There’s an assumption so deep in Western thought that it feels like common sense. That thinking is processing. That the mind takes in information, manipulates symbols according to rules, and outputs conclusions. That intelligence, human or artificial, is fundamentally a computational process. That somewhere inside…
Everything was flowing. Then it stopped. The software crashes mid-presentation. The word you always knew suddenly looks wrong on the page. The road you drive every day is closed. For a moment you’re suspended, neither here nor there, and in that suspension something unusual happens.…
Pick up a hammer. When you’re actually hammering, focused, in the work, where is the hammer? It’s not in your awareness. You’re aware of the nail, the wood, the thinfg you’re building. The hammer has disappeared. It became an extension of your intention. Heidegger called…
We talk about love as something that happens to us. Falling in love. Being loved. Losing love. The language is passive, love as an external event, something that arrives or departs, something another person gives or withholds. But what if that framing is structurally wrong?…
Structure-determined systems: systems whose changes depend on their structure, not on external agents. The environment triggers change. The structure determines what change occurs. A structure determined system is one whose behavior follows from its structure, not from external specification. Input acts as a trigger. Structure…
Operational closure: the process through which autopoietic systems determine their own states. Nothing from outside can specify what state the system occupies, only the system’s operations determine this. Operational closure means the system’s state at any moment results from its own previous operations, not from…
Bringing forth a world: how organisms create their reality through autopoietic organization. This is not discovering a pre-existing world. Enacting the world through structure and coupling. Bringing forth a world: the organism’s cognitive domain constitutes its reality. This is not a representation of the external…
Perturbation versus instruction: the difference between triggering change and specifying change. Living systems cannot receive instructions, only perturbations that their organization determines how to process. Perturbation: an interaction that triggers structural change in an autopoietic system. The environment perturbs. The system’s organization determines what structural…
Plasticity: the capacity to change structure while maintaining organization. How living systems transform without losing identity. Plasticity is the range of structural changes a system can undergo while preserving its autopoietic organization. Structure, specific components and their spatial arrangement. Organization, the pattern of relationships that…
Observer and observed: the problem that observation creates is what it observes. Every description reveals more about the observer’s organization than about the observed system. The observer is an autopoietic system operating in a cognitive domain. Observation is coordinated behavior within that domain. What the…