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Principles of Biological Autonomy

North-Holland (1979)

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  1. Facing Life: The messy bodies of enactive cognitive science.Marek McGann - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-18.
    Descriptions of bodies within the literature of the enactive approach to cognitive science exhibit an interesting dialectical tension. On the one hand, a body is considered to be a unity which instantiates an identity, forming an intrinsic basis for value. On the other, a living body is in a reciprocally defining relationship with the environment, and is therefore immersed and entangled with, rather than distinct from, its environment. In this paper I examine this tension, and its implications for the enactive (...)
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  • Subjectivity, nature, existence: Foundational issues for enactive phenomenology.Thomas Netland - 2023 - Dissertation, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
    This thesis explores and discusses foundational issues concerning the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and the enactive approach to cognitive science, with the aim of clarifying, developing, and promoting the project of enactive phenomenology. This project is framed by three general ideas: 1) that the sciences of mind need a phenomenological grounding, 2) that the enactive approach is the currently most promising attempt to provide mind science with such a grounding, and 3) that this attempt involves both a naturalization of phenomenology (...)
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  • Using neurons to maintain autonomy: Learning from C. elegans.William Bechtel & Leonardo Bich - 2023 - Biosystems 232:105017.
    Understanding how biological organisms are autonomous—maintain themselves far from equilibrium through their own activities—requires understanding how they regulate those activities. In multicellular animals, such control can be exercised either via endocrine signaling through the vasculature or via neurons. In C. elegans this control is exercised by a well-delineated relatively small but distributed nervous system that relies on both chemical and electric transmission of signals. This system provides resources to integrate information from multiple sources as needed to maintain the organism. Especially (...)
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  • The Deliberation Model of Organismic Agency.Hugh Desmond - manuscript
    Organismic agency is often understood as the capacity to produce goal-directed behavior. This paper proposes a new way of modelling agency, namely as a naturalized deliberation. Deliberative action is not directed towards a particular goal, but involves a process of weighing multiple goals and a choice for a particular combination of these. The underlying causal model is symmetry breaking, where the organism breaks symmetries present in the selective environment. Deliberation is illustrated though the phenomena of mate choice and bacterial chemotaxis.
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • Qualities of Consent: An enactive approach to making better sense.Basil Vassilicos & Marek McGann - 2023 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-23.
    Philosophical work on the concept of consent in the past few decades has got to grips with it as a rich notion. We are increasingly sensitive to consent not as a momentary, atomic, transactional thing, but as a complex idea admitting of various qualities and dimensions. In this paper we note that the recognition of this complexity demands a theoretical framework quite different to those presently extant, and we suggest that the enactive approach is one which offers significant value in (...)
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  • Examining participatory sense-making frames: how autonomous patterns of being together emerge in recurrent social interaction.Mark M. James - 2021 - Dissertation, University College Dublin
    This thesis investigates how recurrent face-to-face social interactions engender relatively invariant patterns of being together that cause those who instantiate them to act in ways that support their reproduction. Existing accounts within both cognitive science and sociology offer important insights into the consideration of patterns of being together. However, given their explanatory strategies, they struggle to integrate both ‘social’ and ‘individual’ levels of explanation. Herein a compatibilist account is developed, intended as a ‘third way’ that obviates the limitations of existing (...)
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  • Enactivism and the Hegelian Stance on Intrinsic Purposiveness.Andrea Gambarotto & Matteo Mossio - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (1):155-177.
    We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary theory of biological autonomy devoted to the study of cognition and the mind. What is at stake in the Hegelian stance is the elaboration of a naturalized, although non-reductive, understanding of natural purposiveness.
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  • Osteopathic Care as (En)active Inference: A Theoretical Framework for Developing an Integrative Hypothesis in Osteopathy.Jorge E. Esteves, Francesco Cerritelli, Joohan Kim & Karl J. Friston - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Osteopathy is a person-centred healthcare discipline that emphasizes the body’s structure-function interrelationship—and its self-regulatory mechanisms—to inform a whole-person approach to health and wellbeing. This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for developing an integrative hypothesis in osteopathy, which is based on the enactivist and active inference accounts. We propose that osteopathic care can be reconceptualised under active inference as a unifying framework. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual’s internal model of the (...)
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  • Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation.Leonardo Bich & William Bechtel - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-27.
    The new mechanists and the autonomy approach both aim to account for how biological phenomena are explained. One identifies appeals to how components of a mechanism are organized so that their activities produce a phenomenon. The other directs attention towards the whole organism and focuses on how it achieves self-maintenance. This paper discusses challenges each confronts and how each could benefit from collaboration with the other: the new mechanistic framework can gain by taking into account what happens outside individual mechanisms, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Enacting Environments: From Umwelts to Institutions.Mog Stapleton - 2021 - In Karyn L. Lai (ed.), Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy: Epistemology Extended. Springer Nature. pp. 159-189.
    What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to (...)
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  • Jacob's Ladder and Scientific Ontologies.Julio Michael Stern - 2014 - Cybernetics and Human Knowing 21 (3):9-43.
    The main goal of this article is to use the epistemological framework of a specific version of Cognitive Constructivism to address Piaget’s central problem of knowledge construction, namely, the re-equilibration of cognitive structures. The distinctive objective character of this constructivist framework is supported by formal inference methods of Bayesian statistics, and is based on Heinz von Foerster’s fundamental metaphor of objects as tokens for eigen-solutions. This epistemological perspective is illustrated using some episodes in the history of chemistry concerning the definition (...)
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  • On the naturalisation of teleology: self-organisation, autopoiesis and teleodynamics.Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas - 2022 - Adaptive Behavior 30 (2):103-117.
    In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy to account for organism teleology. This article argues that the treatment of teleology in autopoiesis and other organisation theories is inconclusive for three reasons: First, (...)
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  • The Ontology of Organismic Agency: A Kantian Approach.Hugh Desmond & Philippe Huneman - 2020 - In Andrea Altobrando & Pierfrancesco Biasetti (eds.), Natural Born Monads: On the Metaphysics of Organisms and Human Individuals. De Gruyter. pp. 33-64.
    Biologists explain organisms’ behavior not only as having been programmed by genes and shaped by natural selection, but also as the result of an organism’s agency: the capacity to react to environmental changes in goal-driven ways. The use of such ‘agential explanations’ reopens old questions about how justified it is to ascribe agency to entities like bacteria or plants that obviously lack rationality and even a nervous system. Is organismic agency genuinely ‘real’ or is it just a useful fiction? In (...)
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  • Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal.Miguel Segundo-Ortin - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11 (1319).
    Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with (...)
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  • Interactive Models in Synthetic Biology: Exploring Biological and Cognitive Inter-Identities.Leonardo Bich - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:510543.
    The aim of this article is to investigate the relevance and implications of synthetic models for the study of the interactive dimension of minimal life and cognition, by taking into consideration how the use of artificial systems may contribute to an understanding of the way in which interactions may affect or even contribute to shape biological identities. To do so, this article analyzes experimental work in synthetic biology on different types of interactions between artificial and natural systems, more specifically: between (...)
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  • The Objectivity of Organizational Functions.Samuel Cusimano & Beckett Sterner - 2020 - Acta Biotheoretica 68 (2):253-269.
    We critique the organizational account of biological functions by showing how its basis in the closure of constraints fails to be objective. While the account treats constraints as objective features of physical systems, the number and relationship of potential constraints are subject to potentially arbitrary redescription by investigators. For example, we show that self-maintaining systems such as candle flames can realize closure on a more thorough analysis of the case, contradicting the claim that these “simple” systems lack functional organization. This (...)
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  • An organisational approach to biological communication.Ramiro Frick, Leonardo Bich & Alvaro Moreno - 2019 - Acta Biotheoretica (2):103-128.
    This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretical framework to the study of biological communication, we focus on a specific approach, based on the notion of influence, according to which communication takes place when a signal emitted by a (...)
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  • Pragmatism, enactivism, and ecological psychology: towards a unified approach to post-cognitivism.Manuel Heras-Escribano - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 1):337-363.
    This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the (...)
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  • From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.Marcin Miłkowski, Robert Clowes, Zuzanna Rucińska, Aleksandra Przegalińska, Tadeusz Zawidzki, Joel Krueger, Adam Gies, Marek McGann, Łukasz Afeltowicz, Witold Wachowski, Fredrik Stjernberg, Victor Loughlin & Mateusz Hohol - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the (...)
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  • Philosophy of nature and organism’s autonomy: on Hegel, Plessner and Jonas’ theories of living beings.Francesca Michelini, Matthias Wunsch & Dirk Stederoth - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3):56.
    Following the revival in the last decades of the concept of “organism”, scholarly literature in philosophy of science has shown growing historical interest in the theory of Immanuel Kant, one of the “fathers” of the concept of self-organisation. Yet some recent theoretical developments suggest that self-organisation alone cannot fully account for the all-important dimension of autonomy of the living. Autonomy appears to also have a genuine “interactive” dimension, which concerns the organism’s functional interactions with the environment and does not simply (...)
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  • (1 other version)Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism.Charles T. Wolfe, Bohang Chen & Cécilia Bognon-Küss - 2018 - Kairos 20 (1):113-140.
    Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and (...)
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  • Against Organizational Functions.Justin Garson - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):1093-1103.
    Over the last 20 years, several philosophers have developed a new approach to biological functions, the organizational approach. This is not a single theory but a family of theories based on the idea that a trait token can acquire a function by virtue of the way it contributes to a complex, organized system and thereby to its own continued persistence as a token. I argue that the organizational approach faces a serious liberality objection. I examine three different ways organizational theorists (...)
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  • Il concetto di “ milieu intérieur”: ruolo e implicazioni teoriche in un approccio sistemico allo studio del vivente.Leonardo Bich - 2012 - In Cianci Eloisa (ed.), Quaderni del CERCO. Epistemologie in Dialogo? Contesti e costruzioni di conoscenze. Guaraldi. pp. 179-210.
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  • Systems, Autopoietic.Leonardo Bich & Arantza Etxeberria - 2013 - In Dubitzsky, Wolkenhauer, Cho & Yokota (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. Springer. pp. 2110-2113.
    Definition The authors’ definition of the autopoietic system has evolved through the years. One of them states that an autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (1) through their interactions and transformations regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (2) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the (...)
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  • What are definitions of life good for? Transdisciplinary and other definitions in astrobiology.Tarja Knuuttila & Andrea Loettgers - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1185-1203.
    The attempt to define life has gained new momentum in the wake of novel fields such as synthetic biology, astrobiology, and artificial life. In a series of articles, Cleland, Chyba, and Machery claim that definitions of life seek to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for applying the concept of life—something that such definitions cannot, and should not do. We argue that this criticism is largely unwarranted. Cleland, Chyba, and Machery approach definitions of life as classifying devices, thereby neglecting their other (...)
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  • Cognitive ontology in flux: The possibility of protean brains.Daniel D. Hutto, Anco Peeters & Miguel Segundo-Ortin - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (2):209-223.
    This paper motivates taking seriously the possibility that brains are basically protean: that they make use of neural structures in inventive, on-the-fly improvisations to suit circumstance and context. Accordingly, we should not always expect cognition to divide into functionally stable neural parts and pieces. We begin by reviewing recent work in cognitive ontology that highlights the inadequacy of traditional neuroscientific approaches when it comes to divining the function and structure of cognition. Cathy J. Price and Karl J. Friston, and Colin (...)
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  • Lived Experience and Cognitive Science Reappraising Enactivism’s Jonasian Turn.M. Villalobos & D. Ward - 2016 - Constructivist Foundations 11 (2):204-212.
    Context: The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans Jonas. Jonas credits all living organisms with experience that involves particular “existential” structures: nascent forms of concern for self-preservation and desire for objects and outcomes that promote well-being. We argue that Jonas’s attitude towards living systems involves a problematic anthropomorphism that threatens to place enactivism at odds with cognitive science, and undermine its legitimate aims to become a new paradigm for scientific investigation and understanding of (...)
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  • Sensorimotor Theory and Enactivism.Jan Degenaar & J. Kevin O’Regan - 2017 - Topoi 36 (3):393-407.
    The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which stresses perceptual capacities themselves, from autopoietic enactivism, which claims an essential connection between experience and autopoietic processes or associated background capacities. We show how autopoiesis, autonomous agency, and affective dimensions of experience (...)
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  • The aesthetic stance - on the conditions and consequences of becoming a beholder.Maria Brincker - 2014 - In Alfonsina Scarinzi (ed.), Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 117-138.
    What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...)
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  • Solely Generic Phenomenology.Ned Block - 2015 - Open MIND 2015.
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  • How we affect each other. Michel Henry's 'pathos-with' and the enactive approach to intersubjectivity.Hanne De Jaegher - 2015 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (1-2):112-132.
    What makes it possible to affect one another, to move and be moved by another person? Why do some of our encounters transform us? The experience of moving one another points to the inter-affective in intersubjectivity. Inter-affection is hard to account for under a cognitivist banner, and has not received much attention in embodied work on intersubjectivity. I propose that understanding inter-affection needs a combination of insights into self-affection, embodiment, and interaction processes. I start from Michel Henry's radically immanent idea (...)
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  • Autopoietic enactivism, phenomenology and the deep continuity between life and mind.Paulo De Jesus - 2016 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (2):265-289.
    In their recent book Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic minds without content, Dan Hutto and Erik Myin make two important criticisms of what they call autopoietic enactivism. These two criticisms are that AE harbours tacit representationalists commitments and that it has too liberal a conception of cognition. Taking the latter claim as its main focus, this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of AE in order to tease out how it might respond to H&M. In so doing it uncovers some reasons which not (...)
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  • Agency is Distinct from Autonomy.Fred Cummins - 2014 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (2):98-112.
    Both autonomy and agency play central roles in the emerging enactive vocabulary. Although some treat these concepts as practically synonymous, others have sought to be more explicit about the conditions required for agency over and above autonomy. I attempt to be self-conscious about the role of the observer (or scientist) in such discussions, and emphasise that the concept of agency, in particular, is deeply entwined with the nature of the observer and the framing of the observation. This is probably well (...)
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  • On observing emergent properties and their compositions.Francisco T. Varela & Vicente Sanchez-Leighton - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (2):401-402.
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  • Biological roots of musical epistemology: Functional cycles, Umwelt, and enactive listening.Mark Reybrouck - 2001 - Semiotica 2001 (134):599-633.
    This article argues for an epistemology of music, stating that dealing with music can be considered as a process of knowledge acquisition. What really matters is not the representation of an ontological musical reality, but the generation of music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. Three major positions are brought together: the epistemological claims of Jean Piaget, the biological methodology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the constructivistic conceptions of Ernst von Glasersfeld, each ingstress the role of (...)
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  • Perceptual Modalities: Modes of Presentation or Modes of Interaction?Marek McGann - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (1-2):1-2.
    Perceptual modalities have been traditionally considered the product of dedicated biological systems producing information for higher cognitive processing. Psychological and neuropsychological evidence is offered which undermines this point of view and an alternative account of modality from the enactive approach to understanding cognition is suggested. Under this view, a perceptual modality is a stable form of perception which is structured not just by the biological sensitivities of the agent, but by their goals and the set of skills or expertise which (...)
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  • Autonomy in evolution: from minimal to complex life.Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo & Alvaro Moreno - 2012 - Synthese 185 (1):21-52.
    Our aim in the present paper is to approach the nature of life from the perspective of autonomy, showing that this perspective can be helpful for overcoming the traditional Cartesian gap between the physical and cognitive domains. We first argue that, although the phenomenon of life manifests itself as highly complex and multidimensional, requiring various levels of description, individual organisms constitute the core of this multifarious phenomenology. Thereafter, our discussion focuses on the nature of the organization of individual living entities, (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Open Body.Dorothée Legrand & Joel Krueger - 2009 - In Antonella Carassa, Francesca Morganti & Guiseppa Riva (eds.), Enacting Intersubjectivity: Paving the Way for a Dialogue Between Cognitive Science, Social Cognition, and Neuroscience. Universita della Svizzera Italiana. pp. 109-128.
    In this paper we characterize the body as constitutively open. We fi rst consider the notion of bodily openness at the basic level of its organic constitution. This will provide us a framework relevant for the understanding of the body open to its intersubjective world. We argue that the notion of “bodily openness” captures a constitutive dimension of intersubjectivity. Generally speaking, there are two families of theories intending to characterize the constitutive relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity: either the self is (...)
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  • Belief-Forming Processes, Extended.Spyridon Orestis Palermos - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (4):741-765.
    We very often grant that a person can gain knowledge on the basis of epistemic artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes and so on. However, this intuition threatens to undermine virtue reliabilism according to which one knows that p if and only if one’s believing the truth that p is the product of a reliable cognitive belief-forming process; in an obvious sense epistemic artifacts are not parts of one’s overall cognitive system. This is so, unless the extended cognition hypothesis (HEC) is (...)
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  • Biological Organization and Cross-Generation Functions.Cristian Saborido, Matteo Mossio & Alvaro Moreno - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3):583-606.
    The organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra- and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribute to the maintenance of the same organization which produces them. To face this ‘ontological problem’, a splitting account has been proposed, according to which the two kinds of functions (...)
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  • (1 other version)Enfleshing Embodiment: 'Falling into trust' with the body's role in teaching and learning.Margaret Macintyre Latta & Gayle Buck - 2008 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 40 (2):315-329.
    Embodiment as a compelling way to rethink the nature of teaching and learning asks participants to see fundamentally what is at stake within teaching/learning situations, encountering ourselves and our relations to others/otherness. Drawing predominantly on the thinking of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty the body's role within teaching and learning is enfleshed through the concrete experiences of one middle-school science teacher attempting to teach for greater student inquiry. Personal, embodied understandings of the lived terms of inquiry enable the science teacher (...)
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  • Artificial life as it could be.Eric Bonabeau & Paul Bourgine - 1994 - World Futures 40 (4):227-249.
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  • Do organisms have an ontological status?Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):195-232.
    The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived (...)
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  • Mind Stuffed with Red Herrings: Why William James’ Critique of the Mind-Stuff Theory Does not Substantiate a Combination Problem for Panpsychism. [REVIEW]Itay Shani - 2010 - Acta Analytica 25 (4):413-434.
    There is a famous passage in chapter six of James’ Principles of Psychology whose import, many believe, deals a devastating blow to the explanatory aspirations of panpsychism. In the present paper I take a close look at James’ argument, as well as at the claim that it underlies a powerful critique of panpsychism. Apart from the fact that the argument was never aimed at panpsychism as such, I show that it rests on highly problematic assumptions which, if followed to their (...)
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  • An organizational account of biological functions.Matteo Mossio, Cristian Saborido & Alvaro Moreno - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4):813-841.
    In this paper, we develop an organizational account that defines biological functions as causal relations subject to closure in living systems, interpreted as the most typical example of organizationally closed and differentiated self-maintaining systems. We argue that this account adequately grounds the teleological and normative dimensions of functions in the current organization of a system, insofar as it provides an explanation for the existence of the function bearer and, at the same time, identifies in a non-arbitrary way the norms that (...)
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  • Emergence in exact natural science.Hans Primas - unknown
    The context of an operational description is given by the distinction between what we consider as relevant and what as irrelevant for a particular experiment or observation. A rigorous description of a context in terms of a mathematically formulated context-independent fundamental theory is possible by the restriction of the domain of the basic theory and the introduction of a new coarser topology. Such a new topology is never given by first principles, but depends in a crucial way on the abstractions (...)
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  • What is autonomy?John Collier - unknown
    A system is autonomous if it uses its own information to modify itself and its environment to enhance its survival, responding to both environmental and internal stimuli to modify its basic functions to increase its viability. Autonomy is the foundation of functionality, intentionality and meaning. Autonomous systems accommodate the unexpected through self-organizing processes, together with some constraints that maintain autonomy. Early versions of autonomy, such as autopoiesis and closure to efficient cause, made autonomous systems dynamically closed to information. This contrasts (...)
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  • Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. [REVIEW]Andreas Weber & Francisco J. Varela - 2002 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2):97-125.
    This paper proposes a basic revision of the understanding of teleology in biological sciences. Since Kant, it has become customary to view purposiveness in organisms as a bias added by the observer; the recent notion of teleonomy expresses well this as-if character of natural purposes. In recent developments in science, however, notions such as self-organization (or complex systems) and the autopoiesis viewpoint, have displaced emergence and circular self-production as central features of life. Contrary to an often superficial reading, Kant gives (...)
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  • The ontological roots of human science: The message of evolution - the physics of freedom (choice).András Balázs - 2007 - World Futures 63 (8):568 – 583.
    The original proposal of H. H. Pattee (1971) of basing quantum theoretical measurement theory on the theory of the origin of life, and its far reaching consequences, is discussed in the light of a recently emerging biological paradigm of internal measurement. It is established that the "measurement problem" of quantum physics can, in principle, be traced back to the internal material constraints of the biological organisms, where choice is a fundamental attribute of the self-measurement of matter. In this light, which (...)
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