Autopoiesis and cognition the realization of the living

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Autor(en)Author(s)Humberto Maturana, Francisco VarelaTitelTitle

Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living

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• autopoiesis
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Dec 15, 2009 DJ rated it really liked it

Wow, I've never felt so mentally humbled in the shadow of a biologist. In the realm of arrogant physicists and mathematicians, biologists are seen as the housewives of science - keeping things clean and tidy while the real men do the work. I've met enough intelligent biologists to know that this is only the case most of the time, but Maturana is a giant. I feel no shame in admitting that this was one of the most difficult books I've slogged through and that I'd often spend 10-15 minutes on a sin Wow, I've never felt so mentally humbled in the shadow of a biologist. In the realm of arrogant physicists and mathematicians, biologists are seen as the housewives of science - keeping things clean and tidy while the real men do the work. I've met enough intelligent biologists to know that this is only the case most of the time, but Maturana is a giant. I feel no shame in admitting that this was one of the most difficult books I've slogged through and that I'd often spend 10-15 minutes on a single page. That said, it was worth the slog.

My reactions to this book are a mixture of the following three three-letter phrases: "wow!", "duh...", and "wtf?!" The "wow!"s were accompanied by large-scale synaptic migrations as my paradigms regarding life and cognition were scrambled. The "duh..."s were my response to Maturana's incessant repetition of ideas only a Baptist alligator wrestler from the Deep South would argue with - evolution is a blind and local process, biological systems are recursive, blah, blah, blah. This might, however, be as unfair as accusing Shakespeare of adhering to every stereotype in Western literature, as I'm pretty sure Maturana was an early pioneer in the still fledgling field of theoretical biology and that many works I've read since are derived from his ideas. The "wtf?!"s were in response to Maturana's needlessly complicated lexicon of undefined terms. It seems like he and Varela went off and lived in a forest for 20 years, shielded from civilization, and developed their own strange and impenetrable vocabulary that only they understand.

The "wow!"s occurred almost exclusively during the first essay of this book: "The Biology of Cognition". I was much less impressed by "Autopoiesis", probably because the central idea of this book, recursion, has since spawned a closet industry of books ranging from masterpieces of human thought to crackpot theories on how Gödel’s theorem proves that God invented the internet.

As usual for books that woo me, I'll reserve my fifth star for another few weeks/months to see if my infatuation with the ideas in this book is nothing more than a teenage fling or something truly special and lasting.

Finally, the following are the main ideas I drew from the two essays. These notes are mainly to aid my aging memory, but you're free to treat it as a poorly executed synopsis. My criticisms of the text follow afterwards.

Cyclical (Autopoietic) Systems

A living organism is a cyclical system whose pieces provide for their own synthesis and maintenance (call this process "autopoiesis").
The disruption of this cycle destroys the organism.
This cycle relies on the environment; it continually makes predictions about the environment by requiring and expecting certain resources. If these predictions fail, the organism may die.
One goal of an organism is to expand its environmental requirements (and thus predictions) into broad classes rather than very specific conditions. In this way, the organism becomes more robust to environmental change.
These cycles (autopoietic systems) may be nested, smaller cycles being the components of larger ones. There may even be level-mixing in which interactions play roles on multiple levels.
There is some wiggle room in which an autopoietic system can be perturbed and yet still carry out its autopoietic self-genesis. That wiggle room constitutes the cognitive domain. It is the space of biological deformations that do not destroy an organism.
As autopoiesis defines an organism, the relations between the components that constitute that organism are far more important than the components themselves.
Organisms are fundamentally ontogenic. Development is not a process that culminates in an organism. The organism is the entire spatio-temporal pattern that includes development.

Domain Distinction

An organism's niche is not a subset of the environment an observer describes. The niche is defined in terms of the organism's domain of interactions with its environment. The observer necessarily describes the environment in terms of his own domain of interactions. This is a major barrier to explanation and understanding.
An organism may interact with its environment in ways unobservable to others.
An organism may (perhaps dysfunctionally) interact with its environment in ways unobservable to it, but observable to others.
Communication is the orienting of one organism to a particular internal state by another organism. Note that the cognitive domains of the two organisms are different, so it makes no sense to speak of "information transferred" in the absolute.
Absolute denotation of communication exists only in the mind of an observer who notices a relation in his simultaneous interactions with both organisms.
Two organisms may only communicate if their cognitive domains have significant overlap. Otherwise, they are incapable of orienting one another to corresponding appropriate internal states.

Neural Systems

Only that which leaves a signature on the nervous system may enter the cognitive domain. That which does not affect the brain is invisible to the organism.
Interactions that leave the same neural signature are indistinguishable to an organism, be they between the organism and its environment or between internal cognitive states. It is possible, however, that an external observer may be differentially affected by similar interactions and be quite capable of distinguishing them.
Neural systems can give a representation to "pure relations", expanding the cognitive domain to include abstract ideas. With this, pure relations may begin to independently interact with one another.
Interesting view of a neuron: spatial system of possibly overlapping affector and collector areas
Neural systems function in the present. The past only plays a role to the extent that it leaves a signature in the brain that carries on to the present. In general, for the past and predicted future to play a role in cognition, they must be abstracted and represented.
The brain is local in interaction but not representation. Computation proceeds physically via matter affecting matter (interaction is local). Ideas, stimuli, and other neural states are distributed across the brain (representation is not local).
Internal states represent spatiotemporal interactions with an organism's sensory service and subsequent internal activity.
There are at least three time scales to consider:

Immediate - stimuli transiently affect neural activity
Lifetime - (repeated) stimuli more permanently affect the organization of a neural system (learning)
Evolutionary - evolutionary pressures affect the "base genetic model" that prescribes an organism's development

Neural systems change continuously and non-predictively. For a system to evolve between two states, the intermediate states must be accessible and viable.
Interesting domain in which to study neurons: the I/O domain

Fix I, vary parameters, and watch O change
Fix I/O, examine reduced parameter space that preserves that particular I/O relation

Questions

What are the fundamental units of the nervous system? What are the fundamental units of any information-processing system? That is, what should we treat as primitives in order to explain what neural systems do?

That said, the 40-year old essays do contain some outdated material, namely the (oft repeated) doctrine that neurons are deterministic. Neurons are not deterministic. Their input-output mappings are pretty friggin' stochastic, owing at the very least to the fact that channel dynamics dip into the quantum world of chemical reactions.

I also suspect that the reason Maturana and Varela resort to such a tangled web of undefined jargon is that many of their ideas are less developed than the Olsen twins (warning: my bag of pop culture references has not been replenished since the mid-90s). First, how exactly does autopoiesis define unique topological boundaries for an organism? If the autopoietic cycle that defines an organism is so deeply interwoven with the environment, how does one separate organism and environment? Every organism relies on its environment for resources. How to draw structural boundaries is obviously much clearer to Maturana and Varela than it is to my feeble brain. Second, Maturana and Varela stress that our descriptions of the functioning of organisms are fundamentally flawed due to the domain distinction problems mentioned in the notes above. Why is their description of autopoiesis immune from these mistakes? Why are they so certain that autopoiesis is the definitive characteristic of life when they argue throughout the text that the true character of organisms is forever unknowable in our restricted cognitive domains?

Me costó caleta leerlo, mi base de conocimiento de biología es muy básica y además como la autopoiesis es aplicable para todo lo vivo no habían muchos ejemplos concretos a los componentes y relaciones que se referían, buena volaita

Jul 09, 2017 Satyajeet rated it really liked it

The work is as philosophical as it is scientific, even in discussions of neurophysiology, which was particularly refreshing aspect of the book. It has a very interesting framework, and there are number of pragmatic problems that are handled in a connected manner. Also some people might feel a bit of 'Kant' in it. The one downside is, it over explains 'What autopoiesis is not.'
I definitely recommend this book. The work is as philosophical as it is scientific, even in discussions of neurophysiology, which was particularly refreshing aspect of the book. It has a very interesting framework, and there are number of pragmatic problems that are handled in a connected manner. Also some people might feel a bit of 'Kant' in it. The one downside is, it over explains 'What autopoiesis is not.'
I definitely recommend this book. ...more

The anatomical and functional organization of the nervous system secures the synthesis of behavior, not a representation of the world (p. 22)

Nov 28, 2010 Laura rated it it was amazing

Profound and rich. A thrilling blend of biology and philosophy. Just my cup of tea. Also very influential.

¿Qué comienza cuando nacen los seres vivos en la tierra, y se ha conservado desde entonces?
La respuesta requiere dejar de lado el criterio animista, al agente externo ordenador y el dominio del observador. Maturana y Varela, no se complican y definen en este libro al ser vivo como una unidad autopoietica molecular formada por componentes capaces de satisfacer ciertas relaciones que determinan interacciones y transformaciones de esos mismos componentes en que el resultado no es una molécula para ¿Qué comienza cuando nacen los seres vivos en la tierra, y se ha conservado desde entonces?
La respuesta requiere dejar de lado el criterio animista, al agente externo ordenador y el dominio del observador. Maturana y Varela, no se complican y definen en este libro al ser vivo como una unidad autopoietica molecular formada por componentes capaces de satisfacer ciertas relaciones que determinan interacciones y transformaciones de esos mismos componentes en que el resultado no es una molécula para allá y otra para acá sino que es el mismo sistema, una unidad que constantemente se autoproduce a sí misma.

En biología siempre hay una excepción a la regla y llegar a un modelo que se aplique a todo es difícil. Darwin fue pionero en eso proponiendo un origen en común para todos los seres vivos. Maturana y Varela explican ese origen, esas primeras moléculas que hace 3500 millones de años se encontraron y formaron la unidad autopoietica, a partir de ahí se da el dominio para gatillar la reproducción y evolución como formas de mantener la autopoiesis.

Un libro en que podía estar fácil 1 hora en la misma página, si bien no es de fácil lectura (ni siquiera lo entendí completamente) vale totalmente la pena dedicarle tiempo y releerlo de ser necesario.

Es una obra compleja y con un componente de biología y bioquímica que sobrepasa con mucho mi conocimiento. Ahora bien, la idea básica que rige todo el libro, la autopóiesis, es brillante en su originalidad y en su importancia. Supuso un antes y un después en su campos de investigación, pero también es un concepto muy rico para la filosofía. No voy a decir mucho más porque necesito aclarar muchas cosas para poder explicarme mejor sobre los temas de este libro. Conste, no obstante, que es una gran Es una obra compleja y con un componente de biología y bioquímica que sobrepasa con mucho mi conocimiento. Ahora bien, la idea básica que rige todo el libro, la autopóiesis, es brillante en su originalidad y en su importancia. Supuso un antes y un después en su campos de investigación, pero también es un concepto muy rico para la filosofía. No voy a decir mucho más porque necesito aclarar muchas cosas para poder explicarme mejor sobre los temas de este libro. Conste, no obstante, que es una gran obra. ...more

Jul 27, 2017 Juan rated it it was amazing

Incredible Maturana a Surprising Genius!

Very dense read -- Something I will revisit again and again.

Maturana è un genio, e ho la sensazione che ci vorrà ancora molto tempo prima che il contenuto della sua rivoluzione venga accettato. Accogliere il suo messaggio significa, tra le altre cose, comprendere che, in ogni forma di vita, il mantenimento dell'organizzazione è molto più importante del mantenimento degli organi; il rapporto col mondo esterno ha un peso relativo con i nostri cambiamenti rispetto a quanto e come noi permettiamo all'ambiente di cambiarci.
Questa teoria è così ampia e complet Maturana è un genio, e ho la sensazione che ci vorrà ancora molto tempo prima che il contenuto della sua rivoluzione venga accettato. Accogliere il suo messaggio significa, tra le altre cose, comprendere che, in ogni forma di vita, il mantenimento dell'organizzazione è molto più importante del mantenimento degli organi; il rapporto col mondo esterno ha un peso relativo con i nostri cambiamenti rispetto a quanto e come noi permettiamo all'ambiente di cambiarci.
Questa teoria è così ampia e completa che, se volessimo descrivere una forma di vita completamente diversa da quella che conosciamo, dovremmo partire proprio da qui.

Dal momento che è un testo molto astratto, consiglio di leggere prima la riscrittura divulgativa "L'albero della conoscenza" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...)

Leí una edición con prólogo de los autores que explica la historia y en términos generales qué es la autopoiesis. Gracias a eso entendí un poco más del libro, un treinta por ciento al menos, lo suficiente para darme cuenta de la importancia del cambio de perspectiva que significó el entendimiento de los seres vivos.

Contains some fascinating ideas. Didn't have time to fully read it, just skimmed over sections, but my impression is that is highly philosophical for a science book (or highly scientific for a philosophy text). Contains some fascinating ideas. Didn't have time to fully read it, just skimmed over sections, but my impression is that is highly philosophical for a science book (or highly scientific for a philosophy text). ...more

Feb 03, 2021 Laura marked it as to-read

"An autopoietic system participates in the constitution of a social system only to the extent that it participates in it, that is, only as it realizes the relations proper to a component of the social system" "An autopoietic system participates in the constitution of a social system only to the extent that it participates in it, that is, only as it realizes the relations proper to a component of the social system" ...more

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL PREFACE
GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION (by Professor Maturana)

BIOLOGY OF COGNITION

Dedication
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. The Problem
III. Cognitive Function in General
A. The Observer
B. The Living System
C. Evolution
D. The Cognitive Process
IV. Cognitive Function in Particular
A. Nerve Cells
B. Architecture
C. Function
D. Representation
E. Description
F. Thinking
G. Natural Language
H. Memory and Learning
I. The Observer
V. Problems in the N

It was one the first Book related to autopoiesis! I did read it 30 years ago, exprcting that authors and other will connect it with religion (Gid is the most autopoietic person, almost only He), philosophy (Plato, Spinisa, specially Hegel and Heidegger are nearer to autopoietic concepts than Maturanata and late Varela, who before death started to learn Indiana philosophy), specially i did expect it in psychology, economics, and law? Only Luhmann who i met 1992 satisfied my interest! Anyway autop It was one the first Book related to autopoiesis! I did read it 30 years ago, exprcting that authors and other will connect it with religion (Gid is the most autopoietic person, almost only He), philosophy (Plato, Spinisa, specially Hegel and Heidegger are nearer to autopoietic concepts than Maturanata and late Varela, who before death started to learn Indiana philosophy), specially i did expect it in psychology, economics, and law? Only Luhmann who i met 1992 satisfied my interest! Anyway autopoiesis is for me the greatest concepts! I am waiting the better books! ...more

De acá es la definición de sistemas autopoiéticos.

Una máquina autopoiética es una máquina organizada (definida como una unidad) como una red de procesos de producción (transformación y destrucción) de componentes que: (i) a través de sus interacciones y transformaciones continuamente regeneran y realizan la red de procesos (las relaciones) que los han producido, y (ii) la constituyen (la máquina) como una unidad concreta en el espacio en el que ellos (los componentes) existen especificando el d

Libro denso pero interesante. (Des)Afortunadamente basta con leer las dos introducciones (de Varela y de Maturana) para quedar enterado de todo. En realidad son 3 ensayos en uno: el de ambos (que originó todo), el de Maturana (explicando qué cree que debiera entenderse del libro) y el de Varela (colocando las cosas en perspectiva y haciendo una crítica al original). A mi juicio, vale la pena por el ensayo de Varela.

Un testo non facile, ma estremamente importante per chiunque ami interrogarsi sulla vita e su tutti i grandi temi dell'esistenza.
Cambia per sempre tutto ciò che di ingenuo ci hanno insegnato i libri scolastici di biologia, nei riguardi delle caratteristiche della vita. Un libro che amplia una visione filosofica sulla realtà in modo estremamente convincente. Un testo non facile, ma estremamente importante per chiunque ami interrogarsi sulla vita e su tutti i grandi temi dell'esistenza.
Cambia per sempre tutto ciò che di ingenuo ci hanno insegnato i libri scolastici di biologia, nei riguardi delle caratteristiche della vita. Un libro che amplia una visione filosofica sulla realtà in modo estremamente convincente. ...more

Jun 16, 2013 Gregory rated it really liked it

A hard read, but ultimately worth it, will change the way you view living systems.

Humberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Maturana, along with Francisco Varela and Ricardo B. Uribe, is particularly known for creating the term "autopoiesis" about the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems, and con

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