Thinking through enactive agency: sense-making, bio-semiosis and the ontologies of organismic worlds

Jesus, Paulo De

doi:10.1007/s11097-018-9562-2

Cited by 24 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Autonomous agents, such as bacteria, human beings, or other animals, skillfully adapt to internal and external perturbations by bringing forth (i.e., enacting ) a world ( Varela et al, 1991 ; Froese and Di Paolo, 2011 ; Di Paolo et al, 2017 ; De Jesus, 2018 ). Enactivists argue that mental life originates in such a self-organized, world-making activity ( Weber and Varela, 2002 ; see also van der Schyff, 2015 ; Schiavio and van der Schyff, 2018 for music-related insights).…”

Section: The Ubiquity Of Skillful Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

Schiavio

Benedek

2020

Front. Neurosci.

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Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in everyday creativity are examined and discussed. But while such accounts have gained important analytical leverage for describing the overall conditions and mechanisms through which creativity emerges and operates, they necessarily leave contextual forms of creativity less explored. Among the latter, musical practices have recently drawn the attention of scholars interested in its creative properties as well as in the creative potential of those who engage with them. In the present article, we compare previously posed theories of creativity in musical and non-musical domains to lay the basis of a conceptual framework that mitigates the tension between (i) individual and collective and (ii) domain-general and domain-specific perspectives on creativity. In doing so, we draw from a range of scholarship in music and enactive cognitive science, and propose that creative cognition may be best understood as a process of skillful organism–environment adaptation that one cultivates endlessly. With its focus on embodiment, plurality, and adaptiveness, our account points to a structured unity between living systems and their world, disclosing a variety of novel analytical resources for research and theory across different dimensions of (musical) creativity.

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Section: The Ubiquity Of Skillful Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

Schiavio

Benedek

2020

Front. Neurosci.

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“…meaningful for a subject 81 – 84 . Registry of such meaningful, or semantic, distinctions, usually expressed in natural language, constitutes a basis for cognition of living systems 85 , 86 . Alternatives of each semantic distinction correspond to the alternative (eigen)states of the corresponding basis observables in quantum modeling introduced above.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 116 . In the spirit of QBism, our model explicitly describes cognition of a user who is trying to make sense of that world 25 , 82 , 85 , 131 – 134 . In particular, it provides top-level counterpart for neurophysiological methods of revealing and quantifying cognitive relations like fMRI adaptation 135 , 136 that can be used in semantic studies of human cognition 67 , 137 – 139 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum semantics of text perception

Surov

Semenenko

Platonov

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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The paper presents quantum model of subjective text perception based on binary cognitive distinctions corresponding to words of natural language. The result of perception is quantum cognitive state represented by vector in the qubit Hilbert space. Complex-valued structure of the quantum state space extends the standard vector-based approach to semantics, allowing to account for subjective dimension of human perception in which the result is constrained, but not fully predetermined by input information. In the case of two distinctions, the perception model generates a two-qubit state, entanglement of which quantifies semantic connection between the corresponding words. This two-distinction perception case is realized in the algorithm for detection and measurement of semantic connectivity between pairs of words. The algorithm is experimentally tested with positive results. The developed approach to cognitive modeling unifies neurophysiological, linguistic, and psychological descriptions in a mathematical and conceptual structure of quantum theory, extending horizons of machine intelligence.

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“…An important ideal of philosophical health is the asymptotic unity of knowledge and action (Frisina, 2002), a theme in which enactivist research might be helpful (Colombetti, 2014; Di Paolo, 2009; Stewart et al, 2010; Thompson, 2007). According to the enactivist view, all living systems, from single-cell organisms to human beings, are endowed with some form of teleological and more or less developed sense-making agency (De Jesus, 2018). All living beings bring forth their own unique worlds, an idea originally advanced in Uexküll’s Umwelt theory (Meacham, 2016).…”

Section: Philosophical Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing the SMILE_PH method: Sense-making interviews looking at elements of philosophical health

Miranda

2023

Methodological Innovations

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The present article is a primary introduction to the semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense.

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Thinking through enactive agency: sense-making, bio-semiosis and the ontologies of organismic worlds

Cited by 24 publications

References 45 publications

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

Quantum semantics of text perception

Introducing the SMILE_PH method: Sense-making interviews looking at elements of philosophical health

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