---
slug: maturana-1980
title: Maturana 1980 — Autopoiesis and Cognition
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/maturana-1980
---

## The Source

Maturana, H.R. & Varela, F.J. *Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living*. 1980. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 42. DOI unknown.

## The Claim

Living systems build themselves. A cell makes its own membrane, enzymes, and ribosomes. Nothing external assembles it. It is a closed loop. The loop stays closed because closing is the job. This is not adaptation. Adaptation responds to signals. Autopoiesis keeps producing itself. Producing itself is what it does.

## The Context

Santiago, Chile, 1970s. Maturana studied frog retinas. He asked a simple question. What does a living system actually do? The prevailing answer was wrong. Cells do not process information. They do not compute. They do not optimize. They make themselves. Every second, a human cell manufactures two thousand proteins. It rebuilds its membrane. It pumps ions against gradients. It works to stay alive. That is the job. Maturana and Varela named this autopoiesis. It means self-production. They wrote forty thousand words. The core claim is one sentence.

## The Evidence

Varela, Maturana, and Uribe built a computer model in 1974. It produced a membrane. It produced internal components. It maintained itself. The model was not alive. It proved the logic was computable. [SOURCE:maturana-1980|type:empirical]

A living cell produces approximately two million ATP molecules per second. It rebuilds its entire lipid membrane every few hours. It never stops. If it stops, it dies. [SOURCE:maturana-1980|type:empirical]

You have thirty-seven trillion cells. Each one is a closed production loop. The loops share a boundary. That boundary is you.

## The Convergence

This source instantiates **C12**. It is the self-production pattern. Living systems make their own components. [SOURCE:grain-unified|type:theoretical]

The pattern maps to **A8** (maker-system identity) and **A12** (recursion). A system that makes itself is a strange loop in physical form. It is Gödel's self-reference built from lipids and proteins. It is von Neumann's self-replicator made wet.

Autopoiesis bridges Prigogine's dissipative structures to living matter. A whirlpool maintains its shape through flow. A cell maintains its shape through self-production. The whirlpool is physical. The cell is biological. The logic is identical. [SOURCE:prigogine-1977|type:theoretical]

## The Honest Limits

Autopoiesis risks circularity. Maturana and Varela define life as autopoietic. Then they claim autopoiesis explains life. This is a tautology dressed as mechanism. The definition does not predict. It cannot tell you which chemical soup will spark autopoiesis. It identifies life after the fact.

Micelles self-produce their boundaries. They are not alive. Obligate parasites rely on host metabolism. They lack full autonomy. They are alive. The boundary is fuzzy. The concept works for the canonical case. It struggles at the edges.

Luhmann extended autopoiesis to social systems in 1984. Law produces law. Economy produces economy. This is T3. It is metaphorical. Societies do not physically manufacture their components. Humans do. The extension may be a category error. It may be a useful fiction. GRAIN carries it as contested. [SOURCE:luhmann-1984|type:philosophical]

The strongest rival is selection. Maybe persistence is not self-production. Maybe it is variation and retention. Maybe autopoiesis is merely the output of a selection process. The process filtered out everything that did not produce itself. The pattern is real. The explanation is contested.

## The Receipt

> "An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network."

This is the canonical definition. It is from the book. It says what GRAIN says in different words. A living system produces its own boundary and functional components. [SOURCE:maturana-1980|type:theoretical]

## Related Sources

- [prigogine-1977](/articles/prigogine-1977) — Dissipative structures. The thermodynamic whirlpool that precedes the living cell.
- [schrodinger-1944](/articles/schrodinger-1944) — *What Is Life?* The bridge from physics to biology. Negative entropy.
- [england-2013](/articles/england-2013) — Dissipation-driven adaptation. The statistical physics of self-replication.
- [wiener-1948](/articles/wiener-1948) — Cybernetics. Feedback is the mechanism. Autopoiesis is the biological instantiation.
- [von-neumann-1966](/articles/von-neumann-1966) — Self-reproducing automata. The formal bridge from Gödel's self-reference to DNA.

