As Buddhist teachers often point out, knowledge, in the sense of prajรฑa, is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experience that is separate from the experience itself.
Francisco VarelaIf everybody would agree that their current reality is A reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity for constructing a reality, then perhaps we could all agree on a meta-agreement for computing a reality that would mean survival and dignity for everyone on the planet, rather than each group being sold on a particular way of doing things.
Francisco VarelaThe cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence
Francisco VarelaThe relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.
Francisco VarelaThe emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review the mechanisms of large-scale integration that counterbalance the distributed anatomical and functional organization of brain activity to enable the emergence of coherent behaviour and cognition. Although the mechanisms involved in large-scale integration are still largely unknown, we argue that the most plausible candidate is the formation of dynamic links mediated by synchrony over multiple frequency bands.
Francisco Varela