Autopoiesis, from the Greek auto (self) and poiesis (making), is the term Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced in 1972 to define what makes a system alive.
The definition
An autopoietic system is a network of processes that produce components which, through their interactions, regenerate the same network of processes, and which also form a boundary that makes the system a distinct unity. A cell is the paradigm case: its metabolism produces the molecules, including the membrane, that keep its metabolism going.
Two consequences follow. Autopoietic systems are organisationally closed: what happens inside them is determined by their own structure, and the environment can only trigger changes, not specify them. And they are structurally coupled with their environment: through repeated interactions, system and environment change together.
Cognition
For Maturana and Varela, living and knowing are the same process. To live is to act effectively in one’s environment, and that effective action is what cognition is. This was the root of Varela’s later enactive approach to the mind.
Extensions and debates
Niklas Luhmann applied autopoiesis to social systems made of communications, a move Maturana himself resisted. Lynn Margulis used it in describing cells and the Gaia system. The concept is widely discussed in theories of life, in artificial life research, and in debates about whether machines, including AI systems, could ever be autonomous in the way organisms are.
Further reading
- Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980)
- Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (1987)
Mentioned in
- Article A Brief History of Cybernetics
- Article The Philosophy Behind Cybernetics
- Community CYBCOM
- Person Niklas Luhmann
- Person Lynn Margulis
- Person Humberto Maturana
- Concept Second-order cybernetics
- Person Francisco Varela