Enactive cognitive science: revisionism or revolution?

Doctoral Thesis presented at the University of Wollongong

A revolution is afoot in the cognitive sciences. For decades, the received view has been that all forms of cognitive activity need to be explained by appealing to mental representations and the sort of computational mechanisms by which these representations are manipulated and transformed. This received view is now being questioned by those who defend radical, non-representational approaches to cognition. This dissertation takes issue with one specific radical approach: the radical enactive account of cognition, or REC. My overall goal is to articulate a positive, complementary relationship between REC and a series of already exist-ing approaches in the cognitive sciences in the form of ecological psychology and similarity-based theories in cognitive neuroscience. I hold that it is by incorporating these scientific frameworks into REC that we can build a theoretically sound, empirically robust positive alternative to both representationalism and other forms of enactivism. This dissertation is composed of five autonomous but thematically intertwined papers, all of them presented as independent chapters. The first paper is devoted to discussing different objections to the possibility of a radical embodied cognitive science. The second paper focuses on the debate about plant intelligence from a radical embodied perspective. The third chapter problema-tizes the notion of structural or S-representation and explicates how neutrally-based structural similarities can play an explanatory role in a radical enactive cognitive neuroscience. The last two papers explore the complementarities between REC and ecological psychology, presenting the case for a full-blown alliance between both frameworks.

This commentary will seek to clarify certain core features of Thompson’s proposal about the enactive nature of basic mentality, as best it can, and to bring his ideas into direct conversation with accounts of basic cognition of the sort favoured by analytical philosophers of mind and more traditional cognitive scientists – i.e. those who tend to be either suspicious or critical of enactive/embodied approaches (to the extent that they confess to understanding them at all). My proposed way of opening up this sort of dialogue is to concentrate on the close similarities between Thompson’s biologically-based proposal about non-representational forms of basic cognition and what I take to be a reasonable modification to the ambitions of teleosemantic theories of content. Insofar as today’s theories of mental representation are less concerned to understand content in properly semantic terms they are moving ever closer to the sorts of account proposed by enactivists of the Thompsonian stripe – close enough to have meaningful debates about the nature of basic mentality. It is against this backdrop that I put a spotlight on the true promise and value of enactivism, providing some compelling reasons for wanting to go Thompson’s way.

Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 2: The Cogntive Turn, Warren Neidich (ed.), 2014

"We are writing the year 2014. Information increasingly becomes a desire, the necessity in the form of communication. Desire is an extension of the brain while communication seemingly combines heuristic operations in design development, and reaches beyond thermodynamics. More than 65 years ago, Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics - the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (Wiener, 1948) is published, the Macy Conferences then titled Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems are in their 3rd year and following von Neumann’s findings on the Ergodic Theorem, the Cellular Automaton are on its way.(1) In the meantime Baby, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and the world’s first stored-program computer, tested for the so-called Williams Tube (a lightweight storage device) runs its first program. The Universal Turing Machine becomes the continuing driver for computation.(2) Within the context of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism - Volume II, the subject matter of this paper relates to accessing knowledge and tools for observing and designing an interconnected para-metric world; a cybernetic world characterized by multidimensional behavioural structures informed through using the digital as interface. It provides an extension to the existing emergent construct of The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism in general and the interdisciplinary Cognitive Capitalism Project in particular. The insight given into cognitive capitalism and design strategies are foundations formed in the 20th century and aims at understanding and formulating of what the pathology of The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism may possibly be when looking through the lens of cybernetics beyond. It offers an investigation to the understanding and the form of knowledge through communication, a recursive re-invention and re-understanding of how we think, how we decide and how we actually design and behave. Not just as architects in the design process of a building or a city, but as human beings in the design process of the everyday. It is a compilation, a collection of thoughts and findings, hovering in a paradigm between architecture, cybernetics, system theory, technology and the state of being. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, and the subject of language or syntax, the question of what is reality, may be kept as a filtering veil through which the forthcoming can be received. This paper discusses cultural architectural theory in conjunction with technical, political and economical possibilities for tangible manifestations in the context of interdisciplinary cognitive work and authorship. In particular, in the context of open source software, virtual and unknown design teams, whose common ground is based on common interest and knowledge, a spatial-temporal structural coupling, which, at times, can be in a parallel fashion. The field of cybernetics and architecture within computational design, researches facts and theories developed in the last half of the 20th century, and their relevance to computational thinking and digital making, shaping the built and unbuilt networked environment in the near and distant future. In contrast to the digital, referring to a particular technology of executing calculations, the computational relates to a way of thinking and making reflecting complexity and non-linearity. It is about process rather than an input/output informed by issues such as emergence, algorithms, structure, material behaviour, data and society, in most cases using computers as interface and calculating machines and CNC (computer numerical control) for digital fabrication, such as 3D-printing, laser-cutting or robotic fabrication. Underlying principles are all but reduced to architecture; instead they are methods, possible to be applied to a variety of disciplines; and relevant as an application and proof for cognitive capitalism. The model suggested here pushes the boundaries of contemporary understanding of architecture and reconstructs reality; from the field of function in the scale of buildings, cities and smaller prototypes, towards understanding the liminal space between the built environment, materials used, the perception of the user, the regulation through the designer, client, budget, and most importantly decision-making processes, the choice of software during the design process, data used and the cognitive capital to inform all of the above. So the questions are: ‘Who is the designer?’ and ‘Who owns the copyright, or rather the cognitive copyright?’ Architecture as building, as physical form is the proof of concept of interplay, and most likely is a result of thinking and internalizing dwelling that has been outlived by the construct architecture as organism, evolving and informing itself through filtering, observation and self-observation: “I am the observed link between myself and observing myself” (von Foerster, 1981).(3) This paper is structured in a series of parts, which at times overlap and merge. “Defining the Matter” aims to clarify key terms used, and to establish possible relationships between them. These terms–which derive from biology, computer sciences, architecture or mathematics–so far have neither been defined cross-disciplinarily, nor within architecture. They do however affect how the forthcoming text is understood. Since in an era of rapid technological and theoretical shifts terms and expressions are revisited constantly and receive numerous varying definitions there is a necessity to delineate their complex functions. This will provide a theoretical basis for the present text and sets the topic into the framework of the philosophy of computation simultaneously. The main inquiry focuses on the agenda “It’s not alone, it’s synthetic – the bits are calculating,” and provides the reader with a description of A*cognitivist Architecture in a cyber-biological framework and embeds its construct within the mind/body phenomenon immanent in social environments. The narrative Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles bridges computational thinking, the body, perception through our senses and the brain in a material world. This part introduces the concept of Wechselwirkung offered by biological cognition and the cognitive Internet, with its unknown amount of reflectors in an existing non-linear para-space.(4) Here the cybernetic note will be woven into a genealogical string of thoughts. The paper concludes with an exploration for and of an interconnected para-metric world by engaging largely with immaterial, neurotectural design strategies and the question of collective authorship, relating back to the synthetic that becomes natural, cognitive and bio-semiotic. "

Artificial Intelligence, 2009

The embodied and situated approach to artificial intelligence (AI) has matured and become a viable alternative to traditional computationalist approaches with respect to the practical goal of building artificial agents, which can behave in a robust and flexible manner under changing real-world conditions. Nevertheless, some concerns have recently been raised with regard to the sufficiency of current embodied AI for advancing our scientific understanding of intentional agency. While from an engineering or computer science perspective this limitation might not be relevant, it is of course highly relevant for AI researchers striving to build accurate models of natural cognition. We argue that the biological foundations of enactive cognitive science can provide the conceptual tools that are needed to diagnose more clearly the shortcomings of current embodied AI. In particular, taking an enactive perspective points to the need for AI to take seriously the organismic roots of autonomous agency and sense-making. We identify two necessary systemic requirements, namely constitutive autonomy and adaptivity, which lead us to introduce two design principles of enactive AI. It is argued that the development of such enactive AI poses a significant challenge to current methodologies. However, it also provides a promising way of eventually overcoming the current limitations of embodied AI, especially in terms of providing fuller models of natural embodied cognition. Finally, some practical implications and examples of the two design principles of enactive AI are also discussed.

Kybernetes, 2005

PurposeTo present an account of cognition integrating second‐order cybernetics (SOC) together with enactive perception and dynamic systems theory.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a brief critique of classical models of cognition then outlines how integration of SOC, enactive perception and dynamic systems theory can overcome some weaknesses of the classical paradigm.FindingsPresents the critique of evolutionary robotics showing how the issues of teleology and autonomy are left unresolved by this paradigm although their solution fits within the proposed framework.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper highlights the importance of genuine autonomy in the development of artificial cognitive systems. It sets out a framework within which the robotic research of cognitive systems could succeed.Practical implicationsThere are no immediate practical implications but see research implications.Originality/valueIt joins the discussion on the fundamental nature of cognitive sys...

Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, 2016

The main contribution of this paper is a naturalized account of the phenomenon of computation. The key idea for the development of this account is the identification of the notion of syntactical processing (or information processing) with the dynamical evolution of a constrained physical process, based on the observation that both evolve according to an arbitrary set of rules. This identification, in turn, revealed that, from the physical point of view, computation could be understood in terms of the operation of a component subdivided into two parts, (a) the constrained process and (b) the constraints that control its dynamics, where the interactions with the rest of the system are mediated by configurational changes of the constrained process. The immediate consequence of this analysis is the observation that this notion of computation can be readily integrated into the enactive paradigm of cognition.

Kybernetes, 2004

Despite its successes and its impact on a host of other disciplines, Cybernetics failed to live up to its dream as an interdisciplinary field unifying all the phenomena within the vast space of animals and machines. The reason, I submit, was twofold. First, it ignored one of its two fundamental concepts, namely, communication. Second, it adopted an inadequate Class of Systems for Theory Construction (CSTC).

Cybernetics and Systems, 1997

Cybernetics in the United States has evolved through three identifiable periods. In the first period of the 1950s and 1960s there was a primary concern with designing control systems and with building machines to emulate human reasoning. In the second period of the 1970s and 1980s the focus of attention was on the biology of cognition and constructivist philosophy. In recent years increasing attention has been given to social systems. Whereas the work on the biology of cognition required that attention be shifted from what was observed to the observer, the recent interest in social systems requires an emphasis on multiple observers and their beliefs. The third period of social cybernetics or the cybernetics of conceptual systems is illustrated by considering constructivist cybernetics as a conceptual system created to promote the evolution of certain social systems in a preferred direction.

Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 2015

This column is a journey that considers both the failure of second-order cybernetics (SOC), radical constructivism (RC), and the biology of cognition (BoC) to achieve wide acceptance, particularly in science, and the opportunities for SOC, RC, and BoC in the social sciences and other disciplines.