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

Link

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

Cited from

biology_ecology

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1 citation across 1 artifact.

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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 (2009) 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

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