Francisco Varela Quotes

Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.

... The result, in this world view, is that real freedom comes not from the decisions of an ego-self’s “will” but from action without any Self whatsoever

Just as the mindfulness meditator is amazed to discover how mindless he is in daily life, so the first insights of the meditator who begins to question the self are normally not egolessness but the discovery of total egomania. Constantly one thinks, feels, and acts as though one had a self to protect and preserve. The slightest encroachment on the self's territory (a splinter in the finger, a noisy neighbor) arouses fear and anger. The slightest hope of self-enhancement (gain, praise, fame, pleasure) arouses greed and grasping. Any hint that a situation is irrelevant to the self (waiting for a bus, meditating) arouses boredom. Such impulses are instinctual, automatic, pervasive, and powerful. They are completely taken for granted in daily life.

L'intelligence ne se définit plus comme une faculté de résoudre un problème, mais comme celle de pénétrer un monde partagé.

What are these evolutionary changes? At the simplest level, the development of exceptionally sophisticated resistance mechanisms in all the bacterial populations of the world. In response to the impact of not me on the bacterial me, bacteria have begun generating tremendously sophisticated behavioral and physical responses. Bacteria have literally begun rearranging their genomes. As those genomes shift, their physical structures alter, sometimes considerably. It has been two and a half billion years since anything approaching this degree of change has occurred in the bacterial populations of Earth. But this kind of response is inevitable in any self-organized system; as Francisco Varela et al. observe, a biological network will reconfigure itself to an unspecified environment in such a way that it both maintains its ongoing dynamics and displays a behaviour that reveals a degree of inductive learning about environmental regularities.5

Así como el practicante de meditación se asombra de advertir cuán poco alerta está en su vida cuotidiana, lo primero que descubre cuando comienza a cuestionar el yo no es la carencia de ego sino su total egocentrismo. Constantemente pensamos, sentimos y actuamos como si tuviéramos un yo que proteger y preservar. La menor intrusión en el territorio del yo (la astilla en el dedo, el vecino bullicioso) despierta temor y furia. La menor esperanza de exaltación del yo (ganancia, elogio, fama, placer) despierta codicia y afán. Todo indicio de que una situción es irrelevante para el yo (aguardar un autobús, meditar) provoca aburrimiento. Tales impulsos son instintivos, automáticos, ubicuos y poderosos. En la vida cotidiana los damos por sentados. Los impulsos por cierto están allí y acontecen constantemente, ¿pero qué sentido tienen a los ojos del practicante inquisitivo? ¿Qué clase de yo respalda tales actitudes?

Francisco Varela once told me that a European philosopher, Edmund Husserl, already suggested a similar approach to the study of consciousness.

In fact, the key to autonomy is that a living system finds its way into the next moment by acting appropriately out of its own resources.