Scientific biography: 1969

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE LIVING BEING AS A PHYSICAL FIELD THAT CAN BE STUDIED SCIENTIFICALLY

During a period in which he taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Cordón published an article in which he presented the results of his fifteen-year efforts to interpret the living being.

With the musician Pau Casals in Puerto Rico, 1969

Experience as a physical field (and awareness, as a sector of this field): an essential step forward in his interpretation of the living being

He considered living beings to be entities that can have experience, which they must acquire and apply persistently in order to survive. They do this by performing actions that are continually adjusted to the changes in their environment, and that involve guiding the activity of the living beings of the lower level that make up their somas. Taking a further step, he identified the living being with its psyche and the psyche with a physical field (which has a qualitatively different nature in the living beings of the three biological levels: electromagnetic in the animal, of hydrogen ions in the cell and of intermolecular forces in the protein).

Cordón considered that the physical field of the experience (in which he included that of the awareness) is as real as the body of the living being. The statement that the field of the psyche is the essential character of the living being is confirmed by the fact that its disappearance immediately leads to the interruption of the associative activity of the living beings of its soma, and therefore the death of the latter. For the first time the awareness was considered not as a philosophical object but as a scientific one, as the characteristic of all living beings. Therefore, if its existence was ignored it was impossible exactly to perceive the nature and conduct of each living being."Experience as an essential character of living beings.". (pp. 11-67).

Cordón considered that every type of living being may be potentially explained (by its ontogenic and phylogenic origin) if the empirical and experimental data accumulated on current living beings are suitably organized to reflect their real appearance in the natural process of biological evolution, caused by specific, intelligible selective advantages.

His definition of the living being as an agent capable of action and experience forced him to try to understand the soma that performs its action, the environment in which its action is carried out, and the experience (of which the sector of the awareness forms part) that is able to direct this action.

In this stage of his life he had plunged fully into the study of the biological problem that would focus his greatest efforts from then on: understanding specifically the constant emergence, from the associative activity of the lower living beings that form its soma, of the psyche of a living being that is in permanent relation with its specific, continually changing environment.

Years later he would present a specific model that explained the emergence of the cellular experience and awareness from a soma formed by proteins his main theoretical contribution to biology.