-----Original Message----- From: Cian O'Connor <cian_oconnor at yahoo.co.uk> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 3:49 PM Subject: Re: Marxism is a science
>Do you have any good references for this stuff, it
>sounds fascinating.
Francesco Varela died in last May. His home page is at http://web.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela/, but there is little there but a bibliography. He was a major figure in the philosophy of embodiment, which is similar to some Marxist tendencies in philosophy. Embodiment has become a major heterodox school of thought in linguistics and philosophy of consciousness. In linguistics, its most visible anglophone adherent is George Lakoff.
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/t-Ch.12.html has some discussion of Varela.
This field is near the centre of the research I'm trying to do: connectionism, language, emergence and the roots of human consciousness. This field is still struggling under the heavy weight of a notion alternately called "symbolicism", "symbolic realism" or "the physical symbol systems hypothesis." Varela was a fairly important figure in the anti-symbolicist camp. The work Ian Murray is describing relates to a problem most widely called "the symbol grounding problem."
IMHO, extending cybernetic theory into the new ideas about emegence and embodiment (as well as the new data on biological cognition) is the most crying need cognitive science has, and Varela's work makes something of a contribution in that direction. His grafting of Buddhism into it doesn't help, and makes him sometimes as hard to read as Hegel.
This is a field of research littered with the ruins of older lines of work and rife with ideology. All too often, it's most important researchers run a huge risk of becoming mystics and loosing all value to scientists. Varela's work ran awfully close to that line.
Scott Martens
>>The guy was a genius and
>> appreciated dialectics and
>> really helped move some debates in interesting and
>> profound directions
>> for a biological and *ecologically* motivated
>> epistemology which would
>> be of enormous benefit if more people wrestled with
>> the issues as he
>> framed them. His take on the responsibility of
>> scientists and
>> technology designers is etremely challenging.
>> Recursion leads to
>> virtuous circles...robust maps and maps of maps of
>> metabolisms and
>> other manifestations of cellular and organismic and
>> ecological
>> complexity........
>
>
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