About the Life of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Life

by Maria Odete Madeira

Any production of knowledge is supported by an organizing activity that acts in accordance to rules that have, as their objective, the resolution of problems that promote the organism’s survival and adaptive fitness.

The discovery of the double-helix, by Watson and Crick, allowed the application, to the notion of living organization, of the cybernetic scheme of a machine governed by an informational program, inscribed in the structure of the DNA molecules, that organizes and directs all the activities of the cellules (Morin, 1986).

In this way, a living organization can be signaled and referred as a self-cognitive, self-organizing and self-replicating agent that is capable, through exchanges with the environment, of concentrating, in itself, the flows of order that feed it and sustain it as a spatio-temporally localized individuated structure.

The knowledge of the life of the systems introduces us to the life of the knowledge, itself. Being, doing and knowing are, thus, inseparable.

The development of communication networks, between the different agents, allowed the transformation, of the natural flows and turbulences, in the subjugated motricity that was at the origin of the human space of millions of years ago, and that can be signaled as a bio-anthropological space aimed at the satisfaction of the biological needs of survival and of the immediate and practical interests, full of feelings and emotions, fantastic visions and terrors, but also full of techniques and precise calculations, synchretically linked to the objects.

In that historical time, the time of the myth, the interface with the environment was profoundly biological, accompanied by that which Damásio (1999) designates by core consciousness, characterized by a weak grasping ability and a weak reflexive operativity that did not allow the exercise of abstract thinking.

The type of thinking produced was profoundly linked to the aleatority of the motion of the natural forces, whose nature revealed itself as powerful, threatening and dramatic.

In this way, the production of judgments exhibited a perceptual and conceptual pattern that allowed the hominidian networks to signal, identify an classify the ecosystemic space, as a fluid and fluctuating nature, determined by local dynamic, unstable, coevolutionary and organic rules, foundationally conditioned by locally emergent mechanisms of territorialization and deterritorialization, rhizomatically aleatorial, producer of myths (meudh, mudh, myo, mytheo, mythos) and of rites, linked to the vital emotions and feelings of immediate survival and creators of visual, tactile, acoustic, and olphactive action spaces, conceptually non-schematizable, but that interacted with the strategic calculus that allowed the development of techniques of working the stone, then the bone and, also, the metal, as well as the development of cognitive memories, associated with the knowledge of the plants, of the animals and of the environment.

From the passage of the mythological thinking towards the so-called rational thinking, the knowledge came to be explicitly referred to as kosmos, or order, and as logos, term of Greek origin, derived from the verb legein that, originally meant to gather, to enumerate or to choose.

In turn, the noun logos, that initially meant collection and (re-)collection of the multiple, came to mean the discourse.

The kosmos and the logos, that substituted the myth as an attempt of interpretation and explanation of the reality, in its complexity, corresponded to the development of the capability of the organismic human grasp, accompanied by the expansion of consciousness.

The core consciousness, thus, lost operative protagonism to the extended consciousness, which came, since then, to operate in the interface with the environment. In accordance with Damásio (1999), if core consciousness is the indispensable foundation of consciousness, extended consciousness is its glory.

Unlike core consciousness, extended consciousness allows to work on temporally more expanded interaction surfaces, connectable to mechanisms of retension and protension.