Enaction, Sense-Making, and the Problem of Collapse

Meaning emerges through interaction—but what happens when enacted meaning catastrophically breaks?---You don't find meaning. You make it.This is the core insight of enactive cognition. Meaning isn't stored in heads or encoded in environments waiting to be retrieved. It emerges through interaction—through the continuous, reciprocal engagement between organism and world.Enactivism radicalized the embodied turn. If embodied cognition showed that the body shapes thought, enactivism showed that organism and environment co-constitute each other. There is no pre-given world that cognition represents. There is only the world-as-enacted through ongoing participation.The approach draws on phenomenology, autopoietic biology, and Buddhist contemplative traditions. It offers rich resources for understanding how meaning emerges, how agents participate in constructing their experienced worlds, how cognition is fundamentally interactive rather than representational.But enactivism's strengths create its blind spots.A framework built to explain emergence has limited tools for explaining collapse. A theory of how meaning arises struggles with how meaning catastrophically breaks. The enactive literature is full of sensitive descriptions of sense-making in action—and nearly silent about what happens when sense-making fails.Dissociation. Depersonalization. Psychotic breaks. The loss of felt meaning that marks severe depression. The fragmentation of coherent experience in trauma. These aren't simply "less meaning" or "impaired sense-making." They are structural collapses that the enactive framework lacks vocabulary to characterize.This article examines what enactivism has achieved, where its explanatory power runs out, and what kind of addition would be needed to address the problem of collapse.---What Enactivism EstablishedEnactivism has developed into a sophisticated research program with distinctive claims about the nature of cognition.Sense-making is fundamental. Living systems are intrinsically sense-making systems. A bacterium swimming up a sugar gradient is already making sense of its environment—distinguishing food from non-food, better from worse, relevant from irrelevant. Sense-making isn't added to biology; it's constitutive of life itself.Organism and environment co-specify. There is no organism-independent environment to be represented. The organism's structure determines what counts as environment; the environment shapes the organism's possibilities. The two emerge together through ongoing interaction. This dissolves the inside/outside boundary that classical cognitivism assumed.Meaning is enacted, not represented. Meaning doesn't exist as stored content that cognition accesses. It emerges in the act of engagement. The meaning of a situation is not looked up but brought forth through participation. This is why meaning can't be transmitted like data—it must be re-enacted by each participant.Cognition is participatory. The knowing subject doesn't stand outside a known world. Knowing is participation that transforms both knower and known. The enactive subject is always already engaged, always embedded in meaning-making activity, never a neutral observer.Autonomy generates value. Autonomous systems—systems that produce and maintain themselves—generate their own perspectives. What matters to such a system is what supports or threatens its continued self-production. Value isn't imposed from outside; it emerges from the system's constitutive self-concern.These claims form a coherent alternative to representational approaches. They make sense of why meaning feels lived rather than computed, why context matters so deeply, why expertise involves attunement rather than rule-following.---The Sense-Making TrajectoryEnactivism describes cognition as trajectory—the continuous movement of a sense-making system through a space of possible engagements.A healthy sense-making trajectory has certain features:Continuity. Experience flows. Moments connect to moments. The past shades into the present; the present opens onto the future. There are no radical discontinuities, no sudden jumps between unrelated states.Coherence. Different aspects of experience hold together. Perception, emotion, action, and thought form an integrated whole. What you see relates to what you feel relates to what you do relates to what you think.Directionality. Sense-making has orientation. You are going somewhere, however vaguely. Goals, intentions, and concerns shape the trajectory. Experience has a forward lean.Groundedness. The trajectory is anchored in embodiment and environment. Experience feels real, present, connected to the world. You are here, in this body, in this situation.These features describe what sense-making looks like when it's working. The enactive literature has rich phenomenological descriptions of such states—flow, engagement, absorbed coping, participatory sense-making in dialogue.But what about when sense-making isn't working?---The Phenomenology of CollapseConsider states where the normal features of sense-making break down:Dissociation. Continuity fragments. The sense of flowing experience breaks into disconnected moments. The past feels unreal or inaccessible. The present feels strange or distant. Actions seem to happen without an agent behind them.Depersonalization. Groundedness fails. Experience continues but feels unreal, dreamlike, observed from outside. The body seems foreign. The self seems absent. You are here, but "you" doesn't feel like you.Derealization. The world loses its felt reality. Objects look flat, artificial, staged. Other people seem robotic or unreal. Everything appears through a veil. The environment is present to perception but absent to significance.Psychotic breaks. Coherence shatters. Elements of experience that should be related become radically disconnected. Elements that shouldn't be related fuse inappropriately. Meaning-making continues but produces interpretations that don't track shared reality.Depressive meaninglessness. Directionality collapses. Nothing matters. Goals feel pointless. The future doesn't pull. The sense-making trajectory flattens into an eternal, meaningless present.Traumatic fragmentation. Experience splits. Memory doesn't integrate. Aspects of experience that should form coherent wholes remain dissociated. The narrative of self has holes, gaps, discontinuities.These are not rare or exotic states. They are common features of psychopathology and, in milder forms, of ordinary human experience under stress. They represent failures of the sense-making process that enactivism describes.---The Conceptual GapEnactivism has difficulty with these phenomena because its conceptual resources are built for emergence, not collapse.The core concepts—sense-making, enaction, participation, bringing forth—are inherently positive. They describe how meaning comes into being. They lack natural extensions for describing how meaning comes apart.When enactivists discuss breakdown, they typically use negation: impaired sense-making, disrupted enaction, failed participation. But negation doesn't explain mechanism. To say that sense-making is impaired is to note that something has gone wrong; it doesn't characterize what has gone wrong or why.Consider how enactivism would describe dissociation. The person is still alive, still an autonomous system, still interacting with environment. In what sense has sense-making failed? The person continues to make some kind of sense of their experience—indeed, they may be hyperaware, processing intensely. What's missing is something about how sense-making is structured, not whether sense-making occurs.Or consider depersonalization. The person hasn't stopped enacting a world. They haven't stopped participating. They continue to perceive, think, and act. What's changed is the felt quality of that enaction—its groundedness, its ownership, its reality-character. But the enactive framework focuses on the process of enaction, not on what determines whether that process feels real or dreamlike.The problem isn't that enactivism has wrong claims about these phenomena. It's that its conceptual vocabulary isn't designed for them. The framework tells you how sense-making works. It doesn't tell you what maintains sense-making coherence or what produces collapse.---Why Emergence Doesn't Imply StabilityThere's a conceptual confusion lurking in enactivism's treatment of sense-making, and surfacing it clarifies the gap.Enactivism often presents sense-making as self-sustaining. The autonomous system maintains itself through continuous interaction. The organism-environment coupling is ongoing and self-renewing. Sense-making continues because the living system continues.But this elides a crucial distinction: the existence of sense-making activity and the coherence of that activity are different things.A living system indeed continues sense-making as long as it lives. But the sense-making can be more or less coherent, more or less integrated, more or less stable. Dissociation, depersonalization, and fragmentation are not cessations of sense-making—they are sense-making in pathological configurations.Think of it this way: a river continues flowing even when it's turbulent. The existence of flow doesn't guarantee smooth flow. Sense-making continues in dissociation; it just doesn't hold together. Meaning-making continues in psychosis; it just doesn't track shared reality. Enaction continues in depersonalization; it just feels unreal.What's needed isn't an account of whether sense-making occurs—for living systems, it always does. What's needed is an account of the conditions under which sense-making maintains coherence versus fragmenting, feeling real versus dreamlike, integrating versus dissociating.Emergence is one thing. Stability is another. Enactivism has rich resources for the first. It needs something more for the second.---The Catastrophe ProblemThe most striking feature of sense-making breakdown is its non-linearity.Sense-making doesn't degrade gradually like a dimming light. It snaps. The person who was functioning coherently is suddenly not. The meaning that held together comes apart in ways that aren't proportional to the stressor.Trauma survivors describe the moment of dissociation as a switch being thrown. Psychotic breaks have a before and after. Depersonalization often has clear onset—the world was real, and then it wasn't.This non-linearity poses a theoretical challenge. If sense-making is continuous engagement, continuously self-maintaining, why does it show threshold effects? Why does it suddenly collapse rather than gradually dimming?The enactive framework doesn't have natural resources for addressing this because it doesn't model sense-making as something that could collapse. The process is presented as inherently self-sustaining. What self-sustaining process shows catastrophic failure?Consider the analogies enactivism uses. Autopoiesis—self-production—is a key concept. Living systems maintain themselves through continuous production of their own components. But autopoietic systems can die. The analogy points toward discontinuous collapse, not gradual degradation.Perhaps sense-making is like autopoiesis in this regard: self-sustaining under normal conditions, but subject to catastrophic failure when conditions exceed some threshold. But this requires theorizing what the threshold is, what determines it, and what produces collapse when it's crossed.This is precisely what the enactive framework lacks: a stability analysis of sense-making.---Candidate AccountsThe broader cognitive science literature offers some resources for understanding collapse, though they're not typically integrated with enactivism.Predictive processing accounts. In predictive processing frameworks, coherent experience depends on successful hierarchical prediction. When prediction errors accumulate faster than they can be resolved, the system may reorganize pathologically. Dissociation might be a reorganization that sacrifices integration to prevent overwhelming error. Depersonalization might reflect uncertainty about self-models.Dynamical systems accounts. Catastrophe theory and related frameworks model how systems can show non-linear transitions between qualitatively different states. Sense-making might be a dynamical regime that can tip into other regimes under certain conditions. The phase space has multiple attractors; stress can push the system into pathological basins.Stress and allostatic load. The stress literature documents how cumulative load can exceed regulatory capacity. At some point, adaptive mechanisms fail and the system reorganizes around new, often pathological, equilibria. Sense-making coherence might depend on regulatory resources that can be depleted.Information integration accounts. Theories of consciousness like Integrated Information Theory suggest that coherent experience depends on information integration across the system. Dissociation and fragmentation might reflect breakdowns in integration—the system continues processing but doesn't bind the processing into unified experience.Each of these offers something that enactivism lacks: an account of what could go wrong, not just how things go right. But they're rarely connected to the enactive framework itself. The result is theoretical fragmentation—enactivism describes emergence; other frameworks describe breakdown; integration is left to the reader.---What Would Complete the Picture?A complete enactive account would need to specify the stability conditions for sense-making—what maintains coherent enaction and what produces collapse.Such an account might involve:A measure of trajectory smoothness. How continuously does sense-making flow? Smooth trajectories maintain continuity; rough trajectories show discontinuities, breaks, sudden transitions. Dissociation would appear as trajectory fragmentation—the sense-making path breaking into disconnected segments.A measure of integration. How well do different aspects of enacted experience hold together? Integrated sense-making connects perception, emotion, action, and thought. Fragmented sense-making has these elements processing in isolation. Depersonalization would appear as reduced integration—experience continuing but not binding into unified selfhood.A measure of grounding. How anchored is enacted experience in embodiment and environment? Grounded sense-making feels real, present, connected. Ungrounded sense-making feels dreamlike, distant, unreal. Derealization would appear as loss of grounding—enaction continuing but without reality-character.A measure of resilience. How much perturbation can sense-making absorb while maintaining coherence? Resilient systems recover from disruption. Fragile systems collapse. Trauma susceptibility would appear as reduced resilience—the system unable to maintain coherence under stress that others absorb.These measures point toward a geometry of sense-making—a way of characterizing not just that meaning is enacted but how well that enaction is structured. Coherent sense-making would be smooth, integrated, grounded, resilient. Pathological states would show specific deficits: fragmented trajectories, reduced integration, lost grounding, exceeded resilience.But enactivism doesn't currently provide this geometry. It describes the process of sense-making without specifying the conditions under which that process maintains coherence versus collapsing.---The Clinical PressureThe gap matters most in clinical contexts, where sense-making collapse is what brings people for treatment.Consider dissociative disorders. The therapeutic task is to restore integrated sense-making—to help the person move from fragmented experience to coherent experience. But what, precisely, is being restored? The person never stopped enacting a world; they never stopped making sense. What changed was something about how sense-making was structured.Without a framework for characterizing this structure, treatment proceeds on intuition. Clinicians develop expertise in recognizing and addressing dissociation. But the expertise isn't grounded in a theory of what maintains or disrupts sense-making coherence. The gap between theoretical framework and clinical need is wide.Consider psychosis. The person experiencing psychosis is intensely engaged in sense-making—perhaps more intensely than normal. They're perceiving meaning everywhere, making connections compulsively, constructing interpretations actively. What's gone wrong isn't absence of enaction but something about its organization. The sense being made doesn't track shared reality; the meanings enacted don't cohere with consensual world.Enactivism can say that psychotic sense-making is somehow different from normal sense-making. It struggles to say precisely how it differs or what produces the difference. The phenomenological sensitivity that enactivism cultivates is real—enactive theorists often provide nuanced descriptions of altered states. But description isn't explanation. Characterizing how psychotic experience feels doesn't explain what produces it or how to restore normal function.---The Bridge NeededEnactivism has established that meaning is enacted through ongoing participation. This is genuine progress beyond representational approaches that treated meaning as stored content.But "enacted meaning" doesn't specify conditions for success or failure. Meaning-making continues in dissociation; it just fragments. Sense emerges in psychosis; it just doesn't cohere. Enaction proceeds in depersonalization; it just feels unreal.The framework needs an addition. Not a rejection of enactivism's core claims—those are sound. But a completion: a principled account of what maintains sense-making coherence and what produces collapse.This addition would need to:Characterize collapse patterns—not just noting that sense-making can fail but specifying how it fails (fragmentation, disintegration, derealization, etc.)Identify stability conditions—specifying what properties of sense-making determine whether it remains coherent or collapsesExplain non-linearity—accounting for the threshold effects and catastrophic transitions that characterize real breakdownConnect to intervention—providing targets for therapeutic efforts to restore coherent sense-makingMeaning is enacted. Enactivism established this clearly.But what makes enacted meaning coherent? What determines whether sense-making holds together or comes apart?That question remains open.---Next week: Part 5—Extended Cognition and the Scaling Problem---Series NavigationThis is Part 4 of a 10-part series reviewing 4E cognition and its structural limits.4E Cognition Under Strain (Series Introduction)Why Cognition Escaped the SkullEmbodied Cognition and the Missing Stability ConditionEmbedded Cognition and Environmental FragilityEnaction, Sense-Making, and the Problem of Collapse ← you are hereExtended Cognition and the Scaling Problem4E and Trauma: The Unspoken Failure CaseAttachment as a 4E SystemNeurodivergence and Precision MismatchLanguage, Narrative, and the Limits of Sense-MakingWhy Coherence Becomes Inevitable