Friam

On 12/01/2017 09:03 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

People have pressed Maturana on me before and I have tried him, but something in me has balked.  I get pissed at authors who, like the complexity folks, seem stuck on their own words.  Perhaps you could recommend ... or even link me to? ... a reader-friendly source?

Maturana's text is mind-bogglingly difficult to read, at least for me.  There are lots of directions you could go.  But I like this document, which may also be interesting to Dave given it's focus:

  Thirty years of computational autopoiesis: A review
  http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/archive/fulltexts/2621.html

[NST==>I think this word encapsulates my rage, here.  I deplore people who take a word that is chosen because it is so misleading and then ram it up the ass of the literature. Yes, I know.  “Poetry” does come
for the greek word for “creation” and so the word does mean, in greek, self-creation.  BUT WE DON’T SPEAK GREEK!  So every English or French or ???? user of that term has to fight off the notion of a self creating poetry, which is groovy, but not very helpful.  The author who invented that term was more interested in appearing groovy than in reaching his audience, and I depise him for it.   <==nst]

Autopoiesis isn't at all misleading.  It captures the core of the theory quite nicely, I think.  We use "auto" in the same way all the time in casual language.  And we use words like hematopoiesis all the time in everyday medicine and biology.

[NST==>Ach!  I HATE the way people use the word system.  Let's say two male cats are having a catfight over a female. We can choose to focus on the individuals, the "dance" of the fight, the relation to the female's movements, or the relation to the great horned owl sitting quietly in a tree paying close attention to the proceedings.  What constitutes the system is entirely a matter of our interest.  To define a system we need a figure, a ground, and a point of view.  This is not to say that "systems" are in the mind of the beholder.  An eclipse is real, but you have to stand in a particular place to see it.  <==nst]

But you're missing the fundamental point that _closure_ is the way to define system without (or with less) reliance on points of view.  We've discussed that a lot on this list, too.  ... which is just more evidence that I always fail in my attempts to communicate.

[NST==>Sorry, if I am being a picky-jerk, here, but …. this bit of rhetoric exemplifies the problem.  The immune system may distinguish between “self” and “non-self”, but that is not its main function … to distinguish between the immune system and everything else.  That is what distinguishing between self and non self MEANS in the plain meaning of the words.  Yet we are asked to forgive that little slip-of-the-tongue, even though it mucks up the whole conversation.  What exactly is the “self” that the immune system is distinguishing between.  Not itself, for sure.  But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?  How do we distinguish the boundaries of a system without engaging at least two other systems in the definition, hence making them part of the system.  <==nst]

I don't believe anyone interprets the "self" in "self vs. non-self" as referring to the immune system.  The immune system distinguishes between biologically active things that were generated by the person/animal/organism and things that were consumed or assimilated by the organism.  So, the "self" is the organism ... which seems pretty standard in biology, right?

[NST==>I gather that those who talk this language see themselves as anti-Cartesians.  To me , it seems, sopped in cartesianism.  The key notion of CArtesianism is foundationalism, the notion that before we have any kind of a discussion we must strip our understandings down to some bare bones, for Decartes, _the cogito. _That is what is so refreshing about Pragmatism.  Pragmatists start in the middle.  We keep looking at the world from various points of view.  From this point of view, this looks like a system; from this other point of view, it seems a part of larger system; from yet another point of view, a collage of systems; from a 4^th point of view, it disappears altogether.  Perhaps after a few decades, or millennia, of that sort of work, we come to agree on some foundations.  Foundations are not the beginning of our labors; they are its most sought after result.  <==nst]

Well, the paper we're discussing this evening, Maturana's "What is sociology?", does run the risk of dualism, because Maturana asserts that language is more open than biology (or biology exhibits the closure required for autopoiesis, whereas language does not).  That, obviously, begs the question of where the decoupling/unbinding from the material grounding of the words/terms/signs/whatever.  But Maturana is arguing *against* the applicability of autopoiesis to social systems (via language).  So, my guess is Maturana is cleaving close to monism, whereas people like Luhmann are the one's at risk for dualism.

Regardless, you would benefit from avoiding generalizing across all people who "talk this language".

Re: causation / evolution