Life continues to organize its consumption of energy in closed loops like the semiotic or ‘meaning’ cycle. When direct perception and direct expression are one, there is no thought of process, or complexity, or simplicity: presence is immediate. When the gap opens up between theory and practice, anticipation and experience, intention and attention, questions arise.
Why are we always engaging in inquiry – opening questions and striving for answers that will close them? What makes cognitive closure so important to us? Probably our physical embodiment: we must value closure because we are energetically open systems. Energy flows through you, so that your self-organizing identity depends on that flow and on your ability to make it your own. This complementarity between closure and openness to energy flow accounts for the biocognitive tension between simplicity and complexity.
Biological equilibrium is far from energetic equilibrium. Maybe psychological equilibrium is equally far from biological equilibrium. That would explain why challenges are essential to the experience of flow.