Few researchers of the past made sense of the collapse of representations in the quantum domain, and looked for a new process of sense-making below the level of representations: the level of the phenomenology of perception and action; the level of the elaboration of knowledge out of experience. But some recent philosophical readings of quantum physics all point in this direction. They all recognize the fact that the quantum revolution is a revolution in our conception of knowledge. In these recent readings of quantum physics (such as QBism), quantum states are primarily generators of probabilistic valuations. Accordingly, they should not be seen as statements about what is the case, but as statements about what each agent can reasonably expect to be the case. Three features of such non-interpretational, non-committal approaches to quantum physics strongly evoke the phenomenological epistemology. These are: (1) their deliberately first-person stance; (2) their suspension of judgment about a presumably external domain of objects, and subsequent redirection of attention towards the activity of constituting these objects; (3) their perception-like conception of quantum knowledge. But beyond phenomenological epistemology, these new approaches of quantum physics also make implicit use of a phenomenological ontology. Chris Fuchs’s participatory realism thus formulates a non-external variety of realism for one who is deeply immersed in reality. But participatory realism strongly resembles Merleau-Ponty’s endo-ontology, which is a phenomenological ontology for one who deeply participates in Being. This remarkable analogy is supported by Merleau-Ponty himself. Indeed, 50 years before QBism, Merleau-Ponty acknowledged the strong kinship between the status of quantum mechanics and his phenomenology of embodiment. He did so in two texts that remained unpublished until after his death: Visible and invisible, and the Lectures on Nature. The final part of this article is then devoted to a study of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of quantum physics.

Current cognitive science models of perception and action assume that the objects that we move toward and perceive are represented as determinate in our experience of them. A proper phenomenology of perception and action, however, shows that we experience objects indeterminately when we are perceiving them or moving toward them. This indeterminacy, as it relates to simple movement and perception, is captured in the proposed phenomenologically based recurrent network models of brain function. These models provide a possible foundation from which predicative structures may arise as an emergent phenomenon without the positing of a representing subject. These models go some way in addressing the dual constraints of phenomenological accuracy and neurophysiological plausibility that ought to guide all projects devoted to discovering the physical basis of human experience.

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporate – everything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments.

This paper outlines two ideas. The first proposes a basic high-level neuropsychological and neurophenomenological cybernetic framework for discussing the structure of mind and experience. The second is that much, perhaps even most, informational processes in the brain are inherently temporal in nature, i.e. that they are subserved by temporal neural codes. To paraphrase Mari Reiss Jones, in the study of mind and brain, “time is our lost dimension” (Jones 1976). In this view, there is pervasive, common temporal structure in the internal neural representations that subserve both perception and action. This common temporal structure permits perception to facilitate, inform, and even bootstrap action, and vice versa. Time structure in perception, action (movement, behavior), cognition, affect, motivation (drives, goals), and memory may allow these different mental faculties to mutually influence one another.

Merleau-Ponty’s description of Cezanne’s working process reveals two things: first, cognition arises on the basis of perception and action, and, second, cognition arises out of frustration, when an agent confronts non-sense. We briefly present the history of the domain of philosophy and psychology that has claimed that perception-action comes before cognition, especially the work of Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and Heidegger. We then present an experimental paradigm “front-loading” the Heideggerian phenomenology of encountering tools. The experiments consisted of a dynamical perception-action task and a cognitive task. The results reinforce the distinction between tools being experienced as ready-to-hand and turning into unreadyor present-at-hand when sense-ma kin g was thwarted. A more cognitive attitude towards the task emerged when participants experienced non-sense. We discuss implications of this for the movement sciences.

In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill acquisition that makes explicit what Merleau-Ponty’s claim presupposes. I will then show how his account of skill and the intentional arc it establishes allows Merleau-Ponty to criticize cognitivism and introduce a new account of the relation of perception and action. Finally, I will suggest that neural-network theory supports Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, but that it still has a long way to go before it can instantiate an intentional arc.

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body’s tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either. Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman’s account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty’s account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip.

Key words: mental representation, successful learning, maximal grip, skillful action, tight connection.

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored,” not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body’s tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either. Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman’s account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty’s account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip.

Key words: Mental representation, successful learning, maximal grip, skillful action, tight connection.

Context: In developing an enactivist phenomenology the analysis of time-consciousness needs to be pushed toward a fully enactivist account. Problem: Varela proposed a neurophenomenology of time-consciousness. I attempt to push this analysis towards a more complete enactivist phenomenology of time-consciousness. Method: I review Varela’s account of time-consciousness, which brings Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the intrinsic temporal structure of experience into contact with contemporary neuroscience and dynamical systems theory, and pushes it towards a more enactivist conception of consciousness. I argue that Varela’s analysis motivates a closer examination of the phenomenological aspects of the intrinsic temporal structure of experience, understanding it in terms of an action-oriented embodied phenomenology in its most basic manifestation. Results: This fully enactivist phenomenology of time-consciousness continues the analysis initiated by Varela and remains consistent with but also goes beyond Husserl’s later writings on time-consciousness. Implications: This analysis shows that the enactive character of intentionality in general, goes all the way down; it is embedded in the micro-structure of time-consciousness, and this has implications for understanding perception and action. Constructivist content: This account is consistent with Varela’s constructivist approach to cognition.

Key words: Time-consciousness, enactivism, Husserl, Varela.

A novel way to model an agent interacting with an environment is introduced, called an Enactive Markov Decision Process (EMDP). An EMDP keeps perception and action embedded within sensorimotor schemes rather than dissociated, in compliance with theories of embodied cognition. Rather than seeking a goal associated with a reward, as in reinforcement learning, an EMDP agent learns to master the sensorimotor contingencies offered by its coupling with the environment. In doing so, the agent exhibits a form of intrinsic motivation related to the autotelic principle (Steels), and a value system attached to interactions called “interactional motivation.” This modeling approach allows the design of agents capable of autonomous self-programming, which provides rudimentary constitutive autonomy – a property that theoreticians of enaction consider necessary for autonomous sense-making (e.g., Froese & Ziemke). A cognitive architecture is presented that allows the agent to discover, memorize, and exploit spatio-sequential regularities of interaction, called Enactive Cognitive Architecture (ECA). In our experiments, behavioral analysis shows that ECA agents develop active perception and begin to construct their own ontological perspective on the environment. Relevance: This publication relates to constructivism by the fact that the agent learns from input data that does not convey ontological information about the environment. That is, the agent learns by actively experiencing its environment through interaction, as opposed to learning by registering observations directly characterizing the environment. This publication also relates to enactivism by the fact that the agent engages in self-programming through its experience from interacting with the environment, rather than executing pre-programmed behaviors.