Structural Coupling

In the Santiago theory a cognitive act is performed by structural coupling of an organism’s recurrent interaction with its environment. A living organism does not react to environmental stimuli, as it was held by cognitive-behavior psychology and earlier information theory, but it responds with structural changes in its nonlinear, organizationally closed, autopoietic network.

The act of cognition is an act of intelligence in a wider meaning. The level of the intelligence of a system is proportional to the flexibility and differentiating ability in the system’s structural coupling with its environmental systems. In other words, intelligence can be measured at work in the abundance of choice in structuring, behavior and connectivity that the living system is capable of embodying. In the Santiago theory perception, cognition, structural change and action are inseparable: cognition is an activity that determines behavior, and the cognitive activity of the system becomes visible in the structural change, which the system adopts in response to its cognitive feedback loops.

Not every environmental disturbance causes response in the system (17): the network, in accord to its organizational history forms criteria of perceptive limits particular to the system, criteria of selectivity to which kind of disturbance it will respond to. The response of the entire network to a selected disturbance consists of rearrangements of its patterns of connectivity.

Even though each structural coupling triggers changes in the living system, its pattern of organization maintains its overall consistency - the system remains organizationally autonomous throughout the continuous changes of its structure. Thus, throughout its history of structural changes, the organism maintains a unifying organizational pattern, which makes its identity as the organizing principle of the system. Therefore, a living system is determined in different ways by its pattern of organization and its structure. The pattern of organization determines the system’s "identity"; the structure, formed by a sequence of structural changes, determines the system’s behavior.

(17) Bateson defines the interaction between parts of mind as triggered by difference. In his book “Mind and Nature” he claims that information is necessarily news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by specified threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable, and ones that are too quick and too large are incomprehensible. The effects of difference, in his words, are transforms, coded versions of events that preceded them.

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