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The autonomy of biological individuals and artificial models
Biosystems, 2008
This paper aims to offer an overview of the meaning of autonomy for biological individuals and artificial models rooted in a specific perspective that pays attention to the historical and structural aspects of its origins and evolution. Taking autopoiesis and the recursivity characteristic of its circular logic as a starting point, we depart from some of its consequences to claim that the theory of autonomy should also take into account historical and structural features. Autonomy should not be considered only in internal or constitutive terms, the largely neglected interactive aspects stemming from it should be equally addressed. Artificial models contribute to get a better understanding of the role of autonomy for life and the varieties of its organization and phenomenological diversity.
Philosophy of Science, 2016
In Biological Autonomy, philosophers Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio present a new theoretical framework for understanding how living organisms differ from other physical systems. Their framework, which they call the "autonomous perspective," addresses biological organisms qua systems. They show how it generates insights into a wide range of questions in philosophy of biology such as, Does causation operate top down? What are functions? Which is more fundamental for the origin of life-metabolism or replication? What distinguishes cognition as a kind of biological process? Moreno and Mossio's systems-oriented approach, with its holistic focus on the organizational features of biological systems (including the entire spectrum from bacteria to large multicellular organisms), is a welcome and refreshing departure from the contemporary plethora of mechanistic approaches that emphasize reductive accounts of biological systems as decomposable into hierarchies of parts and operations. The autonomous perspective also provides insights into why mechanistic explanation must be supplemented with other explanatory approaches. In this review, we briefly sketch some of the core ideas of the framework and how the authors apply it to two central problems in philosophy of biology: the nature of functions in biology and how to understand cognition in biological systems in general.
Biological Autonomy. A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry
Since Darwin, Biology has been framed on the idea of evolution by natural selection, which has profoundly influenced the scientific and philosophical comprehension of biological phenomena and of our place in Nature. This book argues that contemporary biology should progress towards and revolve around an even more fundamental idea, that of autonomy. Biological autonomy describes living organisms as organised systems, which are able to self-produce and self-maintain as integrated entities, to establish their own goals and norms, and to promote the conditions of their existence through their interactions with the environment. Topics covered in this book include organisation and biological emergence, organisms, agency, levels of autonomy, cognition, and a look at the historical dimension of autonomy. The current development of scientific investigations on autonomous organisation calls for a theoretical and philosophical analysis. This can contribute to the elaboration of an original understanding of life - including human life - on Earth, opening new perspectives and enabling fecund interactions with other existing theories and approaches. This book takes up the challenge.
Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation
Biology & Philosophy, 2021
The new mechanists and the autonomy approach both aim to account for how biological phenomena are explained. One identifies appeals to how components of a mechanism are organized so that their activities produce a phenomenon. The other directs attention towards the whole organism and focuses on how it achieves selfmaintenance. This paper discusses challenges each confronts and how each could benefit from collaboration with the other: the new mechanistic framework can gain by taking into account what happens outside individual mechanisms, while the autonomy approach can ground itself in biological research into how the actual components constituting an autonomous system interact and contribute in different ways to realize and maintain the system. To press the case that these two traditions should be constructively integrated we describe how three recent developments in the autonomy tradition together provide a bridge between the two traditions: (1) a framework of work and constraints, (2) a conception of function grounded in the organization of an autonomous system, and (3) a focus on control.
Matching concepts and phenomena: A review of Biological Autonomy
This paper discusses Moreno and Mossio's book Biological autonomy: A philosophical and theoretical enquiry. The book provides an up to date overview of the authors' work within the organizational approach to mind and life, which is linked to the work of Maturana and Varela but which is here developed in new ways and with a strong focus on the autonomy of living systems. After an overview of the book, the paper focuses on the choice of the guiding concepts for this enterprise – autonomy, agency, organism and cognition – and discusses whether these notions are still up to the task of formulating the key issues to be targeted by the organizational approach. Moreno and Mossio wrote a wonderful, state of the art synthesis of ongoing work within the organizational approach to understanding life and cognition. 1 Their book brings together a wide variety of topics and discussions within this tradition that opposes reductive mechanistic and strongly gene-centered interpretations of living organizations. The label they choose for this purpose is 'biological autonomy' reflecting the capacity of living organizations to maintain themselves over time as autonomous entities that resist a broad variety of external and internal perturbations that disrupt and destroy nonliving physical organizations. Biological autonomy is here not only applied to describe what characterizes life, but also extended to deal with notions like agency and cognition, which are placed within the context of living organizations. In this review, I will first provide an overview of the book and subsequently develop some critical remarks concerning the use and influence of certain central concepts.
Biological Agency: Its Subjective Foundations and a Large-Scale Taxonomy
Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
We will outline a theory of agency cast in theoretical psychology, viewed as a branch of a non-eliminativist biology. Our proposal will be based on an evolutionary view of the nature and functioning of the mind(s), reconsidered in a radically subjectivist, radically constructivist framework. We will argue that the activities of control systems should be studied in terms of interaction. Specifically, what an agent does belongs to the coupling of its internal dynamics with the dynamics of the external world. The internal dynamics, rooted in the species' phylogenetic history as well as in the individual's ontogenetic path, (a) determine which external dynamics are relevant to the organism, that is, they create the subjective ontology that the organism senses in the external world, and (b) determine what types of activities and actions the agent is able to conceive of and to adopt in the current situation. The external dynamics that the organism senses thus constitute its subjective environment. This notion of coupling is basically suitable for whichever organism one may want to consider. However, remarkable differences exist between the ways in which coupling may be realized, that is, between different natures and ways of functioning of control systems. We will describe agency at different phylogenetic levels: at the very least, it is necessary to discriminate between non-Intentional species, Intentional species, and a subtype of the latter called meta-Intentional. We will claim that agency can only be understood in a radically subjectivist perspective, which in turn is best grounded in a view of the mind as consciousness and experience. We will thus advance a radically constructivist view of agency and of several correlate notions (like meaning and ontology).
Biological Autonomy and Systemic Integration
Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biospheres, 2010, 40, 480-484, 2010
In this article I will outline the basic theoretical assumptions of two examples of the confederative and the integrative views of the living - respectively Ganti’s Chemoton theory and Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic theory - by showing that they are both consistent perspectives, but they differ in the accounts they make of the role of organization in biological systems. In doing so I will also put into evidence how the choice between these two theoretical frameworks is strictly connected to the problem of structure and function in living organisms and entails different strategies of investigation.
Philosophy Study, 2012
We argue that genuine biological autonomy, or described at human level as free will, requires taking into account quantum vacuum processes in the context of biological teleology. One faces at least three basic problems of genuine biological autonomy: (1) if biological autonomy is not physical, where does it come from? (2) Is there a room for biological causes? And (3) how to obtain a workable model of biological teleology? It is shown here that the solution of all these three problems is related to the quantum vacuum. We present a short review of how this basic aspect of the fundamentals of quantum theory, although it had not been addressed for nearly 100 years, actually it was suggested by Bohr, Heisenberg, and others. Realizing that the quantum mechanical measurement problem associated with the “collapse” of the wave function is related, in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, to a process between self-consciousness and the external physical environment, we are extending the issue for an explanation of the different processes occurring between living organisms and their internal environment. Definitions of genuine biological autonomy, biological aim, and biological spontaneity are presented. We propose to improve the popular two-stage model of decisions with a biological model suitable to obtain a deeper look at the nature of the mind-body problem. In the newly emerging picture biological autonomy emerges as a new, fundamental and inevitable element of the scientific worldview.