Reconceiving representation-hungry cognition: an ecological-enactive proposal

“Every science operates with theoretical assumptions that guide scientific research, shaping how scientists think about the phenomena they investigate, framing the research questions scientists ask (Fleck, 1979; Kuhn, 1962).”

“Recursive dependence of this kind between processes yields an organisational property often referred to as ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self-production’ (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela, 1979).”

“Enactive theories might then be argued to be restricted in their scope to cases of cognition in which ‘the world can serve as its own best model’ (Brooks, 1991).”

“This is where the enactive approach to cognitive science enters the story (Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2010; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).”

“yields an organisational property often referred to as ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self-production’ (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela, 1979).”

“See also Di Paolo (2005).”

“Varela (1991, 1997, 1999) proposed thinking of agents as bundles of ‘micro-identities’.”

“Indeed, we would argue that the ambient array does not contain information about affordances independently of how the structure in the ambient array can be used to do things by the animals in the form of life (Hutto & Myin, 2017; Van Dijk, Withagen, & Bongers, 2015).”

“We can, for instance, think about all of the objects that belong to the Pope (to offer an example discussed by Clark and Toribio (1994)).”

“In the biological world, we find networks of processes that produce and sustain an identity at multiple levels of organisation from ‘microbial communities, nervous systems, immune systems, multicellular organisms, ecosystems, and so on’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 46; c.f. Varela, 1991, 1997).”

“An example is the tension one experiences when someone stands too close to us in conversation (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2007; Rietveld, 2008).”

“…is not best understood at the basic level of biological autonomy associated with metabolism (though metabolism will certainly play a central role in cognition through the dense reciprocal interactions between bodily affective processes and cognitive processes (Colombetti, 2014; Pessoa, 2013)).”

“In the biological world, we find networks of processes that produce and sustain an identity at multiple levels of organisation from ‘microbial communities, nervous systems, immune systems, multicellular organisms, ecosystems, and so on’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 46; c.f. Varela, 1991, 1997).”

“Online control is typically distinguished from offline cognition on the basis of decoupling (Clark & Grush, 1999).”

“…of so-called representation-hungry cognition in terms of temporally extended activities in which the agent skilfully coordinates to a richly structured landscape of affordances (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2016; c.f. Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016).”

“The notion of affective significance we have appealed to in explaining the enactive notion of sense-making presupposes the meaning that is already present in the environment because of the affordances it offers (Hodges & Baron, 1992).”

“An example is the tension one experiences when someone stands too close to us in conversation (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2007; Rietveld, 2008).”

“See Barandiaran and Moreno (2006) for more discussion of this last point.”

“See Barandiaran and Moreno (2006) for more discussion of this last point.”

“For further discussion of the sense in which bacteria qualify as minimal agents, see Fulda (2017).”

“She is responsive to the multiplicity of affordances as a whole, ready to make a move that will put her on the right track for the whole route ahead (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Seifert et al., 2014).”

“Situated in a concrete situation, creative imagination opens one up to hitherto neglected affordances (Van Dijk & Rietveld, under review; Hutchins, 2010).”

“In what follows, we will use the term ‘representation’ to denote states of a system that stand in and function as surrogates for things in their absence (Clark & Grush, 1999; Haugeland, 1991; Orlandi, 2014; Ramsey, 2007).”

“Degenaar and O’Regan (2017) distinguish sensorimotor enactivism from AE enactivism.”

“However, in creatures with more complex biological organisations, patterns of sensorimotor behaviour can quite literally take on a life of their own (Di Paolo et al., 2017; Egbert & Barandiaran, 2014).”

“22 In EM-imagining, the perceiver relies on the very same attunement to external dynamics that is used in action to coordinate to affordances.”

“…of this type with frequently encountered passages in the more recent writings of enactivists in which organism and environment are described in terms of ‘co-determination’ and ‘mutual interdependence’ (Varela et al., 1991, p. 177; also see Di Paolo, 2018; McGann, 2014; Thompson, 2007, pp. 152–154).”

“McGann (2014) is an important exception, and more recently Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran (2017).”

“…of so-called representation-hungry cognition in terms of temporally extended activities in which the agent skilfully coordinates to a richly structured landscape of affordances (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2016; c.f. Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016).”

“Also see Rucińska (2016) for a helpful treatment of play in terms of skilled engagement with affordances in an intersubjective context.”

“Consider the following case from Shapiro (2013).”

“Moreover, this is clearly not all that one can do with chairs: they can, for instance, be used for firewood, in a children’s party game, and even play the role of an example in a philosophical argument. Affordances occupy a place in historically developed constellations of regular, more or less stable patterns of acti…”

“Current machines exhibit some intelligence but no sense-making, defined as an agent’s “meaningful relation to the environment” 4 .”

“Merleau-Ponty understands life as a process always delicately balanced between relatively stable equilibrium with the environment, and disequilibrium, or instability (MerleauPonty, 2003, p. 149; Rietveld, 2008b; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018).”

“Core concepts in psychology, such as learning, knowledge, memory, skill, problem-solving, intelligence, intention, and agency, become less isolated when one acknowledges the role of the dimension of better and worse outcomes (see also Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018).”

“…the status of their needs by training to maintain environmentally dependent variables in a narrow but shifting viability window to survive (homeostasis) and to maintain a representation of these variables ’ homeostatic values even when they are not present ( 18 ), much like human feelings.”

“…ecological-enactive paradigms agree that the usually considered representation-hungry problem types (Clark and Toribio, 1994) can be addressed without postulating the existence of skull-bound mental representations, namely, ‘stand-ins’ for external states of affairs (Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018).”

“…and/or temporally distal properties), these approaches generally expand Gibson ’ s notion of affordances to include any relation that can be defined between an organism and its environment, up to and including social, linguistic, and cultural relations (Chemero, 2009; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018).”

“See Kiverstein and Rietveld (2018) and Degenaar and Myin (2014) for ecological-enactive solutions to this objection.”

“If perceiving and knowing are continuous rather than separate activities (cf. Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018), then (we claim) there is no motivation for the claim that affordances are discontinuous in either ontology or episte-mology.”

“…assume that cocalled ‘higher’ forms of cognition involving abstracta and absentia cannot be accounted for without invoking mental representations (Clark and Toribio 1994), proponents of embodied approaches disagree (e.g. Degenaar and Myin 2014; Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018; Zahnoun 2019).”

“Other enactivists and ecological psychologists proceed similarly, examining for instance episodic memory (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018) and imagination (Bruineberg et al., 2019) in ecological, enactive, or ecological-enactive terms.”

“11 For an alternative approach, which combines ecological psychology with enactivism, see Kiverstein and Rietveld (2018).”

“Rather, a gradual increase in resolution and complexity of awareness, coupled with increasing integration of perception with memory as brains became larger and more complex during phylogeny, is logically more persuasive (Rose, 1976; Bullock, 1984; Griffin, 1984; Tononi, 2004; Tononi and Koch, 2015; Mercado, 2008; Koch…”

“Others aim to reconceive the putative representational hunger of some tasks, such as remembering and imagining, so as to recast them in ecological terms (Bruineberg et al., 2019) or in ecological-enactive terms (Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018).”

“Kiverstein and Rietveld likewise speak of the “affordances of a linguistically structured environment” that allow for engaging in “abstract and symbolic modes of cognition” (Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018; cf. Rietveld et al. 2018).”

“In autopoietic enactive systems, knowledge is not processed as an input–output chain but is rather conceived as the capacity to adapt to the environment and shape the ecological niche (Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018).”

“…level precision (typically decreasing the precision of lower level sensory models) allows organisms with deep hierarchies to entertain reenactments (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018) or simulations of fields of affordances32 which enable them to organize their behavior and entertain action policies…”

“Kiverstein and Rietveld (2018) have proposed that it may be possible to account for phenomena such as imagination, memory and planning without resorting to representational schemata.”

“…share common roots (Barrett, 2019; Crippen, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2019b) but also can be put to work together in a proficient manner as an integrated view (Baggs & Chemero, 2021; Carvalho & Rolla, 2020; Gallagher, 2017; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Rolla & Novaes, 2022; Travieso et al., 2020).”

“Golonka and Wilson take things in a rather different direction by arguing that ecological psychology does not yet actually have an account of "representation-hungry" problems (cf. Bruineberg, Chemero, & Rietveld, 2018; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; van Dijk & Withagen, 2015).”

“This is the information provided by the notion of free-energy (Kiverstein 2018, p. 6).”

“They also suggest that the temporal dynamics of neural activity may reflect ongoing engagement with the environment rather than sequential updating of internal models (Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018; Raja 2019).”

“…with the notable advancements within post-cognitivist paradigms, there remains a need for a comprehensive understanding of conceptual thinking and other psychological processes that have conventionally been viewed as detached from real-world interactions (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Shapiro 2011).”

“In these cases, informative acts of language are used to construct shared simulations or reenactments (Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018) of fields of affordances that the participants can use as situation models to coordinate their behavior in relation to the spatiotemporally distant elements that are…”

“Some researchers have proposed the idea of an ‘ecological enactivism’ or ‘ecological enactive’ approach (HerasEscribano, 2019; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018), supporting a ‘productive synthesis’ (Baggs & Chemero, 2018).”

“Kiverstein and Rietveld (2018) have further argued that higher cognition is characterized by its ability to deal with the abstract and possible over extended time periods.”

“Some researchers involved in the rapprochement between these two approaches have even suggested the idea of an ‘ecological enactivism’ or ‘ecological enactive’ approach (Baggs and Chemero 2018; Heras-Escribano 2019; Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018).”

“These include, for instance, enactive, performative, and externalist theories of meaning (see Gallagher, 2020a, 2020b; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Sterelny, 2004; Welch, 2019).”

“Together with many others, (cf. Bruineberg et al., 2019; Degenaar & Myin, 2014; Di Paolo et al., 2018; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018), we believe that this impression about the need to posit mental representations to cognize is misguided.”

“That is, attention is redirected onto empirical questions pursued within a coherent realist framework regarding the organism’s cognitive and motivational adjustment to its environment (see, Chemero, 2009, pp. 195–7; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018).”

“In an ecological dynamics perspective on motor skill development, the emergence of cognitive states that support motor execution require an individual to be continuously coupled to the environment (Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018).”

“Philosophers intensively work in this direction, exploring how everyday cognition and behavior (Hutto & Satne, 2015; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963; Sheets-Johnstone, 2011) and scientific work (e.g., Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1988) can be described as a continuation of nature’s…”

“…resources, they often make their case with smaller-scale illustrations based on dynamic systems modeling (e.g., Baber et al. 2019), minimal simulations (Di Paolo et al. 2008), simplified experimentation (e.g., Walton et al. 2015), or anecdotal analysis (e.g., Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018).”

“In our account, communicating agents can also entertain reenactments or simulations of fields of affordances (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018), with which they can coordinate with spatiotemporally distant sets of affordances (Pezzulo & Cisek, 2016).”

“Many recent developments from both enactivism and ecological psychology point to their overall convergence (Baggs & Chemero, 2021; Carvalho & Rolla, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2019; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Travieso et al., 2020).”

“…science was initially developed to address low-level cognitive processes, currently intensive attempts are being made to extend those ideas to higher-level processes, such as thinking and conceptual understanding (Abrahamson, 2021; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Sanches de Oliveira et al., 2021).”

“…to explain the phenomenology of skillful action, agreeing with those that see the possibility of a fruitful convergence between the two (Baags and Chemero 2018; Corris 2020; Hutto 2017; Hutto andMyin 2017; Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018;McGann 2020; Sepúlveda-Pedro 2020; Travieso et al. 2020).”

“…to how a terrestrial animal can learn to perceive the occluded apple as gatherable, an albatross, for instance, can learn to perceive that plenty of fish are edible even if the albatross can’t currently smell them (see also Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016, Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Van Woerkum, 2021).”

“MI is a stimulus-absent cognitive process, decoupled from the environment, thus seemingly unable to sustain the ongoing information-movement coupling necessary for the emergence of cognitive states (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Sims, 2020).”

“1979) one form of enactivism (Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018; Bruineberg et al. 2017; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014) understands coupling to be a relation between inner dynamics and the environmental information.”

“Similar to our position, some of the whole-body accounts consider internal processes (like motor imagery) as aris - ing from environmentally-decoupled activity (E. Di Paolo et al., 2017; Fuchs, 2018; Gallagher, 2017 ; Hutto & Myin, 2013 ; Kirchhoff & Kiverstein, 2019 ; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018 ).”

“Although the verdict is not yet out on the scope of the class of representationally hungry tasks (Bruineberg et al., 2019; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018, 2021; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014), plausibly some cognition is representational, the so-called ‘higher’ cognition—as opposed to online cognition…”

“…a problem for Enactivism, insofar as it seems difficult to abandon the idea of linguistic cognition as the manipulation of content-bearing internal states when having to do with non-currently present or abstract objects, as is continuously the case in verbal speech (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018).”

“…- tion is (correctly) categorised as non-representational, then it is not obvious why we should think that a re-enactment of perceptual experience would suddenly bring into being representational properties [Degenaar & Myin, 2014 ; Hutto, 2015 ; Hutto & Myin, 2017 ; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018 ].”

“The mind is therefore constituted through the body; it is situated in a highly structured environ - ment; it is non-representational and non-computational (Hutto & Myin, 2013, 2017 ; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018 ; Rietveld et al., 2018 ).”

“…affordance landscapes and the ecological foundations of human evolution, child development, language acquisition, and even advanced cognitive achievements, like long-term planning and executing intentions (Bruineberg & van den Herik, 2021; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014).”

“Others, however, take the radical agenda a step further by seeking to eliminate representation hunger altogether (Degenaar and Myin, 2014; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018).”

“…of nested information can “look ahead” across immediate sensorimotor action (for example, revealing the next five moves in a game of basketball) or reveal nested information across longer time scales, including conceptual action (Bru - ineberg and van den Herik, 2021; Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018).”

“And some of these self-evidencing organisms are specified as “selves” or as “subjects of minimal phenomenal experiences” under FEP (Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013; Kiverstein, 2018).”

“They orient us within shared sociomaterial environments, but do not determine what is to be done (Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Rietveld et al., 2022).”