What Self in Self-Organization? Engaging Varela's Epistemology for the Co-embodied Self
Journal of Consciousness Studies December 1, 2023 Miriam Kyselo
A non-dualistic epistemology, grounded in Francisco Varela's early work 'Not One, Not Two' (1976), supports the argument that the human self is fundamentally social and co-embodied, not merely individual. The enactive view of the self, which Varela and Evan Thompson developed, treats the self as self-organized and organismically autonomous, but it remains ambiguous whether social interactions are constitutive of the minimal self or only a secondary, shaping factor. Drawing on Varela's epistemology, the author argues that the minimal self-organizational network of the human self inherently includes both individual bodily processes and joint co-embodied processes, making the self constitutively social from the start.