Enacting Life

What does embodiment mean? It is often taken to mean that having a body influences how we think. These readings take a broader view: the organization and activity of a living body are part of what perceiving, acting, and knowing are, and they make it possible for things to matter to a living being.

Enacting Life asks how this is possible: How do the form and activity of a living being make a world of significance possible? By form, I don’t just mean what a body looks like, but the organization of a living thing and what it is capable of doing. What can matter to a bat, a tick, or a developing child depends on that form, and on how its capacities are exercised in particular encounters.

The readings introduce enactivism, an approach to cognition that challenges the idea of a mind simply processing information about an already meaningful world. They mainly follow the biological line associated with Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. It begins with how living things produce and maintain themselves, then asks how their activity makes things significant to them. This provides a different way of connecting the study of cognition to biology, psychology, and neuroscience.

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 them. 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 approaches the body as living form, as actively engaged with the world, and as lived experience. Starting with a bacterium, it then introduces Maturana and Varela’s account of living organization and considers how later enactivists connect that organization with sense-making.

Enacting Worlds

Different organisms share a physical world, but what becomes food, shelter, or danger depends on how each lives. Uexküll’s tick is not simply a creature with access to less information, and the example of bats shows how bodily capacities are exercised in particular encounters and change through development. The reading asks what we can learn about another animal’s meaningful world through its activity without presuming to know its subjective experience.

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.