[Buddha-l] Query about Francisco Varela

[Vaj]

Hey Barnaby:

On Jan 10, 2007, at 4:51 PM, Barnaby Thieme wrote:

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

I appreciate you taking the time.

>
> 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.

I just started reading this book and this covers a lot of what I've  
read so far.

>
> 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.

Cooperative, co-emergent arising of inseparable "microidentity" and  
"microworld" seems to be what I'm getting thus far in my reading (if  
I had to sutrify the first lecture). This would be where a  
microidentity is readiness (responsiveness?) to interpret the  
microworld of our sense contacts for any given situation--and the  
natural interdependence of these two in perception.

>
> 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.

Thanks, I'm enjoying this work so far.

Best,

Steve

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