Francisco Varela Boeken

The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors' basic question 'How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?’ The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zoller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans as sapient languaging beings was love, and that this remains our fundament even when other emotions become socially prevalent.

Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the scientific study of consciousness -- an area that has been largely ignored since the time of William James. This renaissance has primarily been stimulated by developments in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technology that enable scientists to pinpoint the neural correlates of conscious experience with ever-increasing accuracy. However, the study of conscious experience itself has not kept pace with these advances in third-person methodologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the 'view from within' involve little more than cataloging its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science. This has led many to deny that there could possibly be such a thing as a truly scientific study of conscious experience, or at least to ask: can one be objective about the subjective? Drawing on a wide range of approaches -- from phenomenology to meditation -- THE VIEW FROM WITHIN examines the possibility of a disciplined approach to the study of subjective states. The focus is on the practical issues involved.

How can science be brought to connect with experience? This book addresses two challenging problems facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science: understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions and creating an ethics adequate to our present awareness.

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication.

A unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

Francisco J. Varela ; übersetzt Von Wolfram Karl Köck ; Mit Einem Vorwort Von Siegfried J. Schmidt. Translation Of: Cognitive Science. Includes Bibliographical References.

Co je podstatou lidské mysli? Mohou mít počítače vědomí? Můžeme se naučit soucítění? Kdy vstoupí vědomí do lidského embrya? Tyto a další otázky byly předmětem prvního velkého dialogu západních vědců s tibetským dalajlamou (1987). Tématy byly výzkum mozku a vědomí, kognitivní vědy, neurovědy, experimentální psychologie, umělá inteligence a filosofie mysli. Kniha ukazuje nejen hluboký zájem dalajlamy o současnou vědu, ale i možnosti, jimiž může buddhismus přispět k výzkumu lidské mysli. Konference se účastnili mj. Newcomb Greenleaf, Ph.D., profesor informatiky z Kolumbijské university; Jeremy W. Hayward, Ph.D., profesor z Naropova institutu v Coloradu; Robert B. Livingston, M.D., profesor neurovědy z Kalifornské university v San Diegu; Luigi Luisi, Ph.D., profesor chemie z Federálního Polytechnického Institutu v Curychu; Eleanor Roschová Ph.D., profesorka kognitivní psychologie z Kalifornské university v Berkeley, a Francisco J. Varela, Ph.D., profesor kognitivních věd a epistemologie z Ecole Polytechnique a Institutu pro neurovědu v Paříži. Přeložil a doslov napsal Michal Šašma. Kniha byla přeložena rovněž do francouzštiny, němčiny, španělštiny, italštiny, japonštiny a čínštiny. "Nejplodnější vývoj se odehrává tam, kde se střetávají dva různé myšlenkové proudy." Werner Heisenberg

La récente émergence des sciences cognitives, constellation de disciplines aussi diverses que l'informatique, la linguistique et les neurosciences, marque un changement conceptuel qui préfigure sans doute les nouveaux champs scientifiques du siècle prochain. Autour de la question de la connaissance ont spontanément convergé plusieurs approches complémentaires dont Francisco Varela dresse ici un panorama très complet. De l'intelligence artificielle aux réseaux de neurones et aux travaux actuels sur la conscience et la vie artificielle, il nous invite à mettre en perspective les grands courants des sciences cognitives tout en prenant fermement position dans le débat. L'approche "enactive" qu'il propose met en question la tentation de réduire la conscience à des interactions entre neurones. ou celle de séparer le cerveau du monde extérieur. Cette invitation aux sciences cognitives, rejetant tout réductionnisme et tout a priori théorique, en est une parfaite illustration.

El presente libro es el relato de un dialogo historico entre importantes cientificos occidentales y el Dalai Lama de Tibet acerca del dormir, de los suenos y de la muerte: los tres momentos clave de la consciencia que el internacionalmente reconocido neurocientifico Francisco Varela denomino las /""zonas de sombra del ego/"". En este dialogo participaron, entre otros, relevantes personajes como el filosofo Charles Taylor, la psicoanalista Joyce McDougall, la psicologa Jayne Gackenbach, la ecologista Joan Halifax o el neurocientifico Jerome Engel. Ya traten acerca de los suenos lucidos, de las experiencias cercanas a la muerte o de la estructura misma de la consciencia, los participantes de este intercambio unico sorprenden y deleitan de manera absorbente por medio del contraste entre sus respectivas tradiciones. Es este el producto de un intercambio unico (tras una semana de exploracion del ambito de la consciencia) entre el Dalai Lama y unos pocos de sus colegas de la tradicion tibetana, junto con representantes de la ciencia y el humanismo occidentales.