Gefter’s Enactive-QBist Engagement

Science philosopher/writer Amanda Gefter’s theory of consciousness proposes unifying QBist physics with enactive cognitive science. QBist physics, Qbism, is a quantum-Bayesian interpretation that treats quantum theory as a normative ‘user’s manual’ for agents in a participatory universe. Enactive cognitive science, enactivism, is the adaptive, embodied cognitive science framework in which cognition is the enactment of a subject–object boundary through ongoing sensorimotor engagement with the environment. Taken together, she says, “they offer the possibility of a unified metaphysics—one that brings subject and object, mind and world, back together again” (Gefter, 2024).

QBism and Enactivism as Complements

Expounding her vision, Gefter dissects their claims and challenges. “Enaction can ground concepts of experience, agency, knowledge, and normativity—which play key roles in QBist quantum mechanics—in terms consistent with QBism’s participatory approach. That’s because QBism and enaction both reject an absolute, pregiven subject-object split: for QBism, quantum measurement is the enactment of the subject-object divide; for enaction, cognition is the enactment of that divide. Indeed, each appears to be half of the same story. QBism is a theory of how the world is created and recreated through interactions with an agent, while enaction is a theory of how agents are created and recreated through interactions with the world” (Gefter, 2024).

Gefter notes that each framework takes one pole as primitive—QBism takes the agent as given; enaction takes the world as given. Integrated, she suspects they could yield a post-Cartesian metaphysics in which both self and world are co-enacted, and novelty arises in the dynamic, precarious, participatory ‘between.’

Gefter sees in Qbism and enactivism a core parallelism:

• QBism focuses on how the world is continually (re)created through agent–system interactions (quantum measurements enact the subject–object divide).
• Enactivism focuses on how the agent is continually (re)created through organism–environment interactions (autopoiesis and sense-making enact that divide; see below).
• Both reject a pregiven, absolute subject–object split, and both are anti-representational: there are no static, internal models corresponding to an external reality (Gefter, 2024).

Enactive Foundations

Gefter establishes enactivist foundations:

• Autopoiesis: living systems self-produce and self-distinguish, generating the boundaries that individuate them.
• Sense-making: perception and cognition are normative engagements—actions and couplings that matter for the system’s continued viability.
• Knowledge-how: all knowing is embodied skill and adaptive coordination, not abstract propositional content.
• Second-person primacy: selves emerge in participatory ‘between spaces,’ not in solipsistic first-person interiors or detached third-person views.

Enactivists extend autopoiesis to the social domain: coordinated interaction between agents can form autonomous shared processes with their own norms, allowing the co-creation of novel meaning. Gefter sees this mapping naturally onto QBism’s treatment of intersubjective agreement as an achievement, not a given—negotiated in live interaction rather than fixed in pre-existing ‘facts.’

She references Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo’s enactive approach to intersubjectivity in their theory of ‘participatory sense-making.’ The idea, Gefter says, “is that the same dynamic processes of sense-making through which individual agents create and individuate themselves can also take place in social interactions between agents” (Gefter, 2024).

Mutual Benefits

In a crucial move, Gefter suggests how Qbism and enactivism each benefit from their interaction:

• For QBism: Enactivism offers rigorous, non-Cartesian definitions of ‘agent,’ ‘experience,’ ‘belief,’ and ‘normativity,’ avoiding the cognitivist connotations that invite charges of solipsism or idealism.
• For Enactivism: QBism offers a physics grounded in participation, dissolving the assumption of a classical, observer-independent world into which cognition merely emerges and inserts itself.

This mutual benefit comes from separate needs.

“Why do QBists need enaction?” Gefter asks. “In telling a participatory story of quantum mechanics, QBism must draw on terms that aren’t traditionally part of the physics lexicon. Experience, agency, beliefs, normativity—these are terms that more typically belong to cognitive science. And yet, if we define them using mainstream cognitive science, which draws from the same Cartesian split that participatory quantum mechanics rejects from the start, contradictions are bound to arise.”

Thus, she formulates a response: “Enaction provides clear answers to QBism’s critics. You think QBism is solipsistic? See enaction: beliefs aren’t representational; experiences aren’t private. You want to know how two agents can agree on the truth value of a proposition? See enaction: knowledge isn’t propositional. You think QBism amounts to idealism? See enaction: mind is embodied and world-involving through and through” (Gefter, 2024).

Why do enactivists need Qbism? Qbism grounds phenomenology and embodied interaction in the (putative) foundational theory of the universe. Gefter contends, “Just as QBism would fall into incoherence if it understood agency, belief, experience, and normativity in representational, cognitivist terms, enaction would fall into incoherence if it understood agents to be acting within a world governed by classical, non-participatory physics. Enaction needs the QBist understanding of the world as crucially as QBism needs the enactive understanding of the agent.”

Thus, she argues, “If QBism is ultimately a theory of how the world is created and recreated through interactions with an agent, enaction is a theory of how the agent is created and recreated through interactions with the world. One can’t help but feel that each is half of the same participatory story” (Gefter, 2024).

Toward a Unified Metaphysics

Gefter stresses that while QBism and enaction “both stand as challenges to our most deeply entrenched notions of world and self, the very foundations of reality”—and they both face uphill battles—“it’s the same battle.” Both, she says, “are fighting against the same 17th-century Cartesian split, the same dichotomy of subject and object. Trying to convince others of QBism or the enactive approach in isolation may be tough going precisely because it leaves half the story untold.”

Here, then, is her claim: “QBism and enaction can make for powerful allies, as they can offer, for the first time, a unified post-Cartesian metaphysics, one that finally brings self and world back together again” (Gefter, 2024).

In summary, Gefter proposes that Qbism-enactivism synthesis reframes both quantum theory and cognitive science as complementary accounts of the same process: the continual, normatively constrained enactment of the subject–object boundary. In uniting them, she envisions the chance of dissolving the entrenched dualism of self and world that has structured both physics and philosophy since Descartes—opening space for a genuinely participatory ontology where meaning, agency, and reality are inseparable from the acts that engender them (Gefter, 2024).

Clarifying Materialism and Categories

Note: In response to the above description, Amanda Gefter, a friend and colleague, makes an important point (reproduced with her permission):

“I don't consider my view, or enaction in general, to fall under materialism. But it's a nuanced point, because it's certainly not idealist or dualist either. The way I think about it is that materialism and idealism, to even be formulated as categories in the first place, require an absolute subject-object split. That way, the idealists can take the subject side as foundational and the object side as emergent, the materialists can do the reverse, and dualists can take some of each. But by rejecting the absoluteness of that split in the first place, enaction (and QBism) doesn't operate within those categories. It's not all first person (like idealism) or all third person (like materialism) but something more like second person, where the split itself is enacted in a participatory way. Some forms of embodied cognition are perhaps more comfortably categorized as materialist if they take the body itself as a given, as an object. But enaction describes cognition and sense-making as processes through which the body makes itself in participation with the world, so the body is an ongoing verb rather than a pregiven noun. By enacting itself, the body is functioning as both subject and object, and doesn't fit squarely in either one alone.”

I [RLK] responded, with appreciation, recognizing that Amanda makes a critical distinction in classifying enactivism from a subject-object framework—and joked that in classifying theories of consciousness, instead of being restricted to a 2D map/grid, if I had, say, Hilbert Space, I could do a better job.

I explained that my approach to Materialism as a category is based on fundamental ontology and framed rather simplistically, defined in the negative. If there is nothing in the theory that is outside the bounds of current physics, it is Materialism. Enactivists, to my knowledge, take pains to stress that there is nothing spooky or non-material in their theories. (Qbism, on the other hand, I would not classify as under Materialism.)

I do break out “Non-Reductive Physicalism” and “Quantum & Dimensional” as categories separate from Materialism—even though they have physicalist ontologies—because they offer a different or enlarged view of the physical. So, I cannot claim a logically precise demarcation between where Materialism theories stop and Non-Materialism theories begin—I’m simply satisficing, given the constraints, as best I can.

I do stress that I am presenting “A Landscape,” not “The Landscape,” in that there are alternative classification schemes equally valid.