----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Martens" <sm at kiera.com>
> 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.
=============
Well V's. Buddhism was personal and, I think, had to do with the fact that people like the Buddha and Nagarjuna were among the first to see the limits of bivalent logic. It also made for excellent intercultural exchange--meeting of East & West and all that as researchers in Japan and India see their epistemological traditions as for more fruitful than the legacy we in the West got from guys like Descartes and Locke with the entire mess of dualism and the mind-body 'problem.'
Ian