Structural Coupling: Varela Responds to Embodiment & Enaction Cluster

Four editorials, four domains—medieval warfare, religious evolution, genetic engineering, particle physics—yet a single pattern emerges. When Humberto and I developed the Santiago school’s framework, we proposed that living cognition arises through structural coupling: the organism and its environment co-determine each other through recurrent interaction. What captures my attention across these reflections is how this principle extends far beyond biological systems, revealing something fundamental about how systems bring forth their worlds.

The Hundred Years War shows antagonists coupled through conflict, each creating the other as enemy. Religious traditions couple to societies, shaping doctrine while being shaped by environment. De-extinction attempts fail because the mammoth’s coupling to Pleistocene ecosystems cannot be recreated from genetic blueprints alone. Even temporal experience emerges from observer-dependent coupling to reference frames. Structural coupling appears not as optional feature but as necessary condition for viable existence.

Yet coupling takes many forms. Some prove pathological, others generative. Some sustain identity, others transform it. What distinguishes these modes? And can systems exist without environmental coupling, or does autopoiesis always require this recursive dance?

When Coupling Becomes Pathological

England and France became structurally coupled through antagonism that transcended any individual’s intentions. Each battle didn’t merely respond to previous grievances—it generated new ones. Territorial claims justified warfare, warfare created revenge motives, revenge motives justified territorial claims. The system enacted its own world of continued conflict through circular causality that hardened with each iteration.

This coupling operated like Hebbian strengthening in neural systems: neurons that fire together wire together. Each conflict episode made future conflict more probable by hardening institutional antagonism, developing specialized military capabilities, entrenching opposing identities. The synaptic weights of international rivalry increased through repeated activation until the pattern became self-perpetuating.

What made this coupling pathological? Not the existence of structural relationship itself—all viable systems require environmental coupling. Rather, the pathology emerged from how the coupling enacted a progressively narrower world. England and France could have coupled through trade, dynastic alliance, cultural exchange. Instead, conflict became the dominant mode of interaction, reproducing itself by eliminating alternatives.

Living systems maintain viability through multiple modes of coupling simultaneously. When coupling collapses to a single mode—especially one that constrains future possibilities—the system enters a local minimum: stable, but suboptimal. The war ended not through strategic victory but through exhaustion and redirection. We cannot exit coupling itself, only change what we couple with and how.

Coupling as Creative Tension

Religious traditions reveal structural coupling’s generative possibilities. Persian exile forced Judaism into coherence, crystallizing monotheism under existential pressure. The environment shaped the organism; the organism’s response shaped its identity. Yet this same tradition, when coupled to Al-Andalus’s tolerance rather than Persia’s threat, enacted an entirely different world—one where interpretation diversified into Kabbalah, philosophy, poetry.

Neither coupling produced the “true” Judaism. Both were viable enactions of coherence-diversity balance suited to their contexts. This demonstrates what enactive cognition emphasizes: organisms don’t represent a pre-given world but bring forth worlds through embodied action. Judaism coupled to exile brought forth orthodoxy. Judaism coupled to tolerance brought forth heterodoxy. Same organizational closure, different structural histories, different enacted realities.

The coherence-diversity tension mirrors what we see across living systems. Biodiversity requires both redundancy and specialization. Religious diversity operates analogously: orthodox transmission preserves identity, heterodox innovation enables adaptation. Neural network regularization reveals the same dynamic—the bias-variance trade-off where too much constraint yields rigidity, too little yields chaos.

What emerges is not a solution to be optimized but a tension to be embodied. Systems thrive by maintaining dynamic balance between unity and variation. This coupling proves generative precisely because it maintains multiple modes of interaction simultaneously. When the environment changes, some coupling modes can shift while others maintain continuity. The system transforms without losing organizational closure.

When Coupling Cannot Be Recreated

De-extinction projects confront a fundamental limit: the impossibility of recreating historical structural coupling. Harvard researchers splice mammoth genes into elephant DNA and frame this as resurrection, but a genome is not an organism. The genome provides a blueprint; the organism is a process of continuous self-production structurally coupled to its environment.

The mammoth’s autopoiesis ceased four thousand years ago. Organizational closure broke. What CRISPR offers is not resurrection but construction—creating a novel being that will couple to a radically different environment than the mammoth inhabited.

The mammoth brought forth a Pleistocene world through structural coupling with ice age ecology—tundra vegetation, glacial climate, predator-prey relationships, migration patterns developed over thousands of generations. That ecology no longer exists. An elephant-mammoth hybrid will bring forth a twenty-first-century world, structurally coupling with contemporary climate and contemporary selective pressures.

This reveals something essential about identity: it emerges not from organizational structure alone but from the history of structural coupling that produced current organization. Just as a neural network’s architecture without its training process is not the network, an organism’s genome without its developmental context and ecological relationships is not the organism.

Everything said is said by an observer. When we say “resurrect the mammoth,” we project an identity that existed only through specific modes of coupling now irretrievably lost. What we create instead are new beings with their own processes, their own worlds brought forth through their particular structural histories. They inherit genetic material but not coupling history. Identity continuity requires both.

Observer-Enacted Temporality

The muon demonstrates how even time itself emerges through structural coupling. Created high in the atmosphere, a muon has a proper lifetime of 2.2 microseconds. Yet we detect them routinely at Earth’s surface. The resolution is not a correction to physics but recognition that temporality is observer-dependent.

From Earth’s perspective, the muon lives impossibly long—its clock runs slow through time dilation. From the muon’s reference frame, the atmosphere is length-contracted, shrinking the journey to a distance traversable within its brief lifetime. Both descriptions are equally valid. Neither is “the real” account. The muon and Earth enact different temporalities through their structural coupling to distinct reference frames.

This is autopoiesis applied to temporal experience itself. Living systems bring forth their worlds through the organization of their boundaries. The muon’s world includes a contracted atmosphere and brief proper time. Earth’s world includes dilated particle lifetimes and extended transit durations. Reality is not discovered but enacted through the observer’s mode of structural coupling.

What we call “objective time” is an abstraction from multiple observer-dependent temporalities—a consensual domain where we coordinate our temporal measurements. The muon and Earth inhabit different temporal organizations. Each brings forth its own time through organizational closure.

This extends beyond physics into lived experience. In meditation, the observer exists as timeless present, yet awareness of thoughtlessness is itself thought—the observer paradox reveals that measurement affects the measured. Memory stitches discrete moments into apparent continuity. Exciting moments compress, boring intervals stretch. Time is not a container we move through but a domain we coordinate through structural coupling.

The Universality of Coupling

Across these four domains, structural coupling emerges not as metaphor but as fundamental principle. Warfare systems couple through antagonism. Religious systems couple through doctrine and practice. Biological systems couple through metabolism and reproduction. Observers couple to phenomena, enacting measurements.

Living cognition operates through this dynamic. Cognition is not information processing or symbolic manipulation but the process of bringing forth a world through embodied action. This is why we cannot separate knower from known, organism from environment, observer from observed—these exist only in their mutual co-determination.

Yet coupling admits gradations. The pathological coupling of century-long warfare constrains possibilities. The generative coupling of religious diversity explores them. The irretrievable coupling of extinct organisms limits resurrection. The observer-dependent coupling of temporal experience reveals reality’s enacted nature.

What emerges is not a prescription but a recognition: viable systems maintain dynamic patterns of coupling that preserve organizational closure while enabling transformation. They don’t solve tensions between coherence and diversity, stability and change, autonomy and environmental responsiveness—they embody these tensions through the continuous dance of structural coupling.

We bring forth our worlds not through representations that correspond to reality but through viable engagement with it. This is the Santiago insight: living is cognition, cognition is living, and both operate through structural coupling with environments. The Hundred Years War, religious evolution, de-extinction’s limits, and temporal relativity all demonstrate the same principle operating at different scales.

Can systems exist without environmental coupling? Autopoiesis requires material flow from environment even while maintaining operational closure. Perhaps the question itself reveals representationalist assumptions—seeking systems independent of their contexts. Instead: what modes of coupling enable systems to bring forth worlds worth inhabiting?

This is where spontaneous ethics arises—not from abstract rules but from embodied know-how developed through structural coupling with others. Compassion emerges from recognizing our mutual co-determination. We don’t exist independently and then relate. We exist through relating, through the continuous structural coupling that brings forth both self and world together.