| The Third Culture |
|
|||||||
|
Francisco Varela is amazingly invective, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self-representation in immune networks. I love it. Stuart Kaufman
|
Francisco Varela "Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether the mind/body level the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is the key and eternal question."
FRANCISCO VARELA is a biologist; director of research at the
Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and progessor of
cognitive science and epistemology at the Ecole Polytechnique,
in Paris; author of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979);
coauthor with Humberto D. Maturana of Autopoieses and
Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980) and The
Tree of Knowledge (1987), and with Evan Thompson and Eleanor
Rosch of The Embodied Mind (1992).
|