Seminar #12: Why representation needn’t be re-presentation

The next Life and Mind seminar will be on Wednesday, the 28th of Feb., at 15:00 in room ARUN 404A. Joel will be leading a discussion on:
Why Representation is Not Antithetical to Autopoiesis or Operational Closure
…Or: Why Representation Needn’t Be Re-Presentation
In all of the debates over representations, most people seem at least implicitly to [...]

Thoughts on trivial vs non-trivial closure

Semi-random thoughts following Tom’s post.
1. I cannot recall where I’ve read it in the primary literature, but I’m almost certain that Varela has written somewhere that what at some point he referred to as operational closure he was now calling organizational closure (or vice versa). The point is that I have never actually distinguished [...]

Autopoiesis and closure

This is just a comment on something that occurred to me after today’s seminar. While I was of the opinion then (and previously) that operational closure and organizational closure are probably just two different concepts describing exactly the same phenomena, I’ve now changed my mind. I now see the crucial concepts as follows:
- autopoiesis: a [...]

Seminar # 11: Autonomy and the organization of the living

The next Life and Mind seminar will be on Wednesday, the 21st of Feb., at 15:00 in room ARUN 404A.
Seminar # 11: Autonomy and the organization of the living
There are currently many different approaches to understanding autonomy in the cognitive sciences. Recently, the autopoietic approach has been gaining in recognition, especially through its relation with [...]

Autopoiesis: an organization of components or of processes?

There recently has been some discussion within our group about the fact that there are two distinct ways of defining autopoiesis, namely that it can either be defined as a specific organization of components or of processes.
Up to now I could not really see any advantage of preferring one way over the other, except that [...]