Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience

Abstract

Abstract.The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related (the body-body problem) via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O'Regan, Noë, and Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of 'bodiliness' and 'grabbiness' are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness. The Enactive ApproachThe name "the enactive approach" and the associated concept of enaction were introduced into cognitive science by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) in order to describe and unify under one heading several related ideas. 1The first idea is that living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain their identities, and thereby enact or bring forth their own cognitive domains. The second idea is that the nervous system is an autonomous system: it actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity, according to its operation as an organizationally closed or circular and re-entrant sensorimotor network of interacting neurons. The nervous system does not process information in the computationalist sense, but creates meaning. The third idea is that cognition is a form of embodied action. Cognitive structures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action. Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of endogenous, dynamic patterns of neural activity, which in turn inform sensorimotor coupling. The fourth idea is that a cognitive being's world is not a pre-specified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being's autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment. This

Motor and Audiovisual Learning Consolidate Auditory Memory of Tonally Ambiguous Melodies

“…As such, learning music is not a modification of the behavioral output only (in light of more conceptual clarity of a given music-related representation), but rather a change in the whole brain-body-world system (see Kelso, 1995). We are confident that this may represent the starting point for a paradigm shift in the psychology of music, as has begun already in cognitive science (Thompson, 2005). Particularly, this study contributes to the existing body of knowledge highlighting the benefit that musically naïve and experienced subjects can obtain through active engagement with music, relative to more passive forms of music learning (Bowman, 2004;Keebler, Wiltshire, Smith, Fiore, & Bedwell, 2014;Schiavio & Cummins, 2015).…”

The enactive approach and disorders of the self - the case of schizophrenia

“…Until recently, these relations have been specified in terms of the body and sensorimotor activity (Thompson 2005). However, a new elaboration on the enactive self conceives of its constitutive processes in terms of social interactions (Kyselo 2014).…”

Enactive autonomy in computational systems

“…Di Paolo and Thompson, perhaps the main representatives of contemporary CE, claim that the principal concept that differentiates enactivism from other approaches in cognitive science is the concept of autonomy (Di Paolo and Thompson 2014;Thompson 2005Thompson , 2007Di Paolo 2009). The same idea can be found in other enactive representatives such as Ziemke (2009), andBarandiaran (2016).…”

“…In this paper, we will concentrate on the 'classical' (also called 'canonical,' 'autopoietic,' or 'autonomist') version of enactivism (see Villalobos and Ward 2015 for discussion). Classical enactivism (hereafter 'CE', or simply 'enactivism') was originally introduced by Varela, Thompson and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991), and subsequently developed through a series of important contributions (Weber and Varela 2002;Thompson 2005Thompson , 2007Di Paolo 2005, 2009Froese and Ziemke 2009;Stewart et al 2010;Di Paolo and Thompson 2014). Historically, CE has had two reasons to reject computational theories of cognition.…”