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This is a bold, brilliant, provocative and puzzling work. It demands a radical shift in standpoint, an almost paradoxical posture in which living systems are described in terms of what lies outside the domain of descriptions. Professor Humberto Maturana, with his colleague Francisco Varela, have undertaken the construction of a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as they are objects of observation and description, nor even as in teracting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to them selves. Thus, the standpoint of description of such unities from the 'outside', i. e. , by an observer, already seems to violate the fundamental re...
The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors' basic question is: ‘How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?' The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zöller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans as sapient languaging beings was love, and that this remains our fundament even when other emotions become socially prevalent.
"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication.
Opstilling af en plan for en helhedsforståelse af processerne i biologiske systemer og en diskussion af dette biologiske udgangspunkts konsekvenser for den menneskelige erkendelsesproces
At the beginning of the last century, physicists revolutionised the scientific view of the world. Today biologists are radically transforming our understanding of the processes of life and cognition. Probing the mysteries of the mind, they have been able to prove that, in the act of knowing, the observer and the observed, subject and object, are inextricably enmeshed. The world we live in is not independent from us; we literally bring it forth ourselves. One of the protagonists of this new kind of thinking is the internationally renowned neurobiologist and systems theorist Humberto R. Maturana who was interviewed for several weeks by Bernhard Poerksen, journalist, and communication scientist. In this book, they explore the limits of our cognitive powers, discuss the truth in perception, the biology of love, and give, all in all, an introduction to systemic thinking that is down to earth, imaginative, and rich in anecdote.
Neurobiologen og systemteoretikeren Humberto R. Maturana (f. 1928) anskueliggør sin filosofi og teorier gennem samtale og anekdoter, og samtidig dannes et billede af personen Maturana og hans livsanskuelse
This book presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker’s key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.
In this ground-breaking book, pre-eminent thought leader in the fields of sustainability and flourishing, John R. Ehrenfeld, critiques the concept of sustainability as it is understood today and which is coming more and more under attack as unclear and ineffective as a call for action. Building upon the recent work of cognitive scientist, Iain McGilchrist, who argues that the human brain’s two hemispheres present distinct different worlds, this book articulates how society must replace the current foundational left-brain-based beliefs – a mechanistic world and a human driven by self interest – with new ones based on complexity and care. Flourishing should replace the lifeless metrics now being used to guide business and government, as well as individuals. Until we accept that our modern belief structure is, itself, the barrier, we will continue to be mired in an endless succession of unsolved problems.
How can science be brought to connect with experience? This book addresses two of the most challenging problems facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science: understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions as a result of neurological and cognitive processes, and creating an ethic adequate to our present awareness that there is no such thing as a transcendental self, a stable subject, or a soul.