Enacting Life

Enacting Life is a freely available set of readings introducing enactivism, a different way of thinking about cognition that begins with the organization and activity of living things. The readings follow the biological strand of this approach, rooted in the work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

What does being alive have to do with cognition? How should we understand the relation between an organism and its surroundings? And how does an account of what happens in the nervous system connect to what we describe as perceiving or knowing? The readings work through these questions and consider how enactivism might help ground psychology and neuroscience more coherently in biology.

The discussions range from how living things produce and maintain themselves to the different worlds animals encounter through their particular ways of living. There are four readings plus a coda that considers AI and its place in human sense-making. You don’t need a background in philosophy to follow the readings. Reading them in order, beginning with Embodiment and Enactivism, will help with ideas that build across the text, but each reading can also be used on its own.

Preface

The Preface describes the background to the readings and how they were prepared.

Embodiment and Enactivism

What does embodiment mean beyond having a physical body? This reading introduces Maturana and Varela’s ideas about how living things produce and maintain themselves while remaining dependent on their surroundings. It then considers how later enactivists connect living organization with sense-making and agency.

Enacting Worlds

Different organisms share a physical world, but what becomes food, shelter, or danger depends on how each lives. This reading explores how meaningful environments arise through relations between living things and their surroundings. Drawing on Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt and later enactivist accounts of sense-making, it asks what studying another animal’s senses and behavior can tell us about its world, and what remains beyond our access.

Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience

How does explaining the operation of a nervous system relate to understanding what an organism is doing? Maturana’s work on vision provides a starting point for examining perception and knowing. The reading also considers his account of language and the role of observers in describing and explaining living activity.

What Makes Living Things Different?

Machines can respond to changing conditions and pursue goals. What, then, is distinctive about living activity? This reading explores how the need to maintain a living organization bears on agency and perspective. It also considers development: how each generation builds a viable way of life using resources and relations inherited from earlier generations.

Coda: AI and Human Sense-Making

Language models raise questions about the relations among embodiment, language, and understanding. The coda considers what their abilities give us reason to reconsider, and how exchanges with AI can change what people understand, what matters to them, and what they become able to do.

For a complementary account of how living beings develop, see About Development.

Annotated Reading Guide

Begin with Start Here for a selection of starting points, then explore more detailed recommendations in Going Further.