Session 13

Interlude (1) - Autopoiesis & physics of life, cognition & knowledge

Thursday, July 16, 2015 - 5:30 PM

Seminar Room B309, Engineering Block B

The remainder of the book requires a deep and unified understanding of the interrelated theories of life and knowledge as presented in the next two sessions.

Unifying theories of life and knowledge helps to understand what follows

My work on the book came to a halt when I tried to connect my ideas with the organizational and professional literature on the cognitive interactions of individuals and their cognitive technologies with knowledge, cognition and technologies at the organizational level. I understood organizations from a biological point of view rather than from a sociological point of view, where these views were further grounded in fundamentally different understandings of what knowledge is. It took several years and the publication of several papers before I thought I fully understood the details and implications of the different paradigms of organizational understanding. Only then could this book be finished. This interlude in the evolutionary history of humans and technology explores the fundamental relationships between knowledge and life at several levels of biological organization from single cells to complex social entities such as corporations, states and nations and how cognition plays out at each of these levels.

Emergence of autopoietic eddies