This is a selective review of the published literature on object-choice tasks, where participants use directional cues to find hidden objects. This literature comprises the efforts of researchers to make sense of the sense-making capacities of our nearest living relatives. This chapter is written to highlight some nonsensical conclusions that frequently emerge from this research. The data suggest that, when apes are given approximately the same sense-making opportunities as we provide for our children, they will easily make sense of our social signals. The ubiquity of nonsensical contemporary scientific claims to the effect that humans are essentially – or inherently – more capable than other great apes in the understanding of simple directional cues is, itself, a testament to the power of pre-conceived ideas on human perception.

This paper tackles the problem of the nature of the space of perception. Based both on philosophical arguments and on results obtained from original experimental situations, it attempts to show how space is constituted concretely, before any distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” can be made. It thus sheds light on the presuppositions of the well-known debate between internalism and externalism in the philosophy of mind; it argues in favor of the latter position, but with arguments that are foundationally antecedent to this debate. We call the position we defend enactive externalism. It is based on experimental settings which, in virtue of their minimalism, make it possible both to defend a sensori-motor/enactive theory of perception; and, especially, to inquire into the origin of the space of perception, showing how it is concretely enacted before the controversy between internalism and externalism can even take place.

Key words: Constitution, enaction, externalism, internalism, sensori-motor, sensory-substitution, space.

Early cybernetics emphasized control and communication in the animal and the machine. Subsequent understandings of linguistic phenomena in the animal have shown them not to be reducible to purely mechanistic models. The linguistic complementarity, with its possibilities for transcendence, provides such an understanding, indicating relativistic approaches within modern systems theory. Comparisons are made with Bohr´s concept of complementarity for quantum physics, again an area where linguistic objectifications are developing. The linguistic complementarity is taken as a basis for a general concept of language, permitting particularizations like programming languages, formal languages, genetic languages, and natural communication languages.

What is it like to have a body? The present study takes a psychometric approach to this question. We collected structured introspective reports of the rubber hand illusion, to systematically investigate the structure of bodily self-consciousness. Participants observed a rubber hand that was stroked either synchronously or asynchronously with their own hand and then made proprioceptive judgments of the location of their own hand and used Likert scales to rate their agreement or disagreement with 27 statements relating to their subjective experience of the illusion. Principal components analysis of this data revealed four major components of the experience across conditions, which we interpret as: embodiment of rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, and affect. In the asynchronous condition, an additional fifth component, deafference, was found. Secondary analysis of the embodiment of runner hand component revealed three subcomponents in both conditions: ownership, location, and agency. The ownership and location components were independent significant predictors of proprioceptive biases induced by the illusion. These results suggest that psychometric tools may provide a rich method for studying the structure of conscious experience, and point the way towards an empirically rigorous phenomenology.

First, I will attempt to provide perspective on the neurodynamic approach to characterizing self-conscious- ness by contrasting it against more common neuroanatomical approaches. Secondly, I aim to put this study in the broader context of brain research on clinical therapies and will discuss its possible contribution.

Excerpt: In this chapter, I argue for the position that active perception is actually best accounted for by a representational theory of perception. Along the way, this will require a relatively novel conception of what to count as representations. In particular, I flesh out a novel account of action-oriented representations: representations that include in their contents commands for certain behaviors.

Whether stated or not, the fundamental quest of neurophysiology is to understand the processes that determine the so-called higher functions in the brain. The present work is an explicit attempt in that direction. Whatever success I have in this endeavor I owe to the enriching discussions I had with my friend Heinz Von Foerster and my student Francisco Varela.

In this introduction I wish to make some comments in relation to the two essays that make this book [“Biology of Cognition” and “Autopoiesis: The organization of the living”], but in order to do so I must, at least in part, write about how they came into being.

Key words: The living, perception, anthropology, autopoiesis, biology of cognition, society, ethics.

The phenomenon of size constancy is defined as the apparent perceptual invariance of the linear dimensions of a seen object as this approaches the eye or recedes from it. It has been interpreted as resulting from the application by the brain of a size correction, made possible by the subject’s apprehension of distance cues present in the image. We present several observations which, by dissociating accommodation from distance of the seen object and by suppressing the optic effects of accommodation on the visual image itself, show that this interpretation is incorrect, and that in fact the size correction of the visual image is a function of the central effort of accommodation, not of the distance of the seen object.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of “nonsensical gender” – that is, cases of breakdown within the domain of gender identity. First, it is argued that gender is a multifaceted system that shapes and subtends cognitive processing. Next, the chapter examines cases of gender breakdown and compares those phenomena with other forms of cognitive breakdown. It is then contended that, while there are some striking similarities among all these failures to “make sense,” a crucial distinction needs to be made: gender interactions, unlike human-tool interactions, are marked by complex intersubjective modes of meaning-making. Thus, in order to “make sense” of gender misidentification, the chapter argues for a more nuanced account of breakdown, one that pays more heed to the interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of social sensemaking.