Enacting Life

Psychology and neuroscience often explain the mind by asking how the brain receives information about the world and processes it. Much has been learned this way, but the living being whose brain it is tends to drop out of the explanation. An organism does more than receive signals and produce responses. It must maintain itself as a living being, and what it encounters can matter to it in ways that depend on how it is organized and on its history.

Enacting Life is a freely available set of introductory readings that start from that living being. They are primarily meant for readers with a background in psychology and neuroscience who are curious about what ideas of embodiment and enactivism have to offer. Four readings and a coda on AI explore what changes in our understanding of mind and behavior when we begin with the living organism rather than an isolated processor of information. The readings work through a line of philosophy that may be hard to follow at times, but they assume no philosophical background. They were written by a psychologist and neuroscientist, not a philosopher, trying to understand what this literature offers psychology and neuroscience. The About page says more about how they came about.

Readers may have come across embodiment, embodied cognition, or 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) without being sure what these terms commit anyone to. They cover a wide range of approaches. Some hold that having a body influences how we think, for instance that bodily states can shift judgments or that gesture can support reasoning. Some argue that thinking can extend beyond the body into notebooks, devices, and other people. Others make the stronger claim that the organization and activity of a living body are part of what perceiving, acting, and knowing are.

Enactivism is a tradition in philosophy and cognitive science that approaches cognition through the activity of living beings in their surroundings. Rather than beginning with a brain constructing representations of a world whose features are already given, it asks how perception, action, and knowing arise through the activities and histories of organisms. The approach developed from The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), drawing partly on earlier work by Humberto Maturana and Varela on the organization of living things. Enactivism encompasses different approaches, including ones that place greater emphasis on lived experience, social interaction, and the sensorimotor organization of perception.

These readings offer a selective introduction, focusing on three questions that interest me as a psychologist and neuroscientist. How does anything come to matter to a living being? How do an organism’s body, activity, and history shape what it can perceive and do? And what difference does starting with the living organism make to the explanations we construct in psychology and neuroscience? The readings pursue these questions through the biological strand of enactivism. They do not attempt to cover the full range of enactivist thought, particularly its treatment of lived experience.

About

Why a psychologist and neuroscientist came to write about enactivism, the questions about mind and life behind the readings, and how they were written and revised, including the use of AI tools.

Embodiment and Enactivism

What does embodiment mean, and what does the enactivist approach add to our understanding of the relationship between the body and the mind? This reading explores the ideas of self-production (autopoiesis) and sense-making, or how things come to matter to a living being, and follows the argument from cells to persons.

Enacting Worlds

Using a tick and bats as examples, this reading introduces enaction and asks what science can tell us about another animal’s world and what it cannot tell us about that animal’s experience. The point is a broader one, that we experience the world through our own activity, and that what we can know about another being is limited by our own ways of acting and making distinctions.

What Are We Explaining?

Using Maturana’s work on vision, this reading asks how neural mechanisms relate to psychological phenomena and how the observer’s own descriptions enter into scientific explanation. It then follows Maturana’s account of language and shared ways of making distinctions. This is not an easy reading, but it is a key one for understanding a particular line of the enactivist approach to mind and life.

What Makes Living Things Different?

Unlike a machine, a living thing has to keep producing the organization that keeps it alive. This reading traces what follows from that difference for agency, perspective, and what can matter to an organism. It also looks at how a viable way of life is built anew in each generation.

Coda: AI and Human Sense-Making

A language model can answer us, and its answer can change what we think. Does that mean it understands anything, or that anything matters to it? The coda takes up these questions and considers how exchanges with AI may shape what matters in human lives.

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

Further Reading

Suggestions for further reading, grouped by topic.