THE CREATIVE CIRCLE: SKETCHES ON THE

NATURAL HISTORY OF CIRCULARITY

From The Invented Reality. Edited by Paul Watzlavick, Norton Publishing, New
York, 1984.
Francisco J. Varela.

A HAND RISES OUT of the paper, groping into a larger world. When we believe it is
hopelessly beyond the flatness of its origin, it plunges back onto the flat surface,
sketching its own emergence from the white sheet. A loop is completed whereby two
levels are collapsed, intercrossed, entangled. At this point, what we wanted to hold in
separate levels is revealed as inseparable, our sense of direction and foundations seems to
falter, and a sense of paradox sets in.

Traditionally such circularities were called vicious circles; they were the epitome of what
had to be shunned. But I suggest that they be called virtuous and creative circles. In their

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apparent strangeness, there are keys to the understanding of natural systems, their
cognitive phenomena, and a rich world of forms. Here I shall offer some sketches of this
world of strange loops from three fundamental perspectives: empirical, formal, and
epistemological.

THE EMPIRICAL PERSPECTIVE

In the Escher engraving we see that the two hands mutually draw themselves. That is,
they mutually specify their conditions of production. They bootstrap themselves out of
the engraving to constitute a separate entity. More precisely, their mutual specification
sets them apart from the rest of the drawing to constitute a unity. Their operation (mutual
drawing) specifies the conditions under which they can be distinguished, setting them
apart from a background. To find that a unity sets itself apart from a background by its
operations is an ordinary experience we normally associate with living things. Since
antiquity, autonomy served to designate this experience. If I observe a dog walking on the
street and it suddenly changes direction and moves toward me, I generally impute an
intention in the dog to greet me. Whether or not such an imputation of mentality is valid
is not so interesting to me as the fact that it is tempting to impute intention on the basis of
what the dog does. That is, the dog's behavior is difficult to account for unless I observe
that the dog confronts its environment not as if it were receiving instructions from this
environment for particular outcomes but, rather, as if these instructions were mere
disturbances that the dog interprets and constructs according to its sense of regulation and
balance. This is again that peculiar quality that we call autonomy. In fact, should my car
not start one morning, I would be tempted to say it was mad at me; but since I am
civilized, I realize that such an imputation is impossible, given that the machine was
designed by men in the first place. Perhaps the trouble begins precisely there: We did not
design the dog, nor does it seem to be there for any purpose about which we can easily
agree. The sharp contrast between living systems that exhibit autonomy and many other
natural and man-made artifacts has fascinated biologists since the time of Aristotle and
until the nineteenth century, and only the fascination with the diversity of the living could
compete in attraction [11]. Interestingly, the theme of autonomy gradually disappeared
into the fog of nondiscussion with the rise of genetics and molecular biology by the turn
of the century, and, in parallel, the fields of engineering and design developed rapidly,
giving rise to cybernetics and control theory. As a consequence, today not only do we not
think about autonomy in natural systems, but we simply do not even recognize that such a
name could apply to anything that could be made precise. Autonomy's conceptual
counterpart, control, can surely be made exact, but not autonomy. There is, of course, no
more intrinsic mystery to autonomy than there is to control. The key is to see that
autonomy is an expression of a peculiar kind of process that is profusely found in nature
in many concrete forms [13]. This kind of process is precisely the one portrayed by
Escher - parts that mutually specify themselves. It is through this kind of articulation, in
the molecular domain, that life specifies itself and acquires its autonomous quality. A cell
stands out of a molecular soup by defining and specifying boundaries that set it apart
from what it is not. However, this specification of boundaries is done through molecular
productions made possible through the boundaries themselves. There is, therefore, a
mutual specification of chemical transformation and physical boundaries; the cell draws
itself out of a homogeneous background. Should this process of self-production be

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interrupted, the cellular components no longer form a unity and gradually diffuse back
into a homogeneous molecular soup [8]. The backbone of the cellular organization
(Figure 23) can be drawn as follows:

This configuration is the key: closure of operations whereby products are in the same
levels as productions. In fact, within this organization, the usual distinctions between
producer and product, beginning and end, or input and output cease making sense. Little
can be said about how cells originated, but a substantial amount of recent evidence is
consistent with the idea that the closure just sketched is a necessary condition [3]. Once
such autonomous unities are established, a whole new domain is generated: life as we
know it today. Indeed, on this basic theme of tangled loops of molecular productions,
many variations can be played, many different specific configurations, and thus a host of
different cells. In fact, it is possible that modern cells arose out of the symbiosis of units
that were themselves autonomous and are now only vaguely remembered as
mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other organelles [6]. Or even today, algae and fungi
mutually satisfy their individual environments for maintenance and form a lichen. Thus
cells can interact among themselves so as to constitute themselves new autonomous
unities; all multicellular organisms arise under similar circumstances. In such cases, the
basic phenomenon is always the same: operational closure of elements in separate levels
intercrossed to constitute a unity. When such level crossings and tangledness are
interrupted, the unity vanishes. Autonomy arises at this point of intercrossing. The origin
of life is no meager example of this general law.

THE STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE

"Yields falsehood when apprended to its own quotation" yields falsehood when appended
to its own quotation. This Quine [10] koan is a colorful way of presenting a pervasive
knot that has been present in the study of language and mathematics for a long time. In
fact, ever since the Cretan Epimenides had the odd idea of saying, "All Cretans are liars,"
the odd quality of self-reference has been a permanent headache [4]. This oddity springs
from the assumption that what we say about something should not enter into the
constitution of that something. Epimenides-Quine type phrases explicitly violate this
assumption. In all such cases of linguistic tangledness, the family resemblance with both
the Escher engraving and the emergence of cells and autonomy is apparent. There is the
same move whereby that which should have stayed separate (in the Quine or Epimenides

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case, levels of meaning) is intercrossed and two levels collapse into one, yet remain
distinguishable. What is interesting, however, is that what seemed complex but
understandable at the molecular domain acquires a sense of paradox in this linguistic
domain. It is harder to leap out of the need to stay at a given level of meaning and simply
look at the whole sentence as a unity. Paradox is exactly that: that which cannot be
understood unless we examine it by leaping beyond both levels tangled in the structure of
the paradox. In the Quine or Epimenides case, the phrases remain a paradox unless I am
willing to let go of the need to choose between true or false, and see the sentence's
circularity as its own way of specifying its meaning. That is, the sentence sits in a larger
domain and only becomes paradoxical when projected to the flatter domain of either true
or false.

(I suppose this is why paradox appears over and over again in situations such as Zen
training, where the learning is precisely that of leaping out to a larger domain where one
can consider one's thoughts and values with detachment. To the extent that the student is
fixed on one level or another, with one preference or judgment - good or bad, positive or
negative, spiritual or mundane - the aim of the teaching is not achieved. A good teacher, I
suppose, is one who can convey the unity or circularity, the tangledness of the situation,
so vividly that the student is forced to leap out of it.)

Perhaps the most interesting and illustrious evidence of the richness of self-reference in
language and mathematics is Godel's theorem, which I shall use as an example to trace
some further consequences of closure.

The spirit of Godel is (again) well represented in the Escher engraving. He and others of
his time were interested in examining whether formal languages could examine
themselves, whether the very inside of mathematics could talk to itself. For this purpose
we must concentrate on those mathematical languages that can at least refer to and deal
with numbers. Now numbers are not mathematical statements; they are mathematical
objects that can be referred to in mathematical language adequate to that task. The genius
of Godel was to intercross those two levels, numerical language and numbers: a strange

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loop. To make the cross, he chose a correspondence between every symbol in the
language and a number, in such a way that strings of symbols (thus statements about
numbers) could also correspond to a number. The details need not concern us here [9],
but this is the general gist of the language thus constructed by Godel.

Once this intercrossing of domains is firmly established, it is easy to generate circular

sentences like Quine's. In Godel's case it takes the form, "This sentence has no proof" (it
cannot be proved either true or false). Now the very existence of such a statement shows
that all formal systems rich enough to contain numbers and arithmetic have perfectly
well-defined and sensical things that cannot be decided right or wrong; thus, it is said,
they are incomplete.

That undecidable statements could be thus produced at the very heart of such a central
portion of mathematics sent waves of dissatisfaction among mathematicians. From our
point of view, however, it is possible to understand Godel's result rather differently: Not
one of limitation, but as yet another instance of how closure can lead to the constitution
of an autonomous domain, where out of a background a unity emerges and specifies a
larger domain. In Godel's case, once the loop is completed and the levels entangled, we
have the emergence of a unity in the linguistic universe. The comparison with the
biological case is evident:

Let us consider for a moment the inside of any of these strange loops. In the Epimenides
case, if we assume the statement is true, then it is consequently false, then it must be true.
Its fine structure is one where there is an oscillation between parts that were previously

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separate. We can write it thus:

Or, in the cellular case, we can unfold the circle and obtain also an infinitely growing
pattern:

In a unit with operational closure, what appears as coherent or distinguishable behavior

(whether in the domain of meaning or in the domain of molecular structures) has a
peculiar nature indeed. On the one hand, it appears as a single property of the unit itself;
on the other hand, when we attempt to examine the origin of such a property through its
own properties, we find that there is nothing but an indefinite iteration of the same; it
starts nowhere and it ends nowhere. The coherence is distributed through an ever
repeating circle that is infinite in its circulation, yet finite, since we can see its effect or
results as a unit's property.

Let me give a more tangible illustration of this same idea. Consider a triangle. Break each
side of it in three so as to produce a six-pointed star. Take each side of the star and break
these in the same fashion. Repeat the process with every new side, ad infinitum. The
resulting figure, somewhat like a snow crystal, is immediately graspable; it has coherence
as a shape. Yet what we perceive is like a mythical ancestor that can never be fully drawn
or described, but only stated as a trend of uninterrupted iteration. Interestingly enough,
because of this self-referential geometrical construction, figures such as this have
dimensions that are in between the traditional ones (besides having other peculiar
properties). In the case of the triangle, the dimension of the final product is greater than 1,
but less than 2 - it is exactly 1.2618. Because of their fractional dimension, such figures
are called fractals (Figure 27) [5].

In the example of a fractal we have all the ingredients, in a visual form, to see how
closure in a process can lead (1) to a coherence that is always distributed and thus never
fully present, but graspable as a "mythical ancestor" and (2) to properties which are
emergent, and not simply added from the component elements that participate in the
process.

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THE COGNITIVE PERPSECTIVE

We have been discussing two instances - whether they be cells and the living, or formal
systems and undecidability - where operational closure generates a whole new domain in
the apparently harmless act of curling onto itself. At this point, we must take the next step
in our examination of the natural history of circularity and explore the next fundamental
case where closure changes the picture completely: our own descriptions, our own
cognizing.

In fact, in considering our own cognizing, we put together the essentials of the two
previous instances discussed. On the one hand, our cognition is in our biological substrate
as body; on the other hand, our descriptions are fully capable of self-descriptions at
indefinitely many levels. Through the nervous system, these two modes of closure are
superimposed so as to constitute that closest and most elusive of all experiences:
ourselves.

It is apparent that the nervous system is a part of our unity as biological beings, an
autonomous unit in its own right. What is not so apparent is that the nervous system itself
is curled on itself in several fundamental ways [7].

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First, there is no effect or action of the nervous system (motility, glandular secretion) that
does not have a direct effect on a sensorial surface. Just as a neuron acts on another by a
close apposition of their surfaces in a synapse, a set of muscles acts on the sensorium of
the body through recurrent action or sensorimotor synapse. A knee jerk is produced
because a tendon is stretched, proprioceptors are pulled, and the activity of motor neurons
in the spinal cord is changed, leading to muscles contracting in the opposite direction of
the stretch. Motor actions have sensorial consequences, and sensorial actions have motor
consequences. This reafference principle is of universal validity.

But there is still another essential sense in which the nervous system has operational
closure. Once we pass the threshold of the sensorium or motorium, the effects of such
organs in the nervous system are not like a one-way street or channel where traffic is
clearly routed. Rather, it resembles

..the addition of one new voice on the floor of the stock market. For example, if we were
to travel with the nerve activity originating at the retina into the cortical area (of the
occiptal lobe), we would find that for each fiber from the retina entertaining this piece of
cortex, 100 other fibers enter at the same spatial location from all over the brain [1]. Thus
the activity of the retina at best sculpts or modulates what is going on internally in the
high interconnection of the neural layers and nuclei.

But there is still more. Although electrical impulses travel along in only one direction,
many other chemicals travel in the opposite direction in the cell's axon, so that routes in
the nervous system are always two-way. For example, regulatory metabolites can be
taken up at the axon's terminal end, travel toward the cell body, and go across a synapse
to act on the preceding neuron with respect to the electrical flow. There are many such
mutual effects in the nervous system that are just beginning to be charted [2]. A diagram
may help to visualize this organization:

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In this view of the nervous system we see a behavior when there is some particular
coherence attained by the closure of this whole pattern of interconnections. One can
analyze this coherence by breaking the process into its parts. We could start, say, with
vision as originating in the eye, and then consider all the pathways that lead from the eye
into the cortex, and then from the cortex to the thalamus and the forebrain, and so on.
Eventually, we would end up in a full circle, and, indeed, we could loop around
indefinitely. As in the illustration of a fractal, behavior is like the mythical ancestor of
this infinitely recurring process, looping on itself repeatedly.

SUBJECT/OBJECT

If we are thoroughly consistent with what we have said about the nervous system, we
must see our own experience arising in the same manner. And if we do so, there are two
paramount consequences to consider.

First, that we cannot step outside the domain specified by our body and nervous system.
There is no world except that experienced though those processes given to us and which
makes us what we are. We find ourselves in a cognitive domain, and we cannot leap out
of it or choose its beginnings or modes.

Second, and equally important, we cannot trace a given experience to its origins in a
unique fashion. In fact, whenever we do try and find the source of, say, a perception or an
idea, we find ourselves in an ever-receding fractal, and wherever we choose to delve we
find it equally full of details and interdependencies. It is always the perception of a
perception of a perception…..Or the description of a description of a description....There
is nowhere we can drop anchor and say, "This is where this perception started; this is how
it was done."

In finding the world as we do, we forget all we did to find it as such, entangled in the
strange loop of our actions through our body. Much like the young man in the Escher
engraving "Print Gallery", we see a world that turns into the very substratum which
produces us, thereby closing the loop and intercrossing domains. As in the Escher
engraving, there is nowhere to step out into. And if we were to try, we would find
ourselves in an endless circle that vanishes into an empty space right in its middle (Figure
31).

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Editors note: Escher's biographer Bruno Ernst, explains this print as follows: At the
lower right-hand corner we find the entrance to a gallery in which an exhibition of prints
is being held. Turning to the left we come across a young man who stands looking at a
print on the wall. On this print he can see a ship, and higher up, in other words in the
upper left-hand corner, some houses along a quayside. Now if we look along to the right,
this row of houses continues, and on the far right our gaze descends, to discover a corner
house at the base of which is the entrance to a picture gallery in which an exhibition of
prints is being held...So our young man is standing inside the same print as the one he is
looking at [The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, Random House, New York, 1976, p.31]

Tradition (1) would have it that experience is either a subjective or an objective affair,
that the world is there and that we either see it as it is or we see it through our own
subjectivity. However, when we follow the guiding thread of circularity and its natural
history, we may look at that quandary from a different perspective: that of participation
and interpretation, where the subject and the object are inseparably meshed. This
interdependence is revealed to the extent that nowhere can I start with a pure account of
either one, and wherever I choose to start is like a fractal that only reflects back precisely
what I do: to describe it. By this logic, we stand in relation to the world as in a mirror that
does not tell us how the world is: neither does it tell us how it is not. It reveals that it is
possible to be the way we are being, and to act the way we have acted. It reveals that our
experience is viable.

That the world should have this plastic texture, neither subjective nor objective, not one
and separable, neither two are inseparable, is fascinating. It points both to the nature of
the process, which we can chart in all of its formality and materiality, as well as to the
fundamental limits about what we can understand about ourselves and the world. It shows
that reality is not just constructed at our whim, for that would be to assume that there is a
starting point we can choose from inside first. It also shows that reality cannot be
understood as given and that we are to perceive it and pick it up, as a recipient, for that

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would also be to assume a starting point: outside first. It shows, indeed, the fundamental
groundlessness of our experience, where we are given regularities and interpretations
born out of our common history as biological beings and social entities. Within those
consensual domains of common history we live in an apparently endless metamorphosis
of interpretations following interpretations [12].

It reveals to us a world where "no-ground", "no-foundation" can become the basis for
understanding that the age-old idea of objectivity and communication as progressive
elimination of error for gradual attunement is, by its own scientific standards, a chimera.

We should do better to fully accept the notoriously different and more difficult situation
of existing in a world where no one in particular can have a claim to better understanding
in a universal sense. This is indeed interesting: that the empirical world of the living and
the logic of self-reference, that the whole of the natural history of circularity should tell
us that ethics - tolerance and pluralism, detachment from our own perceptions and values
to allow for those of others - is the very foundation of knowledge, and also its final point.
At this point, actions are clearer than words.

(1) One should qualify the various alternative traditions that are dissident. A very
important one in this regard is phenomenology, and many of its side branches, but we
speak here of the dominant common sense.

REFERENCES

1. Braitenberg, V. The Texture of Brains. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1978.

2. Dismukes, R.K. The Brain and Behavioral Sciences 2. 409, 1979.

3. Eigen, M. and Schuster, P. The Hypercycle. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1979.

4. Hughes, P, and Brecht, G. Vicious Circles and Infinity. Doubleday, New York 1975.
Also see Hofstadter, D. Godel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books,
New York, 1979.

5. Mandlebrot, B. Fractals: Form, Chance, Dimension. Freeman, San Francisco, 1978.

6. Margulis, L. The Evolution of Eucorytic Cells. Freeman, San Francisco,1980.

7. H, Maturana. The biology of cognition. In Maturana and Varela, ep. cit.

8. Maturana, H., and Varela, F. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Boston Studies in

Philosophical Science, Vol. 42. D. Reidel, Boston, 1980.

9. Nagel E, and Newman J. Godels Proof. New York University Press, New York, 1965.
See also Hofstadter, ep. cit [4].

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10. Quine, W.O. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971.

11. Schiller, J. La Notion d'organization dans l'histoire de la biologie. Maloine, Paris,

1978.

12. The closes philosophical expression of this conclusion I have found is the
Madhyamikan school of medieval Indian philosophy. See for example, the helpful
introduction by F. Streng, Emptiness: A Study of Religious Meaning, Abingdon Press,
New York, 1967.

13. Varela F. Principle of Biological Autonomy. North Holland, New York, 1979.

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