Special Seminar with Juan-Carlos Letelier, PhD, University of Chile

Thursday, November 17, 12:00-1:00pm | Picower Seminar Room (46-3310)

Talk Title: The origins and projections of Biology of Cognition and Autopoiesis: The Intertwined History Between MIT, Biological Computing Laboratory (BCL), and Chile

Abstract: In the 1950s an intense wave of interest about Systems science, encapsulated by the catchy term CYBERNETICS, took hold in many labs and lecture halls. According to MIT Legend Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics promised not only new fundamental results in a variety of fields but also a new epistemology. Furthermore, due to the unexpected launching of Sputnik-I, in 1958 the US created a well funded laboratory (BCL=Biological Computer Laboratory) to work on artificial intelligence, and BIONICS, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster who was a protegé of another MIT titan, Warren McCulloch. By 1961, BCL became a hotbed of theoretical thinking concerning computers, cybernetics and the brain. A chance encounter in 1963 between von Foerster and Humberto Maturana (one of the co-authors of the 1959 classic paper “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain” done in the McCulloch’s lab) changed the history of Cybernetics. Maturana spent a sabbatical year at MIT in 1969 and wrote BIOLOGY OF COGNITION, a small technical report where he stated that the brain is not an information processing device but rather a machine constructing correlations between its motor and sensory lamina. This intuition, which was not shared by the vast majority of neuroscientists, would be further translated into cellular metabolism, with the notion of AUTOPOIESIS, stating that living systems are, before anything else, self-fabricating devices (Autopoiesis and Cognition: ISBN-10: 9027710163). After a slow start, the notion of Autopoietic systems, with its undertones of autonomy, circularity, self-reference and cognition, has permeated many domains from Architecture to Ecology, Neurophysiology and Systems Biology. Autopoiesis, initially put forward more than half a century ago, is being refined into a more robust theory linking cognition, brain function, and metabolic networks. This interdisciplinary endeavor, currently cultivated in many groups across Europe, South America and Japan, uses mathematics, physics and biology to understand how self-fabricating networks remain stable as they construct the objects they encounter in their ecological niche. In this talk we will survey the unusual history of Autopoiesis—which could be considered the intellectual offspring of Cybernetics—and its current developments as one of the cornerstones of Artificial Life and a framework for paradigm changing results.