CONCEPT
The Enactive Approach
Thompson and Varela's foundational thesis that cognition is not information processing but the enacted engagement of an embodied organism with a world it brings forth through structural coupling.
The enactive approach is the most sustained philosophical challenge to the computational theory of mind produced in the twentieth century. Developed by Thompson with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991) and elaborated across Thompson's subsequent career, it argues that cognition is not the manipulation of internal representations of a pre-given world but the ongoing activity through which an organism and its environment mutually specify each other. The frog does not compute the fly's trajectory; the frog-fly system enacts a world of significance. The approach denies that cognition can be abstracted from the living process through which it is constituted, and on that ground it denies that any computational system — however sophisticated — instantiates cognition in the sense that living organisms do.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The enactive approach emerged from a specific intellectual lineage: Maturana and Varela's biology of autopoiesis, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, and the Buddhist contemplative traditions Varela and Thompson drew upon throughout their collaboration.