To study Ecological Psychology is to study the relation between knower and known. Because every other discipline, by definition, begins with an epistemic agent (the knower), and an intentional object of knowledge (the known) as well as the explicitly or implicitly held epistemological or ontological assumptions that go with them, however they are construed, ecological psychology, which is just the study of these things, can appropriately be thought of as the most fundamental of all disciplines. In this role it forms a fundamental bridge between, both drawing from and informing, what are otherewise usually taken as separate and usually incommensurate disciplines such as physics, biology, evolutionary theory, and cognitive theory.
the solar radiation spectrum provides another clue to the ecological relation
the absorption spectrum of the Earth's atmosphere shows the planetary nature or ecological context for perceiving and acting entropy production leads to spontaneous order in an example that shows the irreducible ecological relation
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ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 3(4), 317-348 Copyright c 1991, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Thermodynamic Reasons for Perception-Action Cycles
R. Swenson
Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut
M. T. Turvey
Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories
Abstract An argument is developed to show that the origin and evolution of the perceptual guidance of movements and the movement enhancement of opportunities to perceive, that is, perception-action cycles, have a direct and deep connection with thermodynamic principles. The cornerstones of the argument are: (a) maximum entropy production as a physical selection principle (thermodynamic fields will behave in such a fashion as to get to the final state -minimize the field potential or maximize the entropy -at the fastest possible rate given the constraints); (b) the inexorability of order production (order production is inexorable because order produces entropy faster than disorder); (c) evolution as a global phenomenon (the Earth system at its highest level evolves as a single global entity); and (d) information in Gibson's law-based, specificational sense (invariant relations exist between higher order properties of structured energy distributions and their environmental sources). In the coordination of self-organizing dynamics with information in the specificational sense, access is provided to otherwise inaccessible opportunities to produce ordered flow and to dissipate, thereby, the geocosmic potential at faster rates. The progressive emergence of perception-action cycles in the evolution of the Earth as a global entity is the lawful product of opportunistic physics: There was no other way to produce the collective (ordered) states that would engender these higher levels of dissipation. Perception-action cycles express higher order symmetries of the world itself, in its own becoming. Perception-action is the physics at these higher levels.
(c) Copyright 2001 Archives of Science
ecological psycholoy: radiation spectrumplanetary ecology: increase in atmospheric oxygenecological psychology: increase in mass specific respirationecological psychology: solar radiation windowecological relations: spontaneous orderecological psychology: mainecological psychology: perception 1