Abstract
In their recent book Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic minds without content, Dan Hutto and Erik Myin (H&M) make two important criticisms of what they call autopoietic enactivism (AE). These two criticisms are that AE harbours tacit representationalists commitments and that it has too liberal a conception of cognition. Taking the latter claim as its main focus, this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of AE in order to tease out how it might respond to H&M. In so doing it uncovers some reasons which not only appear to warrant H&M’s initial claims but also seem to point to further uneasy tensions within the AE framework. The paper goes beyond H&M by tracing the roots of these criticisms and apparent tensions to phenomenology and the role it plays in AE’s distinctive conception of strong life-mind continuity. It is highlighted that this phenomenological dimension of AE contains certain unexamined anthropomorphic and anthropogenic leanings which do not sit comfortably within its wider commitment to life-mind continuity. In light of this analysis it is suggested that AE will do well to rethink this role or ultimately run the risk of remaining theoretically unstable. The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing theoretical development of AE by highlighting potential internal tensions within its framework which need to be addressed in order for it to continue to evolve as a coherent paradigm.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The notion of autopoiesis has undoubtedly strongly influenced the development of AE. Nonetheless there is at least one sense in which “AE” is potentially misleading. Although the original formulation of autopoiesis has served as the main inspiration for AE, the theorists which heavily draw from it have gradually moved away from and continue to refine the original formulation (see Colombetti 2010; Di Paolo 2005, 2009; Thompson 2007, 2011a).
Unless otherwise specified all reference to H&M refer to their (2013) book.
Many thanks to a reviewer for helping clarify the distinction between CIC and CEC.
H&M appear fairly happy to allow for “complex” human minds, at least certain aspects thereof, to contain and process informational content. The authors nonetheless leave it as an open question how we should best understand the use and interpretation of semantic information.
See (pp. 39–56) for discussion of the research H&M draw from.
Note that here I put aside H&M’s “master argument”, what they call the “hard problem of content”, against representationalism. Though this is a crucial argument for REC it is less relevant for the broader discussion of this paper.
Many thanks to a reviewer, who’s detailed comments on this issue have enabled me to make these points clearer.
Again, as noted above, this is due to the fact that H&M take this to be a clear indication of undesirable theoretical commitments.
Note, as just highlighted in the previous paragraph, that unlike AE H&M take “interpretation”, “sense-making”, “understanding” and so on, to be “higher level” cognition.
The term “phenomenology” has different meanings across different fields, here it is used in the sense originally proposed by Husserl and further refined and developed by the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, as the systemic study of the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person perspective and their instantiation in the human body and social intuitions and objects (for an excellent introduction to the field see Gallagher 2013). Here, unless otherwise specified, it will be primarily the phenomenology of Hans Jonas which will be of concern.
In this paper I will use the word “strong” rather than deep as Thompson does in this quote. The two words are however synonymous in this context.
Note here that this move does not mean that AE forgoes the organisational/functional dimension of SLMC, only that this dimension is now endowed with an extra phenomenological dimension not appreciated by proponents of a mere SLMCT. My gratitude here to a reviewer for pressing me on this point.
Note here, as the Barbaras’ quote also nicely highlights, that there are two interconnected demissions to Jonas’ conception of life and mind. The metabolic dimension which can be considered to roughly correspond to the organisational/operational (autopoietic) side of the system and the phenomenological dimension which corresponds to its inner/subjective (teleological) side. In what follows I will have nothing much to say on Jonas’ views on the metabolic side of living systems. This is not because I don’t take them to be important or informative, but rather, because I take them to be subsumed (at least in the context of SLMC+) by the phenomenological dimension. The introduction of Kant, and indeed the H&M challenge, is meant to illustrate this point. Recall that what is at stake between Kant and AE is the intrinsic status of teleology. Recall moreover that all parties appear to agree that living systems have a distinctive type of organisation. The fact that it is the inner dimension of nonhuman living systems which is in dispute here, manifested in the move from SLMCT to SLMCT+, is ultimately what motivates my decision.
Indeed, as a reviewer of this paper pointed out, even if this much were to be granted, how would this secure sense-making, subjectivity and the like?
Indeed, this also seems to be an inevitable implication of the “transcendental argument” presented above. After all, “our experience of our own bodily being is a condition of possibility for our comprehension of autopoietic selfhood” (Thompson ibid, 164).
For those not familiar with this line of argument see Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, p. 181–184) for a discussion and phenomenological critique.
Jonas (1996, p. 43) considers phenomenology to be “a program of self-examination of consciousness as the site of the appearance of all things possibly present to thought”, that is, consciousness without “the adventitious nature of all factual and individual elements”. Jonas’s phenomenological origins notwithstanding, this general distrust for phenomenology can also be witnessed in the manner he thinks in terms of teleology rather than intentionality, freedom and necessity rather than of possibility and impossibility, and perhaps closer to traditional phenomenology, he maintains notions of interiority and exteriority.
Anthropocentrism is a general tendency to take human beings as the central or most significant entities in the world (see Boddice 2011 and essays therein).
It is for this reason in particular that Mathew Calarco (2008) argues that Heidegger is committed to a “metaphysical anthropocentrism” Heidegger (1929/1995) for example, criticises the western philosophical tradition for being too anthropocentric, nonetheless regards animals as "poor in world", without history, without dwelling, without space (see Tonner 2011). All properties which he grants to human but not to animals.
As this quote already indicate Jonas was keenly aware of his own anthropocentrism/anthropomorphism but justified it on ethical grounds. For Jonas the placing of the human being at the centre of the living world, whom he endowed with a certain ”nobility”, merely implied that we have an inherent ethical responsibility towards the rest of nature. See the Epilogue in Jonas (1966) and Jonas (1996). This view is at once biocentric and anthropocentric, for we should care about preserving the integrity of the life-world, but primarily because we are the highest expression of life's purposiveness.
As already mentioned above, a central motivation for Jonas is to overcome the sort of anthropocentrism which sees humans above all else in nature, as somewhat superior to all other creatures. However, at the same time Jonas is also clear that “man is the measure of all things”. There is a tension here which also appears to mirror the tension with regards to anthropomorphism.
Jonas (ibid, pp. 7–58) traces this sort of anthropomorphism to Descartes dualistic partitioning of the world into res extensa and res cogitans. With this distinction all value, purpose and subjectivity was striped from nature and become sole properties of human minds leaving the rest of nature effectively dead. But this notion of anthropomorphism unquestionably stipulates that animals have no mentality whatsoever and so makes it difficult to understand how humans themselves acquired these properties. In my opinion Jonas is correct in criticising this particular conception of anthropomorphism, nonetheless as this subsection will attempt to show, the “positive anthropomorphism" which he is amenable to remains equally problematic.
Note that this in turn rises the further question, one which we cannot address here, of how exactly (if at all) these stances relate? Here it suffices to highlight how they lead to an uneasy tension pulling at opposite directions which threaten to undermine each other.
On the one hand, as Fred Cummings (2014) points out, bacteria are vastly more complex and more deeply embedded in their environment than the AE theorist recognises. AE never considers E.coli as a social creature and so ignores its relation to other bacteria and to its broader environment. This is a particularly striking omission since bacteria are amongst the most social creatures on earth (see Lyons 2007; Shapiro 2007). AE thus needs to reconsider its ahistorical, individualist conception of bacteria as solitary creatures acting alone. On the other hand, considered operationally (see Egbert et al. 2010) a bacterium reduces to a mere mechanism in the true sense of the word, requiring a single sensor capable of detecting glucose, a locomotion capacity with a direct and indirect mode of locomotion and a probabilistic link between the slope of a glucose gradient and the likelihood of switching between the two modes.
See footnote 21 for further support of this point.
Note that AE conceives of human cognition as non-representationalist in nature and so it is this conception of cognition which gets projected down.
Alternatively, AE could re-conceptualise phenomenology itself so that it can accommodate its requirements. This would be a rather difficult ask but not impossible.
References
Agamben, G. (2004). The open: Man and animal (Vol. 1). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Barandiaran, X. E., Di Paolo, E. A., & Rohde, M. (2009). Defining agency: individuality, normativity, asymmetry, and spatio-temporality in action. Adaptive Behavior, 17(5), 367–386.
Barbaras, R. (2010). Life and exteriority: The problem of metabolism. Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science, 89–122.
Boddice, R. (Ed.). (2011). Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments (Vol. 12). Brill.
Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence, 47(1), 139–159.
Buchanan, B. (2008). Onto-ethologies: the animal environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. New York: Suny Press.
Calarco, M. (2008). Zoographies: The question of the animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia University Press.
Clark, A. (2001). Mindware: An introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Colombetti, G. (2014). The feeling body: Affective science meets the enactive mind. MIT Press.
Cummins, F. (2014) Agency is distinct from autonomy. Avant: Vol. V, No. 2(2014) Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies.
De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2007). Participatory sense-making: an enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485–507.
De Jaegher, H., & Froese, T. (2009). On the role of social interaction in individual agency. Adaptive Behavior, 17(5), 444–460.
De Jesus, P. (2014) Book Review, Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. Cognitive Computation.
Di Paolo, E. (2003). Organismically-inspired robotics: homeostatic adaptation and teleology beyond the closed sensorimotor loop. Dynamical systems approach to embodiment and sociality, 19–42.
Di Paolo, E. (2005). Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4(4), 429–452.
Di Paolo, E. (2009). Extended life. Topoi, 28(1), 9–21.
Di Paolo, E.A., Rohde, M., & De Jaegher, H. (2011). “Horizons for the enactive mind: Values, social interaction, and play”. In J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, and E.A. Di Paolo (eds), Enaction:Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 33–87.
Egbert, M. D., Barandiaran, X. E., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2010). A minimal model of metabolism-based chemotaxis. PLoS Computational Biology, 6(12), e1001004.
Froese, T. (2011). Breathing new life into cognitive science. Avant. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2(1), 113–129.
Froese, T., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2009). Sociality and the life–mind continuity thesis. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 439–463.
Froese, T., & Ziemke, T. (2009). Enactive artificial intelligence: investigating the systemic organization of life and mind. Artificial Intelligence, 173(3–4), 466–500.
Froese, T., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2011). The enactive approach: Theoretical sketches from cell to society. Pragmatics & Cognition, 19(1), 1–36.
Fuchs, T., & De Jaegher, H. (2009). Enactive intersubjectivity: participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 465–486.
Gallagher, S. (2012). In defense of phenomenological approaches to social cognition: interacting with the critics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3(2), 187–212.
Gallagher, S. (2013). Phenomenology. Chicago: The Interaction Design Foundation.
Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2008). The phenomenological mind: An introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. London: Routledge.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (1994). Spencer and Dewey on life and mind. In R. Brooks & P. Maes (Eds.), Artificial life IV: Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on the synthesis and simulation of living systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heidegger, M. (1929/1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2008). Biosemiotics: An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. Scranton: University of Scranton Press.
Hutto, D. D. (2013). Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian point of view. American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(3), 281–302.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013) Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. MIT Press.
Jonas, H. (1966). The phenomenon of life: Toward a philosophical biology (p. 2000). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by Northwestern University Press.
Jonas, H. (1996). In V. Lawrence (Ed.), Morality and mortality. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Kant, I. (2000). In G. Paul, G. Paul, & M. Eric (Eds.), Critique of the power of judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, J. (1992). The new anthropomorphism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyon, P. (2006). The biogenic approach to cognition. Cognitive Processing, 7(1), 11–29.
Lyon, P. (2007). From quorum to cooperation: lessons from bacterial sociality for evolutionary theory. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38(4), 820–833.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing.
Mazis, G. A. (2008). Humans, animals, machines: Blurring boundaries. Suny Press.
O’Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of visionand visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 883–917.
Oyama, S. (2011). Life in mind. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(5–6), 83–93.
Painter, C. M., & Lotz, C. (Eds.). (2007). Phenomenology and the non-human animal: at the limits of experience (Vol. 56). Springer.
Shapiro, J. A. (2007). Bacteria are small but not stupid: cognition, natural genetic engineering and socio-bacteriology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38(4), 807–819.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009). The corporeal turn, an interdisciplinary reader. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Stewart, J. (2010). Foundational issues in enaction as a paradigm for cognitive science: From the origin of life to consciousness and writing. In J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, & E. A. Di Paolo (Eds.), Enaction: Towards a new paradigm for cognitive science. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E.A. (eds). (2011). Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E. (2011a). Living ways of sense making. Philosophy Today, 55(Supplement), 114–123.
Thompson, E. (2011b). Reply to commentaries. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(5–6), 5–6.
Tonner, P. (2011). Are animals poor in the world? A critique of Heidegger’s anthropocentrism’, in Anthropocentrism: Investigations into the History of an Idea. In: R. Boddice (Ed.), Brill.
Torrance, S., & Froese, T. (2011). An inter-enactive approach to agency: participatory sense-making, dynamics, and sociality. Humana Mente, 15, 21–53.
Tyler, T. (2009). If horses had hands. Animal Encounters, 6, 13.
Varela, F. (1979). Principles of biological autonomy. New York: North Holland/ Elsevier.
Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Weber, A., & Varela, F. J. (2002). Life after kant: natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(2), 97–125.
Welton, D. (2011). Can a Top-down phenomenology of intentional consciousness be integrated with a bottom-up phenomenology of biological systems? Philosophy Today, 55(Supplement), 102–113.
Wheeler, M. (1997). Cognition’s coming home: the reunion of life and mind. In P. Husbands & I. Harvey (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th European conference on artifical life. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wheeler, M. (2010). Mind, things and materiality. In C. Renfrew & L. Malafouris (Eds.), The cognitive life of things: Recasting the boundaries of the mind. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Publications.
Wheeler, M. (2011). Mind in life or life in mind? Making sense of deep continuity. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(5–6), 148–168.
Yolton, J. W. (1966). (Review of the book. The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology by Hans Jonas): The Journal of Philosophy, 64(8), 254–258.
Zaner, R. M. (1978). Ontology and the body: A reflection. In Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics (pp. 265-282). Springer Netherlands.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Prof Mark Bishop for extensive discussions on most the issues addressed in this paper. Fred Cummings for reading and providing some very insightful and invaluable comments on an earlier draft. Fred Keijzer for discussions on issues to do with the anthropogenic stance and life-mind continuity. Finally, I am deeply indebted to two reviewers for this journal, to whose insightful comments and suggestions I can only hope I have done justice.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
De Jesus, P. Autopoietic enactivism, phenomenology and the deep continuity between life and mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 15, 265–289 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9414-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9414-2