The cognitive sciences are increasingly coming to terms with the embodied, embedded, extended, and experiential aspects of the mind. Exemplifying this shift, the enactive approach points to an essential role of goal-directed bodily activity in the generation of meaningful perceptual experience, i.e., sense-making. Here, building on recent insights into the transformative effects of practical...
Varela is well known in the systems sciences for his work on second‐order cybernetics, biology of cognition and especially autopoietic theory. His concern during this period was to find an appropriate epistemological foundation for the self‐reference inherent in life and mind. In his later years, Varela began to develop the so‐called ‘enactive’ approach to cognitive science, which sets itself...
There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach . The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse...
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a kind of linguistic competence that theories of embodied and enactive cognition have long deemed impossible for systems lacking the meaningful perspective of a living being, i.e. sense-making. Facing up to this unexpected development requires confronting this AI dilemma: either LLMs can be sense-makers in their own right despite lacking biological...
In this interview, Tom Froese and Matthieu Koroma address the irruption theory, an account of how mental actions manifest themselves as unexplained variability in brain and bodily activity. We discuss how this approach can be applied to trace back consciousness in (neuro)physiological signatures such as scale free activity and informational complexity. We highlight the study of altered states...