Autopoiesis and life.

Boden, M. A. (2000). Autopoiesis and life. Cognitive Science Quarterly, 1(1), 117-145.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2000

Volume

1

Issue

1

Pages

117-145

Link

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Autopoiesis-and-life-Boden/ed7343e7350ab4e805e49c55ca8e4f4b07c5cc0a

Cited from

biology_ecology

Cited by

1 citation across 1 artifact.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Autopoiesis
  • formally, Varela, Maturana, and Uribe (1974) characterize an autopoietic system as a network of processes of production (transformation, destruction) of components that (a) through their interactions regenerate the network that produced them, and (b) constitute the system as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network; the system's unity is the organization of self-production, not any particular material substrate; (2) the concept has two canonical distinctions, as Maturana (2002) re-articulates them: organization (the relational pattern defining the system as a specific kind — for a cell, the circular network of metabolic processes that produces the cell's own components, including its membrane) versus structure (the particular material realization of that organization in a given instance — this cell's specific molecules at this moment); a system persists as the same autopoietic system when its structure changes while its organization is preserved (normal metabolism replaces components while the pattern remains); it ceases to be that system when the organization breaks (the network stops producing itself — the cell dies, ceasing to be autopoietic even while its material persists briefly); and two further concepts — operational closure (the system's processes recursively feed back into the system itself; outputs become inputs; there is no process that isn't part of the self-producing network) and structural coupling (the system interacts with its environment via perturbations that it responds to according to its own organization — the environment triggers but does not determine the system's dynamics; coupling is a history of mutual perturbation, not input-output determination); (3) the deeper logic, which Mossio, Bich, and Moreno (2013) develop in terms of organizational closure and inter-level causation, is that autopoiesis makes the system-environment distinction a product of the system rather than an external imposition: the cell's membrane separates inside from outside, but the membrane is produced by the internal processes that require the inside/outside distinction to function; self-production and boundary-production are co-constitutive; this inverts the conventional engineering view in which a boundary is designed and components are put inside — in autopoietic systems, the distinction between system and environment is dynamically and continuously constituted from within, and any external observer's description of the system's boundary is always second-order to the system's own self-production; (4) the concept extends across domains, as Boden (2000) surveys — biology (cells as the paradigm case; Maturana and Varela identify cellular autopoiesis as the minimal form of life and propose autopoiesis as the definition of living systems), cognitive science (mind as self-organizing enactive process — Maturana-Varela's autopoiesis and cognition connects living and cognitive; later enactivism — Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991 The Embodied Mind — grounds cognition in autopoietic organization), sociology (Niklas Luhmann's 1984 Soziale Systeme extends autopoiesis to social systems — communications produce communications, economic transactions produce economic transactions, legal decisions produce legal decisions; each social subsystem is operationally closed and structurally coupled to others), organizational theory (organizations as autopoietic communication systems — maintaining identity through self-produced norms, roles, decisions), philosophy of mind (autopoiesis as a candidate account of the living/non-living and cognitive/non-cognitive distinctions), artificial life and computation (minimal autopoietic models — chemical reaction networks, cellular automata; debate about whether software can be autopoietic given that it typically depends on external substrate for its material realization), systems theory broadly (autopoiesis as a more-specific concept than self-organization — every autopoietic system self-organizes, but not every self-organizing system is autopoietic; the distinguishing property is self-production of the components themselves) — across these, the shared pattern is operational closure with structural openness: the system is closed for its self-producing dynamics while being open for energy, matter, or information exchange with the environment.

    This sourceCritical review of autopoiesis across biology, cognitive science, and artificial life, surveying multi-domain uptake and assessing its claim to define living systems (Journal now defunct, no DOI; linked to scholarly index.)

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. The single citation of this work carries no recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:3c1d7abb57f0 · see in the full table