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 makes this stronger claim and emphasizes the continuity between life and mind. The name comes from The Embodied Mind (1991), in which Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch described cognition as the enactment of a world through the activity of a living being, rather than the representation of a world that is already given. Behind that book lay earlier work by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on how living things produce and maintain themselves. These readings follow that biological strand. They begin with how living things keep themselves going, then ask how that activity makes things significant to them and what this means for how we explain perception and action in brains and bodies. Much enactivist thought also gives a central place to lived experience, meaning what it is like to perceive and act. These readings say less about that, and Ward (2026), listed in Further Reading, is a good place to start for an overview that gives it more room.

Working through the readings 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.

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

Embodiment is often taken to mean that having a body matters for psychological life, but a robot has a body too. This reading asks what makes a body living. It introduces three standpoints on the body (as form, as actively engaged with the world, and as lived experience) and explains why the readings concentrate on the first two. Starting with a bacterium, it introduces self-production (autopoiesis) and sense-making, the enactivist term for how things come to matter to a living being, then asks what changes for animals with nervous systems and for persons.

Enacting Worlds

Different organisms share a physical world, but what becomes food, shelter, or danger depends on how each lives. Starting from what enaction means, the reading uses the biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s account of the tick and the bats in my backyard to ask how a living being brings forth its own world, why the limits of our senses do not cut us off from a “complete” one, and what we can learn about another animal’s world without presuming to know its experience.

What Are We Explaining?

How does explaining the operation of a nervous system relate to understanding what an organism is doing? Maturana’s early work on vision in the frog 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, and what comes to matter to them.

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

Further Reading

Suggestions for further reading, grouped by topic.