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Hey guys, I am hosting a special event at Phil's group on "Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency". This matches so well with our own Fragments to Agents series that I am going to count it as a proper part of that series. Hope to see you all there.

Details (from Phill's page)
This week in our group, we're discussing a super-influential (but surprisingly readable) paper by Ezequiel Di Paolo from 2005: "Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency".
[autopoiesis_teleology_2005.pdf](https://ezequieldipaolo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/autopoiesis_teleology_2005.pdf)
Our presenter will be Tone from Culture, AI, Science, and the Human Experience (CASHE) | Meetup. He is going to give us a little tour of the land on teleological explanation in biology.
Don't worry if those words sound intimidating — we'll break them down together! The paper asks some of the coolest, deepest questions in philosophy:

  • How can purely physical, chemical processes (like in a cell) create real purpose (teleology) — things happening "for the sake of" staying alive — without any designer or magic?
  • Why does the world feel meaningful to living beings? Why do some things "matter" to a bacterium or a person, while a rock doesn't care about anything?
  • What makes something an agent that acts on its own, with its own goals, instead of just reacting like a machine?

Di Paolo builds on an idea called autopoiesis (living things constantly make and remake themselves, like a self-repairing factory). But he says that's not quite enough. He adds adaptivity — the ability to monitor and adjust to stay alive — and suddenly you get real values (good/bad for the organism), behavior, health/sickness, and the roots of mind emerging naturally from life itself.

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