Abstract
The enactive approach is becoming increasingly influential within the philosophy of cognition, to the extent that it is now one of the dominant models of embodied cognition—an umbrella term for a varied set of discourses sharing the view that our minds don’t just happen to be ‘in’ bodies, but are enabled, shaped and (at least partly) constituted by the specifics of our physicality. This chapter will argue that the rise of enactivism is particularly relevant to transhumanist discourses, and vice versa, because their concerns intersect and conflict in vital ways. The discussion will use three core enactivist themes—organisational integrity, embodiment, and precarity—to draw out the kinds of tensions and intersections that enable enactivism and transhumanism to problematise one another. Enactivism defines life and cognition in terms of autonomy; that is, it posits that living systems generate and maintain themselves as porous yet bounded self-unities. This sets up a delicate balance—both for the enacting system and for enactivism itself—between the dual imperatives of adaptive self-creation and homeostasis. The system must change constantly in order to sustain itself, yet there is a limit to the system’s flexibility. Beyond a certain point, change means disintegration, and disintegration means death. This balance itself resonates within transhumanist discourses, in the tension between the promise of radical self-transformation and the concern about taking this too far. These discourses, however, also challenge enactivism’s potential to capture the full potential of the kinds of systems it describes. How do we determine the limits of morphological flexibility for cognisers as complex as ourselves? Are those limits fixed or malleable—and must integration always mean death, or can it facilitate redefinition?
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Notes
- 1.
A cogniser is a system that is capable of cognition. For enactive approaches, this means that it must be able to undertake the kind of sense-making outlined in Sect. 3.2, which requires autonomy and adaptivity (at least according to those who accept Di Paolo’s work on the latter; see Di Paolo 2005). These terms will be defined later in the chapter. For now, it is worth nothing that the enactive model of cognition is particularly broad, embracing a vast range of different types of systems, arguing for what Thompson calls a “deep continuity of life and mind” (2007, p. 222).
- 2.
I emphasise ‘as traditionally conceived’ here because there are other models of representation that do not include these characteristics; many of them have been proposed by proponents of 4E approaches. There is some controversy over whether any of these types of representation might be compatible with enactivism.
- 3.
Since all four ‘Es’ share an emphasis on the role of the non-neural body in cognition, it might seem strange that ‘embodied’ cognition is given an ‘E’ of its own, so to speak, or that enactivism is then also referred to as a type of embodied cognition at the beginning of the chapter. On the one hand, all of the Es do give the body a greater role than computational approaches to the mind, making all of the Es ‘embodied’ to some extent (for this reason, ‘embodied cognition’ and ‘4E cognition’ are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature). On the other, each E treats and weights embodiment differently. Enactivism, for example, tends to assign a greater importance to the material specificities of particular types of bodies, while extended cognition is more closely aligned to functionalism. There are also models of embodied cognition that are neither extended nor enactive—hence the separate ‘Es’ here.
- 4.
- 5.
This point is still controversial within enactivist scholarship. Some couch their analyses primarily in terms of autopoiesis, while others emphasise autonomy (at least at the level of human cognition). This chapter will focus on autonomy mostly in order to circumvent these discussions.
- 6.
A further development that has become especially relevant in the past decade is the ‘splitting’, for lack of a better word, into three main strands of enactive discourse: One, associated with figures like Thompson and Di Paolo, has continued the focus on the key themes of The Embodied Mind. (This is usually labelled ‘autopoietic enactivism’, although Di Paolo and Thompson point out that this is inaccurate due to the focus being on autonomy in general rather than just the basic autopoietic variety. See Di Paolo and Thompson 2014). A second approach deals almost exclusively with the structures of perception. The third and most recent type—‘radical enactivism’—is mainly concerned with providing an account of what it calls ‘basic minds’, which involves extending the rejection of traditional representations to representations of all types as well as to content itself (Ward et al. (2017) provides more details about the relations and divergences between the three). This chapter will only engage with the first approach.
- 7.
Wolfe explicitly focuses on post-, rather than trans-, humanism. The distinction between them is, of course, controversial. I follow Wolfe (1995, 2010) and Harfield (2013) in viewing posthumanism as focusing more on a critique of humanism (especially in terms of anthropocentrism and the privileging of a certain model of rationality). However, I don’t take this to be a hard and fast distinction, and follow Ross (2020) in thinking that these vast, disputed, heterogenous regions of discourse are close enough that insights about one can apply to the other.
- 8.
Varela’s memorable descriptor “selfless selves” comes from the title of a 1991 chapter and refers to what Froese calls the “nesting” (2017, p. 38) way in which many small, basic autonomous systems can comprise larger, more complex ones (e.g. the way that cells form structures within our bodies, and these structures all add up to form us). Within these networks of overlapping processes and concerns, each autonomous unit is a ‘self’ (in the sense that it is a self-maintaining, self-preserving unity) and yet also ‘selfless’ (it does not possess a traditional sense of personal identity, and it is not isolated; its role within larger interlocking systems is important to making it what it is).
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Stendera, M. (2022). Beyond Disintegration: Transhumanism and Enactivism. In: Tumilty, E., Battle-Fisher, M. (eds) Transhumanism: Entering an Era of Bodyhacking and Radical Human Modification. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 100. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14328-1_3
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