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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from dualism
from Not one, not two
from John Vervaeke
from The purpose of second-order cybernetics, Glanville
  • Seems closely related to Francisco Varela's work, particulary Not One, Not Two.
from VTR on Society of Mind
from autopoiesis
  • Self-creating. A term created and promulgated by Maturana and Varela, and the core of their theories about the nature of biological life.
from against dualism
from Free Agents
  • In part he seems to be rediscovering Francisco Varela's notion of autopoiesis, although it is not cited.
    • The activity of the organism changes the environment and the organism's relation to it. The apparently linear chain of causation is really a loop or series of loops—you can think of it as a spiral stretched through time.
    • The phase transition:
    • For a long time, nothing in the universe did anything. There was a lot goig on, to be sure...its not that nothing happened,—it's that nothing in the universe could be said to be doing any of it. And then, at some point, actors emerged on this stage. Simple lifeless components were somehow assembled into forms that held themselves apart from these general happenings and instaed acted on the world.(p24)
from Marvin Minsky
from Joseph Goguen
  • He co-published with Francisco Varela, was a Buddhist, has a Naropa connection.
from Iain Hamilton Grant
from RD Laing
  • Hm link to Francisco Varela autopoeisis, which is about how organisms generate and maintain boundaries?
from Laws of Form
  • A cultish math book, introduced to me by the Whole Earth Catalog and Francisco Varela. From a purely math standpoint, it appears to introduce some novel and perhaps useful notation and invent something sort of like imaginary Boolean values. From a deeper metaphysical standpoint, it offers a way to talk about distinctions in general and our representation and participation in them.
from Deleuze
  • Later, these ideas would be reframed in the terms of autopoieitic systems, as Guattari engaged with Maturana and Francisco Varela’s work in systems theory.
    • That's an interesting connection.
from self-reference
from Deleuze
  • Later, these ideas would be reframed in the terms of autopoieitic systems, as Guattari engaged with Maturana and Francisco Varela's work in systems theory.

Francisco Varela

30 Oct 2021 - 15 Aug 2025
Open in Logseq
    • There's a big online conference on Varela, watching some of the videos.
    • Paper: The Arithmetic of Closure, Varela and Joseph Goguen
      • Huh Goguen is a familiar name, he was a CS guy and at SRI,
        • Goguen, Joseph. 1997. "A Social, Ethical Theory of Information." In Geoffrey C. Bowker, Les Gasser, Susan Leigh Star and William Turner (eds.). Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work. Princeton, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.
      • What is the proper notion of a whole? Uh-oh.
        • Realizing I have an instinctive sneer to all holism-talk. Picked that up at MIT of course. Yet I find myself attracted to it, eg here or with Christopher Alexander. Probably deserves a page of its own.
      • Distinction and Stability
      • Definitions are distinctions, so defining them is problematic
    • Recursion is the CS manifestation
    • Knots as things that are structurally stable despite deformation. Ouroboros as symbol of closure.
    • Not One, Not Two
      • I like that he is inventing notation.
        • The Star statement:
          • trinity = __the it / the processs leading to it__
          • The / is to be read "consider both sides of /"
          • Oh interesting, I think I get it...hard to put it into my own words...he is saying that it is not enough to consider either things (normie) or processes (science and rationality). And while obviously processes form the things, I think he is pointing out that the relationship is bidirectional, and things somehow shape or determine the processes...actually no idea if that is what he means. Never mind.
      • Ouroboros discussion by Evan Thompson
        • Bateson invitational paper http://www.oikos. ....
          • "The Logic of Paradise"
            • Varela, Reflections on the Chilean Civil War
          • Title from Zen Mind Beginners Mind maybe
            • This is kind of a skeleton key to 4E cognition jargon! Useful!
          • "/" stands for the procedure to find the trinity stance. Self-referential
          • A contrast between Hegelian dualities and Star dualities. Hegelian are oppositional, the two sides negate each other, where * dualities co-create each other (imbricated, what a word)
        • The highest or universal *: Reality / levels of reality (?)
        • Pask conversational pattern (don't know anything about that, should)
        • Later writing: "NeurophenomenologyL A Methodolgical Remedy for the Hard Problem" (1996)
        • Q from audience: Michele Cerutti​What do you think of recent accounts of enactivism, like Shaun Gallagher's or Hutto and Myin's radical stance?
        • Varela did work on immune system, should check that out.
        • Louis Kaufmann points out that slash is direct descendent of GSB's distinction
        • Enlightenment / Practice a good Star Statement
    • Another Seminar with Evan Thompson, June 14th, 2021
      • What is Enaction?
        • V: I like Borges but prefer Naruda
        • Bateson never talked down (reminds me of Minsky)
        • Merleau-Ponty and groundlessness (key term in Embodied book)
        • Original title was Worlds Without Ground (from dad, William Irwin Thompson)
        • History of "enaction"
          • from cognitivism → neural nets → hermeneutic
          • Maybe borrowed from jerome bruner?
        • Book "created a conversational space"
        • He doesn't like "enactivism". They never used it, just "the enactive approach".
        • Managed to ask a question:
          • Around the same time The Embodied Mind came out, there was a strain of work on Heideggerian artificial intelligence which was very much in the same spirit…I wonder if you were aware of this work (then or later) and have any thoughts about it? (Terry Winograd, Phil Agre, David Chapman were some of the people in this field)
          • Ooh I had to read it and the answer was yes, esp Terry Winograd, but he knew about all of them, incl Rod Brooks
        • Walter Freeman "opened up the bandpass filters"
        • Asked about PP, cites Hemholts (but that is more representational).
        • Mentions Bayesian Brain (skeptically)
        • Bruce Bough, asks about enactive approach to emotion
          • Embodied Mind is cognition focused, except Buddhist abidharma doesn't make distinction between cognition/emotion
        • Question about Master/Emissary book, but Thompson is extremely skeptical
        • Neurophenomenology (is a thing – you measure neural activity AND ask people about their experiences)