The Organic and the Normative

(Yogi)

From Jul 29 to Aug 1, Yogi traveled to beautiful Ljubljana in Slovenia, to give a talk called "Organizational Continuity as the Basic Norm for Living Systems" at a workshop entitled "The Organic and the Normative", which was organized by Sebastjan Vörös, Ela Praznik, and Timotej Prosen.

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The workshop included speakers such as Arantza Etxeberria, Xavier Barandiaran, Charles T. Wolfe, Andreas Weber, and also fellow group member Mortiz Kriegleder.

Yogi's talk focused around Rosen's concept of immanent causation and the idea of organizational continuity (first proposed by DiFrisco and Mossio) as a naturalist and materialist foundation for the emergence of norms in self-manufacturing (autopoietic) systems. This is the core of an argument that Yogi plans to write up as a collaborative paper with biochemist Jannie Hofmeyr. His talk stirred some controversy through his remark that contemporary (heavily computationalist) biology understands life less than ever before in human history...