Humberto Maturana

Michael Levin cites Maturana and Varela (1980) for the view that early living forms persisted by keeping parameters within set ranges and so held their spatial and metabolic integrity¹. Levin treats these setpoints as the first small goal-seeking loops. In a second passage, a basic homeostatic loop is the bottom layer of a stack of increasingly far-seeing agents. It is needed for any life form to persist against entropy, and the citation again names Maturana and Varela².

Authors use the 1980 book as a source for embodied cognition. Ciaunica, Shmeleva and Levin say its central tenet is that cognitive mechanisms evolved to serve an organism's adaptive interaction with its environment⁵. Lyon lists Maturana with James, Jennings, von Uexküll, Lorenz and Gibson. Lyon says these thinkers stress what information use does for an organism staying alive in a niche.

Levin relates the notion of agency to autopoiesis and to Rosen's anticipatory systems³. Fields and Levin place Maturana and Varela in a line that includes Ashby, Pattee and Rosen. They describe it as observer-focused, gradualist and substrate-independent⁴. Fábregas-Tejeda and Sims count autopoiesis theory among frameworks holding a strong life-mind continuity thesis. They call its defenders panextensionalists about cognition, in contrast to those who restrict cognition to a few animal clades⁶.