Přemítání o věcech, jevech a lidech kolem nás a nakonec i o sobě sama - tedy o tom jak uvažujeme, co prožíváme a jak se chováme - může být pro mnohé procesem značně nesnadným. Nebývá jednoduché odpovědět na otázky, které se během vlastních úvah vynořují: Vidím skutečnost ...

The scientific study of self-organizing systems is relatively new, although questions about how organization arises have of course been raised since ancient times. The forms we identify around us are only a small sub-set of those theoretically possible. So why don't we see more variety ? To answer to such ...

Today "systems theory" is a catchall concept for very different denotations and very different levels of analysis. The word refers to no unambiguous meaning. When one introduces the concept of system into sociological analyses without further clarification, then an illusory precision arises that lacks any basis. Thus controversies arise in ...

The term 'autopoiesis' has been invented to define life its origin is clearly biological. Its extension to other fields has been discussed, but rather unsuccessfully and on the wrong premises. The problem may well be that we use a questionable approach to the issue, 'tangling' our 'hierarchies' of investigation.

My intent in this essay is to reflect on the history of some biological notions such as autopoiesis, structural coupling, and cognition, that I have developed since the early 1960's as a result of my work on visual perception and the organization of the living. No doubt I shall repeat ...

I am not a linguist, I am a biologist. Therefore, I shall speak about language as a biologist, and address myself to two basic biological questions, namely: 1. What processes must take place in an organism for it to establish a linguistic domain with another organism? 2. What processes take ...

The answers to these two questions would have been obvious years ago: Human beings, of course, machines are instruments of human design! But now days when we speak so much of progress, science and technology as if progress, science and technology were in themselves values to be venerated, there are ...

My purpose in this essay is to explain cognition as a biological phenomenon, and to show, in the process, how language arises and gives origin to self consciousness, revealing the ontological foundations of the physical domain of existence as a limiting cognitive domain. In order to do this I shall ...

| Ontology of Observing

To consider the implications of the operation of the nervous sys- tem – and of the constitution of cultures as closed networks of languaging and emotioning – for how we understand and generate so-called “virtual realities.”

| The Biological Foundations of Virtual Realities and Their Implications for Human Existence

My very first meeting with Gianfranco was in the summer of 1982 when he visited Dublin as part of a holiday in Ireland with his daughter. My colleague, Nollaig Byrne had met him previously at the Ackerman Institute in New York. They had been by Monica McGoldrick, our mutual friend. ...