Enactive Cognition
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Old paradigm umed the physical world was “out there” and that the brain represented it in some internal neural language.
New paradigm sees that the nervous system is autopoietic (self-making) and therefore organizationally closed. What we know about the world has to do with how our own internal structures organize themselves (ie, the brain is self-organizing!), not with how a pre-existing world is represented.
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/articles/1.1.mcgee.pdf
“…the enactive approach consists of two points:
(1) perception consists in perceptually guided
action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from
the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable
action to be perceptually guided. The overall con-
cern …is not to determine how some perceiver-
independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather,
to determine the common principles or lawful
linkages between sensory and motor systems
that explain how action can be perceptually
guided in a perceiver-dependent world.”
– Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991, p. 173
Duration : 0:5:57