First of all, any organism may be treated as an autonomous but open system, separated from its environment by means of a boundary (skin or cell membrane).
Information metabolism is the other side of the same process, but it concerns the structural aspect (i.e. how matter and energy is organized) and how control is executed.
By contrast, inanimate matter does not have the ability to raise or even maintain its negentropy, because spontaneous natural processes are always accompanied by entropy generation.
Humans are able to project themselves into the future, think abstractly and consciously and therefore their goals may possess transcendent and symbolic character.
From the biological perspective, the number of processes occurring simultaneously in the organism and its physical surroundings is virtually infinite.
The structure of the body and locations of various receptors are evolutionally adapted to assure isolation of the most relevant signals from the surrounding environment.
At the level of signals reaching the field of subjective experience, attention is actively directed (with the help of emotions) towards those related with two biological laws.
[7] Above biological and emotional levels of signal interpretation, there is the frame of social and cultural norms of the community, which serves as reference for conscious decisions.
If the stimulus was evaluated negatively in the first phase, then it is likely that the executed reaction will take the form of escape, fight or immobilization.
The separation from reality in the second phase of information metabolism is greater in complex animals and reaches its maximum in humans.
[7] In the case of humans, the number of possible functional structures associated with the first phase of information metabolism is limited.
Humans possess the ability to generate many possible models of reality in response to a newly perceived phenomenon.
Typically, multiple functional structures are generated in the second phase of information metabolism, but only one is embodied (executed).
Although typically there are many possible ways of reacting, they are limited by the emotional background appearing in the first phase.
This effort is rewarded by positive emotional state – the feeling of satisfaction associated with the overcoming of obstacles and advancing towards important goals.
In many cases, the predisposition to depression is caused by the lack of warm and friendly maternal environment during childhood.
[7] In pathological cases, the individual may aim to gain absolute control over their environment, or quite contrarily, to fully submit to some external power (i.e. their partner, a political group etc.).
The need for an absolute control cannot be fulfilled, therefore it frequently takes the form of fantasy, which sometimes becomes indistinguishable from reality (e.g. in schizophrenia).
[5] Many individuals submit to revolutionary movements, promising a utopian future, and to social ideologies which offer simple answers to complex life problems.
In his reflections on information metabolism, Kępiński tried to explain psychological mechanisms which made the atrocities of the Second World War possible.
[5][9] It is traditionally assumed that functional structures associated with the subjective experience of emotions and moods (the first phase of information metabolism) are controlled by phylogenetically older parts of the brain (diencephalon and rhinencephalon), while those generated in the second phase of information metabolism, subjectively experienced as thoughts, are associated with the neocortex.
[14] The controversy was related with the fact that some elements of the theory cannot be verified by the scientific method because it is hard to design appropriate experiments.
[14] In response to these objections, psychiatrist Jacek Bomba pointed out that information metabolism was never meant to be a scientific theory, but rather an anthropological model, which accurately integrates the findings of neurophysiology, psychology, social science and medicine.
[14] Philosopher Jakub Zawiła-Niedźwiecki noted that current reading of Kępiński has to correct for his work mostly being pre-scientific from before the evidence-based medicine, modern philosophy of the mind and cognitive psychology era.
He also reminded that Kępiński was sceptical about methods that lacked strong scientific basis, e.g. psychoanalysis, and rejected magical thinking in general.
[16] Based on the Kępiński's work and Jungian typology, Lithuanian economist Augustinavičiūtė proposed her pseudoscientific[17] theory of information metabolism in human mind and society, known as socionics.