Autopoiesis

The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto) 'self' and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production'), one of several current theories of life, refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.

[4]: 89 : 16 "It was in these circumstances ... in which he analyzed Don Quixote's dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis, action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation, production), I understood for the first time the power of the word "poiesis" and invented the word that we needed: autopoiesis.

[10] The theory of autopoiesis has also been applied in the context of legal systems by not only Niklas Luhmann, but also Gunther Teubner.

[13][14] Varela eventually further applied autopoesis to develop models of mind, brain, and behavior called non-representationalist, enactive, embodied cognitive neuroscience, culminating in neurophenomenology.

In the context of textual studies, Jerome McGann argues that texts are "autopoietic mechanisms operating as self-generating feedback systems that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them".

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his discussion of Hegel, argues: "Hegel is – to use today's terms – the ultimate thinker of autopoiesis, of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency, the thinker of contingency's gradual self-organisation, of the gradual rise of order out of chaos.

[20] Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[21] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[22] [23] [24] the (M,R) systems[25][26] of Robert Rosen, and the autocatalytic sets[27] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.

An extensive discussion of the connection of autopoiesis to cognition is provided by Evan Thompson in his 2007 publication, Mind in Life.

[36] Thompson wrote that this distinction may or may not be fruitful, but what matters is that living systems involve autopoiesis and (if it is necessary to add this point) cognition as well.

Thompson refers to this issue as the "explanatory gap", and one aspect of it is the hard problem of consciousness, how and why we have qualia.

[40] Critics have argued that the concept and its theory fail to define or explain living systems and that, because of the extreme language of self-referentiality it uses without any external reference, it is really an attempt to give substantiation to Maturana's radical constructivist or solipsistic epistemology,[41] or what Danilo Zolo[42][43] has called instead a "desolate theology".

[44] According to Razeto-Barry, the influence of Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living in mainstream biology has proven to be limited.

[45] Zoologist and philosopher Donna Haraway also criticizes the usage of the term, arguing that "nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing",[46] and suggests the use of sympoiesis, meaning "making-with", instead.