The Enactive Conception of Life
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition October 9, 2018 Ezequiel Di Paolo 55 citations
Enactivism proposes an alternative to functionalism in embodied cognition by focusing on how organic, sensorimotor, and social bodies are individuated through their material precariousness. This chapter analyzes the concepts of autonomy, agency, and sense-making from a dialectical examination of autopoiesis. The requirements for an organism to simultaneously self-produce and self-distinguish involve contradictory potentialities and tendencies. Overcoming this dialectic leads to a more concrete concept of self-individuation as an open, unfinished process extended over time—the enactive concept of agency. Even the simplest life-forms are always already self-individuating as behaving agents that enact a world.