Reflecting Life Itself C oordination is one of the more pervasive of human activities. We coordinate our own limbs, and we coordinate our behavior with our surround, with the actions of others, and with our intentions and goals. Scott Kelso uses the fact of coordination as the central motivation for his approach to understanding "mind, brain, and behavior." An explicit goal of this work is to "discover the laws and principles of coordination in living things." En route, he tackles issues of action, intention, cognition, perception, and finally, of organization in the brain. This is a sufficiently comprehensive agenda to evoke the thought that this book may offer a substantive contribution to some of the troubling issues in cognitive science.
The search is for level independent principles that will facilitate an understanding of mind, brain, and behavior in "terms that reflect life itself" [p. 235]. These terms are of stability, instability, transition, intermittency, and metastability. The level independent principles are those underlying self-organization in dynamical systems that range from neurons through assemblies of neurons, brain regions, perceptual/cognitive/ motor acts, and extended behavioral activities. A critical intuition, taken from Bernstein (1967), motivates the appeal to principles of self-organization. Bernstein saw the problem of coordinated activity as one in which the highdimensional component level of description can be redescribed succinctly