The central idea of this book is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity. The self isn’t something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm.

Soteriological concepts are like aesthetic concepts in this respect. They’re always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the communities of practice and thought in which they figure.

The waking world isn’t outside and separate from our mind. It’s brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.

The organism’s environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.

The waking world isn't outside and separate from our mind. It's brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.

Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.

Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism's integrity.

The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.

Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).

In establishing a pole of internal identity in relation to the environment, the autopoietic process brings forth, in the same stroke, what counts as other, the organism’s world. To exist as an individual means not simply to be numerically distinct from other things but to be a self-pole in a dynamic relationship with alterity, with what is other, with the world.