BEING ABOUT Part I. Cognitive bodies In Chapter 1, Aboutness, I suggest that whole bodies are oriented and structurally responsive to their environments, and that whole organisms, and not isolated internal parts, refer to, and are about, things in those environments. The immediate aboutness of an organism is thus its whole structure in a moment, insofar as that structure is its means of relating to other things. Cortical structure participates in momentary relatedness by coordinating selection of one among the indefinitely many structural states possible to a body of that species and somatic history. In the cortex, momentary change of structure includes cell growth, migration, and death, axon and dendrite extension and retraction, synaptic growth and modification, and spike and slow wave propagation -- an array of kinds of alteration varying in cause, degree and permanency, all occurring simultaneously, all changing the connective structure of the brain. In Chapter 2, Wide nets, and in the rest of this work, I simplify this unimaginable complexity by imagining it as a widely distributed net that may include partially segregated subnets, one of which coordinates conscious or sentient function.
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