Library Concept
Autopoiesis
A system that produces and maintains itself by continuously creating its own component parts — Maturana and Varela's 1972 term for the self-organization of living systems.
Coined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1972, revised 1980), autopoiesis — from the Greek for “self” and “creation” — names a system organized as a network of processes that continuously produces and regenerates the very components that constitute the network itself, maintaining its own organization even as its material parts turn over. Maturana and Varela developed the concept to describe the defining dynamic of living cells, distinguishing autopoietic (self-producing) systems from merely allopoietic ones that produce something other than themselves, and extended its implications for cognition and understanding in their later book The Tree of Knowledge (1987).