“But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. [ … ] If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it!”
(Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, qtd. in Floridi)

Does Feynman here make a rare mistake, a Cartesian oversight that forgets that a thought, too, is part of the universe? That is to say, of course nature knows it. But then what is knowing if knowing is nature? As nature, as part of the universe, is a thought something self-reflexive, autopoietic, or … thoughtless? Perhaps Feynman is correct.

In her discussion of Chilean neurophysiologist Humberto Maturana’s
closed, “autopoietic” model of self, N. Katherine Hayles considers an
onto-epistemology grounded in species-specific geneticism (and even further variated by allelic arrangements). Maturana’s autopoiesis presents a looping
mechanism where the individual’s “structure-determined system” (140)
manifests a “circular, self-reflexive dynamic”; that is, the
individual’s organizational system produces the very stuff, e.g., nucleic
acids, that in turn produces the organizational system (136). What this means epistemologically is that
the individual does not so much “register reality as [s/he] does construct
it” (135), e.g., the eye communicates to the brain not by a
“transmission of an accurate copy of light,” but rather through a
“language already highly organized and interpreted” by structure
(135). Whatever “reality” is, it comes to us only “through
interactive processes determined solely by the organism’s own
organization” (136). Such recursive onto-epistemology may appear to be another version of liberal humanism. Maturana’s autonomous individual, however, is still “structurally coupled to the phenomenon she sees”
(142).  As Hayles explains:

Autonomy as Maturana envisions it is not consistent with laissez-faire
capitalism; it is not consistent that each person is out for himself and devil
take the hindmost; and it is not consistent with the ethical position that a
scientist could undertake a research program without being concerned about how
the results of the research would be used. In these respects, the individualism
and autonomy that Maturana champions challenge the premises embodied in liberal
subjectivity at least as much as they
reinscribe those premises. (143)

In this sense, “[s]elf-consciousness arises when the
observer ‘through orienting [linguistic] behavior can orient himself toward
himself, and then generate communicative descriptions that orient him toward
his description of this self-organization’” (144). This recursive reflexivity is grounded in positionality not personality since in “autopoietic theory, the opposite of objectivism is not subjectivism but relativism”:

Maturana’s observer is more like the observer that Albert Einstein
posits in the special theory of relativity. The one who sees is always called simply “the observer,”
without further specification, implying that any individual of that species
occupying that position would see more or less the same thing. (143)

Consciousness becomes an “epiphenomenon rather than a defining characteristic of the human as an autopoietic entity” (145).

Everything is textual and I am an intertext, a voice pronounced and
determined yet protean and unfinalized, a compliant courier of the langue,
absorbing, refashioning, and delivering circumstances not always dire, not even
tangible, but assuredly mobile, a mobile army of metaphors that are at once
mine—me—and another’s—other. Though I
still have much to say, I am already a cultural artifact, what Richard Johnson
calls a “moment” in the “production and circulation of subjective forms” (qtd.
in Gagnier: 6-7); as an intertext my construction is always in play, decentered
by its own undecidability, entirely dependent on other moments un/like myself
or, as Joseph Harris imagines it, a “set of perspectives,” the very kind that
pluralizes my “I” and yours (36). I am, just as an example, Freud’s sponging
Sophocles and then Tom Lehrer’s wry, ragtime amalgam of the two, not to mention
Thwackum’s centropy, I. A. Richards’s, and my doting parents’. And somewhere
before, between, and after my lines here is the adolescent rebellion that came
of the latter, a loud rebellion by way of locked door and David Lee Roth’s
abstruse Pasadena-speak in Van Halen’s “Light up the Sky” 

Wolves at my door wised up quick
Turn here and gone from on the go
Seems
the old folks who come up short were the pretty
Little kids who didn’t want
it, no. 

Coincidentally (or not), my Van Halen evokes another David who once
said, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me”
(qtd. in Bede: 80).  

But enough about us.