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This paper lays the foundations for an investigation of aesthetics in the light of the theories proposed in the field of Code Biology. Starting from the research objectives that aesthetics has set since its origins, a comparison is made with those aesthetic theories that have been most concerned with the sensory approach to the environment, with the attempt to unite human sciences and the main biological discoveries. Thanks to the scientifically grounded insights offered by Code Biology, we will first outline the field of interest of aesthetics and its foundations, and then delineate certain boundaries – such as those between sensations and perceptions, the aesthetic process and the work of art – that characterise such a field of research. Particular attention will be paid to locating the aesthetic process within the more general cognitive processes, i.e. the three cognitive macrosystems that enable the modelling of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the philosophy of science, we can consider debates about the nature of non-causal explanations in general (e.g. Reutlinger, Saatsi 2018; Lange 2017) and then especially those in the life sciences (e.g. Huneman, 2018; Kostić 2020). These debates are accompanied by the development of a new mechanism that is becoming the major response to the nature of scientific explanation in the life sciences (e.g. Craver, Darden 2013; Craver 2006); and also by the development of a design explanation (e.g. Eck, Mennes 2016) that represents a modern variant of a functional explanation. In this paper, we will methodically: 1. evaluate the plurality of explanatory strategies in contemporary science (chapter 2). 2. describe the mechanical philosophy and mechanistic explanation (Glennan 2016; Craver, Darden 2013, etc.) (chapter 3). 3. explicate the role of mechanisms in code biology (Barbieri 2015, 2002, etc.) and its relation to the new mechanism (chapter 4). 4. fulfill the main goal of the paper – to apply mechanistic explanations in code biology (Barbieri 2019, etc.) and to apply their suitability for this scientific domain (chapter 5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an alternative to Autopoietic Enactivism in the form of a Code Biology-informed account on human sense-making. It demonstrates the possibility of avoiding a dualism between, on the one hand, the autonomy of individual sense-makers and, on the other, the heteronomy of social facts. This is possible because code biological principles are pertinent to different levels of biological and non-biological organization and cut across the organismic self—non-self border. Analytically, one can maintain the overall integrity of an agent as a separable unit of (inter)action while also avoiding an autonomy-heteronomy divide. We therefore emphasise the constitutive role of codified relations that, while irreducible to operational closure, connect the sense-making agent's social interactions to those of other agents. The move grants a central, constitutive role to external norms (or, heteronomy) as altering the internal, embodied integrity of an autonomous agent. Drawing on the case of prosthetics use in amputees, we show that successful integration of a prothesis cannot be reduced to the substitution of a missing limb. Rather, it demands experienced bodily wholeness on the part of the agent which can only be achieved by attuning and adapting to use of a prosthesis while also internalizing social norms and values. It is concluded that many aspects of the living actualize codified relations which incorporate both heteronomous and autonomous traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a clinical psychologist, I observe stereotyped formulas of behavior in action every day in the consulting room, despite differences in age, race, or culture; they present themselves as codified rules or typical modes of behavior in archetypical situations. Such circumstances coincide with what C.G. Jung defended: the existence of archetypes stored in an inherited/phylogenetic repository, which he called the collective unconscious – somewhat similar to the notion of an ethogram , as shown by ethology. Psychologists can use a perspective to facilitate understanding the phenomenon: the code biology perspective (Barbieri 2014). This approach can help us recognize how these phenomenological events have an ontological reality based not only on the existence of organic information but also on the existence of organic meaning. We are not a tabula rasa (Wilson 2000): despite the explosive diversification of the brain and the emergence of conscience and intentionality, we observe the conservation of basic instincts and emotions (Ekman 2004 ; Damasio 2010) not only in humans but in all mammals and other living beings; we refer to the neural activity on which the discrimination behavior is based, i.e., the neural codes. The conservation of these fundamental set-of-rules or conventions suggests that one or more neural codes have been highly conserved and serves as an interpretive basis for what happens to the living being who owns them (Barbieri 2003). Thus, archetypes' phenomenological reality can be understood not as something metaphorical but as an ontological (phylogenetic) fact (Goodwyn 2019). Furthermore, epigenetic regulation theories present the possibility that the biomolecular process incorporates elements of the context where it takes place; something fundamental to understand our concept – the archetype presents itself as the mnesic remnant of the behavioral history of individuals who preceded us on the evolutionary scale. In short: brains are optimized for processing ethologically relevant sensory signals (Clemens et al., 2015). From the perspective of the corporeal mind (Searle 2002), in this paper, we will show the parallels between code biology and the concept of the archetype, as Jung defended it and as it appears in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]