Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Autopoesis

Also just finished "Autopoesis" by Maturna and Varela that Henry recommended I read earlier, reading in between ESSLLI classes. Overall, the book's project is impossible - trying to describe a world using language without a third-person "objective" perspective, but a lot of ideas - including ideas of invariance and embodiment, are crucially here. Interesting enough, their idea of an autopoetic system as a system where all the components have no "input" or "output", but function as a co-ordinated whole (although the individual components may have allopoetic input and outputs, these do not interface with the system as a whole) in order to maintain and recreate the system. Seems like the best definition of "life" I've heard yet. However, it does have difficulties. For example, how can one realistically draw the line between invariant components of the system and those that are not? For example, I eat food. It maintains me, and is part of my life. However, I am not eating all the time, but only some of the time. Yet I need food to prevent dying, and must have physical contact with it. To what extent does is physical connection needed for something to count as a component of an autopoetic system? Three times a day as with food? How about the Web? How much do I have to surf for the Web to it to be part of my autopoetic existence? And how long till I become a component of the autopoetic existence of the Web? Again, I think these things are more fuzzy than Maturna makes them out to be...

And at ESSLLI, Cem Bozsahin gave an excellent intro to CCG, and the summarization class has been great! Took a brief trip over the weekend...



Enjoying surprisingly good Scottish weather near Elgol

2 Comments:

Blogger Vikram Waman Karve said...

I wonder if there is a truly autopoetic system!
There are always inputs and outputs - tangible or intangible.

6:39 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

7:31 PM  

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