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Autopoietic machines are homeostatic machines. Their peculiarity, however, does not lie in this but in the fundamental variable which they maintain constant. An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. It follows that an autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations.

Therefore, an autopoietic machine is a homeostatic (or rather a relations-static) system which has its own organization (defining network of relations) as the fundamental variable which it maintains constant. This is to be clearly understood. Every unity has an organization specifiable in terms of static or dynamic relations between elements, processes, or both. Among these possible cases, autopoietic machines are unities whose organization is defined by a particular network of processes (relations) of production of components, the autopoietic network, not by the components themselves or their static relations. Since the relations of production of components are given only as processes, if the processes stop, the relations of production vanish; as a result, for a machine to be autopoietic, its defining relations of production must be continuously regenerated by the components which they produce. Furthermore, the network of processes which constitute an autopoietic machine is a unitary system in the space of the components that it produces and which generate the network through their interactions.