The Contribution of Francisco Varela to the Emergence of a New Paradigm in Social Sciences and the Practice of Relational Mindfulness

Abstract

In this work, Varela’s contribution to the emergence of a biocybernetic paradigm in the social sciences is proposed and, in this context, his contribution to the practice of relational mindfulness. It starts by showing that in the convergence of informatics, neuroscience, and linguistics, a new unified perspective is built on the phenomena of perception and knowledge that lay the foundations for a new paradigm in science. The scientific contribution of the biologist Francisco Varela is collected. This is the one that brings to science the philosophical vision that comes from the phenomenological tradition that recognizes that knowledge is related to the fact of being in a world that is inseparable from our body, our language, and our social history. In this unified scientific approach, knowledge is ontological. Hence, this scientific approach has been given the name of “ontological turn,” which shows that living systems operate with operational closure and do not have an input and output relationship with the environment. From the development of cyber sciences, a unified approach is proposed in which the methodology of a neurophenomenology is used to discuss the transverse emergence, the production of distributed systems interwoven by lines that encompass the brain-body-environment relationship. It is this neurophenomenology that constitutes a contribution to the practice of relational mindfulness. Finally, a point of view is raised regarding the fact that this contribution shapes the emergence of social biocybernetics.