Psyche 7(12): Obituary of Francisco Varela (1946 - 2001)
Patrick Wilken
PSYCHE: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS
-----------------------------------------------------------------
FRANCISCO J. VARELA (1946-2001)
It is with great sadness that I announce the death of Francisco Varela,
who passed away at his home in Paris, on May 28, 2001. With his passing,
the science of consciousness has lost one of its most brilliant,
original, creative, and compassionate thinkers.
Francisco Varela was born September 7, 1946 in Chile. As a child and
teenager, he received a strong classical education from the German
Lyceum in Santiago, which instilled in him a deep and lifelong
appreciation of literature, art, philosophy, and science. He received
his M.Sc. (Licenciatura) in Biology in 1967 from the University of Chile
in Santiago, where he studied with the neurobiologist Humberto R.
Maturana (well known for his classic work with Jerome Lettvin on the
neurophysiology of vision in frogs and for his subsequent work with
Varela on autopoiesis). According to the story Francisco was fond of
telling, as a young undergraduate he one day burst into Maturana's
office and enthusiastically declared that he wanted "to study the role
of mind in the universe." Maturana responded, "My boy, you've come to
the right place."
From 1968 to 1970 Francisco followed in the footsteps of his mentor
Maturana by pursuing graduate studies in Biology at Harvard University.
His doctoral thesis, "Insect retinas: information processing in the
compound eye," was written under the direction of Torsten Wiesel (who
shared a Nobel Prize with Davd Hubel in 1981).
With his Ph.D. in hand at the young age of twenty-three, Francisco
declined a position as researcher at Harvard and another as Assistant
Professor at another American university, choosing instead to return to
Chile to help build a scientific research community. It was during these
years of 1970 to 1973 that Varela and Maturana, now colleagues at the
University of Chile, formulated their famous theory of autopoiesis
(Maturana & Varela 1973, 1980; see Varela 1996a for a personal
recounting of this time and work). According to this theory, living
systems are autonomous systems (endogenously controlled and
self-organizing), and the minimal form of autonomy necessary and
sufficient for characterizing biological life is autopoiesis, i.e.,
self-production having the form of an operationally closed,
membrane-bounded, reaction network. Maturana and Varela also held that
autopoiesis defines cognition in its minimal biological form as the
"sense-making" capacity of life; and that the nervous system, as a
result of the autopoiesis of its component neurons, is not an
input-output information processing system, but rather an autonomous,
operationally closed network, whose basic functional elements are
invariant patterns of activity in neuronal ensembles (see Varela 1979).
These ideas, dating back to the early seventies, not only anticipated
but laid the groundwork for ideas that were to become prominent much
later in the nineties, in scientific fields as diverse as the origins of
life (Fleischaker 1994), the chemical synthesis of minimal living
systems (Bachman et al. 1992), artificial life (Varela & Bourgine 1991),
theoretical immunology (Varela & Coutinho 1991), dynamical neuroscience
(Varela et al. 2001), and embodied cognition (Varela et al. 1991).
When Francisco returned to Chile, he arrived on September 2, 1970, two
days before the election of Salvador Allende (the first Marxist
politician ever elected in a free election). Three years later Chile was
in turmoil, and Francisco, a strong supporter of the Allende government,
was forced to flee with his family after the military coup of General
Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government on September 11, 1973.
They fled first to Costa Rica, and then eventually to the United States,
where Francisco took up a position as Assistant Professor at the
University of Colorado Medical School in Denver. There he taught and
pursued his research until 1978. In 1978-79, he spent a year in New York
at the Brain Research Laboratories of the NYU Medical School, and as
scholar in residence at the Lindisfarne Association, and then returned
to Chile in 1980, staying there until 1985 (with a year spent in 1984 as
a Visiting Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Brain
Research in Frankfurt). In 1986 he moved to Paris, where he was based at
the Institut des Neurosciences and at CREA (Centre de Recherche en
Epistemologie Applique). In 1988, he was appointed to be a Director of
Research at CNRS (Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique), a
position he held until his death.
Francisco's years in Paris, up until the very month of his passing, were
remarkably full and productive by any standard; that he suffered from
Hepatitis C from the early 1990s onward, including receiving a liver
transplant in 1998, makes his life and work during this time truly
wonderful and inspiring.
During these years Francisco pursued two main complementary lines of
work: experimental studies using multiple electrode recordings and
mathematical analysis of large-scale neuronal integration during
cognitive processes; and philosophical and empirical studies of the
"neurophenomenology" of human consciousness (see Varela 1996b).
In a 1998 study published in Nature, Francisco and his colleagues in
Paris showed for the first time that the human perception of meaningful
complex forms (high contrast faces or "Mooney figures") is accompanied
by phase-locked, synchronous oscillations in distinct brain regions
(Rodriguez et al. 1998). In an important review article published one
month before his death, in the April 2001 issue of Nature Reviews
Neuroscience, Francisco and his colleagues presented a new viewpoint on
what they call the "brainweb": the emergence of a unified cognitive
moment depends on large-scale brain integration, whose most plausible
mechanism is the formation of dynamic links mediated by synchrony over
multiple frequency bands (Varela et al. 2001). In addition to these
studies, Francisco published numerous technical, experimental and
mathematical papers on the nonlinear dynamical analysis of brain
activity, including groundbreaking studies on the prediction of seizures
in epileptic patients prior to the onset of symptoms (Martinerie et al.
1998; see also Schiff 1998).
Francisco also firmly believed, however, that such scientific research
needs to be complemented by detailed phenomenological investigations of
human experience as it is lived and verbally articulated in the first
person. To this end, he published a number of original and innovative
phenomenological studies of aspects of human consciousness (e.g., Varela
1999; Varela and Depraz 2000), including a profound and moving
meditation on his own illness and the phenomenology of organ
transplantation experience (Varela 2001). He also co-edited two
important collections, one on phenomenology and cognitive science
(Petitot et al. 1999), and the other on first-person methods in the
science of consciousness (Varela and Shear 1999).
Since the mid-seventies, Francisco was a serious practitioner of Tibetan
Buddhist meditation and a student of Buddhist psychology and philosophy.
His conviction that this tradition and Western cognitive science have
much to gain from each other provided another, ultimately spiritual and
existential dimension, to his work. This dimension was the subject of
his 1991 book (co-written with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch), The
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. He was one of the
key members of the Advisory Board of the Mind and Life Institute, which
organizes private meetings between Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the
Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Western scientists (see Varela 1997). The
ninth and most recent of these meetings was held May 21-22, 2001, at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, on the theme of "Transformations of
Mind, Brain, and Emotion: Neurobiological and Bio-Behavioral Research on
Meditation," directed by Professor Richard Davidson. This meeting was a
dream-come-true for Francisco: the best of Western brain science and
Buddhist meditative practice and psychology brought together in the
context of cognitive neuroscientific research on the cognitive and
emotional effects of meditation evident in long-term practitioners.
Francisco was to present his studies and findings using EEG and MEG
methods at the morning session of May 22, but sadly was unable to be
there because of his illness. His Ph.D. student, Antoine Lutz, presented
the material in his stead, and a live web-cam was set up so that
Francisco could watch the proceedings from his apartment in Paris.
Francisco was an active and enthusiastic supporter of many
interdisciplinary groups devoted to the study of consciousness. In the
seventies and eighties, he served on the faculty of the Naropa Institute
in Boulder, Colorado, and was a Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association in
New York City. He was a founding member of the Association for the
Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and was actively considering
hosting the 2002 ASSC meeting until shortly before his death. He was a
strong supporter of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the
University of Arizona at Tucson, and served on the Editorial Advisory
Board of the *Journal of Consciousness Studies*. He was also
instrumental in the creation of a new journal, *Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences*, and was to serve as its Consulting Editor.
Although the passing of Francisco, especially at a time when his rich
and diverse research program was coming to such fruition, is an
immeasurable loss, the spirit of his unique and exemplary style of
research has never been stronger, and will continue to inspire many of
us for years to come.
Francisco died calm and at peace, in the loving embrace of his family,
at 5AM, May 28, 2001. I visited him several days before, and was deeply
touched by the serenity, kindness, and intelligence he continued to
radiate. He leaves his wife, Amy Cohen Varela, and their son Gabriel,
and his former wife Leonor, and their daughters Alejandra and Javier,
and son Leonor. He will be deeply missed.
Evan Thompson
Department of Philosophy and Centre for Vision Research
York University
ev...@yorku.ca
LINKS
Francisco Varela's homepage: http://web.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela The
Mind & Life Institute: http://www.mindandlife.org/index.html
REFERENCES
Bachman, P.A., Luisi, P.L., & Lang, J. (1992) Autocatalytic
self-replicating micelles as models for prebiotic structures.
*Nature 357,* 57-59.
Fleischaker, G.L. (1990) Origins of life: an operational definition.
*Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 20,* 127-137.
Martinerie, J., Adam, C., Le Van Quyen, M., Baulac, M., Clemenceau, S.,
Renault, B., & Varela, F.J. (1998) Epileptic seizures can be
anticipated by non-linear analysis. *Nature Medicine, 4(10),*
1173-1176.
Maturana, H.R. & Varela, F.J. (1973). *De maquinas y seres vivos: Una
teoria de la organizacion biologica.* Santiago: Editorial
Univeristaria.
Maturana, H.R. & Varela, F.J. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The
Realization of the Living. *Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science,* vol. 42. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Petitot, J., Varela, F.J., Pachoud, B. & Roy, J.-M. (Eds.),
*Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science.* Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rodriguez, E., George, N., Lachaux, J.-P., Martinerie, J., Renault, B.,
& Varela, F.J. (1998) Perception's shadow: long-distance
synchronization of human brain activity. *Nature, 397,* 430-433.
Schiff, S.J. (1998) Forecasting brain storms. *Nature Medicine, 4(10),*
1117-1118.
Varela, F.J. (1979) *Principles of Biological Autonomy.* New York:
Elsevier North Holland.
Varela, F.J. (1996a) The early days of autopoiesis: Heinz and Chile.
*Systems Research, 13(3),* 407-416.
Varela, F.J. (1996b) Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy for the
hard problem. *Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3,* 330-350.
Varela, F.J. (Ed.) (1997) *Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration
of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama.* Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Varela, F.J. (1999) The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time
consciousness. In J. Petitot, F.J. Varela, B. Pachoud, & J.-M. Roy
(Eds.), *Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary
Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.* (pp. 266-314). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Varela, F.J. (2001) Intimate distances: fragments for a phenomenology of
organ transplantation. In E. Thompson (Ed.), Between Ourselves:
Second Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness. *Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 8(5-7).* Published simultaneously as a book
by Imprint Academic.
Varela, F.J. & Bourgine, P. (Eds.) (1991) *Toward a Practice of
Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on
Artificial Life.* Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Varela, F.J. & Coutinho, A. (1991) Second generation immune networks.
*Immunology Today, 12,* 159-166.
Varela, F.J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991) *The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience.* Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Varela, F.J. & Shear, J. (1999) The View from Within: First-Person
Approaches to the Study of Consciousness. *Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 6(2-3).* Published simultaneously as a book by Imprint
Academic.
Varela, F.J. & Depraz, N. (2000) At the source of time: valence and the
constitutional dynamics of affect. *Ar@base.* Electronic journal:
<http://www.arobase.to/>.
Varela, F.J., Lachaux, J.-P., Rodriguez, E., & Martinerie, J. (2001) The
brainweb: phase synchronization and large-scale integration. *Nature
Reviews Neuroscience, 2,* 229-239.