By autopoietic organization, Maturana and Varela meant the] processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which… - Francisco Varela

The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence:

The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.

There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment.