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Humberto Maturana, a biologist into psychology.

  Humberto Maturana is a biologist dedicated to the study of relations between life systems. He was born on September 14, 1928 (like my mother, except for the year) and he made all his theoretical and experimental work in Universidad de Chile. The most relevant work of Humberto Maturana is contained in his works The tree of knowledge and Autopoiesis and cognition. Nowadays, Maturana and his collaborators represent the idiosyncratic area known as biology of knowing.
  With the collaboration of his student Francisco Varela, Maturana created and described the concept of “autopoiesis”, the one that basically consists in the feature of a system to maintain and reproduce itself. Maturana y Varela (1973, p. 69) defined autopoiesis:

  “An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network”.

  In psychology, he has contributed to the systemic and constructivist scientific research program, specifically to the conceptions of a) the human like a live system, in relation/connection to the other live systems and b) the human like builder of multiple realities (trough the language we could build multiverses).  

  Finally, I would like to say a cliché phase of Maturana, that represent his legacy: Everything said is said by someone.

Reference: Maturana, H. & Varela, F. 1973. De máquinas y  seres vivos. Editorial Universitaria, Santiago, Chile

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