En mi libro Feels Theory, en su último capítulo, propongo interpretar una dinámica recursiva del raciocinio, donde la propia información que generamos se vuelven los datos que más tarde generarán nueva información. En ese contexto situé una teoría de la verdad en tanto que sentimiento, sensación, o bien “sentido“; y comparé a los sentidos humanos con aquellos componentes de la robótica que se utilizan para captar información del entorno. Allí también me animé a borrar un poco la línea entre lo que consideramos inteligencia o razón y aquello que hacen los animales, y hasta me animé a dejar tímidamente anotada a la voluntad como un límite para la infinita recursividad de nuestra sentimentalidad.
Pero mi texto no es en absoluto exahustivo, sino más bien algo cercano al boceto. Yo no había leido nada similar a mis ideas por aquel entonces, y recién después de plasmarlas fue que comencé a buscar gente que caminara el mismo camino. Así me crucé con Humberto Maturana, que hoy cito nuevamente, explicando ideas y conceptos mucho más rigurosos que los míos, pero mediante los cuales por momentos parecieramos estar hablando de lo mismo:
(…)
The cognitive process
(1) A cognitive system is a system whose organization defined a domain of interactions in which it can act with the relevance of the maintenance of itself, and the process of cognition is the actual (inductive) acting or behaving in this domain. Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system.
(2) If a cognitive system enters into a cognitive interaction, its internal state is changed in a manner of relevant to its maintenance, and it enters into a new interaction without loss of its identity. In an organism without a nervous system (or its functional equivalent) interactions are of a chemical or physical nature (a molecule is absorbed, and an enzimatic process is initiated; a photon is captured and a step in photosyntesis is carried out). For such and organism the relations holding between the physical events remain outside its domain of interactions. The nervous system enlarges the domain of interactions of the organism by making its internal states also modifiable in a relevan manner by “pure relations”, not only by physical events; the observer sees that the sensors of an animal (say, a cat) are modified by light, and that the animal (the cat) is modified by a visible entity (say, a bird). The sensors change through physical interactions: the absorption of light quanta; the animal is modified through its interactions with the relations that hold between the activated sensors that absorbed the light quanta at the sensory surface. The nervous system expands the cognitive domain of the living system by making possible interactions with “pure relations”; it does not creates cognition.
(3) Although the nervous system expands the domain of interactions of the organism by bringing into this domain interactions with “pure relations”, the function of the nervous system is subservient to the necessary circularity of the living organization.
(4) The nervous system, by expanding the domain of interactions of the organism, has transformed the units of interactions and has subjected acting and interacting in the domain of “pure relations” to the process of evolution. As a consequence, there are organisms that include as a subset of thir possible interactions, interactions with their own internal states (as states resulting from its own internal and external interactions) as if this were independen entities, generating the apparent paradox of including their cognitive domain within their cognitive domain. In us this paradox is resolved by what we call “abstract thinking”, another expansion of the cognitive domain.
(5) Furthermore, the expansion of the cognitive domain of “pure relations” by means of a nervous system allows for non-physical interactions between organisms such that the interacting organisms orient each other toward interactions within their respective cognitive domains. Herein lies the basis of communication: the orienting behaviour becomes a representation of the interactions toward which it orients, and a unit of interactions in its own terms. But this very process generates another apparent paradox: there are organisms that generate representations of their own interactions by specifying entities with which they interact as if this belonged to an independent domain, while as representations they only map their own interactions. In us this paradox is resolved simultaneously in two ways:
(a) We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.
(b) We become self-conscious through self-observation: by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process.
(…)
De Autopoiesis and cognition, The realization of the living, de Humberto Maturana y Francisco Varela, páginas 13 y 14 (21 y 22 del PDF).
Pero no conforme todo eso, Maturana también pone en un lugar de absoluta centralidad a la idea de verdad, llamando la atención sobre cómo la episteme moderna está condicionada por los propios mecanismos internos de la cognición, con las siguientes observaciones:
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The basic claim of science is objectivity. It attempts, through the application of a well defined methodology, to make statements about the universe. At the very root of this claim, however, lies its weakness: the a priori asumption that objective knowledge constitutes a description of that which is known. Such assumption begs the question, “What is it to know?” and “How do we know?“.
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(1) Cognition is a biological phenomenon and can only be understood as such; any epistemological insight into the domain of knowledge requires this understanding.
(2) If such an insight is to be attained, two questions must be considered:
What is cognition as a function?
What is cognition as a process?
(…)
Hay una cercanía muy fuerte entre mis hipótesis y las de Maturana. El futuro de mi trabajo estará segura y necesariamente sesgado por mis lecturas del suyo. Pero probablemente incluso deba dedicar un texto entero a comparaciones entre lo que yo digo y lo que dice él, porque hay tantas similitudes (al punto tal de no darme el tiempo para escribirlas todas en un post) que se vuelve costoso percibir las divergencias.