Neuronal Group Selection: Conditions and Consequences: 2 Consequences of Neuronal Group Selection — The Mind as Selectional Ecology

If Darwin displaced essence with relation at the level of life, Edelman did so at the level of mind. Once cognition is seen not as computation but as selectional ecology, every category of mental life — perception, learning, memory, consciousness — must be reconceived as an emergent effect of systemic alignment. The brain becomes not a mirror of the world, but a living field of relational differentiation through which world and organism co-actualise.

1. From encoding to alignment

In representational models, meaning arises from coding: neurons are thought to ‘represent’ features of the world by corresponding to them. Edelman’s model dissolves this correspondence. Neural groups do not encode; they align. Through continuous reentrant signalling, ensembles of neurons synchronise their activity until stable patterns emerge — not as depictions of the world, but as internally coherent relations of fit to the organism’s sensorimotor context. Cognition is thus the semiotic act of maintaining relational coherence within ongoing flux.

2. Perception as selection

Perception, in this light, is not the reception of data but the selection of coherence from potential. Each perceptual act is an evolutionary event in miniature: multiple neural configurations compete and cooperate until one achieves stable resonance with the system’s current state. The ‘image’ of the world that results is not an input, but a construal — an actualisation of possible alignments that stabilises experience.

3. Consciousness as reentrant coherence

Edelman’s concept of reentrant mapping reframes consciousness itself as the emergent synchrony of selectional processes. What we call awareness is not a substance or container but the momentary closure of recursive selection loops across distributed neural populations. Consciousness is thus the self-coordination of a selectional ecology — an ongoing negotiation among countless micro-alignments that together instantiate a coherent phenomenal field.

4. Learning and memory as stabilised selections

Learning becomes the retention of previously successful selections — the consolidation of alignments that have proven coherent within the organism’s history of interaction. Memory is not stored content but stabilised potential: a configuration that can be re-selected under compatible conditions. In this sense, cognition is evolution without reproduction — selection in the register of construal rather than organism.

5. The relational consequence

The shift from representation to selection has a profound ontological implication. It erases the boundary between the biological and the semiotic. The brain’s operations are not about meaning — they are meaning, construed materially. The same relational logic that underlies evolution at the level of life operates now at the level of experience: variation, constraint, selection, and stabilisation. Thought itself becomes the living semiotics of possibility.