Humberto Maturana: System

“Love is the grounding of our existence as humans, and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.”

Humberto Maturana

Humberto Maturana et al. (1996) " Biology of love http://www.lifesnaturalsolutions.com.au/documents/biology-of-love.pdf"

Love

“Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 9.

Parting

“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 constitute the organization of the machine.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 137.

“The linguistic domain as a domain of orienting behavior requires at least two interacting organisms with comparable domains of interactions, so that a cooperative system of consensual interactions may be developed in which the emerging conduct of the two organisms is relevant for both. The specifiability through learning of the orienting interactions allows for a purely consensual (cultural) evolution in this domain, without it necessarily involving any further evolution of the nervous system; for this reason the linguistic domain in general, and the domain of self-consciousness in particular, are, in principle, independent of the biological substratum that generates them.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 43.

Behavior , Learning

“Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social ( linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: The tree of Knowledge (1987), p. 199 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989) " Life, the Multiverse and Everything; an Introduction to the Ideas of. Humberto Maturana http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm".

Learning

“A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization, (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works. For this same reason living systems are historical systems; the relevance of a given conduct or mode of behavior is always determined in the past.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 26-27.

Behavior , Past

“[T]he space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.”

Humberto Maturana

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 89.