![]() The quest of the physicist and the philosopher is then to find out about those tiny building blocks, inquiring about the smallest of objects, in order to identify and characterize the constituents of reality. This everyday experience, when formally articulated as a philosophical system, corresponds to “substance metaphysics.” Namely, the presupposition that reality is like a building and that, as such, it is made of building blocks. When we look around we see objects all over the place: pens, chairs, and trees. It seems common sense to affirm that the world is made of discrete, independently existing objects. This doctrine is what is here denied.” ( Whitehead, 1925). “ It has been usual, indeed, universal, to hold that spatio-temporal relationships are external. Lí cito es responderle: Sí, pero sólo existe la mente como perceptiva y meditadora de cosas.” ( Borges, 1925) “ Berkeley afirma: Sólo existen las cosas en cuanto se fija en ellas la mente. In sum, we argue that the notion of internal relations has a strong theoretical power to overcome some fundamental difficulties in the study of life and mind. Our work aims to criticize the notion of simple location, even in the framework of emergentist accounts, so as to contribute to a “relational turn” that will conceive “inter-identities” as “intra-identities” in which interactants are not enduring substances, but internally related processes. We propose an alternative relational approach based on Whitehead's notion of “internal relations,” which we explicate and illustrate with several examples. The aim of this work is to uncover such a stance, particularly in the context of dynamical systems, and to show its shortcomings. ![]() Whitehead criticizes this externalist ontological perspective in which each interacting element exists, and can be thought, without essential reference to other elements. An appraisal of Whitehead's perspective reveals a difficulty shared by both approaches, referred to him as “simple location”: the commitment to the idea that the nature of things is exhausted by their intrinsic or internal properties, and does not take into account relations or dynamic interactions denoting “togetherness.” In a word, that things are simply where they are. Here we consider Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy as providing important insights to metaphysics of science in general, and to the reductionism vs. The emergentist holistic stance is particularly relevant in biology and cognitive neuroscience, where interactions amongst system components and environment are key. Reductionism relies on expectations that it is possible to make sense of the whole by studying its parts, whereas emergentism considers that program to be unattainable, partly due to the existence of emergent properties. 2Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain. ![]() 1Behavior of Organisms Laboratory, Instituto de Neurociencias CSIC-UMH, Alicante, Spain. ![]()
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