Santiago, Chile
It is the work of the late theoretical biologist and neuroscientist Francisco Varela that has taken us here to Santiago. Varela was a proponent of the "embodied mind" philosophy, building on the work of George Lakoff and others. He maintained that the mind can only be well understood in the context of understanding the body and the natural world surrounding it. Is it any wonder that we have started some of our days here with yoga and meditation, often to the mellifluous tones of Dr. John Kabat-Zinn of the UMass Medical School?
A serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Varela greatly advanced the science of consciousness by understanding that Western cognition and Eastern mindfulness have much to learn from each other. His integrative approaches serve as the foundation for the September 2005 Journal of Management Inquiry article by Karl Weick and Ted Putnam entitled, "Organizing for Mindfulness: Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge" as well as the Mind & Life Institute book, "The Dalai Lama at MIT." Of course, the weakness with some of these prescriptions is in their very binarism, as if "we" Westerners only think and act one way while "they" Easterners are similarly mired in stereotype.
Varela believed in our own emergent qualities, arguing that the whole of ourselves appears only as a result of the dynamics of its component parts. Thus the importance of the mind-body symbiosis as well as the body-nature relationship. Of course, it is too easy for less creative, less romantic, less revolutionary and, yes, less brilliant observers than Varela to position his work as a flight of fancy. Far from it!
Yes, I have to admit a problem fully understanding what the mystic Varela and his mentor Humberto Maturana are teaching us. As with the entry below from Cuncumen, however, I understand that language quite simply eludes a full understanding - at present! Yet, just because language may seem obscurantist, or something may seem beyond our current capacity to understand, does not make it wrong.
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Professor Shaun Gallagher of the University of Central Florida edits The Journal of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, first inspired by Francisco Varela.
We were joined by the extraordinary Professor Maria Isabel Mizon, an applied linguistics specialist on the faculty of the Universidad Catolica de Chile. Professor Mizon soon heads to China's University of Nanjing for a year-long assignment.
It is the work of the late theoretical biologist and neuroscientist Francisco Varela that has taken us here to Santiago. Varela was a proponent of the "embodied mind" philosophy, building on the work of George Lakoff and others. He maintained that the mind can only be well understood in the context of understanding the body and the natural world surrounding it. Is it any wonder that we have started some of our days here with yoga and meditation, often to the mellifluous tones of Dr. John Kabat-Zinn of the UMass Medical School?
A serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Varela greatly advanced the science of consciousness by understanding that Western cognition and Eastern mindfulness have much to learn from each other. His integrative approaches serve as the foundation for the September 2005 Journal of Management Inquiry article by Karl Weick and Ted Putnam entitled, "Organizing for Mindfulness: Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge" as well as the Mind & Life Institute book, "The Dalai Lama at MIT." Of course, the weakness with some of these prescriptions is in their very binarism, as if "we" Westerners only think and act one way while "they" Easterners are similarly mired in stereotype.
Varela believed in our own emergent qualities, arguing that the whole of ourselves appears only as a result of the dynamics of its component parts. Thus the importance of the mind-body symbiosis as well as the body-nature relationship. Of course, it is too easy for less creative, less romantic, less revolutionary and, yes, less brilliant observers than Varela to position his work as a flight of fancy. Far from it!
Yes, I have to admit a problem fully understanding what the mystic Varela and his mentor Humberto Maturana are teaching us. As with the entry below from Cuncumen, however, I understand that language quite simply eludes a full understanding - at present! Yet, just because language may seem obscurantist, or something may seem beyond our current capacity to understand, does not make it wrong.
.jpg)
Professor Shaun Gallagher of the University of Central Florida edits The Journal of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, first inspired by Francisco Varela.We were joined by the extraordinary Professor Maria Isabel Mizon, an applied linguistics specialist on the faculty of the Universidad Catolica de Chile. Professor Mizon soon heads to China's University of Nanjing for a year-long assignment.
