Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana / quote 44 of 50
Structural determinism, main points
(1) Interactions in the medium only trigger structural changes of composite unities. (2) The structure of the system fully determines its interactions by specifying the variety of interactions it can undertake. (3) The structure of the system specifies what it will accept as an interaction and! what will be ignored. (4) A major implication of these ideas is that "information" does not exist, and that instructional interactions cannot take place. You cannot by acting externally on a system specify what happens in that system. (5) You can trigger certain changes and you may know what will happen when you do this triggering by knowing the structure of the system but you cannot specify what happens in the system because that is specified or determined in the structure of the system. [...] Since we are structure-determined entities, then whatever happens to us is determined by our structures and is never determined by whatever we encounter in our medium . It may be triggered by perturbations but not determined by them"