Enactive Approach

The Enactive Approach holds that there is a continuity of mind and life, i.e., that mental phenomena can be understood based on the principles that describe the organization and behavior of all life. In other words, it characterizes the identity of cognitive beings by similar principles and concepts as the identity of living beings.

Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.It claims that an organism's environment is enacted (brought about) by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes.

• The species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems.
• This domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world.
• Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.

References

• Di Paolo, E., Rohde, M., and De Jaegher, H. (2010). “Horizons for the enactive mind: values, social interaction and play,” in Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, eds J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, and E. A. Di Paolo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 33–87.
• Clark, A. (2001). Mindware. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Thompson, E., and Varela, F. (2001). Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and consciousness. Trends Cogn. Sci. 5, 418–425.
• Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Varela, F. J. (1997). Patterns of life: intertwining identity and cognition. Brain Cogn. 34, 72–87.