Autopoiesis and cognition maturana pdf

DOI: Beer Published Medicine, Computer Science Artificial Life 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… Expand. View on MIT Press. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert.

Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Topics from this paper. Autopoiesis Cognition Conway's Game of Life. Situated Francisco Varela Science. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type.

More Filters. Characterizing Autopoiesis in the Game of Life. Computer Science, Medicine. Artificial Life. View 3 excerpts, cites background and methods. Bittorio revisited: structural coupling in the Game of Life. View 2 excerpts, cites methods and background. 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 … Expand. View 4 excerpts, cites methods and background. For Popper, explicit knowledge is the primary focus of his epistemology; and it is, of course, explicit knowledge that information technology is best able to process and manage. By contrast Polanyi , focuses most of his attention on personal knowledge.

The value of a claim i. This value is tested in action. If the entity's hypothesis about reality enables its survival in W1, the hypothesis has a positive value. If the hypothesis is inadequate, the hypothesis dies along with the entity holding it, representing the ultimate form of criticism.

In time, entities holding adequate hypotheses that survive criticism increase at the expense of those failing criticism. Thus, for Popper, knowledge is the expression of a theory about reality. Consciousness, language, and writing allow individuals to articulate and share their W2 beliefs or claims as objective W3 hypotheses inferring aspects of W1 that can be "scientifically" criticised on the basis of logic and evidence external to the knowing individual.

The inferences themselves are W3 objects subject to evaluation by W2 cognitive processes—i. The relative values of such artefacts of knowledge are determined by the degree to which they can be or have been criticised and tested. Popper called this his evolutionary theory of knowledge growth. Conjectures that have been criticised by attempts to refute them or are capable of such criticism are qualitatively more valuable, in the sense that they do or can provide demonstrably adequate representations of W1, than claims that have not been or cannot be so tested.

As new claims are made and criticised to refute and remove clearly inadequate claims, through time our store of evaluated claims grow in quality and quantity, giving us a continually improving understanding of reality.

With the advent of computer systems and electronic communications, organizations are moving increasing proportions of their knowledge into W3, where it is capable of being evaluated and managed objectively if its nature and value are understood.

Autopoiesis denotes a minimal set of properties that are necessary and sufficient to differentiate systems considered to be living from those that are not. According to Maturana and Varela, living things are dynamic systems of structurally coupled components, where the minimal properties they must have to be considered to be alive are distinctiveness, autonomy, self-regulation, and self-production.

Of these properties, the most difficult to grasp is self- production. This means that the dynamic system is so organized that its constituent components collectively i. This relates to the cybernetic concept of homeostasis, which can be defined as "the capability of a system to hold its critical variables within physiological limits in the face of unexpected disturbance or perturbation" Beer — 5.

Beer notes that autopoiesis is a special kind of homeostasis " Constitutive structurally coupled cybernetic processes embodied within the system itself provide self-regulation e. If perturbations exceed the adaptive capacity of self-regulation, the system "dis-integrates" i. As noted by von Krogh and Roos organizations may also have properties of autopoiesis and cognition 6.

Varela et al. The system is identifiably bounded i. The system is comprised of a set of parts comprising an identifiable whole. Properties of the system are generated by interactions its components and are not simply the sum of the properties of those components taken individually.

The components forming the system's boundaries do so as a result of their interactions with other elements that identifiably belong to the system. Whitaker's Web-based works are invaluable guides to understanding. It is unclear from Beer's account to what extent he and Maturana conceived governments to be a truly autopoietic entities. All other elements of the system are also produced by the interactions of its elements as in 5 above, and if those elements which are not so produced participate as necessary permanent constitutive components in producing other components.

If all these criteria are met, then the system is considered to be autopoietic. Without citing Maturana and Varela's work or using the term autopoiesis, Stuart Kauffman , covers much of the same ground at the level of mathematical modelling and molecular chemistry to demonstrate how mutually autocatalytic sets of processes can emerge spontaneously as systems become more complex.

Quoting from Whitaker's exegesis of Maturana and Varela's thinking and terminology: For [Maturana and Varela], cognition is a consequence of circularity and complexity in the form of any system whose behavior realizes maintenance of that selfsame form.

This shifts the weight of discussion from discernment of those active agencies and replicable actions through which a given process "cognition" is conducted the viewpoint of cognitivism to the discernment of those features of an organism's form which determine that entity's engagement with its milieu.

Thus, analysis should focus more on those features of the autopoietic assembly that determine its "engagement" or interactions with its milieu, than on how "active agencies and replicable actions" involved in given cognitive processes are conducted the cognitivist viewpoint.

A cognitive system is a system whose organization defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself, and the process of cognition is the actual inductive acting or behaving in this domain. There is no object of knowledge. To know is to be able to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation.

Cognition is an extension of the cybernetics of autopoietic self-regulation, that Popper places in W2. Maturana and Varela's knowledge corresponds to Polanyi's personal or tacit knowledge that is evaluated by observing results of the actions it informs; which, again, is a W2 phenomenon. Nelson and Winter treat organizations as autonomous entities in their own rights, possessing transcendent knowledge.

They argue that organizational experience is captured as organizational knowledge via unconscious "routinization" of processes and procedures, and building social and physical contexts and connections that survive the membership of particular individuals in the organization.

They specifically equate this to Polanyi's tacit knowledge, and note that such knowledge is built into the constitutive structure of the organization and exists independently of individuals' knowledge. Von Krogh and Roos argue that organizations are autopoietic, with properties of cognition and memory transcending those of the individuals comprising the organizations. They then attempt to use this to elucidate how organizations create knowledge and build organizational memories.

To date, the applicability of autopoiesis to these concepts has been limited because the concepts of autopoiesis and knowledge as used in the existing literature are themselves limited. Maturana and Varela considered only the very borderline between non-life and life, and thus did not consider reproduction and implications of objectively persistent forms of heredity for real-world entities. Also, the epistemologies of Polanyi, Maturana and Varela, Nelson and Winter, and von Krogh and Roos did not consider a significant role for objective forms of hereditary knowledge comprising Popper's W3.

Combining the ideas of organizational autopoiesis with an understanding of how organizations create and use explicit forms of knowledge in W3 gives a more complete picture of the roles and management of organizational knowledge and memory.

It helps to consider how autopoietic organizations maintain their adaptation in a dynamically changing competitive environments. John Boyd is a useful guide. Although he first developed his ideas thinking about dogfights between jet fighters, he recognised that they represent a generic cognitive framework applicable to organizations as well as individuals for achieving strategic power Fadok ; Spinney ; Cowan Boyd first described this process in Destruction and Creation.

In terms of Popper's epistemology; input, cultural paradigms, and the processes of analysis and synthesis would occur in W2. Genetic heritage and memories of history represent knowledge that exists in or may be exchanged via W3. Genetic heritage is immutable within the time span of a cycle, but ultimately determines what orientation capabilities are available.

All kinds of organizational knowledge may be stored and retrieved in the form of persistently recorded knowledge, which can be used to inform cognitive processing in the orientation phase. The OODA loop is an essential aspect of the cybernetics of autopoietic entities whether they are individuals, species or organizations 8. It summarises the endlessly repeating cycle of sensation, cognition, hypothesising, and testing to track and improve responses to the entity's dynamic environment.

Cognition involves cybernetic guidance and control paradigms for observing, deciding and acting as well as for the orientation process itself.

The actions of these paradigms are also observed so they may also be improved. Genetic heritage in an individual's orientation is just that: genes W3 hypotheses are generated by random mutation, and the developed logical content of the genes is tested over generations of natural selection. Organizational heredity is comprised of the genetic capabilities of its constituent individuals plus persistent forms of knowledge such as articles of incorporation, systems used to tag individuals as members of the organization, corporate manuals, routines, procedures, and other persistent forms of knowledge governing interactions of individuals comprising the organization that serve to maintain organizational integrity in a dynamic economic environment.

Analysis and synthesis represent processes for attending to sensory input, assessing the history of past OODA cycles to build wisdom, relating input to existing knowledge to build intelligence, developing hypotheses, and ranking them to be selected for decision.

Strategic power over resources can be achieved and maintained through more effective and quicker OODA cycles than can be produced by other competitors. This is determined by the capabilities of the cognitive processes involved in orientation. By becoming aware of OODA processes and understanding how they work, we can make them work faster and more effectively, whether we are fighter pilots or organizational managers.

Coherent terminology facilitates understanding how entities create knowledge. Ian Coombe personal communication, — presented definitions in the Australian Army Information Management Manual edition comparing the epistemic values of information objects broadly defined.

These terms represent a sequence of value adding transformations an autopoietic entity can use to gain strategic power. Some knowledge can be expressed in the form of W3 objects able to be stored, processed, transmitted, and used by others.

Wisdom is intelligence that has a proven value based on experience. It should be noted that various kinds of objects relating to all of these information categories can exist and persist independently as W3 objects. Autopoiesis implies that they have cognition, memory, and knowledge that transcend the collective cognitivie processes of their individual members.

It follows from this that they are capable of evolution as this knowledge changes through organzational learning i. When Nelson and Winter developed their ideas in the mid to late 's, information technology was still relatively primitive. Relational databases were only beginning to be implemented Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications, Thus, their picture was realistic then, that most organizational memory important for the autonomic regulation of organizational processes and production existed primarily in "tacit" forms, either as "routinized" knowledge in the form of W2 cognitive artefacts, or in the tacit knowledge of its members.

Many organizations probably existed on the borderline between autopoiesis and cooperating collectives of autopoietic individuals under the managerial control of an entrepreneur.

However, as routines and procedures become established to tag and control people in the organization, component members begin to act in ways that are self-productively autopoietic for the organization as a whole.

As computer technology has become more powerful and capable since the s, more aspects of regulatory organizational knowledge have been externalised into W3 objects, both quantitatively and qualitatively, while still remaining readily available for cognitive processing and transformation. Over the last 20 years there has been a strong trend to use computers to increase the epistemic value in information, from data processing, to information systems, and now to knowledge bases.

Data processing involved tabulation. Information management basically involves the production, management, and maintenance of relational databases and various reporting structures based on the databases.

On the other hand, knowledge management involves such tools as structured authoring to enable the assimilation of information into semantically codified knowledge and sophisticated semantic and contextual retrieval tools Hall In this application, it is claimed Aftergood and Pike , Kaiha that TeraText and associated software is in every hour able to semantically process millions of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and other types of electronic communications in W3 for intelligence, only to alert human monitors W2 when it finds particular contexts or relationships.

Some Wilson , Snowden argue that knowledge management technology has been oversold and has not met the promise to help organizations improve their pformance.