Living beings as autopoietic bodies

Villalobos, Mario

doi:10.1177/1059712319879747

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(47 reference statements)

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“…In sum, the emergence of new increasingly complex cognitive organisms from the simpler ones progresses through the processes of self-assembly and self-organization as a new paradigm in evolutionary biology [ 40 ], and autopoiesis [ 30 , 43 ], by way of continual interactions of constituent parts with each other and with the environment. This view has been supported by the evidence in the recent research literature.…”

Section: Foundations Of Cognition: Self-organization and Autopoiesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition as Morphological/Morphogenetic Embodied Computation In Vivo

Dodig-Crnković

2022

Entropy

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Cognition, historically considered uniquely human capacity, has been recently found to be the ability of all living organisms, from single cells and up. This study approaches cognition from an info-computational stance, in which structures in nature are seen as information, and processes (information dynamics) are seen as computation, from the perspective of a cognizing agent. Cognition is understood as a network of concurrent morphological/morphogenetic computations unfolding as a result of self-assembly, self-organization, and autopoiesis of physical, chemical, and biological agents. The present-day human-centric view of cognition still prevailing in major encyclopedias has a variety of open problems. This article considers recent research about morphological computation, morphogenesis, agency, basal cognition, extended evolutionary synthesis, free energy principle, cognition as Bayesian learning, active inference, and related topics, offering new theoretical and practical perspectives on problems inherent to the old computationalist cognitive models which were based on abstract symbol processing, and unaware of actual physical constraints and affordances of the embodiment of cognizing agents. A better understanding of cognition is centrally important for future artificial intelligence, robotics, medicine, and related fields.

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Section: Foundations Of Cognition: Self-organization and Autopoiesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition as Morphological/Morphogenetic Embodied Computation In Vivo

Dodig-Crnković

2022

Entropy

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“…Recently, representatives of the autopoietic theory, recognizing that the abstract original formulation of the theory fails to neatly demarcate the class of living beings, have offered an embodied and thermodynamic reformulation of the notion of autopoiesis that aims to distinguish living beings as a particular kind of dissipative structures [ 56 , 57 ]. In essence, they observe that instead of characterizing living beings as autopoietic systems, as the theory’s original formulation does, the autopoietic theory should characterize them as autopoietic bodies [ 56 ].…”

Section: Embodied Autopoietic Theory (Eat): a Non-teleological Thermo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The proposal, labeled “embodied autopoietic theory” (EAT) [ 56 , 58 ], argues that the notion of system is too generic and abstract to specify the distinctive thermodynamic nature of living beings as internally cohesive, self-contained physical systems; that is, as physical bodies. It is argued that without this specification, the autopoietic theory leads us to include within the class of living beings natural systems that we should not be including.…”

Section: Embodied Autopoietic Theory (Eat): a Non-teleological Thermo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Autocatalytic networks and candle flames, for instance, are organized as recursive chemical productive networks that define a certain topology, and can therefore be qualified as autopoietic systems according to the theory’s original formulation. However, the argument continues, these systems do not keep by themselves the proximity of their products and components against the entropic tendency to spatial diffusion, as living beings distinctively do [ 56 , 59 , 60 ].…”

Section: Embodied Autopoietic Theory (Eat): a Non-teleological Thermo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EAT explicitly rejects “to depict living beings as agents that do things in a teleological sense” ([ 56 ], p. 57. Internal quotation marks removed).…”

Section: Embodied Autopoietic Theory (Eat): a Non-teleological Thermo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Autopoiesis, Thermodynamics, and the Natural Drift of Living Beings: Another Way to the New Evolutionary Synthesis

Villalobos

Frick

Vicencio-Jimenez

2022

Entropy

Self Cite

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The New Evolutionary Synthesis (NES) groups a series of theories that, departing from the gene-centric approach of Modern Synthesis evolutionary theory (MS), place the organism as the central agent of evolution. Two versions of NES, each one with advantages and disadvantages, can be distinguished in this regard; the restrictive NES and the comprehensive NES. Comparatively, the comprehensive NES is a more robust theoretical construction than the restrictive one because it comes grounded on a general, thermodynamically informed theory of living beings (something that the restrictive NES lacks). However, due to its strong teleological commitments, the comprehensive NES has serious problems fitting with modern science’s methodological framework; a problem that the restrictive version, with no explicit commitment to teleology, does not face. In this paper, we propose the autopoietic approach to evolution as a way of integrating these two versions of NES, combining the theoretical robustness of the comprehensive view with the methodological appropriateness of the restrictive one. The autopoietic approach, we show, offers a non-teleological, organism-centered theory of evolution, namely the natural drift theory (NDT), and a grounding on a thermodynamic theory of living beings, namely the embodied autopoietic theory (EAT). We conclude that, from the programmatic point of view, an autopoietic (NDT plus EAT) approach to evolution offers a promising way to develop the NES project.

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Determinism: Collision of Natural and Social Sciences’ Interpretations

Орланов¹,

Orlanova²

2020

Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference on Philosophy of Education, Law and Science in the Era of Globalization

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The article substantiates the thesis that the category of determinism retains its methodological significance in modern social sciences and natural sciences. The appeal to the category of determinism is relevant in the context of its contemporary criticism. A categorical rejection of determinism is present in many publications by M. Wieviorka, P. Bourdieu, I. Prigogine, I. Stengers, and other researchers. The critical position is dictated by the identification of some interpretation disadvantages of the "determinism" concept. The article substantiates the critic's insufficiency to send a cognitive tool such as determinism to the archive. Consideration should be given to the possibility of updating the concept of determinism, given the fundamental nature of this philosophical concept. The study outlines the contours of a methodological approach that allows preservation of determinism in the arsenal of practical categorical tools in the sciences of nature and society. The essence of this approach is expressed in the introduced concepts of reflexive determinism and case determinism. The content of these concepts is considered from the standpoint of the activity of the subject of knowledge.

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Living beings as autopoietic bodies

Cited by 3 publications

References 20 publications

Cognition as Morphological/Morphogenetic Embodied Computation In Vivo

Cognition as Morphological/Morphogenetic Embodied Computation In Vivo

Autopoiesis, Thermodynamics, and the Natural Drift of Living Beings: Another Way to the New Evolutionary Synthesis

Determinism: Collision of Natural and Social Sciences’ Interpretations

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