Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Autonomous Systems The Chilean neurologist
Francisco Varela adapted Humberto Maturana's biological ideas to his theory of autonomous systems. He merged the
themes of autonomy of natural systems (i.e. internal regulation) and their
informational abilities (i.e., cognition) into the theme of a system
maintaining an identity and interacting with the rest of the world. The organization of a system
is the set of relations that define it as a unity. The structure of a system,
on the other hand, is the set of relations among its components. Components and
relations among them may change over time without necessarily changing the
overall organization. For example, a machine can be implemented by different
sets of components and relations among them. Homeostatic systems are
systems that keep the values of their variables within a small range of values.
An autopoietic system is a
homeostatic system that continuously generates its own organization, by
continuously producing components that are capable of reproducing the
organization that created them. Autopoietic systems turn out
to be autonomous, to have an identity, to be unities, and to compensate
external perturbations with internal structural changes. Living systems are
autopoietic systems in the physical space. Self-reproduction can only occur in
autopoietic systems, and evolution is a direct consequence of
self-reproduction. By definition, an autonomous
system is organizationally closed. The cognitive domain of an autonomous system
is the domain of interaction that it can enter without losing that closure. An autonomous system always
exhibits two aspects: it specifies the distinction between self and non-self,
and deals with its environment in a cognitive fashion. Therefore, every
autonomous system (ecosystems, societies, brains, even conversations) is a
"mind. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Self-organization and the Science of Emergence" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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