A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum, a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.

Key words: affect and value, central and peripheral nervous system, ecological psychology, enactivism, gut microbiome, pragmatism and phenomenology, physarum polycephalum, realism vs. constructivism.

Autopoiesis was introduced into the literature by Maturana and Varela as the name for a particular system description which they claimed was necessary and sufficient to define the living and also to explain it. The term has been widely applied in the literature instead to spontaneous order production or self-organization in general, whether living or not. Zeleny and Hufford, authors of the focal paper for this volume, would like to continue this tradition. While their effort to seek the generic behavior of spontaneous order is to be commended, this particular move must be rejected. In the first place, if the concept of autopoiesis can be used in this way it immediately shows the concept’s failure to define and explain the living, making it enigmatic as to what is being generalized. In the second place, the whole concept of autopoiesis is contrived at its foundations where it is miraculously decoupled from the physical world to promulgate a solipsistic epistemology with abhorrent social consequences. An alternative ecological physical view is presented here which shows that purposive, creative behavior is a consequence of natural law itself where order is produced such that order acts back upon order to produce more order. The ecological view rejects subject-vs, -object debates (“us” vs. “reality”) as academic; all ordered states are higher-order symmetry states of the world itself. Social praxis and evolutionary competence have an amplifed meaning in such a world, one that is not yet fully determined and where small actions, intended or unintended, can produce large consequences.

Key words: Autocatakinetics. autonomy, autopoiesis, emergence, ecological realism, ecological physics, entropy production, self-organization, symmetry, teleology