Everything in this post is drawn from Chapter 1 of The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (MIT Press, 1991). These are my notes and understanding of that chapter, written mainly to help me remember the ideas and to share them with colleagues who might find this interesting.

The mind awakens into a world that was already there before it. We come to reflect on this world only as we live and grow, yet it is our own structure that makes this reflection possible in the first place. So there’s a loop: the world seems to exist prior to us, but it isn’t separate from us. Perception, then, isn’t the mind holding an inner copy of a pre-existing world. It is closer to an ongoing exchange between self/mind and world, each shaping the other.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw this same loop and gave it a name: the entre-deux, a middle way between self and world. According to the middle way, neither one comes first. That is, the world is not separate from the mind, and the mind does not simply construct the world on its own. Self and world make each other, together, at the same time. Yet science mostly avoids this middle way. It is easier to assume a detached observer (or as Varela puts, ‘disembodied’ observer) studying an objective world, or a mind that builds reality entirely on its own. Both sidestep the harder answer: self and world are already tangled together.

This loop between the self and the world appears even sharper when the mind turns to study itself. The investigation of mind (Cognitive Science) is, after all, carried out by the mind of the scientist. As such, any scientific description of the brain or behavior is itself a product of our own cognitive structure. The tool and the object of study are the same thing.

But this realization does not come from nowhere either. We arrive at it from within a background of biological, social, and cultural beliefs and practices. So even our reflection on the structure is sitting inside more structure. Yet noticing this background is, again, something we are doing right now, as embodied people thinking about this whole scheme. This process does not stop. Each time we think we have stepped outside to get an objective view of the mind, the very act of stepping back turns out to be another instance of the mind doing what it does. There is no neutral ground from which to observe cognition from outside.

This is the fundamental circularity: the mind cannot get outside itself to study itself objectively, because the act of studying is itself an act of the mind. It is the same entanglement between mind and world we started with, just turned back on the scientist doing the studying.

Rather than adding one more layer of abstraction each time, the reasonable move is to go back to the concrete, particular experience we actually have. This is the seed of the enactive approach discussed in the book.

To explain what the enactive approach is, it is essential to mention the three positions the authors use to map cognitive science:

  1. Cognitivism treats the mind as a machine that manipulates symbols standing for the world.
  2. Connectionism pushes back on cognitivism by modeling the mind instead as a network of simple parts whose connections, not any single symbol, result in the emergence of global behavior.
  3. Enaction, proposed by the authors, goes further than both. Instead of a mind representing a world that already exists, mind and world are enacted together, through the history of actions a being performs.

Enaction doesn’t try to escape the circularity we started with. Instead, it works with it, treating the entanglement between mind and world as the starting point rather than a problem to be solved.

This matters for a practical reason, not just a philosophical one. If a science of mind refuses to take experience seriously, it has nothing left to explain. After all, the whole point of studying cognition was to understand what it’s like to think, perceive, and act. Real progress, then, means bringing lived experience and scientific method together, treating experience as something that can be studied rigorously rather than dismissed as too subjective to count.

In my next post, I would like to explore how things have changed since this book was published in 1991. I will cover what has held up, what has shifted in cognitive science since then, and where things stand today.