The concept of "Autopoiesis", also jointly developed by Maturana and Varela, in conjunction with strict BCL logicians such as Löfgren and McCulloch, has created a configuration that has pointed to such "second order" phenomena. Significantly, the autopoiesis article originally appeared as a BCL report[18] and, incidentally, was simply stolen by a Boston publisher with no BCL connection.
When I (Heinz) was in Chile, we asked ourselves: "Can we write a living computer program?" If we could write such a program, it would become even clearer what we are talking about when we talk about a living system. I found the "autopoietic" form of self-organization, in which things reconstruct or construct themselves over and over again, very important. So we sat together in Chile, discussed, sat together, discussed, sat together, discussed … When the first manuscript was finished, I had to leave Chile immediately because Pinochet had staged a coup and Allende had been killed. Mai and I left Chile a few hours after Allende's assassination. We went to Mexico first, and I had the manuscript of Autopoiesis with me. One of my students, Ken Wilson, and I translated the Spanish manuscript and submitted it to Biosystems, which became the first English publication[19].
Of course, the basic idea of autopoietics, Maturana's basic idea, was very important to me – I was always a strong proponent of that concept and still consider it a very important definition. But Maturana was centrally concerned with what a living system "there" would be. And I really like his definition of what a living system "there" is. I, on the other hand, try to design a description in such a way that I include the reader, so that together we form a living system in which we play the game of writing, reading, speaking, understanding, responding.
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VON FOERSTER, Heinz, Albert MÜLLER und Karl H. MÜLLER, 1997. Der Anfang von Himmel und Erde hat keinen Namen: eine Selbsterschaffung in 7 Tagen. Wien: Döcker. ISBN 978-3-85115-245-6, p. 87.