"Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is the key and eternal question."

FRANCISCO VARELA (1946 - 2001)

FRANCISCO VARELA
The Emergent Self
[6.5.01]

Francisco Varela died on May 28 at his home in Paris. According to his friend and collaborator Evan Thompson "I am told he died completely calm and at peace. I spent several days last week with him and his family. I will always cherish the strength of spirit, intelligence, and kindness he continued to manifest in his last days, despite his illness. He will be deeply missed."

Francisco, an experimental and theoretical biologist, studied what he termed "emergent selves" or "virtual identities." His was an immanent view of reality, based on metaphors derived from self-organization and Buddhist-inspired epistemology rather than on those derived from engineering and information science. He presented a challenge to the traditional AI view that the world exists independently of the organism, whose task is to make an accurate model of that world — to "consult" before acting. His nonrepresentationalist world — or perhaps "world-as-experienced" — has no independent existence but is itself a product of interactions between organisms and environment. He first became known for his theory of autopoiesis ("self production"), which is concerned with the active self-maintenance of living systems whose identities remain constant while their components continually change. Varela is tough to categorize. He was a neuroscientist who became an immunologist. He was well informed about cognitive science and was a radical critic of it, because he was a believer in "emergence" — not the vitalist idea promulgated in the 1920s (that of a magical property that emerges inexplicably from lower mechanical operations) but the idea that the whole appears as a result of the dynamics of its component parts. He thought that classic computationalist cognitive science is too simplemindedly mechanistic. He was knowledgeable and romantic at the same time.

In 1995 I talked to Francisco for my book The Third Culture (Simon & Schuster, 1995. Speaking about Varela in the book, theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman noted that "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."

To remember and honor Francisco, to think about his ideas, I present "The Emergent Self", Chapter 12 in The Third Culture. Included in the chapter are commentaries on Francisco and his work by Stuart Kauffman, W. Daniel Hillis, Christopher G, Langton, Daniel C.Dennett, Niles Eldredge, Brian Goodwin, and Lynn Margulis.

— JB

FRANCISCO VARELA was a biologist; director of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and professor of cognitive science and epistemology at the École Polytechnique, in Paris; author of Principles of Biological Autonomy; coauthor with Humberto D. Maturana of Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living and The Tree of Knowledge, and with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch of The Embodied Mind .

Click Here for Francisco Varela's Bio Page for Francisco Varela's Edge bio page

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