Context: Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana
worked closely together for several short episodes and wrote joint
publications during the 1970s and 1980s. After that their respective
paths in life diverged. Problem: What is the common ground and what are
the differences between these two authors with respect to their lives
and aims? Method: The author reconstructs their common history in the
form of personal reflections and conversations with Varela. Results: The
personal reflections reveal the intellectual path Maturana
took to develop his way of thinking, in particular his fascination with
explanatory processes and the phenomenon of life. The conversations
with Varela portray him as a man of great "cognitive autonomy," whose
career started with the intention to study "psychism in the universe."
For Varela it seemed possible, through meditation, to reach
transcendental reality as something that exists externally to the living
of human beings and that can be known as such. Maturana,
by contrast, claims that there is no way to refer to such a universal
truth. Rather, human beings generate all the worlds they live in.
Implications: While the two men collaborated in both teaching and
writing, they eventually created two different constructivist approaches
driven by a different set of questions. Constructivist content: Both
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have decisively contributed to constructivist approaches.
Context: At the conference "The Ethical Meaning of Francisco Varela's Thought," which took place on 28 May 2011 in Sassari, Italy, Humberto Maturana,
Michel Bitbol, and Pier Luigi Luisi participated in two discussions.
Purpose: In this edited transcription of the discussions, the
participants talk about several aspects of autopoiesis, the observer,
ontology, making distinctions and distinguishing different domains,
perception and illusion, and transcendence. Results: The discussions
shed light on how constructivist concepts are perceived by individual
authors. Concepts such as "transcendence" and "objectivity" are
understood in different ways. Constructivist content: The concepts
discussed are highly relevant for constructivist approaches.
This article questions the predominance of pragmatism
and fixed points of reference in academic paradigms regarding culture
and proposes a theory of autopoietic culture based on a theory of living
forms developed by the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela. The central part of the theory of autopoietic culture is that
culture, something originating with humanity and reflected upon by the
same, is an autonomous and autonomic unity that is a network of
processes and production of components that are continuously generated
and recursively participate through their interactions in the generation
and realization of the network of process of production of components
which produced them (Maturana,
1999: 149, 153). This article briefly refers to the theories of Thomas
Sebeok, Juri Lotman, Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu, which have
similar components to the theory of autopoietic culture. The article
concludes that within autopoietic culture whatever we would consider
describing as a cultural element is not as significant as the processes
within which it is part in the construction of its own boundary of
discernment; our description of the process is always conducted with
other observers in a linguistic domain; our existence carries its own
ontogeny and creates perturbations in the structure (elements) which we
distinguish; and there are an unknown number of elements and processes
continuing in time within the unity that define the unity and are beyond
our ability to distinguish.
Context: In 1974, Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela published De Máquinas y Seres Vivos. Autopoiesis: La
organización de lo vivo in Santiago, Chile as a little book. A second
edition of this publication was proposed in 1994, and the present
document is a recent translation of Maturana's
reflections "twenty years after." Problem: The book clearly enunciates
what it means to say that living systems are molecular autopoietic
systems, and this Preface reflects on the shift of understanding from
earlier notions of self-referred or auto-referred systems to the concept
of autopoiesis. Implications: The Preface describes the systemic
quality that is human living and human sense-making. It marks what we
can retrospectively see as the bridge between the explicitly biological
studies of Maturana (and Varela), and the later, more anthropological and therapeutic work of Maturana
with Gerda Verden-Zöller between 1989 and 1994 and, especially, with
Ximena Dávila Yáñez since the year 1999. Results: The underlying
understanding implicit in this document outlines in great clarity the
implications of Maturana's
fundamental insights. It presents both a logical and passionately argued
case for mutual respect, grounded in scientific findings in biology.
The Preface is a clear vision of why Maturana's work has been so influential for reflexivity and constructivism.
ENACTIV is a project that addresses, explores and
offers solutions for converting a performer/composer's expressive sonic
and kinetic patterns into continuous variables for driving sound
synthesis and processing in real-time interactive composition. The
investigation is inspired by the achievements in cognitive science, in
particular Umberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela's Santiago Theory (1980, 1987), in which the authors explain how
the process of cognition arises through structural coupling a- a mutual
influence among living beings, and living beings (humans in particular)
and the environment, and how this process stipulates certain patterns
of organisation driving the individual's behaviour. The project
investigates how a composer/performer's cognitive archetypes, which have
been developed via his or her structural coupling with the social and
natural environment and expressed through voice and unwitting hand
gestures, can be associated with or mapped onto sound synthesis and
processing parameters in such a way that the system will play an active
role and act reciprocally, involving a certain degree of variation and
unpredictability at its output. The aim of the project is to develop a
creative tool which will allow professional musicians, multi-media
artists and non-expert participants to engage with multi-modal
improvisation in an intuitive way.
This paper discusses the cognitive policies present in
models of prevention and treatment proposed for drug users and drug
addicts. It takes as reference the laws 6.368/1976, 10.409/2002 and
11.343/2006, and a policy launched by the Ministry of Health in 2003,
the Política do Ministério da Saúde para Atenção Integral a Usuários de
Álcool e outras Drogas. The academic literature that supported the
analysis was mainly the works of Humberto Maturana, Francisco
Varela and Virgínia Kastrup. The analysis made it possible to identify a
movement in the cognitive policies - that in the beginning are much
more focused in recognitive and representative experiences of cognition -
towards an inventive and enactive cognition. The fact that some
policies and proposals open the possibility to the practice of an
inventive cognition does not constitute a logical or necessary
dislocation, but, on the other hand, an ethic and political one.
This paper has two primary aims. The first is to
provide an introductory discussion of hyperset theory and its usefulness
for modeling complex systems. The second aim is to provide a hyperset
analysis of several perspectives on autonomy: Robert Rosen's
metabolism-repair systems and his claim that living things are closed to
efficient cause, Maturana and
Varela's autopoietic systems, and Kauffman's cataytically closed
systems. Consequences of the hyperset models for Rosen's claim that
autonomous systems have non-computable models are discussed.
Some of the works done by Joseph Goguen in the field
of computer science are discussed. Throughout his distinguished career,
he bridged the rigorous formal systems and the messey, creative ways in
which human minds and social groups operate in actual terms. His early
works were on fuzzy logic, foundations of the computer science, and then
on the empirical studies on the group decision making. Goguen's
arguments about software engineering showed his passion about overcoming
designer-centered and reductionist approaches to the development of the
technology. He developed an alternative way to conceive software
development on the basis of Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela's notion of self-organizing or poietic systems. Goguen
recognized that just as controlling a complex sociotechnical system
development process is impossible using regimented top-down controls,
which manages the requirements about complex sociotechnical systems
within which such regimentation is also impossible.
The aim of this article is to examine how the notion
of biological autonomy may be linked to other notions of autonomy usual
in philosophical discussions. Starting in the 70s, the Chilean
biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela developed a theory of life as autopoiesis which gives rise to a
new conception of autonomy: biological autonomy The development of this
concept implies the recovery of the notion of the organism in a
scientific context in which biology and philosophy of biology are
focused on the study of the gene by Molecular Biology and evolution by
natural selection, by the so called Modern Synthesis. Here we try to
show some implications of the concept of life as autonomy for current
biology and how this concept can be related to other more usual ones in
philosophy.
Drawing upon cognitive science and systems theory,
this article examines a number of issues commonly undertaken in
theorizing 'online communities.' The thesis is that current approaches
to online community that focus on specific online 'places,' such as
LamdaMOO, may overlook the actual practices engaged in by current
internet users, which focus on ad-hoc interactions with a distributed
community. Systems theory, as developed by Vilem Flusser, Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela, is used to examine the relationship between communication and
community. Through this examination a definition of community as a
distributed communications systems, in which individuals function as
nodes in the overall system, is developed. The conclusion considers the
significance of this definition for the evaluation of the internet as a
tool for political action and self-realization. Co
Computational autopoiesis - the realization of
autopoietic entities in computational media - holds an important and
distinctive role within the field of artificial life. Its earliest
formulation by Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana,
and Ricardo Uribe was seminal in demonstrating the use of an
artificial, computational medium to explore the most basic question of
the abstract nature of living systems - over a decade in advance of the
first Santa Fe Workshop on Artificial Life. The research program it
originated has generated substantive demonstrations of progressively
richer, lifelike phenomena. It has also sharply illuminated both
conceptual and methodological problems in the field. This article
provides an integrative overview of the sometimes disparate work in this
area, and argues that computational autopoiesis continues to provide an
effective framework for addressing key open problems in artificial
life.
The aim of the paper is to review critically the notion of autopoiesis as presented by Maturana
and Varela. In particular, recognizing that there are difficulties in
obtaining a complete and clear picture from the primary literature, an
effort is made to present a coherent view-also based on many years of
personal contact with Francisco
Varela. The paper begins with a few historical notes to highlight the
cultural background from which the notion of autopoiesis arose. The
basic principles of autopoiesis as a theory of cellular life are then
described, emphasizing also what autopoiesis is not: not an abstract
theory, not a concept of artificial life, not a theory about the origin
of life-but rather a pragmatic blueprint of life based on cellular life.
It shown how this view leads to a conceptually clear definition of
minimal life and to a logical link with related notions, such as
self-organization, emergence, biological autonomy, auto-referentiality,
and interactions with the environment. The perturbations brought about
by the environment are seen as changes selected and triggered by the
inner organization of the living. These selective coupling interactions
impart meaning to the minimal life and are thus defined by Maturana
and Varela with the arguable term of "cognition". This particular view
on the mutual interactions between living organism and environment leads
these authors to the notion of "enaction", and to the surprising view
that autopoiesis and cognition are two complementary, and in a way
equivalent, aspects of life. It is then shown how cognition, so defined,
permits us to build a bridge between biology and cognitive science.
Autopoiesis also allows one to conceive chemical models of minimal
cellular life that can be implemented experimentally. The corresponding
work on "chemical autopoiesis" is then reviewed. The surprising impact
of autopoiesis in the social sciences ("social autopoiesis") is also
briefly discussed. This review also comments on why the theory of
autopoiesis had, and still has, a difficult time being accepted into the
mainstream of life-science research. Finally, it is pointed out that
the new interest in system biology and complexity theories may lead to a
reappraisal of autopoiesis and related notions, as outlined also by
other authors, such as Tibor Ganti and Stuart Kauffmann.
This paper is the first one of a series devoted to the
analysis of metabolic networks. Its aim is to establish the theoretical
framework for this analysis. Two different lines of research are
considered: the one about metabolism-repair systems ((M,R)), introduced
by Robert Rosen as an abstract representation of cell metabolic
activity, and the concept of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela. Both concepts have been recently connected by Letelier et al.,
determining that the set of autopoietic systems is a subset of the set
of general abstract (M, R) systems. In fact, every specific (M, R)
system is an autopoietic one, being the boundary, which specifies each
system as a unity, the main element of autopoietic systems which is not
formalized in Rosen's representation. This paper introduces the
definition of boundary - a physical boundary and a functional one - for
(M, R) systems in the context of a representation using category theory.
The concept of complete (M, R) system is also introduced by means of a
process of completion in categories which is functorial, natural and
universal.
The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a
paradox: while people believe they act on the basis of their own
authentic experience, cultural psychologists observe their behavior to
be socially patterned. It is argued that, in order to account for those
patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its
analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within
cultural psychology to either neglect human experience, by focusing
exclusively on discourse, or to consider the structure of this
experience to originate in an already produced cultural order. For an
alternative approach, we turn to the enactive view of cognition
developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela. Their theory of autonomy can provide the epistemological basis
for a cultural psychology that explains how experience can become
socially patterned in the first place. Cultural life forms are then
considered as consensually coordinated, embodied practices.
Global competition and rapidly changing customer
requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and
configuration of manufacturing organizations. Agent-based systems are
showing considerable potential as a new paradigm for agile manufacturing
systems. With this approach, centralized and sequential manufacturing
planning, scheduling, and control systems may be replaced by distributed
intelligent systems to facilitate flexible and rapid response to
changing production styles and variations in product requirements. In
this paper, the characteristics and components of such a multi-agent
architecture for advanced manufacturing are described. This architecture
addresses agility in terms of the ability of the manufacturing system
to solve manufacturing tasks using virtual enterprise mechanisms while
maintaining concurrent information processing and control.
A generic agent Mediator has been developed to
coordinate heterogeneous intelligent agents in a distributed
manufacturing system. Coordination takes place both between dynamically
created virtual clusters of agents and within these so-called
coordination clusters. Task plans are decomposed successively into
subtasks which are allocated down through the agent clusters and
coordinated through these. The Mediator's structure and activities are
illustrated through application to an intelligent manufacturing
scheduling problem. The system components, including all machines and
parts, are implemented as intelligent agents. This approach is being
further developed to manage a concurrent engineering environment in an
intelligent manufacturing system.
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