Alvaro Moreno

• University of the Basque Country

We argue that cognitive functions are not reducible to biological functionality. Since only neural animals can develop complex forms of agency, we assume that genuinely cognitive processes are deeply related with the activity of the nervous system. We first analyze the significance of the appearance of the nervous system in certain multicellular or...

There is a long-lasting quest of demarcating a minimally representational behavior. Based on neurophysiologically-informed behavioral studies, we argue in detail that one of the simplest cases of organismic behavior based on low-resolution spatial vision–the visually-guided obstacle avoidance in the cubozoan medusa Tripedalia cystophora–implies alr...

Recent research in philosophy of science has shown that scientists rely on a plurality of strategies to develop successful explanations of different types of phenomena. In the case of biology, most of these strategies go far beyond the traditional and reductionistic models of scientific explanation that have proven so successful in the fundamental...

Recent research in philosophy of science has shown that scientists rely on a plurality of strategies to develop successful explanations of different types of phenomena. In the case of biology, most of these strategies go far beyond the traditional and reductionistic models of scientific explanation that have proven so successful in the fundamental...

Both physiological and evolutionary criteria of biological individuality are underpinned by the idea that an individual is a functionally integrated whole. However, a precise account of functional integration has not been provided so far, and current notions are not developed in the details, especially in the case of composite systems. To address t...

This chapter discusses individuality from the perspective of its origins. It is argued that the different forms and levels of biological organization ultimately date back to-and lie in-the prebiotic appearance of a minimal form of individuality, understood as a self-encapsulated self-maintaining (autopoietic) organization, which constitutes the cor...

Eusociality is broadly defined as: colonies consisting of overlapping generations, cooperative brood care, and a reproductive division of labor where sterile (or non-reproductive) workers help the reproductive members. Colonies of many complex eusocial insect species (e.g., ants, bees, termites) exhibit traits, at the collective level, that are mor...

This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretic...

The idea of minimal agency (MA) may be understood as the simplest agent within the known phenomenological domain, that is, the simplest agent as-we-know-it, and as the simplest agent that could exist, either synthetically or in a hypothetical process of biogenesis, that is, the simplest agent as-it-should-be. The second view is more radical, since...

Although the analogy between macroscopic machines and biological molecular devices plays an important role in the conceptual framework of both neo-mechanistic accounts and nanotechnology, it has recently been claimed that certain complex molecular devices (consisting of biological or synthetic macromolecular aggregates) cannot be considered machine...

The transition from chemistry to biology is an extremely complex issue because of the huge phenomenological differences between the two domains and because this transition has many different aspects and dimensions. In this paper, I will try to analyze how chemical systems have developed a cohesive, self-maintaining and functionally differentiated s...

In this paper we address the question of minimal cognition by investigating the origin of some crucial cognitive properties from the very basic organisation of biological systems. More specifically, we propose a theoretical model of how a system can distinguish between specific features of its interaction with the environment, which is a fundamenta...

Scholars consider the origins and consequences of the evolution of multicellularity, addressing a range of organisms, experimental protocols, theoretical concepts, and philosophical issues. The evolution of multicellularity raises questions regarding genomic and developmental commonalities and discordances, selective advantages and disadvantages, p...

Biological regulation is what allows an organism to handle the effects of a perturbation, modulating its own constitutive dynamics in response to particular changes in internal and external conditions. With the central focus of analysis on the case of minimal living systems, we argue that regulation consists in a specific form of second-order contr...

This paper argues that the question of the origin of life cannot be explained by appealing exclusively to Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms, as many experts tend to assume, but requires a profound change in perspective. Accordingly, we highlight the fact that, in order to operate as a diversification force (and indirectly, a force for a potential i...

We argue that the transition from unicellular to multicellular (MC) systems raises important conceptual challenges for understanding agency. We compare several MC systems (from bacterial swarms to colonies and plants, and to lower metazoans) displaying different forms of collective behavior, and we analyze whether these actions can be considered or...

The general issue that we address in this chapter is whether and how, from the autonomous perspective, cognitive phenomena can be understood as a specific and highly complex class of interactive capacities, stemming from the evolutionary complexification of agency.

What is the relationship between evolution and autonomy, as conceived from the autonomous perspective? What role does history play? The general picture is that the evolution of biological systems stems from the mutual interplay between organisation and selection: in a word, organisation channels selective processes and selection drives organisation...

In this chapter, we argue that autonomy involves an interactive dimension, enabling biological systems to maintain themselves in an environment. We will refer to this interactive dimension as agency. A system that realises constitutive closure (metabolism) and agency, even in a minimal form, is an autonomous system, and therefore a biological organ...

In this chapter, we discuss some of the necessary conditions required for a multicellular system to be a relevant candidate as a higher-level autonomous system, and hence as a multicellular organism. In particular, we will focus on the kind of functional integration that a multicellular organism must exhibit. Our central claim will be that the func...

Our argument in this chapter will be twofold. On the one hand, we will argue that closure can be consistently understood as an emergent regime of causation even though the autonomous perspective is interpreted, as we do, as being fundamentally committed to a monism (of properties). On the other hand, we will maintain that, although the mutual relat...

According to the autonomous perspective, the constitutive organisation of biological systems realises an emergent regime of causation, which we labelled closure of constraints. One of the crucial implications of the realisation of closure is that, as we will argue in this chapter, it provides an adequate grounding for a distinctive feature of biolo...

The aim of this first chapter is to propose a theoretical and formal framework that characterises closure as a causal regime specifically at work in biological organisation. In particular, it will be our contention that biological systems can be shown to involve two distinct, although closely interdependent, regimes of causation: an open regime of...

In these concluding pages, we sum up the main ideas that we have been developing throughout the book by providing a synthetic overview of the autonomous perspective as we conceive it. Also, because most work still remains to be done, we will mention some central issues that the theoretical framework outlined here should handle in (the near) future,...

In this paper, we advocate the idea that an adequate explanation of biological systems requires appealing to organisational closure as an emergent causal regime. We first develop a theoretical justification of emergence in terms of relatedness, by arguing that configurations, because of the relatedness among their constituents, possess ontologicall...

In this short contribution we explore the historical roots of recent synthetic approaches in biology and try to assess their real potential, as well as identify future hurdles or the reasons behind some of the main difficulties they currently face. We suggest that part of these difficulties might not be just the result of our present lack of adequa...

In this paper we explore the organizational conditions underlying the emergence of organisms at the multicellular level. More specifically, we shall propose a general theoretical scheme according to which a multicellular organism is an ensemble of cells that effectively regulates its own development through collective (meta-cellular) mechanisms of...

This paper addresses the issue of the biological foundations of agency and cognition. It does so from the point of view of the theoretical framework of autonomy, of which the theory of autopoiesis constitutes one of the paradigmatic examples. The starting point of this analysis consists in the thesis according to which agency and cognition are root...

In this paper we review the concept of organism analysing the main ideas related to it in the context of present biological theories. The discussion is focused and developed according to four key issues: individuality, organisation, autonomy and reproduction. Once these basic connections are established, a spectrum of possible entities that fall un...

Even the simplest cell exhibits a high degree of functional differentiation (FD) realized through several mechanisms and devices contributing differently to its maintenance. Searching for the origin of FD, we briefly argue that the emergence of the respective organizational complexity cannot be the result of either natural selection (NS) or solely...

Our aim in the present paper is to approach the nature of life from the perspective of autonomy, showing that this perspective can be helpful for overcoming the traditional Cartesian gap between the physical and cognitive domains. We first argue that, although the phenomenon of life manifests itself as highly complex and multidimensional, requiring...

The organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra- and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribut...

The domain of nonlinear dynamical systems and its mathematical underpinnings has been developing exponentially for a century, the last 35 years seeing an outpouring of new ideas and applications and a concomitant confluence with ideas of complex systems and their applications from irreversible thermodynamics. A few examples are in meteorology, ecol...

Bringing together the latest scientific advances and some of the most enduring subtle philosophical puzzles and problems, this book collects original historical and contemporary sources to explore the wide range of issues surrounding the nature of life. Selections ranging from Aristotle and Descartes to Sagan and Dawkins are organised around four b...

In the present, post-genomic times, systemic or holistic approaches to living phenomena are compulsory to overcome the limits of traditional strategies, such as the methodological reductionism of molecular biology. In this paper, we propose that theoretical and philosophical efforts to define life also contribute to those integrative approaches, pr...

Most of current theoretical analyses on biological functions can be classified as etiological or dispositional, depending on how they deal with the teleological dimension. In this paper, we propose a critical survey of these two perspectives, and we argue that some recent studies have set the basis of a new approach which grounds the teleological d...

The central aim of this paper consists in arguing that biological organisms realize a specific kind of causal regime that we call "organisational closure"; i.e., a distinct level of causation, operating in addition to physical laws, generated by the action of material structures acting as constraints. We argue that organisational closure constitute...

Since Darwin it is widely accepted that natural selection (NS) is the most important mechanism to explain how biological organisms—in their amazing variety—evolve and, therefore, also how the complexity of certain natural systems can increase over time, creating ever new functions or functional structures/relationships. Nevertheless, the way in whi...

The overlapping fields of adaptive behavior and artificial life are often described as novel approaches to biology. They focus attention on bottom-up explanations and how lifelike phenomena can result from relatively simple systems interacting dynamically ...

In this article, we propose some fundamental requirements for the appearance of adaptivity. We argue that a basic metabolic organization, taken in its minimal sense, may provide the conceptual framework for naturalizing the origin of teleology and normative functionality as it appears in living systems. However, adaptivity also requires the emergen...

This paper aims to offer an overview of the meaning of autonomy for biological individuals and artificial models rooted in a specific perspective that pays attention to the historical and structural aspects of its origins and evolution. Taking autopoiesis and the recursivity characteristic of its circular logic as a starting point, we depart from s...

We offer a critical review of the concept of neural information, as received within mainstream neuroscience from Artificial Intelligence. This conception of information is constructed as a conditional probability of a stimulus given a certain neural activation, a correlation that cannot be accessed by the organism and fails to explain its causal or...

In this paper we review and argue for the relevance of the concept of open-ended evolution in biological theory. Defining it as a process in which a set of chemical systems bring about an unlimited variety of equivalent systems that are not subject to any pre-determined upper bound of organizational complexity, we explain why only a special type of...

El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar cómo engarza la noción de autonomía biológica con las nociones de autonomía que se manejan habitualmente en filosofía. A partir de los años setenta del siglo XX, los biológos chilenos Humberto Maturana y Francisco Varela desarrollaron la teoría de la vida como autopoiesis, que origina una nueva concepción de...

Most of the models for cellular origin stress one of these two approaches: "replication-first" or "metabolism-first." The model presented here focuses on the latter, consisting of the combination of kinetic and energetic descriptions of protocellular metabolism. In this model, the membrane plays a very crucial role in the maintenance of the cell an...

Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of "how cognitive agents work" but the issue of "what makes something cognitive" has not been sufficiently addressed yet and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the latter. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized...

We analyze the conditions for agency in natural and artificial systems. In the case of basic (natural) autonomous systems, self-construction and activity in the environment are two aspects of the same organization, the distinction between which is entirely conceptual: their sensorimotor activities are metabolic, realized according to the same princ...

Life is a complex phenomenon that not only requires individual self-producing and self-sustaining systems but also a historical-collective organization of those individual systems, which brings about characteristic evolutionary dynamics. On these lines, we propose to define universally living beings as autonomous systems with open-ended evolution c...

In the search for the primary roots of autonomy (a pivotal concept in Varela's comprehensive understanding of living beings), the theory of autopoiesis provided an explicit criterion to define minimal life in universal terms, and was taken as a guideline in the research program for the artificial synthesis of biological systems. Acknowledging the i...

The first form of the inside-outside dichotomy appears as a self-encapsulated system with an active border. These systems are based on two complementary but asymmetric processes: constructive and interactive. The former physically constitute the system as a recursive network of component production, defining an inside. The maintenance of the constr...

Artificial Life is developing into a new type of discipline, based on computational construction as its main tool for exploring and producing a science of life as it could be. In this area of research, the generation of complex virtual systems, in place of the traditional empirical domain, has become the actual object of theory. This entails a prof...

This paper reviews Pattee's ideas about the symbolic domain as a phenomenon related to the self-simplifying processes of certain hierarchical systems, such as the living. We distinguish the concepts of constraint, record, and symbol to explain how the Semantic Closure Principle, that is to say, the view that symbols are self-interpreted by the cell...

This paper deals with the problem of finding a suitable framework for designing computer simulations that could help us determine the minimal requirements (both material and organizational) for the origin of the first full-fledged autonomous systems. The design of a particular model that takes into account some fundamental thermodynamic requirement...

In this paper we propose a philosophical distinction between biological and cognitive domains based on two conditions that are postulated to obtain a useful characterization of cognition: biological grounding and explanatory sufficiency. According to this, we argue that the origin of cognition in natural systems (cognition as we know it) is the res...

We propose an explicit dialogue between MetaSystem Transition (MST) Theory and theoretical biology. Then MST is approached in a double and complementary way. We apply MST to the study of biological levels of organization and we draw some consequences for the understanding of MST mechanisms from the analysis of the essential features of living syste...

Recently a model formed by self-replicative units with catalytic capabilities evolving in an extended system has been presented. It has been shown that under particular conditions this model exhibits spatial compartimentation without any kind of membrane. In the framework of ALife, we suggest that this model can allow a global growth in the complex...

This volume contains 71 revised refereed papers, including seven invited surveys, presented during the Third European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL '95, held in Granada, Spain in June 1995. Originally AL was concerned with applying biologically inspired solutions to technology and with examining computational expertise in order to reproduce a...

Currently theoretical biology offers two different perspectives on the definition of life, one based on genetic information and the other on dynamic self-organisation. Artificial life (AL) attempts to develop a universal biology, understanding life as pure organisation and overcoming this antagonism by alternatively seeking dynamical or information...

In this paper we pose the problem of how to study basic cognitive processes in the frame of simulations of artificial worldr of the style of Artificial Life The main difficulty of simulating biologically grounded cognitive processes lies in the search for fonns of organisms suitable to establish functional relationships with their environments and...

A discussion of various theories of emergence is given. It is argued that artificial life and the related theoretical constructs have to be rethought on the basis of new epistemological foundations. In particular, three earlier approaches, the theories of ‘anticipatory systems,’ ‘semantic closure’ and ‘component systems’ are examined from the point...

Both the irreducible complexity of biological phenomena and the aim of a universalized biology (life-as-it-could-be) have lead to a deep methodological shift in the study of life; represented by the appearance of ALife, with its claim that computational modelling is the main tool for studying the general principles of biological phenomenology. Howe...

Among the community of "alifers" the principles of the basic organization of all possible life have been searched mainly in terms of constructive-relational or purely formal systems inspired in an abstract chemistry, rather than in the context of the physics of self-organization or thermodynamics. In particular, computational models of metabolism t...

Resumen En este trabajo planteamos una revision cr´itica del concepto de informacion neuronal, tal como ha sido entendido dentro del para- digma dominante en neurociencias. A partir de una concepcion del or- ganismo como sistema autonomo, reconstruimos desde una perspectiva naturalizadota un nuevo concepto de informacion neuronal, entendida como ci...

En este artículo planteamos como estudiar los procesos cognitivos básicos en el marco de simulaciones de mundos artificiales al estilo de la vida artificial. La dificultad principal de simular procesos cognitivos de base biológica reside en la búsqueda de formas de organismos adecuados para establecer relaciones funcionales con sus entornos y desar...

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