Who are you? You are that which transforms what you are." — Jordan B Peterson More on reddit.com

I look into this a lot in my personal time. It'd be fun to talk.

Many programs that emphasize psychological treatment of severe psychological dysfunction utilize cognitive restructuring methods for alleviation of symptoms. What are your thoughts about internal organization as a utility for the alleviation of psychological disorder?

How about teaching internal structuring to redirect maladaptive thought patterns and behaviors? What methodologies have you found to be effective either personally or within research?

Is a structural approach applicable enough to explain more than human biology? Structures are limited by the system in which they operate, which system are all structures limited by and how do you find those structures to be limited? Can we develop structures which transcend sentience?

My favorite question right now: Can the systems involved in the physicality of the universe and those more abstract psychological systems within the mind be compared effectively with a single set of structures? (I believe yes and that the systems are quite relatable)

I love extrapolating systems and implementing them into programs and approaches!

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Based on how you frame your question, I would say that autopoeisis does preclude humanism, in the sense that post-humanism has sought to bracket and/or question the presumption of individual agency/autonomy of human beings, in order to see how it is antecedently suspended in relational systems or milieus that feed back upon an individual, by various means. Autopoeitic theory is based in second-order cybernetics, which is (quoting from first line of the Wikipedia entry) where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science". This is the epistemological/methodological stance of autopoesis, and it helps frame one of its central questions, which is something like: what makes up the relational difference between the physical individuation of matter, the vital individuation of living things, and the collective individuation of a member of a social population? In material below from Maturana and Varela, biologically it amounts to the production of some membrane between inside and outside, where the exterior milieu or environment of a living thing is met and transformed into a principle and set of dynamics for it to continue living, through its auto-organization. From here people have analogized the basic biological account over into social systems and technology, as you'll see from some of the references below. Self-organization would seem to suggest autonomy as you put it above, but I think it's more about digging in to the underlying principles of self-regulation in a given milieu that go into any sense of an individual's autonomy. Again, Maturana and Varela write that "...the living organization can only by characterized unambiguously by specifying the network of interactions of components which constitute a living system as a whole, that is, as a 'unity'" In terms of how autopoeisis has traveled into the (post-)humanities, there were some early connections in Heidegger's Being and Time discussing our phenomenological relationship to signs in a context, which made reference to the work of Jakob von Uexkull, a German biologist who developed the precursor notion of an animal's Umwelt -- how mind interprets world for a given organism. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young's Afterword in a reprint of von Uexkull's work (noted below) is a good read for how his ideas fit together with the modern humanities context, from Heidegger onwards. At this point I'm waving my hand in a bit of a broad sweep, but basically Von Uexkull and second-order cybernetics found their way into the humanities through certain connections between it and post-structural critiques of meaning. Both are about reflexively characterizing the question of meaning by examining the (historical, embodied, structural) conditions of meaning's construction and closure, for humans and animals alike. Of course there are many, many ways in which this reflexivity of the subject in a 'conditioned milieu' has played out (eg. through appeals to language's paradox of closure via Derridean différance, through knowledge systems, ideology theory, the unconscious, affect theory, the role of media technologies...) But sticking strictly to autopoeisis and second-order cybernetics, you've already mentioned Niklas Luhmann, so I'll just mention a few more books that have been helpful for me to situate self-organization in this post-humanities context: The reprint of Von Uexkull's treatise (with the afterword), A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning William Rasch's book Niklas Luhmann's Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation Clarke and Hansen's book Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory Maturana and Varela's book Autopoeisis and Cognition N. Katherine Hayles's book How We Became Posthuman Bernhard Siegert's book Cultural Techniques Henri Atlan's Selected Writings Conversations with Heinz von Foerster in the book The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name Hope this helps situate you to keep going with your explorations. More on reddit.com

Every time I hear about him the more I want to read Luhmann's work. I can't comment on your analysis but it is interesting. More on reddit.com