por Humberto Maturana
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Conditions of existence.
Living systems are structure determined systems, that is, they are systems such that all that happens to them at any instant depends on their structure (which is how they are made at that instant). Structure determined systems are systems such that any agent impinging on them only triggers in them structural changes determined in them. This we know from daily life. Furthermore, structural determinism is an abstraction that we make from the regularities and coherences of our daily living as we explain our daily living with the regularities and coherences of our daily living. So, the notion of structural determinism reflects the regularities and coherences of our living as we explain our living with the regularities and coherences of our living, and not any transcendental aspect of an independent reality.
No doubt we frequently speak as if what we see as an external agent impinging on a system did determine what happens in the system on which it impinges, but at the same time we also know that this is not so. Furthermore, we also know from our daily life that as we listen to some one else what we hear is as an internal happening in us, not what the other says, although what we hear is triggered by him or her. No doubt we would like that the other hears what we say, but that does not happen unless we have been interacting recursively with each other sufficiently long to have become structurally congruent in a way that results in that we become capable of coherent behavior through talking with each other. When that happens we say that we understand each other. Structural determinism is so basic a feature of our existence, that even the catholic church recognizes it by accepting as miraculous a happening that violates structural determinism.
In this sense living systems are machines. Yet, they are a particular kind of machines: they are molecular machines that operate as closed networks of molecular productions such that the molecules produced through their interactions produce the same molecular network that produced them, specifying at any instant its extension. In a previous publication with Francisco Varela (The tree of Knowledge) I have called this kind of systems, autopoietic systems. Living systems are molecular autopoietic systems. As molecular systems living systems are open to the flow of matter and energy. As an autopoietic systems living systems are systems closed in their dynamics of states in the sense that they are alive only while all their structural changes are structural changes that conserve their autopoiesis. That is, a living system dies when its autopoiesis stops being conserved through its structural changes.
Living systems have a plastic structure, and the course that their structural changes follows while they stay alive is contingent to their own internal dynamics of structural change modulated by the structural changes triggered in them by their interactions in the medium they exist as such. What I have just said means that a living system remains alive only as long as it slides in the medium following a path of interactions in which the structural changes triggered in it are structural changes that conserve its autopoiesis ( its living). Furthermore, what I have said also means that while a living system lives both the living system and the circumstances in which it operates appear to an observer as changing together congruently. In fact, this is a general condition for structure determined systems, namely: the conservation of the operational congruence between a particular structure determined system and the medium in which it exists in recursive interactions, as well as the conservation of the system's identity (its defining organization), are both at the same time conditions for the spontaneous arising and spontaneous conservation of a structure determined system, and the systemic result of its actual existing in recursive interactions in the medium while its defining organization is conserved.
Domains of existence.
Living systems exist in two operational domains, namely: the domain of their composition that is where their autopoiesis exists and in fact operates as a closed network of molecular productions, and the domain or medium where they arise and exist as totalities in recursive interactions. The first domain is domain where the observer sees them in their anatomy and physiology, the second domain is where the observer distinguishes them as organisms or living systems. These two domains do not intersect, and cannot be deduced one from the other, although the composition of the living system as an autopoietic system by constituting it as a bounded or singular totality, makes possible the other as the domain in which it operates as such totality or discrete entity. That is, as the two domains of existence of living systems (or of composite entities in general) do not intersect, there is no causal relation, or what an observer could call causal relations, between them, all that there is reciprocal generative relations that the observer may see as he or she distinguishes dynamic correlations between the operations, phenomena or processes that take place in them. And what the observer sees, is that the structural changes in the domain of composition (anatomy and physiology) of a living system result in changes in its dynamic configuration as a totality, and therefore in changes in the manner in which it interacts with the medium, and that the interactions of the living system with the medium trigger in it structural changes in its composition which result in turn in changes in the configuration of the living system as a totality ..... Indeed, I have described in the previous section this dynamics and some of its consequences for the constitution and conservation of composite entities (systems) in general.
The operational domain in which living systems exist as wholes or totalities is where each living system exists in the realization of its living as the particular kind of discrete or singular entity that we distinguish as we distinguish it. In these circumstances, what is fundamental to remark after all that I have said in relation to the existence of living systems, is that all that occurs in or to a living system is operationally subordinated to the conservation of the manner of living that defines and realizes it in the domain in which it operates as a whole or totality. Or in other words, the bodyhood which is where the autopoiesis of the living system in fact occurs, is the condition of possibility of the living system, but the manner of its constitution and continuous realization is itself continuously modulated by the flow of the living of the living system in the domain in which it operates as a totality. It is, for example, in that operational domain where an elephant exists as an elephant, and it is in that operational domain where we human beings exist as human beings. Therefore, bodyhood and manner of operating as a totality are intrinsically dynamically interlaced; so that none is possible without the other, and both modulate each other in the flow of living. The body becomes according to the manner the living system (organism) operates as a whole, and the manner the organism operates as a whole depends on the way the bodyhood operates.
The medium.
The medium as the space in which a system operates as whole, has a structural dynamics independent of the structural dynamics of the systems that it contains, although it is modulated through its encounters with them. So, the medium and the systems that it contains are in continuous structural changes, each according to its own structural dynamics, and each modulated by the structural changes that they trigger on each other through their recursive encounters. In these circumstances all systems that interact with a living system constitute its medium. Furthermore, according to the recursive dynamics of reciprocal interactions described above, all systems in recursive interactions change together congruently.
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