Autopoietic Life And Embodied Mind

Varela is a famous cognitive neuroscientist of Chile, and he puts forward thetheory of autopoiesis and embodied mind, resists the dichotomous research statusbetween scientism and humanism, advocates to combine natural science and empiricalscience. It is do helpful for us to advance the comprehension of mind if we are able toclassify and comment Varela’s views reasonably.Embodied mind is erected on grounds of criticizing the tradition of materialismand idealism which take realism as their premise on understanding mind. Varelaclaims that mind is neither something subjective which comes from somewhereunknown, nor something objective which produced by our body (especially by thebrain and nervous system). Mind, in his view, is something procedural and historical,and might be grasped only in the relationship between organism and world.“Relationship” holds special place for Varela. In fact, it is by bringing relationshipinto the understanding of mind and life can Varela build the coupling betweenorganism and world based on reforming the theory of evolution. Coupling is aco-evolved process of the both through an available approach rather than optimalfitting leaded by one side. It is within the co-evolution that world organism being inshows up as enaction of significance, while the embodied organism emergences as ancirculated percept-motor system which links to the world through operational closure.And the actualization of this system is based on his early theory of autopoiesis, whichis consisted of operational closure, identity, domain of interactions, significance–information. On the one hand, mind emerges from the system as the structure ofbody; on the other hand, it links to the operational closure intentionally as thestructure of mind. Attributing to this circulation of world-body-mind, life gets rid ofthe limitation of matter and acquires her own logic. However, Varela discussesanimal’s mind on the basis of the human’s without demonstration, and uses “mind” tocontains both the animal behavior（including tropism, reflection etc.）and the humanbehavior(mainly intentional behavior).However, animal and human, in Varela’s view, are living in the same dimension all the time upon life getting rid of the limitation of matter. Varela persists in thereality of mind, but intends to explain the mechanism how it emerges through theprocess of body by borrowing a term named “emergence” which comes fromself-organizing. In fact, what the term affords is a mysterious mechanism, and hasnothing to do with the problem except its ambiguous meaning. In addition,embodiment exists as an actual structure and mainly an actual structure of body forVarela, and only when the mind emerges from embodiment can it relate to operationalclosure intentionally. It is here where Varela falls into dualistic logic again, andeventually falls into reductionism, thus he can never insight the whole connotation ofthis term.