The attempt to define living systems in terms of goal, purpose, function, etc. runs into serious conceptual difficulties. The theoretical biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela realized that any such attempt cannot capture what is distinctive about them: their autonomy and unity. Goal, purpose, etc. always define the system in terms of something extrinsic, whereas living systems are unique because they maintain their unitary continuity of pattern despite the ceaseless turnover of their components. So, system-closure is a prerequisite of their adequate conceptual comprehension. Maturana and Varela themselves found that system-closure pertains exclusively to their organization, i.e. the set of relations among system-components which unify them. For living systems this comprises the relation between the system-components and the processes which they undergo. This relation is self-referential because it is closed, i.e. it essentially (re)produces itself. \\While this model worked very well in the biological domain, attempts to extend it to the social domain met with serious conceptual obstacles. The reason for this is that Maturana did not make a consistent enough application of it. He understood the components of social systems biologically (individuals, persons, etc.) and the relations between them socially (language). This inconsistency ruptured the system’s organizational closure. Consequently organizational closure (autopoiesis) can be maintained only when both the components of social systems and their processes are of the same type: social. This interpretation can be found in the work of Niklas Luhmann who recognizes that the components of social systems are not persons, individuals, actors or subjects but communicative actions themselves. This preserves the organizational closure of the system and permits the concept of autopoiesis to be used as a powerful instrument of social analysis.
Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis has the potential to transform the conceptual foundation of biology as well as the cognitive, behavioral, and brain sciences. In order to fully realize this potential, however, the concept of autopoiesis and its many consequences require significant further theoretical and empirical development. A crucial step in this direction is the formulation and analysis of models of autopoietic systems. This article sketches the beginnings of such a project by examining a glider from Conway’s game of life in autopoietic terms. Such analyses can clarify some of the key ideas underlying autopoiesis and draw attention to some of the central open issues. This article also examines the relationship between an autopoietic perspective on cognition and recent work on dynamical approaches to the behavior and cognition of situated, embodied agents. Relevance: The article focuses on the theory of autopoiesis and related concepts such as structural coupling and cognitive domain.
Beer R. D. (2014) The cognitive domain of a glider in the Game of Life. Artificial Life 20: 183–206. https://cepa.info/6303
This article examines in some technical detail the application of Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition to a simple concrete model: a glider in the game of Life cellular automaton. By adopting an autopoietic perspective on a glider, the set of possible perturbations to it can be divided into destructive and nondestructive subsets. From a glider’s reaction to each nondestructive perturbation, its cognitive domain is then mapped. In addition, the structure of a glider’s possible knowledge of its immediate environment, and the way in which that knowledge is grounded in its constitution, are fully described. The notion of structural coupling is then explored by characterizing the paths of mutual perturbation that a glider and its environment can undergo. Finally, a simple example of a communicative interaction between two gliders is given. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential implications of this analysis for the enactive approach to cognition.
Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis defines the essential organization of living systems and serves as a foundation for their biology of cognition and the enactive approach to cognitive science. As an initial step toward a more formal analysis of autopoiesis, this paper investigates its application to the compact, recurrent spatiotemporal patterns that arise in Conway’s Game of Life cellular automata. In particular, we demonstrate how such entities can be formulated as self-constructing networks of interdependent processes that maintain their own boundaries. We then characterize the specific organizations of several such entities, suggest a way to simplify the descriptions of these organizations, and briefly consider the transformation of such organizations over time. Relevance: The paper presents an analysis of a minimal concrete model of autopoiesis to provide a more rigorous foundation for the concept of autopoiesis and highlight its ambiguities and difficulties.
Beer R. D. (2018) On the origin of gliders. In: Ikegami T., Virgo N., Witkowski O., Oka M., Suzuk R. & Iizuka H. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life. MIT Press, Cambridge MA: 67–74. https://cepa.info/6304
Using a glider in the Game of Life cellular automaton as a toy model, we explore how questions of origins might be approached from the perspective of autopoiesis. Specifically, we examine how the density of gliders evolves over time from random initial conditions and then develop a statistical mechanics of gliders that explains this time evolution in terms of the processes of glider creation, persistence and destruction that underlie it.
Beer R. D. (2019) Bittorio revisited: Structural coupling in the Game of Life. Adaptive Behavior 1059712319859907.
The notion of structural coupling plays a central role in Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition framework and strongly influenced Varela’s subsequent enactive elaboration of this framework. Building upon previous work using a glider in the Game of Life (GoL) cellular automaton as a toy model of a minimal autopoietic system with which to concretely explore these theoretical frameworks, this article presents an analysis of structural coupling between a glider and its environment. Specifically, for sufficiently small GoL universes, we completely characterize the nonautonomous dynamics of both a glider and its environment in terms of interaction graphs, derive the set of possible glider lives determined by the mutual constraints between these interaction graphs, and show how such lives are embedded in the state transition graph of the entire GoL universe.
Villalobos and Razeto-Barry’s target article highlights a debate about the role of spatial boundaries in autopoiesis that has been simmering for some time. I argue that, ultimately, controversies such as this are best resolved not by verbal argument, but rather in the context of actual mathematically formulated theories of biological individuality. Finally, I briefly review some initial efforts in this direction as they relate to the question of boundaries.
Berger J. (1987) Autopoiesis: Wie “systemisch” ist die Theorie sozialer Systeme? In: Haferkamp H. S. M. (ed.) Sinn, Kommunikation und soziale Differenzierung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main: 129–152.
Bich L. (2006) Autopoiesis and emergence. In: Minati G., Pessa E. & Abram M. (eds.) Systemics of emergence: Research and development. Springer, Berlin: 281–292. https://cepa.info/2320
Autopoietic theory is more than a mere characterization of the living, as it can be applied to a wider class of systems and involves both organizational and epistemological aspects. In this paper we assert the necessity of considering the relation between autopoiesis and emergence, focusing on the crucial importance of the observer’s activity and demonstrating that autopoietic systems can be considered intrinsically emergent processes. From the attempts to conceptualize emergence, especially Rosen’s, autopoiesis stands out for its attention to the unitary character of systems and to emergent levels, both inseparable from the observer’s operations. These aspects are the basis of Varela’s approach to multiple level relationships, considered as descriptive complementarities.
In this article I will outline the basic theoretical assumptions of two examples of the confederative and the integrative views of the living – respectively Ganti’s Chemoton theory and Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic theory – by showing that they are both consistent perspectives, but they differ in the accounts they make of the role of organization in biological systems. In doing so I will also put into evidence how the choice between these two theoretical frameworks is strictly connected to the problem of structure and function in living organisms and entails different strategies of investigation.