Radical Enactivism: What the Heck Is It

I only recently discovered that there exists a school of thought known as radical enactivism. Since it involves a philosophical issue with which I have done a lot of wrestling, the issue of consciousness itself, I really ought to say something about it. First, though, I am going to have to figure out what it is.

Radical enactivism is associated with Daniel Hutto of the University of Antwerp. Although there are other ways to understand it, one way to do so begins with the question that Chalmers years ago christened the hard problem of consciousness, "why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?"

Why, indeed? Chalmers made certain assumptions in the phrasing of this problem: for example, the idea that consciousness (or a "rich inner life") is a late evolutionary emergent. Wherever exactly it emerges in the history of life, probably after the divide between animals and plants and on the animal's side of that divide, the implication would seem to be that before that point, there had been only physical processing: after that point, there was something new. What happened there and why?

You can of course deny the hardness of the problem by questioning this premise. There are two obvious ways of doing that: one might assert that psychism may itself be a fundamental constituent of all physical processes, so there is no emergence to explain (that seems to be Chalmers' own view) or one might deny that there is any rich inner life at all -- the very idea of consciousness, says Dennett, is an illusion.

But radical enactivism is neither Dennett's reductive physicalism nor the panpsychism that interests Chalmers. What, then, is it? Apparently, it is a nonreductive identity theory. The idea is (my example, not that of Hutto or anyone else) akin to saying that the physical processes of firing synapses in a brain are "Clark Kent" and the rich inner life is "Superman." We can understand that they are identical to one another without reductionism. We aren't saying that Superman is only Clark Kent with tights and a cape. Nor are we saying that Clark Kent is only Superman trying to act mild mannered. Neither is to be reduced to the other: yet we are to understand that they are one.

Okay, so far this sounds like dual-aspect monism. Like Spinoza, right? Well, wrong. The radical enactivists are apparently after something different. They want to tell us that we can adopt the proper non-reductive sort of identity if and only if we can "go wide" and understand the mind-brain relationship in the context of the over-all organism-environment relationship.

That's enough work for today, though. Radical Enactivism. I'm still not clear what it is. And my head hurts.

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