According to Carsetti's main thesis, it is necessary to take note, pace
Immanuel Kant, that, at the level of a biological cognitive system, sensibility is not a simple interface between absolute chance and an invariant intellectual order. On the contrary, the reference procedures, if successful, appear able to modulate canalization at the level of embodiment process thus setting the stage for the appearance of ever-new frames of incompressibility through morphogenesis. In Carsetti's opinion, the real problem is represented not by the subject's discovery and exploration of ever new territories (according to the well known and many shared view held by the great scholar
Hilary Putnam), but by his coming to offer himself as a matrix and arch in view of the autonomous release of new biological landscapes in accordance with ever increasing levels of complexity. There is no casual autonomous process already in existence, and no possible selection and synthesis activity via a possible "remnant" through reference procedures considered as a form of simple regimentation. "These procedures - he writes - are in actual fact functional to the construction and irruption of new incompressibility: meaning, as Forma formans, offers the possibility of creating a holistic anchorage, and that is exactly what allows the categorial apparatus to emerge and act according to a coherent 'arborization' ". As Carsetti maintains: "The new invention, which is born then shapes and opens the (new) eyes of the mind: I see as a mind because new meaning is able to articulate and take root through me". This individuation, on the other side, presents itself, in his view, not only as an important theoretical achievement but also as one of the essential bases of our very evolution as intelligent organisms. With respect to this theoretical mainframe, and in accordance with
Heinz von Foerster (1981) and
Louis Kauffman (2003), the two scholars, that is to say, to which Carsetti makes continuous reference in his works, Carsetti assumes that the objects of our experience are the fixed points of specific operators, these operators are the structure of our perception: the single object is an eigenform. Actually, in his opinion, at the level of the observation process, a continuous interaction takes place between the individual subject and the world, an interaction that produces stabilities which therefore become objects, i.e. the objects that populate our perceptual world. In this sense, perceptual activity appears conditioned by the unfolding of the embodiment process and is linked to the cues offered by Reflexivity to meaning in action. In Carsetti's opinion, it is necessary, however, to emphasize that the classic reflexive models to the extent that they do not appear capable of creatively exploring the structures of reality are not really able to account for the creativity and continuous metamorphosis that characterize cognitive activity. They do not loosen the knot related to the intricate relationships between invariance and morphogenesis and do not arise in relation to the actual realization of a specific embodiment. Hence the importance of making reference to theoretical tools more complex and variegated as, for instance, non-standard mathematics and complexity theory, in order to provide an adequate basis for the afore mentioned exploration. As Carsetti shows in 2012 in his volume
Epistemic Complexity and Knowledge Construction, by referring to this particular and very simple theoretical "landscape", it is possible to realize that the constraints imposed by specific selective pressures (operating in ambient meaning and articulating in accordance with suitable non-standard procedures) at the level of the dynamics of an original cellular (dissipative) automaton can, actually, permit a more complex canalization of the informational fluxes at stake. In particular, they can allow the unfolding of silent potentialities, the full expression of generative principles never before revealed and, consequently, the effective expression of new autonomous processes of production of varied complexity. In this way, there is the real possibility, in his opinion, to preserve the deep insights outlined by
Gregory Chaitin relative to the mathematical substratum underlying biological evolution. In particular, it will then be possible to take into account some general themes concerning, for instance, the role played, at the level of the development of living beings, by: 1) meaning in action; 2) the computational membranes; 3) those specific processes that determine that particular emergence of ever-new biological structures that distinguishes natural evolution. Hence, in his opinion, the possibility to enter, according to a more precise mathematical formalism, the mystery concerning, at the biological level, the stratified and hierarchical development of the differentiation processes. As Carsetti remarks: "The intentionality belonging to meaning manages, through the brain’s channeling, to rise to the surface of the incarnated coder, constituting itself as membrane able to mirror in itself the coder's nesting by programs". According to Carsetti, the result is a surfacing "countenance" and an extended arborization revealing itself at surface level (in that life traverses it) as a design-web of connections unified by a living intentionality finally expressing itself as true harmony. "This harmony - he writes - is that of signs created by a "hand" which ramifies (as instantiated, for example, by Auguste Rodin in a famous sculpture) to become countenance, a hand that individuates (and perceives) itself, through the operated design, as the combined and productive features of meaning in action". Metabiology cannot avoid dealing with a renewed critical assessment of this mysterious but intrinsically biological phenomenon, a phenomenon that is central to the interests of Carsetti also in the field of
Philosophy of Mind. In his latest volume entitled
Metabiology published in 2020, Carsetti revisits a fundamental thesis enunciated by
Henri Atlan which states that, on a biological level, "the function self-organizes together with its meaning" and connects this thesis which constitutes one of the cornerstones of the contemporary theory of self-organization, with
Monod's intuition according to which Nature really appears as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization. According to Carsetti, while, however, Monod had at his disposal as a general reference framework exclusively a syntactic information theory such as that developed by
Shannon (a theory framed furthermore in a first-order Cybernetics), the presence, today, of innovative analysis tools such as those represented by the definition of a second order Cybernetics as well as by the development of a new type of relationship between information and meaning, offers the possibility for the leavening of that conceptual revolution increasingly referred to as metabiology. It is exactly in this context, that Carsetti places his proposal for the very definition of a new kind of scientific Realism, i.e. the enactive (or participatory) Realism. == Selected publications ==