Francisco Varela

[gentle music] Dr. Julie is a practicing Buddhist, but she was cautious about integrating it into her professional work.

Then someone told me that there was a scientist named Francisco Varela who had these dialogue between Buddhism and scientists.

I'm like, "Really?" And they're like, "Yeah, and they're, and there's gonna be a class coming up on the whole Buddhist science of mind, Buddhist psychology." I'm like, "Ooh, I, I ...

You know, I, I've been staying away from the Buddhist side.

I mean, one, one of the examples from, from the literature and kind of more theoretical biology, um, there's this book by, uh, uh, Moreno and Mossio on biological autonomy.

They, they are building on the ideas of, uh, people like Francisco Varela and, uh, you know, Robert Rosen, and they talk about-

Hmm

... like networks of constraints that are operating at a higher Let's say layer, right? Because, uh, on-

Well, autopoiesis is for me the best definition of life.

It was proposed by the cyberneticians in Chile, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and it literally means auto-self-poiesis production.

It's self-production.

What an organism does is it produces itself, that is because an organism is not an inert object like a stone, it is a network, a metabolic network of processes that are constantly taking in resources, extracting energy, extracting building blocks, producing all kind of molecules, enzymes, fatty acids, cells, organelles, organs, everything is being constantly being produced and reproduced, and that is necessary because an organism is a so-called dissipative system.

And this is where we get to this question of multiple worlds and even the very philosophical term of a world, which is something I'm still trying to kind of come to terms with myself.

But I think what I've really, I'm really starting to see is that for some people, the word world, necessarily indicates all that is real and then there would they would be comfortable saying sure there are different perspectives on that mind independent reality which is the world you know and and you see it your way i see it my way and you know an ant sees it their way and uh you know a hungry ghost sees it their way to use a buddhist idea um And then there's another way of thinking, which is coming to the fore more through the work of those people who are interested in what's called inactivism, E-N, inactivism, which is really coming out of the work of Francisco Varela and his collaborators like Evan Thompson, Eleanor Roche, and then more recent people like Ezequiel de Paolo and... and others like that, that it's not just that there's a mind-independent world and then there's people who have different perspectives on it and then therefore there's multiple truths, but actually in the creation of, as we do actions in the world, and this gets back to the idea that truth is an action, as we create our truths, we are also changing our world.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so it's not just like there's a world out there and then we are going to say at one moment we have this idea about it and another moment we have this idea and we can say, yeah, I was wrong before.

So I was working on, in one room, and he was in the PhD student room, and he was working in the, in the permanent people, uh, room.

And we met over coffee, and we were discussing, and I was reading Varela already because it, I was interested a little bit.

And, and he was working already, he was starting to work on the concept of teleology too, but in this completely different concept.

And he had, he ended up writing a paper that was published online in 2014, uh, with Leonardo Bik called, uh, "What Makes Biological Organization Teleological?" Um, and, and it was striking to me the similarity between-

I was trying to do it in a sort of pithy manner.

No, it's, it's, uh, very accurate, and you, you named the, the, the, the main people.

So, um, principle of biological autonomy is from Varela, nineteen seventy-nine.

Just got republished by, um, MIT Press with a new apparatus by, edited by Ezechiele Paolo and Evan Thompson.