Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience

By Evan Thompson. 2005

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5830d77876c1c3191c4b22c6570bee61d3bad47c

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Citations in the corpus

Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mind (2009, background): “…journal publication 4 We argue that it looks promising that an answer to the current problems might be gained by drawing some inspiration from recent developments in enactive cognitive science (e.g. Thompson 2007; 2005; 2004; Torrance 2005; 2007; Stewart, Di Paolo & Gapenne, in press; Noë 2004).”
Autonomy and Enactivism: Towards a Theory of Sensorimotor Autonomous Agency (2017, background): “…aware, that history needs a subject (a character that is both cause and effect of its own history) to leave its traces, to be explanatory of anything; that no plain 19 A similar, and much more detailed, criticism to Noë, O’Regan and Hurley’s approaches is made by Evan Thompson (2006, 2007).”
Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play (2010, background): “We can identify fi ve highly intertwined ideas that constitute the basic enactive approach ( Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991 ; Thompson 2005 ): autonomy , sensemaking , emergence , embodiment , and experience .”
Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation (2009, background): “Rather, it is the result of a 'dialogue' between the sense-making activity of an agent and the responses from its environment (Varela et al. 1991; Varela 1991, 1997; Torrance 2005; Thompson 2005, 2007; Di Paolo et al. 2008).”
The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes (2017, background): “This is because the SM approach explains the origin of differences between sensory modalities or instances of perceptual experiences, but as Thompson (2005) has noted, it does not address the question of why we have experiences at all, i.e., the problem of creature consciousness.”
Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition (2019, background): ““A cognitive being’s world is not a pre-specified, external realm (…) but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment” (Thompson, 2005, p. 407).”
Enacting Musical Experience (2009, background): “For more on this connection with phenomenology, see Thompson (2005).”
Participatory sense-making (2007, background): “These are the mutually supporting concepts of autonomy, sense-making, embodiment, emergence, and experience (Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher Forthcoming; Thompson 2005; 2007; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991).”