Enactive Cognitive Science Andbiology of
Enactive Cognitive Science Andbiology of
autopoiesis is usually taken to be an all-or-nothing class category, it left no conceptualroom for explaining the
possibility of gradations of adaptedness and varieties of concern (Di Paolo, 2005). For instance, sometimes we do
well at managing our livelihoods, sometimes we fail our goals; sometimes people are healthy, sometimesthey fall ill;
sometimes people are brimming with life, sometimes they are at the brink of death. We experience these different
kinds of existential situations faced withrelevant concerns that make specific demands on our ability to interact with
the world, but in all these cases we are equally autopoietic. Thus, there must be other processesgoing on inside the
organism that can help us to explain these phenomena. AsMaturana acknowledges, “The form of the relation of
adaptation changescontinuously in the realization of the living of the living being while its relation of adaptation is
conserved” (Maturana, 2011, p. 148, footnote 4). But what kind of internal process regulates the continuous changes
in the relation of adaptation suchthat the relation is conserved? How is their success evaluated such that we
feelaccordingly? Di Paolo (2005) proposed the concept of adaptivity to partially accountfor this process; living is no
longer only autopoiesis, but living is autopoiesis andadaptivity.Another related worry about the adequacy of the
traditional description of autopoiesis for the enactive paradigm relates to the notion of
precariousness
. Thisnotion, which derives from the existential biology of Jonas (2001), is in agreementwith Maturana’s observation
that living beings are beings that can die. In biologicalterms, dying is the process whereby an organism no longer
adequately regulates itsmaterial and energetic exchanges with its immediate environment, such that itsidentity
eventually disintegrates into the thermodynamic equilibrium. Conversely, wecan say that living is a process of
recursively maintaining one’s integrity as adissipative structure in far-from-equilibrium conditions (Bickhard, 2009).
Note thatthe autopoiesis of the living, which Maturana describes as “their continuous self production as discrete self
producing dynamically closed molecular entities”(Maturana, 2011, p. 148), follows directly from this thermodynamic
account of livingand dying. On this view, autopoiesis is necessarily a physical process, and this processcannot be
divorced from the adaptive regulation of material and thermodynamicinteractions with its environment (Barandiaran
& Moreno, 2008). In this way the enactive paradigm tries to clarify the concrete phenomenologicalimplications and
concrete biological realizations of autopoiesis. Varela (1995) hasreferred to this goal of returning to the phenomena
themselves as the re-enchantmentof the concrete. Given this project, the important point we tried to make in our
articlewas the following. Once we reject the traditional cybernetic conception of autopoiesis,which explicitly
abstracts autopoiesis from its material and energetic realization (whatwe called the Ashbyan interpretation), and
recognize that the concrete thermodynamicembodiment of the living is an essential aspect of autopoiesis, the
concept’s currentshortcomings for grounding our concrete phenomenological embodiment can beresolved. There is
no longer any need to supplement autopoiesis with a shopping listof other conditions, such as adaptivity or
precariousness. Similarly, there is no longer