The problem of double contingency and its accompanying parable of the black boxes informs Luhmann’s conception of meaning and frequently provides illustration at critical junctures. In life, (we) ‘psychic systems’ and (societies) ‘social systems’ are constantly faced with situations that require choices. Our meanings develop from those choices. Each choice that we make is an element of our meaning. Autopoiesis forms the background of Luhmann’s theory. Psychic and social autopoietic systems live by constantly maintaining their reproduction as a closed system. At the same time, they constantly interact with their environment by incorporating elements from it and releasing unneeded elements back into it. In this process, what remains the same is the reproductive process, which incorporates those elements that foster its life and evolution. Interpenetration describes how closed autopoietic systems come to share meaning and come to cooperatre and understand each other.

Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a thought-provoking theory of sensorimotor agency and the pre-reflective experience of action that builds on the enactive notions of autonomy and sense-making. The account provided in this book fits into a radically embodied, enactive, and extended cognitive science. However, the notion of the environment requires further conceptual clarification by the enactive camp.

Key words: agency, sensorimotor contingencies, sensorimotor learning, enactive approach, habits, 4e cognition

On the 4th of September 2017, the 14th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2017, Lyon, France) hosted a satellite workshop dedicated to a frontier research question: ‘What can Synthetic Biology offer to (Embodied) Artificial Intelligence (and vice versa)?’ This workshop, as the previous three of the ‘Synthetic Biology (SB)–Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ workshop series, brought together specialists from different disciplines to address the contemporary debate on the evolution of embodied artificial intelligence from a new angle. In a few words: defining the possible roles that SB – an emerging research line combining biology and engineering – can play in the process of establishment of the so-called ‘Embodied paradigm’ in the scientific exploration of cognition and, in particular, in artificial intelligence.

Key words: : artificial intelligence, autonomy, constructivism, (radical) embodiment, minimal cell, minimal cognition, self-organization, synthetic method

This chapter traces how the concept of autopoiesis, originating in the field of theoretical biology with Chilean scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, has generated a wide range of disciplinary uses outside the sciences. The unlikely transit of autopoiesis was made possible in large part by the interdisciplinary ferment of postwar cybernetics that recast living organisms as information-processing machines. This chapter highlights the overlooked significance of the literary model that inspired this paradigm shift in the re-description of cellular life: Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel Don Quixotede la Mancha. Through a reading of cybernetics, autopoiesis, and Cervantes, this essay compares scientific concepts of self-organization with the literary stakes of autopoiesis and “languaging” for theorists such as Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault.

Excerpt: We speak of self-organization whenever an operatively closed system uses its own operations to build structures that it can either reuse and change later on, or else dismiss and forget. Computers depend on external programming, although computer-generated programs may be developed eventually. By contrast, autopoietic systems produce their own structures and are capable of specifying their operations via these structures (structural determination). This mode of operation does not exclude causal environmental influences. Some of Munch’s paintings bear traces of water damage because they were left outdoors. While some people might consider this beautiful, no one would argue that the rain completed the painting. Nor would anyone try to prove the appropriateness of the rain’s decisions with regard to the altered formal structure of the painting. Rather, the impression is that a painting was not and could not have been painted in this manner. Self-organization owes its possibilities and its room for play to the differentiation of the system. Accordingly, art observes itself by means of the distinction between a reality “out there” and a fictional reality. The doubling of reality generates a medium of its own, in which the fixation of forms becomes not only possible but necessary, if the medium is to be reproduced. The opportunity and the need to do something go hand in hand. This conceptual model will guide the following analyses. In functional systems, we call the system’s basal structure – a structure that is produced and reproduced by the system’s operations – a code. In contrast to the concept of code in linguistics, we think here of a binary schematism that knows only two values and that excludes third values at the level of coding. A code must fulfill the following requirements: (1) it must correspond to the system’s function, which is to say, it must be able to translate the viewpoint of the function into a guiding difference; and (2) it must be complete in the sense of Spencer Brown’s definition, “Distinction is perfect continence,” rather than distinguishing just anything. The code must completely cover the functional domain for which the system is responsible. It must therefore (3) be selective with regard to the external world and (4) provide information within the system. (5) The code must be open to supplements (programs) that offer (and modify) criteria to determine which of the two code values is to be considered in any given case. (6) All of this is cast into the form of a preferential code, that is, into an asymmetrical form that requires a distinction between a positive and a negative value. The positive value can be used within the system; at the least, it promises a condensed probability of acceptance. The negative value serves as a value of reflection; it determines what kinds of program are most likely to fulfill the promise of meaning implied in the positive code value.

Predictive processing (PP) is now a prominent theoretical framework in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This review focuses on PP research with a relatively philosophical focus, taking stock of the framework and discussing new directions. The review contains an introduction that describes the full PP toolbox; an exploration of areas where PP has advanced understanding of perceptual and cognitive phenomena; a discussion of PP’s impact on foundational issues in cognitive science; and a consideration of the philosophy of science of PP. The overall picture is that PP is a fruitful framework, with exciting new directions awaiting exploration.

Key words: approximate inference, free energy, perceptual inference, philosophy of mind and cognition, predictive coding, predictive processing

Excerpt: My current research work on autopoietic biology relies on one of its most discussed and, in my view, promising operations: leading the two central questions of cognitive biology – i.e., “What is life?” and “What is cognition?” – to converge in one theoretical solution. Maturana and Varela conceptualized life and cognition as expressions of the distinctive form of autonomy characterizing biological systems. They defined this property as autopoiesis, and identified it as the capability of these systems to exercise on themselves an activity of self-production through an internal process of permanent (re-)constitution of their elemental components. In line with the emergentist approach developed by the early studies on biological autonomy, the two researchers referred this property not to single components, but to the organization of living systems, that is, to the functional correlation integrating the components in the dynamic units that these systems constitute. This approach defined the main theoretical issue addressed by autopoietic biology: characterizing the organization of biological systems, that is, hypothesizing a form of organization able to generate and maintain their autopoiesis – their self-production. Maturana and Varela offered a rigorous solution to this issue at the level of the minimal living system, providing the description of an organizational mechanism supporting the self-productive dynamics of the cell – its topological self-distinction included. This theoretical result, expressed in the notion of autopoietic organization, conveys the Santiago School’s most innovative contributions to the disciplinary areas related to cognitive biology – results on which my research work draws.

In this article, we investigate the merits of an enactive view of cognition for the contemporary debate about social cognition. If enactivism is to be a genuine alternative to classic cognitivism, it should be able to bridge the “cognitive gap”, i.e. provide us with a convincing account of those higher forms of cognition that have traditionally been the focus of its cognitivist opponents. We show that, when it comes to social cognition, current articulations of enactivism are – despite their celebrated successes in explaining some cases of social interaction – not yet up to the task. This is because they (1) do not pay sufficient attention to the role of offline processing or “decoupling”, and (2) obscure the cognitive gap by overemphasizing the role of phenomenology. We argue that the main challenge for the enactive view will be to acknowledge the importance of both coupled (online) and decoupled (offline) processes for basic and advanced forms of (social) cognition. To meet this challenge, we articulate a dynamic embodied view of cognition. We illustrate the fruitfulness of this approach by recourse to recent findings on false belief understanding.

The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received, mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk, explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas. Increasingly, teacher educators ask new teachers to learn how to elicit and then use students’ existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. While the role a teacher plays in developing or shaping students’ thinking via constructivist pedagogies is obvious to teacher educators who advocate such strategies, the case of Taylor, a prospective English teacher, suggests that the role a teacher plays when using these strategies may not be at all clear to prospective teachers. Rather than understanding constructivist pedagogies as techniques for thinking with learners, for teaching them, Tayor saw these strategies as ends in themselves. Faced with models of constructivist pedagogies, Taylor concluded that the teacher’s role ends when she has activated learners, invited them to talk, successfully engaged their participation. This article describes how she reached this conclusion and explores the ways in which constructivist pedagogies can lead prospective teachers to project a thin vision of their role as a teacher.

Recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience depicts the brain as an ever-active prediction machine: an inner engine continuously striving to anticipate the incoming sensory barrage. I briefly introduce this class of models before contrasting two ways of understanding the implied vision of mind. One way (Conservative Predictive Processing) depicts the predictive mind as an insulated inner arena populated by representations so rich and reconstructive as to enable the organism to ‘throw away the world’. The other (Radical Predictive Processing) stresses the use of fast and frugal, action-involving solutions of the kind highlighted by much work in robotics and embodied cognition. But it goes further, by showing how predictive schemes can combine frugal and more knowledge-intensive strategies, switching between them fluently and continuously as task and context dictate. I end by exploring some parallels with work in enactivism, and by noting a certain ambivalence concerning internal representations and their role in the predictive mind.