Sensorimotor Life: An enactive proposal

by Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, Xabier Barandiaran

How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer.

Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human mind, while developing an alternative picture closer to people's daily experiences. Enactive ideas are applied and extended, providing a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of meaning and agency. The book includes a dynamical systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies; a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery; and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, as well as its implications for embodied subjectivity.

Written for students and researchers of cognitive science, the authors offer a fuller view of the mind, a view better attuned to the experiences of people who live, work, love, struggle, and age, thrown into a world of meaningful relations they help create. Additionally, the book is of interest to neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers of science.

Genres: Psychology

296 pages, Hardcover

Published July 1, 2017

Reviews

[B Conatus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a bit slow to get going, but I realize that much of my resistance is actually driven by my apprehensions about the nature of the project that they are engaged in. But the more that I settled into their way of thinking about things, and the less I tried to translate their non-computational, and non-representational approach to the mind into an idiom that I'm more comfortable with, the more I started to like the book. I can't say that I'm convinced by their claims. But the attempt to develop an account of sensorimotor agency is *interesting*. They break a lot of new ground, and they are working hard to develop a unified theory of mental life. At the end of the day, what more can you really ask for. As a committed pluralist, I think that it is only by articulating proposals like this that we will ever get traction on questions about the nature of mindedness. That said, I'm still inclined toward a view that is enactivist-friendly about biological autonomy, while making room for computation and multiple types of representations.