One glance further up from autopoiesis to the cognitive domain

One glance further up from autopoiesis to the cognitive domain 

The notion of cognition, as one of the determinants of life, permits a link with the humanistic cognitive domain, including ethics and consciousness. I have mentioned 

The city in which we live, the value ascribed to plants and fruits, to love and politics and religiosity, are all products of our mental cognition - also the acquisition of indirect evidences (a photo, a third-person report) is based on our consciousness. Conversely, consciousness is created by the world we live in more specifically, by the experience and learning that we have in our fives. Going back to the example of whether a rose is only molecules or not - it is clear that a rose takes its essence from the concept of rose that is present in our consciousness. This is the result of the experience of vision, smell, poetry, musical tradition, culture - a rose makes no sense without human consciousness. For a fish, a rose is not a rose. 

We can go yet another step further in this cautious tapping at the higher domains. One point is linked to the trivial observation made earlier, that arose is not a rose for a hsh. In fact, this is tantamount to saying that there are as many realities as there are different observers, since each of them will have a different internal structure, and therefore a different co-emergence with the environment. When extrapolated, this takes us to Varela s notion of groundless-ness, the lack of an objective, unique reahty and to the even more complex concept of the simultaneous existence of many different worlds. 

Some readers may recognize in all these ideas a flavor of Buddhism. I mention this because the life and thoughts of Francisco Varela were indeed significantly influenced by Buddhism. The Embodied Mind (Varela et a/., 1991) is in fact a book 

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