Biological mechanisms: organized to maintain autonomy

Publisher Summary The chapter discusses how an organization is far more critical than often recognized in mechanistic science and philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation. Vitalists and holists play an important function when they remind mechanists of the shortfalls of the mechanistic accounts on offer. Ideas such as negative feedback, self-organizing positive feedback, and cyclic organization are critical for explaining the phenomena exhibited by living organisms. Moreover, the importance of these modes of organization can be appreciated when the relevance of notions such as being closed to efficient causation is taken into account and it is appreciated that, as organized systems, living systems are far from equilibrium and require ways of channeling matter and energy extracted from their environment to maintain themselves far from equilibrium. These critical features are nicely captured in Moreno's conception of basic autonomy in which we recognize living systems as so organized to metabolize inputs to extract matter and energy and direct these to building and repairing themselves. The notion of basic autonomy provides a framework for relating organization tightly to the matter and energy of the system as the organization of interest is one which, given the energy and material to be utilized, is able to be built and maintained by the living system.