Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency

By E. D. Di Paolo. 2005

752 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30808ce8fb040c4e27e5d150db670de09e837ad5

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Citations in the corpus

Participatory sense-making (2007, background): “Abstract discussions of embodiment tend to be rather impoverished and defenders of the role of the body in cognition have often easily fallen back into disembodied patterns of thought (see discussion in Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher (2007)).”
Emergent vision system of autonomous virtual characters (2016, background): “It is only crashing against the ground that is bad for the organism ” [19].”
Biological regulation: controlling the system from within (2015, neutral): “…is realised when a control subsystem(e.g. an enzyme) acts as a variable constraint on a process by affecting its 10 Ganti (2003a), together with di Paolo (2005), consider that the template subsystem of the chemoton might be playing an incipient regulatory role in the system, in so far as…”
Autonomy and Enactivism: Towards a Theory of Sensorimotor Autonomous Agency (2017, background): “What enactivism hasn’t yet been able to make explicit—despite some theoretical approximations (Barandiaran 2008; Di Paolo 2003, 2005)—is how exactly sensorimotor identity or individuality, interactional asymmetry and the origin of cognitive or behavioural norms can be naturalized in terms of a…”
Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology (2019, background): “Here others, and the interactive experience and skills we honed 13 Cf. Jonas 1966, 1984, 2016; Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1968; Maturana and Varela 1980; Dillon 1997; Varela et al. 1991; Thompson 2007; Di Paolo 2005, 2009, 2018.”
Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play (2010, background): “Cognitive systems are also autonomous in an interactive sense in terms of their engagement with their environment as agents and not simply as systems coupled to other systems (Moreno & Etxeberria, 2005; Di Paolo, 2005 ).”
Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action (2009, methodology): “In contrast, a system with a reactive controller that is situated in a spatial environment can transform non-Markovian tasks into Markovian tasks by exploiting geometric properties of the agent–environment coupling (e.g., Izquierdo-Torres & Di Paolo, 2005).”
Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition (2017, background): “…character of agency, ‘enactivism’ complements this causal account with a phenomenological account of cognition as ‘sense-making’ or ‘conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy’ (Thompson 2007: 126; Di Paolo 2005).”
The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes (2017, background): “Following Di Paolo (2005) and Barandiaran (2007), we suggest that the answer is positive, and that the behavioural analogue to biological agency is a network of precarious but interactively self-sustaining sensorimotor schemes, i.e. a self-asserting sensorimotor repertoire, whose adaptive…”
Self–other contingencies: Enacting social perception (2009, background): “The enactive approach focuses on the interaction between an autonomous agent and its environment (Varela 1997; Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007).”
Playing together without communicating? A pre-reflective and enactive account of joint musical performance (2015, background): “Through this dynamic interplay, the agent enacts or brings forth her own domain of meaning (Di Paolo, 2005; Thompson, 2005).”
Emotion and ethics: An inter-(en)active approach (2009, methodology): “We have used De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s (2007) work as our starting point for exploring the affective and ethical nature of participatory sense-making, thus deepening and enriching their approach, as well as elaborating on the links of such an approach to both emotion and ethical theory.”
Musical creativity and the embodied mind (2018, background): “It should also be noted that while this perspective asserts the inseparability of organism and environment, it also seeks to provide a biological account of the autonomy we experience with ourselves and other living beings (Di Paolo, 2005; Schiavio & van der Schyff, 2018; Weber & Varela, 2002).”