Enacted Cognition: Bringing Forth a World

Series: 4E Cognition | Part: 4 of 9

Move your head side to side. Notice how the world stays stable even though your retinal image shifts dramatically. Now push your eyeball gently from the side (through closed eyelid). The world jumps.

Same retinal displacement. Different perception. Why?

In the first case, your motor system predicted the retinal shift and compensated. In the second, the shift was unexpected—no motor prediction, so the brain interprets the change as world-movement rather than self-movement.

This isn't a curiosity. It reveals something fundamental: perception isn't passive reception. It's active sense-making that depends on what you're doing and what you expect to happen as a result.

This is enacted cognition: the recognition that perception and action aren't sequential stages (perceive → decide → act) but coupled processes that constitute each other. You don't perceive then act. You perceive by acting, and you act to perceive. The world you experience is enacted—brought forth through sensorimotor engagement, not delivered pre-formed to a passive observer.

This changes everything about what cognition is and how it works.

Sensorimotor Contingencies: The Laws of Perception-Action Coupling

Alva Noë asks: what's the difference between seeing something and merely having visual information about it? A blind person using a sensory substitution device (camera feeding tactile stimulation) eventually reports seeing through touch. What changed? Not the sensory channel—touch stayed touch. What changed was mastery of sensorimotor contingencies.

Sensorimotor contingencies are the lawful relationships between action and sensory change. When you move your head left, the visual field shifts right in a specific way determined by head movement speed, distance to objects, and optical geometry. Learning these contingencies is learning to see.

The blind users of sensory substitution devices don't start by "seeing" through touch. They start with confusing tactile noise. But as they learn how their movements change tactile patterns—how turning the head sweeps the tactile field, how approaching objects makes patterns expand—the experience shifts. The tactile sensations become transparent to distal objects. They're seeing, not through visual cortex, but through enacted sensorimotor skill.

The Softness Problem

How do you know something is soft? Not by looking—softness isn't a visible property. You know by pressing and feeling how it yields. The perception of softness is enacted through exploratory action (pressing, squeezing) and interpretation of the resistance pattern.

Kevin O'Regan and Noë argue that all perception works this way, even vision. You don't perceive "redness" as an intrinsic property of surfaces. You perceive how surfaces reflect light under varying conditions, and that pattern of variation (the sensorimotor contingency) is what redness is phenomenologically.

This dissolves the puzzle of qualia—why red feels like red. Red feels the way it does because it has a particular profile of sensorimotor contingencies distinct from blue or green. The "what it's like" is the set of "what happens when I do this."

Enaction: Bringing Forth a World Through Interaction

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch's The Embodied Mind (1991) introduced enaction as a framework that goes beyond just sensorimotor skill. Enaction is the claim that cognition is sense-making—bringing significance into being through the autonomous activity of the organism.

A paramecium swims toward nutrients and away from toxins. Is it perceiving? Deciding? Acting? These categories dissolve. What the paramecium does is enact significance: nutrients become "good" and toxins become "bad" through the paramecium's metabolic needs and motile capacities. The meaning of a chemical gradient is brought forth by what the paramecium can do and needs to maintain itself.

This scales all the way up. A tick perceives three things: warmth, butyric acid, and falling opportunities. These aren't arbitrary—they're enacted by the tick's life-form. A tick's world is constituted by its sensorimotor capacities and vital concerns.

Humans are more complex, but the principle holds: the world you perceive is enacted through your particular sensorimotor skills and concerns. A musician perceives melodic patterns that non-musicians don't—not because the sound waves differ but because the musician has enacted a world where those patterns have significance.

Umwelt: Every Organism Enacts Its Own World

Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt captures this: every species lives in its own perceptual world determined by its receptors, effectors, and meaningful relations. A bat's Umwelt is structured by echolocation. A bee's by ultraviolet vision and polarized light detection. A human's by linguistic categorization and cultural meaning.

These aren't different perspectives on the same objective world. They're different worlds enacted by different forms of life. The echolocated world and the visually perceived world aren't translations—they're fundamentally distinct domains of significance.

This doesn't mean solipsism or relativism. Umwelts couple and coordinate. But the coupling happens between enacted worlds, not between organisms and a single pre-given reality.

The Perception-Action Loop: No Separation

Classical cognitive science models cognition as: perception → cognition → action. Sense data comes in, gets processed, then action comes out. This makes sense if you think of minds as computers—input, computation, output.

Enacted cognition says this is backwards. There is no perception without action and no action without perception. They're not stages—they're aspects of a single ongoing loop.

Active Vision

You don't passively receive visual scenes. You actively construct them through saccades (rapid eye movements), fixations, and attention shifts. Experiments show people make 3-4 saccades per second, sampling tiny high-resolution foveal regions while peripheral vision provides context.

The "visual scene" you experience as seamless and complete is enacted through this rapid sampling. You're not seeing all at once—you're seeing through doing, continuously moving your eyes to where relevance emerges.

This explains change blindness: people miss large changes to visual scenes between saccades because they're not maintaining complete internal representations. They're enacting perception through ongoing sampling, and what's not currently being sampled doesn't exist in consciousness.

Reaching and Grasping

When you reach for a cup, perception and action are coupled from the start. You don't first perceive the cup's location, then calculate a motor plan, then execute. The reaching is the perceiving—your hand moves to where the cup is through continuous visual-motor coupling.

If the cup moves mid-reach, your hand adjusts before you're consciously aware of the movement. The loop is faster than awareness because it's not mediated by conscious perception then deliberation. It's a direct sensorimotor coupling.

Sense-Making: Meaning as Enacted Significance

The deepest implication of enaction: meaning isn't in the world waiting to be discovered, nor is it in the mind projected onto neutral matter. Meaning is enacted at the boundary between organism and environment through sensorimotor engagement.

What makes something "food"? Not intrinsic properties—arsenic is nutritious to some bacteria, toxic to humans. "Food" is enacted by metabolic needs and digestive capacities. The significance emerges in the relation.

What makes a sound a "warning"? Not the acoustic properties alone—alarm calls mean different things to different animals. The significance is enacted by the receiver's perceptual capacities and behavioral repertoire.

This applies to abstract meaning too. What makes a sentence meaningful? Not just syntax and semantics—meaning emerges through understanding, which is enacted through linguistic competence, cultural embedding, and embodied experience. You don't decode meaning from symbols—you enact meaning through skillful engagement with linguistic practices.

The Autonomy Requirement

Varela emphasized that enaction requires autonomy: the system must be self-maintaining and self-organizing. Only autonomous systems can enact worlds because only they have intrinsic norms (conditions they must maintain to persist) that constitute significance.

A rock doesn't enact anything—it has no autonomous organization, no norms, no conditions it must maintain. A bacterium does—it must maintain metabolic coherence, which makes some states better than others, which enacts a world of significance.

This grounds meaning in biology without reducing it to mechanism. Meaning is what emerges when autonomous systems couple with environments in ways that matter for their persistence.

The Geometry of Enacted Coherence

In AToM terms, enaction means coherence emerges through sensorimotor coupling, not internal representation. You don't maintain coherence by building accurate models then acting on them. You maintain coherence by skillfully coupling perception and action in ongoing loops.

The Free Energy Principle provides the mathematical foundation: systems minimize prediction error not just through updating beliefs (perception) but through changing the world (action). This is active inference, and it's the formal structure of enaction.

When you reach for a cup, you're not minimizing prediction error about where the cup is through better perception alone. You're minimizing error through action—moving your hand to where the prediction says the cup should be, which makes the prediction true.

Enacted cognition is active inference at the sensorimotor level. You don't represent the world then act. You enact coherence through tightly coupled prediction-action loops.

Why This Matters: From Robotics to Phenomenology

Behavior-Based Robotics

Rodney Brooks built robots that don't use internal world models. They couple sensors to effectors through simple rules, achieving complex adaptive behavior through environmental interaction. A obstacle-avoiding robot doesn't build a map—it enacts navigation through direct sensorimotor coupling.

This works because the world is its own best model. You don't need to represent everything internally if you can interact skillfully with what's actually there.

Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science

Enaction bridges phenomenology (the study of lived experience) and cognitive science (the study of cognitive mechanisms). Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that experience is structured by embodied action, not passive reception. Enactive cognitive science formalizes these insights.

The result: a cognitive science that doesn't ignore experience but grounds itself in phenomenology. What it's like to perceive isn't an afterthought—it's central data about how sensorimotor coupling creates worlds.

Therapy and Practice

If meaning is enacted, then changing experience requires changing enaction patterns. Contemplative practices work not by changing beliefs about reality but by training different modes of sensorimotor engagement.

Mindfulness doesn't teach you that thoughts aren't real—it trains you to enact a different relationship to thinking, where thoughts are perceived as mental events rather than reality. The shift is in the enaction, not the content.

Further Reading

• Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
• Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. MIT Press.
• O'Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2001). "A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939-973.
• Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press.
• Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language. MIT Press.

This is Part 4 of the 4E Cognition series, exploring how cognitive science moved beyond the brain.

Previous: Embedded Cognition: Mind in Context
Next: Extended Cognition: When Mind Leaks Into the World