Autopoiesis
Based on Wikipedia: Autopoiesis
The System That Makes Itself
Imagine a machine that builds its own parts. Not a factory that stamps out products—those products leave and become something else. This machine creates the very components that keep the machine running, which in turn create more components, in an endless loop of self-creation. This is autopoiesis, and you are one.
Every cell in your body is doing this right now. Proteins are being manufactured that will become part of the machinery that manufactures more proteins. Membranes are being maintained by processes that the membranes themselves make possible. It's circular, self-referential, and—according to two Chilean biologists who coined the term in 1972—it's the defining characteristic of life itself.
A Word Born from Don Quixote
The word "autopoiesis" didn't exist until Humberto Maturana invented it during a conversation about Cervantes. His friend José Bulnes was analyzing Don Quixote's famous dilemma: should the knight follow the path of arms—praxis, meaning action—or the path of letters—poiesis, meaning creation and production? Quixote chose action over creation.
But Maturana was struck by the power of that word, poiesis. He combined it with the Greek auto, meaning self, and produced a term with no history, no baggage, no prior meaning to confuse things. Autopoiesis: self-creation.
He and his colleague Francisco Varela published their ideas in a book with the wonderfully matter-of-fact title "Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living." What they proposed was deceptively simple: a living system is one that continuously produces and maintains itself by creating its own parts.
The Cell as the Perfect Example
Consider a eukaryotic cell—the kind that makes up your body. It contains nucleic acids like DNA and RNA. It has proteins folded into intricate shapes. It's organized into structures: a nucleus containing genetic material, mitochondria generating energy, a membrane defining its boundaries, a cytoskeleton giving it shape.
None of these components exist independently. The membrane is maintained by proteins that the cell manufactures using instructions from the nucleus. The nucleus is protected by a membrane. The proteins are built by ribosomes using energy from mitochondria. The mitochondria are enclosed by membranes and regulated by nuclear genes.
Everything creates everything else. There's no starting point, no external manufacturer. The cell is a network of processes that produce the very components that make those processes possible. It's not just self-sustaining—it's self-creating.
What Autopoiesis Is Not
A car factory is not autopoietic. It takes in raw materials and produces cars, which are entirely different from the factory itself. Maturana and Varela called this "allopoietic"—other-creating rather than self-creating. The factory makes something else; a cell makes itself.
But here's where it gets interesting. Zoom out far enough, and even a car factory might qualify. Include the supply chains, the workers, the dealerships, the customers, the contracts, the competitors, the cars that become spare parts that return to the factory for repairs. At a certain scale, this entire system maintains and reproduces itself. The boundaries of autopoiesis depend on where you draw the circle.
Maturana was also careful to distinguish autopoiesis from self-organization, a term often used interchangeably but incorrectly. Self-organization implies that a system can reorganize itself, change its fundamental structure. But Maturana argued this is operationally impossible. If the organization of a thing changes, the thing itself changes—it becomes something else. Autopoiesis is about maintaining identity through constant self-creation, not about transformation.
Closed but Coupled
Here's a paradox at the heart of autopoietic theory: the system is both closed and connected.
It's operationally closed because all the processes needed to maintain the system exist within the system. A cell doesn't need an external engineer to repair its membrane. It has everything it needs to keep being a cell.
Yet it's also "structurally coupled" with its environment. Cells respond to their surroundings. They take in nutrients, expel waste, react to signals. They're embedded in a dynamic of changes that Maturana and Varela described as "sensory-motor coupling."
This coupling—this continuous dance between organism and environment—led them to a radical claim. They argued that this back-and-forth, this ongoing adjustment and response, constitutes a rudimentary form of knowledge. Cognition, they suggested, isn't something that only happens in brains. It's happening in every living cell, every time it responds to its world.
From Cells to Societies
Once you have a concept this powerful, people start applying it everywhere.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann took autopoiesis into social theory. He argued that social systems—legal systems, economic systems, political systems—are autopoietic. They produce and reproduce their own elements through their own operations. The legal system, for instance, creates legal decisions that become the basis for future legal decisions. It maintains itself through its own processes.
This might sound abstract, but it has concrete implications. If social systems are autopoietic, they can't simply be controlled from outside. You can't reform a legal system by decree any more than you can redesign a cell by shouting at it. The system will interpret any intervention through its own logic, transforming it into something that fits its existing operations.
The legal theorist Gunther Teubner extended this work, examining how law operates as a self-creating system that defines its own boundaries between legal and illegal, valid and invalid. Bob Jessop applied it to the capitalist state, analyzing how political and economic systems maintain themselves through their own internal dynamics.
The Architecture That Designs Itself
Patrik Schumacher, long-time partner of the late architect Zaha Hadid, has applied autopoiesis to architecture. He uses the term to describe what he calls "the discursive self-referential making of architecture"—the way architectural discourse produces concepts that become the basis for more architectural production.
In textual studies, the scholar Jerome McGann argues that texts themselves are autopoietic mechanisms. A book or a digital text is a "self-generating feedback system that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them." The text produces interpretations that change how we read, which produces new interpretations. The coding and markup of digital texts might seem like external tools, but they become generative parts of the system they serve to maintain.
Even Hegel has been retrospectively drafted into the autopoietic tradition. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls Hegel "the ultimate thinker of autopoiesis"—a philosopher who understood how necessity emerges from contingency, how order gradually rises from chaos through a process of self-organization that creates its own logic.
The Origins of Life Itself
If autopoiesis defines life, then understanding how autopoietic systems first emerged might explain how life began.
This is the puzzle of abiogenesis—the origin of life from non-living matter. At some point, roughly four billion years ago, simple molecules became complex enough to start maintaining and reproducing themselves. The first autopoietic system appeared, and everything that followed—from bacteria to blue whales to the person reading this—descends from that moment.
Autopoiesis isn't the only theory trying to explain this transition. There's the chemoton model proposed by the Hungarian theoretical biologist Tibor Gánti, which envisions the minimal unit of life as a chemical system with metabolism, a template molecule for replication, and a boundary membrane. There's the hypercycle theory of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster, describing networks of self-replicating molecules that catalyze each other's reproduction. There's Robert Rosen's metabolic-repair systems, abstractly modeling organisms as machines that repair themselves. And there's Stuart Kauffman's work on autocatalytic sets—collections of molecules where each catalyzes the production of at least one other in the set.
All of these theories trace their inspiration to a slim book written by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1944: "What Is Life?" Schrödinger, famous for his equation describing quantum mechanics and his thought experiment with a cat in a box, turned his attention to biology and asked what physical principles might explain the strange phenomenon of living things.
Curiously, though all these theories share this common ancestor, their creators largely developed them in isolation. They rarely cited each other. Only recently have scholars begun comparing these different approaches, looking for common ground and productive disagreements.
From Living to Thinking
Perhaps the most ambitious extension of autopoiesis is into the realm of mind and consciousness.
Evan Thompson, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, explores this connection extensively in his book "Mind in Life." The basic idea is to extend autopoiesis from mere self-maintenance to cognition. Maturana originally defined cognition as behavior that's relevant to an organism maintaining itself. But this definition is too broad—computer simulations can be self-maintaining without anything we'd call thinking.
Thompson and his colleagues suggest that cognition requires something more: the system must readjust its internal workings through some metabolic process. Cognition isn't just responding to stimuli; it's reorganizing your internal state in a way that's bound up with your physical, chemical self-maintenance. This makes autopoiesis necessary for cognition, though perhaps not sufficient.
In 1991, Varela, Thompson, and the psychologist Eleanor Rosch published "The Embodied Mind," a landmark work that applied autopoietic thinking to develop what they called "enactive" models of cognition. The idea is that the mind isn't a computer processing representations of the world. Instead, cognition emerges from the dynamic interaction between an embodied organism and its environment. We don't represent the world and then act on those representations; we enact a world through our sensory-motor coupling with our surroundings.
This is a radical departure from the computational view of mind that dominated cognitive science for decades. It suggests that consciousness isn't something that happens in the brain; it's something that emerges from the whole dance of organism and environment, self-creation and adaptation.
The Hard Problem Remains Hard
But here's where we hit the wall that always appears when discussing consciousness: the "explanatory gap."
Grant that autopoiesis explains self-maintenance. Grant that it helps explain cognition in the sense of adaptive behavior. There's still a yawning chasm between this and conscious experience.
Why does any of this feel like something? When your cells adjust their operations in response to environmental stimuli, why is there an accompanying experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, thinking? This is what the philosopher David Chalmers called the "hard problem of consciousness"—the question of why there's subjective experience at all, why we have what philosophers call "qualia," the raw feels of conscious life.
Thompson addresses this honestly: autopoiesis can explain a lot, but it doesn't solve the hard problem. The organism may be entirely unaware of the processes where its decisions are made. Cognition, in the broad biological sense, and consciousness, in the sense of subjective experience, might be quite separate phenomena.
Still, Thompson suggests that autopoiesis might provide a bridge. An autopoietic cell actively relates to its environment. Its sensory responses trigger motor behavior. This continuous real-time interaction, he argues, requires something like attention. And attention implies awareness. The gap between life and consciousness might be smaller than it appears.
The Critics Speak
Not everyone is convinced.
Some critics argue that autopoiesis fails to do what it claims—define and explain living systems. The language of self-reference, they say, becomes circular and ultimately empty. The philosopher Danilo Zolo called it a "desolate theology," a system that refers only to itself without any connection to external reality.
There's something troubling about Maturana and Varela's assertion that "we do not see what we do not see and what we do not see does not exist." This sounds like solipsism—the philosophical position that only one's own mind is sure to exist. If autopoiesis leads us to radical constructivism, to the view that we each create our own reality with no access to any external world, then it might tell us more about the psychology of its creators than about the nature of life.
The biologist Donna Haraway has a different objection. "Nothing makes itself," she argues. "Nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing." Every organism exists in relationships with other organisms. Cells contain mitochondria that were once independent bacteria. Bodies are ecosystems for trillions of microbes. Even the most apparently autonomous individual is a community in disguise.
Haraway suggests we should replace autopoiesis with "sympoiesis"—making-with rather than self-making. Life isn't about isolated systems creating themselves; it's about systems creating each other, entangled in webs of mutual dependence that make a mockery of any clear boundary between self and other.
And within mainstream biology, autopoiesis has had limited uptake. According to the philosopher Pablo Razeto-Barry, it's rarely used as the criterion for life. Working biologists tend to prefer more operational definitions, ones that can be applied to specific organisms in laboratory settings rather than philosophical claims about the nature of living systems.
A Different Way of Seeing
Perhaps the value of autopoiesis isn't as a definition or explanation but as a perspective, a way of seeing.
When you look at a living thing through the lens of autopoiesis, you see it differently. You notice the circular causality—how every part depends on every other part, how the system creates the conditions for its own existence. You notice the boundaries—how the organism defines itself against its environment, distinguishing self from not-self while remaining coupled to what surrounds it.
You might also notice a different kind of complexity than the ones we usually measure. One generalized view of autopoiesis defines it as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment. An autopoietic system, in this view, produces more of its own complexity than its environment produces. It's not just ordered; it's self-ordering in a way that exceeds what the world around it could impose.
This is a strange kind of autonomy. Not independence—the system is always coupled to its surroundings, always exchanging matter and energy with the world. But a kind of self-determination, a way of being that creates the conditions for its own continuity.
Whether or not this captures what life really is, it captures something important about how life feels from the inside: this sense of being a process that maintains itself, a pattern that persists through constant change, a self that keeps making itself until, eventually, it doesn't.
And perhaps that's why the concept keeps spreading beyond biology, into sociology and architecture and philosophy. We recognize something in autopoiesis. We see ourselves—these strange, self-creating, boundary-maintaining, perpetually-becoming beings—reflected in the idea of a system that makes itself.