The Organisation of Organisms – Beyond Networks: The Evolution of Living Systems

Module 8 of “Beyond Networks“ forms the core of the whole course. It looks at organisms (at last) and examines their fundamental nature: their dynamics, their (self-)organisation, and their agency. In lecture 2, we ask what makes living systems different from non-living systems. It is not their composition, but their organisation. The defining property of a living system is that it has organisational closure: every efficient cause that is necessary for its continued existence must be in turn generated from within the system. We look at organisational theories of the organism from Aristotle, via Kant, to Robert Rosen, who provided a basic relational diagram for a system with closure to efficient causation. I discuss how we can map Rosen’s efficient causes to particular aspects of an actual cell. I don’t necessarily encourage anyone to read Kant, but he states his theory of the organism in his “Critique of Judgement,“ in case you are interested. I highly recommend Hans