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The term autopoiesis () refers to a
system
A system is a group of Interaction, interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment (systems), environment, is described by its boundaries, ...
capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.
The term was introduced in the 1972 publication ''
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living'' by Chilean biologists
Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün a ...
and
Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesi ...
to define the self-maintaining
chemistry
Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...
of living
cells.
Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of
cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
,
systems theory
Systems theory is the interdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or human-made. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structu ...
,
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
and
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
.
Overview
In their 1972 book ''Autopoiesis and Cognition'', Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela described how they invented the word autopoiesis.
They explained that,
They described the "space defined by an autopoietic system" as "self-contained", a space that "cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection."
Meaning
Autopoiesis was originally presented as a system description that was said to define and explain the nature of
living systems
Living systems are open self-organizing life forms that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter.
In the last few decades, some scientists have proposed that a general living systems ...
. A canonical example of an autopoietic system is the
biological cell
The cell is the basic structural and functional unit of life forms. Every cell consists of a cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane, and contains many biomolecules such as proteins, DNA and RNA, as well as many small molecules of nutrients and ...
. The
eukaryotic
Eukaryotes () are organisms whose cells have a nucleus. All animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms, are Eukaryotes. They belong to the group of organisms Eukaryota or Eukarya, which is one of the three domains of life. Bacte ...
cell, for example, is made of various
biochemical
Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology an ...
components such as
nucleic acid
Nucleic acids are biopolymers, macromolecules, essential to all known forms of life. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomers made of three components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main cl ...
s and
protein
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respo ...
s, and is organized into bounded structures such as the
cell nucleus
The cell nucleus (pl. nuclei; from Latin or , meaning ''kernel'' or ''seed'') is a membrane-bound organelle found in eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotic cells usually have a single nucleus, but a few cell types, such as mammalian red blood cells, h ...
, various
organelle
In cell biology, an organelle is a specialized subunit, usually within a cell, that has a specific function. The name ''organelle'' comes from the idea that these structures are parts of cells, as organs are to the body, hence ''organelle,'' the ...
s, a
cell membrane
The cell membrane (also known as the plasma membrane (PM) or cytoplasmic membrane, and historically referred to as the plasmalemma) is a biological membrane that separates and protects the interior of all cells from the outside environment ( ...
and
cytoskeleton
The cytoskeleton is a complex, dynamic network of interlinking protein filaments present in the cytoplasm of all cells, including those of bacteria and archaea. In eukaryotes, it extends from the cell nucleus to the cell membrane and is compos ...
. These structures, based on an internal flow of molecules and energy, ''produce'' the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components.
An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an
allopoietic Allopoiesis is the process whereby a system produces something other than the system itself. One example of this is an assembly line, where the final product (such as a car) is distinct from the machines doing the producing. This is in contrast with ...
system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something ''other'' than itself (the factory). However, if the system is extended from the factory to include components in the factory's "environment", such as supply chains, plant / equipment, workers, dealerships, customers, contracts, competitors, cars, spare parts, and so on, then as a total viable system it could be considered to be autopoietic.
Of course, cells also require raw materials (nutrients), and produce numerous products -waste products, the extracellular matrix, intracellular messaging molecules, etc.
Autopoiesis in biological systems can be viewed as a network of constraints that work to maintain themselves. This concept has been called organizational closure or constraint closure and is closely related to the study of
autocatalytic chemical networks where constraints are reactions required to sustain life.
Though others have often used the term as a synonym for
self-organization
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when suffi ...
, Maturana himself stated he would "
ver use the notion of self-organization ... Operationally it is impossible. That is, if the organization of a thing changes, the thing changes". Moreover, an autopoietic system is autonomous and operationally closed, in the sense that there are sufficient processes within it to maintain the whole. Autopoietic systems are "structurally coupled" with their medium, embedded in a dynamic of changes that can be recalled as
sensory-motor coupling Sensory-motor coupling is the coupling or integration of the sensory system and motor system. Sensorimotor integration is not a static process. For a given stimulus, there is no one single motor command. "Neural responses at almost every stage of a ...
. This continuous dynamic is considered as a rudimentary form of
knowledge
Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinc ...
or
cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
and can be observed throughout life-forms.
An application of the concept of autopoiesis to
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
can be found in
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann (; ; December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory.
Biography
Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Free State of Prussia, where his father's fa ...
's
Systems Theory
Systems theory is the interdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or human-made. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structu ...
, which was subsequently adapted by
Bob Jessop in his studies of the capitalist state system.
Marjatta Maula adapted the concept of autopoiesis in a business context. The theory of autopoiesis has also been applied in the context of legal systems by not only Niklas Luhmann, but also Gunther Teubner.
Patrik Schumacher
Patrik Schumacher (born 1961, Bonn, Germany) is a London based architect and architectural theorist. He is the principal architect of Zaha Hadid Architects.
Education and early career
Schumacher studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the Friedr ...
has applied the term to refer to the 'discursive self-referential making of architecture.'
In the context of textual studies,
Jerome McGann
Jerome John McGann (born July 22, 1937) is an American academic and textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Career
Educated at Le Moyne College (B.S. 1959), Sy ...
argues that texts are "autopoietic mechanisms operating as self-generating feedback systems that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them". Citing Maturana and Varela, he defines an autopoietic system as "a closed topological space that 'continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components, concluding that "Autopoietic systems are thus distinguished from allopoietic systems, which are Cartesian and which 'have as the product of their functioning something different from themselves. Coding and markup appear
allopoietic Allopoiesis is the process whereby a system produces something other than the system itself. One example of this is an assembly line, where the final product (such as a car) is distinct from the machines doing the producing. This is in contrast with ...
", McGann argues, but are generative parts of the system they serve to maintain, and thus language and print or electronic technology are autopoietic systems.
The philosopher
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New Y ...
, in his discussion of
Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...
, argues:
Relation to complexity
Autopoiesis can be defined as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment.
Autopoiesis has been proposed as a potential mechanism of
abiogenesis
In biology, abiogenesis (from a- 'not' + Greek bios 'life' + genesis 'origin') or the origin of life is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothes ...
, by which molecules evolved into more complex cells that could support the development of life.
Comparison with other theories of life
Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the
chemoton
The term chemoton (short for 'chemical automaton') refers to an abstract model for the fundamental unit of life introduced by Hungarian theoretical biologist Tibor Gánti. Popular articles express surprise that Gánti's work is so little known. G ...
of
Tibor Gánti
Tibor Gánti (10 September 1933 – 15 April 2009) was a Hungarian theoretical biologist and biochemist, who is best known for his theory of the chemoton, a model for defining the minimal nature of life. He taught industrial biochemistry at F ...
, the
hypercycle of
Manfred Eigen
Manfred Eigen (; 9 May 1927 – 6 February 2019) was a German Biophysical chemistry, biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions.
Eigen's research helped solve major problems in ...
and
Peter Schuster
Peter K. Schuster (born 7 March 1941) is a theoretical chemist known for his work with the German Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen in developing the quasispecies model. His work has made great strides in the understanding of viruses and their replica ...
,
the
(''M,R'') systems of
Robert Rosen, and the
autocatalytic sets
An autocatalytic set is a collection of entities, each of which can be created catalytically by other entities within the set, such that as a whole, the set is able to catalyze its own production. In this way the set ''as a whole'' is said to be ...
of
Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylv ...
, similar to an earlier proposal by
Freeman Dyson
Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum m ...
.
All of these (including autopoiesis) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger's book ''What is Life?'' but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories. Nonetheless, there are more similarities than may be obvious at first sight, for example between Gánti and Rosen. Until recently there have been almost no attempts to compare the different theories and discuss them together.
Relation to cognition
An extensive discussion of the connection of autopoiesis to
cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
is provided by Evan Thompson in his 2007 publication, ''Mind in Life''.
[
] The basic notion of autopoiesis as involving constructive interaction with the environment is extended to include cognition. Initially, Maturana defined cognition as behavior of an organism "with relevance to the maintenance of itself".
However, computer models that are self-maintaining but non-cognitive have been devised, so some additional restrictions are needed, and the suggestion is that the maintenance process, to be cognitive, involves readjustment of the internal workings of the system in some
metabolic process. On this basis it is claimed that autopoiesis is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cognition.
[
] Thompson wrote that this distinction may or may not be fruitful, but what matters is that living systems involve autopoiesis and (if it is necessary to add this point) cognition as well.
It can be noted that this definition of 'cognition' is restricted, and does not necessarily entail any awareness or
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
by the living system.
Relation to consciousness
The connection of autopoiesis to cognition, or if necessary, of living systems to cognition, is an objective assessment ascertainable by observation of a living system.
One question that arises is about the connection between cognition seen in this manner and consciousness. The separation of cognition and consciousness recognizes that the organism may be unaware of the substratum where decisions are made. What is the connection between these realms? Thompson refers to this issue as the "explanatory gap", and one aspect of it is the
hard problem of consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to d ...
, how and why we have
qualia
In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term ''qualia'' derives from the Latin neuter plural form (''qualia'') of the Latin adjective '' quālis'' () ...
.
A second question is whether autopoiesis can provide a bridge between these concepts. Thompson discusses this issue from the standpoint of
enactivism
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active ...
. An autopoietic cell actively relates to its environment. Its sensory responses trigger motor behavior governed by autopoiesis, and this behavior (it is claimed) is a simplified version of a nervous system behavior. The further claim is that real-time interactions like this require attention, and an implication of attention is awareness.
Criticism
There are multiple criticisms of the use of the term in both its original context, as an attempt to define and explain the living, and its various expanded usages, such as applying it to self-organizing systems in general or social systems in particular. Critics have argued that the concept and its theory fail to define or explain living systems and that, because of the extreme language of
self-referential
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philosop ...
ity it uses without any external reference, it is really an attempt to give substantiation to Maturana's radical
constructivist or
solipsistic
Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known an ...
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
, or what
Danilo Zolo has called instead a "desolate theology". An example is the assertion by Maturana and Varela that "We do not see what we do not see and what we do not see does not exist".
According to Razeto-Barry, the influence of ''Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living'' in mainstream biology has proven to be limited. Razeto-Barry believes that autopoiesis is not commonly used as the criterion for life.
See also
References
Further reading
* – general introduction to the ideas behind autopoiesis
*
*
* —an adaptation of autopoiesis to language.
* —Luhmann's adaptation of autopoiesis to social systems
* —biologist view of autopoiesis
*
*
*
* —the main published reference on autopoiesis
* —a book on the autopoiesis concept in many different areas
*
* — draws on systems theory and cognitive science to introduce autopoiesis to literary studies
* —one of the original papers on the concept of autopoiesis.
*
* —cognitive systems perspective on autopoiesis
External links
''The Observer Web: Autopoiesis and Enaction'': a website with more explanationsSeveral papers on autopoietic theory are available through archonic.net*
ttps://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sres.745 Autopoiesis and knowledge in the organization by Aquiles Limone, Luis E. Bastias
{{Authority control
Cybernetics
Systems theory
Philosophy of mind
Enactive cognition
Consciousness studies
Self-replication
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics
Biological hypotheses