Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.
"[3] These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science.
[3] How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
[4] The term 'enactivism' is close in meaning to 'enaction', defined as "the manner in which a subject of perception creatively matches its actions to the requirements of its situation".
[2] This was further developed by Thompson and others,[1] to place emphasis upon the idea that experience of the world is a result of mutual interaction between the sensorimotor capacities of the organism and its environment.
[6] However, some writers maintain that there remains a need for some degree of the mediating function of representation in this new approach to the science of the mind.
[11] The self arises as part of the process of an embodied entity interacting with the environment in precise ways determined by its physiology.
They seek to "confront the problem of understanding how our existence-the praxis of our living- is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories.... to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions.
Maturana & Varela describe that "This was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems"[15] Using the term autopoiesis, they argue that any closed system that has autonomy, self-reference and self-construction (or, that has autopoietic activities) has cognitive capacities.
[20] Instead, according to Thompson's view of enactivism, the study of consciousness or phenomenology as exemplified by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is to complement science and its objectification of the world.
[25] Constructivism looks upon interactivity as a radical, creative, revisionist process in which the knower constructs a personal 'knowledge system' based upon their experience and tested by its viability in practical encounters with their environment.
[27] According to him, enactive conceptions of cognition can be found in many pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey.
For example, Dewey says that "The brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and responses directed upon it" (1916, pp. 336–337).
This biology-inspired theory of the growth of knowledge is closely tied to universal Darwinism, and is associated with evolutionary epistemologists such as Karl Popper, Donald T. Campbell, Peter Munz, and Gary Cziko.
According to this objection, enactive theories only have limited value because they cannot "scale up" to explain more complex cognitive capacities like human thoughts.
For example, Adrian Downey (2020) provides a non-representational account of Obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then argues that ecological-enactive approaches can respond to the "scaling up" objection.
[37] McGann & others[38] argue that enactivism attempts to mediate between the explanatory role of the coupling between cognitive agent and environment and the traditional emphasis on brain mechanisms found in neuroscience and psychology.
"[45] Alva Noë in advocating an enactive view of perception[46] sought to resolve how we perceive three-dimensional objects, on the basis of two-dimensional input.
He points to internal processing of visual signals, for example, in the ventral and dorsal pathways, the two-streams hypothesis.
According to one interpretation, it is suggested that "the hand [is]...an organ of cognition", not a faithful subordinate working under top-down instruction, but a partner in a "bi-directional interplay between manual and brain activity.
"[50] Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007)[42] have extended the enactive concept of sense-making[20] into the social domain.
[51] De Jaegher and Di Paolo argue that the interaction process itself can take on a form of autonomy (operationally defined).
The notion of participatory sense-making has led to the proposal that interaction processes can sometimes play constitutive roles in social cognition (De Jaegher, Di Paolo, Gallagher, 2010).
[53] In a similar vein, "an inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behavior of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself".
"[72] The ideas of enactivism regarding how organisms engage with their environment have interested those involved in robotics and man-machine interfaces.
[85] In 2015 Jan Lieke and Marcus Hutter showed that "Legg-Hutter intelligence is measured with respect to a fixed UTM.
[89] In a natural environment, the stimulus-reaction pair (causation) is unpredictable due to many irrelevant stimuli claiming to be randomly associated with the embodied information.