What is the importance of Maturana and Varela?

What is the importance of Maturana and Varela?

INTRODUCTION The work of Maturana and Varela on the nature of living systems and their cognitive capacities is important and has potentially far-reaching consequences. It is, however, rather inaccessible, using an idiosyncratic vocabulary and mak- ing little connection with other literature.

What is cognition according to Maturana?

For Maturana, this itself means that the organism has knowledge, even if only implicitly. The notion of cognition is extended to cover all the effective interactions that an organism has.

What does Maturana’s approach bring out?

Perception and Intelligence Maturana’s approach brings out characteristically novel insights into these domains (Maturana and Guiloff, 1980; Maturana, 1983). In both cases he asks not What is this phenomenon as an entity or characteristic? but What is this as a p r o c e s s generating the observed phenomena?

Does Maturana address the coontogenetic drift problem?

(Teubner, 1987; Kennealy, 1987; Heller, 1987). It seems to me that this is much less of a problem. Maturana’s more recent ideas on structural coupling between systems and coontogenetic drift (Maturana and Varela 1987), not referred to by the legal theorists, addresses precisely these questions.

What is Maturana’s autopoiesis?

Maturana, along with Francisco Varela and Ricardo B. Uribe, was particularly known for creating the term ” autopoiesis ” about the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems, and concepts such as structural determinism and structural coupling.

What did Maturana contribute to the field of evolution?

Aside from making important contributions to the field of evolution, Maturana is associated with an epistemology built upon empirical findings of neurobiology. Maturana and Varela wrote in their Santiago Theory of Cognition: ” Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition.

Who is Humberto Maturana?

Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher, generally known as Humberto Maturana. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld .