What Is Living? A View from the South
摘要
Autopoiesis is a concept of complexity. It breaks with dualism and does not seek the answer to what life is, but rather answers from biocentrism, what living is. Autopoiesis is living as an emergent, self-created, distributed process, without center or external control, without hierarchies, maintaining its organization and generating its norms, its autonomy. The life of a thermodynamically open organism, operationally closed, with functional closure determines its identity. Living is a continuous transformation, never static, or predictable. Both the living being and its environment emerge together, coexist, and have relationships and interactions involving processes in a systemic and networked manner. The human being is an autopoietic, self-organizing organism that exists in an environment that makes it possible. This union is a structural coupling that generates the ecological unit organism-niche, an emergent coherence. Human life occurs in an ever-changing, interconnected, networked, and systemic present. Humans were not born human; we became human through coexistence, through language, through the biology of love, through the cooperative creation of a niche, resulting in the ecological unity of organism-niche-culture. That is to say, humans coexist and are interdependent with other organisms.