Science · Mind & body · 1991
A Loop That Is Lived
A Chilean biologist, with a philosopher and a psychologist, argues that mind is not a picture in a head. It is an enactment in a body that is already a world.
- Santiago, Paris, and the page of *The Embodied Mind*
- Late twentieth-century cognitive science
- 33.45°S 70.67°W
Plate · Generated interpretation
A loop that is not a circle drawn on paper. Where does the inside start?
Listen · Eve
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Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991). Autopoiesis (with Humberto Maturana) is in the background. Enaction: cognition as embodied action. Varela’s later “neurophenomenology” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1996) asks the laboratory to take first-person report as data, not as noise.
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Varela, “Neurophenomenology,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (1996). Merleau-Ponty is an acknowledged ancestor, not a disguise.
Gibson’s handle is an ecological psychology of affordance. Varela’s loop is a biology of making a world. They rhyme. They are not one school. Buddhist mindfulness appears in the 1991 book as a method of first-person discipline. That use must not swallow the traditions it borrows from.
Embodiment can become a slogan. Here it is a research program: no inner cinema required, and no simple brain-in-a-vat.
If the world is enacted, who, if anyone, is the enactor when the loop is running well?
Distant echoes
Echo
Late twentieth-century ecological psychology · Cornell, on the page
The handle
Gibson’s seeing is already a possible act. Varela’s knowing is already a living loop.
One question remains
Mind & body · How does experience live in matter?
If mind is a loop and not a picture, where does the inside start once the looping is the life?