The first session of the of the IAS research seminar 2022/2023 will take place next Thursday, October 20th, at 4pm. To connect remotely please register by writing to: andrea.gambarotto@ehu.eus
Biological Autonomy and Gaian Systems
Sergio Rubin
Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research, Earth and Life Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
In this presentation it is assumed that the Earth system is autopoietically organized and that therefore the system is constituted as an autonomous system. That is assumed from chemical atmospheric and geological evidence and from how the organization of the Earth system as autopoietic satisfies relations of formal systems such as the (M,R)-system, chemical organization theory, and variational free energy minimization. This implies that the autonomy of the internal biological unities of the Gaian system, such as prokaryotes and unicellular or metacellular eukaryotes, although they are structurally coupled and therefore participate in planetary self-production, their autonomy and their ecology and evolution depend largely on the Gaian system biology of cognition and enaction with its outer solar space. This point of view, however, poses a fundamental problem. To what extent the biological unities internal to the Gaian system can or can’t affect its autonomy. This presentation will discuss this problem, but by no means will it come to a final conclusion.