‘The Map is the Territory’

A seminar with Humberto Maturana

Milton Keynes gives the impression of being a vaguely prosperous city, hardly surprising I
suppose, named as it is after a hypnotherapist and an economist. It is also the headquarters of the Open
University. I was there for three days in March attending an unusual and unique seminar sponsored by the
Open University Systems Department, entitled ‘Knowing and Being’ given by the Chilean neuro-biologist
Humberto Maturana. Maturana’s standing in the international systems community is comparable to
Gregory Bateson’s in the NLP community – an internationally respected figure, not always easy to
understand, and this seminar was a fascinating excursion into the realms of systems thinking, and human
experience.
Attending the seminar was something of a leap of faith of my part, but I was intrigued by
Maturana’s published work (see bibliography) and wanted a different perspective on language and
experience. I was not disappointed.
Humberto Maturana is a delightful man in his early sixties. For three days he spoke without notes
about human experience, language and perception with a wide range of metaphor and some very precise
spatial marking of concepts that would have done credit to a NLP master trainer. He is not familiar with
NLP. Although English is not his first language he used it very precisely to squeeze shared understanding
in real life terms from such nominalisations as ‘knowledge’, ‘experience’, and ‘language’.
Here was a man who respects and insists on the importance of subjective experience to an even
greater extent than any student of NLP. His work is built on the epistemological question, ‘How do we do
what we do?’ And he insists on subjective experience as the starting point. He models human experience.
Maturana takes Gregory Bateson’s saying about modeling very seriously: ‘to think in the way that that
thing thunk.’ He wants to explain living systems and our experience as an observer in terms of the living
we do, and the experience we have, without importing any other presuppositions. He describes himself as a
scientist and has an interesting reframe on what constitutes scientific explanation. He says scientific
explanations hold fast to the coherence of individual experience, and are prepared to be flexible about the
principles they employ. (Unlike philosophy which holds to principles and is not concerned about the
coherence of individual experience). For Maturana, a scientific explanation is a description of what you
have to do in one domain that gives the results you observe in a different domain. So for example,
biochemistry can provide an explanation of emotions, in the sense that when certain substances are present
in the body, they consistently generate a particular feeling, everything else being equal. However, this does
make science reductionistic, in other words it cannot claim that emotions are ‘only’ a matter of
biochemistry, or even that biochemical changes ‘cause’ emotions. The emotions emerge in a different
domain, and are generated by an interaction between the biochemical recipe and the structure of the human
body system. Claiming that biochemical reactions in the body ‘cause’ emotions would be like pushing the
record button on a cassette recorder and if nothing happened, thinking there was something wrong with
your finger. Your finger, or something like it, is needed to push the button, but the result is dependent on
the structure of the tape recorder. This means that every science is a closed system, that is, coherent in
itself. No science is more basic than any other.
Explanations do not exist in a vacuum. They have to be accepted as valid by the listener. To my
mind this fits into NLP modeling very well. For example, suppose we were to model good public speakers.
What we are modeling is in the domain of behaviour. But what generates this behaviour? There must be
more to it otherwise modeling would be easy – just go away and do exactly what your model did. We
explain on a different level, we look at sequences of representation systems, metaprograms, beliefs, values
and physiology. None of these on their own or in combination constitute the behaviour of good public
speaking. We say however, if you entertain these internal representations (Neuro), employ language in this
way (Linguistic), and use your physiology in such and such a way with these outcomes (programming) then
the behaviour you want will emerge. And this explanation has to be accepted for the model to work, the
modeler has to act congruently as if it were true and in so doing may make it so.
Maturana has made several significant contributions to the systems field. The most widely known
is the concept of autopoiesis that he developed with his colleague Francisco Varela. The word looks
formidable, but the meaning is straightforward. It is derived from the Greek roots meaning ‘self-
producing’. Autopoietic systems are networks of components that produce their own components, or
expand them. Living systems are autopoietic systems. This has many implications that are being explored
in biology, artificial intelligence, and even business change management, because a business can be looked
upon as an autopoietic system with respect to information. This way of defining a living system is also self
referential, referring to its own process, consistent with his insistence on the primacy of subjective
experience. Most of the definitions of living systems I have encountered, beginning with my biology
classes at school, define them in terms of functions and features – what they do or have, rather than what
they are. This way of thinking is also used to define other organisations such as businesses. It is known as
‘laundry list’ thinking, and not very useful. How do you know when such a list is complete? You would
need another, master list to check it against. And how would you know when this master list was
complete…?
Maturana is very generous with his time and very approachable, and I was able to ask him many
questions, relating to NLP. I brought up the saying, attributed to Korzybski ‘the map is not the territory’ - a
useful anchor for the NLP model that our individual experience of the world is a map fashioned by our
senses, interests, emotional state, metaprograms, personal history and temporary preoccupations. It is not
what is ‘out there’, so different people can experience the same situation and it will mean something
different to each of them. NLP works in a twilight world of internal representations. A world sandwiched
between a ‘reality’, about which we can say nothing directly, and the ‘hard’ scientific domain of
neurology, and biochemistry that we also do not experience directly, but we do feel its effects.
Maturana’s answer was immediate. ‘I would say the map is the territory.’ Again this answer is
consistent with his focus on subjective experience. Our experience is paramount. It is real for us, it is the
territory and we live in it. This is not a limitation, but a condition of living. NLP could then become a
means of creating the reality in which we live. The search to find yourself is endless because there is no self
to find, that is different, above, or separate from, what you are doing right now. For Maturana the self in
embodied in action.
The three days were a rich experience and there is only so much that can be put in a short article.
They gave me many new and interesting ways of thinking about a range of subjects from therapy to
organisational change management. The seminar was held in the Open University main lecture hall which
backs onto a grassy quadrangle that reminded me of the cloisters of a mediaeval church, only with
advertisements for systems lectures pinned to the walls rather than stations of the cross. In the late
afternoon sun of the last day I sat there wondering about what practical difference these ideas could make
to people’s lives. I asked Maturana in the last session.
He replied, ‘I think the change that would happen would be more awareness about our emotions
and responsibility would come through that… I think if that were to happen the other thing we would
discover is that we are not in any special way. Of course we have a fundamental body structure and we
have grown in a fundamental domain - I speak Spanish you speak English - but we are not good nor bad,
we are not physicians, not cooks. It depends on how we live what we become. We would become aware
there is… a domain of more openness in which we would realise that we and our children are not stuck, we
are not stuck in a being. This is important. We are not stuck in being a bad person. We are not stuck in
being a good person, the field is open...’
© Joseph O’Connor 1997

Bibliography

Maturana, Humberto, and Varela, Francisco, Autopoiesis and Cognition – The Realisation of the Living
Boston studies in the Philosophy of Science Volume 42, D Reidel Publishing Company (1980)

Maturana, Humberto, and Varela, Francisco, The Tree of Knowledge – the biological Roots of Human
Understanding Shambala (1987)

Varela Francisco, Thompson Evan, and Rosch Elanor, The Embodied Mind MIT Press (1991)

Also see the review of The Embodied Mind by Brian Van der Horst in NLP World March (1994)