Enaction: The Bridge from Autopoiesis to Embodied Cognition

Series: Autopoiesis and Second-Order Cybernetics | Part: 5 of 11

You don't perceive a world that exists independently of you. You bring forth a world through action.

This isn't mysticism or metaphor. It's the core insight of enaction—Francisco Varela's radical reconception of cognition that transformed autopoietic theory from a biological account of life into a full philosophy of mind. Where autopoiesis explained how systems maintain themselves, enaction explains how they create meaning. Where structural coupling described interaction between system and environment, enaction goes further: the very distinction between system and environment is something the system enacts.

For Varela, cognition isn't about representing a pre-given world. It's about bringing forth a world that matters to you—through the sensorimotor patterns of your embodied action. The world you experience isn't discovered. It's enacted.

This insight bridges autopoiesis to what we now call 4E cognitive science—the view that mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And it radically reshapes how we think about perception, consciousness, meaning, and what it means to be a self.

The Problem with Representation

Classical cognitive science had a seductive story. Your brain receives sensory input, builds internal representations of an external world, processes those representations through computational rules, and outputs motor commands. Perception comes first, action comes later. Mind happens in between.

This is the sandwich model of cognition: sensory input is the bottom slice, motor output is the top slice, and cognitive processing is the filling in between. The model dominates AI, neuroscience, and folk psychology. It feels obvious.

But Varela saw its fatal flaw.

If cognition is representation, you need to explain how internal symbols correspond to external reality. You need a homunculus—a little observer inside your head—to read the representations and determine whether they're accurate. But then you need another homunculus to interpret the first one's judgments. And another. The regress never ends.

Worse, the model makes perception passive—a mere reception of data from an objective world that exists independently of you. But phenomenology (the philosophical study of lived experience) reveals something different. When you reach for a cup, you don't first build a representation of "cup," then compute motor commands, then execute movement. The cup shows up as reachable. Its meaning is inseparable from your capacity to act on it.

The world you perceive is not value-neutral data awaiting interpretation. It's already structured by what you can do—by your history of embodied interaction, by your sensorimotor capacities, by the concerns that keep your autopoietic system viable.

Varela's solution: abandon representation entirely. Replace it with enaction.

What Enaction Means

The term "enaction" comes from the Spanish enacción—a neologism Varela coined to capture the idea that cognition is a process of bringing forth a world. The English "enact" works perfectly: cognition is something you do, not something you have.

Varela's formulation (with Thompson and Rosch in The Embodied Mind, 1991):

Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind, but rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs.

Unpack this:

1. No pre-given world. The environment you experience is not an objective, fixed reality that exists independently of you. Different organisms with different sensorimotor structures bring forth different worlds. A tick, a bee, a bat, a human—each enacts a distinct world structured by their particular mode of coupling with their environment.

2. No pre-given mind. The cognitive system isn't a static processor. Your "mind" is the ongoing pattern of sensorimotor activity that emerges through your history of structural coupling. You don't have a mind that perceives. You are a pattern of perceiving-acting.

3. History matters. What world you enact depends on your ontogeny—your developmental trajectory, the accumulated history of interactions that have shaped your structure. Two organisms with the same current structure but different histories will enact different worlds because meaning is constituted by patterns of action over time.

4. Action is constitutive, not consequential. Action doesn't follow perception. Perception is action. Your sensorimotor loops are what create the meaningful distinctions in your experienced world.

This is the move from cognition as representation to cognition as enaction. You don't build an internal model of the world and then act on it. You bring forth a world by acting in it.

Perception as Sensorimotor Mastery

If perception isn't passive reception, what is it?

For Varela, perception is sensorimotor mastery—a practical, embodied know-how that lets you anticipate how your actions will change your sensory experience.

When you see a cube, you don't construct an internal representation of "cubeness." You master a pattern of sensorimotor contingencies: if you move your head to the left, the cube's appearance shifts in a predictable way; if you reach out, your hand meets resistance at a particular distance; if you rotate it, the visible faces change according to a learned structure.

Seeing the cube is this mastery. It's a readiness to engage in the sensorimotor loops that constitute "cube" as a meaningful object.

This is why visual perception doesn't happen in the brain alone. It happens in the sensorimotor loop—the closed cycle of action, sensory consequence, and anticipation that defines your embodied relation to the world. Alva Noë, extending Varela's work, puts it bluntly: "Perception is not something that happens to us. It's something we do."

The world isn't a pre-given stage onto which you project meaning. It's co-constituted by your sensorimotor activity. The cup on your desk shows up as "graspable" because you've enacted a world where cups afford grasping. For an octopus with tentacles, the same object affords something entirely different. For a bacterium, it doesn't exist as a meaningful distinction at all.

Different structures, different sensorimotor capacities, different enacted worlds.

Bringing Forth a World: The Example of Color

Varela's favorite example: color vision.

We experience color as a property of objects. The apple is red. The sky is blue. This seems like simple feature detection—your retina registers wavelength, your brain categorizes it, you perceive red.

But color doesn't work that way.

Color categories aren't determined by wavelength alone. The same wavelength can appear as different colors depending on context. Different wavelengths can appear as the same color. Some cultures have fewer color terms; others have more. And there's no "objective" fact about where red ends and orange begins—color boundaries are enacted by communities of speakers through linguistic and perceptual practices.

Varela's insight: color is brought forth, not detected.

Your color experience arises from your retinal cone cells, your history of perceptual learning, your linguistic community, and your current context. The world doesn't contain "red" as an objective property waiting to be discovered. You enact "red" through a history of sensorimotor coupling in which certain wavelength patterns become salient, meaningful, and nameable.

This is why bees see ultraviolet patterns invisible to us, and why people with tetrachromatic vision see color distinctions we can't. They're not perceiving the same world more accurately. They're enacting different worlds—worlds structured by different sensorimotor possibilities.

Enaction doesn't mean solipsism. It means the world you experience is co-determined by your structure and the structure of your environment. Meaning emerges at the boundary—in the dance of structural coupling.

Sense-Making: Enaction at the Organismal Level

Enaction isn't just about perception. It's about sense-making—the process by which an organism brings forth a world of significance.

Di Paolo and Thompson (developing Varela's work) define sense-making as:

The interactional and relational process whereby a system brings forth significance in its world, regulating its coupling with the environment in a way that promotes its own continued existence.

This ties enaction directly back to autopoiesis. An autopoietic system must maintain its organization in the face of environmental perturbations. To do that, it must distinguish what matters—what threatens its viability, what sustains it, what's irrelevant. Those distinctions aren't pre-given. They're enacted by the system's own activity.

For a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient, "food" isn't an objective category in the world. It's a significance the bacterium brings forth by regulating its motility in response to chemoreceptor activity. The bacterium enacts a world where certain molecular configurations matter because they're relevant to its autopoiesis.

For you, reading this sentence, "meaning" isn't transmitted through symbols. It's enacted through your sensorimotor engagement with the text—your history of linguistic coupling, your current affective state, the concerns that make this essay relevant (or irrelevant) to your ongoing projects.

Sense-making is normative. An organism can get it right or wrong. The bacterium that swims toward a toxin instead of food fails at sense-making. You can misread a sentence, misinterpret a gesture, misjudge a situation. But the norms aren't external standards. They're intrinsic to the system's autopoiesis—grounded in the basic fact that the system must maintain its organization or cease to exist.

This is how enaction bridges fact and value, is and ought. Meaning isn't arbitrary. It's constrained by what the system needs to stay viable. But meaning isn't objective either. It's relative to the system's structure and history.

Enaction gives us a naturalized account of normativity—one that doesn't require minds to be representing an external world, but doesn't collapse into relativism either.

The Enactive Self

If cognition is enacted, what about the self?

Varela's answer: the self is enacted too.

You don't have a fixed, unified self that persists across time. You're a dynamic pattern of sensorimotor and affective activity that brings forth a sense of selfhood moment by moment. The self isn't a thing. It's a process—an ongoing enactment.

The self is a virtual center—a coherent pattern that emerges from recursive sensorimotor and affective loops, stabilized by narrative, by social recognition, by the ongoing need to maintain autopoietic viability. You enact a self by acting as if there's a self, and that very enactment brings forth the phenomenology of being someone.

This is why contemplative practices (which Varela studied deeply) can dissolve the sense of self. When you stop actively maintaining the sensorimotor patterns that constitute selfhood, the self is revealed as a process you were enacting all along. In 4E cognition, this becomes the extended self—a self that includes tools, environments, and other people in its constitutive dynamics.

Enaction and the Free Energy Principle

Enaction might sound distant from Karl Friston's computational neuroscience. But the convergence is striking.

Friston's Free Energy Principle says organisms minimize surprise—they act to confirm their predictions. Perception is controlled hallucination. Action is self-fulfilling prophecy. The brain doesn't passively receive data. It actively samples the world to minimize prediction error.

This is enaction in mathematical clothing.

Active inference—Friston's account of action—is literally enaction. You don't perceive the world, then act. You act to enact the world you predict. Your sensorimotor loops generate the very reality you experience.

Varela arrived at enaction through phenomenology and biology. Friston through information theory and neuroscience. But they're describing the same dynamics: cognition as the ongoing enactment of a world through sensorimotor coupling.

Enaction gives phenomenological depth to active inference. Active inference gives mathematical rigor to enaction. Together: living systems don't represent the world—they bring it forth by minimizing surprise through action.

From Autopoiesis to 4E Cognition

Enaction is the conceptual bridge from autopoiesis to 4E cognition—the now-dominant framework in cognitive science that rejects the brain-bound, representational model of mind.

Embodied: Cognition depends on the body's sensorimotor structure. Embedded: It happens in context. Enacted: It brings forth a world through action. Extended: It includes tools, environments, and other people.

Varela's enaction is the conceptual core of all four E's. Without enaction, embodiment is just the claim that the body matters for computation. With enaction, embodiment becomes the claim that cognition is embodied activity, not something that happens in a body. Enaction radicalizes 4E cognition: mind is the enactment of a world through sensorimotor coupling.

The Coherence Connection

In AToM terms, enaction is coherence maintenance through active engagement.

An autopoietic system maintains coherence by regulating its coupling with the environment. But coupling isn't just reaction. It's enaction—the active bringing forth of a world in which the system's continued existence makes sense.

When your predictions match sensory input, you're in low-curvature state space—everything flows smoothly, coherence is high. When predictions fail, curvature spikes—the world becomes surprising, incoherent. You must act to restore coherence, which means enacting a different relationship with the environment.

Enaction is how organisms navigate their state space. By acting, you shape the trajectory through which your system evolves. You don't just move through a pre-given landscape. You co-create the landscape by the paths you take.

This is why sense-making is normative. The "correct" enactments keep you in low-curvature regions. The "incorrect" ones push you toward dissolution. M = C/T (Meaning equals Coherence over Time) reveals how meaning arises—through the ongoing enactment of a world structured by your need to stay coherent.

You bring forth a world that makes sense because sense-making is what keeps you alive.

Practical Implications

Enaction has profound practical consequences.

You can't think your way to a different world. Representation-based models suggest that changing beliefs changes behavior. But enaction says the reverse: you enact your beliefs through action. Want to perceive the world differently? Change your sensorimotor patterns. Act as if the world you want were already real, and it becomes real—not magically, but because you're enacting it into being.

Therapy is re-enactment. Trauma lives in your sensorimotor patterns—the enacted world of threat, hypervigilance, and defensive collapse. Healing isn't cognitive reframing. It's enacting new sensorimotor patterns that bring forth a different world. Somatic therapies work because they target the level at which worlds are actually made.

Environments shape who you become. You can't enact a coherent self in an incoherent environment. If you want to think differently, feel differently, be differently—change the environment you're coupled with. This is why moving to a new city or joining a different community can feel like becoming a different person. You are.

Identity is enacted, not discovered. You don't find yourself. You create yourself by enacting a self. Gender, culture, personality—all are brought forth through repeated patterns of action. This doesn't make them arbitrary. It makes them made—and therefore changeable.

You bring forth the world you predict. If you expect threat, you'll enact a threatening world—selectively attending to dangers, acting defensively in ways that provoke aggression. If you expect support, you'll enact a supportive world. Enaction reveals why "mindset" isn't just positive thinking—it's a sensorimotor commitment that generates the reality you experience.

The world you experience is not a given. It's something you make, moment by moment, through the sensorimotor loops that constitute your being.

Further Reading

• Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
• Di Paolo, E. A., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2017). Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal. Oxford University Press.
• Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. MIT Press.
• Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press.
• McGann, M., De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2013). "Enaction and Psychology." Review of General Psychology, 17(2), 203-209.
• Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E. A. (Eds.). (2010). Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. MIT Press.

This is Part 5 of the Autopoiesis and Second-Order Cybernetics series, exploring how self-making systems became a full theory of cognition and meaning.

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