| Chilean School of Biology of Cognition |
| ASK Dr. HUMBERTO MATURANA |
Dr Maturana,
You have often spoken about perception and have characterized it interms of 'congruent action'.
In your published work you do not seem to have discussed how it is that weactually SEE a world that appears (at first sight) to BE IN FRONT OF US outside of our bodies.
Could you comment on this. I know that you say that objects arise in languaging. Does vision have a location.
Finally, when you say that we make things exist in language what about autopoietic systems. Do they only 'insist' until they are distinguished by an observer in language.
Perception is a comentary that an observer does when he or she sees some animal operating congruently with its circumstances in the flow of its interactions.
So, perception occurs as a process of congruent operation with the circumstances that results of the congruent structural dynamics of the organism and the medium as a result of a history of congruent structural changes of the organism and medium.
Seeing occurs in the living in coherence with the medium with the perticipation of the eyes. So, actually seeing the world outside is a manner of describing what happens in seeing by an observer.
I say that objects arise as distinctions of the observer in language as they appear in conversations as entities. They are not made by language, they are operations or coordinations of operations in conversations. We usually act and speak as if it had sense to say that objects exist by themselves prior to the distinction that brings them about. BUT TO THE EXTENT THAT WE EXIST IN LANGUAGING THAT HAS NO SENSE. at the same time, once we have generated a domain of objects in a conversation, and as we operate in that domain, we can operate as if the objects of that domain existed independently from us. Remember that we are explaining experiences, as closed structure determined systems, and we are not referring to an independent reality.
The notion of autopoiesis is an explanatory notion, and to say that living systems are molecular autopoietic systems is both the explanation of living systems and the claim that if there were a molecular autopoietic system, a living system would be there.