Bernstein's last paper: the immediate tasks of neurophysiology in the light of the modern theory of biological activity

On the concept of activity in the last papers of Nikolai Bernstein

In this paper, we analyze Nikolai Bernstein's notion of the activity of living organisms, which he introduced at the end of his career. Bernstein did not leave a systematic description of his last thoughts, but many remarks in his writing, especially in his last book [Bernstein, 1966], show that he thought deeply about the biological significance of the ideas that he developed while studying motor control. He accepted that negentropy (the tendency towards probabilistic determinacy, orderliness, free energy expenditure) is a hallmark of all life processes but wrote extensively about the insufficiency of this property and searched for a more complete definition of living organisms. This definition would include the goal-directedness of development, anticipation, persistence, tendency toward autonomy, initiative, and more. Thus, this paper is an attempt to present the definition of the activity of living organisms from Bernstein's later work to English-speaking readers.