  The mind is a biological phenomenon. Thus, biological principles of
organization should also be the principles underlying mental operations.
Practopoiesis states that the key for achieving intelligence through adaptation
is an arrangement in which mechanisms laying a lower level of organization, by
their operations and interaction with the environment, enable creation of
mechanisms lying at a higher level of organization. When such an organizational
advance of a system occurs, it is called a traverse. A case of traverse is when
plasticity mechanisms (at a lower level of organization), by their operations,
create a neural network anatomy (at a higher level of organization). Another
case is the actual production of behavior by that network, whereby the
mechanisms of neuronal activity operate to create motor actions. Practopoietic
theory explains why the adaptability of a system increases with each increase
in the number of traverses. With a larger number of traverses, a system can be
relatively small and yet, produce a higher degree of adaptive/intelligent
behavior than a system with a lower number of traverses. The present analyses
indicate that the two well-known traverses-neural plasticity and neural
activity-are not sufficient to explain human mental capabilities. At least one
additional traverse is needed, which is named anapoiesis for its contribution
in reconstructing knowledge e.g., from long-term memory into working memory.
The conclusions bear implications for brain theory, the mind-body explanatory
gap, and developments of artificial intelligence technologies.
