Though my motives may differ somewhat, I agree with the target article Villalobos and Razeto-Barry, (VR; 2019) in rejecting the tentative claims of Virgo, Egbert and Froese, (VEF; 2011) and others that the relevant boundaries for autopoietic systems may extend beyond their physical boundary. I appeal to a habeas corpus principle: the boundary that matters is that which allows an individuated self-maintaining entity to survive transfer from one environment to another.
Virgo N., Egbert M. D. & Froese T. (2011) The role of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis. In: Kampis G., Karsai I. & Szathmáry E. (eds.) Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann. 10th European Conference ECAL 2009. Springer, Berlin: 234–241. https://cepa.info/2254
Abstract: We argue that the significance of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis has been overstated. It has the important task of distinguishing a living system as a unity in space but should not be seen as playing the additional role of delimiting the processes that make up the autopoietic system. We demonstrate the relevance of this to a current debate about the compatibility of the extended mind hypothesis with the enactive approach and show that a radically extended interpretation of autopoiesis was intended in one of the original works on the subject. Additionally we argue that the definitions of basic terms in the autopoietic literature can and should be made more precise, and we make some progress towards such a goal.
Zaretzky A. N. & Letelier J. C. (2002) Metabolic networks from (M, R)-systems and autopoiesis perspective. Journal of Biological Systems 10(3): 265–280.
This paper is the first one of a series devoted to the analysis of metabolic networks. Its aim is to establish the theoretical framework for this analysis. Two different lines of research are considered: the one about metabolism-repair systems ((M, R), introduced by Robert Rosen as an abstract representation of cell metabolic activity, and the concept of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Both concepts have been recently connected by Letelier et al., determining that the set of autopoietic systems is a subset of the set of general abstract (M, R) systems. In fact, every specific (M, R) system is an autopoietic one, being the boundary, which specifies each system as a unity, the main element of autopoietic systems which is not formalized in Rosen’s representation. This paper introduces the definition of boundary – a physical boundary and a functional one – for (M, R) systems in the context of a representation using category theory. The concept of complete (M, R) system is also introduced by means of a process of completion in categories which is functorial, natural and universal.