“Are living beings extended autopoietic systems? An embodied reply,” makes the case for grounding the autopoietic definition of living beings to the discrete bodies of organisms rather than to autopoietic systems that extend beyond the organisms into their environments. They attempt this grounding by amending a clause to the original formulation of autopoiesis that identifies living beings with their bodies, and then they explicitly define “bodies”. This commentary makes the case that bodily grounding can be derived from molecular autopoiesis by taking the molecular domain seriously, and no new amendment is required.

Key words: autopoiesis, embodiment, organisms.

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action–perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions (SDPs), which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, and music. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and intermodal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of SDP: attentional focus, aspects’ salience, and modal-specific harmony-like relations.

Key words: enactivism, perception, practices, culture, intersubjectivity, pragmatism

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action–perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions (SDPs), which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, and music. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and intermodal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of SDP: attentional focus, aspects’ salience, and modal-specific harmony-like relations.

Key words: enactivism, perception, practices, culture, intersubjectivity, pragmatism.

In his comment, McGann argues that in my “From Sensorimotor Dependencies to Perceptual Practices: Making Enactivism Social,” I have overlooked a group of enactivist theories that can be grouped under the participatory sense-making label. In this reply, I explain that the omission is due to the fact that such theories are not accounts of perception. It is argued that, unlike participatory sense-making, the approach of the “From Sensorimotor Dependencies to Perceptual Practices” article does not focus on the perceptual aspects of things social, but on the social aspects that are constitutive of perception in general. I conclude by underscoring the central argument of the original article: that the adequate notion to make enactivism about perception social is that of “perceptual practices,” a social practices-based notion of perception.

Key words: enactivism, perception, sociality, practices, intersubjectivity, culture

At present, due in part to our insufficient understanding of the traumatic experience, we are unable to account for the fact that while some people develop post-traumatic symptoms following a traumatic event, others do not. This article suggests that by adopting the enactive approach to perception – according to which perceiving is a way of acting – we may be able to improve our understanding of the traumatic experience and the factors which result in the development of post-traumatic symptoms. The central argument presented in this paper is that when the options of flight or fight are unavailable as a coping/defense mechanism, one freezes (freeze response). In this situation, the ability to master one’s movements is damaged and, in radical cases, the ability to move is lost altogether; as a result the sensorimotor loop may collapse. This, in turn, leads to distorted perception and, in consequence, memory disorders may develop.

Key words: trauma, ptsd, enactivism, knowing-how, freeze response, dissociation

Villalobos and Razeto-Barry propose a theory of living individuals that includes both considerations about autopoietic systems and about material individuals. However, I think that their characterisation of individuality is problematic and would not be useful to account for living individuals.

Key words: individual bodies, autopoiesis.

Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of “how cognitive agents work” but the issue of “what makes something cognitive” has not been sufficiently addressed yet and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the latter. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused on the internal dynamic relationships that constitute cognitive systems. A definition of cognition as adaptive-autonomy in the embodied and situated neurodynamic domain is provided: the compensatory regulation of a web of stability dependencies between sensorimotor structures is created and pre served during a historical/developmental process. We highlight the functional role of emotional embodiment: internal bioregulatory processes coupled to the formation and adaptive regulation of neurodynamic autonomy. Finally, we discuss a “minimally cognitive behavior program” in evolutionary simulation modeling suggesting that much is to be learned from a complementary “minimally cognitive organization program”

Key words: minimal cognition, adaptive autonomy, neurodynamic organization, cognition-as-it-could-be, emotional embodiment

In this article, we propose some fundamental requirements for the appearance of adaptivity. We argue that a basic metabolic organization, taken in its minimal sense, may provide the conceptual framework for naturalizing the origin of teleology and normative functionality as it appears in living systems. However, adaptivity also requires the emergence of a regulatory subsystem, which implies a certain form of dynamic decoupling within a globally integrated, autonomous system. Thus, we analyze several forms of minimal adaptivity, including the special case of motility. We go on to explain how an open-ended complexity growth of motility-based adaptive agency, namely, behavior, requires the appearance of the nervous system. Finally, we discuss some implications of these ideas for embodied robotics.

Key words: naturalist approach to normativity, autonomous systems, adaptivity, minimal agency, decoupling of the nervous system, definition of adaptive behavior

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavily weighted terms such as intentionality, rationality, or mind. However, most of the available definitions of agency are too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific research program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: (a) a system must define its own individuality, (b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry), and (c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable of meeting the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook for the road that lies ahead in the pursuit of understanding, modeling, and synthesizing agents.

Key words: agency, individuality, interactional asymmetry, normativity, spatiality, temporality

Review of: Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese (eds.) Enactive cognition at the edge of sense-making: Making sense of non-sense. PalgraveMacmillan: Basingstoke, UK, 2014