Every reflection brings forth a world.

--Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela,
from The Tree of Life, The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, p. 26




After publishing his ideas in 1970, Maturana began a long collaboration with Francisco Varela, a younger neuroscientist at the University of Santiago who was Maturana's student before he became his collaborator. According to Maturana, their collaboration began when Varela challenged him in a conversation to find a more formal and more complete description for the concept of circular organization. They immediately set to work on a complete verbal description of Maturana's idea before attempting to construct a mathematical model, and they began by inventing a new name for it -- autopoesis.

Written by Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 97





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