This article delineates the notion of conjectural artworks – that is, ways of thinking and explaining formal and relational phenomena by visual means – and presents an appraisal and review of the use of such visual ways in the work of Chilean biologists and philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Particularly, the article focuses on their recurrent uses of Cellular Automaton, that is, discrete, locally interacting, rule-based mathematical models, as conjectural artworks for understanding the concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition and enaction: (i.e. Protobio and Bittorio). Additionally, the article proposes a new model of conjectural artwork based on an extension of cellular automaton: random Boolean networks namely, binary systems with variable local connections. Such model, as it is argued, is useful to connect the theoretical frameworks by Maturana and Varela, especially structural coupling and enaction, with other relevant fields such as biosemiotics’ Umwelt-research and cognitive landscapes in neurodynamics, and to advance and explore the concepts of structurally coupled categorization and generalization.

Key words: structural coupling, enactivism, conjectural artworks, cellular automaton, random boolean networks.

This work attempts to present the most important contributions of Humberto R. Maturana to the field of psychology, in an effort to reveal them directly. The main conclusion is that Maturana has expanded the understanding of humanness and therapy through revealing the biology of the observer.

Humberto Maturana’s concept of conversation as the braiding of emotion and language has been the basis of the authors’ framework-for-action, proving its usefulness across a number of research and consulting initiatives. We agree with Maturana’s claim that learning and change take place in a relational space, over time, and as a consequence of engagements shaped by the participants’ emotions. This paper is a tribute to the joy, and at times the frustration, that both authors have experienced from an ongoing conversation with Maturana’s work and our desire, wherever possible, to put it to the test. The paper will refer to research that illustrates the researcher as chorographer (one practiced in the systematic description of regions) and as choreographer (one practiced in the design of dance arrangements) of the emotions.

In his foreword to “Autopoietic Systems,” Stafford Beer remarks: “The request to write this foreword I consider a distinction, and a pleasant duty to perform, for I consider it truly significant work.… ” I, too, find myself in this situation between distinction and obligation as co-editor (and foreword writer) of the German collection of the most important works by H. R. Maturana’s. And like Beer, I think Maturana’s work is genuinely significant; not significant in any abstract sense related to any epistemological or object-theoretical theories; but significant for the way in which, under the influence of this work, I have learned over the past few years to see old problems differently and in a surprisingly new way for me. With this consciously subject-related interpretation of the significance of a scientific theory, I am, in my opinion, already on the ground of an important Maturanian insight, if I consider problems from the perspective of his cognitive-biological theory, which I first became acquainted with through Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld and Wolfram K. Köck (for which I sincerely thank all three). In this foreword I want to briefly summarize what I have learned, in the hope that this will become an invitation for others to read Maturana. [Translated by Google, corrected by the Curator]

This chapter traces how the concept of autopoiesis, originating in the field of theoretical biology with Chilean scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, has generated a wide range of disciplinary uses outside the sciences. The unlikely transit of autopoiesis was made possible in large part by the interdisciplinary ferment of postwar cybernetics that recast living organisms as information-processing machines. This chapter highlights the overlooked significance of the literary model that inspired this paradigm shift in the re-description of cellular life: Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel Don Quixotede la Mancha. Through a reading of cybernetics, autopoiesis, and Cervantes, this essay compares scientific concepts of self-organization with the literary stakes of autopoiesis and “languaging” for theorists such as Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault.

Open peer commentary on the article “In Maturana’s Wake: The Biology of Cognition’s Legacy and its Prospects” by Randall Whitaker. Abstract: With respect to pedagogic goals, Whitaker’s work stands for itself. First, I suggest valuing Maturana’s first-person approach to social interaction analysis and further exploring his late work and experience in applying biology of cognition to practical problems in social relations. Then I criticize Whitaker’s insufficient explanation of his distinction of the “abstract (non-physical)” nature of what he calls the “novel domain” engendered by the feature of operational closure of the nervous system. I end by discussing the difficulties encountered by the author when trying to “extract” a pedagogical methodology from biology of cognition.

Latencies of the different types of ganglion cell responses to stimulation within a receptive field were measured in guinea pigs. The latency of the response evoked by stimulation of the center or intermediate zone was always less than the response evoked by stimulation of the periphery or intermediate zone. The on-off response had latency values as if the responses were independently elicited in the center and periphery. When two light spots were shone in the receptive field at different time intervals, it was found that one could cancel the other if shone in a precise time which was dependent on the latencies of the responses of the receptive field. To account for the observations, it is postulated that the time courses of excitation and inhibition can vary from ganglion cell to ganglion cell.

Machines and Biology have been, since antiquity, closely related. From the zoological figures present in astronomical simulacra, through renaissance mechanical imitations of animals, through Decartes’ wind pipe nerves, to present day discussions on the computer and the brain, runs a continuous thread. In fact, the very name of mechanism for an attitude of inquiry throughout the history of Biology reveals this at a philosophical level ([4] and [6]). More often than not, mechanism is mentioned in opposition to vitalism, as an assertion of the validity of the objectivity principle in biology: there are no purposes in animal nature; its apparent purposefulness is similar to the purposefulness of machines. Yet, the fact that one picks machines as a set of objects comparable to living systems, deserves a closer look. What in machines makes it possible to establish such a connection?