CONCEPT
Sense-Making
Thompson's technical term for the organism's creation of a world of significance through its embodied activity — the primitive form of cognition that computational systems cannot perform because significance requires stakes.
Sense-making is the most load-bearing concept in Thompson's framework. It names what living organisms do and what computational systems do not: the active creation of significance through the organism's embodied engagement with its environment. The bacterium navigating a chemical gradient is not processing information about the gradient. It is making sense of the gradient — evaluating it in terms of its own needs, its own survival, its own stakes in continued existence. The significance is not in the sugar; it is in the relationship between the organism and the sugar, a relationship constituted by the organism's autopoietic need for nutrients. This relational structure is the foundation of all cognition, from the simplest adaptive behavior to the most sophisticated conceptual thought, and it is the specific capacity that AI systems, lacking both stakes and embodiment, cannot possess.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept distinguishes Thompson's enactive framework from functionalist and representationalist theories of cognition. Functionalism holds that cognition is whatever performs the appropriate causal role,
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