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Another thought on radical enactivism

 


I wrote about "radical enactivism" back in January. 

To review: this is a philosophical theory about consciousness associated with Daniel Hutto of Antwerp. 

It is a non-reductive identity theory of mind and body. In this, it sounds a bit like Spinoza, and the "dual aspect" school. 

But Hutto maintains that we can understand the brain-mind relationship if and only if we look at it as part of the organism-environment interaction. That's as far as I got. 

What else is Hutto, and the rest of the school, saying? 

Three of the other members of the school are: Francisco J Varela; Evan Thompson; Eleanor Rosch. They co-authored  THE EMBODIED MIND published in 1992.

Varela et al invented the word "enactivism" to, in their words, "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but s rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs." 

That is as clear as mud, I'm afraid. But, hey, maybe I would have to roll that around in my mind a bit and even enact it somehow in order to cognize it. 

Anyway: given enactivism: there seems to be both a "conservative" and a "radical" variant.

Regan, J. K. and Noë, A. 2001 expounded on enactivism at some length. 

Later, Regan writing with a different co-author, Myin, called this a "way to naturalize phenomenology."

It is Hutto who feels the need to distinguish himself from the work of O'Regan and co-authors, because Hutto says they are not thorough enough about turning the backs on the old ways of trying to understand the issues involved. In a word, too "conservative."

Using their "landmark sensorimotor contingency theory of perceptual experience as a foil, I demonstrate how easy it is to fall into conservative thinking... [I]t shows itself to be riddled with suppositions threatening to reduce it to a rules-and-representations approach." 


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