**4. The co-evolution of living beings**

*Proprioception*

representation of an external world.

global activity emerges -of a temporary nature. This global state specifies a coherent and unified cognitive state that determines the behavior of the individual in his/her relationship with the environment; a mechanism in which local changes modulate the state of global activity and, vice versa global states modulate the activity of local areas, without the existence of an external or internal agent or force that controls them. Such mechanisms of sensorimotor coordination are constituted in the operation of every living being with or without nervous system -what varies among species are the types of sensorial and effector structures- of a centralized control or product of an external or internal agent that specifies the states of activity of sensorimotor patterns of the organism, as well as dispenses with the idea of a

Returning to the behavior of the amoeba in its coupling with the environment in which the protozoon is found, they establish a structural coupling, which from an observer's perspective, the protozoon constitutes the prey as a result of a feeding behavior. This fact that a western human being perceives, observes and interprets from the distinctions of the world of his culture, has no relation with the intentional behavior of the amoeba, since by the way, the amoeba does not distinguish the protozoon nor has perspective of the changing environment, therefore it does not intentionally go towards it with the purpose of swallowing it and thus feeding itself. This anthropomorphic interpretation hides what occurs inside the animal in its structural coupling with the environment, that is, it hides the physiological operation of a cognitive nature of the organism that specifies its changes of states triggered by the disturbances of the environment, in relation to its previous states, a

fact alluded to when characterizing said operation as circular and recursive.

co-evolution with the environment in which they exist.

without perspective of its changing environment.

nature: corporeal-spiritual constitutive of a living unit.

and knowledge arise in the same act.

In summary, from this systemic perspective, the sensation-movement state of a living body in its environment, in a present, results from the dynamic activity of the sensory-motor operations that gives rise to a global cognitive state - of a temporary character - that specifies the coordinated and synchronic dynamic movement sequences that constitute the coherence and uniqueness of an effective or adequate behavior for the conservation of the organism in adaptation in the structural coupling with the environment. This was illustrated with the case of the amoeba's behavior, showing the origins of the generative mechanisms of the effective behavior of living beings with motility, as well as the cognitive processes that result from their

From what has been said before, we can distinguish that the environment in which an observer distinguishes the amoeba, does not correspond to the world that it lives from its sensorimotor dynamics that are referred to its internal operation, which on the one hand means that the environment that it knows is its interiority and on the other hand that these dynamics that specify the movements in their structural coupling with the environment are generative of the lived world, a world

We could say that the living of a body arises spontaneously in a generative movement of its knowing, which Maturana expresses strictly by saying: "to live is to know and to know is to live" [1], which from our perspective alludes to a fundamental fact that reveals the mode of existence of every living being, namely, both life

Therefore, the autonomous movement of animals with motility is a key to the understanding of cognition and the phenomenon of perception in human beings, as we will see in the following section the knowledge of the body in its environment is the source and origin of the way of knowing of human beings: reflection. In this regard the biological origin of human knowledge is evidenced by unifying its

**100**

Bearing in mind that the world that a living organism feels within its coupling with the environment, it constitutes a continuum of sensation-movement resulting from the cognitive states that emerge from the dynamics of activity of patterns of sensorimotor correlations. These patterns, which are constitutive of the learning process, result from recurrent and recursive movements that are constitutive of the individual's behavior, and determine his anatomo-physiological structure, which specifies his species and his way of knowing and living in his structural coupling with the environment.

In the -recurrent and recursive- structural couplings between living beings that co-exist in the same environment, it is constituted temporary reciprocal interactions between them, generating mutual learning that modify in congruence the anatomo-physiological structures of them. For this reason, in each temporary encounter between them the autonomous operating of the corporal structure of each one determines the specific movements of their behavior, recreating the structural couplings that occur in these temporary encounters. For example, this phenomenon occurs with symbiosis relations between species. This is the case with the structural correspondence between pollinating insects and the flowers of the plants they pollinate. The plant species Drakeae glyptodon, an orchid species whose structure takes a similar form to the female Thynnid wasp, and in its operation produces pheromones that attract the male wasp which is the only insect vector of its pollination. Thus, in the co-evolution of both species, they constitute a history of structural coupling that constitutes the structural changes that are conserved in their progeny.

This epigenic phenomenon when it occurs between individuals of the same species gives rise to the constitution of social systems. In the recurrent encounters of two or more organisms, specific action dynamics are synchronically triggered, generating a coordination of action between them resulting in a communication that specifies a particular way of interacting and relating, which defines a domain of possible actions between them. Thus, said systems are constituted in dynamics of networks of coordination of action between individuals, that give emergency to a collective of autonomous beings self-organized, which moves like a totality in congruence to the changes of the environment, inside which the individuals generate behaviors that of isolated form they could not acquire. This is the case of the flocks of Franklin gulls that migrate from Cape Horn to Canada, a flight in which individuals increase their speed of flight by 72%, compared to the speed of flight of an isolated individual, and no further in the case of human beings who, in their social

way of life, learn in doing with another to incorporate the mastery of language that makes their capacity for reflection possible.

Thus, in social systems, the learnings that are generated in individuals in the coordination of action among them, constitute the sensorimotor patterns that are the ways of moving and relating that constitute the way of life of the collective, which is transgenerational preserved by maintaining a living knowledge that makes its existence possible within the environment.

This co-evolutionary phenomenon constitutes a communicative process that is not related to an exchange of information, but rather to interactions of a reciprocal nature that generate specific and recurrent structural changes that occur in their encounters; encounters in which the structural changes of the organisms in their reciprocal interactions are modulated - at each instant - generating a coordination of movements that configure a choreography that is repeated in their recurrent interaction within the social system in the environment in which they are found. "We will understand communication as the mutual triggering of coordinated behaviors among the members of a social system" [1].

### **5. Reflexive movement and proprioceptive perception**

Following this second order cybernetic perspective [7], which recognizes that the architecture of the neural networks constituting the nervous system that is embedded in the body of the organism, maintains a circular operation that is to say with operational closure, therefore this operation is referred to the states of activity of the network, and not to an external world [8]. This network is self-organized by distributed mechanisms, in which the global states of activity of the network modulates the activity of local zones, and vice versa the activity of local zones modulates the global states of the network. In this way, there is no internal or external agent that controls its operation; on the other hand, this system modulates and is modulated by the physiological operation of the organism. Therefore, the condition of operational closure of the neuronal network would explain that the world perceived by the organism, including the human being, is a world that emerges from the internal operation of the organism in its structural coupling with others and the environment.

Considering this, we will explain the perception of the world lived by a human being and the learnings that originate the proprioceptive perception, from recognizing the type of structural links that occur between the hominid ancestors of *Homo sapiens*, generative of phylogenetic learnings that make possible the emergence of language and its capacity to reflect. These facts give origin to the particular way of life of a social system constituted by networks of coordinated action coordinations from the operational distinctions of the language domain, that is to say, generative action coordinations of the networks of consensual conversations. We are going to see how the first condition for the constitution of the phenomenon of perception in human beings is the origin of the observer. "The observer and the observed, then, emerge in the flow of structural changes that occur in the members of a community of observers when they coordinate their consensual actions through their recurrent structural interactions in the domain of operational coherences in which they carry out their connected practices of living." [9]. Thus, if language is constituted in the domain of the coordinations of the dynamics of action coordinations that occur in the joint action of individuals within the social system in which they carry out their living in coexistence.

The mathematician H. Von Foerster, in his original presentation of the notion of second-order cybernetics, who is a precursor of the same, starts by pointing out

**103**

*Proprioceptive Perception: An Emergence of the Interaction of Body and Language*

A theorem to which Foerster adds a corollary that affirms:

not say who was first and who was last […] a closed triad is formed" [7].

what he calls a theorem, alluding to the statement made by Maturana after explaining the origin and mode of operation of language, which he states in this way:

Concluding that I and II connect two observers through language, with this connection, in turn, a new concept is established, namely that of society, the two observers constitute the fundamental nucleus of a society, thus the three concepts are connected in a triadic way, each one with the other. "In this interaction we can-

Thus, in this circularity, the operation of language within a social system constitutes observers, and observers in turn constitute the language in its operation in the domain of the coordination of the coordination of action among observers, a reflexive dynamic that is recurrent and recursive and generative in turn, of the domain in which it is constituted. This is a dynamic in which perceptual objects that constitute the world of culture in a society of human beings are configured. Thus, the operation of language domain constitutes an operational system constituted by the distinctions of perceptive objects that are associated among them, generating new distinctions that constitute the association network that generates them, a

In the operation of language, the observer and the perceptual objects that constitute him/her are constituted, a circular dynamic that generates the world perceived by individuals, which does not correspond to an objective reality. Therefore, the description that an observer makes of the world of objects or phenomena that he/she perceives is the result of the flow of the experience of his/her consensual behavioral coordination with others. Therefore, these descriptions are not absolute truths, but descriptions agreed upon with others in the coexistence by such "everything said is said by an observer and for an observer" with whom they maintain a generative structural congruence of their coordination of actions in

"And since perceptual objects arise as behavioral configurations, the world of shared perceptual objects belongs to the sphere of operational concordances between organisms, which constitute them in the course of their coexistence as configurations of their behavioral concordances. In other words, if the perceptual objects remain configured by the behaviors of the organism, the world of perceptual objects that occurs in the coexistence of organisms, including the observer, can only arise from the coexistence as long as the organisms operate generating and conserving their mutual structural correspondence. That this is so is also apparent in everyday life, in which we know that the common world only arises in the com-

How does the observer in language generate perceptual objects that are configured in the behavior of the individual? Language occurs in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions of organisms whose actions are coordinated because they have congruent dynamic structures that have emerged or are emerging through their recurrent interactions in a co-ontogenetic structural drift. Because of this, interactions in language are structural interactions that trigger in the organisms interacting contingent structural changes with the course of the coordinations of consensual actions in which they arise. As a result, even though the domain of language is not intercepted with the structural domain of the body of the interacting organisms, the structural changes of the interacting organisms in language are a

In this way, the origin of language generates a new operational domain in the behavior of human beings, which generates reflexive operations. Thus, this domain, which

function of what occurs in their language and vice versa [9].

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95461*

"I. - All that is said is said by an observer.

II.- All that is said is said to an observer".

circular and recursive operation.

doing together in the coexistence.

munity of living" [10].

#### *Proprioceptive Perception: An Emergence of the Interaction of Body and Language DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95461*

what he calls a theorem, alluding to the statement made by Maturana after explaining the origin and mode of operation of language, which he states in this way:

"I. - All that is said is said by an observer.

*Proprioception*

makes their capacity for reflection possible.

its existence possible within the environment.

behaviors among the members of a social system" [1].

**5. Reflexive movement and proprioceptive perception**

way of life, learn in doing with another to incorporate the mastery of language that

Thus, in social systems, the learnings that are generated in individuals in the coordination of action among them, constitute the sensorimotor patterns that are the ways of moving and relating that constitute the way of life of the collective, which is transgenerational preserved by maintaining a living knowledge that makes

This co-evolutionary phenomenon constitutes a communicative process that is not related to an exchange of information, but rather to interactions of a reciprocal nature that generate specific and recurrent structural changes that occur in their encounters; encounters in which the structural changes of the organisms in their reciprocal interactions are modulated - at each instant - generating a coordination of movements that configure a choreography that is repeated in their recurrent interaction within the social system in the environment in which they are found. "We will understand communication as the mutual triggering of coordinated

Following this second order cybernetic perspective [7], which recognizes that the architecture of the neural networks constituting the nervous system that is embedded in the body of the organism, maintains a circular operation that is to say with operational closure, therefore this operation is referred to the states of activity of the network, and not to an external world [8]. This network is self-organized by distributed mechanisms, in which the global states of activity of the network modulates the activity of local zones, and vice versa the activity of local zones modulates the global states of the network. In this way, there is no internal or external agent that controls its operation; on the other hand, this system modulates and is modulated by the physiological operation of the organism. Therefore, the condition of operational closure of the neuronal network would explain that the world perceived by the organism, including the human being, is a world that emerges from the internal operation of the organism in its structural coupling with others and the

Considering this, we will explain the perception of the world lived by a human being and the learnings that originate the proprioceptive perception, from recognizing the type of structural links that occur between the hominid ancestors of *Homo sapiens*, generative of phylogenetic learnings that make possible the emergence of language and its capacity to reflect. These facts give origin to the particular

The mathematician H. Von Foerster, in his original presentation of the notion of second-order cybernetics, who is a precursor of the same, starts by pointing out

way of life of a social system constituted by networks of coordinated action coordinations from the operational distinctions of the language domain, that is to say, generative action coordinations of the networks of consensual conversations. We are going to see how the first condition for the constitution of the phenomenon of perception in human beings is the origin of the observer. "The observer and the observed, then, emerge in the flow of structural changes that occur in the members of a community of observers when they coordinate their consensual actions through their recurrent structural interactions in the domain of operational coherences in which they carry out their connected practices of living." [9]. Thus, if language is constituted in the domain of the coordinations of the dynamics of action coordinations that occur in the joint action of individuals within the social system in which

**102**

they carry out their living in coexistence.

environment.

A theorem to which Foerster adds a corollary that affirms:

II.- All that is said is said to an observer".

Concluding that I and II connect two observers through language, with this connection, in turn, a new concept is established, namely that of society, the two observers constitute the fundamental nucleus of a society, thus the three concepts are connected in a triadic way, each one with the other. "In this interaction we cannot say who was first and who was last […] a closed triad is formed" [7].

Thus, in this circularity, the operation of language within a social system constitutes observers, and observers in turn constitute the language in its operation in the domain of the coordination of the coordination of action among observers, a reflexive dynamic that is recurrent and recursive and generative in turn, of the domain in which it is constituted. This is a dynamic in which perceptual objects that constitute the world of culture in a society of human beings are configured. Thus, the operation of language domain constitutes an operational system constituted by the distinctions of perceptive objects that are associated among them, generating new distinctions that constitute the association network that generates them, a circular and recursive operation.

In the operation of language, the observer and the perceptual objects that constitute him/her are constituted, a circular dynamic that generates the world perceived by individuals, which does not correspond to an objective reality. Therefore, the description that an observer makes of the world of objects or phenomena that he/she perceives is the result of the flow of the experience of his/her consensual behavioral coordination with others. Therefore, these descriptions are not absolute truths, but descriptions agreed upon with others in the coexistence by such "everything said is said by an observer and for an observer" with whom they maintain a generative structural congruence of their coordination of actions in doing together in the coexistence.

"And since perceptual objects arise as behavioral configurations, the world of shared perceptual objects belongs to the sphere of operational concordances between organisms, which constitute them in the course of their coexistence as configurations of their behavioral concordances. In other words, if the perceptual objects remain configured by the behaviors of the organism, the world of perceptual objects that occurs in the coexistence of organisms, including the observer, can only arise from the coexistence as long as the organisms operate generating and conserving their mutual structural correspondence. That this is so is also apparent in everyday life, in which we know that the common world only arises in the community of living" [10].

How does the observer in language generate perceptual objects that are configured in the behavior of the individual? Language occurs in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions of organisms whose actions are coordinated because they have congruent dynamic structures that have emerged or are emerging through their recurrent interactions in a co-ontogenetic structural drift. Because of this, interactions in language are structural interactions that trigger in the organisms interacting contingent structural changes with the course of the coordinations of consensual actions in which they arise. As a result, even though the domain of language is not intercepted with the structural domain of the body of the interacting organisms, the structural changes of the interacting organisms in language are a function of what occurs in their language and vice versa [9].

In this way, the origin of language generates a new operational domain in the behavior of human beings, which generates reflexive operations. Thus, this domain, which

is not intercepted with the corporeal domain (constitutive of the physiological operation), nor with the relational domain (constitutive of the reciprocal interactions that the organism maintains with others and its environment), is constituted as a domain that in its operation generates perturbations both in the state of the organism and in the interactive contexts of the organism. Therefore, it corresponds to a third operational domain, which participates in the modulation of human behavior and experience.

The operation of language generates associations, descriptions and interpretations that originate the beliefs of the world of culture that give meaning to the way of doing and relating to individuals, making them learn to incorporate the recurrent and recursive coordination of action. This operational domain, brings the intentional movements from the reflection, which entails the learning of the reflexive movement of orienting the focuses of attention towards the perceptive objects constitutive of the world that the individuals learn to see in the doing with others, within the culture in which they grow. This reflexive attentional movement brings the possibility of the human being to become aware of himself, of the others and of the environment in which they are, by differentiating himself proprioceptively from the objects that he perceives, which occurs by the ways of relating and interacting that are constituted in the way of life of the hominids.

We will now see what happens in the bodily domain of behavior with the structural couplings in the hominid lineages that give rise to the phylogenetic learnings that make the origin of *Homo sapiens* possible. In the lineages of hominids that give rise to the human being, their way of life was generated learning gave rise to the architecture a nervous system that is characterized by a significant increase in brain mass, which means an increase in interneurons that expands the possibilities of structural plasticity of individuals, and thus the ability to learn, which means greater behavioral plasticity. Today we know that the genomes between *Homo sapiens* and anthropoids are almost identical, and from neuroscience it is observed that the regions of the brain have equivalents in the brains of apes. An interesting difference is the development of the generative auditory capacity of phoneme learning that is related to the origin of language [11]. Therefore, the advances of science support with their data the assumption that the origin of the reflection capacity of human beings is related to their way of life.

Such learning, which modifies the anatomophysiological structure, occurs in a way of life in which the game generates continuous and recurrent coordinations of action, and in this way increases the capacity to manipulate and differentiate objects with which they interact with others. At the same time, they had daily physical encounters in which they groomed themselves, and caressed in sensual and prolonged interlacing of their bodies and continuous sexual games with prolonged physical contact. In this way these dynamics of action generate structural changes in proprioceptive sensorial surfaces that correlate with modifications in motor surfaces, constituting recurrent changes in the sensoriality of the qualities of the movements of dynamics of postural sequences and positions of the different parts of the body, which together with maintaining a frontal vision with the other in the coordination of movement that are accompanied by guttural sounds, establishing in dynamics of action in which they generate movements of joint generative attentions of a perspective of the movement of itself and the other, which entails the reflective learning to sustain a division of centers of attention in movements of visualization of the movement of the other and proprioceptive sensation of the movements that it coordinates with him. Thus, in these dynamics of structural links of character -recurrent and recursive- learning is produced, which are constitutive of sensorimotor patterns that result from the coordination of visual, proprioceptive, tactile and auditory sensations, which constitute the sensation of movement and space of oneself, which occurs simultaneously with the differentiation of others in space.

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living [13].

have." [12].

**6. Proprioceptive perception**

correspondence in the environment" [12].

*Proprioceptive Perception: An Emergence of the Interaction of Body and Language*

This pre-reflective process that is observed in the families of hominids is generating the learning that makes possible in the individuals the reflective movement of coordination of the attentional movements and the corporal movements in relation to one another, generative of a perspective that arises from an internal space delimited proprioceptively towards an external space when dividing its attention. "…in effect, their spatiality is not, like that of external objects or like that of spatial sensations, a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation. […] The word here, as it applies to my body, does not designate a certain position with respect to another position or with respect to an external coordinate, but rather the installation of the first coordinates…" [6]. In this way, his corporeality is a spatial reference of his situation in his perspective of the world, moment by moment, which arises in interactions with others and the environment, being the place perceived proprio-

This reflexive movement constitutive of an observer's perspective, which arises from learning to divide their focus of attention into movements of joint attention with another observer in the manipulation of their bodies and objects, is configuring perceptual objects that constitute the observer that emerges with them. In this way the reflexive movement that arises from motor couplings between individuals, is constitutive of the operational domain of language and of the structural congruence between the objects of perception and the living body in its structural coupling with the environment: "The observer's operation in language consists of a way of living in the recursion of behavioral coordination that arise in the community of living and that configure a world of perceptual objects. […] The language and the operation of the observer, therefore, do not require or give rise to references to an external reality. The world of the observer's descriptions and explanations is a world of modes of coexistence that generate perceptual objects, in which the observer emerges as one of them when language emerges. Hence the generative and transforming power of the world that language and the explanations given in it

This composite concept leads us first to consider how perception is understood from this systemic perspective that includes living beings as structurally determined systems. This means that everything that happens to the organism in the interaction with its environment is determined by its structure. Therefore, the interactions of the organism with its environment are not instructive [1, 12]. From this perspective, perception consists of "the configuration that the observer makes of perceptual objects by distinguishing operational cleavages in the behavior of the organism, by describing the interactions of the organism in the flow of its structural

For there to be a perceptive experience, it is the observer who emerges from language as a perceptual object, the one who configures a world of perceptual objects in the recursion of behavioral coordination that arise in the community of

On the other hand, we will define proprioception as one more sense like vision, smell, taste, hearing; it is the sense of the qualities of the body's movement and its situational disposition in space (that the same movements generate) (see **Table 1**). Proprioception is not in itself a form of perception that gives us the "perception of the body", it is not the image, nor the representation, nor the consciousness of the body as an object [14]. The proprioceptive sensation is produced, moment by moment, by the changes in the activity of the proprioceptors that generate the

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95461*

ceptively in which he is and exists in a present.

#### *Proprioceptive Perception: An Emergence of the Interaction of Body and Language DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95461*

This pre-reflective process that is observed in the families of hominids is generating the learning that makes possible in the individuals the reflective movement of coordination of the attentional movements and the corporal movements in relation to one another, generative of a perspective that arises from an internal space delimited proprioceptively towards an external space when dividing its attention. "…in effect, their spatiality is not, like that of external objects or like that of spatial sensations, a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation. […] The word here, as it applies to my body, does not designate a certain position with respect to another position or with respect to an external coordinate, but rather the installation of the first coordinates…" [6]. In this way, his corporeality is a spatial reference of his situation in his perspective of the world, moment by moment, which arises in interactions with others and the environment, being the place perceived proprioceptively in which he is and exists in a present.

This reflexive movement constitutive of an observer's perspective, which arises from learning to divide their focus of attention into movements of joint attention with another observer in the manipulation of their bodies and objects, is configuring perceptual objects that constitute the observer that emerges with them. In this way the reflexive movement that arises from motor couplings between individuals, is constitutive of the operational domain of language and of the structural congruence between the objects of perception and the living body in its structural coupling with the environment: "The observer's operation in language consists of a way of living in the recursion of behavioral coordination that arise in the community of living and that configure a world of perceptual objects. […] The language and the operation of the observer, therefore, do not require or give rise to references to an external reality. The world of the observer's descriptions and explanations is a world of modes of coexistence that generate perceptual objects, in which the observer emerges as one of them when language emerges. Hence the generative and transforming power of the world that language and the explanations given in it have." [12].
