Already in the romantic it has been assumed, that there is an existential interrelation between nature, human being and mind. According to this idea, there is a narrow interrelation of creation between literature, science, dream and reality, which should be expressed in a progressive universal poetry. Gestalt theory and the concept of autopoiesis, developed by Maturana and Varela, could be regarded as a scientific enhancement of this approach and are united in that sense. By analyses of dreams, it becomes evident, that neurobiological and mental processes are determined by the same principles of self-constitution and gestalt production. They are attending in equal measures to homeostatic conditions. The interaction of living systems with their environment as well as their evolution base on recursive reorganisation. Following this principle, imagination, speech and self-reflection are developed. The observer comes to existence by his own distinctions. Phenomenal appearance and real existence, poetry and scientific findings are results of the autopoietic organisation of living, of which we form a part.

Key words: universal poetry, autopoiesis, imagination, gestalt psychology, systems theory.

How may mental activity be conceptualized within the context of the epistemology engendered by cybernetics, and how may that epistemology account for imagination? I argue for an epistemology of imagination that both distinguishes imagination, understanding and interpretation, and unites all three concepts in a dialogical circle of ideas. The processes of distinguishing these concepts (and the processes that give rise to and describe mental activities) are dialogical processes. As dialogical, they fall within the scope of Heinz von Foerster’s work on second-order cybernetics.

Key words: Cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, epistemology, imagination, understanding, interpretation, von Foerster.

The concept of affordances is rapidly gaining traction in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. Affordances are opportunities for action provided by the environment. An important open question is whether affordances can be used to explain mental action such as attention, counting, and imagination. In this paper, we critically discuss McClelland’s (‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’, 2020, Mind, 129(514), pp. 401–427) mental affordance hypothesis. While we agree that the affordance concept can be fruitfully employed to explain mental action, we argue that McClelland’s mental affordance hypothesis contain remnants of a Cartesian understanding of the mind. By discussing the theoretical framework of the affordance competition hypothesis, we sketch an alternative research program based on the principles of embodied cognition that evades the Cartesian worries. We show how paradigmatic mental acts, such as imagination, counting, and arithmetic, are dependent on sensorimotor interaction with an affording environment. Rather than make a clear distinction between bodily and mental action, the mental affordances highlight the embodied nature of our mental action. We think that in developing our alternative research program on mental affordances, we can maintain many of the excellent insights of McClelland’s account without reintroducing the very distinctions that affordances were supposed to overcome.

Key words: affordance, mental action, action selection, attention.

Excerpt: This essay has two parts. In the first, I advance the main theses of the enactivist approach to perception and experience. Moreover, embracing Alvin Goldman’s concept of “enactment imagination,” I argue that the imagination works by simulating (or enacting) a hypothetical perceptual experience, and that this accounts for its experiential quality. In the second part, I develop an enactivist model of the reader’s imagination, suggesting that narrative texts are sets of instructions for the enactment of a storyworld. I also question the view that fictional consciousnesses are represented in narrative texts, adding some remarks concerning the relationship between narrative and qualia (defined as the intrinsic, ineffable qualities of our experience). The analogy that steers me through this argument is that, in their imaginative engagement with narratives, readers are like blind people tapping their way around with a cane. Every tap of the cane corresponds to the reader’s being invited to imagine a nonexistent object.

Problem: There is currently a great deal of mysticism, uncritical hype, and blind adulation of imaginary mathematical and physical entities in popular culture. We seek to explore what a radical constructivist perspective on mathematical entities might entail, and to draw out the implications of this perspective for how we think about the nature of mathematical entities. Method: Conceptual analysis. Results: If we want to avoid the introduction of entities that are ill-defined and inaccessible to verification, then formal systems need to avoid introduction of potential and actual infinities. If decidability and consistency are desired, keep formal systems finite. Infinity is a useful heuristic concept, but has no place in proof theory. Implications: We attempt to debunk many of the mysticisms and uncritical adulations of Gödelian arguments and to ground mathematical foundations in intersubjectively verifiable operations of limited observers. We hope that these insights will be useful to anyone trying to make sense of claims about the nature of formal systems. If we return to the notion of formal systems as concrete, finite systems, then we can be clear about the nature of computations that can be physically realized. In practical terms, the answer is not to proscribe notions of the infinite, but to recognize that these concepts have a different status with respect to their verifiability. We need to demarcate clearly the realm of free creation and imagination, where platonic entities are useful heuristic devices, and the realm of verification, testing, and proof, where infinities introduce ill-defined entities that create ambiguities and undecidable, ill-posed sets of propositions. Constructivist content: The paper attempts to extend the scope of radical constructivist perspective to mathematical systems, and to discuss the relationships between radical constructivism and other allied, yet distinct perspectives in the debate over the foundations of mathematics, such as psychological constructivism and mathematical constructivism.

Key words: Foundations of mathematics, verificationism, finitism, Platonism, pragmatism, Gödel’s Proof, Halting Problem, undecidability, consistency, computability, actualism

Clear similarities may be found between enaction and Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. In this article, and in the wake of recent research in the field of enaction, I argue that Simondon’s work is relevant to our understanding of the articulation between life, subjectivity, and technics. In line with John Stewart, I define enaction as the dynamic relation whereby living organisms and their environment co-emerge, a process in which technics is revealed as “anthropologically constitutive.” I show that this process is truly enlightened by Simondon’s theory of imagination and invention.

Key words: life, subjectivity, technics, cultural integration, individuation, transduction, dialectic, co-emergence, imagination, invention, affectivity, enactivism, maurice merleau-ponty, gilbert simondon

Clear similarities may be found between enaction and Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. In this article, and in the wake of recent research in the field of enaction, I argue that Simondon’s work is relevant to our understanding of the articulation between life, subjectivity, and technics. In line with John Stewart, I define enaction as the dynamic relation whereby living organisms and their environment co-emerge, a process in which technics is revealed as “anthropologically constitutive.” I show that this process is truly enlightened by Simondon’s theory of imagination and invention.

Key words: life, subjectivity, technics, cultural integration, individuation, transduction, dialectic, co-emergence, imagination, invention, affectivity, enactivism, maurice merleau-ponty, gilbert simondon

Psychopathology of schizophrenia is presented as a core issue for an enactive theory that is confronted by non-sense. The core disturbance of schizophrenia has been recently identified with disembodiment: a lack, or weakening, of sensory-motor self-awareness. The problem of the transition from prodromal disembodiment to acute schizophrenic symptoms (hallucinations and delusions) is discussed. A phenomenological psychology of imagination turns out to be necessary to explain this transition and to conceive of schizophrenic delusion as reified imaginings unchallengeable by perception. The enactive approach to the psychopathology of schizophrenia shows that there can be no radical experience of non-sense without imagination, but also that imagination is a crucial faculty to make sense of non-sense in embodied and embedded psychotherapies.

We address the claim that nonhuman animals do not represent unobservable states, based on studies of physical cognition by rooks and social cognition by scrub-jays. In both cases, the most parsimonious explanation for the results is counter to the reinterpretation hypothesis. We suggest that imagination and prospection can be investigated in animals and included in models of cognitive architecture.

This contribution offers reflections about Chilean Cybersyn, 50 years ago. In recent years, Cybersyn, has received significant attention. It was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the Chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a vibrant and modern society, driven by cybernetic tools. These aspects have received much attention in recent times; however, in this contribution, I want to discuss how working in Cybersyn influenced my work after the coup of 1973. Perhaps, for me, its major influence was in the management of complexity, through what I refer here as variety engineering and through the Viable System Model VSM as a paradigm to the management of relationships with implications to enterprises, society and the economy. After the 1973 coup major interest was in technological aspects of Cybersyn such as real-time management and its contribution to decision support and executive information systems. In the late 70s I was personally influenced by information management, but by the early 1980s my work moved towards methodological aspects of how to use the VSM. By 1989 I had created the VIPLAN method (Espejo, 1989). Key questions I attempted to answer were, how to model the complexity of enterprises and their interactions with environmental agents. Later on, in the 1990s and 2000s, the main direction of my work was epistemological, ontological and methodological towards second-order cybernetics and relationships. Only in recent decades the political transformations proposed by Cybersyn have captured the imagination of many commentators. The confluence of social and cultural changes with information technology, data models, artificial intelligence, algorithms and several additional technological developments have challenged the excesses of capitalism, particularly after the banking crisis of 2008–2009. The purpose in this paper is discussing this evolution in the light of those early days in Chile.