January 1997

In many of their books/articles both Maturana and Varela state that the operation of *distinction* can only arise once a consensual domain has been established between a group of organisms.
While I can see, more or less clearly, that the opposite of this pro- position is not the case, namely that distinction or reference is not a primitive operation in a consensual domain, I cannot see how this operation actually arises from other, more basic operations.
This is a crucial point (for my work in particular) since it would provide directions as to what (cognitive) requisites would be needed for a society of communicating agents to become a society of observers.

An operation of distiction is something that an observer does as he or she cleaves an entity from a background that arises at the same time as the entity distinguished, and which thus constitutes the domain in which the distinguished entity exists. As the observer exist and operates as such in language, and language is a manner of flowing in living together in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behaviors, distinctions can only take place within the language consensual domain.

A new system arises spontaneously included in a larger system when an operational cleavage occurs within the larger system that constitutes a systemic dynamics that realizes and conserves the organization of the new system. As the new system arises, the larger one becomes the medium of its realization. This process is usually called self-organization. I consider that this expression is fully inadequate because the system arises as the organization that defines it begins to be conserved through the mentioned cleavage and systemic dynamic of conservation. The organization conserved defines the system and constitutes its self, and as such does not preexist its origin. I call the process through which a system arises, spontaneous organization.

The distinction of a system is an act of cognition by an observer, and can occur only in the domain of structural coupling in which he or she operates. And this is so because languaging occurs as a manner of operating in recursive coordinations of consensual behaviors, so the observers can do in language only what is possible within the operational coherences in which they operate. Therefore, there is a basic congrence between what the observer does and the domain of structural coherences in which he or she does his or her doings. This is so precisely because languaging occurs as a flow in coordinations of doings of structure determined systems.

Consensualization occurs as a process in the flow of structural coupling in recursive interactions, as there is recursive interactions it is possible that languaging may take place, and as languaging takes place as a flow in recursive coordinations of consensual behaviors, language occurs in the concretness of structural coupling. Consensual is a notion that connotes what occurs in the flow of living together and as such it is abstract, but the process connoted occurs in the concretness of structural coupling.

Humberto Maturana Romesin.

Santiago de Chile, January 1997.

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