If behaviour is the actualisation of viable possibilities, then the familiar picture of an organism acting in an environment must be abandoned.
That picture presumes a boundary across which information flows:
the environment presents inputs,
the organism processes them,
behaviour is emitted as output.
Once again, this is the wrong cut.
The ecology is not outside the system.
It is inside the cut that makes behaviour actual.
Why the organism–environment split misleads
The organism–environment distinction is analytically useful.
But when treated as ontological, it distorts explanation.
It suggests:
that the organism carries its own behavioural machinery internally,
that the environment merely triggers or perturbs it,
and that coordination happens across a boundary.
In reality, the boundary itself is part of what is being coordinated.
Behaviour as a joint phenomenon
Behaviour does not belong to the organism alone.
A landing bird includes:
wing dynamics,
air currents,
branch elasticity,
gravitational pull.
Remove any of these, and the behaviour ceases to exist.
What is actualised is not an internal state followed by an external effect.
It is a jointly constrained trajectory of organism and ecology together.
The environment as constraint, not cause
Ecological features do not cause behaviour in the way a switch causes a light to turn on.
They shape the space of what is possible.
These are not messages sent to the organism.
They are constraints that structure the cut.
Why input–output models fail
Input–output models assume that behaviour can be decomposed into:
perception first,
action later.
But in real behaviour:
sensing is already active,
movement reshapes what can be sensed,
perturbation and response are inseparable.
The cut that actualises behaviour spans the whole system at once.
Ecological coupling without representation
Once the ecology is treated as internal to the cut, representation becomes unnecessary.
The organism does not need to model the environment.
It is continuously coupled to it.
Adequacy arises because:
the coupled system stabilises certain trajectories,
destabilises others,
and reshapes itself through ongoing interaction.
The work is done by coupling, not by depiction.
Niche as enacted possibility
An organism’s niche is often treated as a static backdrop.
But a niche is not a place.
It is a structured field of viable actions enacted through ongoing behaviour.
As behaviour changes, so does the niche.
Ecology is not merely inhabited.
It is continuously co-actualised.
Why this matters
When ecology is placed outside the cut:
behaviour looks internally generated,
adaptation looks representational,
coordination looks miraculous.
When ecology is placed inside the cut:
behaviour becomes intelligible,
representation becomes redundant,
coordination becomes expected.
Where this leaves us
We now have the pieces needed to explain most animal behaviour:
value without meaning,
actualisation without execution,
ecology inside the cut.
One question remains.
If behaviour is always constrained by what already exists, how does genuine novelty arise?
The next post addresses that final source of bafflement:
Novelty Without Creativity.
How new behaviours appear without invention, insight, or imagination.
No comments:
Post a Comment