In my previous articles I introduced some interaction metaphors that should be useful in our 2023 course: sensemaking up-hierarchy and habitat - habitas. When we view the whole from a collective system level, we see that local agents are sensing and reporting up-wards as actions taken. As the information “rises” toward a centralized processing region, information becomes more global but also more generalized, eventually reaching a context that is coherent.1
Habitat and habitas are terms that apply to the more general sensemaking up-hierarchy. The activities in the habitat are local and participatory. The actions taken have an immediate, direct effect on the internal state of the actor, catalyzing sense-making processes. The sense that is made, the internal meaning, is the habitas of the actor. Habitat-habitas refers to much more specific interaction patterns than the generalized term “sense-making up-hierarchy.”
In this article I want to tie in the notion of habitas with action protocols, which refers to an even more precise level or smaller scale of process of the habitas itself. To put it into perspective, remember that the habitas is composed of action protocols.
One of the books I am reading is MetaZoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith and much to my surprise I read this excerpt:
In the framework of Aristotle, developed over two millennia earlier, soul unifies the living and the mental. Soul, for Aristotle, is a kind of inner form that directs bodily activities, and it exists in different levels or grades in different living things. Plants take in nutrients to keep themselves alive--- that shows a kind of soul. Animals do this and can also sense their surroundings and respond--- that is another kind of soul. Humans can reason, in addition to the other two capacities, and so have a third lind. For Aristotle, even inanimate objects that lack souls also behave in accordance with purposes or goals, tending toward their natural place.
We can take this almost verbatum as a deifnition for action protocols:
Action protocols are a kind of inner form that directs bodily activities, that exist in different levels or grades in different living beings and also all the other animate entities which behave in accordance with purposes or goals, executing their degreees of freedom, as they tend toward relationships in the natural order.
In other words, action protocols are “internal metabolic signatures of the external world.” *Metabolism *means internal activity, signature means specific and reflective of the external activity--- essentially it is a direct participation, fractal relation. Every act of sensing and perception and movement calls forth a cascade of metabolic activity of certain specificities and gradations--- the whole body participates, but not to the same degrees, until the action on the outside becomes a faint but non-trivial echo at the smallest fractal scale. At the level of the individual self, the person senses the tree, but not much of the responses in the metabolic activity. She may ponder the tree’s ancient age; while the mitchondria in the cortical cells, respond to an in-rush of neuropeptides catalyzed by the affect-laden perceptual event. Every external action, has an equal and reflective internal resonance--- in reality the perceptual experience is spread out across the entire moment.
The tree doesn’t stamp an image in my eye or mind which then my brain has to read. This is non-sense.
Rather, the tree has direct access to the metabolic agents and their cascading resonance through the perceptual activity. This effect on *their history, *constitutes the ever-evolving action protocols of my self. 2
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It is actually impossible to parse this one simple act of perception down to the finest details, which dissolve into processes that depend on threshold events and serendipity. For example, the “tree” is not participating as a thing. Rather, I and the tree occupy a habitat which Gibson calls “sky” which includes the atmosphere and light photons and their interactions. 3
Now, moving down the scale toward the cellular it is easy to see that in brain cells (the neurons) what we are calling action protocols is very similar to what is commonly known in neuroscience as action potentials. The action protocol, however, is more complex than what the neuroscientists are measuring across the membrane and synapses. Unlike the action potential which is a measure of ion capacitance and synaptic flow, the action protocol of a neuron is shaped by its relations within a global ecosystem. Some of these relationships are excitatory, some of these relationships are inhibitory, and many of them are complex combinations of the two --- entangled with feed-forward and feed-back relationships, temporal delays and threshold events--- awash in an extra-cellular sea of neruo-active chemicals and hormones that are created and regulated elsewhere.
Every neuron acts in a local habitat which is part of this global ecosystem. The neuron, in turn provides a local habitat for intracellular organelles such as the nucleus, nucleolus, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, mitochondria, ribosomes, lysosomes, endosomes, and peroxisomes. God only know what these organelles sense, but they too are alive and active participants which provide the neuron with its own habitas--- the action protocols that they historicize by their metabolic sense and response. The role of the neuron in its location, is the terminus of the sense-making up-hierarchy at this scale. The neuron, through its activity, makes sense for its internal members, and contributes a bit of sense to its external relationships. First travelling in parrallel streams through all the sense-making networks, the information recorded as actions taken, become increasingly more convergent along pathways that reach toward a perceptual experience in the eye of the beholder. The tree-me is born!
Never before has this particular tree-me existed. Given its vast complexity and participatory immediacy, never again will this particular tree-me exist. Only the generalized trace, grossly imprecise and distorted by generalities and distanced by time, might be brought forth by initiating a simulation which can only serve up the low-resolution replay of memory.
Further Resources
Footnotes
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Coherence rarely means “the same” --- rather it is a functional context in which each local actor can receive in a way that it “makes greater sense” to them. This is the root function of “common sense” which takes on different forms in different cultural (local) settings. ↩
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In the module on Perception in the course series, we will see that perception is no mere passive portal, but an active participatory function, with affect-laden desire designed to “go somewhere” … ↩
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Gibson says humans don’t walk on the earth any more than fish, although gravity is a factor in both cases. Rather, humans walk in the air the same way that fish swim in the water. Air is our *medium, *whereas water or earth are mediums for other species. ↩