Thompson argues that the boundary between life and mind is not a sharp discontinuity but a continuum organized by the same fundamental principle: autopoiesis, the self-producing and self-maintaining organization that constitutes any living system. Mind is not an add-on to life but an elaboration of the same organizational logic: what life does minimally (self-produce, self-regulate), mind does elaborately (sense, attend, intend, experience). This continuity grounds a biology of mind that resists both the reductionism that would dissolve experience into mechanism and the dualism that would quarantine experience from nature.
OM’s neurophenomenology references cite Thompson alongside Varela as having carried the dictum of empirical openness to “great ends in STEM.” Thompson’s framework is relevant to the research program’s treatment of the protocol underground as a living, cognitive system: if autopoiesis is the organizational logic of both life and mind, then the underground’s capacity for self-production and self-maintenance is not merely organizational but cognitive in the deepest sense.