CONCEPT
World-Enactment
The enactivist thesis that organisms do not passively inhabit an environment but actively <em>bring forth</em> a meaningful world through their species-specific capacities for perception and action — and that AI, lacking a body, does not enact a world but processes data about worlds enacted by others.
World-enactment is the concept, central to enactive philosophy, that the world an organism perceives is not the objective world described by physics but a meaningful world constituted by the meeting of the organism's bodily capacities with environmental features. Jakob von Uexküll's concept of the Umwelt, Heidegger's analysis of being-in-the-world, and J.J. Gibson's theory of affordances all contributed to the view that worlds are species-relative and enacted, not simply given. A tick's world consists of butyric acid, warmth, and hair. A human's world consists of affordances — chairs for sitting, doorways for passing, coffee cups for grasping — constituted by the relationship between bodily capacities and environmental features.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept of the Umwelt was developed by Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the early 20th century, most famously in his 1934 essay A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Uexküll argued that