Biology of modeling: revisiting Humberto Maturana’s philosophy

Abstract The paper presents modeling as more than interpretation of signs. Although this term is often associated with AI, a method of operating AI, or operating with AI in the human task environment, it may also be understood as the ability of any form of life to realize its living in general. Both these understandings of modeling can be too narrow and too broad to cope with one of the main problems it poses for semiotics and beyond – the elusive explanatory nature of models and/or their misuse in an effort to explain life and its relational ecology. Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s biological epistemology, I propose a systemic approach to modeling, as well as elaborating on supersession, a functional and operative substitution of the modeled by the model. In its biological account, modeling is a repetitive and/or recursive way in which the organism arises and operates as a system capable of finding (and distinguishing) itself as a primary source of all happenings in, around, and with it. The system, the composite unity, conserves the composition its components compose and deals with the consequences of this conservation by continuing (projecting) what has been conserved onto the space that affords further conservation.