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The Significance of Social Processes
Published in Gerry R. Cox, Neil Thompson, Death and Dying, 2020
We encountered this term briefly earlier, but its importance merits a fuller consideration. With its roots in biology, autopoiesis refers to a constant process of regeneration – for example, how cells in the body that die off are replaced by more or less identical cells. The effect of autopoiesis is to have a degree of continuity – and thus stability – even as part of a process of change.
Cry and response
Published in Anthony Korner, Communicative Exchange, Psychotherapy and the Resonant Self, 2020
Self is understood as process. If we understand humans as developing under the “rather simple evolutionary constraint of social dependency for survival” (Atzil et al., 2018), then we understand how the social environment is not only vitally salient in providing “the ultimate driving force for socially crafted brain development and learning” (ibid.) but also in providing the interpersonal basis of this process. There is self-organizing combined with mutuality, referred to as dual processes of autopoiesis and consensuality (Maturana, 1978).
Complexity, guidelines and ethics
Published in Deborah Bowman, John Spicer, Roger Higgs, Primary Care Ethics, 2018
Maturana and Varela43 coined the term ‘autopoiesis’ for the Aristotelian notion of ‘self-realisation’ or ‘self-creation’. Autopoiesis refers to the ability of organisms to reproduce themselves as autonomous unities in an inseparable connection (‘structural coupling’) with their environment. The coexistence of others necessitates an interaction with another in order to ‘fit’ to the environment. The nature of this interaction ‘implies an ethics we cannot evade, an ethics that has its basis in the biological and social structure of human beings, an ethics that puts human reflection right at the core as a constitutive social phenomenon’.44 The idea of autopoiesis and ‘structured coupling’ has also been developed and claimed as a paradigm change in social systems theory45 and legal theory.46
Minimal selfhood
Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2020
An example is the self-organization that emerges when a flow of energy and matter maintains itself through time as a transiently stable, dynamic entity, such as Hurricane Katrina or the venerable whirlpool beneath the Niagara Falls (on such self-organizing ‘dissipative structures’ see Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). In biology, intrinsic reflexivity is sometimes referred to as autopoiesis. This is exemplified by the individual cell, understood as a ‘self-producing bounded molecular system’ that ‘dynamically produces its own material boundary or membrane’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 44). By contrast with the reflexivity of, say, poking oneself in the eye, such an intrinsically reflexive process is essential to the entity engaged in it. If the process of organizing or producing itself ceases, the entity will cease to be. Conceived in these terms, selfhood is inherently processual. It presupposes the continuity of a process, for it is the self-producing process that persists, not the self-produced product. Selfhood is thus dependent upon energetic flow. Noteworthy is that this conception excludes the formation of crystals. Even though the self-assembly characteristic of crystals may appear to be an intrinsically reflexive process, crystal formation results in an end-product at energetic equilibrium. A self, by contrast, requires energetic flow to keep on sustaining itself as the self that it is.
The systems view of life: Undergirding and unifying three philosophies of occupation
Published in Journal of Occupational Science, 2018
Humbert Maturana invented the term autopoiesis from the Greek roots auto (self) and poiesis (creation, from the same root as poetry) to describe the integral nature of circular organization, autonomy, and creative potential in a living system (Maturana & Varela, 1980). Autopoiesis is defined as the capacity of a living system to sustain itself “due to a network of reactions which continuously regenerate the components from within a boundary ‘of its own making’” (Capra & Luisi, 2014, p. 134). The life system's identity and pattern of organization, through engagement with the environment, are structurally altered. While the environment triggers adjustments (as per open system functions), changes are self-determined by the structure of the organism (as per operational boundaries of a closed system). What and how triggers are accommodated in the existing pattern of organization is necessarily self-determined if the life system is to be sustained. Autopoiesis thus demonstrates how open and closed systems intertwine in a living system.