Summary
The concept of autopoiesis, which is understood (more or less) to signify “self-creation”, or alternatively “self-production”, has been more enthusiastically accepted in sociological, psychological and philosophical circles than in the biological sciences, where it was first proposed around 40 years ago as an alternative definition of a living being. More exactly, the aim of the concept of autopoiesis was to characterize a minimal definition of life, that is, to describe the minimal requirements needed in order to consider a system a living system. Purportedly, the ambitious objective of the two authors (which, in general, was not well-received by the majority of mainstream biologists) was to provide a unifying concept for biology, but it was soon extended to knowledge theory and to various branches of behavioral, cognitive and social sciences, partly thanks to its high degree of abstraction and to the fact that it is a relational definition. This also renders it compatible with such concepts as complexity and systems thinking, because it is based on the relationship between the components of entities, rather than on their type or properties.
The authors did not make it easy for fellow researchers to grasp the full meaning of the term they had coined. Their revised definition, from the year 1980, seven years after the first publication, is as follows:
“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i). through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii). constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network
system would continue to be considered autopoietic.”
Autopoiesis as the self-creation (self-production) of systems is not related to their physical components, but to their organization, measurable by considering the amounts of information and levels of complexity of the system. In other words, we can describe autopoietic systems as those that are capable of producing more complexity within themselves than the amount produced by the surrounding environment. Speaking more mathematically, autopoiesis can be expressed as a proportion: the ratio between a system’s complexity and that of its environment.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Since autopoiesis necessarily involves some kind of constructive interaction with the environment, the authors have considered that it must include cognition, which is taken to mean “behavior with relevance to the maintenance of itself”, provided that this process or maintenance remains cognitive insofar as it involves readjustment of the internal workings of the system in some metabolic process. This latter condition was adopted to exclude the pitfall of having to define computers, whose software programs include self-maintenance, as living, cognitive beings. It follows that autopoiesis is necessary for cognition but is not sufficient. It should be added that this definition of 'cognition' is limited, and does not necessarily require awareness or consciousness on the part of the living system.
