Abstract Contemporary phenomenology and cognitive science have increasingly converged on the idea that social understanding is embodied, interactive, and enacted in real-time engagement. Interaction theory and enactivism have challenged cognitivist models of social cognition by emphasizing direct perception, affective attunement, and participatory sense-making. Yet while current interactive...
Abstract This article develops the concept of minimal self-sentience to extend the phenomenological notion of minimal self-awareness to non-human animals. Drawing on the phenomenological account of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness (e.g., Zahavi), and on the view that such a minimal form of self-experience can be attributed to non-human animals (e.g., Strawson), we propose to deepen the...
Abstract The concept of sedimentation, developed in phenomenology, provides a bridge between recent discussions of habit in embodied-enactive theories of cognition and skilled performance and conceptions of how habit and routine function in social practices and institutional formation. Although the notion of habit is little discussed in mainstream neoclassical economics, various theorists of...
Folk attributions of consciousness to non-human systems often reveal what may be termed double bias. Within the standard distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, non-human animals often receive low attributions of consciousness despite convergent behavioral and neurobiological evidence treated as relevant to subjective experience. By contrast, disembodied artificial intelligence...
In this chapter I argue that to understand consciousness in relation to social interaction, we need to consider not just brain mechanisms, but also the extensive and enactive pro cesses of bodily engagement in the social environment.In addition, I suggest that the starting point for such an analy sis should not be reflective self-consciousness (see glossary), as if that were simply equivalent...
Cognitive architectures are simplified models of complex neural and behavioral processes, designed to equip artificial agents with flexibility and adaptive behavior. To enhance context-awareness and autonomy in humanoid robots, it is essential to address the role of temporality. The temporal dimension extends far beyond its association with memory, encompassing the continuity of self and...
This article provides guidance on Front-Loaded Phenomenology (FLP) in qualitative research, an approach where researchers use phenomenological concepts and conceptual distinctions during initial research planning to shape how a study is designed and conducted. FLP studies have precise conceptual foci and enable the generation of nuanced findings that may be difficult to obtain using other...
Suffering is a foundational yet understudied construct within the field of pain. There is general agreement that pain-related suffering involves disruption to one's sense of self. The selfhood literature characterizes two inter-related modes of self-experience. One mode entails in-the-moment experiences that shape one's stream of consciousness; another involves self-reflective thoughts about...
In the last decades, research on animal consciousness has advanced significantly, fueled by interdisciplinary contributions. However, a critical dimension of animal experience remains underexplored: the self. While traditionally linked to human studies, research focused on the self in animals has often been framed dichotomously, distinguishing low-level, bodily, and affective aspects from...
Abstract For many centuries, scholars and philosophers from wisdom traditions in different cultures have reported and discussed non-self states of consciousness. These states can be both short-term (state, transitory) and long-term (trait, lasting) conditions. However, in psychology, the importance of a healthy self is usually emphasized, and some theorists have dismissed the idea of “selfless”...
Concepts of empathy, sympathy and compassion are often confused in a variety of literatures. This article proposes a pattern-theoretic approach to distinguishing compassion from empathy and sympathy. Drawing on psychology, Western philosophy, affective neuroscience, and contemplative science, we clarify the nature of compassion as a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include...
Mental disorders are increasingly understood as involving complex alterations of self that emerge from dynamical interactions of constituent elements, including cognitive, bodily, affective, social, narrative, cultural and normative aspects and processes. An account of self that supports this view is the pattern theory of self (PTS). The PTS is a non-reductive account of the self, consistent...
This Element discusses contemporary theories of embodied cognition, including what has been termed the '4Es' (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition). It examines diverse approaches to questions about the nature of the mind, the mind's relation to the brain, perceptual experience, mental representation, sense making, the role of the environment, and social cognition, and it...
I focus on the enactivist and extended mind approaches to embodied cognition (EC), and specifically on the concepts of body schema, affectivity, distributed cognition and intersubjectivity to show how EC has relevance to questions about expert performance, and to the theory and practice of performing arts.
This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decision making, which stems from the subjective...
Abstract In this paper, we address core insights from Buddhist psychology about mind-body phenomena and the self, and we relate such insights to the notion of the self-pattern developed in the pattern theory of self. We emphasize the dynamic, temporal and enactive characteristics of the self-pattern, consistent with the core Buddhist notion of non-self. Although there is no one-to-one mapping...
Clinical and neuroscientific evidence indicates that transdiagnostic processes contribute to the generation and maintenance of psychopathological symptoms and disorders. Rigidity (inflexibility) appears a core feature of most transdiagnostic pathological processes. Decreasing rigidity may prove important to restore and maintain mental health. One of the primary domains in which rigidity and...
The concept of minimal self-consciousness or "minimal self" is equivalent to a very basic form of first-person, pre-reflective self-awareness, which includes bodily self-awareness, and is related to phenomenal experience (qualia) and sentience. This phenomenological concept plays a role in characterizations of the senses of ownership and agency; in recent debates about Buddhist conceptions of...
Can we explain how the various factors of knowledge, skill, habit, environmental constraints and affordances interact or integrate in improvisational performance? In attempting to explain how this integration takes place, I’ll consider two possible approaches: predictive processing (PP) and enactivism. I’ll argue that PP, which, on a neuroscientific view, conceives of the mind as set up to...
In this paper I address what has been called the integration problem in psychiatry. This problem is tied to conceptions of causality and explanatory levels in our understanding of mind. I take an interdisciplinary enactive perspective to develop a 3-fold method for exploring the dynamics of integration, based on a concept of dynamical causation and a non-hierarchical (level-free) notion of...
In this paper I examine a set of exceptional aesthetic experiences that remove us from our pragmatic everyday life and involve a specific type of unaffordability. I then extend this notion of unaffordability to experiences of awe and its relation to the sublime. My analysis is guided by considerations of the phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach that supports an affordance-based...
This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with...
We review 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approaches to the analysis of art and aesthetic experience. We argue that extended mind analyses that focus on tool use miss important aspects, and that it requires 4 or more E’s to address the broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences that correlate to the broad variety of artistic genres. We develop an enactive, affordance-based approach...
Ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that the best explanation for a large share of cognition is non-representational in kind. In both ecological psychology and enactivist philosophy, then, the task is to offer an explanans that does not rely on representations. Different theorists within these camps have contrasting notions of what the best kind of non-representational explanation...
An important part of what it means for agents to be situated in the everyday world of human affairs includes their engagement with economic practices. In this paper, we employ the concept of cognitive institutions in order to provide an enactive and interactive interpretation of market and economic reasoning. We challenge traditional views that understand markets in terms of market structures...