Theme: Consciousness and communication as separate autopoietic systems

linked via structural coupling

Normally, my book summaries are about recently published novels and general-interest non-fiction books. This one is an exception (it remains to be a summary; it is not an essay). It was prompted when I began reading Anil Seth. 2021. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. In an earlier introduction to his approach (“The Real Problem,” 2016), Seth included statements such as that brains made sense out of the data sent to it by the human body’s senses based on “prior expectations or ‘beliefs’ about the way the world is.” Moreover, the brain used these beliefs “to form the brain’s optimal hypothesis of the causes of these sensory signals … What we see is the brain’s ‘best guess’ of what’s out there” (p. 6). Thus, “perceptual content is carried by perceptual predictions” (p. 7). I was fundamentally irritated, either by what Seth thought, or how he chose the wording, because those words seemed to turn the brain into a meaning-based actor.[1] I got the impression that he humanized what I would rather see as a self-organizing adaptive apparatus (adaptive regarding both information from its own body as well as data from its environment that it received through the body’s senses) that serves to maintain its own internal functional homeostasis as well as that of the body. This view is another way of saying what Niklas Luhmann stated in the above book on p. 35:

Organisms can, insofar as their viability in an environment is secured, organize a self-observation with the help of the nervous system. The observation refers exclusively to the internal state of the organism. This applies also to brains of every kind. Consciousness develops— parasitically, in whatever way—on this reality basis, but with the opposite tendency: primarily to observe that which it can see as an external world. Consciousness is, to a considerable extent of its attention, perceiving consciousness, and would, without possibilities of perception, quickly wither.[2]

To give an initial orientation about the relationship between consciousness and communication, here is a quote from Luhmann’s definitive statement in his two-volume Die Gesellchaft der Gesellchaft (Theory of Society) that was published roughly one year before his death in November 1998. The statement is taken from the chapter on “structural coupling.” This concept “consciously aims at the question of how autopoietic systems, notwithstanding their own autonomy and operative closure, can still be thought of as being connected to the environment.”[3] Luhmann writes:

… all communication is structurally coupled with consciousness. Without consciousness, communication is impossible. Communication is totally dependent (in every operation) on consciousness—if only because only consciousness and not communication itself can perceive sensorily, and neither oral nor written communication could function without perception. … Nonetheless, consciousness is neither the “subject” of communication nor in any other sense a “vehicle” of communication. It contributes no operations of any sort to communication (e.g., in the sense of a successive thought-speech-thought-speech sequence). Communication functions only because no recursions have to be produced between such heterogeneous modes of operation and because communication has no need to thematize the presupposition of consciousness, but accepts it through structural couplings. We must therefore abandon the classical metaphor that communication is a “transmission” of semantic content by one psychic system that possesses it to another.[4]

From here, my summary will proceed sequentially in four steps. Each step presents statements from relevant publications by Luhmann. These steps are as follows.

1) Social Systems

2) “What is Communication?”

3) “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?”

4) Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Science as a Social System)

1) Social Systems

Since this summary is not about the entire book Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Science as a Social System) but only on the first chapter, entitled “Consciousness and Communication” (pages 11-67), I shall start with explaining how Luhmann constructs the concept of “communication.” Obviously, the everyday understanding that a sender sends (transfers) a message (or meaningful content) to a recipient, or that a communicative interaction takes place is not what Luhmann has in mind. Instead, he conceptualizes communication as a process that comprises three selections, namely information, utterance, and understanding. He says, “From now on we will treat communication as a three-part unity. We will begin from the fact that three selections must be synthesized in order for communication to appear as an emergent occurrence.”[5] The first selection concerns information. A piece of information does not normally impose itself on me. Rather, at any given time, I am surrounded by a great many of them. Thus, in order to begin a communication, I will have to select one piece of information. In a second step, I will have to select an utterance. After all, a piece of information does not normally determine by itself how I utter it. There will be different ways of doing so. After I have made my utterance, the receiving psychic system does not take it as I have spoken it. Rather, first, it must understand that this was not merely simple behavior (such as when the personnel at a hotel, upon checking in, hands the keycard of my room to me). It must understand that I had to select the information as well as the utterance. And it can pay its attention both to the intentions that led me to select the information and the utterance as well as to the content of the utterance. “Communication emerges only if this last difference [between information and utterance] is observed, expected, understood, and used as the basis for connecting with further behaviors” (p. 141).[6] This third selective component of a communication is conceptually very important: “The fact that understanding is an indispensable feature in how communication comes about has far-reaching significance for comprehending communication. One consequence is that communication is possible only as a self-referential process” (ibid., p. 143, original italics.). Any connecting communication includes a test of whether the preceding communication was understood. Furthermore: “From the assumption that communication is a basally self-referential process that coordinates three different selections in each of its elements, it follows that, according to systems theory, that there can be no environmental correlate for communication. The unity of communication corresponds to nothing in the environment” (p. 144). Such formulations always refer to the principle that systems are operationally closed[7] but cognitively open. This means that the environment (neither the physical environment nor the physical brains of the participating psychic systems) cannot contribute any operations to the communicative process. It can only contribute data to communication in so far as the communication system perceives them. “‘Cognitively open’, therefore, does not mean anything else than that the system creates the respective information in a condition of external reference, relating them to differences in its environment.”[8]

This conception of communication does not make “action” entirely disappear. One can still ask: “For social systems, which is truly the final element with which relations are created and which cannot be further decomposed—action or communication?” (p. 164). In short, it is communication. However, to operate as a communication system, its symmetry must be interrupted. Being symmetrical means that all of the selections can serve as points of continuation of the system. Yet, a selection cannot do anything by itself, and the word indicates that there must be an entity that makes the selections. Since this is the consciousness of a psychic system, the concept of “action” offers itself. Thus, “Only by building the understanding of action into a communicative occurrence can communication become asymmetrical; only thus can a person who utters information give directives to its receiver, and this can be reversed only if the receiver begins to utter something of his own, that is, begins to act” (p. 165, original italics). In this way, the symmetrical unity of the communication is made to appear as if it was an interaction between two (or more) actors. In Luhmann’s words:

Thus, a social system is constituted as an action system on the basis of communicative happenings, and using their operative means. The system generates a description of itself in itself to steer the continuation of the process, the reproduction of the system. Communication’s symmetry is made asymmetrical to allow self-observation and self-description … And in this abbreviated, simplified, and thereby more easily comprehensible self-description, action—not communication—serves as the final element. (p. 165).

To add to the preceding quote: At the beginning of the chapter 4 in Social Systems that deal with “Communication and Action,” Luhmann turned against Max Weber and Talcott Parsons who had both, in different ways, seen social action as a special case of action. He states,

If one begins with the possibility of a theory of self-referential systems and with problems of complexity, there is much to suggest simply reversing the relationship of constraint. Sociality is not a special case of action; instead, action is constituted in social systems by means of communication and attribution as a reduction of complexity, as an indispensable self-simplification of the system. (p. 137, my italics)

However, this should not be misunderstood as encouraging methodological (or even methodical) individualism. When a researcher wants to investigate social phenomena, such as an anti-government protest, a military coup, the drafting of a new constitution, or the royal capture of the command over regular army combat units, it would be wrong to start by investigating the mental states of the participants. It is almost common sense when Luhmann points out that, “Observers can predict action better by knowing a situation than by knowing people, and, correspondingly, their observation of actions often, if not always, is not concerned with the mental state of the actor, but with carrying out the autopoietic reproduction of the social system” (p. 166).[9] And an anti-government protest and the other examples mentioned above are social systems, or they occur as events within encompassing social systems. “Nevertheless, everyday action is attributed to individuals” (ibid.). Luhmann follows up on this quote with an ironical remark, saying, “Such extremely unrealistic behavior can only be explained by a need to reduce complexity” (ibid.).[10]

2) “What is Communication?”

This step is still concerned with clarifying Luhmann’s concept of communication. In a lecture-based article called “What is Communication?”, he summarized his approach in 21 points.[11] It is probably not necessary to list all these points here because they overlap of what was said above already. Nevertheless, I selected some of them to further clarify the concept. The issue headlines are italics in the original.

“Only communication can communicate.”

Luhmann rejects the common view that “In the end, it is always people, individuals, subjects who act or communicate” (p. 156). Contrary to that perspective, “I would like to assert  … that only communication can communicate and what we understand as ‘action’ can be generated only in such a network of communication” (ibid., my italics).

“Self-reference is not a special property of thought.”

Sociological theory must begin with communication. “For not action, but communication is an unavoidably social operation and at the same time an operation that is necessarily set in motion whenever social situations are formed” (my italics). Consequently, Luhmann states that in conceptualizing communication, he will “strictly avoid any reference to consciousness or to life, that is, to other levels of the realization of autopoietic systems.” It should be noted at this point that he refers to both the brain and to consciousness as autopoietic systems. As a “precaution,” he adds that, obviously, communication is impossible without neither. Yet, it is also impossible “without carbon, without moderate temperatures, without the earth’s magnetic field, without the atomic bonding of matter. Faced with the complexity of the world, one cannot take all the conditions of the possibility of a state of affairs into the concept of this state of affairs, for the concept would thereby lose all of its contours and any technical applicability to theory construction” (p. 157).

“Communication comes about through a synthesis of three different selections.”

“Like life and consciousness, communication is also an emergent reality, a self-generated state of affairs” (ibid, my italics). I have said enough about this above.

“It is of paramount significance to maintain the distinction between perception and communication.”

Perception “remains locked up within consciousness and [is] nontransparent to the system of communication as well as to every other consciousness” (ibid., my italics). However, a participant can insert his/her perceptions into communications.

“Even understanding is itself a selection.”

“Understanding is never a mere duplication of the utterance in another consciousness…” (ibid.) “Whatever the participants in their own respective self-referential, closed consciousnesses may think, the communication system works out its own understanding and creates processes of self-observation and self-inspection for this purpose” (ibid., my italics).

“What is new about this concept of communication?”

“…a systems’-theoretical approach emphasizes the emergence of communication itself. Nothing is transferred” (p. 160, original italics).

“With these three components, it is a matter of different selections.”

“There is no information outside of communication; there is no utterance outside of communication; there is no understanding outside of communication” (ibid.).

“A system of communication is a completely closed system.”

“A system of communication is therefore a fully closed system that generates the components of which it consists through communication itself” (ibid.). “Only communication can influence communication; only communication can decompose units of communication (for example, by analyzing the hirozon od horizon of selection of a piece of information or asking about the reasons for an utterance); and only communication can inspect and repair communication.” (p. 161). I don’t know how many times I have sat at home and thought about communications I had. Those thoughts occurred in my consciousness. They would have no effect on the communication that has passed already. In trying to change any deficiencies, I would have to enter into a new set of communications with the same participants.

“Communication has no goal.”

“It [communication] happens, or not, and that is all that one can say on that point.” (p. 161)

“All communication is risky.”

After all, an utterance can be rejected. This has important implication, because “It leads to the building of institutions that secure a disposition of acceptance even towards improbable communications” (p. 162). However, it can also lead to the avoidance of utterances if participants have a sense that they might be rejected.

“Communication duplicates reality.”

“Therefore, to repeat this important point once more in other words, communication duplicates reality. It creates two versions, a yes-version and a no-version, and thereby compels selection” (p. 163). If a participant sees the risk as too high, he/she might simply end the communication.

“One’s own consciousness dances about upon the words like a will-o’-the-wisp [Irrlicht].”

“This superiority of consciousness to communication (which, of course, corresponds in inverted system-reference to a superiority of communication over consciousness) becomes fully clear if one realizes that consciousness is occupied not only with words or with vague word-and-sentence ideas, but additionally and often more importantly with perception and with the imaginative construction and dismantling of images. Even during speech, consciousness is ceaselessly occupied with perception…” (p. 166).

“It is inevitable to adapt communication to the will-o’-the-wisp of consciousness.”

Communication cannot deal with the bits and pieces of consciousness. An utterance cannot be composed of merely bits and pieces of a participant’s thought process. “The autopoietic autonomy of consciousness, one could say, is represented and compensated in communication by binarization” (p. 167), that is, utterances that can be accepted or rejected, irrespective of the turmoil that might at the same time take place in the participant’s consciousness.

“Communication can be interfered with by consciousness.”

“… communication can be interfered with by consciousness and even anticipates this, but only in forms that are connectable in further communication and that can thus be treated communicatively. In this way, a mixing of the autopoiesis of the two systems never comes about, yet a high degree of co-evolution and practiced reactivity does” (p. 167).

3) “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?”

Having come to this point, I have covered most of the path leading to the book this summary is about. Yet, there is still one article I would like to mention because it happens to be very topical: “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?” The German original text does not say “mind” but “consciousness.”[12]

It might be best to start with a formulation that is typical Luhmann: “Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds [German: “Bewusstsein” or consciousness] can communicate. Only communications can communicate” (p. 169, my italics). And no consciousness can link up with another consciousness [the English translation on p. 170 uses “minds”]. It can merely imagine performing a communication. However, this imagination remains internal to consciousness. “No mind can operatively think outside itself, although it can certainly think of something else within itself” (p. 182). Moreover, consciousness is “fluid, constantly changing” (p. 171). Above, I quoted the will-o’-the-wisp of consciousness. How can communication rely on such a fickle foundation? “How can communication reproduce itself if it must rely on a multitude of nervously vibrating brains and agitated minds?” (ibid.). For better or worse, communication depends on consciousness. Communication can only be produced when at least two conscious minds can produce the three selections of information, utterance, and understanding. Yet, “psychic systems and social systems never fuse or even partially overlap but are completely separate, self-referentially closed, autopoietic-reproductive systems. As I said: humans cannot communicate” (p. 176).

However, the mind, by producing thoughts, can “disturb, stimulate, and irritate communication” (ibid.). This is not to be understood as if consciousness was able to instruct communications regarding its content and procedure, because this is done in the system of communication itself. What gives consciousness a certain advantage is the fact that it is only consciousness that is capable of perception. And this perception remains “locked up” (p. 177) in consciousness. Given this situation, all that a psychic system participating in communication can do is to treat perception as information and formulate it as an utterance that another psychic system can understand. Yet, this understanding can only use the utterance, not the original perception (except the fact that a perception did occur) made by the other participating psychic system. Communication “cannot copy states of mind, cannot imitate them, cannot represent them” (p. 178). Likewise, environmental factors can enter communication only through this occurrence of perception, never directly. Here, Luhmann introduces the phrase “structural complementarity.” On the one hand, communication can only occur by virtue of active consciousness. On the other hand, consciousness is attracted by interesting content.

Thus, we can keep in mind that:

• One communication is the unity of three selections: information, utterance, and understanding.
• At least two psychic systems (even if one is dead already, like Luhmann, and even if the utterance is a rather long one at 732 pp) are involved in creating one communication.
• Both consciousness and communication are self-referentially closed systems, though they are open to perception and cognition.
• Communication is structurally coupled with consciousness, which means that all communications, though depending on processes of thought, remain self-referential, depending on their own structures. The same applies to the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Both are self-referentially closed systems, but consciousness is structurally coupled with the brain. In other words, consciousness depends on the existence and proper functioning of the brain, but its operations are not determined by the brain. Simply put: The brain enables consciousness, but it does not determine the content of thoughts.  

4) Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Science as a Social System)

Finally, I will move to Luhmann’s book Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Science of Society, Science as a Social System). Since much has been said already about how Luhmann conceptualizes consciousness and communications, and how he links them, there is not that much I would like to add. Still, it needs to be recalled that autopoietic systems, such as the brain, consciousness, and communications, gain their respective unity as systems by producing the elements of which they are composed by their own internal structures. The complementary concept of structural coupling means that the brain needs a body, consciousness needs the brain, and communication needs consciousness to exist, though none of the systems can contribute operations to the other systems. There is also no “overlapping” of the systems. What, for example, consciousness can do to communication or the latter to the former is producing “irritations.”

The mutual dependence is reduced to the form of mutual irritations that are noticed and processed only in the irritated system. (p. 36)

Irritations are entirely internal states of systems. Luhmann clarifies this in a comprehensive text passage:

Irritation, like surprise, disturbance, disappointment, etc., is always a state internal to the system, for which there is no equivalent in the environment. In other words, the environment itself does not have to be irritated in order to serve as a source of irritation for the system. Irritations arise only under the condition of structuring expectations, and they are irritations only insofar as they pose a problem for the continuation of the system’s autopoiesis. (p. 40)

A conscious mind can produce an utterance that irritates communication, but the latter can also irritate the conscious mind. Communication gives the conscious mind something to think about, while the utterance produced by a conscious mind gives the communication something to communicate about. The respective thoughts and communications are recursive. Recursive relations simply are those “in which the conclusion of an operation is the condition for another to take place.”[13] Thoughts must recursively follow preceding thoughts (one cannot not think, one can only think not to think, or one dies), and communications recursively follow preceding communications (if the latter indeed continue; they might also end, for example when a meeting is over and the participants return to their offices). For an observer, such as a participant in communications, it may seem as if thoughts and utterances constituted unity. This, however, is not the case.

Even the structural operational interconnection of consciousness and communication is only a moment-to-moment variable coupling, which continually renews the systems’ freedom for autonomous movement with the completion of each individual event.[14]

In other words, for making an utterance, consciousness must momentarily concentrate on what is to be uttered; making utterances requires attention at the moment they are made. But as soon that they are made, consciousness is free to follow its own flow of thoughts again. At this point, another concept enters the picture: persons/people. They are neither psychic systems nor human beings in their totality. Rather, they are attributions, or constructs, that communication systems devise to have addressees for utterances and understanding. After all, communications cannot directly access a conscious mind.

            Fundamental for the assumption of a strict separation of consciousness and communication is the radical temporalization of the participating systems via their individual operations. “Operations are events that disappear in the very moment of their occurrence and cannot be repeated.” This sentence reflects a key element of Luhmann’s approach, and it cannot be repeated too often. Social systems in Luhmann’s sense are not merely analytical tools, and they are neither objects nor collections of institutions. Social systems exist only because they are able recursively to produce another momentary operation as soon as the preceding operation has vanished (see footnote 7). As for the strict separation of consciousness and communication, if four people are in a meeting and they communicate. In such a case, Luhmann states, their talk appears as events in four conscious systems. But these events are not identical. Put another way, communications are not simply copies that are implanted into the participating conscious systems, thereby producing identical compact pieces of meaning in all four conscious systems. Rather, the communications are perceived and processed in participating conscious systems with reference to their different internal networks of other events. We must keep in mind that the conscious minds that participate in such a meeting are internally in a constant flux of creating momentary events followed recursively by other events, followed recursively by other events, and so forth. It is on this basis that the three selections that constitute one communication—information, utterance, understanding—are made. Both the conscious system that produces the utterance and the conscious system producing the understanding operate in a constant flux of only momentarily meaningful events. (When I was still working at university, this was what made me hate having to be an active participant in department meetings.) To use another word, each conscious system has a different memory and must therefore connect what is being said in the meeting to different preceding internal operations.  In a different context, Luhmann noted that society “tolerates the uncoordinated multiplicity of perspectives of the endogenously restless individual systems.”[15] (In those department meetings, I was regularly baffled by how one communication could lead to entirely unanticipated reactions by participants and thus might have become less than tolerant.)[16] Luhmann follows this section with the statement:

Only when this state of affairs has been sufficiently grasped and described can one recognize how consciousness and communication do, after all, form a necessary connection (but not, that is, a unified system). The key to this lies in the concept of structural coupling. (p. 38; original italics).

In The Theory of Society (Vol. 1, p. 54), Luhmann put this point more dramatically. He stated that the question was how the system of society

organizes its relationship with the environment if it maintains no contact with this environment and has only its own referential capacity at its disposition. The entire theory of society depends on the answer to this question… The answer to a difficult question is a difficult concept. Following Humberto Maturana, we speak of “structural coupling.”

The introduction of this concept, to put this another way, “consciously aims at the question of how autopoietic systems, notwithstanding their own autonomy and operative closure, can still be thought of as being connected to the environment.”[17] This connection must exclude the possibility that a system’s own structures are determined by its environment. On the other hand, certain environmental conditions must exist independently of a system—without affecting the content of a system’s operations—because otherwise the system would cease to exist. In the case of social systems, all communications are structurally coupled to consciousness.

Without consciousness, communication is impossible. Communication is totally dependent (in every operation) on consciousness—if only because only consciousness and not communication itself can perceive sensorily, and neither oral nor written communication could function without perception.[18]

Again, this is not to be understood as a causal relationship in the sense that consciousness causes a certain content of communication, though it is most directly involved in the perception and selection of information and the selection of an utterance (but it cannot take part in the concluding selection, that is, the understanding by another conscious system). Rather, it is about the simultaneity of a connection in which communication relies on the materiality of consciousness to produce and continue its operations. This kind of structural coupling is enabled by language. In turn, consciousness is structurally coupled with its physical foundation:

Consciousness processes the thoughts currently available to it in a specific sequence, while numerous bodily processes, especially those of the brain, take place simultaneously, enabling consciousness without themselves being conscious. In this respect, as it moves from one thought to the next, consciousness can rely on certain capacities (for example, the recognition of complex configurations) without having to make a conscious decision about them, or even being able to do so. (p. 43, my italics)[19]

Thus, just like communication is structurally coupled to consciousness, consciousness is structurally coupled to its living basis, mainly to the brain. Importantly, the brain cannot contribute thoughts to consciousness, and neither can consciousness contribute thoughts to communication. When communicative acts happen, the state of consciousness that was present when producing such acts is not part of that communication (of course, neither are relevant processes in the brain). Such communication presupposes the existence of consciousness without consciousness becoming part of communication. There is no causal or deterministic relationship between brain and consciousness, and neither is there such a relationship between consciousness and communications. All three systems are operationally closed and linked only by a vertical arrangement of structural coupling.

Closing remarks

I have reached the end of what I wanted to say about the issues of communication, consciousness and structural coupling. To me, the most fascinating element of Luhmann’s theory is its radical temporalization of the foundational elements of society into operations that disappear in the moment they occur and that must therefore be followed recursively by a similar type of operation for the respective system being able to continue its existence, be it politics, law, science, the economy, art, education, the mass media, or religion. Moreover, this approach is complicated by the fact that Luhmann also does not treat consciousness as an integrated whole but rather dissolves it into units that equally consist of temporalized elements that disappear the moment they appear. Thus, consciousness must continuously reproduce itself by connecting thoughts recursively to preceding thoughts and point to possible subsequent thoughts, ad infinitum, until its physical basis dies. Therefore, the production of the basic elements of society—communications—entirely depends on the structural coupling with a unit that is fundamentally highly unstable and fickle.

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[1] In Chris and Uta Frith’s What Makes Us Social (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2023, p. 255) one reads the truly bizarre sentence, “We conclude that meaning does not reside in single brains. Rather, it is constantly re-created through interactions between brains.”

[2] All translations were done by ChatGPT, with occasional input by me. I asked for a rather literal approach in the translations. The German text reads: “Organismen können, soweit ihre Lebenfähigkeit in einer Umwelt gesichert ist, mit Hilfe des Nervensystems eine Selbstbeoachtung organisieren. Die Beobachtung bezieht sich ausschlieslich auf den Eigenzustand des Organismus. Das gilt auch für Gehirne jeder Art. Bewusstsein entwickelt sich, wie immer parasitär, auf dieser Realitätsbasis, aber mit der umgekehrten Tendenz, primär das zu beobachten, was es als Aussenwelt sehen kann. Bewusstsein ist mit erheblichen Anteilen seiner Aufmerksamkeit wahrnehmendes Bewusstsein und würde ohne Wahrnehmungsmöglichkeiten rasch verkümmern.”

[3] Niklas Luhmann. 1995. “Die operative Geschlossenheit psychischer und sozialer Systeme.” In Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch, pp. 25-36 (p. 31). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. (Originally a presentation given in April 1991.)

[4] Niklas Luhmann. 2012. Theory of Society. Volume 1. Translated by Rhodes Barrett. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, p. 56f.

[5] Niklas Luhmann. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, p. 142. German original: Sozial Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985 (my italics).

[6] Psychologically oriented conceptions of the social usually base their framework on individual “minds” and social cognition, while for denoting the overall process of the social a commonsensical idea of “interaction” is used (about Luhmann used to ask how precisely this “inter” was to be understood). For example, see Chris and Uta Frith, in their book What Makes us Social (Cambridge, Mass. And London: The MIT Press, 2023) assume that there are separate minds that are connected by an “interface” called “reflexion,” which is seen as the “top level of the information-processing hierarchy” (p. 1). This goes together with what they call “mentalizing,” that is “the ability [of one mind] to model the minds of others to predict what they are going to do, its causes, and its consequences for our social interactions” (p. 4). Similarly, Forgas, Crano, and Fiedler base sociability on the need to “possess a theory of mind—the capacity to understand that other people live in different subjective universes, experience different mental states, beliefs, and intentions, and that these states are only imperfectly accessible to outsiders. Having a theory of mind is absolutely essential for success in everyday human social interactions.” (Joseph P. Forgas, William D. Crano, and Klaus Fiedler. 2022. “The Psychology of Human Sociability: From Individuals to Community,” In The Psychology of Sociability: Understanding Human Attachment, ed. by the authors. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 3-21 (p. 8). Finally, Enfield and Levison noted, “Crucial elements of this [social interaction] include the ability to recognize others’ intentions through modeling the minds of others in real contexts (and to anticipate their modeling of our anticipation of their intention attribution!). These elements together form the essential equipment for formulating and interpreting actions in an interactional setting.” N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levison. 2006. “Introduction: Human Sociability as a New Interdisciplinary Field.” In Roots of Human Sociability: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, ed. by the authors. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 1-35 (p. 26f.).

[7] Operations are the fundamental elements of social systems; they are radically temporalized. In other words, operations are events that disappear at the moment that they have occurred. They cannot be repeated; they can only be followed by other events of the same kind. At this level, systems are closed. What occurs is a “recursive enabling of [a system’s] own operations by the results of its own operations” (Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 94). The “conclusion of one operation is the condition of the possibility of another [operation]” (ibid., p. 95). “At the level of its own operations, [the system] has no access into its environment, nor can systems in the environment participate in the autopoietic processes of an operationally closed system” (ibid., p. 92). In Das Recht der Gesellschaft (p. 44), Luhmann provides this definition, “Systems are denoted as operationally closed when, for the production of their own operations, they depend on the network of their own operations and, in this sense, reproduce themselves.”

[8] Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 112).

[9] In a less Luhmannarian language, one could say that sociologists are concerned with macro phenomena. If they start with the individual, the usual problem occurs to explain how micro (individual) actions can lead to collective (macro) phenomena. In his “Instead of a Preface to the English Edition [of Social Systems]: On the Concepts ‘Subject’ and ‘Action’”, Luhmann pointed out, “Of course, one can still say that human beings act. But since that always occurs in situations, the question remains whether and to what extent the action is attributed to the individual human being or to the situation. If one wants to bring about a decision of this question, one must observe, not the human being in the situation, but the process of attribution. Therefore actions are not ultimate ontological givens that emerge as unavoidable empirical elements that force themselves upon one in every sociological analysis” (p. xliii, my italics).

[10] If an empirical researcher insists on an individualistic approach, a typical problem occurs: He or she can see and construct a model of the phenomenon, but he or she will not be allowed directly to observe what is assumed to happen. Moreover, if the researcher instead wants to use interviews of individuals, their answers will invariably be of doubtful validity. This is especially true when a system includes very significant proportions of informal, and partly illegal, behavior, such as is the case in Thailand’s political system.

[11] “Was ist Kommunikation?” In Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995, pp. 113-124. The lecture was given in 1986. The English translation, “What is Communication” was published in Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Edited, with an Introduction, by William Rasch. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 155-168.

[12] Niklas Luhmann. 2002. “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?” In Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Edited, with an Introduction, by William Rasch, pp. 169-184. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Niklas Luhmann. 1995. “Wie ist Bewusstsein an Kommunikation beteiligt?“ in Niklas Luhmann: Soziologische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch, pp. 37-54. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. The German text was first published in 1988.

[13] Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society. Volume 1, p. 51. In Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 275, Luhmann states that “recursively closed systems can produce their elements only by a network of these very elements.”

[14] The German text reads, “Selbst der strukturelle Operationszusammenhang von Bewusstsein und Kommunikation ist nur eine von Moment zu Moment variable Kopplung, die die Freiheit der Systeme zur Eigenbewegung mit dem Ablauf jedes Einzelereignisses immer wieder erneuert“ (p. 31). Translation by ChatGPT.

[15] Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society. Volume 1, p. 51.

[16] In a footnote, Luhmann adds: “The same argument could be used to resolve the so-called reductionism debate concerning consciousness and the brain, if one accepts that the brain, too, consists of events rather than of cells” (fn. 40 on p. 38).

[17] Niklas Luhmann. 1995. “Die operative Geschlossenheit psychischer und sozialer Systeme.” In Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch, pp. 25-36 [p. 31]. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. (Originally a presentation given in April 1991.)

[18] Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society. Volume 1, p. 56.

[19] The English translation hides a nice German-language construction. What appears here as “the thoughts currently available to it” is “die ihm verfügbare Gedankenaktualität” in German.