CONCEPT
The Enactive Approach
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's 1991 thesis that cognition is not the manipulation of internal representations of a pregiven world but the bringing forth of a world through a living system's embodied activity.
The enactive approach is Varela's most direct alternative to the computational theory of mind. Where computationalism treats cognition as information processing over representations of an external reality, enactivism treats cognition as the activity by which an autopoietic organism brings forth a domain of significance through its structural coupling with an environment. The world the organism knows is not the pregiven physical world — it is the enacted world, the specific landscape of affordances, distinctions, and meanings that emerges from this particular body's engagement with this particular environment over this particular history. The tick's world of butyric acid, warmth, and blood chemistry is not a filtered subset of the forest — it is the only world the tick has, brought forth through the tick's sensorimotor coupling with its surroundings.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Enactivism developed as a direct response to the representational paradigm that dominated cognitive science from the 1950s through the 1980s. The paradigm