Matteo Mossio

• Research Associate at French National Centre for Scientific Research

For most of the twentieth century, biology forgot or largely neglected organization. By this term, I mean a certain mode of interaction among the parts of a system, which is by hypothesis distinctively realized by biological systems. While a systemic trend is progressively pervading various biological fields – notably Evolutionary Biology, Systems...

The theory of biological autonomy provides a naturalized characterization of agency, understood as a general biological phenomenon that extends beyond the domain of intentionality and causation by mental states. Agency refers to the capacity of autonomous living beings (roughly speaking: organisms) to purposively and functionally control the intera...

The Genotype-Phenotype (G-P) distinction was proposed in the context of Mendelian genetics, in the wake of late nineteenth century studies about heredity. In this paper, we provide a conceptual analysis that highlights that the G-P distinction was grounded on three pillars: observability, transmissibility, and causality. Originally, the genotype is...

We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary theory of biological autonomy devoted to t...

Through the comparison between two major, long-lasting theoretical frameworks-geocentrism and genocentrism-we discuss the different epistemological role played by metaphors in physics and biology. Throughout its history, physics developed theories and mathematical formalisms, which either do not seem to rely on metaphors at all (as geocentrism) or...

What does it mean to be the same organism over time? This chapter develops an understanding of diachronic identity of organisms from an organizational perspective. We argue that a necessary condition for diachronic identity is organizational continuity, i.e., the presence of a continuous causal process linking successive organizational regimes, irr...

We address the identity of biological organisms at play in experimental and modeling practices. We first examine the central tenets of two general conceptions, and we assess their respective strengths and weaknesses. The historical conception, on the one hand, characterizes organisms' identity by looking at their past, and specifically at their gen...

Endocrinologists apply the idea of feedback loops to explain how hormones regulate certain bodily functions such as glucose metabolism. In particular, feedback loops focus on the maintenance of the plasma concentrations of glucose within a narrow range. Here, we put forward a different, organicist perspective on the endocrine regulation of glycaemi...

We develop a conceptual framework that connects biological heredity and organization. Heredity designates the cross-generation conservation of functional elements, defined as constraints subject to organizational closure. While hereditary objects are functional constituents of biological systems, any other entity that is stable across generations—a...

This paper argues that biological organisation can be legitimately conceived of as an intrinsically teleological causal regime. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between organisation and teleology through the concept of self-determination: biological organisation determines itself in the sense that the effects of its ac...

Darwin introduced the concept that random variation generates new living forms. In this paper, we elaborate on Darwin's notion of random variation to propose that biological variation should be given the status of a fundamental theoretical principle in biology. We state that biological objects such as organisms are specific objects. Specific object...

Organisms, be they uni- or multi-cellular, are agents capable of creating their own norms; they are continuously harmonizing their ability to create novelty and stability, that is, they combine plasticity with robustness. Here we articulate the three principles for a theory of organisms proposed in this issue, namely: the default state of prolifera...

In the search of a theory of biological organisms, we propose to adopt organization as a theoretical principle. Organization constitutes an overarching hypothesis that frames the intelligibility of biological objects, by characterizing their relevant aspects. After a succinct historical survey on the understanding of organization in the organicist...

We reply to Artiga and Martinez’s claim according to which the organizational account of cross-generation functions implies a backward looking interpretation of etiology, just as standard etiological theories of function do. We argue that Artiga and Martinez’s claim stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about the notion of “closure”, on which t...

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...

We propose a conceptual and formal characterisation of biological organisation as a closure of constraints. We first establish a distinction between two causal regimes at work in biological systems: processes, which refer to the whole set of changes occurring in non-equilibrium open thermodynamic conditions; and constraints, those entities which, w...

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,...

Ce chapitre propose un aperçu de la tradition théorique et philosophique qui, au cours des deux derniers siècles, a mis la circularité au centre de l'analyse des phénomènes biologiques. Selon cette tradition, les organismes réalisent un régime causal circulaire dans la mesure où leur existence dépend des effets de leur propre activité : les organis...

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 biological systems, closure refers to a holistic feature such that their constitutive processes, operations and transformations (1) depend on each other for their production and maintenance and (2) collectively contribute to determine the conditions at which the whole organization can exist. According to several theoretical biologists, the conce...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper, we develop an organizational account that defines biological functions as causal relations subject to closure in living systems, interpreted as the most typical example of organizationally closed and differentiated self-maintaining systems. We argue that this account adequately grounds the teleological and normative dimensions of fun...

In this paper, we propose a mathematical expression of closure to efficient causation in terms of lambda-calculus; we argue that this opens up the perspective of developing principled computer simulations of systems closed to efficient causation in an appropriate programming language. An important implication of our formulation is that, by exhibiti...

In this paper, we propose a mathematical expression of closure to efficient causation in terms of l-calculus; we argue that this opens up the perspective of developing principled computer simulations of systems closed to efficient causation in an appropriate programming language. An important implication of our formulation is that, by exhibiting an...

Ecological and sensorimotor theories of perception build on the notion of action-dependent invariants as the basic structures underlying perceptual capacities. In this paper we contrast the assumptions these theories make on the nature of perceptual information modulated by action. By focusing on the question, how movement specifies perceptual info...

In Mossio & Taraborelli (2008) we challenged the assumption according to which the ecological and sensorimotor approaches are mere conceptual variations on the same enactive theme. We showed, on the contrary, that they endorse substantially different notions of an "action-dependent perceptual invariant" and we submitted that this distinction has in...

In this study, we addressed four related issues concerning the estimation of traveled distances in a distance-matching visual task, using a virtual reality (VR) setup. Firstly, we found that when explicit counting strategies were blocked by an interfering dual task, the performance of 35% of subjects was strongly impaired. Secondly, we found that,...

In this paper, we discuss Robert Rosen's conjecture according to which a system closed under efficient causation possesses noncomputable models. We suggest that this conjecture relies on a fundamental misunderstanding between circularity and noncomputability, and it is therefore false. Nevertheless, Rosen's work contains several powerful insights a...