Postscript: Creativity and Freedom
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<b>Postscript: Creativity and Freedom</b>
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Much of what I have said has been intuitively accepted by philosophers since antiquity,
but until now no one had proposed an explanation that could show the biological nature of
the phenomena of cognition and reality. This chapter is such an explicit attempt (see also
Maturana, 1970, 1974). Furthermore, until now, it had not been shown that there is no
contradiction between the subject-dependent nature of our reality and our effective
operation in a socially valid and seemingly objective physical world. Since a description
always implies an interaction, and since the describing systems describe their components
via their interactions through their components, there is a constitutive homomorphism
between descriptions, and behavior in general, and the operation of the systems that
describe. Therefore, we literally create the world in which we live by living it. If a
distinction is not performed, the entity that this distinction would specify does not
exist; when a distinction is performed, the created entity exists in the domain of the
distinction only, regardless of how the distinction is performed. There is no other kind
of existence for such an entity.
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In this context, then, what are creativity and freedom?
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Answers to these questions have been entangled in a frequent confusion of determinisms
with predictability, and in the belief in the objective occurrence of the phenomenon of
choice. That a system is structure determined means that it is deterministic and that in
its operation choice is out of the question, but it does not mean that it is necessarily
predictable. Determinism is a feature of the operation of a system, while predictability
and choice are expressions that reflect the state of knowledge of the observer. If the
system observed and the medium in which it is observed are known, then the system does not
appear to encounter alternatives in its interactions, because it and its medium form for
the observer a single predictable system; if the system or the medium are unknown, then
the system appears to encounter alternatives in its interactions, because system and
medium constitute operationally independent systems for the observer who cannot predict
their course: in such a case the observer projects his or her own uncertainty on the
system by claiming that it must make a choice. An unknown system is, for the ignorant
observer, a chaos, however deterministic it may appear to the knowing observer who sees it
as a structure-determined system. Once this is understood, it becomes apparent that a
novelty, the new, is always an event viewed in a frame of reference from which it could
not have been predicted by an observer.
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When an organism enters into an interaction that arises from a contingency, that is, from
an encounter with an operationally independent system (which could be part of the organism
itself), the ensuing triggered changes of state of the organism could not have been
predicted by an observer of the operation of the organism alone. For the observer, the
organism performs a novel distinction and specifies a new reality. This is creativity: the
generation by an organism of distinctions (unexpected for an observer) through its
interactions with systems to which it is not structurally coupled (operationally
independent systems), and to which it may become structurally coupled as a result of the
interactions. Since the structure of an organism (its nervous system included) is under
continuous change as a result of its autopoiesis in an operationally independent medium,
organisms are, at least potentially, in the position of undergoing a continuous change in
their structural couplings anal hence, of continuously encountering independent systems
and thus of undergoing continuous changes of state unpredictable from their perspective
alone. Creativity, then, is a necessarily widespread feature in living systems.
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If an organism exists in a domain that does not determine all its interactions, so that it
can undergo interactions with independent systems, there is freedom in the domain of
existence of the organism. The organism is free even if its operation is deterministic,
and if it can generate second-order consensual domains, it can, as an observer,
recursively generate operationally independent consensual entities as a recursive observer
of its circumstance. This has been well understood throughout the history of mankind. If a
human being can observe the social system that he creates with his behavior, he may
dislike it and reject it, and thus become a source of change, but if he can only undergo
interactions specified by the social system that he integrates, he cannot be an observer
of it and his behavior can only confirm it. Accordingly, all coercive political systems
aim, explicitly or implicitly, at reducing creativity and freedom by specifying all social
interactions as the best means of suppressing human beings as observers and thus attaining
political permanence. To obtain this ultimate goal, however, the typically human mode of
creativity must be completely suppressed, and this, as long as there is any capacity to
establish such second-order consensual domains as the use of language requires, is
impossible.
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Every human being, as an autopoietic system, stands alone. Yet let us not lament that we
must exist in a subject-dependent reality. Life is more interesting like this, because the
only transcendence of our individual loneliness that we can experience arises through the
consensual reality that we create with others, that is, through love.
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