The Autopoietic Model
The picture is simple. A closed interior with a functional purpose of maintaining the internal processes via energetic interactions with an environment. So, starting from the definition:
Autopoiesis
We look at the relationships of the elements:
The other named element is the boundary between the system and its environment. Well, not exactly a boundary, more of an interface defining the self and its world through interactions:
structural coupling
The ideas of structural coupling and operational closure do a lot of the work in the definition of Autopoiesis, and the deep connections to semiotics is within the exploration of these ideas. The importance of this has nothing to do with the words we use, the words and phrases are an invention to contain the structure of these ideas. We have stipulated a fractal network of processes that actively produce and reproduce themselves as the network itself, physically expressed entity of semi-autonomous living entities. By splitting the autopoietic processes into the inside and outside of the entity and calling attention to what happens in the boundaries between the entities. We can now become observers of what transacts across the boundaries defined by the operation of the entity.
Because of operational closure, we cannot make any strong statements about the internal organization of the entities processes, but we can become observers of the internal structural coupling between the nested entities. Because the actual operation of the nested entities is only completely realized within the context an active and autonomous living entity, and to observe the nested entities we will always be disturbing their normal autopoietic processes, we can only have part of the picture. Human cells in a petri dish will continue to produce and reproduce themselves as cells, or even as tissues or organs, and we can learn a lot about how they function as subsystems. By reproducing critical aspects of the internal environments of different subsystems, we can study them in isolation, and by making internal measurements of subsystems operating in the context of the whole organisms, we can learn a lot. On the other hand, we should never loose sight of how our study of these systems in always incomplete because we can never fully observe the complete systems in operation.
We claim that this difficulty in formal investigation is also at the bottom of all the confusion in physics about observation and experiment (ref H. uncertainty, and related).