Ray, I'm in a hurry and just popping by my computer, but you may find this description interesting. In hindsight I should have chosen a more common term, but I've been reading a lot of systems thinking books lately so it popped to the top of my head.
The rest of your post I'll try and address later. Appreciate the thoughtful reply. It looks like we have a good starting point for discussion.
platon.ee.duth.gr
“The autopoietic organization is defined as a unity by a network of productions of components which (i) participate recursively in the same network of productions of components which produced these components, and (ii) realize the network of productions as a unity in the space in which the components exist.” (Varela, Maturana & Uribe 1974: 188).
The property of organizational invariance is essential as it addresses that of autonomy: being invariant, an autopoietic system does not adapt to the environment, at least until adaptation to environmental features or changes does not menace its organizational invariance. Indeed, an autopoietic system filters, enacts and reacts to the environment in order to maintain its autopoiesis, that is, its self-production. That property is what was initially called organizational closure and subsequently operational closure (Varela 1977, 1979). Therefore the system exchanges matter and energy with the environment, but neither information nor commands nor inputs, because all these concepts, developed by systems theory and first-order cybernetics, refer to some sort of possible orientation or control or governance of the system. On the contrary, an autopoietic system is autonomous and maintains its own identity. Finally, in addition to demonstrating the self-organizing process of a cellular automata reaching a fixed point, the seminal article determines three more important questions. Firstly, autopoietic systems are defined in a physical space, that of cellular biology. Secondly, they are mechanistic and real objects. Thirdly, they must have a clearly identifiable boundary, like a cell membrane, which is independent from either the internal production network or the environment. Finally, autopoietic systems are a large set, which comprises the sub-set of living systems. |
