The role of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis

Authors:
Nathaniel Virgo;Matthew D. Egbert;Tom Froese
Affiliations:
Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK;Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK;Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Venue:
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
Year:
2009

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Abstract

We argue that the significance of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis has been overstated. It has the important task of distinguishing a living system as a unity in space but should not be seen as playing the additional role of delimiting the processes that make up the autopoietic system. We demonstrate the relevance of this to a current debate about the compatibility of the extended mind hypothesis with the enactive approach and show that a radically extended interpretation of autopoiesis was intended in one of the original works on the subject. Additionally we argue that the definitions of basic terms in the autopoietic literature can and should be made more precise, and we make some progress towards such a goal.