in the mind of Tao

Those who believe in substantiality

are like cows

those who believe in emptiness

are even worse
Saraha

In the area of cognitive sciences the development of an alternative guideline to the two dominant paradigms, cognitivism and connectionist-emergence, for the study of consciousness and Self has been carried on in the last years of his life by Francisco Varela with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosh, as a natural development of the autopoietic model of living systems by Maturana and Varela which sets cognition as the life process.

In the first part the authors outline the reference phenomenology:

A Fundamental Circularity:

In the Mind of the Reflective Scientist

An Already-Given Condition

A phenomenologically inclined cognitive scientist reflecting on the origins of cognition might reason thus: Minds awaken in a world. We did not design our world. We simply found ourselves with it; we awoke both to ourselves and to the world we inhabit. We come to reflect on that world as we grow and live. We reflect on a world that is not made, but found, and yet it is also our structure that enables us to reflect upon this world. Thus in reflection we find ourselves in a circle: we are in a world that seems to be there before reflection begins, but that world is not separate from us.

For the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the recognition of this circle opened up a space between self and world, between the inner and the outer. This space was not a gulf or divide; it embraced the distinction between self and world, and yet provided the continuity between them. Its openness revealed a middle way, an entredeux. In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote,

When I begin to reflect, my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience, moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself .... Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them: The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

And toward the end of the book, he wrote, “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.”

Science (and philosophy for that matter) has chosen largely to ignore what might lie in such an entre-deux or middle way. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty could be held partly responsible, for in his Phenomenology at least, he saw science as primarily unreflective; he argued that it naively presupposed mind and consciousness. Indeed, this is one of the extreme stances science can take. The observor that a nineteenth-century physicist had in mind is often pictured as a disembodied eye looking objectively at the play of phenomena. Or to change metaphors, such an observor could be imagined as a cognizing agent who is parachuted onto the earth as an unknown, objective reality to be charted. Critiques of such a position, however, can easily go to the opposite extreme. The indeterminacy principle in quantum mechanics, for example, is often used to espouse a kind of subjectivism in which the mind on its own “constructs” the world. But when we turn back upon ourselves to make our own cognition our scientific theme-which is precisely what the new science of cognition purports to do-neither of these positions (the assumption of a disembodied observor or of a dis-worlded mind) is at all adequate.