Cognitive domain: what an autopoietic system experiences as its world. Not the objective environment. The domain of interactions that maintain the system’s organization. The cognitive domain is the space of all possible interactions that allow an organism to maintain its autopoiesis. Not what exists objectively.…
Structural coupling: how two autonomous systems interact repeatedly without losing their autonomy. The mechanism that allows connection without merger. Structural coupling occurs when two autopoietic systems interact recurrently. Each interaction triggers structural changes in both systems. The changes maintain autopoiesis in both systems while creating…
Organizational closure: the pattern that makes autopoiesis possible. Living systems operate in circles where every process connects back to itself through other processes. Organizational closure means the network of processes that define a system form a closed loop. Each process depends on other processes in…
Autopoiesis: self creation. The word explains what makes something alive versus not alive. Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela discovered this pattern in the 1970s. Autopoiesis means a system that produces and maintains itself through its own processes. A living cell: produces proteins that…