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<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Dear Krassimir,</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Many thanks again for taking the time to read my work so thoroughly
and for offering such a rich, pointed, and philosophically serious set of reflections. Your critique identifies the core conceptual pressure points that any extension of autopoietic theory inevitably encounters. I appreciate the clarity, the directness, and
the spirit of engagement in your message. Let me respond in detail because each of your points deserves proper treatment.</span></p>
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<p role="presentation">Genesis of recursive systems</p>
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You are absolutely right that classical autopoietic theory, from Maturana and Varela forward, has always been more articulate about the maintenance of autopoiesis than its origination. AE inherits that asymmetry, though attempts to address genesis indirectly.
In AE, emergence is treated as an ecological transition rather than an internal property: a set of operations reaches coherence when mutual enabling stabilises into a closure condition. In this view, genesis occurs at the intersection of three things: historically
contingent catalytic events, asymmetric flows that constrain possible configurations, and ecological pressures that select for stable couplings.</div>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">There are deep affinities here with autocatalytic set theory (Kauffman),
dissipative structure theory (Prigogine), and niche-construction models. But you are right: AE emphasises persistence over origination. Your critique reveals a need for a fuller articulation of the boundary between dissipative pre-autopoietic dynamics and
the emergence of genuine recursive closure. This is an area I intend to expand, and your remark pushes it in the right direction.</span></p>
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<p role="presentation">Termination, breakdown, collapse, and death</p>
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This is perhaps one of the most generative parts of your critique. Autopoiesis has often treated breakdown as “the outside” of the theory, a limit case rather than an object of analysis. AE does include in its structure the collapse of closure: when co-regulation
fails, when perturbations exceed the compensatory capacity of the system, or when enabling structures dissipate faster than they can be regenerated. But this has not been formally developed.</div>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">A genuine ecology of autopoiesis must treat breakdown, decay, and
structural exhaustion as central rather than peripheral. In living systems, breakdown is ubiquitous and constitutive: apoptosis, senescence, organismal death, species extinction. In social and institutional systems, breakdown is the norm, not the exception.
AE’s conceptual frame actually lends itself well to describing failure modes, because closure itself is historically bounded and always vulnerable to environmental shifts. I agree completely that this dimension must be made explicit.</span></p>
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<p role="presentation">Metabolic dependency, trophic asymmetry, predation</p>
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This is a vital point. Autopoietic literature tends to foreground organisational autonomy and background the asymmetric material conditions that make autonomy possible. AE does assume, but has not sufficiently emphasised, that operational closure depends absolutely
on energetic and material openness. Viability is achieved only through asymmetric flows of matter and energy. And those flows are not neutral: predation, parasitism, symbiosis, resource gradients, and interspecies entanglements all shape what a system can
do.</div>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lindemann’s trophic ecology is therefore not only compatible with
AE, but a necessary complement. Lindemann describes precisely the vertical asymmetries through which ecological organisation arises. If autopoiesis tends to focus on the horizontal organisation of closure, trophic ecology reveals the vertical dependencies
that constrain it. A robust AE must integrate both dimensions.</span></p>
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<p role="presentation">Material substratum, thermodynamic grounding, and your concern about transcendentalism</p>
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You raise the concern that AE appears to privilege organisation over material substratum, thereby introducing a quasi-transcendental layer. This is exactly the point to clarify. AE is not organisationally transcendental: matter and energy are integral to its
conceptual core. AE is grounded explicitly in three interdependent material layers.</div>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">First, thermodynamics: operational closure is possible only under
irreversible energy throughput. Every AE system is necessarily a dissipative system. There is no circularity, no energetic self-sufficiency, and no organisational autonomy that is not thermodynamically underwritten.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Second, quantum mechanics: quantum discreteness, potentiality, wavefunction
collapse, and constraint patterns underlie the very possibility of distinct operations. The AE notion of “enabling potentials” maps directly onto quantum mechanical properties. AE is compatible with a view in which organisational form arises from constraint
patterns over quantum and classical flows, not instead of them.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Third, ecological materiality: AE assumes, rather than denies, the
historical, environmental, trophic, energetic, and chemical conditions under which closure is sustained. These are not add-ons; they are constitutive.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Your critique is therefore invaluable: it shows the need to state
this more directly, so that AE is not mistaken for a purely organisational formalism. In that sense, your pointer to Barad, Prigogine, and Lindemann is well placed. But let me also address your invocation of those thinkers.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Prigogine situates system formation in irreversible thermodynamics,
which is essential. But his framework tends toward universalisation: “order out of chaos” becomes a general metaphysical claim. AE resists this universalism and instead treats emergent organisation as historically situated.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lindemann captures trophic asymmetry beautifully, but his model
presupposes stable ecological compartments. AE adds the historical contingency and variable closure conditions that Lindemann’s ecological energetics do not address.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Barad’s agential realism offers a rich vocabulary of relational
ontology, but it becomes essentialist when the intra-action apparatus is treated as a universal metaphysics binding all phenomena. AE shares the emphasis on relational constraint but rejects the universalist move. Relations are not metaphysical primitives;
they are ecological achievements.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">So I welcome the synthesis you propose, but AE engages these thinkers
as partial complements, not as foundations that subsume AE under their metaphysics.</span></p>
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<p role="presentation">Category theory and duality</p>
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You are right to point out that if one uses category theory formally, one must respect its dualities. In AE I use category theory in a minimal, Lawvere-inspired way, as an expressive scaffold to describe recursive enabling relationships. It is not intended
as a full mathematical foundation. Your point shows I need to state this explicitly, so that readers do not assume a stronger formal intent than is present.</div>
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<p role="presentation">On the equation O = F(O) and perpetual motion</p>
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Your remark that O = F(O) resembles the formula for a perpetual motion machine is understandable, but the equation is not claiming energetic circularity. It is a structural fixed-point condition: the operation regenerates the organisation that enables it. This
is analogous to self-consistent solutions in physics, attractor states in dynamical systems, and eigenbehaviour in second-order cybernetics.</div>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Nothing in the AE formulation denies the necessity of entropy production,
energy throughput, or material exchange. A cell satisfies O = F(O) organisationally, but no one believes a cell violates thermodynamics. Likewise, AE systems require continuous dissipation. Closure is organisational, not thermodynamic. Your critique will help
me clarify this distinction more explicitly.</span></p>
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<p role="presentation">Toward the synthesis you suggest</p>
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Your final suggestion—to integrate autopoiesis with dissipative structures, trophic ecology, and agential realism—is deeply promising. AE already works across the interfaces you describe: the organisational recursion of autopoiesis; the energetic grounding
of irreversible thermodynamics; the material flows of ecological energetics; and the relational constraint dynamics represented (with their limits) by Barad.</div>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">A next phase of AE development will need exactly this kind of synthesis.
Your critique makes clear where AE can be expanded and where its material grounding must be made more explicit. I appreciate the seriousness with which you offered these remarks, and I take them as an invitation to sharpen the framework rather than as a rejection
of its direction.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I would be very glad to continue this exchange. You raise precisely
the issues that matter for the next stage of work, and I value both the critique and the opportunity it opens.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_MSFontService, -apple-system, Roboto, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Warm regards,<br>
Steve</span></p>
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PS. A brief note on political organisation</div>
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One further point, which your critique implicitly raises, concerns political organisation. AE treats political structures not as abstract institutions but as autopoietic–ecological formations: recursively stabilised ensembles of communication, material infrastructure,
legal constraint, affective atmosphere, and energetic throughput. They persist only so long as their closure conditions continue to be enabled by the broader ecological substrate — economic flows, technological mediators, environmental affordances, and the
lived practices of populations.</div>
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Seen this way, political order is neither a purely symbolic system (as in classical autopoiesis) nor a fully material apparatus (as in Marxian or neo-materialist accounts). It is a co-regulated, partially stabilised coupling of organisational, material, energetic,
and communicative processes. Collapse and transformation therefore occur when the enabling structures — metabolic, technological, economic, ecological — shift faster than the organisational layer can reorganise its closure.</div>
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This is why I resist Barad’s essentialisation of “agency” at the microphysical level: political systems do not require a metaphysical notion of agential matter; they require a clear articulation of how recursive organisational patterns depend upon — and must
continually renegotiate — their material–energetic supports. AE, I believe, offers a way to describe this without reductionism in either direction.</div>
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>From:</b> Fis <fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Krassimir Markov <itheaiss@gmail.com><br>
<b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, December 3, 2025 10:16:10 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> fis <fis@listas.unizar.es><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [Fis] Contingency signals: AI Information, Decision and Learning</span>
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<div dir="ltr">Dear Steve,<br>
Thank you for the opportunity to read your publications.<br>
In this regard, I will allow myself a few brief remarks.<br>
While autopoiesis offers a revolutionary framework for understanding self-sustaining systems, systematic research, including your publications, reveals critical gaps in accounting for:<br>
(1) the genesis of recursive systems,<br>
(2) their termination and death,<br>
(3) metabolic dependencies and predation,<br>
(4) the material substratum beneath operations, and<br>
(5) political transformation.<br>
Autopoietic theory suffers from a transcendental organizational perspective—privileging operations over objects, closure over consumption, and modulation over material constraints. Furthermore, your attempts to formalize autopoiesis through category theory
introduce additional problems by ignoring fundamental categorical principles, notably duality.<br>
I see a possible development in a synthesis integrating autopoiesis with dissipative structures (Prigozhin), trophic ecology (Lindemann) and agential realism (Barad), allowing a transition to a complete ecology capable of dealing with birth, death and metabolic
predation.<br>
Finally, I will note that your formula O=F(O) is the formula of the perpetual motion machine, which we all know is impossible.<br>
With respect,<br>
Krassimir</div>
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