The auto-poetic concept suffers a dangerous flaw. It is the conflation of the cognitive as a biological process, instead of acknowledging the existence of cognitive content as an entirely different subsystem within the larger wholesystem.
Groups as complex systems is a misleading and even misguiding concept. One look as the five characterisitics in the Medium article even mentions, let alone highlight the importance of the conceptual interface in the system.
Every one of the human “complex dynamic systems” is mediated by an entirely non-biological kind of content — cognitive content. It is the quality (accuracy, consistency and comprehensivenss) of the cognitive content at each human complex dynamic system that determines the behavior of each human system.
Inaccurate, inconsistent and limited cognitive content can exert massive distortion on both the input and output arcs of the operating feedback loops through which human systems impact the rest of the larger system.
It is the dysfunctional and destructive behavior of human complex dynamic systems that is threatening the survival of living systems on the earth system. Hence the ‘autopoesis’ concept that doesn’t help us to focus on those points in the system that are driving the most important changes in the system — is simply not a useful concept.
And by attracting support to this limited concept, which cannot help except at the downstream end of initiating new activity, valuable human resources are being misdirected away from where they might do some good.
In a nutshell. The auto-poetic concept makes it difficult for us (the wholesystem) to effect change on the behavior of individual human systems, where it is the quality of the cognitive content that determines their dysfunctional or destructive behaviors.
