Enacting Ontological Pluralism: Informational Dynamics and Embodied Cognition in Śaiva-Śākta Phenomenology
Philosophies July 14, 2026 Diego Gonzalez-Rodriguez
Cognitive science often fails to capture the first-person quality of experience because of its physicalist focus on neural and computational processes. This paper argues that Śaiva-Śākta phenomenology, a non-Western tradition, offers systematic practices—such as visualization and ritual enactment—that actively reshape attentional, mnemonic, and perceptual processes, thereby reconfiguring the experiential structure of self and world. Drawing on predictive processing and enactive cognitive science, the authors propose that such practices enact rather than merely represent ontology, supporting a model of ontological pluralism where different experiential worlds correspond to stabilized cognitive modes. This perspective suggests that non-Western traditions provide alternative phenomenological pathways for exploring embodied cognition and expanding cognitive science's methodological and ontological horizons.