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Life and cognition
Lyon lists Maturana among thinkers who treat cognition as a biological function and stress the ecological context in which an organism uses information to stay alive1. Ciaunica, Shmeleva and Levin cite the 1980 book for the tenet that cognition evolved to assist adaptive interaction with the environment6. Fábregas-Tejeda and Sims count the theory of autopoiesis among frameworks that hold a strong life-mind continuity, which they call panextensionalism about cognition7.
Homeostasis and agency
Levin (2019) cites Maturana and Varela when arguing that life began with simple systems that kept coherence and distinction from their surroundings against perturbation2. The same paper calls the basic homeostatic loop the bottom layer of a stack of homunculi, needed for any life form to persist against entropy3. Levin (2022) says the view of agency he uses is related to autopoiesis and to Rosen's anticipatory systems4.
An observer-focused lineage
Fields and Levin place Maturana and Varela in a line that runs back at least to Ashby and includes Pattee and Rosen5. They describe the shared view as observer-focused, gradualist and substrate-independent, with attention to embodied, enactive cognition and to life as it can be. Their own work builds on it to compare agents at many scales5.
Others concerned with the specifically biological manifestation of cognitive function – which historically includes William James, H.S. Jennings, Jacob von Uexküll, Konrad Lorenz, James J. Gibson, and Humberto Maturana
Lyon P, 2015 · The cognitive cell: bacterial behavior reconsidered · open at passage 15The ancient origin of living forms is predicated on the ability of some simple systems to achieve coherence and distinction from the external environment, against perturbations
Levin M, 2019 · The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives… · open at passage 38the bottom homunculus is a basic homeostatic loop, which is required for even the simplest life form to persist against entropy (Varela et al., 1974; Maturana and Varela, 1980)
Levin M, 2019 · The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives… · open at passage 64This view of agency is related to those of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1980) and anticipatory systems (Rosen, 1985).
Levin M, 2022 · Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework… · open at passage 133it dates back at least to Ashby [39] and was featured prominently in the work of Maturana and Varela [40], Pattee [41], and Rosen [42,43], among many others.
Fields C, Levin M, 2022 · Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing… · open at passage 6A central tenet of this approach is that the mechanisms of cognition have evolved to assist biological organisms in their adaptive interactions with the environment (Maturana and Varela, 1980).
Ciaunica A, Shmeleva EV, Levin M, 2023 · The brain is not mental! coupling neuronal and immune cellular processing in… · open at passage 4some defenders of disparate frameworks such as the theory of autopoiesis, enactivism, and the free energy principle can be counted as panextensionalists regarding cognition
Fábregas-Tejeda A, Sims M, 2025 · On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary… · open at passage 26
