Humberto R. Maturana’s research while affiliated with University of Santiago Chile and other places

The purpose of this paper is to present a concept of education that stems from the theory of cognition of one of the authors. From this concept the values and competencies (abilities and skills) are proposed that the School of the Future ought to develop as a new learning environment. The following basic statement is discussed: “Education is a process by means of which adequate relational behaviors (i.e. cognitive, affective and psychomotor behaviors) are triggered through which another (or oneself) arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself.” If this emotion is conserved as the fundamental culture that we live together, it is more likely to observe an educational environment in which human beings (adults and children) can live together in autonomy, responsibility and respect for themselves, for others, and for their ecological environment. If these conditions are fulfilled, human actions will be developed with trust and mutual acceptance. We can expect that within this educational and learning environment, persons will interact with enthusiasm in their daily life, they will show creativity when proposing new ideas, ability to assess themselves with equity and to conserve their adequate social behaviors with responsibility and self-respect.

We present here a theoretical framework about the nervous system operation that explains the origin of coordinated behavior without violating the structural determinism inherent to the constitutive autonomy of living systems. At the same time we will show that cognition is not the outcome of a computational task, as it is envisaged by the tradicional paradigm that considers the brain an information processing device, but rather is the results of the spontaneous structural coupling that take place ontogenically and phylogenically between a living system and its circumstances of living.

We propose that to understand the biological and neurophysiological processes that give rise to human mental phenomena it is necessary to consider them as behavioral relational phenomena. In particular, we propose that: a) these phenomena take place in the relational manner of living that human language constitutes, and b) that they arise as recursive operations in such behavioral domain. Accordingly, we maintain that these phenomena do not take place in the brain, nor are they the result of a unique operation of the human brain, but arise with the participation of the brain as it generates the behavioral relational dynamics that constitutes language.

This article is Maturana's response to Morris Berman's review of The Thee of Knowledge by Maturana and Varela. Maturana claims that Berman partially misunderstood the book and explains that, far from advocating passivity in the face of evil, the book asks that we act out of responsible, personally chosen love, instead of from the belief that we hold a better "truth." In the case of Chile, this would mean opposing Pinochet for personal and cultural reasons rather than alleged biological principles of viability. Nothing is gained by attempting to defeat tyrants with the tyranny of our own imposed, alternative truth.

Although according to its etymology the word science means the same as the word knowledge, it has been used in the history of Western thinking to refer to any knowledge whose validity can be defended on methodological grounds, regardless of the phenomenal domain in which it is claimed. In modern times, however, this has progressively changed, and the word science is now most frequently used to refer only to a knowledge validated through a particular method, namely, the scientific method. This progressive emphasis on the scientific method has arisen under two general implicit or explicit assumptions of scientists and philosophers of science alike, namely: a) that the scientific method, either through verification, through corroboration, or through the denial of falsification, reveals, or at least connotes, an objective reality that exists independently of what the observers do or desire, even if it cannot be fully known; and b) that the validity of scientific explanations and statements rests on their connection with such objective reality. It is of this kind of knowledge that I shall speak in this article when speaking of science, and in the process I shall implicitly or explicitly disagree, without giving a full philosophical justification, with one aspect or another of what many classic thinkers of the philosophy of science who discuss these matters in depth have said.1 And I shall do so because I shall speak as a biologist, not as a philosopher, reflecting about science as a cognitive domain generated as a human biological activity. Furthermore, I shall do these reflections attending to what I see that we modern natural scientists do in the praxis of science in order to claim the scientific validity of our statements and explanations, and I shall show how that which we do as scientists relates to what we do as we live our daily lives revealing the epistemological and ontological status of that which we call science.

Birds exhibit a variable retinal organization in terms of foveas and areas of high cell density. The distribution of these retinal structures in different species does not follow phylogenetic lines. In order to study this phenomenon, we presented chickens and pigeons with a luminous bar that could be moved at different speeds and directions in the visual field and could be located at various distances from the animal; head movements were monitored during the presentations. The results show that for a static or slow-moving stimulus the birds adopted a frontal gaze that stabilized the image in the retina, and for a fast-moving stimulus they adopted a lateral gaze that allowed the image to move across the retina. These results reveal that: (a) these two ways of looking correlate with the retinal anatomy, not with the phylogeny, of the species, and (b) these two ways of looking reflect two different sensorimotor systems that involve different anatomical features and neurophysiological properties of the visual system in birds.Copyright © 1988 S. Karger AG, Basel

Applies H. R. Maturana's (1978; Maturana and F. J. Varela, 1987) theory of "bringing forth" reality to the clinical domain. Many common features of therapy are redefined, including the notions of "psychopathology," languaging and conversations, the family, and cognition. New concepts are introduced, notably those of the "multiversa" and the placing of objectivity in parentheses. The role of the socially sanctioned specialist is examined and criticized for pretending to have a privileged access to an objectively existing reality. The authors propose a radical change in epistemology, premised on changes in understanding, which they propose in relation to the ontology of the phenomenon of cognition. Particular attention is given to the orthogonality of the therapist's approach to interacting with families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

It is said that we human beings are rational animals. On account of this, we devalue emotions and exalt rationality so much that, whenever we see some complex behaviour in a non-human animal, we want to ascribe rational thinking to it. In this process, we have made the notion of objective reality a reference to something that we deem universal and independent of what we do, and which we use as an argument aimed at compelling someone to do something against his or her will. As an analysis of this, the article concerns the ontology of reality and is a reflection on the social and ethical consequences that understanding such an ontology may have.

The avian thalamic ventral lateral geniculate nucleus (GLv) was studied by light microscopic techniques in order to understand its anatomy, neuronal composition, and the nature of its retinal and tectal afferents. The avian GLv is of considerable interest because physiological experiments show that it is the brain structure with the highest percentage of color-opponent responses (Maturana and Varela, '82). We used adult pigeons and quail for the present study. With Nissl techniques a predominance of medium-size neurons (58%) constitute the GLv. The shape, size, and orientation of the different neurons is highly variable throughout the GLv. With the Golgi methods, 5 classes of neurons are distinguished: I and IV (large), II (medium-size), III and V (small). Some class IV large neurons have bifurcated axons; no axons were distinguished on the small neurons. Optic fibers penetrating the GLv are often collateral branches of retinal axons that continue elsewhere. Fink-Heimer methods show that retinal axon terminals end around large and medium-size neurons and also reach the internal lamina of the GLv. HRP tracing shows that the large and medium-size neurons of the GLv project to the optic tectum. On the basis of comparisons between the cytoarchitecture of the GLv described here and the physiological findings previously reported (Maturana and Varela, '82; Pateromichelakis, '79), we suggest that: (1) large GLv neurons are the color-opponent units, (2) medium-size neurons are the movement-sensitive units, and (3) small neurons are either interneurons (local circuit neurons), or they might project to the area pretectalis or to some other GLv projection region not yet described.