What is Enactivism?
Enactivism is a theoretical framework in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and related fields that posits cognition as an emergent process arising from the dynamic, reciprocal interactions between a living organism (or agent) and its environment, rather than as an internal computation or representation of an external world. It challenges traditional representationalist views (e.g., the brain as a computer processing symbols) by emphasizing the “enactive” role of the body in shaping perception, action, and meaning.
Core Principles
Enactivism, pioneered in the 1990s by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in their book The Embodied Mind (1991), rests on several key ideas:
- Autonomy and Self-Organization: Living systems are autonomous, self-organizing entities that maintain their identity through ongoing structural coupling with their environment. The body isn’t a passive machine but an active participant in cognition.
- Sensorimotor Enaction: Cognition emerges from sensorimotor loops—perception and action intertwined—where the world is “brought forth” through embodied engagement, not pre-given. For example, understanding a chair isn’t just mental imagery but enacted through bodily interactions like sitting or grasping.
- Sense-Making: Agents actively interpret and enact meaning in their world, creating “relevance” based on their concerns and history. This ties into phenomenology, bridging subjective experience with objective processes.
- Embodied and Embedded Cognition: As a strand of embodied cognition, it stresses that mind is distributed across body-environment couplings, not confined to the brain.
Variants and Evolution
There are three main strands today:
- Sensorimotor Enactivism: Focuses on perception-action cycles (e.g., O’Regan and Noë’s work on how seeing is “know-how”).
- Autopoietic Enactivism: Emphasizes life as self-producing systems (from Maturana and Varela).
- Radical Enactivism: Rejects contentful mental states altogether, viewing cognition as skillful coping (e.g., Hutto and Myin).
Enactivism extends to a “philosophy of nature,” integrating science with broader questions about agency, ethics, and prediction of others’ behavior. In nursing or AI, it informs “sense-making” models for human-AI interaction.
In our earlier chat on sentience, enactivism suggests consciousness involves these embodied dynamics, making it a test for “what it’s like” to be an agent.