NOTE-1437: Moreno & Mossio — Biological Autonomy, the Introduction

Contribution

This note reads the Introduction only (pp. xix–xxxiv), in which the authors summarise the book. What it adds to the record is the authors’ own statement of their programme and of where in the book each claim is argued. It does not add the arguments, which are in chapters 1–7.

Key insight

The authors make two moves. Life is to be explained by the organisation of organisms, not by evolution; on their account evolutionary mechanisms “operate because they are embodied in the complex organisation of organisms” (p. xxi). And the specific organisation of organisms is a closure of constraints that differs in kind from physical self-organisation: “biological systems … are not just self-organised systems” (p. xxvi).

Assumptions

• Monism and continuity between non-living and living matter (p. xxi, note 1), with emergence handled in chapter 2.
• Two causal regimes: constraints, and the thermodynamic flow they act on. “Closure (of constraints) and (thermodynamic) openness go hand in hand” (p. xxix).
• The Kantian lineage: organisms as “natural purposes”, parts producing one another (pp. xxiv–xxv), carried through organicism, cybernetics and autopoiesis (pp. xxv–xxvii).

Key results

As the Introduction states them; each is argued in the chapter named, not here.

• Dissipative structures fall short (p. xx). They “appear spontaneously and persist only when specific external boundary conditions are met and, more importantly, they lack internal complexity and functionality”.
• Self-organisation is not organisation (p. xxvi). After Fox Keller: the complexity of organisms, from iterative organisation over time, “is constituted by functional parts”, while one-shot self-organisation “lacks functionality”. “The logic of the metabolism, for example, shows a functionally diversified organisation, clearly different in this sense from any physicochemical dissipative structure” (p. xxvi). Promised “at length in Chap. 1”.
• The candle flame, in passing (p. xxvii). Presenting autopoiesis: “From this perspective, phenomena like tornadoes, whirlpools, and candle flames, which are to a certain degree self-organising and self-maintaining systems, are not autonomous, because they lack an internally produced physical boundary”. And: “what distinguishes self-organisation from autonomy is that the former lacks an internal organisation complex enough to be recruited for deploying selective actions capable of actively ensuring the system’s maintenance.”
• Two criticisms of autopoiesis (pp. xxvii–xxviii). It leaves interaction with the environment out of the definition, and treats material and energetic aspects as contingent. The book adds the interactive dimension and thermodynamic grounding; “autonomy should not be confused with independence” (p. xxviii).
• Closure of constraints is the core (p. xxix). Biological systems “generate and maintain a set of structures acting as constraints which, by harnessing and channelling the processes and reactions occurring in the system, contribute to sustain each other”. Chapter 1 will show “how it fundamentally differs from other ‘process loops’ and self-organising phenomena in Physics and Chemistry”.
• Regulation (p. xxx). Regulatory constraints act only when closure is disrupted and are “subject to second-order closure” (chapter 1, last section).
• Teleology, normativity, function (p. xxx). Chapter 3 argues that closure grounds all three: the organisation’s existence depends on the effects of its own activity, so it is teleological; it “must behave in a specific way, otherwise it would cease to exist”, so it is normative; and “the causal effects produced by constraints subject to closure define biological functions”. Closure, organisation and functionality are “reciprocally defining concepts”.
• Closure is not autonomy (pp. xxx–xxxi). Agency, constraints subject to closure acting on the system’s boundary conditions, is added in chapter 4: “a system whose organisation realises closure, regulation, and agency … is an autonomous system, and therefore a biological organism”.
• Levels (p. xxxi). A continuum runs from systems “fulfilling only the requirements for closure (as ecosystems)” through Nostoc punctiforme to multicellular organisms; higher-level autonomy turns on control of development (chapter 6).
• History is not definitional (p. xxxii). Evolution explains where autonomous systems come from, not what they are (chapter 5).

Concepts

• Biological autonomy — a regime of causation able to produce and maintain the parts of an integrated, topologically distinct whole and “to promote the conditions of its own existence through its interaction with the environment” (pp. xxvi–xxvii).
• Constitutive and interactive dimensions — the first “largely determines the identity of the system”; the second deals with its functional interactions with the environment (p. xxviii).
• Closure of constraints — mutual sustenance of a set of constraints generated by the system (p. xxix); defined in chapter 1, not here.
• Second-order closure — the closure of regulatory constraints (p. xxx).

Connections

The programme is the book-length form of the papers the record has read: Mossio, Saborido and Moreno 2009 (LIT-570, NOTE-444) and Montévil and Mossio 2015 (LIT-582, NOTE-468), which the authors acknowledge as reworked into the book (p. xxxiii names Montévil and Saborido among the co-authors whose ideas are reused). Its account of autopoiesis and its criticisms are the ones Nahas and Sachs report (NOTE-094).

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-072: not met; consistent as far as it goes. The account’s promote_when says reading chapters 1 and 3 “would show whether the authors keep differentiation as a separate condition or fold it into closure”. The Introduction does not answer that. It never uses “differentiation” for the line between flames and organisms. It does say, in summary, that closure itself “fundamentally differs” from self-organising phenomena (p. xxix), that dissipative structures “lack internal complexity and functionality” (p. xx), that metabolism is “functionally diversified”, unlike any dissipative structure (p. xxvi), and that closure and functionality are “reciprocally defining” (p. xxx). That fits THEORY-072’s reading that the 2015 closure builds in what the 2009 paper called differentiation, but it is the authors’ preview, not the analysis, and no flame is analysed under the definitions. Its one remark on the candle flame (p. xxvii) gives autopoiesis’s criterion, an internally produced boundary, which is a different line. Two further points for the account: the authors say ecosystems fulfil “only the requirements for closure” (p. xxxi), which agrees with LIT-582’s footnote 27 that closure does not make an organism; and that remark bears on Baedke’s objection (LIT-167, NOTE-148) that closure criteria take in ecosystems, which the authors appear to accept for closure and meet with regulation, agency and development.
• No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.

Limitations

• The Introduction is a summary. Every substantive claim is a promise of an argument in a chapter this reading does not cover.
• The deposit is partial. HAL catalogues it as “Introduction”, and it contains no chapter. The chapters are paywalled at Springer.
• The Foreword was not read, though Hooker discusses the book’s criticisms (including his own) of the organisational account.

Open questions

• Chapter 1 (pp. 1–38), especially §1.4 “From Self-Organisation to Biological Organisation” (p. 15) and §1.6 “Closure” (p. 20), and chapter 3 (pp. 63–87): do they apply closure to a flame, and do they treat differentiation as part of closure or apart from it?