Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
Edited by M&T Thellefsen

Autopoiesis

Definition
Self-reproduction.
The proces whereby an organization produces itself.
Self-producing systems, where a system can be a cell, an organism and perhaps a corporation.

...a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (i) through their interactions and transformations continously regenerate the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realizations as such a network. (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), p.79

Relations:

Autonomy
Autopoietic machine
Autopoietic Organization
living systems
self-creation
social communication

 

Definitions:

Principia Cybernetica
Encyclopedia Autopoietica
International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics

 

Principia Cybernetica (web)
The process whereby an organization produces itself.

Autopoiesis is a process whereby a system produces its own organization and maintains and constitutes itself in a space.

e.g. a biological cell, aliving organism and to some extend a corporation and a society as a whole.

Self-production

 

Encyclopedia Autopoietica
autopoietic systems must produce their own components in addition to conserving their organization.

Specifically autopoiesis is attributed to a machine (delineated as a network of processes) which through that network of processes produces the components that:

1)through their interactions and transformations continously 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(the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network

 

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics
The condition of a system able to regenerate itself by self -reproduction of its own elements and of the network of their characteristic interactions.

The perspective of autopoiesis, in which organisms are described "from the inside out", proposes a basic shift in the observer-object relationship behaind traditional scientific observation