The concept of “autonomy,” once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind (Varela et al. in The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991), is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor accounts of cognition cannot ignore: they provide a naturalized account of normativity and the resources to ground the identity of a cognitive subject in its specific mode of organization. There are, however, good reasons for the contemporary neglect of autonomy as a relevant concept for enactivism. On the one hand, the concept of autonomy has too often been assimilated into autopoiesis (or basic autonomy in the molecular or biological realm) and the implications are not always clear for a dynamical sensorimotor approach to cognitive science. On the other hand, the foundational enactivist proposal displays a metaphysical tension between the concept of operational closure (autonomy), deployed as constitutive, and that of structural coupling (sensorimotor dynamics); making it hard to reconcile with the claim that experience is sensorimotorly constituted. This tension is particularly apparent when Varela et al. propose Bittorio (a 1D cellular automata) as a model of the operational closure of the nervous system as it fails to satisfy the required conditions for a sensorimotor constitution of experience. It is, however, possible to solve these problems by re-considering autonomy at the level of sensorimotor neurodynamics. Two recent robotic simulation models are used for this task, illustrating the notion of strong sensorimotor dependency of neurodynamic patterns, and their networked intertwinement. The concept of habit is proposed as an enactivist building block for cognitive theorizing, re-conceptualizing mental life as a habit ecology, tied within an agent’s behaviour generating mechanism in coordination with its environment. Norms can be naturalized in terms of dynamic, interactively self-sustaining, coherentism. This conception of autonomous sensorimotor agency is put in contrast with those enactive approaches that reject autonomy or neglect the theoretical resources it has to offer for the project of naturalizing minds.

Key words: Autonomy, enactivism, operational closure of the nervous system, sensorimotor constitution of experience, mental life, habit, sensorimotor autonomous agency, autonomist sensorimotor enactivism.

In a recent paper, Andy Clark (2008) has argued that the literature on embodied cognition reveals a tension between two prominent strands within this movement. On the one hand, there are those who endorse what Clark refers to as body-centrism, a view which emphasizes the special contribution made by the body to a creature’s mental life. Among other things, body centrism implies that significant differences in embodiment translate into significant differences in cognition and consciousness. On the other hand, there are those who endorse what Clark calls extended functionalism, a view which sees the mind as the joint product of the computational resources presented by (i) intracranial processing, (ii) bodily input, and (iii) environmental scaffolding. As such, extended functionalism allows for the possibility that any contribution of the body to cognition and consciousness can be compensated for by the other two contributing factors. While Clark’s sympathies lie with the latter approach, we argue in favour of the former. In particular, we focus on consciousness and argue that the unique contribution the body makes to a creature’s manifold of phenomenal experience cannot be compensated for, in the manner, and on the scale, that Clark envisages.

Excerpt: In our first study of the beginnings of mental life we analyzed the origins of intelligence in children and tried to show how the forms of intellectual activity are constructed on the sensorimotor level. In the current work we have tried, on the other hand, to understand how the real categories of sensorimotor intelligence are organized, that is, how the world is constructed by means of this instrument. In conclusion, the time has come to show the unity of these various processes and their relations with those of the child’s thought, envisaged in their most general aspect.

The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related (the body-body problem) via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O’Regan, Noë, and Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness.

Key words: Enactive cognitive science, self, sensorimotor, subjectivity.