In the early 1970s, biologists argued that the living cell, when conceptualized as an autopoietic or self-producing system, is the continual creation of itself. Varela ( 1979 ) defi ned the unity of autopoietic systems as organized networks of the pro- cesses of transformation and destruction through which the system continuously regenerated and realized the processes or relations that produced it. Maturana and Varela ( 1987 ), Varela ( 1979 ), and Maturana, Varela, and Uribe ( 1974 ) adapted prin- ciples from cybernetics 9 and dynamic systems theory to explain how structural change within a biological system defi nes its unity, identity, stability, and internal coherence. Autopoiesis sparked a new way of thinking about the structural deter- minism of biological systems and the roots of human understanding. 10
The theory of autopoiesis revisited and called into question theories regarding the unity of consciousness, atomism, empiricism, and representationalism, of great concern to philosophers of the classical modern era such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hume, Brentano, James, and Peirce. For example, the question for Kant (1781/ 2003 ) was determining the form that cognition had to take to make the experience of the world possible. He found pure knowledge in universal a priori, theoretical and deductive, not empirical categories, and claimed that only through representation could we know something as an object (phenomena) given that the law of causality, founded on mathematics, has its a priori basis in human understanding. In contrast, James ( 1890 , 1892 / 1961 ) believed that a thing could not be known through its representation, but must be directly experienced.
However, the ground itself did not need to be structured before the mind splits pure experience into subject- object and other categories of interpreted experience (James, 1885 ; Taylor, 1996 ). 11
With regard to representation, the central concern of the enactive approach to cognition has remained in contradistinction to the received view that perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of environmental information. Knowledge is itself enacted. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch ( 1991 ) approached the problem of knowledge from a Buddhist perspective arguing that there is no independent, fi xed, or unitary self within the world of pure experience. There is, instead, a selfl essness or egolessness, a rapidly shifting stream of momentary mental occurrences that include the
perceiver and the perceived (in which the Buddhists’ fi ve aggregates, constituting a psychophysical complex, made up the person and each moment of their experi- ence). 12 They argued that while self, as an emergent property or process of these aggregates, is empty of self, it is full of experience. Meaning is not located in cogni- tive symbols or representations, but is instead a function of the global state of the system’s complex pattern of activity emerging from the interactions of its many constituents. Varela et al. resolved this problem as follows:
In effect, if we presuppose the existence of an objective world, independent of us as observ- ers and accessible to our knowledge through our nervous system, we cannot understand how our nervous system functions in its structural dynamics and still produces a representation of this independent world. But, if we do not presuppose an objective world independent of us as observers, it seems we are accepting that everything is relative and anything is possible in the denial of all lawfulness. Thus we confront the problem of under- standing how our experience—the praxis of our living—is coupled to a surrounding world, which appears fi lled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories. ( 1991 , pp. 240–241)
Varela’s Selfl ess Self . Given the enactive view of human knowledge, Varela called for a science of the “sense of self” in which biological cognition was not considered a representation of the world “out there,” but rather an ongoing bringing- forth of a world, through the process of living itself. Thus, the theory of autopoiesis attempted to defi ne the uniqueness of the emergence that produced life in its fundamental cel- lular form, i.e., biochemical pathways of the cell and its membranes continuously regenerate through the internal production of substratum components, and bio- chemical states of the organism transform the state of activity of neural networks by acting on the neuron’s membrane receptors. Having no fi xed point of reference, Varela believed that human beings, as autopoietic, homeostatic systems, regenerate, recreating themselves by their own mutual interactions as a natural drift.
Throughout his life, Varela’s position remained situated in the context of what he saw as the irreducible nature of conscious experience. He studied phenomenal expe- rience or embodiment as lived from the point of view of the subject’s fi rst-person experience associated with cognitive and mental events (i.e., attention, present- time- consciousness, body image, volition, perceptual fi lling in, fringe, center, and emotion), which represented an irreducible ontological level that retained its quality of immediacy because it played a role in the organism’s structural coherence.
Consciousness was a distributed phenomenon of the whole active organism, not just the brain embedded in its environment. Rejecting the computational, logical views of the mind in favor of the concrete embodied lived description of its processes, Varela saw the mind as a selfl ess or a virtual self—“a coherent whole that is nowhere to be found, and yet can provide an occasion for the coordinated activity of neural ensembles” ( 1992 , p. 60).
What are the differences between an embodied versus non-embodied approach to cognition? If one uses a non-embodied approach, sensory systems inform the cognitive system and then the motor system does the cognitive system’s bidding.
The non-embodied view is that there are causal relations between the systems, the sensory and motor systems are not constitutive of cognition. However, if one uses
an embodied approach, the relation of the sensorimotor system to cognition is both causally linked and constitutive (Adams, 2010 ). Human beings as dynamic systems are characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy, and are therefore not reducible to the more basic mental and physical events that constitute them.
However, while self may be emergent and constructed, it is not virtual (Mackenzie, 2010 , 2012 ). Self-constitution is an active, embodied, embedded, self- organizing process. Reality is not given. It is instead perceiver-dependent.
As Thompson ( 2007 ) notes, the emergent process of self-making is grounded in the fundamentally recursive processes that characterize lived experience: autopoi- esis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of con- scious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the level of intersubjectivity. While self may be dependently originated and empty, it is never- theless real. The Buddhist-enactive conception of the self provides a middle path in which the stream of experience becomes self-referential through the structure of time-consciousness. The embodied being is thus prerefl ectively aware of itself in and through its active striving body.
The doctrine of nonself or anātman that Varela and others refer to is in essence a rejection of the atmān or the enduring substantial self and one of the most contro- versial aspects of Buddhism. Siderits, Thompson, and Zahavi ( 2011 ) offer a won- derful interdisciplinary discussion of consciousness and the self characterized as a type of self-reference, self-illumination, or sense of self . Nonself theorists (Krueger, Albahari, Dreyfus, and Ganeri) do not infer from the sense of self that self really exists because they claim that it is not ontologically grounded, but arises from the stream of consciousness. For them, the emergence of self is only “a useful fi ction that helps to maintain the sense of agency and mobilize action-guided emotions”
( 2011 , p. 137). In contrast, self theorists (Zahavi, Thompson, Fasching, and Ram Prasad) speak of self as the mode of givenness or essential structure of conscious- ness, which is prerefl ective, subjective, and self-revealed (Cai, 2012 ). They argue that a correspondence between conception and realty is required only if the sense of self is an epistemic state, which takes the self as its objective content. While the self theorists offer no counterargument that defeats the Buddhist doctrine, their charac- terization of the sense of self (phenomenal character of consciousness) as “self- illuminating” captures the feature, which preconditions the sense of self that the nonself theorists concentrate on.
It is also important to note that Varela derived his concept of “self” and “no self”
from immunology as well as Buddhist philosophy. Vaz and Varela ( 1978 ) provide an autopoietic framework for understanding the genetic induction and cellular inter- actions of the immune system. Their hypothesis was that the immune system is a closed network of interactions that self-determines its ongoing pattern of stability and capacities of interaction with its environment. Thus, immune events are a form of self-recognition. For example, in the operation of the lymphoid network, cellular interactions are not only complex, they are self-determined (p. 236). Varela also drew parallels between the nervous and lymphoid systems with regard to ontoge- netic development. Every “recognition event” was followed by some form of action that changed the responsiveness of the system through learning that was based on
the plasticity of synaptic contacts (p. 245). At variance with the assumptions of the times (e.g., clonal selection theory), Varela and Vaz’s picture of the immune system stressed the cooperative nature of events typical of lymphoid cells as a network of interactions that defi ned the organism’s macromolecular individuality (p. 255).
How did Varela view self in relation to mind? Varela ( 1999 ) described the mind as phenomenology in action. Viewed from both the fi rst-person and third- person perspectives, he situated behavior in a specifi c cycle of operation where the locus of the mind emerged through a distributed process within its organizational closure.
Mind was an aspect of a pattern in fl ux in which our concrete biophysical being lives. As embodied selves in dynamic equilibrium, we continually emerge in inter- actions of constituents and interactions of interactions. Varela and Cohen ( 1989 ) viewed the body as the locus where the corporal ego emerges such that the ego gives rise to a sense of self in which this selfl ess self takes on a form so that it looks like our experience inside. Experience continuously shapes this dynamic core at all lev- els of reciprocal causality through the organizational complementarity of the circu- lar closure of its nervous, hormonal, and mechanical pathways. Varela ( 1991 ) conceptualized the organism’s identity as an autonomous self, its constitution, nature, and mode of existence as a meshwork of selfl ess selves:
Thus we need to deal with a multiplicity of regional selves, all of them having some mode of self-constitution, and in their overall assemblage giving rise to an organism. Accordingly, I want to invoke here the following “regional” selves: (1) a minimal or cellular unity, (2) a bodily self in its immunological foundations, (3) a cognitive perceptuo-motor self associated to animal behavior, (4) a socio-linguistic ‘I’ of subjectivity, and (5) the collective social multi- individual totality. In all these regions we are dealing with levels and processes where an identity comes about—not as substance, but as movement—and whose fabric of articulation is the organism. To efface the multiplicity of this meshwork is a source of confusion. (p. 80)
Varela et al. ( 1991 ) argued that cognitive science does not distinguish between the idea or representation of the self and the actual basis of that representation, which is the individual’s grasping after an ego-self, nor does it take seriously its own fi ndings of the lack of self, which is rooted in not having a disciplined method for examining human experience. Their concept of embodiment provided for the emer- gence of a global state among resonating neuronal ensembles in which the auto- nomic, neuroendocrine, and limbic systems, as autopoietic networks or aggregates of resonant neurons, have patterns of activity that are altered by experience—the phenomenological life world, intentionality, and attention through a process of becoming that is conditioned by its past. Knowledge is thus the result of ongoing subjective interpretations that emerge from our capacities of understanding rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment that are enacted within the domain of consensual action and cultural history.