The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

by Fritjof Capra

Cognition, according to Maturana and Varela, is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. In other words, cognition is the very process of life.

The organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. The interactions of a living organism – plant, animal, or human – with its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Mind – or, more ac...

Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system.

He used both “mind” and “mental process,” but always emphasized that “mind” stands for a process, or rather a set of mental processes. At any rate, Maturana made it clear already in his first paper that, like Bateson, he sees no essential difference between the process of human cognition and the cognitive processes of other living beings.

“Our cognitive process,” Maturana (1980/1972, p. 49) wrote, “differs from the cognitive processes of other organisms only in the kinds of interactions into which we can enter, such as linguistic interactions, and not in the nature of the cognitive process itself.”

cognition is closely linked to autopoiesis, the self-generation of living networks. The defining characteristic of an autopoietic system is that it undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its web-like pattern of organization.

According to the theory of autopoiesis, a living system couples to its environment structurally – that is, through recurrent interactions, each of which triggers structural changes in the system

Living systems are autonomous, however. The environment only triggers the structural changes; it does not specify or direct them.

Living systems, then, respond to disturbances from the environment autonomously with structural changes – that is, by rearranging their patterns of connectivity. According to Maturana and Varela, we can never direct a living system; we can only disturb it.

Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living.

consciousness is a special kind of cognitive process that emerges when cognition reaches a certain level of complexity.

The difference between the easy and the hard problem is profound. The easy problem (cognition) has to do with brain mechanisms; the hard problem has to do with the question, how and why personal experience arises.

A full understanding of biological phenomena is reached only when we approach it through the interplay of three different levels of description – the biology of the observed phenomena, the laws of physics and biochemistry, and the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems.

In spite of the differences in the detailed dynamics they describe, the two models of resonant cell assemblies and the dynamic core have much in common.

Both view conscious experience as an emergent property of a transient process of integration, or synchronization, of widely distributed groups of neurons.

In the terminology of the Santiago theory, we may say that the mapping of the body as protoself is the cognitive activity out of which consciousness emerges.

Damasio distinguishes between emotions, which can be triggered and displayed nonconsciously, and feelings, which are emotions made conscious.

Emotions are complex patterns of chemical and neural responses that have specific regulatory functions. Most emotional responses have a long evolutionary history; they automatically provide organisms with survival-oriented behaviors.

A feeling, in Damasio's terminology, is the conscious experience, or “mental...

Core consciousness arises, according to Damasio, when the neural maps of the protoself become mental images; and since these neural maps include the organism's emotional responses to perceived o...

Damasio's core consciousness is created in pulses, each pulse triggered by an object that we interact with or recall.

The continuous “stream of consciousness” arises from the steady generation of consciousness pulses that correspond to the endless processing of myriad objects, whose interactions, actually or recalled, modify the protoself.

our consciousness is not only a biological but also a social phenomenon.

Communication, according to Maturana, is not primarily a transmission of information, but rather a coordination of behavior between living organisms.

Maturana emphasizes that the phenomenon of language does not occur in the brain but in a continual flow of coordinations of behavior.

As humans, we exist in language and we continually weave the linguistic web in which we are embedded.

The first discovery means that most of our thought operates at a level that is inaccessible to ordinary, conscious awareness. This “cognitive unconscious” includes not only our automatic cognitive operations but also our tacit knowledge and beliefs. Without our awareness, the cognitive unconscious shapes and structures all conscious thought.

In other words, the classical Aristotelian syllogism is not a form of disembodied reasoning but grows out of our bodily experience. Lakoff and Johnson argue that this is true for many other forms of reasoning as well. The structures of our bodies and brains determine the concepts we can form and the reasoning we can engage in.

In the same way, we speak of a “warm welcome,” or a “big day,” projecting sensory and bodily experiences onto abstract domains.

The stream of consciousness arises from the steady generation of consciousness pulses that correspond to the endless processing of myriad objects, actual or recalled.

The very structure of reason arises from our bodies and brains. The use of metaphors is fundamental to human thought because it allows us to project bodily experience onto abstract concepts. Indeed, our abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Blaise Pascal put it succinctly in the seventeenth century, “Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.”

The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to atman, the reality within.

In the Buddhist view, mental activity is one of the physical senses (much like in cognitive science), so that there is no opposition between subject and object, self and world.

Moreover, for Buddhists no single phenomenon in the world has an independent, intrinsic reality; all phenomena arise in mutual dependence and are dependent on contextual causes and conditions.

Rather than judging unethical behavior as bad in an absolute sense, Buddhists consider it “unskillful,” because it is a hindrance to one's self-realization.

Durkheim's ideas exerted a major influence on both structuralism and functionalism, the two dominant schools of early twentieth-century sociology.

Such attempts to identify some hidden phenomena – vital forces or other “extra ingredients” – have occurred repeatedly in the life sciences when scientists struggled to understand the emergence of novelty that is characteristic of all life (see Chapter 8) and cannot be explained in terms of linear relations of cause and effect.

Giddens emphasizes that people's strategic conduct is based largely on how they interpret their environment. In fact, he points out that social scientists have to deal with a “double hermeneutic” (from Greek hermeneuein, “to interpret”). They interpret their subject matter, which itself is engaged in interpretations. Consequently, Giddens believes that subjective phenomenological insights must be taken seriously if we are to understand human conduct.

The interaction between social structures and human agency is cyclical, according to Giddens. Social structures are both the precondition and the unintended outcome of people's agency. People draw upon them in order to engage in their daily social practices, and in so doing they cannot help but reproduce the very same structures.

For example, when we speak we necessarily draw upon the rules of our language, and as we use language we continually reproduce and transform the very same semantic structures.

agency does not consist of discrete acts but is a continuous flow of conduct. Similarly, a living metabolic network embodies an ongoing process of life. And as the components of the living network continually transform or replace other components, so the actions in the flow of human conduct have a “transformative capacity” in Giddens’ theory.

Their ultimate task, according to Habermas, is to uncover the structural conditions of people's actions and to help them transcend these conditions. Critical theory deals with power and is aimed at emancipation.

However, he points out that people's interpretations always rely on a number of implicit assumptions that are embedded in history and tradition, and he argues that this means that all assumptions are not equally valid.

According to Habermas, social scientists should evaluate different traditions critically, identify ideological distortions, and uncover their connections with power relations. Emancipation takes place whenever people are able to overcome past restrictions that resulted from distorted communication.

The pattern of organization of any system, living or nonliving, is the configuration of relationships among the system's components that determines the system's essential characteristics.

The configuration of relationships that gives a system its essential characteristics is what we mean by its pattern of organization.

The structure of a system is the physical embodiment of its pattern of organization.

In a living system, by contrast, the components change continually. There is a ceaseless flux of matter through a living organism. Each cell continually synthesizes and dissolves structures, and eliminates waste products.

This striking property of living systems suggests process as a third perspective for a comprehensive description of the nature of life.