To ensure we offer contemporary continuing education opportunities, the CE credit associated with this video is no longer available, however, the video remains available for viewing.
This lecture will explain, by means of a theory of coordination, the relationship between matter, movement and mind. There will be a little physics (self-organization), a little biology (synergy selection), a little math (mostly nonlinear), a little theory (coordination dynamics) and a little experimentation (from fingers and babies and brains to ballet dancing and beyond)—all presented at the level of the proverbial educated layperson. The story is one of emergence, how spontaneous processes give rise to properties not usually ascribed to ordinary matter, but rather to living things, such as agency and goal-directedness. Paradoxical though it may seem, the self–the “I”– emerges from self-organization which, by definition, means the system organizes itself. In these open, complex systems, there is no organizer doing the organizing. The path, made by walking--as Machado would have it--is from nonequilibrium phase transitions in matter and movement (including motor development and learning) to the “eureka effect” of experiencing oneself as an agent for the first time. Who cares? Well, if you have ever wondered how mind gets into matter or how matter produces mind, please join me: like a choreographed script, the order of matter, movement and mind might be important. Phase transitions offer a transcendental mechanism, “the way in” to their relationship. Via symmetry breaking, “the way out” is the modern, metastable mind.