This was accidentally posted here due to me doing something wrong with the ‘press this’ bookmarklet in Chrome. Ho hum.
Leaving here for Arthur’s comments, but now reblogged at http://www.syscoi.com where it was intended to go originally, and where you can find Much More Like This!
Francis Heylighen, Evo Busseniers
Maturana and Varela defined an autopoietic system as a self-regenerating network of processes. We reinterpret and elaborate this conception starting from a process ontology and its formalization in terms of reaction networks and chemical organization theory. An autopoietic organization can be modelled as a network of “molecules” (components) undergoing reactions, which is (operationally) closed and self-maintaining. Such organizations, being attractors of a dynamic system, tend to self-organize—thus providing a model for the origin of life. However, in order to survive in a variable environment, they must also be resilient, i.e. able to recover from perturbations. According to the cybernetic law of requisite variety, this requires cognition, i.e. the ability to recognize and compensate perturbations. Such cognition becomes more effective as it learns to accurately anticipate perturbations by discovering invariant patterns in its interactions with the environment. Nevertheless, the resulting predictive model remains a subjective construction. Such…
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