Francisco Varela
Profile – Francisco Varela (1946–2001)
Born in Chile, Francisco Varela studied biology before moving to the USA for a PhD on insect vision at Harvard and later working in France, Germany, and the United States. He said that he pursued one question all his life: why do emergent selves or virtual identities pop up all over the place, whether at the mind–body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This question motivated his work on three topics: autopoiesis or self-organisation in living things, enactive cognition, and the immune system. Critics claim that his ideas, though fluently described, make no sense, and even friends described him as a revolutionary who threw out too much accepted science. His Buddhist meditation, as a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, informed all his work on embodied cognition and consciousness. Uniquely both a phenomenologist and a working neuroscientist, he coined the term neurophenomenology. Reflecting on his liver transplant, he wrote vividly of the shifting sense of body and boundaries (Varela, 2001). Until his death he was Director of Research at the CNRS laboratory of Cognitive Neurosciences and Brain Imaging in Paris.
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Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Lutz, A., Lachaux, J.-P., Martinerie, J., and Varela, F. J. (2002). Guiding the study of brain dynamics by using first-person data: Synchrony patterns correlate with conscious states during a simple visual task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 99(3), 1586–1591. Open-access full text here.
Varela, F. J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(4), 330–349. Also in J. Shear (Ed.) (1997). Explaining consciousness: The ‘hard problem’ (pp. 337–357). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paywall-protected journal record here. Full text (html) here. Google Books preview here.
Varela, F. J. (1999). Steps to a science of inter-being: Unfolding the dharma implicit in modern cognitive science. In G. Watson, S. Batchelor, and G. Claxton (Eds), The psychology of awakening (pp. 71–89). London: Random House. Full text (html) here. Google Books preview of 2000 edition (Weiser) here.
Varela, F. J., and Shear, J. (Eds) (1999). The view from within: First-person approaches to the study of consciousness. Special issue, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(2–3). Also (1999. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Google Books preview here.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. London: MIT Press. Google Books preview here.
Varela, F. J. (2001). Intimate distances: Fragments for a phenomenology of organ transplantation. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5–7), 259–271. Paywall-protected journal record here. Draft text (html) here.
Video
What we do and what we see is not separate. Talk on science, art, and religion. Paris, 1983
What is life? Brief tribute to Varela
Art meets science and spirituality in a changing economy, Part 3: Crisis of perception. Documentary including an interview with Varela, GionoFilm, November 2013