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Themesicon: navigation pathAesthetics of the Digitalicon: navigation pathAesthetics/Communication
 
 
 
 
 

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the Chilean biologist Humberto together with the neuroscientist Francisco J. Varela. This theory linked for the first time two areas until then studied only separately: biology, or the theory of the organization of living organisms, and cognitive theory, which is particularly concerned with the problem of the cognition and perception of phenomena. In 1969 Maturana drew up the thesis according to which the nervous system is a closed system. [5]

According to this thesis, living systems are autopoietic. [6] An autopoietic system operates as a closed system that generates only states of autopoiesis. The most important consequence of an autopoietic organization consists in the fact that everything occurring within the system is subjected to autopoiesis; otherwise the living system would collapse, because changes in the state of the organism and of the nervous system as well as of the medium act reciprocally, and so give rise to continuous autopoiesis. That means that living systems are determined by their structure («structure-specified»), and that autopoiesis represents their constitutive attribute. The expansion of the cognitive processes

 

(action and interaction) by the nervous system enables, according to Maturana, non-physical interactions between organisms in simple relationships—and therefore communication. [7]

These non-physical interactions distinguish human beings from organisms that lack a nervous system and in which interactions are purely physical in nature (as in the case of a plant, for example, where the reception of a photon triggers photosynthesis). Communication as interaction is a component of the system, and as a cognitive process does not refer to an autonomous external reality, but is—according to Maturana—a process of behavioral coordination between the observers through structural coupling. In this way, the cognitive domain is characterized by consensual coordinations of actions that enable operations to take place in many different cognitive domains constituting different realization modes of autopoiesis. [8] /p>

If one speaks of a ‹world› or of ‹our culture,› then one would seem to be referring to something external, something independent of humanity, or to ‹an› objective reality. Contradicting this view, Constructivist theory holds that an organism creates its world on the

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