Today is King Michael’s birthday, and in four days it will be Queen Marie’s.
I’m sitting in front of my coffee and, with the little history I know, I honor their memory as nation-shaping monarchs!
Through their example, I remembered that nobility is not measured in titles and crowns, but in discernment, in clarity, in the lucidity with which you remain dignified yet flexible in the midst of a storm, when emotions shake you.
It is about this kind of quiet strength that I want to say a few words — about the mind, the forgotten Sovereign of our being.
I don’t know whether I am brave, naïve, or reckless to squeeze such a topic into a single post, but, in any case, I am just a small part of the human-thinking fractal, and this is how I understand supporting its rationality. I’m not waiting for likes — perhaps for moments of reflection.
Emotions are physio-psychological states with a precise biochemical substrate.
Whether considered positive — joy, euphoria, satisfaction, pride — or negative — frustration, anger, sadness, fear, shame, guilt — they all rely on the same neurochemical mechanism: the release and regulation of substances that influence the entire organism.
From an intense emotional reaction to bodily imbalance manifested as illness, there’s only one step.
Every emotion requires a real consumption of energy and specific molecular resources; this up-and-down, pleasure–pain biochemical dance has a concrete physiological cost that slowly erodes the hormone-metabolic system.
Thus it happens that emotions, although they seem our most authentic expression, are often merely the result of a fluctuating, unstable biochemical dynamic leading to neuro-immuno-metabolic adaptive syndromes. They have quietly become the stars of the modern age!
Contemporary politics is fueled by affects, financial markets have recently become excessively emotional, conflicts are increasingly shaped by emotional rhetoric, and the network — the virtual space — has become, as Mihnea Măruță remarked in an interview, more erotic than reality itself.
From academia to the marketplace, on the street, at the corner of the block, in the tram, or on social media, everyone has the same refrain on their lips: emotion, emotional intelligence, emotional language, trauma.
We don’t really know what these terms mean, but we use them broadly and often as if they were science.
I deeply appreciate the merit of professionals in mental-health care who approach emotional states with discernment and balance, without interpretive excesses or simplifications. They know how to look beyond manifestations, beyond what is visible, toward the subtle causal mechanisms — where thought, emotion, physiology, and experience meet in a complex, coherent dynamic.
Emotions, even though visible through bodily reactions and increasingly recognized in psychosomatics, do not lead the scene. They are more like spectators of the play, while perceptions trace the true coordinates for our mental activity and behaviors. Two years ago, at the National Psychosomatics Conference, a single psychiatrist spoke eloquently about cognitive restructuring — presented as a Royal Road toward psychosomatic balance.
Since then, I keep wondering why we fail to take a more substantial step toward transdisciplinarity, especially in the age of technology, when we have so much concrete data from cognitive sciences and computer science that fundamentally changes the lens through which we should now look at life, not only at matter or mind.
In this context, someone unfairly marginalized remains in the defendant’s seat.
Forgotten, misunderstood, often treated as a cold, rational enemy, it would nevertheless have something important to say in the multifaceted crisis humanity is facing.
The accused is called cognitive process, mental activity, or — if you prefer a shorter nickname — mind.
Out of ignorance, misunderstanding, or an old subordination to various authorities — religious, moral, or even scientific — the mind has come to be treated as a necessary evil: a source of unrest, an inconvenience that must be tempered, calmed, dominated.
The cognitive process, on which conscious life itself rests, has been steadily pushed into perceptual and ideological disgrace.
Meanwhile, emotions, feelings, sensitivity, contact with our vulnerable zones have been elevated to the rank of prima donna.
The feeling of safety, of presence, of aliveness arises from the perceptual analysis of the moment, from the history the brain has traversed, from its receptivity to the internal and external environment, from the metabolic and physiological state of the body.
The much-praised “state of presence” is just a marketing expression that sells well; in biological reality, the brain cannot stay in the present.
To ensure homeostasis and allostasis, it needs to gather many data from the past, quickly evaluate what worked, what is energetically efficient, and make complex, probabilistic calculations for the future.
The brain will constantly seek to protect itself from uncertainty, ambiguity, and prediction errors.
For some time now, I’ve felt obliged to act as a kind of advocate for the mind: to plead its cause, to restore its dignity and its right to be understood not as an enemy, but as the very structure of life.
Perhaps this stance will have no effect in the dense magma of so much scattered information, but at least I tried.
The mind is not an exclusive gift of humans, but a continuous evolutionary process that began long before the appearance of the brain and the nervous system as we know them.
It begins to take shape from the chaos of primordial matter, when certain molecules started to show rudimentary forms of intentionality — the tendency to orient toward a target, to respond to the environment, to “choose” between alternatives.
Evolution on Earth did not begin with the first living cell, but millions of years earlier, through a process known as molecular or prebiotic evolution.
Our detailed ideas about this prebiotic evolution are still speculative, but most biologists and biochemists do not doubt that life’s origin on Earth resulted from a succession of chemical events governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems.
Before molecular complexity increased, certain molecules assembled into primitive lipid membranes that spontaneously formed closed bubbles. Inside them, in tiny unstructured “chemical soups,” molecules self-organized evolutionarily.
This fascinating image was offered to us in wonder at the seminars with Professor Pier Luigi Luisi, one of the world leaders in origin-of-life research.
This was the molecular mind — an incipient form of organizing information and action, where life and thought weave their first common roots.
With the appearance of nervous systems, evolution led to neuronal minds: beings capable of integrating sensations, learning, anticipating, deciding.
Worms, insects, then vertebrates developed increasingly complex architectures of information processing, leading to modular minds.
Different regions of the brain and nervous system collaborate or come into conflict, producing thought, attention, memory, receptivity, language.
From this internal self-orchestration emerges the conscious mind — capable of reflection, spontaneous creation, and self-distinction.
But things do not stop here.
The mind continues to extend beyond the limits of the individual, evolving toward collective forms of intelligence — superminds.
From ant colonies and bee swarms to human societies, science, art, culture, and global digital networks, all contribute to the formation of emergent cognitive entities in which millions of minds interact and produce together the phenomenon of knowledge.
In this view, the mind is not an isolated entity but a universal evolutionary force that always tends to self-organize, communicate, and create meaning.
How, then, did we come to look in the wrong direction?
Although each era had periods of intellectual flourishing and decline, the 17th century stands out for its exceptional convergence of ideas from philosophy, mathematics, physics, and astronomy, which led to a progressive departure from traditional epistemologies — the religious one, dominant in the Middle Ages, and the one based on the authority of the great Greek thinkers: Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, etc.
Thus were established the foundations of modern knowledge and the scientific method.
That period was characterized by radical questions, revolutionary discoveries, and a redefinition of systematic, rational knowledge.
Inspired by the critical spirit of his contemporaries — Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Francis Bacon — René Descartes proposed a rational method meant to offer certainty in knowledge and liberate the mind from prejudices and the authority of tradition.
In Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, he recommended systematic doubt, breaking down complex problems into simple elements, synthesizing them in a logical order, and carefully verifying each step.
Through this approach, Descartes placed reason and critical thought at the center of the process of knowing, affirming the autonomy of the mind and preparing the ground for modern philosophy and science.
Yet he also made a clear separation between two fundamental substances:
-Res cogitans — the thinking substance: mind, consciousness, reason;
-Res extensa — the extended substance: matter, the physical world, all that can be measured.
Thus the mind-body dualism was born, which would deeply mark Western thought for centuries.
The mind, separated from the body, became a mysterious, almost intangible entity.
Thinkers after Descartes approached it as a separate “thing,” unable to fully explain how it interacts with matter and the body.
Although reality continues to be perceived through the lens of this old dualism, the current postmodern crisis challenges us to reconsider this division, opening the path to a reconfiguration that transcends the traditional Cartesian paradigm.
Neurophysiology in the 20th century intuited that brain activity and mental processes are interconnected, but for a long time it was not understood how exactly mind and body interact.
Attempts to overcome dualism existed as early as the 18th–19th centuries, through the work of David Hume, Adam Smith, Paul Broca, Carl Wernicke, William James, and others, who explored the link between mental experience and bodily functions.
Still, the exact unfolding of this relationship remained unclear.
Only after 1960, with Gregory Bateson’s theories — speaking not of “mind” but of mental processes — and the work of Humberto Maturana, who defined mental activity as the process of knowing, did an integrated perspective begin to take shape.
In the Santiago Theory of Cognition, developed by Maturana and Francisco Varela, brain functions, cognitive and physiological processes, and sensory experiences are understood as parts of a unified system.
Its central intuition is the identification of the process of knowledge with the process of life itself.
Cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks.
In this way, life and cognition become inseparably linked. The mind is immanent in life at all levels. For example, the relationship between mind and brain, which baffled scientists and philosophers, is now very clear: it is a relationship between process and structure.
The brain is the material structure, and the mind is the process it sustains.
Although in recent decades neuroscience has made spectacular progress, and Daniel Siegel proposed at an international congress a comprehensive definition of “mind,” psychology remains fragmented from physiology, and biological, cognitive, and social perspectives still fail to intertwine harmoniously.
And today, public opinion is unfortunately influenced more by popular figures, influencers, and shiny media-cultural trends than by the fragile and rigorous scientific consensus.
I believe that precisely the mind — rejected and despised — should somehow return to the center of reflection.
Not as a cold master over emotions, but as a force that continuously reproduces an independent world.
Indeed, Kant says in his philosophy that objects do not determine our knowledge; rather, our mental structures determine the way we perceive and understand objects. Thus, each person sees the world not “as it is,” but “as he is,” through the lenses of individual reason.
There unfolds a continuous process of bringing into existence a particular world through each person’s very process of living.
The interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living is itself a process of knowing.
As Maturana and Varela say, “to live is to know.”
Thus, the mind is not a calculating machine or an intangible thing, but a living principle of order, connection, and meaning.
Surely there remain other angles and theories to explore, other syntheses to add, because, as Pascal said, knowledge is like a sphere: the larger it grows, the greater its contact with the unknown.
Thank you for accompanying me this far!
I don’t know whether I’ve placed an efficient bandage on the split between mind and matter, between process and structure, but if I have managed at least to awaken a few questions, to stop the gaze for a moment, and to spark curiosity, then the effort to shape my opinion into words was worth it.
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