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developed the idea of 'autopoiesis'. An autopoietic system is one that
is organized so that the components from which it is composed
work towards maintaining its composition. Such systems produce
the components by which they are defined and then recursively
regenerate these components in order to maintain their identity.
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Autopoietic systems are closed inasmuch as any response to changes
in their medium takes place solely within the network of processes
defining them as entities. The identity of such systems is defined
through its organization, rather than through its material structure.
Like Maturana and Varela, Bateson understood that the world is
constructed by our sensory perceptions, rather than being available
in the plenitude of its reality. He explored these ideas in a number of
works, which were later published in topic form as
Steps to an Ecology
of Mind
,
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A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind
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and
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
.
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Owing perhaps to the
approachability of his style or his wide range of interests and invoca-
tion of esoteric concepts, Bateson achieved cult status within the
counter-culture. In particular his work, and that of Maturana and
Varela and von Bertalanffy, founder of General Systems Theory,
was of great importance to the burgeoning ecology movement. Their
emphasis on the interconnected nature of phenomena and the
relation between living entities and the ecosystem presented a frame-
work through which the troubling issues surrounding the human
depredation of the environment could be discussed and criticized.
At the same time the greater availability and increased processing
power of computers was offering new insights into the complex ways
in which systems were organized and how that organization might
arise. In the mid-
s Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT,
while doing experiments with computers to model atmospheric
conditions, realized that very small variations in the data used could
lead to massive changes in the end result. Lorenz, with some poetic
license, encapsulated the basic idea with the image of a butterfly,
which, by flapping its wings in South America could, eventually, lead
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