The Tree of Knowledge,
The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
This is one of the seminal books that I have studied. Giving five stars I underrate the book enormously. I have bought the book some ten years ago, and once of twice a year I pick it up and study it again.
Why is it that I write that it is a seminal book?
We all live in a world and most of us think – until you have read the book – that this world is an objective, steadfast phenomenon that we derive information from. Here you have the most important mistakes one can make - there are smaller ones! – and that are dispelled as illusions by the writers, Maturana and Varela, both neuro-biologists from Chili. To be sure, it takes them a while to get at their key point, but the detours are necessary to understand the outcome. And that is that each human being, on his own – although in a coupling with the environment, be it human, family, friends, foe’s, spouse and children, or non-human, nature in all its diversity, - brings forth his world. And because we are with others we bring forth a world together. You can say that each person imagines his world to be, or into being, but always with this aim: to maintain the coupling with, and the conservation of adaptation to his environment. And in doing so he is learning, and so living is learning and learning is living. Much of this is done in language, the most versatile tool we humans have, which makes possible to make discriptions and descriptions of description et cetera, and in the end gives rise to self-consciousness. That is, to understand yourself. But the idea that the outside world is objective and inside us is a representation of it, to derive knowledge from, is utterly destroyed after reading the book, and rightly so.
The theory set me on the path of the development of a conflict theory that in essence states that conflict is never about some seeming conflict between people, but always about two or more people acting out their own problems with the conservation of adaptation and maintenance of coupling, which is in normal language that we have to master our human deficiencies. I give an example: there is a just-married couple, deeply in love, and at a party the husband sees his wife chat joyously with one of her ex-es. He gets jealous and he thinks she is deceiving him, but in reality he does not know. He only thinks that she is deceiving him and acting upon that thought alone will bring havock upon them both. This is the stuff of literature and opera’s. The matter is that he is jealous because he has not learned yet not to become jealous. But how can he solve his real problem in another way than look inside into his own mind in self-consciousness and ask himself why he got jealous? Because there is the root of the conflict.
Here in a nutshell the theory of autopoiesis is explained. Thinking dat what you see in an outside world is anything else than the productions or distortions of your own mind is self-deceiving. This looks very Buddhist as is taught in Dzogchen and no wonder that Varela was one of the initiators of the Mind Life Institute of the Dalai Lama and also a Buddhist himself.
One other point where the theory is at first sight conclusive is on language. Reading the book you will understand that when you say a sentence your listener will hear sounds that through the coordination in a shared domain will enable him to create information from the heard sounds, but not further or more that he has learned to do untill that very moment. If you spoke Chinese and he has nor learned the language he will not be able to create anything out of it. This and some other points make sure that you understand that a person, and that means you too, is not able to act or react outside of the domain of what he has learned already. And that all perturbations (impulses) invite me and you to expand the range of actions, of which, when we succeed, can be said of that we have learned.
I have given these examples to give you the taste of the enormous impact that the book will have, when you have really understood its contents. You will never be the same, and it will be impossible to get back to your old ways of looking. Real knowledge cannot be unlearned!
So, buy the book and become a different person. You will have the same troubles, but you then will have learned to learn much faster.
Jan Willem van Ee
The Netherlands
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- The Embodied Mind, revised edition: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Mit Press)Francisco J. VarelaPaperback
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- Juan Carlos SanchezReviewed in Canada on February 17, 2021
Book in very good condition. Swift delivery. Thanks
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