Autopoïesis

What a pain in the neck. No matter how much I read and reread Humberto Maturana and Fransisco
Varela's reference book - and many other related texts - I feel like I'm standing still. And for good reason,
as it is rather an ambiguous theory. There are certainly relevant principles, especially those concerning
cognition and enaction, but I always have the impression that I remain in the dark because of the
contradictions that mark out the work. Let's start with the beginning, i.e., the definition given by their
authors, the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela:

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of process of production

(transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their
interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize 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 realization as such a network. It
follows that an autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own organization through
its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of
components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations.
(H. R. Maturana, F. J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980, p. 78-79).

If you have not understood, this is normal, because it is indeed vague and ambiguous from a linguistic
point of view. Without going into detail, I point out straight away to the English verb regenerate which
can be of two kinds here in the sentence: either direct transitive or reflexive pronominal. In the first
case, the components do not change, and they regenerate and shape the process network that
produced them; in the second case, they regenerate themselves (the text says endless turnover of
components) and shape the process network that produced them. This contradiction induces a big
change for the autopoietic process, but I'm not going to get into these intricacies.

Then, it is the word machine that causes confusion, because autopoiesis concerns first of all, by the very
admission of its authors, the world of life and in particular that of micro-organisms. According to the
above passage, the machine produces its components by means of a network of processes, then its
components thus produced are in charge of permanently maintaining this machine by means of an
eternal regeneration (is it the machine or the components? It's not clear, but the result is the same in
general). Spot the error. How can a machine be a machine if it is initially empty, or almost empty, since it
is, or contains (it's worse because it's empty), a network of component production processes? Why
would it need components via the process’ network? This process looks a lot like the discourses of some
scientists about the birth of the universe, according to which universal laws are the basis of the creation
of the universe. It is as if we had an empty factory - without a production or assembly line - which, with
a magic wand (the production process network) produces its components (the production line) which
will produce the products that will keep the factory running.

It is therefore not surprising that, on the linguistic level, the two authors placed communication before
the birth of human language, affirming thus that the mind and the consciousness result from language
and not the other way around. We therefore have from the beginning a vague and ambiguous definition
of an indistinct and confusing concept. And that's where the problem lies, because this conception of
the language has a strong impact on the meaning of the concept of information. Let's go into some
detail on this topic.
First, let us clarify the essential notions of autopoiesis. First, the word itself means self-production, an
auto-poietic system being a system that is constantly self-producing. Then comes the operational
closure: the behaviour of the system is not determined or controlled by its environment; it is triggered
by it. This operational closure provides the system with autonomy and individuality. The behaviour of
the system is determined by the system's own structure, but this does not mean that the system is
disconnected from its environment; it is in permanent interaction with it in a process that Maturana and
Varela have called structural coupling: the system and its environment are mutual sources of
disturbance.
As a result, the system will appear to an observer as adapting to its environment. But what is actually
happening is a process of structural drift, the system responding to the disturbances of its environment
according to its structure, at all times. If I am not mistaken, Heinz Von Foerster said the same thing with
his principle of order out of noise, Ilya Prigogine with his principle of order out of fluctuations and Henri
Atlan with his principle of complexity out of noise. According to H. Atlan, noise has both destructive and
organizational effects, depending on the reaction of the system and its internal representation model of
the external environment, in order to know which part of the information entered is significant and
regular and which part is insignificant and random, i.e. noise. However, disturbances are noise (which
does not necessarily mean parasite) and noise is information for any system.

The problem is: autopoiesis rejects the concept of information. The two Chilean biologists state this in
their main book (p. 90): Notions such as coding and transmission of information do not enter in the
realization of a concrete autopietic system because they do not refer to actual process in it. This means
that, on the cognitive level, the idea that the system constructs an internal representation of its external
environment through its nervous system is rejected. Therefore, the brain cannot be an information
processing device and therefore communication does not transmit information; this transmission occurs
when behavioural coordination is established in a situation of structural coupling. For the two biologists,
communication must be understood in terms of what happens to the facing interlocutor.

The problem with autopoiesis is that the living entity in question would thus live in quasi-autarchy or
even in complete autarchy, otherwise, how would such an entity perceive the disturbances of its
environment if the notion of information is rejected?

Those rejections of autopoiesis (information, input, output, feedback, etc.) are defeated by the Blob,
whose real name is Physarum polycephalum, which is a mysterious and fascinating unicellular living
being that has no neurons, no mouth, no eyes, no nose, no ears, no limbs, no vital organ, but which is
nevertheless endowed with cognition, because it is able to learn and solve complex problems (This
"thing" is endowed with exceptional regenerative capacities, as it can divide or merge with its peers at
will, can learn new behaviours and transmit them to its peers). It may be true that mental
representation is not necessary to process information, but it is a pillar of our world, and of the
universe, and it is necessary for cognition.

Personally, I think that the problem of autopoiesis lies in the concept of self-production: if the entity
produces itself, it is because it is conscious of itself, therefore it is informed about itself. It therefore has
a representation of itself.Thus, it processes information. The principle of operational closure confirms
this, and Structural coupling assumes that the entity has information about its environment; it therefore
has a representation of its environment. And the semantic shenanigans, such as the fact that the
environment triggers disturbances, but does not specify/determines them, make us doubt the credibility
of the autopoietic approach.
Therefore, what is the purpose of living for such an entity ? Is there some kind of anti-teleonomy here?