Open the Francisco Varela player & site

This site is dedicated to his mind and work. As a biologist and researcher in the field of cognitive science he gained acclaim by his theory of Autopoiesis which he formulated together with his mentor Humberto Maturana. 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.

Link

Refocusing on biology and complex systems

Back then, in the early 1990's, the first two ECAL conferences in Paris and Brussels were mainly centered on theoretical biology and the physics of complex systems. Today, we feel that Alife can look back on these origins and take more inspiration from new developments at the intersection between computer science and theoretical biology—thus it is our wish to refocus the conference on complex biological systems. Closing a loop, this ECAL will mark the 20th anniversary of the 1st ECAL and will be framed as a tribute to the late Francisco Varela, co-organizer in 1991 with two of this year's committee members (Paul Bourgine, CREA, and Hugues Bersini, IRIDIA).


Refocusing on biology and complex systems