The Twinkle in a Frogs Eye
"In their millions, the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle."
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Steinbeck had a keen interest in Frogs. He wrote about them in Cannery Row, East of Eden, and Tortilla Flat. Frogs are indeed interesting; however, their eyes are even more fascinating. Frogs have an almost 360° field of vision with their eyes on top of their heads, enabling them to spot predators and prey in the water, on land, or in the air above them. Even in total darkness, frogs can see color at night. A Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana also had a keen interest in frogs, explicitly their eyes. As a result of Matarana's fascination with frogs' eyes, he developed a new form of cybernetics called Autopoiesis. In his 1972 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, the Chilean biologist described how they coined Autopoiesis. He used the famous "Don Quixote's Dilemma" from Miguel de Cervantes' "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha."
The dilemma Quixote faced was the dichotomy between praxis and poiesis. Aristotle believed there are three basic activities of humans: theoria, poiesis, and praxis. Theoria is the process of seeking theoretical knowledge. Poiesis is the end goal of producing, and praxis is the practical aspect of an activity. Quixote's dilemma was between living and acting in the world (praxis) or creating his world (poiesis.) His "credo-loco" is sanity or craziness. Quixote believed he was a knight and fought windmills he thought were giants. Maturana coined autopoiesis to refer to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its parts, like Steinbeck's suggestion that the eyes make twinkling little stars.
Maturana
Maturana's insight came from studying frogs' eyes. Maturana working with other scientists, found that a frog's visual system constructs its reality instead of just representing it. A frog's vision is designed to see small, fast-moving objects (such as flies) and ignore significant, slow-moving things. He found that a frog's eye is like a mini-computer or a cybernetic system. Images are not just sent to the brain for processing; they are pre-processed in a cybernetic manner. If you leave dead flies near a frog, the frog will starve to death. In other experiments, dark cardboard flies were designed to fly over a frog's head, and the frogs ate the cardboard. The frog sees the world in a particular way, not because of how it interprets reality but how it creates reality. These experimental results made Maturana consider his views on reality, knowledge, and cognition. Being a biologist, he struggled with the basic definition of what it means to be a living system.
