"There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all […] Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain [...] there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment." (Francisco Varela, "On being autonomous: The lessons of natural history for systems theory", 1977)
"An autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (a) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produce them and, (b) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Francisco Varela, "Principles of Biological Autonomy", 1979)
"Autopoietic organization simply means processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitutes it as a unity." (Francisco Varela & Humberto Maturana "Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living", 1980)
"The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine." (Francisco Varela & Humberto Maturana "Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living", 1980)
"A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations. However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction. But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member. In such a community information and ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles-even the diversity of mistakes-will enrich the entire community." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"As observers we designate as communicative those behaviors which occur in social coupling, and as communication that behavioral coordination which we observe as a result of it." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"By behavior we mean the changes of a living being's position or attitude, which an ob-server describes as movements or actions in relation to a certain environment." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"By cultural behavior we mean the transgenerational stability of behavioral patterns ontogenically acquired in the communicative dynamics of a social environment." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social ( linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Each time an observer describes the inter-actions that occur between two or more organisms as if the meaning he attributes to them determined the course of those interactions, the observer is making a description in semantic terms." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Each time in a system that a state arises as a modification of a previous state, we have a historical phenomenon." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Knowing is effective action, that is, operating effectively in the domain of existence of living beings." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Organization denotes those relations that must exist among the components of a system for it to be a member of a specific class. Structure denotes the components and relations that actually constitute a particular unity and make its organization real." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"The dynamics of any system can be explained by showing the relations between its parts and the regularities of their interactions so as to reveal its organization. For us to fully understand it, however, we need not only to see it as a unity operating in its internal dynamics, but also to see it in its circumstances, i.e., in the context to which its operation connects it. This understanding requires that we adopt a certain distance for observation, a perspective that in the case of historical systems implies a reference to their origin. This can be easy, for instance, in the case of man-made machines, for we have access to every detail of their manufacture. The situation is not that easy, however, as regards living beings: their genesis and their history are never directly visible and can be reconstructed only by fragments." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"We admit knowledge whenever we observe an effective (or adequate) behavior in a given context, i.e., in a realm or domain which we define by a question (explicit or implicit)." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"We call social phenomena those phenomena associated with the participation of organisms in constituting third-order unities." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"We speak of structural coupling whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world." (Francisco Varela, "The Embodied Mind", 1991)
"The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence: the use of mathematical logic to understand the operation of the nervous system; the invention of information processing machines (as digital computers), thus laying the basis for artificial intelligence; the establishment of the metadiscipline of system theory, which has had an imprint in many branches of science, such as engineering (systems analysis, control theory), biology (regulatory physiology, ecology), social sciences (family therapy, structural anthropology, management, urban studies), and economics (game theory); information theory as a statistical theory of signal and communication channels; the first examples of self-organizing systems. This list is impressive: we tend to consider many of these notions and tools an integrative part of our life […]" (Francisco J Varela, "The Embodied Mind", 1991)
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