Title: Philosopher

I'm interested in the concept of a system.  The Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock) was forwarded from a background context defined by cybernetics and general systems theory.  Cybernetic systems draw a distinction between themselves and their environments and consist in control mechanisms internal to the boundaries of a system.  Control mechanisms operate to reproduce the system homeostatically, that is, control mechanisms represent the systems auto-poietic character: the fact that it produces itself by reproducing its elements or operations.  Because control mechanisms are auto-poietic, they are self-referential: they are closed off from their environments, both as a condition of communication and reduction of environmental complexity.  Such systems desrcibe the structure of many natural or empirical phenomena.  Given this, one might construct an ontology of these systems.  Such an ontology was implicit in the Gaia hypothesis. 

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