ABSTRACT The classical scientific method, particularly its deterministic approach, encounters limitations when attempting to fully capture the complexities of human beings. Although many 20th‐century philosophers criticized this method, their arguments were primarily philosophical. I see a need for a critique of the scientific method grounded in empirical science itself. The complexity paradigm...
The noosphere remains an underappreciated and understudied idea despite that it provides unique hope towards a positive and meaningful global integration. A core reason for this lack of attention is that its very definition is often unclear both in the West with Teilhard de Chardin and in the East with Vernadsky. I show how Living Systems Theory can clarify two fundamental meanings: the...
I review here my personal and scientific interactions with Francisco Varela, starting from our meeting in 1983 in Alpbach, Austria, a momentous meeting, which was also the place where the Mind and Life Institute and independently the Cortona week were conceived. Later on, the scientific cooperation focussed on autopoiesis and permitted to arrive at the experimental autopoiesis on the basis of...
Varela is well known in the systems sciences for his work on second‐order cybernetics, biology of cognition and especially autopoietic theory. His concern during this period was to find an appropriate epistemological foundation for the self‐reference inherent in life and mind. In his later years, Varela began to develop the so‐called ‘enactive’ approach to cognitive science, which sets itself...
Twenty-two years of investigation of spider-web-building and its sensitivity to drugs has produced insight into this invertebrate behavior pattern and its vulnerability. Most data were collected by measuring and analyzing photographs of webs built under different circumstances; groups of web data were subjected to statistical comparisons. Another approach was through analysis of motion pictures...