From Being to Doing: the Origins of the Biology of Cognition

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2006), "From Being to Doing: the Origins of the Biology of Cognition", Kybernetes, Vol. 35 No. 1/2, pp. 244-246. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2006.35.1_2.244.4

This is in the same style as two earlier books having Bernhard Poerksen as joint author and motivator. (Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics, with Heinz von Foerster, and The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism, in which Poerksen reports interviews with a number of workers.) The present book stems from a series of conversations for which he visited Humberto Maturana in Chile for some weeks. The title indicates that Maturana's theories stem from observations of the activity of living systems rather than merely their structure.

As Heinz von Foerster says in a note on the back cover, the book is “rich in anecdote”. The anecdotes are of two kinds. Some of them give an interesting glimpse of Maturana's life, from impecunious early years after his maternal grandfather was murdered in Bolivia and he and his mother spent two years in an Indian community in the Andes. His thinking was also influenced by long periods of illness, and near‐death experience. At a later stage, when he was a university professor, he had no alternative to remaining in Chile during Pinochet's dictatorship, and had exchanges with the dictator in which he showed exceptional integrity and courage.

Other anecdotes, however, are used by Maturana to illustrate aspects of theory, and many of these I found unconvincing. Along with Heinz von Foerster he is a leading advocate of the current idea of “constructivism“, and originator of the mantra: “Anything said is said by an observer”. This is presumably true, though the use of the term “observer” rather than “speaker” acknowledges outside influence of some sort. Scepticism about the more extreme constructivist viewpoints has been expressed in an article in this journal (Kybernetes Vol. 33, No. 9/10, pp. 1392‐5, 2004).

What seems to me to be an unfortunate feature of various discussions in this area is that there is no distinction between the justifiable aim of being as objective as possible (for example, by using approved statistical methods to process results) and what might be termed “extreme objectivism”. Application of statistical methods certainly does not allow description of any ultimate reality, but nevertheless the methods are valuable, if only in guarding against the unavoidable “wishful thinking” of experimenters who would like to see their efforts rewarded by interesting results.

It is undeniable that, as stressed by Maturana and von Foerster, conclusions and theories are constructions by the observer, though subject to somewhat greater constraints than they seem to acknowledge. In their arguments they use the term “responsibility” in a sense that is difficult to fathom, in saying that the observer should take responsibility for his views (and that the attempt to be objective is a shirking of this). This, however, does not make sense without an indication of to whom, or to what, responsibility is owed, and such indication seems to be missing.

At one point in the book, Maturana discusses responsibility, but in a social context in which the effects of actions on other people should be considered. Applied to theory construction, such an interpretation would imply that scientific findings should be edited according to eventual political and social outcomes, a conclusion that I am sure was not intended by Maturana or von Foerster.

It is, of course, one thing to discuss these matters with reference to an assumed academic research environment, and quite another to think of them in the context of oppressive regimes in which there is extreme pressure to conform to an alien viewpoint. The thinking of several advocates of constructivism has been shaped by such experience, in which they displayed remarkable courage. However, respect for this does not eliminate fundamental problems.

Maturana makes many reference to “love” and claims to have developed a biology of love. There seems to be no great difference between his use of the term and the more prosaic “altruism” discussed much earlier by geneticists Haldane and Hamilton, and in a more modern context by Axelrod (1984). There may be a shade of difference in the treatments in that Maturana considers human interaction with perhaps a rather deeper “meeting of minds” than visualised by the earlier workers, but otherwise there is no very obvious difference.

Maturana is also the originator of the theory of autopoiesis, or self‐production of living organisms. After much consideration he decided this is the essential characteristic that defines life. Essentially, circular processes are involved, whereby the membrane of a living cell produces protein molecules that participate in the cell's metabolism and give rise to further molecules that maintain the membrane. The theory has been around for a considerable time with, for example, an early survey by Zeleny (1981) Maturana advocates an approach based on this to the study of living systems, apparently to the exclusion of others that put greater emphasis on communication. He therefore finds little common ground between himself and McCulloch and Pitts, and certainly very little with Minsky.

This stance seems surprising for an experimental biologist who has examined visual pathways, and was involved with Lettvin in the famous study of frog vision. Disillusionment with such approaches seems to have stemmed from his failure to identify units in the visual tract of the pigeon responding to components of colour. This is an interesting finding, and would seem to have something in common with the discovery by Melzack and Wall (1982) that there are no specific pain fibres in the nervous system. A shift of attention to autopoiesis seems a strange reaction to such a finding.

When first enunciated, the principle of autopoiesis was seized upon with enthusiasm by sociologists and others including Stafford Beer. It is interesting to learn from the new book that Maturana is sceptical of the applications that go outside biology. The book includes useful discussions of education and psychotherapy, but invoking the idea of love rather than of autopoiesis.

Maturana now holds an agreeable academic position in Chile, and is not anxious to compete and defend his views widely, as he might once have been. In the book the views are expressed rather dogmatically, though this is understandable and perhaps permissible in the interview situation with himself as focus. Bernhard Poerksen has once more done an admirable job in asking appropriate questions and compiling the account.

The book is extremely valuable in reviewing the contributions of Maturana and in indicating his current thinking. There are aspects that do not entirely make sense to me, though some of them might be resolved elsewhere in the extensive literature associated with constructivism and autopoiesis.