A.N. Whitehead and F. Varela

Thanks for the link, Bruce! I'm off to read it now…

Hey Bruce,

I did read it, but he doesn't seem to touch too much on autopoiesis. He spent more time relating Whitehead and Sheldrake, and to tell you the truth, I don't think, at least at this point, that Sheldrake's morphic field hypothesis is necessary to explain organic form. I think people like Brian Goodwin (who Wilber does mention) are doing what might be considered more scientific work (based in empirical observation and mathematical modeling) than what Sheldrake's model allows for. Not that I don't think experiments shouldn't be done to determine if there is a statistically significant increase in, say, the rate at which rats learn to navigate a specific maze after one rat has successfully done so. If consistent results from tests like this come back positive, then there will be something to look at, but until then, I don't think it is fruitful to attack the reductionistic paradigm from Sheldrake's angle. I feel much more comfortable with guys/gals like Goodwin, Margulis, Lewontin, etc. Goodwin, for instance, uses the well established notion of a strange attractor to account for morphogenic development, rather than an aparently non-physical force field of some kind (as Sheldrake suggests).

Wilber has a tendency to gloss over the comparisons he makes between different theorists, which isn't really a criticism, as if he really dove into the details, he would not have the time to be the tremendous metasystem-builder we all know and respect him as. He is trailblazing, carving out some rough paths between ideas that are dying to be filled in by more focused work on specifics. My feeling is that the correspondances between Varela/Maturana's biology/cognitive science and Whitehead's metaphysics are easy to spot, but that there are some underlying tensions arising from the fact that Varela's approach is based in the phenomenology of Husserl, who drew much of his approach from Kant, while Whitehead is explicitly questioning many of the assumptions Kant, Hume, Descartes, etc. were working under. I am very exciting about trying to tease out these tensions, and I'm always looking for work that has been done by others in this area to help show me where to start! I haven't found much yet, though!

-Matt

Bruce,

I found an interesting series of essays in Varela's book “A View From Within” concerning Husserlian phenomenology. Owen and Moris' critique is interesting, though I don't think the way they construe standard cognitive science as strictly empirical is quite right. The way cognitive science understands the term “empiricism” already implies a certain set of practices based in a system of metaphysical assumptions. Varela's response was impressive… I see that he doesn't suggest Husserl be imported to cognitive science, but just that 1st person approaches to understanding cognition in general be explored on their own terms. What value V. gets from Husserl seems to come primarily from his phenomenology of time, which I think is exactly the weakest link in the materialist/reductionist metaphysics (that they have neglected the influence of time on matter by falsely spatializing it). Whether Husserl's analysis of time is revealing or not I can't say. I haven't read it yet.

I just ordered Evan Thompson's new book, “Mind in Life.” He and Varela started working on it soon after “The Embodied Mind,” but as Varela's health deteriorated, Thompson took over the project and ended up writing the whole book by himself, though obviously it is still heavily influenced by Varela. T. discusses Husserl at length, as well as contemporary biology and neuroscience. He critiques Dennett's approach to cognition, which I am also looking forward to.

take care,
Matt

hey star!

sorry about that, I will raise my mic volume!

-Matt