One does not usually go around the world asking oneself that question. What is seeing?, How do we humans come to know the world, the reality that surrounds us?

We live, from school onwards, in a discourse where it is explained to us how parts of our bodies, the senses, allow us to capture the environment around us. This enables living beings to move efficiently in the medium in which we exist. That is, for example sight, we are told how a beam of light that bounces off an object, let's say a tree, then hits our retina and, somehow the tree tells us what it is. Thus, we talk about how light "brings" us information from the objects it bounces off.

Well, if one tries to study what that operational and concrete process is through which the tree tells our eye or our brain what it is, one finds that what is evoked in the traditional discourse, does not happen. Since if that were the case, we should find a univocal relationship between the perceived object and the perceiver's nervous system. That is, some process in the retina or in the brain that had to do specifically with the perceived object, in our example, the tree. That is, we could observe in the retina or in the nervous system different processes according to the perceived object.

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When Maturana specifically analyzed that process looking for a univocal relationship between perceived object and perceiver, he realized that what happens in our retina, when we see a tree, has nothing to do with the tree, but rather what happens in the retina has to do with how the retina is made. Maturana shows us, through his scientific works, how the nervous system of any animal is operationally closed, meaning, the neurons that constitute it form a true network in such a way that one can follow the different paths from neuron to neuron without ever leaving the nervous system. The nervous system of a living being never encounters the medium.

If we understand this, we realize that the external world cannot tell us anything about “what it is”. That is, the photon that comes from the tree and hits the retina does not bring any information about its origin. And yet I look and say “I see a tree”. This ability to say that I see a tree has nothing to do with the capture of information, but with an evolutionary history of congruent organism-medium transformation.

To understand this we must introduce here a new distinction. Humans, like any molecular being, are structurally determined beings. That means, everything that happens to us depends on how we are made at the moment it happens to us.

This is not so strange since in our everyday life we know that the objects we interact with behave in a way that has to do with how they are made, and not with our incident action. In a daily example, says Maturana, in the voice recorder, when we press the record button, a process is triggered that has to do with the structure of the recorder and not because our finger determines in any way what happens inside the recorder. Our finger does something, certainly, triggers, the start of a process, but that process has to do with the recorder and not with us. Proof of this is that if we press the same button with the tip of a pencil, the triggered process would be the same.

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We, as molecular beings, also, in that sense, are structurally determined and essentially the same thing happens to us as to the recorder. When something disturbs our senses (Sight, touch, taste, smell,…) this incident action triggers in us a process that has to do with us and not with the agent that disturbs us.

If one takes this reflection seriously, one realizes something surprising. Living beings do not capture nor can capture information from the environment, and yet we look and say that we see a tree. The salamander shoots its tongue and catches the insect with surprising precision, the cheetah observes the gazelle and runs after it until it catches it, etc. In short, we see how animals behave effectively in their living.

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