Sensorimotor Life

Abstract

This book elaborates a series of contributions to a non–representational theory of action and perception. It is based on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. These enactive ideas are applied and extended to provide a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of sensorimotor meaning and agency. This account supplies non–representational extensions to the sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience based on the notion of the living body as a self–organizing dynamic system in coupling with the environment. The enactive perspective entails the use of world–involving explanations, in which processes external to an agent co–constitute mental phenomena in ways that cannot be reduced to the supply of information for internal processing. These contributions to sensorimotor theories are a dynamical–systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies, a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery, and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, with its implications for sensorimotor subjectivity. New tools are provided for examining the organization, development, and operation of networks of sensorimotor schemes that compose regional activities and genres of action with their own situated norms. This permits the exploration of new explanations for the phenomenology of agency experience that are favorably contrasted with traditional computational approaches and lead to new empirical predictions. From these proposals, capabilities once beyond the reach of enactive explanations, such as the possibility of virtual actions and the adoption of socially mediated abstract perceptual attitudes, can be addressed.

Designing Virtuous Sex Robots

“…3 and as illustrated in Table 1. Our assumption is in line with current developments in cognitive science and philosophy of technology, which suggest that the cognitive and moral dimensions of artefact interaction need to be understood from a distributed perspective that puts equal emphasis on agent and environment [17,22,52,53].…”

Exploratory expertise and the dual intentionality of music-making

“…Sensorimotor coupling lies at the foundation of the enactive approach (Di Paolo et al 2017). 2 We have presented the idea that perception is a form of action, but here we can 2 Between the different strands of enactivism there is discussion of how far you can get with sensorimotor coupling in explaining the more complex aspects of cognition.…”

Evolutionary Musicology Meets Embodied Cognition: Biocultural Coevolution and the Enactive Origins of Human Musicality

“…Our aim in the present article is to contribute to the theoretical discussion supporting the biocultural hypothesis by considering it through the lenses of the enactive approach to cognition. This perspective first emerged in the work of Varela et al ( 1991 ) and has been developed more recently across a range of contexts (Thompson, 2007 ; Stewart et al, 2010 ; Colombetti, 2014 ; Di Paolo et al, 2017 ). Most centrally, the enactive approach posits a deep continuity between mind and life, where cognitive processes are explored in terms of how self-organizing living systems enact relationships with the environment that are relevant to their survival and well-being.…”