Autopoiesis
Explanation
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Chilean neurobiologists, coined in the 1970s the concept of autopoiesis (literally self-creation) to characterise what is specific about living beings. An autopoietic system is one that continuously produces its own components while maintaining at the same time the network of production that constitutes it. Life is, essentially, a circular process of self-production.
Consider a cell. Its membranes, proteins, ribosomes, enzymes are constantly being destroyed and replaced. But each new component is produced by the complete network of processes that, in turn, depends on that component. The cell is not an object, it is a self-sustaining pattern of production. If the pattern stops, the cell dies even though the atoms remain.
Autopoiesis has profound implications for the philosophy of mind. Maturana and Varela held that every living system is cognitive in a minimal sense: it must discriminate its environment to preserve itself (what to eat, what to avoid, where to move). Cognition is not something that appears late in evolution with complex brains; it is co-extensive with life itself.
This thesis identifies life and cognition, which has interesting consequences. A bacterium already knows its environment in a minimal sense: it discriminates and acts differentially upon it. A fungus, a plant, an octopus, a human: all are continuations of the same basic phenomenon, enriched by additional evolutionary layers (nervous system, brain, language), but without radical discontinuity.
Varela, in his later work, extended autopoiesis to human consciousness, proposing neurophenomenology: a programme that combines first-person (phenomenological) descriptions with third-person (neuroscientific) descriptions in order to study conscious states. His idea was that consciousness emerges from the coupling of an autopoietic brain with a meaningful environment, not from abstract computational operations.
Autopoiesis has influenced theoretical biology, sociology (Niklas Luhmann applied it to social systems), ecological economics, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Its challenge to mechanistic-reductionist views of life and to computational views of mind remains profound, and feeds the broader programme of contemporary enactivism.
Strengths
- Rigorous articulation between biology and cognition.
- Originated in Latin America, expanded globally.
- Foundation for enactivism, neurophenomenology, systemic therapy.
- Dialogue with systems theory, second-order cybernetics and constructivism.
Main critiques
- Concept of cognition too broad: what is not cognitive?
- Difficult articulation with computational neuroscience.
- Underestimates the representational role in complex cognition.
- Operationalisation of 'structural coupling' is opaque.