Humberto Maturana: Organization

“The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 137.

“I maintain that learned orienting interactions, coupled with some mode of behavior that allowed for an independent recursive expansion of the domain of interactions of the organism, such as social life… and/or tool making and use, must have offered a selective basis for the evolution of the orienting behavior that in hominids led to our present-day languages.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 31.

Life , Behavior , Learning

“The linguistic domain as a domain of orienting behavior requires at least two interacting organisms with comparable domains of interactions, so that a cooperative system of consensual interactions may be developed in which the emerging conduct of the two organisms is relevant for both. The specifiability through learning of the orienting interactions allows for a purely consensual (cultural) evolution in this domain, without it necessarily involving any further evolution of the nervous system; for this reason the linguistic domain in general, and the domain of self-consciousness in particular, are, in principle, independent of the biological substratum that generates them.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 43.

Behavior , Learning

“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of 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 space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 87.

“By autopoietic organization, Maturana and Varela meant the] processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitutes it as a unity.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 80 as cited in: Lee O. Thayer, George A. Barnett (1997) * Organization-Communication: Emerging Perspectives, Volume 5:. p. 193.

“A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization, (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works. For this same reason living systems are historical systems; the relevance of a given conduct or mode of behavior is always determined in the past.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 26-27.

Behavior , Past