Francisco Javier Varela Garcia was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.
10 Facts About Francisco Varela
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Francisco Varela's thesis, defended in 1970 and supervised by Torsten Wiesel, was titled Insect Retinas: Information processing in the compound eye.
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Francisco Varela became familiar, by practice, with Tibetan Buddhism in the 1970s, initially studying, together with Keun-Tshen Goba, with the meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Vajradhatu and Shambhala Training, and later with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation master of higher tantras.
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Francisco Varela died in 2001 in Paris of Hepatitis C after having written an account of his 1998 liver transplant.
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Francisco Varela had four children, including the actress, environmental spokesperson, and model Leonor Francisco Varela.
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Francisco Varela was trained as a biologist, mathematician and philosopher through the influence of different teachers, Humberto Maturana and Torsten Wiesel.
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Francisco Varela wrote and edited a number of books and numerous journal articles in biology, neurology, cognitive science, mathematics, and philosophy.
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Francisco Varela founded, with others, the Integral Institute, a thinktank dedicated to the cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines.
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Francisco Varela supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise.
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Francisco Varela's work popularized within the field of neuroscience the concept of neurophenomenology.