthesis because it transcribes its gene. Hence the essential circular-
ity that characterizes living organisms. From a general point of view, the cellular machinery
“represents”, step by step, the genome into an organism realizing the final stage of what we
usually call the embodiment process. The genome and the cellular machinery really interact
by establishing an evolving and coupled network: one of the key results of this interaction
is represented by the continuous engraving (through selection) at the level of the organisms
of specific formats: among them, we can distinguish, first of all, the formats relative to the
architectures of sensorial perception.
With respect to this general scheme, the discovery relating to the presence of a circular
connection between RNA and DNA has opened the possibility of considering at the molecular
level not only the classic Boolean logic (such as the one used by Monod) but also a dialectical
logic of Hegelian derivation. Already in the 1940s, A. Kojève had revisited Hegelian logic in
France, thus allowing one of his most brilliant pupils: J. Lacan to operate a first “transcription”
of the Hegelian dialectic in the field of Psychology of the unconscious through the reference to
precise topological constructions partially supported by some tools offered by the mathematics
of undecidability.
While, however, Lacan’s recourse to Hegelian logic soon received, albeit partial, recogni-
tion, the first attempts to use Hegelian logic on a molecular level appeared, however, at first, to
have a heuristic character only. Indeed, it is not easy to combine Boolean logic and Hegelian
logic (albeit profoundly transformed) together. It was only in the sixties that a Theory of self-
organization was born (subsequently integrated into the field of Complexity Theory) capable
of accounting for at least some aspects of the circularity of living beings. Hence, once again,
the birth of a continuous reference to topological methods and the tools of undecidability bur
framed this time in the general context of a mathematical theory of semantic information.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Arturo Carsetti, a.carsetti@gmail.com

Citation: Carsetti, A. (2021). Life and cognition. A postscript. Academia Letters, Article 2648.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2648.

2
Soon it was realized that this last attempt could only have serious repercussions as regards the
traditional distinction between software and hardware. Today, for example, to identify an ad-
equate model for the onset of life, the simple reference to hardware in the traditional sense of
the term no longer appears sufficient. On the contrary, it is necessary to refer to “wetware”.
It is wetware that alone can allow for self-organizing bricolage. The software, for its part,
should also come to be configured as a building factor: it embodies its different “subjects” by
bringing them back to the truth of their being thus giving them shape. The flesh appears as
the manifestation of the truth relative to them, to their real ribbing. Here is an incarnation that
can only be realized along the path of cognition. Hence the ever-renewed relationship, at the
level of contemporary Self-organization theory, between signal molecules, intensities, ever
new DNA exposures, and Schematism through filters as well as, in general, the need to refer
each time to the link between capacities, on the one hand, and intended models, on the other
hand. Hence a selection that can only refer to extremely sophisticated software. This is one
of the reasons why life can only reveal itself as being welded together in all its manifestations
(but necessarily for different levels of complexity) to a specific activity of cognition. Function
and meaning as united together but in a teleonomic perspective.
If one works, as G. Chaitin does, for example, with a view to accounting for the creativity
of life making essential reference to traditional software and traditional disembodiment proce-
dures, one cannot fully account for the potentialities of life’s software with respect to wetware,
potentialities that every time may unfold according to processes that can only be described
through the use of second-order cybernetics schemes. Furthermore, the disembodiment must
be targeted and must open to new selection: the journey to Hades is viaticum for the new
selection and the emergence of new flesh. The software of life is software that “embodies”
its subjects in the identification, each time, of their own “eternity”, the eternity, that is to say,
of living bodies that speak of their truth and who are rendered to their meaning. Only the
software that “baptizes” rendering the bodies of the different “subjects” to their meaning can
embed them in life. This is the key to self-organization.
Here is a software characterized in an intentional sense that reveals itself as the necessary
tool for the emergence of life, a software that in Vichian terms appears as a synthesis of Verum
and Factum. Hence teleonomy but in an intentional setting (3).
In this sense, it is not enough to simply affirm the existence at the level of life of an
evolutive (and “Hegelian”) dialectic, of an essential circularity, it is also necessary to follow it
in its steps until it is built in us. It is only in this way that we will be able to participate in life
as builders of it, as, that is to say, living beings added in creativity as, precisely, postulated,
first of all, by Bergson to whom Monod does, in fact, explicit and precise reference in his
masterpiece volume. Here is a life that, as happens in the painting by U. Boccioni “La città

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Arturo Carsetti, a.carsetti@gmail.com

Citation: Carsetti, A. (2021). Life and cognition. A postscript. Academia Letters, Article 2648.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2648.

3
che sale”, rises on itself as autonomy along the paths of cognition and human work (the work
of the “greater craftsman” (il miglior fabbro)), a life that in doing so comes to express (in
accordance with natural evolution) what S. Dali called its Destiny. We will be able to place
ourselves as true heirs of life, as beings who live in themselves the legacy of Syringe, only
if we prove ourselves capable of testifying to it in ourselves by placing ourselves as adequate
tools for it, only if the information expressed will have a genuinely semantic and multiplicative
character, only, that is to say, if we will come to construct ourselves as a function but together
with what is its (and our) meaning. This will necessarily involve the reference to a new theory
of models and a new theory of observation. Hence specific self-organizing (and second-order)
machines that as such must open themselves to an intentional dimension and, therefore, to a
dialectic of recognition.

REFERENCES
1. Cf. J. Monod, (1970) Le hasard et la nécessité, Paris.

2. Cf. A. Carsetti (2020) Metabiology, New York.

3. Cf. A Carsetti, (2014) “Life, Cognition and Metabiology”, Cognitive Processing, 15

(4) (2014) : 423-434; A. Carsetti, (1989) “Meaning and Information” , T. R. , Rome; A.
Carsetti, “Chaos, Natural Order and Molecular Semantics”, La Nuova Critica, 27-28
(1996): 83-107.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Arturo Carsetti, a.carsetti@gmail.com

Citation: Carsetti, A. (2021). Life and cognition. A postscript. Academia Letters, Article 2648.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2648.