As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. Given this theme, there is no better place to start with two of the most fundamental questions of existence:
1. What is Life?
2. What is cognition?
For Maturana and Varela, the scholars who hold our focus in Chapter 6, the answer to each comes from the other: life is being aware, and being aware is to be alive. When first introduced in the 1970s, autopoiesis was dismissed as theoretical biology. Some might wonder, then, why our tour of the present future would look back so far?
The answer is simple enough. Over fifty years later, as a minimal definition, it has become a hallmark of disruptive complexity science, and one that has led to important insights into how life, including human life works, radically upending eons of philosophy that restricted cognition to the brain. The idea that cognition is not synonymous with the brain or brain dependent remains a radical idea that has yet to be fully embraced.
Still, there have been some key advances in Maturana and Varela’s initial definition, which Luisa Damiano and Pier Luisi offered in their article, Toward an autopoietic redefinition of life – notice the slightly different spelling of autopoiesis. They state:
“An autopoietic system is organized as a network of production processes which produces the components which, through their interactions and transformations, permanently regenerate the network of processes constituting the system itself as a concrete topological unit, separated from its medium by a boundary and related to it through cognitive or adaptive coupling. Or, in the simpler version: A living system is a system capable of self-production and self-maintenance through a regenerative network of processes which takes place within a boundary of its own making and regenerates itself through cognitive or adaptive interactions with the medium”.[1]
Chapters 6 – 11 use this definition to then explore how, from bacteria and simple cells to insects and humans, cognition is everywhere in every cell of life on planet earth, extending, even further, potentially, to machine intelligence, as we will see.
KEY WORDS: autopoiesis, cellular cognition, minimal definition of life, Maturana and Varela, theoretical biology, biological complexity.
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[1] Luisa Damiano and Pier Luigi Luisi, ‘Towards an Autopoietic Redefinition of Life’, Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 40, no. 2 (2010). p. 149.
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