Enacting Life

Enacting Life is a freely available set of introductory readings on embodiment and enactivism. It is primarily meant for readers with a background in psychology and neuroscience who are curious about what these ideas 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.

Psychology and neuroscience often focus on how the brain receives information about the world and processes it. This approach has been very productive, but it can leave something important in the background: the living being whose brain it is. 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.

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.

These readings follow one route through this landscape, drawing on enactivism and its emphasis on the continuity between life and mind. Following the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, they begin with how living things produce and maintain themselves, 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. They concentrate on how living things maintain themselves and how things come to matter to them.

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.

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 three standpoints on the body: as living form, as actively engaged with the world, and as lived experience. It explains why the readings concentrate on the first two. 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. Starting from what enaction means, the reading uses Uexküll’s 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 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”, or explore more detailed recommendations in “Going Further.”