Enactivism

Enactivism is the way of thinking that to explore mental activities, one must examine living systems interacting with their environments, agents bringing forth a mental world through embodied, sensorimotor coupling with the physical world. Cognition is characterized, not by representations in the brain, but by embodied activities and organisms-environment dynamics. A mind without a body would be as if incoherent.

“Enaction” was the term introduced in The Embodied Mind, the 1991 book by Varela, Rosch, and Thompson (Varela et al., 1991). The enactive view is that cognition develops via dynamic, bidirectional exchanges between an organism and its surroundings. It is not the case that an organism seeks optimum homeostasis in a static environment, but rather that the organism is shaping its environment and is being shaped by its environment—actively, iteratively, continuously—all mediated by that organism's sensorimotor processes. Thus, organisms are active agents in the world who affect the world and who are affected by the world (Hutto, 2023; "Enactivism,” 2024).

Enaction builds on autopoiesis, the term used to describe the organizational criterion of life—a network of processes that produces and maintains its own components and boundary (operational closure) while remaining structurally coupled to an environment (Maturana and Varela, 1980). Autopoiesis, then, supplies the minimal autonomous organization that makes a system a living agent; enaction adds how such agents enact a meaningful world through ongoing interaction.

Enactivists would harbor no hope of understanding mentality unless it were founded on histories of such bidirectional organism–environment interactions because that's the core concept of how minds arise and work. Organisms are self-creating, self-organizing, self-adapting, self-sustaining living creatures who regulate themselves and, in doing so, can change their environments, which then, iteratively, recycle the whole process.

How enaction and autopoeisis compare and contrast with Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle (FEP) offers insights into enaction and autopoiesis. According to Di Paulo, Thompson, and Beer, while "many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems, they critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misinterpretations of key enactive concepts." In particular, these authors "notice a tendency to disregard the operational definition of autopoiesis and the distinction between a system’s structure and its organization." Other misreadings concern the conflation of processes of self-distinction in operationally closed systems and FEP's assumption that systems reach a non-equilibrium steady state and are enveloped by a Markov blanket. The authors argue that "these assumptions contradict the historicity of sense-making that is explicit in the enactive approach. Enactive concepts such as adaptivity and agency are defined in terms of the modulation of parameters and constraints of the agent-environment coupling, which entail the possibility of changes in variable and parameter sets, constraints, and in the dynamical laws affecting the system. This allows enaction to address the path-dependent diversity of human bodies and minds." The authors argue that these ideas are "incompatible with the time invariance of non-equilibrium steady states assumed by the FEP. In addition, the enactive perspective foregrounds the enabling and constitutive roles played by the world in sense-making, agency, development" (Di Paolo et. al., 2022).

The scientific consensus is that phenomenal consciousness evolved via stages of cognition and proto-consciousness selected by fitness-enhanced traits in challenging environments. Although focused on cognition, enactivism enriches the consciousness-generating conditions by adding interactive dynamism between the organism and the environment. (Enactment is also said to be “a genuinely metaphysical idea” and “an ontological breakthrough” in that “Something is the case if and only if it is enacted” [Werner, 2023].)