When we think about how humans and other living things experience the world, we often rely on a simple model: the body is seen as receiving information through the senses, with the brain processing that information to generate responses. This view of bodies as input devices for our brains has driven much of psychology and neuroscience for decades. But what if this picture is fundamentally incomplete?

Enacting Life explores a radical alternative that emerged from biology in the 1970s. Through the work of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, a new way of thinking developed that sees living things not as passive receivers of information, but as actively creating their own experienced worlds through their embodied activity. This perspective, known as enactivism, goes far beyond simple notions of "embodied cognition" as bodily influences on the brain. Instead, it examines how living things, from single cells to complex organisms, actively maintain themselves and create meaning through their embodied activity.

Drawing on psychology, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy, this Open Educational Resource (OER) explores these profound ideas and their implications. Beginning with the cell as the basic unit of life, the documents examine how living things organize their internal processes and their relationships with their environments. This biological foundation helps us understand development, cognition, perception, and consciousness in new ways that challenge traditional assumptions in psychology and neuroscience. Thinking about these challenges opens up exciting new possibilities for how we think about intelligence, development, and the nature of living systems.

This resource consists of a set of documents by Peter J. Marshall at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA.  For background on this OER project as well as reading tips and information on licensing and attribution, see this page.  

Embodiment and Enactivism 

Living things create and maintain themselves through their own activity. This document introduces the core principles of enactivism, including autopoiesis, operational closure, structural coupling, and how meaning emerges through the autonomous activity of living systems.

Coupling, Cognition, and Intelligence

From an enactivist perspective, cognition isn't something that happens in brains but characterizes all living systems. Here we explore how intelligence emerges from structural coupling with the environment and what this means for understanding both biological and artificial systems. 

Enacting Worlds

Different animals bring forth different self-worlds through their embodied activity. Enacting Worlds examines the concept of umwelt and how organisms enact meaningful environments rather than simply detecting pre-existing features of an objective world. 

Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience

Nervous systems don't passively receive information, they participate in creating experience. This piece explores how enactivist ideas challenge traditional approaches to perception, cognition, and the relationship between psychology and neuroscience. 

What Makes Living Things Different? 

Living things are autonomous in a way that machines are not. This document explores how autopoiesis creates genuine agency, perspective, and meaningful engagement with the world in ways that fundamentally distinguish living things from nonliving things, including machines. 

Coda: Intelligence and Life

A brief reflection on what makes living intelligence different from artificial systems, and why meaning, learning, and understanding depend on embodied engagement with the world.