Enactive Cognitive Science Research Articles

Collective emotions and the distributed emotion framework

AbstractThe main aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of the distributed emotion framework and to conceptualize collective emotions within that framework. According to the presented account, dynamics of mutual affecting and being affected might couple individuals such that macro-level self-organization of a distributed cognitive system emerges. The paper suggests calling a distributed self-organizing system consisting of several emoters a “collective.” The emergence of a collective with a distributed affective process enables the involved individuals to enact emotions together. Accordingly, the suggestion is to conceptualize collective emotions as mereologically complex affective processes consisting of contributions which are distributed among several individuals and integrated through ongoing macro-level self-organization. To spell-out this account, the paper combines key conceptual resources from dynamical systems theory, enactive cognitive science, ecological psychology, and phenomenology. A second aim of the paper is distinguishing collective emotions from group-based emotions and suggesting an understanding of shared emotions as a subtype of collective emotions within the distributed emotion framework.

Facing life: the messy bodies of enactive cognitive science

AbstractDescriptions of bodies within the literature of the enactive approach to cognitive science exhibit an interesting dialectical tension. On the one hand, a body is considered to be a unity which instantiates an identity, forming an intrinsic basis for value. On the other, a living body is in a reciprocally defining relationship with the environment, and is therefore immersed and entangled with, rather than distinct from, its environment. In this paper I examine this tension, and its implications for the enactive approach, particularly the enactive conceptions of life and bodies. Following the lead of others, I argue that enactive cognitive science can benefit from a deeper reading and integration with extant work on the complexity and multiplicity of the living body within feminist philosophy and feminist science studies.

Meaning-making and creativity in musical entrainment.

In this paper we suggest that basic forms of musical entrainment may be considered as intrinsically creative, enabling further creative behaviors which may flourish at different levels and timescales. Rooted in an agent's capacity to form meaningful couplings with their sonic, social, and cultural environment, musical entrainment favors processes of adaptation and exploration, where innovative and functional aspects are cultivated via active, bodily experience. We explore these insights through a theoretical lens that integrates findings from enactive cognitive science and creative cognition research. We center our examination on the realms of groove experience and the communicative and emotional dimensions of music, aiming to present a novel preliminary perspective on musical entrainment, rooted in the fundamental concepts of meaning-making and creativity. To do so, we draw from a suite of approaches that place particular emphasis on the role of situated experience and review a range of recent empirical work on entrainment (in musical and non-musical settings), emphasizing the latter's biological and cognitive foundations. We conclude that musical entrainment may be regarded as a building block for different musical creativities that shape one's musical development, offering a concrete example for how this theory could be empirically tested in the future.

Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and The Meaning of Human Musicality

Reseña de Cory D. Meals del libro Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and The Meaning of Human Musicality, de Dylan van der Schyff, Andrea Schiavio y David J. Elliott. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022.

The ethics of sense-making.

In this paper, we contribute to the arising field of "enactive ethics," that is, the application of enactive cognitive science to the field of ethics. To this end, we will make a case that an "ethics of sense-making" should exist. With "sense-making," we mean the permanent everyday embodied activity of interpreting the surroundings we are in, as well as our role in them. In other words, we mean the activity of understanding our environments in such a way that certain things, but not others, stand out as meaningful and relevant to us. We argue that sense-making can be performed in ethically better or worse ways. For example, one might make sense of a potentially provocative comment either as an insult or as an invitation for a respectful discussion. How one makes sense in this case will affect oneself, the other, and their present and future relations. We propose that it is often helpful to hold humans responsible for their ways of sense-making. This opens up the possibility to transform their sense-making and the worlds they inhabit. This also has significance for their eudaimonic well-being. Our ethics of sense-making focusses on the ubiquitous activities of sense-making, which, when changed, will lead to great ethical improvements of people's actions, choices, and character traits.

Enabling the Phronetically Enacted Self: A Path toward Spiritual Knowledge Management

The role of spirituality in organizations has received increasing attention over recent years. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to take up this shift and develop the foundations for an alternative approach to knowledge management: Spiritual Knowledge Management. A key question in spirituality concerns the unfolding of the identity (of an organization) or the self toward a “higher end” or purpose. We propose the concept of the phronetically enacted self (understood here both in an individual and an organizational sense) that helps us conceive of how this unfolding can be achieved in a thriving and sustainable manner. The self is conceptualized as a highly dynamic and emergent “entity” that is grounded in a continuous process of becoming and of transitions transforming a state of potentiality into a state of actuality and fulfillment. Insights from the theory of spirituality, enactive cognitive science, the theory of potentials/possibility studies, phronetic organizations, and resonance theory lead us to a novel understanding of knowledge-driven organizations embodying a spirituality-based and, as a consequence, (regenerative) sustainable approach. Finally, we will develop the basic characteristics and leverage points for transformative shifts toward sustainability in organizations.

The Problem of Meaning: The Free Energy Principle and Artificial Agency.

Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive cognitive scientists to design artificial agents that possess sensorimotor autonomy—stable, self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor interaction that can ground values, norms and goals necessary for encountering a meaningful environment. More specifically, we consider whether the Free Energy Principle (FEP) can provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy. There is currently no consensus on how to understand the relationship between enactive cognitive science and the FEP. However, a number of recent papers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incompatible. Some argue that biological systems exhibit historical path-dependent learning that is absent from systems that minimize free energy. Others have argued that a free energy minimizing system would fail to satisfy a key condition for sensorimotor agency referred to as “interactional asymmetry”. These critics question the claim we defend in this paper that the FEP can be used to formally model autonomy and adaptivity. We will argue it is too soon to conclude that the two frameworks are incompatible. There are undeniable conceptual differences between the two frameworks but in our view each has something important and necessary to offer. The FEP needs enactive cognitive science for the solution it provides to the problem of meaning. Enactive cognitive science needs the FEP to formally model the properties it argues to be constitutive of agency. Our conclusion will be that active inference models based on the FEP provides a way by which scientists can think about how to address the problems of engineering autonomy and adaptivity in artificial agents in formal terms. In the end engaging more closely with this formalism and its further developments will benefit those working within the enactive framework.

Some reflections on atmosphere and memory from the perspective of enactive cognition and neurophenomenology

In order to fully grasp the possibilities of Stimmung and its implementation nowadays, creating life-enhancing atmospheres responsive to human action, embodied emotional memories, and place in the fullest sense (as both natural and cultural context), a proper understanding of consciousness and perception beyond Cartesian misunderstandings is crucial. To this aim, insights drawn from neurophenomenology and enactive cognitive science prove indispensable. This paper discusses some of these insights.

Knowing the Knowing. Non-dual Meditative Practice From an Enactive Perspective.

Within a variety of contemplative traditions, non-dual-oriented practices were developed to evoke an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self-other and subject–object subside. These practices serve to de-reify the enactment of an observing witness which is usually experienced as separate from the objects of awareness. While several contemplative traditions, such as Zen, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta emphasize the importance of such a non-dual insight for the cultivation of genuine wellbeing, only very few attempts in contemplative science have turned toward the study of non-dual-oriented practices. This article starts from a recently developed theoretical cognitive science framework that models the requirements of a temporary experiential shift into a mode of experiencing free from cognitive subject–object structure. This model inspired by the enactive approach contributes theoretically grounded hypotheses for the much-needed rigorous study of non-dual practices and non-dual experiences. To do so, three steps are taken: first, common elements of non-dual-oriented practices are outlined. Second, the main ideas of enactive cognitive science are presented including a principled theoretical model of what is required for a shift to a pure non-dual experience, that is, an experiential mode that is unbound by subject–object duality. Third, this synthesized theoretical model of the requirements for the recognition of the non-dual is then compared with a specific non-dual style of meditation practice, namely, Mahāmudrā practice from Tibetan Buddhism. This third step represents a heuristic for evaluating the external coherence of the presented model. With this, the aim is to point toward a principled enactive view of non-dual meditative practice. In drawing the implications of the presented model, this article ends with an outlook toward next steps for further developing a research agenda that may fully address the concrete elements of non-dual practices.

Self-organisation, (M, R)–systems and enactive cognitive science

The notion of self-organisation plays a major role in enactive cognitive science. In this paper, I review several formal models of self-organisation that various approaches in modern cognitive science rely upon. I then focus on Rosen’s account of self-organisation as closure to efficient cause and his argument that models of systems closed to efficient cause – ( M, R) systems – are uncomputable. Despite being sometimes relied on by enactivists this argument is problematic it rests on assumptions unacceptable for enactivists: that living systems can be modelled as time-invariant and material-independent. I then argue that there exists a simple and philosophically appealing reparametrisation of ( M, R)–systems that accounts for the temporal dimensions of life but renders Rosen’s argument invalid.

Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System.

This paper proposes an account of neurocognitive activity without leveraging the notion of neural representation. Neural representation is a concept that results from assuming that the properties of the models used in computational cognitive neuroscience (e.g., information, representation, etc.) must literally exist the system being modelled (e.g., the brain). Computational models are important tools to test a theory about how the collected data (e.g., behavioural or neuroimaging) has been generated. While the usefulness of computational models is unquestionable, it does not follow that neurocognitive activity should literally entail the properties construed in the model (e.g., information, representation). While this is an assumption present in computationalist accounts, it is not held across the board in neuroscience. In the last section, the paper offers a dynamical account of neurocognitive activity with Dynamical Causal Modelling (DCM) that combines dynamical systems theory (DST) mathematical formalisms with the theoretical contextualisation provided by Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science (EECS).

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

Mark Making and Human Becoming

This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.

Bridges and hobby-horses: John Stewart’s adventure of ideas

I briefly reflect on the work of John Stewart and his instrumental role in the development of enactive cognitive science, his outstanding ability to communicate across disciplines, and his research obsessions.

Dimensions of Musical Creativity.

Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in everyday creativity are examined and discussed. But while such accounts have gained important analytical leverage for describing the overall conditions and mechanisms through which creativity emerges and operates, they necessarily leave contextual forms of creativity less explored. Among the latter, musical practices have recently drawn the attention of scholars interested in its creative properties as well as in the creative potential of those who engage with them. In the present article, we compare previously posed theories of creativity in musical and non-musical domains to lay the basis of a conceptual framework that mitigates the tension between (i) individual and collective and (ii) domain-general and domain-specific perspectives on creativity. In doing so, we draw from a range of scholarship in music and enactive cognitive science, and propose that creative cognition may be best understood as a process of skillful organism–environment adaptation that one cultivates endlessly. With its focus on embodiment, plurality, and adaptiveness, our account points to a structured unity between living systems and their world, disclosing a variety of novel analytical resources for research and theory across different dimensions of (musical) creativity.

Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal.

Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.

A New Hope: A better ICM to understand human cognitive architectural variability

How can we best understand human cognitive architectural variability? We believe that the relationships between theories in neurobiology, cognitive science and evolutionary biology posited by evolutionary psychology’s Integrated Causal Model (ICM) has unduly supported various essentialist conceptions of the human cognitive architecture, monomorphic minds (to use Griffiths’ apt phrase), that mask HCA variability, and we propose a different set of relationships between theories in the same domains to support a different, non-essentialist, understanding of HCA variability. To set our case against essentialist theories of HCA variability, we detail the general notion of an ICM and the specific ICM at the heart of evolutionary psychology. We briefly illustrate the type of essentialism fostered by evolutionary psychology’s ICM by showing how it grounds essentialist theories of cognitive gender. We shall not criticize these theories here since the literature is replete with compelling objections to them, but shall instead focus on motivating a replacement ICM to destabilize evolutionary psychology’s ICM wholesale. ICMs usually span larger than the models they support, hence larger than arguments against these models, and one reason the essentialist theories addressed here have the kind of staying power they do is that they are partly supported by the ICM in which they are grounded. In short, we offer “A New Hope” against the essentialist empire. True to the Hollywood trope, this new hope rests on an alliance between a young theory, cognitive network neuroscience, and two older, but still quite young, epistemic rebels: enactive cognitive science and developmental systems theory. Accordingly, we detail and discuss the proposed emerging ICM and test-drive it by sketching the multimorphic view of gender it grounds.

The Ecological-Enactive Model of Disability: Why Disability Does Not Entail Pathological Embodiment.

In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medical and social models. Paradoxically, both models overlook the disabled person’s experience of the lived body, thus reducing the body of the disabled person to a physiological body. In this article we introduce what we call the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability. The EE-model combines ideas from enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology with the aim of doing justice simultaneously to the lived experience of being disabled, and the physiological dimensions of disability. More specifically, we put the EE model to work to disentangle the concepts of disability and pathology. We locate the difference between pathological and normal forms of embodiment in the person’s capacity to adapt to changes in the environment. To ensure that our discussion remains in contact with lived experience, we draw upon phenomenological interviews we have carried out with people with Cerebral Palsy.

Where Is the Action in Perception? An Exploratory Study With a Haptic Sensory Substitution Device.

Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience.

Coenhabiting Interpersonal Inter-Identities in Recurrent Social Interaction.

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal inter-identities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilize and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending toward a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them.