CONCEPT
The Santiago Theory of Cognition
Maturana and Varela's radical claim — adopted and extended by Capra — that
cognition is the process of life itself, and that every living system cognizes by the fact of maintaining its own organization.
The Santiago theory of cognition, developed by
Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela in the 1970s at the University of Chile in Santiago, proposes that cognition and life are the same process viewed from different angles. A living system is an autopoietic system — one that continuously produces itself through its own operations — and the process of self-production requires continuous sensing, responding, and adjusting to maintain organizational integrity against perturbation. This sensing-and-responding, Maturana and Varela argued, is what cognition is. It does not require a brain. A bacterium swimming up a nutrient gradient is cognizing. A plant tracking the sun is cognizing. An immune system distinguishing self from non-self is cognizing. Capra made this thesis central to his framework, and it carries sharp implications for the AI question: if cognition is inseparable from the autopoietic process of life, then AI systems — which are not alive in this strict sense — do not cognize in the same way, regardless