On Risk and Responsibility

By Maria Odete Madeira


Responsibility, from the Latin, respondere, is a name for a systemic capability that any autonomous human agent has of being able to account for his/her actions and respective effects, accepting the consequences of these actions (to be accountable).

Because of this capability, the human agents have the right and the duty to account (respondere) for their actions.


“(…) Today the guiding hand of natural selection is unmistakably human with potentially Earth-shaking consequences.

The fossil record and contemporary field studies suggest that the average rate of extinction over the past hundred million years has hovered at several species per year. Today the extinction rate surpasses 3,000 species per year and is accelerating rapidly; it may soon reach the tens of thousands. In contrast, new species are appearing at a rate of less than one per year (…) The broad path for biological evolution is now set for the next several million years. And in this sense the extinction crisis – the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today – is over, and we have lost.”

Stephen M. Meyer, 2006, The end of the wild, pp.3-5.


The question about the responsibility of the human agents is now stretched to the limit point from which we must ask: what fundamental value do we assign to the planet?

In a risk assessment, where the agents involved have an interest in a support to a certain action, there is the inevitable contamination of that assessment with an undervaluation of the scenarios considered to be unfavorable to the intended course of action. This includes, not only, biases in the assumptions and in the processes of risk quantification, but, also, biases in the interpretations of the results.

Many of the technologies that we are now beginning to produce may open up the risk of situations with catastrophic consequences to the planet.

Some of the risk scenarios associated with these situations are known, and worked upon by the sciences involved and by risk science.

It is necessary, within a scientific approach to risk, to consider risk as a fundamental ontological operator linked to the mechanism of life and death. Generally, the risk assessment is made from the perspective of superstructures that transcend the ontological planes of immanence.

Any systemic cognitive synthesis includes an evaluation of risk and it may be more, or less, accurate in accordance with the functioning of the systemic homeostatic mechanisms.

The question that is placed about the human assessment of risk is that the type of evaluation of risk is being done in planes that ontologically transcend the systems and problems themselves, call these planes of transcendence, for instance.

In these planes of transcendence, we have what we call the political, economic, military and scientific games, that introduce an ontologic systemic bias in what regards the life and death of the systems. The evaluations of the risks are not being done about what may constitute a threat or an opportunity to the systems, what are being done are evaluations of the discourses and strategies of power, compromised with the economy, politics, military and science.

The risk has become, in today's economies, a product aimed at the satisfaction of pleasure, which raises a question: what are the phenotypic effects synthesized and metabolized by a neurocognition of the risk? To what point are the homeostatic mechanisms, that include, for instance, background feelings, being organismically blocked?

What are the risk assessments that the human agents, as consumers of risk products, may produce? In what way are they being affected by the effects of a risk culture and a risk economy?

Furthermore, the economy itself is feeding upon the risk for its own development. Besides a risk consumption culture and economy, there are the technological and scientific risks, as well as the power dynamics of wars and of natural disaster aftermaths.

No less important is to consider the role, in the perception of risk, of the religions as power institutions supported by dogmatically organized discourses of faith, built from conventioned truths and that are supported by active ideological mechanisms of convincing and vanquishing. To what point is it not the case that religions constitute a mechanism of alienation, effective and with structural effects, that blocks the cognitive processes linked to the risk perception?

Intelligence and Reason

by Maria Odete Madeira

Intelligence has its etymological root in the Latin intelligentia, term composed of intus,which means within, and legere, which means to choose, to elect.

Intelligence is a dispositional systemic capability to perceive, capture, select and process data and knowledge, from cognitive (co)dynamics, linked to dynamics of interpretation and comprehension, genetically incorporated in all the living systems.

Reason has its etymological origin in the Latin Ratio, meaning Calculation. Rationem ducere means computare, to calculate.

All the living systems actively depend upon the cognitive processes.

All the living systems are producers and consumers of knowledge.

In any cognitive processing intervene dynamics of Intelligence and dynamics of Reason. Intelligence and Reason are not dynamics exclusive of a given living system, but of all the living systems.

on homogeneization and heterogeneization

by Maria Odete Madeira

While the homogeneization, understood as a dynamic process, is intentionally directed towards capturing, in the systems, patterns that exhibit similarities between each other, towards a systemic identity, the heterogeneization, on the other hand, positions itself, with respect to the homogeneization, as an energetic antagonism, intentionally directed towards capturing, in the systems, patterns that are different and divergent between each other.

The energetic antagonism implies an undefined enchaining of contradictories, that, in the systems, can potentiate mechanisms of autopoiesis capable of producing the so-called systemic fracturing evolutionary jumps, from which lines of fugue can be traced as a threat or opportunity to the systems in what regards their growth and development.

Hegel - to think

by Maria Odete Madeira

To Hegel, the territory of science is the thinking, to think is to integrate the existence in a plane of non-reductionist universality, that is, the universality must be considered in a perspective of a systemic totality in relation with the respective parts that constitute it.

Hegel designates by element or ether the constitutive horizon of science, characterizing that element or ether from its translucid and simple character, that allows one to signal it as a standpoint (standpunkt), that is, as a taking of position that preoccupies itself with the reality from its fundament.

The ether constitutes, for Hegel, a universal principle of possibility of all the experience.

Color - light and gravity

by Maria Odete Madeira

The human brain reconstructs the color, from the luminous energies, reflected by the diverse colored surfaces. To that end, neural areas, specialized in the perception of the colors, are mobilized, as well as areas of the cerebral cortex specialized in the analysis of the forms, of the disposition in the space and of the motion (Changeux, 1994).

In the presence of the objects, the eyes capture the luminous radiations that these emit, converting them in electrical impulses that propagate themselves to the cerebral cortex, the place where an internal representation of the color is built.

The human eyes are sensitive to the electromagnetic radiations, in a band called the visible spectrum, in which are localized seven visible colors that distinguish themselves by their respective wave lengths.

The perception of the light takes place through the incidence of the luminous rays that penetrate to the retina that converts them in electrical signals, posteriorly transmitted, through the optic nerve, to the brain that interprets them, configuring an internal image that corresponds to the external image responsible for the emission of light.

The world, such as we see it, is filled with colored forms. Our physical perception of the objects involves the perception of the color. This perception is a dynamic act, that passes through the apprehension of external variables that implicate the spatialization of the color, as actualization of this same color, in a real and communicational time that relates the observed color with the observer.

We can, therefore, speak of an overcoding, associated with the color. If, on the one hand, in the spatial unfolding, the color unfolds, reflexively, the senses implicated in it, on the other hand, it folds the memories and experiences, subjectively triggered in the observer, as observer that is affected by the interpellation of the color.

In this sense, the color affects and is affected, in a reflexive nanodynamics expanded to proto-conscious levels that mobilize sets of neurons that enter in resonance with the overcoded senses, in the act of subject/observer and color/observed, intercrossing short or medium term memories, with those of long term, all of them interpellating coded and codifier living experiences.

The experience of the color is, also, and experience of light and gravity. Affections that fold and unfold, explicate and implicate, intercrossing perceptions and projections of light and gravity.

In a primordial dialogue of convincing and vanquishing, shaded and alchemical blacks are dramatically crossed by solid, material, measurable and quantifiable lights. Tensional spaces, geometrized by light and shadow are, thus, configured.

Black and crepuscular inquietudes alternate with swift, intense and extenuated whites, reflecting hybrid and undecided harmonies, chiseled of night and day, light and gravity.

White theories, objective and explicative, twist and turn through dissymmetric, bifurcating, faithful to Plato’s cave, molecular black flows, in the eternal and eternized struggle between white and black, light and gravity.

Between the cave and the sun, intersections of straight lines, planes, volumes, intervals, regions, translucid and empty white intuitions, shadows, secrets and senses triangulate themselves.

Limits that intercross, agitate, hesitate and ramify, in dissipating, metallurgic, prosthetic and projective webs.

Between the white and the black, between the light and the gravity, are the intersection, the shadow, the remain, the trace, the debris, the sense as pre-figurative energies.

We have disconnected ourselves, little by little, from the space of the land in which we live. Little by little, under our eyes, disappeared the space of the sunlight, of the agriculture, of the sacred, of the war, of the states, of the written page that geometry expressed in its intimidating purity (borrowing Serres, 1993).

Since then, a bundle of bodies, messages, knowings and light circulate. In a global land, a new communicational space installed itself in multiple and interlinked networks. A space of mixture, a shaded space.

Referent and Reference

by Maria Odete Madeira

Any existent can, in any language, be considered a referent, whose existence can be linguistically built in a statement external to it.

Any referential expression is directed towards one or more referents, with which the respective sense(s) and meaning(s) are related.

We are before an act of reference, whenever one states an expression that identifies or names an existent.

In a semiotic language, any sign can be approached as a referent or as a reference, depending upon the position and systemic dynamics of each entity/sign in the statement.

In a situation or process of self-reference, a rotative coincidence is realized, in which the system folds upon itself, in itself. Whenever this occurs, we are before a dynamics of autopoiesis.

On Phenomenology - Discipline and Method

by Maria Odete Madeira

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy, applied to the study of the phenomena.

Phenomenon (phainomenon) is that which reveals itself, by itself and in itself. Thus, all existing things can be considered to be phenomena.

Phenomenology is not a method, it is a disciplinary area constituted by a theoretical body, available as fundament for the construction of methods and methodologies aimed at the study of any existing reality that, genetically, by itself and in itself, reveals itself as position rooted in the world.

Criticizing the positivism as a mere construction of facts, Husserl (1907) held that the so-called crisis of the sciences had to do with a reduction of humans to constructed facts. In the positivistic model, humans, as such, were alienated in the human facticity, derooted from that which constituted them as beings that are intentionally inscribed in the world, from which they received the sense of themselves and of the things with which they related.

For Husserl, the world was the originary datum, that was turned towards humans and towards which they, themselves, turned self-reflexively, in order to determine and distinguish the sense of the things.

Protesting against the reduction of human reason to mere exercises of calculation, Husserl defended phenomenology as the science of the phenomena. In Husserl, the phenomenon is an eidos that reveals itself in an intuition that is defined by an intentionality that assigns a plenitude of presence to the eidos (phenomenon) that is aimed at. Each eidos is accessible, only, to a certain type of intuition: the intuition that refers and identifies it in an immediate way and that, because of that, captures it in all its totality.

Intuition has its origin in the Latin terms tueri (to see) and in (in, within) that conjointly mean the action of seeing directly within the things, thus, signaling a mode of immediate knowledge of an existing object that, because it exists, shows itself, as such, to the consciousness that aims at it, and, because it shows itself, it also demonstrates itself in its modes of existence, so that it can be described from its fundament (eidos).

The experience, in Husserl, assumes the sense of lived world (Lebenswelt), as that which is in the origin of the knowledge and that is before any reflexive activities. That is, the objects present themselves to the consciousness, giving themselves in their completeness (eidos) in order to be, only after, and through a conscious act of radical reflexivity, on the part of the subject, actively apprehended by the consciousness that intentionally signaled them as existents in themselves, and by themselves, and, in this way, as autonomies.

The noumenon, that was impossible to be categorized in Kant, appears, in Husserl, as that which is immediately intuited. Thus, Husserl turned away from the criteria that transcended the experience, to be able to, in the same experience (Lebenswelt) and in a direct way, capture that which, in the phenomena, was their noumenic sense.

In Heidegger, the notion of experience lost the theoretical sense present in Husserl, to mix itself with the notion of existence. The author considered that, originarily, the things do not “make their apparition” and do not “appear to be” to the humans as phenomena or objects of thought, but, instead, as entities that (co)exist in a complex system of references that constitutes the world where each human exists, understands and interprets himself as being-the-there (dasein), projectively launched to a future that he existentially anticipates.

This perspective, of a gnoseology, as activity rooted in the worldly experience, was, also, developed by Merleau-Ponty (1945), who considered that all the universe of science is constituted upon the lived world. The notions of subjectivity and objectivity are synthesized in the notion of the world, lived and understood by subjects incarnated in it. The phenomenological perception is, thus, considered as an originary pre-reflexive experience of each subject with an own body (corps propre), that body, understood, as a node of living significations that is incorporated by an operating intentionality that links it to the world of life.

In this way, the phenomenological perception constitutes itself as the ground that is previous to all reflexive activity. Assuming that knowledge is, always, the apprehension of an ontologically constituted structure, an ontologically constituted structure that, as such, is given to any originary human consciousness, (a consciousness) which is fully rooted in a world that is previous to it, exterior to it and autonomous.