El árbol de conocimiento: Las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano

In El árbol del conocimiento, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela lay out, for a general audience, the theory of autopoiesis they had developed to describe what makes something a living system: an organization that continuously produces and renews its own components. From that starting point the book builds outward, chapter by chapter, from the cell to the nervous system, from perception to language, to the emergence of the social and the human. Its central claim is that knowing is not a passive recording of an external world but an activity inseparable from the biological structure of the knower, so that every act of knowing brings forth a world rather than simply mirroring one already there. The book includes simple perceptual demonstrations, such as the blind spot, to make this point concrete for the reader before drawing out its ethical implications for how humans understand one another. Credits: Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1984). El árbol de conocimiento: Las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria S.A.