Tag: Disease

Book cover titled 'From Autopoiesis to Living Coherence' with a multicolored circular diagram surrounded by plants and wildlife, top-heavy typography.

From Autopoiesis to Living Coherence: A Maturanan Biological Framework for Disease, Healing, and Non-Forcing Action | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humberto Maturana’s biology of cognition offers a rigorous non-reductionist account of living systems as autonomous, structurally determined, autopoietic unities that conserve themselves through ongoing structural coupling with their medium. This white paper develops a Maturanan biological framework for understanding disease, healing, and non-forcing action. It proposes the concept of living coherence to describe the dynamic conservation of congruence among the nested processes through which a living system maintains viable organism–niche relations. These processes include metabolic and mitochondrial regulation, redox signaling, immune tolerance and repair, neuroendocrine-affective regulation, microbiome ecology, developmental plasticity, behavior, social relations, and ecological context. Within this framework, health is interpreted as the dynamic conservation of viable coupling; disease as costly conserved drift, loss of congruence, or collapse of organism–niche viability; and healing as the restoration or reorganization of viable structural coupling. The paper draws on Maturana’s concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition, emotioning, love, and natural drift, and places them in dialogue with contemporary work in allostasis, mitochondrial psychobiology, redox biology, organism-centered immunology, microbiome science, affective neuroscience, evo-devo, and enactive cognition. The resulting framework supports a biological interpretation of non-forcing action: intervention as careful, congruent perturbation that respects the autonomy of living systems and enlarges their field of viable possibilities.

Read More

Applying McMurtry’s Life-Value Framework to Disease and Health | ChatGPT4o

Table of Contents

  • Applying McMurtry’s Life-Value Framework to Disease and Health
  • McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology: Prioritizing Life Over Profit
  • Rethinking the “Natural History of Disease”
  • Disease Progression as a Socially Conditioned Process
  • Life-Blind Priorities in the Medical System
  • A Holistic and Just Life-Value Approach to Health
  • Challenging Orthodoxy: Alignments with Social Medicine and Public Health

Read More

Is pathogenic human interference the cause of our social and planetary woes?

“Life creates conditions conducive to life.” – Janine Benyus

As many of you who follow my blog articles may have realised, I have become captivated by Professor John McMurtry’s life work. His book, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure, has provided a unifying framework of meaning and understanding of all of the degenerative trends of our time. What you may not know, is that for over a year, I have been trying desperately to translate the medical concepts from my training from the level of the individual life host up to the social and planetary levels of life organisation. And by trying to do so, it was hoped that we would be better able to understand the pathogenesis of these degenerate trends, and be able to convince our policy and decision makers on what steps need to be taken at the local, regional and international levels so as to prevent and rehabilitate the social and planetary pathologies in our midst.

What I have just come to realise is that the difficulties I was having in accomplishing this goal had to do with a preconceived assumption that was a major mental block in going forward. That concept has to do with what we in the profession call, the natural history of disease. Read More