I'm a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena.

- Francisco Varela

The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review…

- Francisco Varela

[M]any people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem…

- Francisco Varela

As Buddhist teachers often point out, knowledge, in the sense of prajña, is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experienc…

- Francisco Varela

The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity con…

- Francisco Varela

All our suffering is associated with this pre-occupation. All loss and gain, pleasure and pain arise because we identify so closely with this vague f…

- Francisco Varela

When a living system is suffering from ill health, the remedy is found by connecting with more of itself.

- Francisco Varela

If everybody would agree that their current reality is A reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity for constructing a reality, then…

- Francisco Varela

There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ' holistic ' views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower…

- Francisco Varela