To encourage the reading of the paper concerning Varela's contributions to our questions about consciousness and mind, I'm going to post a longer extract.
". . . if, in Francisco’s view, the environment
doesn’t contain pre-defined information
that is independent of the “domain of
coupling“ that the autonomous system
defines, it literally in-forms the system’s
coping 21.
As a complex, distributed, circular
biophysical system that is self-affirming,
“the body is the place of intersection of the
different identities emerging from closure,
which makes it so that inside and outside
are intricated. We are and we live in such
an intertwined place. Our body doesn’t
have a single external identity alone but
constitutes a meshwork divided and
intertwined without any other solid
foundation than its own procedural
[processuelle] determination” (Varela and
Cohen, 1989).
So, what is embodied?
The notion of “cycles of operation”
(Thompson and Varela, 2001) conceptually
circumscribes the deployment of the
embodied mind as a process that takes place
in a context of constant coping. It provides
the understanding of mind with a kind of
“unity of action,” that evokes its dynamical
status and temporal extension. Here we
will look more closely at how Francisco
approached the issue of the locus of this
embodied mind. The central problem is
therefore how to define the correct level of
existence of what we intuitively call the
mind.
The term itself, em-bodiment, refers to
something immanent to the system, shaping
its way of being in the world, its way of
being coupled. In Francisco’s view,
cognition was nothing other than this
dynamical “coupling” (Varela, 1981;
Varela, 1983). From a phenomenological
point of view, in our daily apprehension,
our mind appears as a very integrated
phenomenon, which extends beyond
conscious experience; it behaves as a global
phenomenon actively asserting its identity,
our identity, with a certain autonomy. We
could say that, as such, the mind behaves as
a self-concerned cognition, or, in the
framework of autonomous systems, a mode
of persistence, i.e. a dynamic core,
associated with a way of interacting, often
with itself.
Francisco liked to use intuitions from our
daily experience, and considered it as a
valid domain of investigation. He illustrated
the irreducible “global” nature of the mind
as embodied through the way we as humans
interact among ourselves. For you, I’m an
entity that interacts with you in a noncompact
temporal process (if you look at
the precise phenomenology of our
interactions): my answers to your questions,
as you can see when you are waiting for
them, take time; my mind’s operations take
time. My concrete mind also acts as an
actual though indirect level of coupling,
which you can perceive through our
sustained exchange and communication,
that involves a global synergy of corporal
operations engaging me as an individual.
This global level of me as an individual
appearing in our mind-related interactions
is “a mode of existence of which you cannot
say it doesn’t exist. (‘Francisco doesn’t
exist’)”, and without which nothing real
would remain of what leads you to see me
as minded or imbued with a subjectivity.
There is a domain of mutual coupling and
mutual determination in which the person
whole is brought forth. This ontological
level of the behaving whole in my body
cannot be denied. As soon as you try to
reduce it to independent sub-systems, you
lose it. This resistance to reduction is the
direct expression of its systemic nature.
Francisco claimed: “I’m an integrated, more
or less harmonic unity that I call ‘myself’
or ‘my’ mind, and you interact with me at
that level: ‘Hi, Francisco.’ That interaction
is happening at the level of individuality,
which is the global, the emergent. Yet we
know that the global is at the same time
cause and consequence of the local actions
that are going on in my body all the time”
(Varela, 1999b). Thus, from both the
biophysical and the concrete experiential
points of view, there is no central “I,” other
than the one sporadically actualized in a
linguistic, self-referential mode in
communication. The “I” can only be
localized as an emergence but it acts as the
center of gravity of the subject himself, of
his real-life experience”(Varela, 1993).
So, “if the mind is not in the head, where
the hell is it?” The answer takes the form of
an enigmatic paradox: “[that’s] precisely
the point here: it is in this non-place of the
co-determination of inner and outer, so one
cannot say that is outside or inside” (Varela,
1999b). My mind is a “selfless self” (or
“virtual self”): “a coherent whole which is
nowhere to be found and yet can provide an
occasion for coupling” (Varela, 1991).
Because of its radical embodiment, the mind
is not a substantial mind: “The mind neither
exists nor does it not exist [...] it is and it
isn’t there” (Varela, 1999b). Finally: “it
does not physically or functionally reside
anywhere” (Varela, 1997c).
If we want to insist on looking at the mind
objectively, as a “cycle of operation,” that
we can describe, we might be satisfied with
considering it as a spatially and temporally
distributed process that behaves in a way
that corresponds to a “mind.” The mind as
a phenomenology in action, viewed from
either a first- or a third-person perspective,
can be described as a behavior, literally
situated in a specific cycle of operation.
Francisco thus conceived of it as a
“behavioral cognition” working “at the
level of a spatially behavioral bodily entity”
(Varela, 1991). The notion of “behavioral
cognition” equates having a mind with
having a particular behavior. Francisco
asserted that each of us, as a “minded”
living being, is a dynamical process open
to interaction with others and itself. The
“locus” of the mind is an “emergence
through a distributed process” within the
organizational closure. But, as a process of
organization, “a non-substantial self can
nevertheless act as if present, like a virtual
interface” (Varela, 1991).
Here we must be careful not to
misinterpret Francisco: as we said earlier,
he had no doubt as to the mechanical origin
of this global entity. “Virtual entity
(Varela, 1997c) or not, dualism and
functionalism are excluded. As stated in
the first section with respect to the
fundamental expression of embodiment, all
wholeness in the physical space is the
organizational closure of its parts, and, as
such, is radically embedded in its
interacting constituents and processes and
is continuously generated by them. Mind is
an aspect of the “pattern in flux” in which
our concrete, biophysical being lives
(Varela, 1999b). It depends on multiple
levels of constitution, and is a way in which
the system is coupled within itself and with
the environment.
As such, it conserves the general
properties of the autonomous systems
described above. That is, the mechanical
conservation of an identity, brought forth
by an internal dynamic core, in a specific
embodiment, giving rise to a history of
coupling through the particular coping of
the system with its environment, defining
regularities and making a particular being
in the world. As a biophysical process of
“bringing forth” identity, it is not surprising
that phenomenologically our mind has a
self-affirming quality. Physically, this
operation of “bringing forth” can be related
in part to the non-linear dynamics of the
brain, since the brain is the strongest source
of self-organization in us and the most
plastic one: “the operational closure of the
nervous system then brings forth a specific
mode of coherence, which is embedded in
the organism. This observable coherence is
a cognitive self : a unit of perception/motion
in space, sensory-motor invariances
mediated through the interneuron network
[...] the cognitive self is the manner in
which the organism through its own self-produced
activity becomes a distinct entity
in space, but always coupled to its
corresponding environment from which it
remains nevertheless distinct” (Varela,
1991).22 Thus, from the point of view of the
external observer, the experimentalist for
example, who must voluntarily distance
himself from the natural coupling with his
object, this cognitive self evokes the
embodied waves of an active dynamic core
reverberating through the entire living
body. Its determination, or persistence
remind us of what we usually think of as
will.
As embodied acting selves, we are a
global dynamical process, in a dynamical
equilibrium, emerging and acting from
interactions of constituents and interactions
of interactions: “organisms, those
fascinating meshworks of selfless selves,
no more, nor less than open-ended, multilevel
circular existences, always driven by
the lack of significance they engender by
asserting their presence” (Varela, 1991).
However, Francisco viewed the body as a
dynamical “locus where a corporal ego can
emerge” (Varela and Cohen, 1989). This
issue of the ego giving rise to a sense of self
must be situated in Francisco’s theory in a
very particular field of causality, that shapes
embodiment.
The morphodynamical field and its
dialectics with the dynamic core
With the notion of the cycle of operation
we have begun to specify the nature of the
system’s coping and the notion of the
selfless self as a dynamical, embodied
expression of the dynamic core at work in
the individual. But how does the selfless
self take on a form so that it “looks like”
our experience from the inside? The lived
ego of the embodied mind must be thought
of as the continuous shaping of the dynamic
core. But again, beyond the basics of the
specific medium of our embodiment
sketched above, it is essential to understand
the levels of causality at which the
embodied coping, that constitutes our mind,
occurs. One of the fundamental sources of
shaping, according to Francisco, was the
body shape itself: “ the most specific
property of multicellular organisms is to
show a form. This last one gives a body to
their operational closure and becomes the
key to understand many dimensions of their
operations” (Varela, 1988b). . . . ."
These claims extracted from Varela's thirty-year career as a biologist, cyberneticist, and neuroscientist are not empty declarations but necessary conclusions from his observations and thinking in laboratories and in life. To see this, one has to at least read this paper in its entirety. But it would also be beneficial to read The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Varela and Evan Thompson and Thompson et al's continuing works based in Varela's insights.
'Enactive cognition' is the term that designates the discipline of neurophenomenology that competes today with reductive approaches to consciousness and mind. I've linked papers and books from this discipline earlier in this now three-part thread and I think we need to incorporate some knowledge of this research program in our efforts to explore consciousness and mind without resorting to reductivism and its parochial consequences in our thinking..
