"Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Stuart Kauffman in: John Brockman ed. (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. p. 209 (online)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela GarcÃa (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher who, together with his teacher Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology.
21 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Francisco Varela →
Related Quotes
"If everybody would agree that their current reality is a reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity …"
"There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionis…"
"A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations. However, diversity is a str…"
"I’m a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena"
"I hope I have seduced the reader to consider that we have in front of us the possibility of an open-ended quest for r…"
"[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This ne…"
"The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specializ…"
"It is actually by experience of our teleology – our wish to exist further on as a subject, not our imputation of purp…"
"By autopoietic organization, Maturana and Varela meant the] processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of…"
"The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it…"