Maturana and Varela

Humberto Maturana (1928-2021) and Francisco Varela (1946-2001) formed one of the most influential partnerships in the history of systems theory and second-order cybernetics. Their collaboration, beginning at the University of Chile in the 1960s, produced revolutionary insights into the nature of living systems, cognition, and consciousness.

Their most significant contribution was the concept of autopoiesis, introduced in their 1972 work "De Máquinas y Seres Vivos." Autopoiesis describes living systems as self-producing networks that maintain their organization while continuously regenerating their components. This concept fundamentally challenged traditional mechanistic views of life and cognition.

Key theoretical contributions include:

1. The Biology of Cognition Their work established that cognition is not a representation of an external world but rather a continuous process of self-organization and structural coupling between an organism and its environment. This led to the famous statement "living is knowing" and the concept that "all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing."

2. Enactivism They developed the enactive approach to cognition, arguing that mind and world emerge together through the interactions of embodied agents with their environment. This challenged both computationalist and representationalist theories of mind.

3. Observer Theory Maturana and Varela emphasized the fundamental role of the observer in scientific understanding, contributing to second-order cybernetics by highlighting how observers are part of the systems they describe.

Their work has influenced diverse fields:

• Systems Biology
• Artificial Life
• Cognitive Science
• Social Systems Theory
• Organizational Learning

Their book "The Tree of Knowledge" (1987) presents their mature theoretical framework, exploring how living systems, cognition, and human consciousness are interconnected through the lens of autopoiesis and structural coupling.

Major concepts they developed include:

• Operational Closure
• Structural Determinism
• Consensual Domains
• Language as Coordination

Their work represents a significant bridge between biology, epistemology, and cognitive science, offering a unified theory of life, mind, and knowledge. Their influence continues through various schools of thought in complexity theory, embodied cognition, and radical constructivism approaches to knowledge and learning.

The Maturana-Varela framework challenges traditional scientific objectivism while maintaining scientific rigor, suggesting that knowledge is inseparable from experience and that objectivity exists only within the consensual domains created by observers in structural coupling.

Their legacy lives on in contemporary discussions of emergence, self-organization, and the nature of consciousness, particularly in approaches that emphasize the inseparability of mind, body, and environment.