Enactivist Re-enactment
by rsbakker
Adam Robberts has tidied up and reposted a debate he and I have been having on enactivism and Blind Brain Theory over at his Knowledge Ecology site. Dissenters are welcome to weigh in over here, there, or at any one of the several sites that have reblogged our exchange. All the lapses in decorum and diction are entirely my own.
By dint of sheer coincidence, Eric Schwitzgebel has included the Bonjour post immediately below in his roundup of the Philosopher’s Carnival – Zombie Mary should be pleased! God and Jesus, not so much.
As for the novel, still no word on pub dates, but I did spend the past two days with my friend Madness going through the manuscript, so if you’re curious as to his impressions, appraisals, by all means visit the SECOND APOCALYPSE FORUM and plague him with questions…
Three Pound Brain 
Thanks for the update Mr. Bakker. But you said months ago that you needed to get in touch with Pat about the preview of chapter one… Any reason why there hasn’t been any follow up on that?
Hundreds of thousands of words systematically interconnected, and hundreds of little bubbles under the wallpaper that need to be pressed offscreen.
Hey Scott, wouldn’t you say that your friends who have been running the PoN wiki for some time now deserve an early look at TUC? You don’t want to end up with another “womb plague happened 4,000 years ago” do you? 😉
That one bummed me out! But the wiki is absolutely fantastic.
Sorry amigos. Missed details or not, I think you guys will be pretty pleased by what I got brewing.
So is Madness actually helping with the finishing touches? What I’m actually getting at is whether it would be bad if we spirited him off to some Iothian compound and starting plying.
Excellent. But I must know… have you seen Spiralhorizon’s new fan art of the Hundred?
Ajokli/a>
Yatwer
Gilgaol
Your enactivist interlocutor says some really far out stuff there! Morphogenesis of biological form requires… Meaning… Evolutionary processes requires … Meaning. Now I remember why enactivism was my goto intentionalism.
But when you look at developmental biology or evolutionary biology literature there is stark disconnect from the Aristotelian meaning / potential the enactivist aesthetician says drives the processes
Have you seen any of the former plasmatics member, rod Swenson’s stuff. He talks a slick game. In the 80s and 90s he was railing aga isn’t wittgensteinian and Cartesian closed circles. He almost prempted meillassoux’s “correlational circle” with his rhetoric. He takes a thermodynamic approach and presumes to link meaning to affordable action perception cycles tracking energy distributions in a way that maximizes entropy production. It’s the most physicalist intentionalism I’ve come across.
Well, correlation was a canard to begin with, a way to rebrand the old, perennially insoluble problem of decanting objectivity via intentionalism, packaged as an insight, and sold as a solution. It still boggles me that anyone took it seriously. Swenson looks like a very interesting figure – thanks for the tip. By sheer coincidence, a friend just sent three papers by a Japanese team that’s attempting to define heuristics via the second law as well!
Have you had a chance to read any Noe, Josef? The guy is a pied piper or something. I should review one of his books… real hard, like.
I read his “Out of Our Heads: Why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness”. I was unimpressed. Apparently his Action in Perception is more serious, but I haven’t read that one. I had the sense that evidence from neuroscience and from neuropathology just rejects this idea that you are not your brain. I mean, look at that lobotomobile guy in the 40s or whatever. He was irrevocably destroying people’s personality structures via a single cut in their neocortex. This idea that you are your sensorimotor coupling to the environment just didnt make sense to me. If this is what is being claimed. I think it is. There’s this underlying *ecomystical* aesthetics in some forms of enactivism. I think Block’s review of his Action book really hits it home: brain function is constitutive or the minimal supervenience conditions of consciousness. But we don’t deny that whatever we happen to have consciousness of at any given moment is causally related to all kinds of things in the environment. For semantics we have to give an account of the history of the body in the environement, and so on. And he gives evidnece from the visual systems to support that body and environment don’t constitute consciousness, and just generalizes the argument to every sense modality. The argument seemed strong enough for me to tentatively reject the enactivist claim that consciousness is sensorimotor engagement in the world. Noe of course denies a meaningful distinction to constitution and causation.
It was an awful book to be sure! I picked it up to see if AP would be worth my time.
The only thing that makes any of this mysterious is intentionality. We are, as a matter of empirical fact, a physical system as thoroughly embedded in a complex of physical systems as any other physical system. In this respect, Brooks big behaviour insight is a no brainer. All that distinguishes the brain is its complexity, but the fact is that this complexity is itself an environmental output, selected to the degree it weathers risk. Explain away intentionality, and all this stupidity about raising ‘boundaries’ around ‘real’ cognition can be replaced by talk of levels or loci of cognitive description, some focused on the brain, others on the environment, and still others on the whole system. ‘Minimal supervenience conditions’ can be relegated to the museum along with Noe!
when i don my representational realist hat i think enactivsm just butchers any distinction between appearances and essences.
Enactivism can’t account for the distinction not because it eschews ‘representation’ (at any level of ‘hunger’) but because it has no naturalistic account of intentionality. The butchery lies in the distinction, if anywhere! Is a table merely an ‘appearance’ and the quantum soup the ‘essence,’ or are these simply more and less granular ways to solve/manipulate environments? Appearance/reality is a heuristic if there ever was one, a blunt instrument suited for blunt tasks requiring blunt results.
As for the novel, still no word on pub dates
Thanks for the update.
Do you plan to write any other works of fiction now that the SA series is done? I heard somewhere that the Disciple Manning series has been abandoned? That would be a shame.