[Buddha-l] Query about Francisco Varela

[Barnaby Thieme]

Hi Vaj

I apologize for the delay in responding to you - I sometimes check Buddha-L 
infrequently.

It's hard to summarize Varela's position concisely, but a quck shorthand way 
of describing his position would be to call him a constructivist. That is, 
he argued that what we experience is a highly-ordered representation of 
sense data that is determined and constrained significantly by cognitive 
processing. The perceptual act is by no means a passive representation of of 
a given world, but a highly-active process of construal that involves 
perceptual and semantic parsing at every step.

A simple illustration of this fact of perception is to observe that for 
every nerve travelling from the retina to the visual cortex, there are ten 
travelling in the opposite direction. Within the supposedly-bare act of 
visual processing at its very source, the mind is intensively active in 
shaping and determining the structure of visual information based on 
heuristics, prediction, and filling-in-the blanks. This is precisely why 
although we all have 2 blind spots in our visual field, we are almost never 
aware of them.

Visual objects must therefore be understood as artifacts of a cooperative 
endeavor by the world and the subject to co-construct a non-arbitrary visual 
space that does not ultimately correspond to a static external universe of 
things in the way the naive realist would suppose.

Following the Buddhist principle of the Middle Way, the prudent cognitive 
scientist is quick to point out that this does mean that we are free to 
envision any desired reality we wish, not, as some charlatans would have us 
believe. Varela would take issue with the old story about Chandrakirti 
milking a painting of a cow.

Varela is far more knowledgeable and eloquent than I in expressing these 
views, and I commend him to any interested party.

regards,
Barnaby Thieme


_________________________________

It's my manner. It looks insubordinate, but it isn't, really. - T. E. 
Lawrence




>From: Vaj <vajranatha at earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: Buddhist discussion forum <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
>To: Buddhist discussion forum <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
>Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] Query about Francisco Varela
>Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2007 16:35:13 -0500
>
>
>On Jan 4, 2007, at 2:53 PM, Barnaby Thieme wrote:
>
>>I'd also highly recommend his magnificent short essay "Ethical Know- How". 
>>I've read quite a bit of Vaela's work and found this to be  accessable, 
>>to-the-point, and extremely illuminating, without  sacrificing precision 
>>or complexity of outlook. It's a wonderful,  wonderful book.
>
>
>Hi Barnaby:
>
>Thanks for the recommendation, it looks excellent so I've ordered it.  But 
>I have to ask you one thing. The description of the book states  that it 
>describes "creating an ethics adequate to our present  awareness that there 
>is no such thing as a transcendental self, a  stable subject, or a soul." 
>Can you outline the argument he posits  for this using neurobiology and 
>cognitive science (or whatever basis  he presents)? I'm dying to hear his 
>rationale!
>
>TIA,
>Sincerely,
>
>Steve Feite
>
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