As sentient and social beings, we live in hope that we can be understood when we try to communicate with each other but we also know that we might be wrong. We strive for better understandings, engaging in an on-going dance of collective sense-making. This paper considers how communication among individuals involves co-creation of meaning by exploring narratives those expressed by a speaker and those created internally by listeners in efforts to achieve understanding. We note that the extent of these efforts varies from reliance on prejudice at one extreme to deep listening at the other, and that organizational barriers may exist which inhibit cocreation of meaning. We suggest that an open systems approach, which enables individuals to explore and share their contextually dependent understandings, will be helpful. We propose a framework that supports and guides participants in endeavors to co-create understandings of problem spaces through storytelling and listening.

Key words: communication, knowledge creation, listening, narratives, open systems, sense-making

Autonomy is modeled in terms of the property of certain far-from-equilibrium open systems to contribute toward maintaining themselves in their far-from-equilibrium conditions. Such contributions in self-maintenant systems, in turn, constitute the emergence of normative function. The intrinsic thermodynamic asymmetry between equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium processes yields the intrinsic normative asymmetry between function and dysfunction. Standard etiological models of function render function as causally epiphenomenal, while this model is of the emergence of causally efficacious function. Recursive self-maintenance – the meta-property of maintaining the property of being self-maintenant across variations in environment – yields the emergence of representation. This model of representation satisfies multiple criteria that standard approaches – such as symbolic or connectionist, or those of Fodor, Dretske, or Millikan – cannot.

“Strong computationalism” holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has important implications for Turing machine functionalism and the prospect of “conscious” machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set (x)”. Then, equating Q (x) to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the “strong AI” thesis for Q (crediting it with mental states and consciousness) opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems, (e.g., grass, rocks, etc.), must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere. Relevance: This paper critiques the computational accounts of mind and cognition using a construction borrowed from Putnam.

Excerpt: This chapter will take a broad view on autopoiesis and relate it to the different disciplines for explanation. Section 7. 1 will shortly describe the concept of autopoiesis as a different way of looking at systems from both a closed systems view and an open systems view. Section 7. 2 pays attention to three main principles of autopoiesis that govern the development of systems. That results in Section 7. discussing the interaction of autopoietic systems with their environment. Section 7. 4 explores perception and cognition. A slight different theory is presented in Section 7. 5: allopoiesis for systems that do not have all properties of autopoietic systems.

The term autopoiesis was coined to describe the regenerating and self-maintaining chemical systems of cells. The term has subsequently been applied to many different fields, including sociology, systems theory and information systems. This theory postulates that an autopoietic unity (cell, machine) is an organised network of processes that exists in a delimited space, which produces components which in turn continuously regenerate and create the network of processes that produced them. The Santiago Theory of Cognition grew from the Theory of Allopoiesis stating that all living systems are cognitive systems, and the process of living is a process of cognition. Cognition is the ability to adapt to a certain environment and cognition emerges because of a continuous bilateral interaction between the system and its environment. The resultant complexity seen in living systems is caused by this interaction between the system and its environment. Autopoiesis and cognition are however opposing concepts because cognition can only exist when the system is open and not closed as autopoiesis suggests. It is also difficult to see how autopoietic systems could originate if they are closed and how the continuous change which we see in evolution can be explained if life consists of autopoietic systems. It is postulated that cells and organisms are in fact open systems relating genetically to ancestors before them and their ever-changing descendants after them and the flow of molecules and energy through an ever-changing ecology.

Scholars have described the sculptures of Linda Stein, limbless, classicizing, thick-waisted female forms that are often wearable, in the context of gender performativity and/or embodied subjectivity, informed by the sumptuousness of her materials, which invite a haptic or touch-centered response. To encompass the performative nature of her wearable sculpture used as a component of her political activism and her developing concept of the interrelationship between individual, society and environment, I propose a reading through the lens of systems theory, particularly the concept of open systems. Associated with life, growth, and change, open systems took on political and social resonance for artists like Stein maturing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Historically coincident with the American women’s movement, the theorization of open systems in relation to society, biology and the environment was deployed by women artists in the early 1970s as an alternative means of conceiving social and environmental relationships. Relevance: I discuss the artist’s work through the theory of Gregory Bateson. In 1972, the anthropologist and cyberneticist argued that individuals, societies and ecosystems must be conceived integrally, as a complex, interrelated system. The notion of a self-sufficient, independent self is a fallacy in this model. According to Bateson, Mind itself expands to become “immanent in the larger system [of] man plus environment.”

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Science of Interdisciplinary Research: A Polyocular Framework for Wicked Problems” by Hugo F. Alrøe & Egon Noe. Upshot: Contrary to Alrøe and Noe, problems are wicked not because they escape the technical expertise of the special sciences but because they reawaken the sciences’ totalizing impulse, which then leads to conflicting cross-disciplinary claims, on the basis of which the state must intervene. This situation is understandable against the backdrop of an “open systems” perspective, in which the sort of second-order perspective presupposed by wicked problems is spontaneously generated.

Higher education research frequently refers to the complex external conditions that give our old-fashioned universities a good reason to change. The underlying theoretical assumption of such framing is that organizations are open systems. This paper presents an alternative view, derived from the theory of social systems autopoiesis. It proposes that organizations, being open systems, are yet operationally closed, as all their activities and interactions with the environment are aspects of just one process: the recursive production of themselves, according to a pattern of their own identity. It is their identity that captures exactly what can and what cannot be sustained in their continuous self-production. Examining the organizational identity of universities within the theoretical framework of autopoiesis may hence shed new light on their resistance to change, explaining it as a systemic and social phenomenon, rather than an individual and psychological one. Since all processes of an autopoietic system are processes of its self-production, this paper argues that in the case of traditional European universities, the identity consists in the intertwinement of only two processes: (1) introducing continuous change in the scope of scientific knowledge and (2) educating new generations of scholars, who will carry on this activity. This surprisingly leaves at the wayside seemingly the most obvious “use of the university’: the adequate education of students for the job market.

Key words: European university, Traditional university, Social system, Autopoiesis, Organizational identity, Resistance to change

Excerpt: The theory of autopoiesis is based on taking a picture of the actual behavior of a living cell. As such, it is not an abstract theoretical model for life – there are many of these – but a phenomenological analysis of life as it is on Earth. It is, in a way, a picture of the blueprint of cellular life, and it is fascinating to see how many concepts related to the process of life – emergence, homeostasis, biological autonomy, operational closure, open systems, interaction with the environment, cognition, evolutionary drift, etc. – pour forth from this analysis in a coherent way. We will see some of these concepts in the next chapter. In addition, autopoiesis permits the construction of chemical models, as seen in chemical autopoiesis; and it pertains also to the social sciences, with the notion of social autopoiesis. A bridge between biology to the cognitive domain is also made possible. This richness is not present in the chemoton or any other autocatalytic networking. The main ingredient of this unity is the fact that all is seen “from within,” that is, from the logic of the internal organization of the living system. As soon as the autopoietic unit reaches the complexity of biological autonomy, everything that happens within the boundary, as well as the perturbing events from the outside, are interpreted and elaborated in order to maintain the identity of the living. We have also touched on some of the philosophical implications of these views, and added that the developments of autopoietic thinking have in some cases diverged from the original statements of Maturana and Varela. We will see that particularly in the case of the important notion of cognition, discussed in the next chapter. And we will see then that the notion of cognition permits a bridge between the biology of cellular life and the cognitive sciences. I mention this here just to make the point that autopoiesis is the only available simple theory that is capable of providing a unified view of life from the molecular level up to the level of human perception.

Constructivist biosemiotics foundations (CBF) imply the first-person basis of cognition. CBF are developed by the biology of cognition, relational biology, enactive approach, ecology of mind, second order cybernetics, genetic epistemology, gestalt, ecological perception and affordances, and active inference by minimization of free energy. CBF reject the idea of an objective independent reality to be represented (cognitivism) by information processing (computationalism) in order to be the fittest (adaptationism). CBF assumes that perception is the behavioral configuration of an object and objects are tokens for eigen-behaviors. Cognition takes place in the organism-environment structural coupling during the ontogeny and phylogeny of all biological unities including unicellular organisms. Therefore, if exogenous DNA particles (virus or trans-sequence) are just tokens for the cell signalling eigen-behaviors, if there is no ‘information’ in the DNA sequence, how can we explain that the same virus or trans- sequence is associated with a similar phenotype? We call this ‘exogenomic problem’. With this basic example, but sufficiently generic to the whole biological world, we agree respectively with Autopoiesis, (Metabolism, Repair)-system, and Gaia theory: i) ‘Information, code and meaning’ in the DNA sequence belong to the domain of the observer’s description. ii) Genetic ‘information’ is not a program or algorithmic software in DNA sequence. Rather it is a microphysical observable mode of eigen-behaviors in biological unities. iii) The transfer and acquisition of DNA particles is a biospheric phenomenon that maintains its homeorhesis, symbiotic and biosemiotic entailment. Based on the theoretical and experimental results of these theories, it is concluded that genetic ‘information’ is not a genomic sequence, nor any kind of information (algorithmic or semantic), but for the cell DNA must embody physical forcing. Genetic characters are the effects and not the cause of phenotype and DNA particles do not ‘use or manipulate’ cellular metabolism. Rather, any cellular configuration change that occurred before or during DNA perturbation (coincident or not with the observation of certain phenotype) is determined on the basis of the cellular standpoint.

Key words: cell cognition, (m, r)-system, autopoiesis, gaia theory, open systems, configuration change, genetic ‘information’, closed to efficient causation, genomic modified organisms (gmos), biosemiotic entailment.