Autopoiesis and Allopoiesis
August 1st 2007 15:00
I've been following some youtube clips from a guy going by the name of redlitrocket4, I find myself in a strange tension with his thoughts. I agree with most of what he says. But at the same time I also agree with most of what he is opposing his views to. So if he says I believe A which means that I disagree with B. I find myself agreeing with A and B.
For example in one Terrence McKenna influenced Vlog he argues that we have to stop viewing the universe as a machine (following laws, etc) and start viewing it as an organism (which evolves and changes). Now I agree that we should view the universe as an organism, but I also think none of our mechanistic ways of viewing the universe are wrong. This is mainly because I think Organisms ARE machines. There are examples of machines which are not organisms, but organism is just a special type of machine, a particularly complex and self-referential type.
Anyways, when I asked him what he meant by machine and organism, he said allopoiesis and autopoiesis (It turns out these are both types of machines!). An allopoietic system is like a car factory, inputs come from the external world, are worked on and the final output is sent back to the external world, the machine is unchanged, it keeps sucking in and spitting out. The product of an autopoietic system, on the other hand, is itself, the example often given is a biological cell (which I don't really think is accurate, but anyway), The system is creating itself, the work it is doing is growing and evolving itself.
Now obviously the universe has to be the latter, because there is nothing outside the universe, so it can't be allopoietic. But still, I think there might be something useful in this metaphor, but I don't want this post to go on for too long, so I will leave it till later to talk about how cultures and other things might be better understood by deploying this metaphor.
For example in one Terrence McKenna influenced Vlog he argues that we have to stop viewing the universe as a machine (following laws, etc) and start viewing it as an organism (which evolves and changes). Now I agree that we should view the universe as an organism, but I also think none of our mechanistic ways of viewing the universe are wrong. This is mainly because I think Organisms ARE machines. There are examples of machines which are not organisms, but organism is just a special type of machine, a particularly complex and self-referential type.
Anyways, when I asked him what he meant by machine and organism, he said allopoiesis and autopoiesis (It turns out these are both types of machines!). An allopoietic system is like a car factory, inputs come from the external world, are worked on and the final output is sent back to the external world, the machine is unchanged, it keeps sucking in and spitting out. The product of an autopoietic system, on the other hand, is itself, the example often given is a biological cell (which I don't really think is accurate, but anyway), The system is creating itself, the work it is doing is growing and evolving itself.
Now obviously the universe has to be the latter, because there is nothing outside the universe, so it can't be allopoietic. But still, I think there might be something useful in this metaphor, but I don't want this post to go on for too long, so I will leave it till later to talk about how cultures and other things might be better understood by deploying this metaphor.
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