“Are living beings extended autopoietic systems? An embodied reply,” makes the case for grounding the autopoietic definition of living beings to the discrete bodies of organisms rather than to autopoietic systems that extend beyond the organisms into their environments. They attempt this grounding by amending a clause to the original formulation of autopoiesis that identifies living beings with their bodies, and then they explicitly define “bodies”. This commentary makes the case that bodily grounding can be derived from molecular autopoiesis by taking the molecular domain seriously, and no new amendment is required.
“In Are living beings extended autopoietic systems? An embodied reply”, Villalobos and Razeto-Barry offer an articulation of the embodied aspect of the autopoietic theory. Their aim is to block the extended interpretation of this theory. For them, living beings are, simply put, autopoietic bodies. In this commentary, I advance two concerns regarding the alleged cases of extended living beings. On the one hand, I argue that their proposal fails to account for the intuitive difference between these cases and living beings that are embedded in the environment. On the other hand, I argue that, from the perspective offered by the authors, there also seems to be a problem in the way the boundaries of a system are delineated.
This is a commentary on ‘Are living beings extended autopoietic systems? An embodied reply’ (Villalobos and Razeto-Barry 2019). The target article proposes a refinement of the autopoietic treatment of living systems, introducing an explicit necessary condition that every living system must be an “autopoietic body”, i.e. a system whose “physical constitution as a body” is “generated by its own poietic activity”. I argue that this criterion is ambiguous, and suggest that it is an expression of a folk theory that will prove inadequate under more rigorous technical analysis.
Villalobos M. & Razeto-Barry P. (2020) Are living beings extended autopoietic systems? An embodied reply. Adaptive Behavior 28(1): 3–13. https://cepa.info/5959
1Building on the original formulation of the autopoietic theory (AT), extended enactivism argues that living beings are autopoietic systems that extend beyond the spatial boundaries of the organism. In this article, we argue that extended enactivism, despite having some basis in AT’s original formulation, mistakes AT’s definition of living beings as autopoietic entities. We offer, as a reply to this interpretation, a more embodied reformulation of autopoiesis, which we think is necessary to counterbalance the (excessively) disembodied spirit of AT’s original formulation. The article aims to clarify and correct what we take to be a misinterpretation of AT as a research program. AT, contrary to what some enactivists seem to believe, did not (and does not) intend to motivate an extended conception of living beings. AT’s primary purpose, we argue, was (and is) to provide a universal individuation criterion for living beings, these understood as discrete bodies that are embedded in, but not constituted by, the environment that surrounds them. However, by giving a more explicitly embodied definition of living beings, AT can rectify and accommodate, so we argue, the enactive extended interpretation of autopoiesis, showing that although living beings do not extend beyond their boundaries as autopoietic unities, they do form part, in normal conditions, of broader autopoietic systems that include the environment.