Francisco Varela | Hacker News Reader

Francisco Varela

en.wikipedia.org

63 pointsaxiologist10 comments

»Varela supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise. These comprise the body (as a biological system and as personally experienced) and the physical world which it enacts.«

»Varela's 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is considered a classic in the field of cognitive science, offering pioneering phenomenological connections and introducing the Buddhism-informed enactivist and embodied cognition approach. A revised edition of The Embodied Mind was published in 2017, featuring substantive introductions by the surviving authors, as well as a preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn.«

'The Embodied Mind' can be borrowed at https://archive.org/details/embodiedmindcogn0000vare

This and The Feeling of What Happens by Anthony Damasio were very influential for me.

The ideas behind interoception and their connection to emotion and thought helped me put start taking this space more seriously.

Many people will also cite "The Body Keeps the Score", which is really focused on trauma and therapy rather than theory.

One of the most inspiring and influential people I've read. Many of the ideas he expressed are more commonplace as of the last five or ten years though—embodied cognition and autopoiesis are part of the conceptual underpinning of all sorts of modern perspectives and movements.

Less often recommended, this book shaped a lot of my thinking: https://www.amazon.com/Tree-Knowledge-Biological-Roots-Under...

Can be borrowed here: https://archive.org/details/treeofknowledget00matu

Or downloaded from annas-archive: https://annas-archive.org/search?q=The+tree+of+knowledge%3A+...

Very good book. Autopoiesis, co-evolution – really interesting concepts

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution

Looks interesting. I'd be interested in hearing how it shaped your thinking, or what parts of your thinking.

Radical constructivism is related to the work of the neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (they are not called constructivists but attributed as main proponents), and the biophysicist Heinz von Foerster.

A deep rabbit hole which started for me when I read Paul Watzlawick in the late 90s.

(the German Wikipedia article about it is much more detailed than the English one; I guess it's good to read using machine translation)

The Embodied Mind is a very influential work for me. Its premise that our experience can be understood by a synthesis between cognitive science and insights rooted in Buddhist practice really stuck with me. It is science for everyone.

A real contender to the connectionist approach.

I always suspect Varela gave us some true keys to unlock the mysteries unsolved about AGI.

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