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Operational closure and autopoiesis (2)

  • radically changed view: living systems and nervous systems as operationally closed systems
  • the nervous system operates as a closed network of interactions (1967-68)
  • external sensory and effector surfaces are also areas of the closed system: the medium is merely the link through which these areas interact
  • as the organism interacts with its medium, its nervous system undergoes changes that are only triggered and not determined by the external elements
  • all that the organism does (behavior) is to perform sensory/effector correlations which are not determined by "instructions" from the medium
  • the nervous system does not extract "informations" from the medium and cannot operate with representations of the medium
  • the product of the functioning of the components is the same functioning organization that produces them

©1998,M.Bettoni,CZM,Fachhochschule beider Basel

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