Help
Sign In
consciousness
August 2009 
Thoughts and questions on Enactivism
Posted on Aug 24th, 2008
by 
ashramdiarist
ashramdiarist
Slowly I am reading the essays posted by Brace Alderman, James Barrow, Matt Segall, and others. The reading of these essays is my first initiation into Enactivism (I am taking the term from Varela to cover the thought of several authors who are re-investigating the epistemological basis of science). To aid my own understanding (and maybe that of others), I have lifted a few important phrases from Matt Segall’s essay and recast them into short aphorisms. Please, all, tell me if I have misunderstood anything here.
Whoever speaks, speaks as an observer. The language shared by speaker and listeners brings forth a world of shared significance. Even when the speaker does not intend to self-refer explicitly, this self-reference is always implicit in the discourse. The content of the discourse is a description (partial or total) of the world we share with others. Our descriptions amount to consensual agreements about the nature of what we observe together. Our language is a social activity embedded in a particular historical situation and in the pre-understanding (if not prejudices) of speaker and listeners.
Questions: To what extent, and how, does our description relate to "an independent reality outside the one we constitute with and for each other"? Physicists describe the world in terms of atoms and subatomic particles; is this irrelevant to true knowledge? Or is it only irrelevant to the non-scientific concerns of speaker and listeners, e.g., questions of life and death? Ultimate question: How does Enactivism avoid the pitfall of Idealism and the slide toward solipsism?
My suggestions: Any description of the shared world is partial, even when we mean our description to refer to the whole. There is so much that we do not, and perhaps can not, observe and know. We know together, and that is necessary for our knowledge to have any basis in reality. But we still know only in part. “Critical Realism” is an epistemology that recognizes the partiality of all knowing but also recognizes that there is some “basis in reality — fundamentum in re” for our knowing, thanks to the multiplicity of observers and their shared consensus about reality.
My difficulties: Any consensus among two or more observers is bound up with culture, the nature of language, private interests, and even emotional issues. Culture, language, interests, and emotions can all diminish the accuracy of our observations and the value of our discourse in relation to the ”basis in reality.” Does this problem — the diminution of accuracy — arise only in discourses about "human affairs" (politics, religion, the arts, love relationships, psi phenomena, etc.), or does it also arise in scientific discourses? To what extent are scientific reductionism and the mechanistic model of the material universe the consequence of cultural and even political biases, rather than being the pure attitude of unprejudiced observers of reality “as it really is”?
So should I be allowed to understand Maturana’s and Varela’s “objectivity-in-parenthesis” in terms of the classic “critical realism”? Some affirmation of realism in our limited and partial knowing seems necessary in order to avoid Idealism and, ultimately, solipsism. That is, we can speak only about what we know, what seems to us to be true, and cannot identify our description with what really is “out there,” but at the same time, in virtue of our shared embodiment in the universe and the language we share in describing it, we can rest assured that we are standing somewhere, and not nowhere. We neither presume to be an objective observer, isolated in our omniscient void, nor despair of coming to any authentic knowledge of what really is.
The “scandal” of the biological sciences lies in the fact that “a widely-agreed-upon definition for the central object of study, life, has yet to be produced.” You could say that the scandal is enormous, because it is largely unconfessed.
Two years ago, I attended a small symposium in Spain organized by the physicist Dr. Paul Gailey of the University of Michigan with the Fetzer Memorial Trust. The symposium gathered around the venerable figure of Dr. Raimon Panikkar, a scholar in intercultural studies and interreligious theology. The overarching theme was “Science and Spirituality,” but an important sub-theme was “life.” Dr. Pierluigi Luisi, professor emeritus of the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, sustained that life is bracketed between microbes, at the bottom, and humans, at the top. Viruses, lacking DNA, are out, and as for the trans-human, or higher intelligent beings, the absence of proof for their existence is taken as proof of absence. I do not remember if Rollie Stanich, a collaborator of Ken Wilber, raised any objection. Panikkar certainly did, as did I. The arbitrary nature of the microbial floor and the anthropic ceiling in describing life seemed clear to me, but not to others.
What does seem clear to me, is that the entire universe is living and is in some way a living organism. Why do I think so? Because what is called abiogenesis, the emergence of cells and nucleic acids from preceding, non-biotic entities — and I agree with the common descriptions of it — seems to demand an intrinsic tendency (classically called “potency”) within matter to coagulate into complex structures that Maturana calls “autopoietic.” While I have a certain difficulty in translating this term literally as “self-producing” — nothing in the universe has been shown to have produced itself — I accept the notion expressed by the term as a good description of living beings. Permit me, with a wink, to translate the term as “self-poetic”: the unity distinguishes itself from the surrounding broth by making itself beautiful, by giving itself a rhythm, by dancing. I am not just playing with metaphors, but claiming to describe unicellular beings as I once observed them in an undergraduate biology course. Forgive my self-referencing here, but as it was said, such self-referencing is inevitable in every description shared through language.
Dare I say that the scandal of the absent definition of life itself is seconded by the scandal of consciousness reduced to an efflux of neuronal cells? It seems to me that life cannot be defined, because life or the potency for it exists at the very root of the universe. If I am not wrong here, then I can say that consciousness cannot be defined, because we are the consciousness, and not solely as individuals. The world is shared; language is shared; consciousness is shared, as Varela, Maturana, and others affirm. Forget psi for the moment: linguistic communication is mysterious enough, and the fact of it shows me the indefinability of the consciousness that spreads its observations abroad by means of language. Please, all, do not hesitate to challenge me on this point, because in spite of the declarative tone, I still call “tentative” any discourse about consciousness, since it cannot be defined by anything other than itself, not even by the firing of neurons that accompanies it. Or so it seems to me.
Matt’s breaking-down of Varela’s statement — “The fundamental logic of the nervous system is that of coupling movements with a stream of sensory modulations in a circular fashion” — was helpful. In Matt’s emphasizing the “active process” in perceiving the world — “We know the world by moving around within it” — he notes the misunderstanding of “perception” as “passive receptivity.” Maybe another term for the same process, coming from medieval thought, might shed light here: call it “simple apprehension,” a taking-hold of a part of the world we move in, without yet judging either the part or the whole. There is then time for judging, for the copula of “is” or “is not”; in the meantime we can engage in a kind of contemplative gazing on the question posed by the reality simply apprehended. Perhaps this gaze can help us to replace the part within the whole, before actuating the intellectual judgment of “is” or “is not.”
Am I getting off the subject here?
Wilber still derails my thinking. I hear him saying one thing, but reading on I find he is saying another. He slips out of the grasp of either my agreeing or disagreeing with him. Wilber complained that Christian De Quincey's objections to his thought were mostly ad hominem arguments. Maybe Wilber invites them by his style of reasoning. What do you think?
Matt’s concluding words about suffering were moving. I deeply respect the personal note in them, while giving myself the permission to ask, in a general way: “Is the fact that all we sentient beings suffer a proof that the universe is unfriendly?” I don’t think it is.
Enough for now. Like James, I acknowledge that someone with a musician’s mind may not succeed in harmonizing with high philosophy.
Whoever speaks, speaks as an observer. The language shared by speaker and listeners brings forth a world of shared significance. Even when the speaker does not intend to self-refer explicitly, this self-reference is always implicit in the discourse. The content of the discourse is a description (partial or total) of the world we share with others. Our descriptions amount to consensual agreements about the nature of what we observe together. Our language is a social activity embedded in a particular historical situation and in the pre-understanding (if not prejudices) of speaker and listeners.
Questions: To what extent, and how, does our description relate to "an independent reality outside the one we constitute with and for each other"? Physicists describe the world in terms of atoms and subatomic particles; is this irrelevant to true knowledge? Or is it only irrelevant to the non-scientific concerns of speaker and listeners, e.g., questions of life and death? Ultimate question: How does Enactivism avoid the pitfall of Idealism and the slide toward solipsism?
My suggestions: Any description of the shared world is partial, even when we mean our description to refer to the whole. There is so much that we do not, and perhaps can not, observe and know. We know together, and that is necessary for our knowledge to have any basis in reality. But we still know only in part. “Critical Realism” is an epistemology that recognizes the partiality of all knowing but also recognizes that there is some “basis in reality — fundamentum in re” for our knowing, thanks to the multiplicity of observers and their shared consensus about reality.
My difficulties: Any consensus among two or more observers is bound up with culture, the nature of language, private interests, and even emotional issues. Culture, language, interests, and emotions can all diminish the accuracy of our observations and the value of our discourse in relation to the ”basis in reality.” Does this problem — the diminution of accuracy — arise only in discourses about "human affairs" (politics, religion, the arts, love relationships, psi phenomena, etc.), or does it also arise in scientific discourses? To what extent are scientific reductionism and the mechanistic model of the material universe the consequence of cultural and even political biases, rather than being the pure attitude of unprejudiced observers of reality “as it really is”?
So should I be allowed to understand Maturana’s and Varela’s “objectivity-in-parenthesis” in terms of the classic “critical realism”? Some affirmation of realism in our limited and partial knowing seems necessary in order to avoid Idealism and, ultimately, solipsism. That is, we can speak only about what we know, what seems to us to be true, and cannot identify our description with what really is “out there,” but at the same time, in virtue of our shared embodiment in the universe and the language we share in describing it, we can rest assured that we are standing somewhere, and not nowhere. We neither presume to be an objective observer, isolated in our omniscient void, nor despair of coming to any authentic knowledge of what really is.
The “scandal” of the biological sciences lies in the fact that “a widely-agreed-upon definition for the central object of study, life, has yet to be produced.” You could say that the scandal is enormous, because it is largely unconfessed.
Two years ago, I attended a small symposium in Spain organized by the physicist Dr. Paul Gailey of the University of Michigan with the Fetzer Memorial Trust. The symposium gathered around the venerable figure of Dr. Raimon Panikkar, a scholar in intercultural studies and interreligious theology. The overarching theme was “Science and Spirituality,” but an important sub-theme was “life.” Dr. Pierluigi Luisi, professor emeritus of the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, sustained that life is bracketed between microbes, at the bottom, and humans, at the top. Viruses, lacking DNA, are out, and as for the trans-human, or higher intelligent beings, the absence of proof for their existence is taken as proof of absence. I do not remember if Rollie Stanich, a collaborator of Ken Wilber, raised any objection. Panikkar certainly did, as did I. The arbitrary nature of the microbial floor and the anthropic ceiling in describing life seemed clear to me, but not to others.
What does seem clear to me, is that the entire universe is living and is in some way a living organism. Why do I think so? Because what is called abiogenesis, the emergence of cells and nucleic acids from preceding, non-biotic entities — and I agree with the common descriptions of it — seems to demand an intrinsic tendency (classically called “potency”) within matter to coagulate into complex structures that Maturana calls “autopoietic.” While I have a certain difficulty in translating this term literally as “self-producing” — nothing in the universe has been shown to have produced itself — I accept the notion expressed by the term as a good description of living beings. Permit me, with a wink, to translate the term as “self-poetic”: the unity distinguishes itself from the surrounding broth by making itself beautiful, by giving itself a rhythm, by dancing. I am not just playing with metaphors, but claiming to describe unicellular beings as I once observed them in an undergraduate biology course. Forgive my self-referencing here, but as it was said, such self-referencing is inevitable in every description shared through language.
Dare I say that the scandal of the absent definition of life itself is seconded by the scandal of consciousness reduced to an efflux of neuronal cells? It seems to me that life cannot be defined, because life or the potency for it exists at the very root of the universe. If I am not wrong here, then I can say that consciousness cannot be defined, because we are the consciousness, and not solely as individuals. The world is shared; language is shared; consciousness is shared, as Varela, Maturana, and others affirm. Forget psi for the moment: linguistic communication is mysterious enough, and the fact of it shows me the indefinability of the consciousness that spreads its observations abroad by means of language. Please, all, do not hesitate to challenge me on this point, because in spite of the declarative tone, I still call “tentative” any discourse about consciousness, since it cannot be defined by anything other than itself, not even by the firing of neurons that accompanies it. Or so it seems to me.
Matt’s breaking-down of Varela’s statement — “The fundamental logic of the nervous system is that of coupling movements with a stream of sensory modulations in a circular fashion” — was helpful. In Matt’s emphasizing the “active process” in perceiving the world — “We know the world by moving around within it” — he notes the misunderstanding of “perception” as “passive receptivity.” Maybe another term for the same process, coming from medieval thought, might shed light here: call it “simple apprehension,” a taking-hold of a part of the world we move in, without yet judging either the part or the whole. There is then time for judging, for the copula of “is” or “is not”; in the meantime we can engage in a kind of contemplative gazing on the question posed by the reality simply apprehended. Perhaps this gaze can help us to replace the part within the whole, before actuating the intellectual judgment of “is” or “is not.”
Am I getting off the subject here?
Wilber still derails my thinking. I hear him saying one thing, but reading on I find he is saying another. He slips out of the grasp of either my agreeing or disagreeing with him. Wilber complained that Christian De Quincey's objections to his thought were mostly ad hominem arguments. Maybe Wilber invites them by his style of reasoning. What do you think?
Matt’s concluding words about suffering were moving. I deeply respect the personal note in them, while giving myself the permission to ask, in a general way: “Is the fact that all we sentient beings suffer a proof that the universe is unfriendly?” I don’t think it is.
Enough for now. Like James, I acknowledge that someone with a musician’s mind may not succeed in harmonizing with high philosophy.
Access: Public
Excellent, Thomas. Do you mind if I put links to your essays in my symposium summary?
Thanks for digging into these ideas with us, Thomas! Let me see where I can go with some of your questions and suggestions…
To what extent, and how, does our description relate to “an independent reality outside the one we constitute with and for each other”? Physicists describe the world in terms of atoms and subatomic particles; is this irrelevant to true knowledge? Or is it only irrelevant to the non-scientific concerns of speaker and listeners, e.g., questions of life and death? Ultimate question: How does Enactivism avoid the pitfall of Idealism and the slide toward solipsism?
Obviously, all of this is my interpretation of enactivism, and were Varela still alive to answer such questions, I'd be first in line to pose them! But my understanding is that any mention of “an independent reality” is necessarily an abstraction brought forth in language. This doesn't mean that such abstractions cannot prove immeasurably useful to us as a technologically adept species; but being that we are organisms, our structure and organization enact for us only the kind of world which has proved useful for our continued survival. I'll admit that I am not happy with this conclusion, as it seems to imply that the truth about reality is beyond our ability to comprehend. No philosopher can retain their sanity in the face of such a conclusion, leaving aside for the moment the problem of applying the limits of knowledge to the enactivist system itself. I have grown quite interested in the last few months in the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead, especially as they relate to enactivism. Varela and Maturana remained relatively silent in regards to metaphysical questions, and I have a feeling that grounding their approach to biology and cognition in Whitehead's process ontology might enrich both traditions. More on this connection later!
I think Varela's reaction to traditional reductionistic materialism is that it totally neglects human experience, which is undoubtedly the core of everything we are and everything we do, including science. So while it is true that atoms can be reliably brought forth through a variety of technological experiments, such abstractions can never explain away the lived realities of our directly experienced lives. Human experience can only be explored on its own terms, not through the lens of physics, which I'm guessing is quite obvious to anyone who isn't trying to sell books with provocative titles asserting the dominance of scientific reductionism over all other methods of human inquiry.
As far as avoiding idealism and/or solipsism goes, I think enactivism is an attempt to get out of the solipsism inherent to the representationalist view of the mind. From the representationalist perspective, we know only through our brain's symbolic translation of sensory information into some type of “language of thought.” For all intents and purposes, the world known is merely a matrix virtually projected by complex computations of neural codes. “Consciousness,” if it exists at all, is an epiphenomenon held prisoner somewhere in the skull, and given no opportunity to partake in the completely determined computational mechanisms of the brain. Enactivism, on the other hand, begins with relationship. Our conscious experience is the product of billions of years of co-evolution with the environment (which includes other experiential beings). I experience myself through my experience of others, and vice versa. Consciousness is what emerges out of our social transaction and conversation. Emphasis is placed on the embodied nature of experience, such that what we sense, perceive, and know is not a result of neural computation, but a directly felt encounter with the world as it relates to our organizational dynamics. Representationalism seems to over-intellectualize what is fundamentally a visceral and sensuously-based phenomenon, modeling cognition on the computer, when a more appropriate model would be the cell. We know primarily by feeling, and only through language do our more intellectual conceptualizations emerge. But even then, the meaning of the terms we speak and write comes from a place far deeper in our being than is usually recognized.
So should I be allowed to understand Maturana’s and Varela’s “objectivity-in-parenthesis” in terms of the classic “critical realism”?
This would be a misunderstanding, I think. Critical realism makes a point of distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities (I believe this scheme originated with Locke). Enactivism explicitly rejects this duality, suggesting that color emerges due to more than just our subjective perception, but because of a more dynamic interplay between organism and environment over the course of deep evolutionary time. Varela et al. do not deny that organisms exist by virtue of the fact that a real physiochemical environment provides them with the necessary raw materials. But they suggest that such an environment does not determine the autopoiesis or the experience of the organism.
Wilber still derails my thinking. I hear him saying one thing, but reading on I find he is saying another. He slips out of the grasp of either my agreeing or disagreeing with him.
I have mixed feelings about Wilber. I imagine he is the apex of a tremendous amount of projection from his followers, students, etc. I think this projection gets the best of him at times, and he tries to be everything to everyone but only ends up confusing those who attempt to seriously engage his contributions.
I have a tremendous amount of faith in the friendliness of the universe. The Buddhist aphorism that “life is suffering” is not meant to be depressing, but on the contrary, to awaken us to the true nature and possibility of life. Suffering is the result of clinging to that which is impermenant. But if we are free from such clinging, my experience is that everything we need is mysteriously provided to us.
I'll leave it at that for now, Thomas. But like I said, I am not happy about some of the conclusions enactivism seems to arrive at. I'm going to work on these unhappy conclusions in connection with Whitehead as I work my way through the course I am enrolled in about his thought. I have a feeling my term paper will be about this : )
Be well,
Matt
i loved this…*****…from one musician to another…this spoke to me…opened up my own understanding…and was overall quiet brilliant! thnx for sharing your awareness…always, star…