Autopoiesis and Cognition

Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Humberto Muturana, H. R. Maturana & F. J. Varela



https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-009-8947-4



 Autopoietic vs Allopoietic



> An organization may remain constant by being static, by maintaining its  components constant, or by maintaining constant certain relations between  components otherwise in continuous flow or change. Autopoietic machines  are organizations of the latter kind: they maintain constant the relations that  define them as autopoietic. The actual way in which such an organization may  in fact be implemented in the physical space, that is, the physical structure  of the machine, varies according to the nature (properties) of the physical  materials which embody it.



> Unity. The basic cognitive operation that we perform as observers is the  operation of distinction. By means of this operation we specify a unity as an  entity distinct from a background, characterize both unity and background  with the properties with which this operation endows them, and specify their  separability. A unity thus specified is a simple unity that defines through its  properties the space in which it exists and the phenomenal domain which it  may generate in its interactions with other unities. If we recursively apply the operation of distinction to a unity, so that we  distinguish components in it, we respecify it as a composite unity that exists  in the space that its components define because it is through the specified  properties of its components that we observers distinguish it. Yet we can  always treat a composite unity as a simple unity that does not exist in the  space of its components, but which exists in a space that it defines through  the properties that characterize it as a simple unity. Accordingly, if an autopoietic system is treated as a composite unity, it exists in the space defined  by its components, but if it is treated as a simple unity the distinctions that  specify it as a simple unity characterize its properties as a simple unity, and  define the space in which it exists as such a simple unity.



> Organization and Structure. The relations between components that define  a composite unity (system) as a composite unity of a particular kind, constitute its organization. In this definition of organization the components are  viewed only in relation to their participation in the constitution of the unity  (whole) that they integrate.



> (i) Autopoietic machines are autonomous; that is, they subordinate all  changes to the maintenance of their own organization, independently of  how profoundly they may otherwise be transformed in the process. Other  machines, henceforth called allopoietic machines, have as the product of their  functioning something different from themselves (as in the car example).  Since the changes that allopoietic machines may suffer without losing their  definitory organization are necessarily subordinated to the production of  something different from themselves, they are not autonomous.



> (ii) Autopoietic machines have individuality; that is, by keeping their  organization as an invariant through its continuous production they actively  maintain an identity which is independent of their interactions with an  observer. Allopoietic machines have an identity that depends on the observer and is not determined through their operation, because its product is different from themselves; allopoietic machines do not have individuality.



> (iii) Autopoietic machines are unities because, and only because, of  their specific autopoietic organization: their operations specify their own  boundaries in the processes of self-production. This is not the case with an  allopoietic machine whose boundaries are defined by the observer, who by  specifying its input and output surfaces, specifies what pertains to it in its  operations.



> (iv) Autopoietic machines do not have inputs or outputs. They can be  perturbated by independent events and undergo internal structural changes  which compensate these perturbations. If the perturbations are repeated,  the machine may undergo repeated series of internal changes which may  or may not be identical. Whichever series of internal changes takes place,  however, they are always subordinated to the maintenance of the machine  organization, condition which is definitory of the autopoietic machines. Thus  any relation between these changes and the course of perturbations to which  we may point to, pertains to the domain in which the machine is observed,  but not to its organization. Thus, although an autopoietic machine can be  treated as an allopoietic machine, this treatment does not reveal its organization as an autopoietic machine.



The Primacy of Semiosis An Ontology of Relations by Paul Bains :



> Why is there a fly there when the frog sticks out its tongue? This question is answered by Maturana and Varela in accordance with their theory of structural coupling. The frog and the fly belong to the same history of congruent changes through millions of years, and become one eating the other in the process of becoming frog and fly. For Maturana and Varela the nervous system does not compute information from an environment; rather, it performs internal correlations that are triggered by perturbations from its external milieu, or by its own changes of state.



> The nervous system is therefore operationally closed its current affective ability is determined by a history of interactions. Bergson calls this habitual recognition 'sensory-motor determinism';



> but insofar as there is a brain, and depending on the 'complexity' of that brain, there is an increasing interval between the perceptual stimulation and the motor response. In human animals the affects and memory or recollection images operate in this gap and alter the response in undetermined ways.



> From an observer's perspective, the action of the fly may not appear as adequate in conserving its autopoiesis; but if the fly and the frog are coupled with the biosphere, conceived of as an organism (Gaia) or second-order, metacellular, autopoietic system, this apparent paradox is resolved. That is, as observers, we can distinguish the substantial multiplicity of which the components (organisms or cells) are a part. When we isolate things in themselves - such as flies - we obscure the multiplicity they constitute with other components in their interactions. As Bateson insisted, the unit of evolution is the organism-and-its-environment.



> For a living system not operating in language (e.g., a tick), there is no inside or outside. Such a distinction arises in language as a particular consensual coordination of actions in which the participants are recursively brought forth as distinctions of systems of distinctions. It follows from this argument that the individual (observing, the observer, selfconsciousness) arises in language: 'Furthermore, it also follows from this that since language as a domain of consensual coordination of actions is a social phenomenon, self-consciousness is a social phenomenon, and as such it does not take place within the anatomical confines of the bodyhood of the living systems that generate it; on the contrary, it is external to them and pertains to their domain of interactions as a manner of co-existence' (ibid., 39).