The present issue is a memorial issue for Francisco Varela both as a scholar and as a colleague. Varela passed away in his home in Paris on May 28 2001. He was part of the editorial board of this journal and thus in this memorial issue we would like to look into his heritage. Most of the papers we present have authors that have known and worked with Varela in some period of their and his life: Ranulph Glanville, Louis Kauffman, Andreas Weber. Weber makes the case that Varela’s thinking can provide a foundation for biosemiotics and as such it provides a further foundation for the cybersemiotic project. Most interesting and promising is his comparison with Varela’s concept of the organism and Bruno Latour’s concept of quasi-objects. The other articles all have some relationship to Varela’s elaboration on the work of Spencer-Brown. Using the metaphor of the Uroboros, Marks-Tarlow, Robertson, and Combs explore the notion of re-entry in Varela’s ‘A Calculus for Self-Reference ’ and his contribution to a theory of consciousness. In their articles, Glanville and Kauffman reflect upon their experience working with Varela on joint papers.

Context: Non-dualistic thinking is an alternative to realism and constructivism. Problem: In the absence of a distinct definition of the term “description,” the question comes up of what exactly can be included in non-dualistic descriptions, and in how far the definition of this term affects the relation between theory and empirical practice. Furthermore, this paper is concerned with the question of whether non-dualism and dualism differ in their implications. Method: I provide a wider semantic framework for the term “description” by means of George Spencer Brown’s terminology in his calculus of indications as laid out in Laws of Form. The connection of descriptions and distinctions enables descriptions to comprise reflections and language as well as empirical observations. Results: Non-dualism can be thought of in different ways but still has essential elements in common with dualism. Implications: Non-dualism, as well as dualism, is an argumentation technique suitable for specific situations, but without significant differences in implications.

Key words: Distinction and indication, neutralistic basis, temporal paradox, re-entry, semantic, empirical and operational non-dualism

The Cambridge (UK) Declaration on Consciousness, proclaimed on July 7, 2012 at a Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, states that there is natural intelligence, and by implication, mind in nature. The declaration marks a significant shift from portraying animal agency through a mechanistic lens. Many years before Bateson had argued that the key to eliminating animal-human dualism lies in an understanding of communication processes, that is, recognition and investigation of an implicate order without which animate existence would not survive. The first part of this article will discuss how communication yields real world patterns to which natural intelligence responds. Bateson is supported in this argument by Ruth Garrett Millikan, the founder of Biosemantics, who also demonstrates how the grasping of natural signs in recursive relational patterns generates meaningful interactions. The second part of this paper concerns mapping of multiple levels of organic existence and how a notion of heterarchical order is linked to communication processes in and between these multiple levels. This important switch of reference stems from Bateson transposing Warren McCulloch’s ideas about distributed memory. Bateson transforms McCulloch’s technical (computer-oriented) insight into a means for mapping redundancy in levels of communication feedback. Recent publications by scholars influenced by Bateson’s approach explain how communication processes coordinate non-transitive distribution of multiple layers of organization into heterarchies rather than hierarchies (Bruni & Giorgi, 2015, 2016). They show why the importance of the notion of heterarchy, with its dynamic synchronicity, has grown in recent years, especially in respect of the way in which genetics interrelates to microbiotic, epigenetic and environmental levels of organization. In addition, Nomura, Murunaba, Tomita, & Matsuno (2018) argue that synchronicity requires an altered understanding of temporality in the plant kingdom. An important addition to our understanding of time concerns the inter-subjective timing of organisms, as they negotiate localized coordination. The perspectives of inter-subjective time is one which extends beyond its usual correlates of subjectivity and objectivity, and modifies these perspectives that, until now, have fostered dualism. A final consideration is Bateson’s move to diminish dualism through an understanding of holographic coding. Its resonance of downward causation permits communication to be informative in the whole econiche, so permitting re-entry of ecosystemic form in order to resist fragmentation and competition among its parts (Harries-Jones, 2016a). Wohlleben (2016) provides an empirical example of this Gaia-like performance.

Key words: analog-digital consensus, circadian clocks, heterarchy, holographic coding, intersubjective time, millikan’s natural signs, proto-cognitive appraisal, redundancy, synchronicity

Open peer commentary on the article “Ontology, Reality and Construction in Niklas Luhmann’s Theory” by Krzysztof C. Matuszek. Upshot: Matuszek omits the decisive notions of autology and re-entry in order to construe and subsequently find Luhmann’s ontology. What is more, the whole endeavour to discover ontology in Luhmann’s work is questionable. It misses the point that a systems theory based on operative constructivism is obviously developed for researching ontogenetic processes.

The purpose of this essay is to sketch a picture of the connections between the concept self-reference and important aspects of mathematical and cybernetic thinking. In order to accomplish this task, we begin with a very simple discussion of the meaning of self-reference and then let this unfold into many ideas. Not surprisingly, we encounter wholes and parts, distinctions, pointers and indications. local-global, circulation, feedback. recursion, invariance. self-similarity, re-entry of forms, paradox, and strange loops. But we also find topology, knots and weaves. fractal and recursive forms, infinity, curvature and imaginary numbers! A panoply of fundamental mathematical and physical ideas relating directly to the central turn of self-reference.

This essay is a discussion of the concept of reflexivity and its relationships with self-reference, re-entry, eigenform and the foundations of physics.

In the spirit of second-order cybernetics, human communication is reconceptualized by including in the process not only its theorists but also their observed Others without whom social reality is inconceivable. This essay examines several versions of otherness, how the voices of Others survive social scientific inquiries, the dialogical spaces made available for people to build their home, and the kinds of citizenship encouraged. The essay draws attention to the epistemological limits of different inquiring practices and seeks to expand the range of possibilities for humans to see each Other.

Key words: cybernetics, human communication, languaging, embodied practices, re-entry, accounts, social theory, social inquiry, otherness, observer, i, it, you, thou, trivial/ nontrivial machines, dialogue, agency, emancipation, epistemology, methodology, politics o

Rationality can be defined as a re-entry of a distinction in itself and in particular as a re-entry of the distincition between system and enviroment in the system. This is a paradoxical and, for practical matters, utopian concept. It has the advantage that one can show that different “unfoldments” of the paradox are possible and that choosing one of them depends upon historical conditions of plausibility.

This is an edited and translated transcript of a lecture by Niklas Luhmann in which he outlined the foundation of his systems theory based on the notion of difference and distinction. After a brief introduction to early theories of distinction, the central ideas of SpencerBrown’s Laws of Form as the most radical form of differential thinking are presented. For Luhmann’s systems theory, this has four important consequences. First, the system is the difference between system and environment. Second, the system can be defined through a single mode of operation. Third, every (social) system observes internally (i.e. within the system) its own system/environment distinction; there is a re-entry of the system/environment distinction into the system. Fourth, every social theory is part of the social domain and as such part of what it describes.

Key words: George Spencer Brown, social systems, systems theory, theory of distinction

In recent years a new science frontier emerged under the umbrella term of second-order science which creates new and challenging problems through a characteristic re-entry-operation like in pattern of patterns, learning of learning, cybernetics of cybernetics or logic of logic, which works with and on building blocks or elements of traditional or first-order scientific research and which, due to this re-entry configuration, becomes inherently reflexive. In this article I will pursue the ambitious goal to develop a general methodology for second-order science which is needed for second-order analyses from their initial stages up to the final steps. This general methodology will be framed as a sequence of recombination operations which become the central task for a particular step in the design of second-order investigations.

Key words: First-order science, second-order science, re-entry, science levels, reflexivity.