This week I’m at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe attending their yearly Varela Symposium. I’ve been coming here giving talks on the intersection of science, experience and contemplative practice since 2018. It’s a unique place (Upaya is a beautiful monastery) and a unique opportunity to explore science in a different key.

The symposium is named in honor of the ground breaking neurobiologist Francisco Varela. Since I’ll be drawing on his ideas a lot in presentation here I thought I’d spend a few paragraphs today introducing them to you.

The great problem for science in understanding life is that organisms are not like other physical systems. They can’t be cleanly dissected in terms of causes and effects. They are, in other words, deeply self-referential. This is the problem of the Ouroboros - the snake that eats its talk. Genes need cells to do anything. Cells need genes to get things done. This kind of chicken/egg problem exists in life at all levels and its this circular logic of is why scientific accounts for life are good at seeing specific mechanisms but bad at understanding organisms as a unified whole.

Varela and his mentor Humberto Maturana wanted to confront this paradoxical self reference head on with the invention of a new concept: Autopoiesis. For a system to be autopoietic it must be self-creating and self-maintaining. That means are networks of molecular productions (thing like enzymes) interactions (things like signaling) that continually regenerate the network that produces them. The network makes the networks which needs the network to maintain the network.

That sounds confusing becuase it is. It’s what makes life so hard to understand as a physical system. What Varela and Manturana did with the name Autopoiesis was shine a light on the specific and exact mystery that science needed to solve if it wants to understand life. Varela would spend many years trying to do just that, to explore the dynamics of Autopoiesis in ways that were scientifically tractable.

For many years Varela’s ideas were on the margins. There was a small group of researchers pushing them forward but they were far from the mainstream. Now I see the term Autopoiesis all over the place in papers about life, about cognition and about consciousness. This may be because AI has raised a deeper interest in the question “What Is Life”. It may just be that the idea’s time has come.

In my talk this week tomorrow I am going to unpack how Autopoiesis - and other formally radical ideas - will play a central role in our big new Templeton funded project on the “Physics of Agency”. We believe self-reference is the key to understanding what makes life as agency and that means we have to find way into that circle.

Cutting the Ouroboros won’t do. It just kills the thing you want to understand. That’s why I’m grateful to Francisco Varela for giving us roadsigns for the path ahead.

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P.S. If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]

— Adam Frank 🚀