The Quantum Ecology as an Onto-Epistemological Framework: Toward an Ecological Theory of Sensing

This article takes the lead from Calzati and de Kerckhove's book Quantum Ecology and expands on some of its major tenets, starting with clarifying why and how the quantum ecology shall be regarded not only as an epistemological framework but as an onto-epistemological one. Notably, the article picks up on the concept of "sense" and frames it as a kind of embodied information processing that is autopoietic, from-within, and open-ended. In doing so, the article introduces the body ecology as a fourth ecology that adds up to the other three identified by the authors. Last, the article discusses how language and digital ecologies originate from within the body ecology as a nested sensing of sensing, offering also a discussion on Large Language Models as an instantiation emerging at the intersection of these two ecologies.