The Tree of Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human Understanding [Paperback]

This book was my introduction to the concept of autopoesis, the process of self-creation.

The book is constucted in a circular path taking the reader from the beginning of the big bang, and working up from atoms to molecules, molecules to organisms, organisms to multicellular life forms and from there into the linguistic domain and language.

Each of these shift to the next level is a result of the interplay of the forces of structural integrity to keep the organism together and whole, and adaptation to the surrounding environment. Like the Escher drawing of one hand drawing the other in a chicken-and-egg creation loop, conservation of structure and adaptation to environment each give rise to the other.

The universe is self created -- no God required!

The authors present biology in the most beautiful poetic prose. If high school biology were this eloquent I may have taken a different path, i.e., my ontogenic drift would have been altered.

Reading their words, I had the same response as I do to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The show clearly how language is something we "do" and a medium in which we exist. How language gives rise to mind, consciousness and self-awareness. It brought new meaning to Steven's line, "Man made out of words."

Part of their narrative drift is an explanation of the workings of the neurosystem. How it is neither representational or solipsistic. We are not "like" computers at all. We do not repond to "reality" out there, but to the neural electrical impulses the external reality triggers on our membrane. From these impulses to the brain, we create a model of the world and respond to that. Looking at others respond we say they exhibit certain behaviour because we interpret their movement in the context with which we see them.

Their entire approach is systems oriented. They stop and language and consciousness, but I would be interested in seeing how their ideas continue into the realm of economics and culture. But these areas are out of scope for this slim volume.

If you are interested in biology, NLP, Buddhism, neurology, linguistics, systems theory, Bateson, Stevens or the movie "The Matrix," this book will give you a lot to chew on for a good long while. Highly recommended.

The reason I like it is not because I suddenly got interest in the field of biology, but it gives me an exposition of Phenomenonlogy philosophy (Husserl, Heiddeger, Gadamer), not from very abstract first philosophical princples, but from phisical and biological roots, so renders this heavy idea far eaiser to be assimilated (although it is still enormously heavy to me:-) ).

So why I like Phenomenology and Autopoiesis? It fundamentally change the way I see the world, both in terms of the nature, humanbeing, and society. Those concepts of "Structural Coupling", "Natural Drifting", "Structure Determined Behavior", "Consensual Domain" are very powerful and proves how so much of our common sense are fundamentally wrong. Those powerful idea has implications and applications, which permeat our life everytime, everywhere.

Drawing on those conceptualizations, I can induce convicing answers to those seemingly simple, but actually very complex questions, at a underlying structural level, such as why defeating ourselves and changing our bad habit is so difficult and how to achieve that feat? How we can be in control of our own lives? Why misunderstanding with and among our relatives, friends are so common, and how to handle? Why different persons have the exactly contrary interpretations to the same situation, the root of multi-perspectives? Why constantly our contributions to others result in indifferent response or even revenge (this conceptulization is actually, sometimes wrong).... and, maybe most importantly, why love lies at the core of our being!

I also, borrows the idea of Autopoieis to elaborate and address the corporate cutural issues inherent in the ERP system implementation, which is the core idea of my dissertation that I am now working on.

Rememeber "Matrix"? the movie features Lewis, the idea behind this movie can be explained precisely by the concept Autopoiesis. The idea of Matrix, which is built to control human mind and render them to slaves of power supplier is ofcourse, radical, but if we can learn from Neo, the main figure, try to break out of our mind structure, to learn to be more open, then it is much likely that we can realize our full potential as human being, the most advanced form of Autopoiesis. The concept of Autopoiesis gives you the RED PILL!

Science is powerful not because it is true, science is true because it is powerful! I believe if I keep asking myself the question "why", remain "childish" in this sense, then I gonna make a difference from the ORIGINAL me!

However Amazon writes "by Humberto Maturana" we cannot forget the other writer (Francisco Varela) dead about three years.

Both come from the research started by Stafford Beer in Chile and they are not alone: People as Terry Winograd or Fernando Flores are in the same package and all of them give powerful reasons against the so-called GOFAI (Good-Old-Fashioned-Artificial-Intelligence).

Maturana and Varela are not the first but, for sure, they are among the brightest.