Movement, Consciousness, and The Ties That Bind You

You’re bound to the world around you.  You’re made of the same stuff as it, and when you die, your stuff will be re-integrated into it in new forms.

This structural coupling is a hallmark of the Santiago theory of cognition.

We’re constantly digesting and assimilating bits of our environment in the form of food or information.  We take in the external and make it internal.  We--like all living organisms--are self-generative processes.  We organize structural adaptations based on the environment around us.  

This response-ability is an inherently cognitive process.  

We can think of it as parallel to the sensory half of the sensory-motor loop that makes up our movement.  Cognition involves the processing of afferent sensory information.  So what’s on the other half?  

I’d argue that it’s creation.  Just as movement is a sensory-motor loop, life is a cognitive-creative process.  We process the environment and make something new from it.  

We can consciously shape the world around us in such a way that it will beneficially shape us in return.  We can bring entire worlds to life with imaginative thought, and we can make them manifest through creative action.  

This is the fundamental role of movement and awareness.  Movement is the vehicle that consciousness uses to interface with the world.  

Make it count.