Consistency, Configuration, Closure and Change

Abstract

Autopoiesis is a typical biological systems concept. As developed in the seventies by the Chilean scientists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980), it stands for the autonomous, self-referring, identity-maintaining and self-producing organization of living systems in relation to their unitary/holistic character. An autopoietic system is fundamentally a homeostatic machine maintaining invariantly, as the critical systemic variable, its own organization, defined as a network of relations (Varela, 1979). They are “self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves” (Maturana and Varela, 1980). The image of these self-referring situations is the mythical one of the snake eating its own tail.