A Code Biology-informed account of human sense-making avoids the dualism between individual autonomy and social heteronomy. Code biological principles apply across biological and non-biological levels, crossing the self-non-self border. Codified relations, irreducible to operational closure, connect the sense-making agent's social interactions to those of others, giving external norms a constitutive role in altering internal embodied integrity. Using prosthetics in amputees as a case, successful integration of a prosthesis requires experienced bodily wholeness achieved by attuning to the device while internalizing social norms and values. Many aspects of the living actualize codified relations incorporating both heteronomous and autonomous traits.
Resilience, a fundamental property of cognitive systems, is tied to their autopoietic (self-maintaining) organization and helps preserve their identity against disturbances. The autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela rejects traditional Shannon information as irrelevant to cognition. This paper proposes an alternative: an affordance-based view of information from radical cognitive science that avoids that critique. It argues that social influence on how affordances are used is key to understanding resilience in the informational relations within the human cognitive ecology.