Problems of Autonomy and Discontexturality in the Theory of Living Systems

Abstract

In the theory of living systems any description of self-organizing processes is confronted by a very central problem concerning the role of the system’s boundary, i.e., there is the necessity of a simultaneous formal representation of the inside and the outside of a system.On the other hand, in a theory of self-organization restricted to changes of states within a system, which may be defined by some physical state variables, the question of the boundary has been eliminated and the distinction between a system and its environment (its inside and outside) generally is interpreted as an information process between both, the system and the environment.In the theory of autopoietic systems (TAS), on the other hand, it is the autonomy of a system which plays a fundamental role and therefore the TAS represents a theory of self-organization in relation to a system and its environment and not primarily a theory of self-organization of states within a system. This, however, results in the logical problem of circularity as an immediate consequence of the postulated closure of any living system.As a result of the closure principle, the distinction between a system and its environment (the boundary of a system) interpreted as an information transfer in the theory of self-organizalion cannot be established any longer as a primarily relevant process in the theory of autopoietic systems.For an adequate description of closed systems it is the discontexturality between autonomous and non-autonomous systems which takes the place of the ‘system-environment-relation’. On the basis of the theory of poly-contextural logic discontexturality between a system and its environment results as an explication and conceptual precision of the ‘structural coupling concept’ as introduced in the theory of autopoietic systems.