Enactive View Research Articles

Visual Consciousness and The Phenomenology of Perception

AbstractIdeally, psychological and phenomenological studies of visual experience should be mutually informative. In that spirit, this article outlines parts of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's phenomenological view of visual experience as a kind of independently active opaque bodily synthesis, and uses those views to (a) help ground and extend Alva Noë's rejection of the “snapshot” theory of visual experience in favor of a more enactive view of visual content, (b) critique a failing of Noë's account, and (c) show how the assumptions underlying more internalist and Cartesian views of visual experience can illegitimately creep in even when they are being carefully criticized.

Games people play-toward an enactive view of cooperation in social neuroscience.

The field of social neuroscience has made considerable progress in unraveling the neural correlates of human cooperation by making use of brain imaging methods. Within this field, neuroeconomic research has drawn on paradigms from experimental economics, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) and the Trust Game. These paradigms capture the topic of conflict in cooperation, while focusing strongly on outcome-related decision processes. Cooperation, however, does not equate with that perspective, but relies on additional psychological processes and events, including shared intentions and mutually coordinated joint action. These additional facets of cooperation have been successfully addressed by research in developmental psychology, cognitive science, and social philosophy. Corresponding neuroimaging data, however, is still sparse. Therefore, in this paper, we present a juxtaposition of these mutually related but mostly independent trends in cooperation research. We propose that the neuroscientific study of cooperation could benefit from paradigms and concepts employed in developmental psychology and social philosophy. Bringing both to a neuroimaging environment might allow studying the neural correlates of cooperation by using formal models of decision-making as well as capturing the neural responses that underlie joint action scenarios, thus, promising to advance our understanding of the nature of human cooperation.

Dynamic Embodied Cognition

In this article, we investigate the merits of an enactive view of cognition for the contemporary debate about social cognition. If enactivism is to be a genuine alternative to classic cognitivism, it should be able to bridge the “cognitive gap”, i.e. provide us with a convincing account of those higher forms of cognition that have traditionally been the focus of its cognitivist opponents. We show that, when it comes to social cognition, current articulations of enactivism are—despite their celebrated successes in explaining some cases of social interaction—not yet up to the task. This is because they (1) do not pay sufficient attention to the role of offline processing or “decoupling”, and (2) obscure the cognitive gap by overemphasizing the role of phenomenology. We argue that the main challenge for the enactive view will be to acknowledge the importance of both coupled (online) and decoupled (offline) processes for basic and advanced forms of (social) cognition. To meet this challenge, we articulate a dynamic embodied view of cognition. We illustrate the fruitfulness of this approach by recourse to recent findings on false belief understanding.

On perceptual presence

In his book Action in Perception, Alva Noe poses what he refers to as the “problem of perceptual presence” and develops his enactive view as solution to the problem. Noe describes the problem of perceptual presence as the problem of how to conceive of the presence of that which, “strictly speaking,” we do not perceive. I argue that the “problem of perceptual presence” is ambiguous between two problems that need to be addressed by invoking very different resources. On the one hand, there is the problem of how to conceive of the presence of objects as wholes, front side and back, and their constant properties. On the other hand, there is the problem of how to account for the presence of unattended detail. I focus on the first problem, which Noe approaches by invoking Husserlian ideas. I argue that Noe’s enactive view encounters difficulties, which can be dealt with by complementing it with Edmund Husserl’s idea of fulfillment and generally restoring the view to its original Husserlian context. Contrary to Noe’s purport, this involves regarding the view not as a theory of perception and perceptual content but as part of a descriptive–clarificatory project of conceptual analysis. The Husserlian phenomenologist analyzes, e.g., the concept of shape or color by investigating the fulfillment conditions pertinent to shape or color. In general, my critique of Noe’s enactive view serves to caution philosophers against unprincipled uses of Husserlian ideas.

Living Ways of Sense Making

My title—“Living Ways of Sense Making”— comes from the title of a paper that Francisco Varela gave in 1981 to the Stanford International Symposium on “Disorder and Order.” Building on his work on autopoiesis or the self-producing organization of living beings, Varela spoke as a neurobiologist concerned with the biology of mind. His paper is notable both for being an early critique of the representationist view of the brain and cognition, and for being an early statement of an alternative view informed by phenomenology—a view we were later to call the enactive view of cognition. According to the enactive view, living beings are sense-making beings; they enact or bring forth significance in their intimate engagements with their environments. Here is how Varela put this idea at the outset of this early paper: “Order is order, relative to somebody or some being who takes such a stance towards it. In the world of the living, order is indeed inseparable from the ways in which living beings make sense, so that they can be said to have a world.” “The ways in which livings beings make sense”—these words have a double meaning. On the one hand, they refer to how living beings go about their sense-making activities and thereby constitute and inhabit their worlds. On the other hand, they refer to how we understand living beings, how living beings make sense to us. In this way, these words point back to us as those living beings who have a pre-understanding of life and who can therefore raise the question, “what is living being?” This question is the overarching question of Donn Welton’s and John Protevi’s papers responding to my book, Mind in Life. Welton has examined how to integrate a “bottom up” phenomenology of biological systems into a phenomenology of intentional conciousness, while Protevi has discussed whether this kind of integration of life and mind might lead us also to panpsychism. My way of entering this discussion and responding to their rich papers will be to take up again the question, “what is living being?” Or, more simply and precisely, “what is living?” My essay has four parts. First, I will say more about what I mean when I ask, “What is living?” Second, I will present my way of answering this question, which is that living is sense-making in precarious conditions. Third, I will respond to Welton’s considerations about what he calls the “affective entrainment” of the living being by the environment. Finally, I will address Protevi’s remarks about panpsychism.

Brain in a Vat or Body in a World? Brainbound versus Enactive Views of Experience

We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actually shows is that the brain and body are so deeply entangled, structurally and dynamically, that they are explanatorily inseparable. Such entanglement implies that we cannot understand consciousness by considering only the activity of neurons apart from the body, and hence we have good explanatory grounds for supposing that the minimal realizing system for consciousness includes the body and not just the brain. In this way, we put the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment to a new use, one that supports the “enactive” view that consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole organism interacting with its environment.

A Mosquito Bite Against the Enactive Approach to Bodily Experiences

The enactive approach aims at providing a unified account of perceptual experiences in terms of bodily activities. Most enactive arguments come from the analysis of visual experiences (Noe, 2004), but there is one domain of consciousness where the enactive theses seem to be less controversial, namely, bodily experiences. After drawing the agenda for an enactive view of tactile experiences, I shall highlight the difficulties that it has to face, both conceptual and empirical.

The Scope and Limits of Enactive Approaches to Visual Experience

I pursue here three related aims. First, I criticise some of the metaphysical claims made on behalf of the so-called 'enactive' approach to visual experience. Secondly, I explain why the enactive view of visual experience is hard to square with the evidence in favour of the two-visual-systems model of human vision. Finally, I explore one possible way to develop the 'pre-emptive perception' framework and explain why, contrary to first appearances, some of the fundamental discoveries of brain mechanisms, whose function might be to underlie pre-emptive perception, do not really support the enactive approach to visual experience.

An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting

Drawing on recent developments in phenomenology, cognitive science, and anthropological ecology, this essay explores an enactive approach to a meta-theoretical understanding of acting as a phenomenon. In contrast to representational and/or mimetic meta-theories of acting, which construct their views of action from a position as an outside observer to the process/phenomenon of acting, an enactive view provides an account of acting from "inside" the process itself—that is, from the perspective of the actor as enactor/doer. Acting is not to be viewed as embodying a representation of a role or a character, but rather should be understood as a dynamic, lived experience in which the actor is responsive to the demands of the particular moment within a specific (theatrical) environment.

Varela and Embodiment

Varela and Embodiment Elena Pasquinelli Francisco Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Chile and in the United States with neurobiologist Humberto Maturana, with whom he developed the theory of autopoiesis. According to this theory, the minimal form of autonomy that defines biological life is autopoiesis or self-production, which has the aspect of a reaction network, operationally closed and membrane bound. The theory of autopoiesis suggests that the nervous system cannot be considered as an input-output information processing system. After some years spent in the United States, Varela moved to Paris, France, where he addressed two main directions of research: the experimental study of brain activity—in particular as regards the neuronal integration during the performance of cognitive tasks—and the phenomenological investigation of human consciousness. Within this second direction of philosophical studies, Varela developed an original and controversial approach to cognition.1 This approach, which has came to be called the enactive view, is aimed at overcoming the mind/world dichotomy felt by many to be a hindrance to the development of a mature psychology. In Varela's enactive view, the world and the cognitive organism determine each other: the organism selects relevant properties of the physical world, and the world selects the structure of the organism, during their respective co-evolutionary history. An important tenet of the enactive approach is in fact that cognition is embodied. This claim represents a crucial step toward the development of a new trend of research in cognitive sciences, where the cognitive process is investigated without abstracting from the conditions in which it takes place. In fact, the statement that "the body matters" for cognition brings forth relevant consequences for the conception of the body and the mind and contains indications for research on the loop between perception, cognition, and action. The statement that "the body matters" for cognition is indeed quite widespread in circles that oppose the classical computationalist-representationalist approach to cognition. But in what way does the body play a constitutive role in cognition? And what should we mean by the term "body"? The claim about embodiment in cognition can be understood as a statement relative to the role played by the physical structure of the body in cognitive, perceptual, and motor performances and acquisitions. However, the conception of the body as simply a physical entity is only one step toward a [End Page 33] theory of the co-determination of the organism and the world that is proposed by Varela. As a medium of the interaction with the world, Varela conceives the body as a structured set of behavioral repertories, of motor and perceptual capabilities and activities. Embodiment goes beyond the physical structure of the organism since it is principally characterized by the sensorimotor structure of the animal: body-scaling, sensory-motor capacities. "The actions of an animal and the world in which it performs these actions are inseparably connected. Going through life as a small fly makes a cup of tea appear like an ocean of liquid; an elephant, however, will see the same amount of tea as an insignificant drop, tiny and barely noticeable. What is perceived appears inseparably connected with the actions and the way of life of an organism."2 Sensorimotor capacities, or the activity of the animal, are then crucial in the mutual enactment of the world and mind. As the world selects the sensorimotor capacities of the animals that are valid for life and adaptation, animals select the properties of the world that are relevant for their structure: "the structure of the perceiving animal, understood as the kinds of self-organizing neuronal networks that couple sensory and motor surfaces, which determine both how the animal can be modulated by the environmental events and how sensory-motor activity participates in animal-environment codetermination." 3 As a consequence, "animals with different sensory-motor capacity would segment the world in different ways. As a corollary, we claim that the prespecified world we find . . . is actually the world as described in relation to the sensory-motor capacities of the higher primates."4 The assertion of embodiment as relevant for the proper motor-perceptual activities of the organism is strictly connected to the idea that action and...

Implications of Inattentional Blindness for "Enactive'' Theories of Consciousness

Mack and Rock show evidence that no consciousperception occurs without a prior attentiveact. Subjects already executing attention taskstend to neglect visible elements extraneous tothe attentional task, apparently lacking evenbetter-than-chance ``implicit perception,''except in certain cases where the unattendedstimulus is a meaningful word or has uniquepre-tuned salience similar to that ofmeaningful words. This is highly consistentwith ``enactive'' notions that consciousnessrequires selective attention viaemotional subcortical and limbic motivationalactivation as it influences anterior attentionmechanisms. Occipital activation withoutconsciousness suggests that motivated search,enacted through the organism's subcorticalmotivational functions, is needed beforevisual stimulation engenders consciousness.This enactive view – that searching for,rather than receiving or processing input isthe basis of consciousness – was slow ingaining acceptance lacking empirical evidenceof this kind, combined with thestimulus-response assumption that brain eventssubserving perceptual consciousness must resultfrom transformation of perceptual input ratherthan from the organism's self-regulatedactivity as manifested through subcorticalactivity. Implicit perception occurring withword priming is ``paradoxical'' according to Mackand Rock, suggesting late selection forattention after extensive unconsciousprocessing, while most trials involvingnonverbal rather than verbal images mightsuggest earlier selection, sinceunattended objects are unseen, apparently evenimplicitly. This paper argues that anteriorand subcortical motivational mechanisms play animportant role in early selection; posteriormechanisms then unconsciously enhance signals;if data survive early gating andcorticothalamic enhancement, then still furtheranterior-limbic loops motivatedlyactivate ``image schemas'' resonating withposterior nonconscious processing; at thatpoint, consciousness occurs.

Ecological Journey: An Enactive View of the Nature of Experience

The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants, and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air, to the composting earth, to the nourishment of insects as well as breathing the world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.

Enactivism and the Experiential Reality of Culture: Rethinking the Epistemological Basis of Cultural Psychology

The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a paradox: while people believe they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, cultural psychologists observe their behavior to be socially patterned. It is argued that, in order to account for those patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within cultural psychology to either neglect human experience, by focusing exclusively on discourse, or to consider the structure of this experience to originate in an already produced cultural order. For an alternative approach, we turn to the enactive view of cognition developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their theory of autonomy can provide the epistemological basis for a cultural psychology that explains how experience can become socially patterned in the first place. Cultural life forms are then considered as consensually coordinated, embodied practices.