Froese T., Virgo N. & Izquierdo E. (2007) Autonomy: A review and a reappraisal. In: Almeida e Costa F., Rocha L. M., Costa E., Harvey I. & Coutinho A. (eds.) Advances in Artificial Life. 9th European Conference, ECAL 2007. Springer, Berlin: 455–464. https://cepa.info/2678
In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines ‘autonomy’. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved.
Virgo N. (2020) The necessity of extended autopoiesis. Adaptive Behavior 28(1): 23–26. https://cepa.info/5958
The theory of autopoiesis holds that an organism can be defined as a network of processes. However, an organism also has a physical body. The relationship between these two things – network and body – has been raised in this issue of Adaptive Behaviour, with reference to an extended interpretation of autopoiesis. This perspective holds that the network and the body are distinct things, and that the network should be thought of as extending beyond the boundaries of the body. The relationship between body and network is subtle, and I revisit it here from the extended perspective. I conclude that from an organism = network perspective, the body is a biological solution to the problem of maintaining both the distinctness of an organism, separate from but engaged with its environment and other organisms, and its distinctiveness as a particular individual.
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.