Enactive Approach

This thesis investigates how contemporary philosophy of mind can contribute to rethinking classical musicians’ practices, with the aim of fostering a deeper and more effective sharing of musical experience. The central focus is the enactive approach to cognition, an interdisciplinary framework that views the mind not as reducible to brain activity alone, but as emerging from the dynamic interaction between brain, body, and socio-material environment. This perspective challenges outdated mind-body dualisms that still influence musical practice and interpretations of musical sharing, often seen as passive or introspective. Instead, musical experience is reframed as a collaborative activity through which individuals extend their cognitive and affective domains. The thesis unfolds in three chapters: the first outlines the theoretical foundations of the enactive approach; the second analyzes the lived experience of musicians—including composers, conductors, soloists, and string quartets—through interviews and testimonies; the third chapter reinterprets these experiences from an enactive perspective, introducing new insights into ineffability, emotion, and musical empathy. The work argues for a shift from internalist and romantic conceptions of musicality toward an understanding of music as embodied, affective, and socially co-constructed. Ultimately, the thesis advocates for a broader application of enactive principles in both cognitive science and music pedagogy.

Given the density of these pages and the language Kant used, it is not possible here to provide further clarification. Nevertheless, I find it important to begin with these passages insofar as they lay the foundations for the subject I wish to address here. For a more detailed contextualization and analysis of these passages, see Severini 2019.

Robots are usually equipped with advanced capabilities in order to autonomously adapt to real and dynamic environments and to interact with humans. Robot Perception is being inspired by new embodied cognition approaches that redefine the notions of perception, cognition and action, basic processes of intelligent behaviour. Enactive approaches consider the perceptual act as a consequence in action of the structural coupling between the organism and its environment in seek of significance. There is a growing interest in the development of robot perception systems based on new architectures to materialize naturally these action-perception functions. In this direction, we propose an evolution of the EAR sensor [4], which fulfills the constraints of mobile robot audition, such as embeddability, synchronous multichannel acquisition and real-time execution. Using Systems-on-a-Programmable-Chip (SoPCs) methodology, this sensor incorporates a novel architecture that offers all the basic calc...

The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, that is, on the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in sensations depend on changes in movements. This hypothesis can be extended into the social domain: perception of other minds is constituted by mastery of self-other contingencies, that is, by the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in others' movements depend on changes in one's movements. We investigated this proposal using the perceptual crossing paradigm, in which pairs of players are required to locate each other in an invisible one-dimensional virtual space by using a minimal haptic interface. We recorded and analyzed the real-time embodied social interaction of 10 pairs of adult participants. The results reveal a process of implicit perceptual learning: on average, clarity of perceiving the other's presence increased over trials and then stabilized. However, a clearer perception of the other was not associated with correctness of recognition as such, but with both players correctly recognizing each other. Furthermore, the moments of correct mutual recognition tended to happen within seconds. The fact that changes in social experience can only be explained by the successful performance at the level of the dyad, and that this veridical mutual perception tends toward synchronization, lead us to hypothesize that integration of neural activity across both players played a role.

Over the last few years, the efforts to reveal through neuroscientific lens the relations between the mind, body, and built environment have set a promising direction of using neuroscience for architecture. However, little has been achieved thus far in developing a systematic account that could be employed for interpreting current results and providing a consistent framework for subsequent scientific experimentation. In this context, the enactive perspective is proposed as a guide to studying architectural experience for two key reasons. Firstly, the enactive approach is specifically selected for its capacity to account for the profound connectedness of the organism and the world in an active and dynamic relationship, which is primarily shaped by the features of the body. Thus, particular emphasis is placed on the issues of embodiment and motivational factors as underlying constituents of the body-architecture interactions. Moreover, enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of architectural spaces singles out the two-way bodily communication between architecture and its inhabitants, which can be also explored in immersive virtual reality settings. Secondly, enactivism has a strong foothold in phenomenological thinking that corresponds to the existing phenomenological discourse in architectural theory and qualitative design approaches. In this way, the enactive approach acknowledges the available common ground between neuroscience and architecture and thus allows a more accurate definition of investigative goals. Accordingly, the outlined model of architectural subject in enactive terms-that is, a model of a human being as embodied, enactive, and situated agent, is proposed as a basis of neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.

What we call the study of the Orient today has meant only taking the Orient as an object of study. As yet a profound reflection about the oriental way of thinking, in order to evolve a new method of thinking, has not been undertaken." Nishida (1958a: 356) The Problem of Modernity In the 1930s and early 1940s, Japanese philosophy reflected the political climate by becoming increasingly nationalistic and authoritarian. With a few honorable exceptions, the major thinkers, such as Kuki, Tanabe, and Watsuji defended Japanese imperialism. 1 Nishida's ambiguous stance was particularly significant since he was the first Japanese philosopher able not only to understand the major trends of Western thought, but also to employ the Western heritage to elaborate an original philosophy of his own. He is generally considered the founder of modern Japanese philosophy. The association between philosophy and nationalist politics was not forgotten after the War and sometimes caused the one to be rejected with the other, especially on the Left. But philosophers' enthusiasm for government policy varied widely and Nishida was by no means the worst. As we will see below, his nationalism was primarily cultural, not military, and he was critical of racist and totalitarian interpretations of official policy. Nevertheless, his inner doubts about the War do not appear to have affected his theoretical conception until quite late, and his ideas were turned to account by thinkers far more enthusiastic about imperialism than he was. 2 So far as I can tell, he continued to hope until near the end that Japan would emerge from the War as the center of an original politico-cultural sphere. One of his chief political essays of the late 1930s summarized his cultural ambitions for Japan as follows: "Up to now Westerners thought that their culture was superior to all others, and that human culture advances toward their own form. Other peoples, such as Easterners, are behind and if they advance, they too will acquire the same form. There are even some Japanese who think like this. But...I believe there is something fundamentally different about the East. They [East and West] must complement each other and...achieve the eventual realization of a complete humanity. It is the task of Japanese culture to find such a principle" (1965e: 404-405). 3 Although there is much in this position that is still of interest, it gradually became so mixed up with the fate of Japanese imperialism that today it is difficult to extract its lasting significance from the circumstances of its formulation. The aim of this chapter is to explain Nishida's views, and so far as possible to identify his contribution to debates on culture that are far from resolved even to this day. Recently, there has been a revival of interest in a key intellectual event of the War that sheds some light on Nishida's position. In 1942 the theme of cultural originality inspired several seminars, the most famous of which was titled "Overcoming [European] Modernity" (kindai no

The idea of knowledge-creation and knowledge management has become an important area of research in management studies. This preoccupation with the creation and accumulation of knowledge in its explicit representational form is underpinned by the epistemological priorities of an alphabetic-literate1 culture that takes written knowledge as the only reliable basis for effective action. Documented knowledge necessarily precedes and hence determines action and performance. Such a metaphysical orientation precludes the possibility of attaining a form of direct unmediated knowing through the relentless perfecting of action. In traditionally based oral-aural communities or in non-alphabetic East Asian cultures knowing is more often achieved directly through the immediate engagement of tasks rather than through the acquisition of abstract written signs and symbols: learning by direct observation and doing is the order of the day. Consequently, there is little systematic documenting and reco...

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: (i) it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and (ii) it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of t...

We introduce a series of evolutionary robotics simulations that address the behaviour of individuals in socially contingent interactions. The models are based on a recent study by Auvray, Lenay and Stewart (2006) on tactile perceptual crossing in a minimal virtual environment. In accordance, both the empirical experiments and our simulations point out the essential character of global embodied interaction dynamics for the sensitivity to contingency to arise. Rather than being individually perceived by any of the interactors, sensitivity to contingency arises from processes of circular causality that characterise the collective dynamics. Such global dynamical aspects are frequently neglected when studying social cognition. Furthermore, our synthetic studies point out interesting aspects of the task that are not immediately obvious in the empirical data. They, in addition, generate new hypotheses for further experiments. We conclude by promoting a minimal but tractable, dynamic and embodied account to social interaction, combining synthetic and empirical findings as well as concrete predictions regarding sensorimotor strategies, the role of time-delays and robustness to perturbations in interactive dynamics.

L’approche par compétences (APC) campe dans un amalgame paradigmatique (Gérald Boutin, 2004) dans lequel s’entremêlent, entre autres, le béhaviorisme, le cognitivisme, le constructivisme et le socioconstructivisme. Une idéologie à saveur utilitariste et une perspective représentationnaliste sont toutefois relativement partagées par les auteurs de l’APC. Au contraire, l’énaction, tout en s’inspirant d’autres courants (cognition incarnée, cognition étendue, cognition située, etc.) repose sur un paradigme, pour ainsi dire, mieux unifié et pragmatique. Quelques présupposés épistémologiques de la perspective représentationnaliste de l’APC seront contrastés avec les postulats de l’énaction. Une analyse énactive du référentiel des compétences d’un/une artiste-pédagogue (enseignant/enseignante) au Québec sera présentée. Les fonctions à remplir par un/une artiste-pédagogue, c.-à-d. ce qu’il/elle doit effectivement faire pour remplir son métier, serviront de base pour juger de la valeur pratique des compétences du référentiel. La problématique suivante, inspirée de Guy Le Boterf (2017), sera traitée: une personne qui vient de terminer sa formation à l’enseignement et qui a acquis toutes les compétences du référentiel sera-t-elle effectivement compétente lorsqu’elle exercera son métier? Quelle est la finalité d’une formation à l’enseignement : transmettre des compétences ou former un/une artiste-pédagogue compétent, c.-à-d. un/une artiste-pédagogue en devenir connaisseur? Les réponses à ces questions permettent de différencier l’APC et l’approche énactive.

This paper investigates the relationship between embodied interaction and symbolic communication. We refer to works by Iizuka & Ikegami and Marroco & Nolfi as the examples of simulating EC (embodied communicating) agents, and argue their differences in terms of joint attention, a class of communication between cognitive agents. Then we introduce a new simulation to bridge the gap between the two models; with the new model we demonstrate the two pathways to establishing agents’ coordinating behaviors. Based on the simulation results, we explain the typology of sentences (such as ‘declarative’, ‘imperative’ and ‘exclamative’ sentences) from a communicative point of view, which challenges the traditional views of formalizing grammar.

This paper investigates the relationship between embodied interaction and symbolic communication. We refer to works by Iizuka & Ikegami and Marroco & Nolfi as the examples of simulating EC (embodied communicating) agents, and argue their differences in terms of joint attention, a class of communication between cognitive agents. Then we introduce a new simulation to bridge the gap between the two models; with the new model we demonstrate the two pathways to establishing agents’ coordinating behaviors. Based on the simulation results, we explain the typology of sentences (such as ‘declarative’, ‘imperative’ and ‘exclamative’ sentences) from a communicative point of view, which challenges the traditional views of formalizing grammar.

The philosophy of Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945) began in pure experience, through Absolute Nothingness and the Logic of Place, lately ended into the theory of Self-Identity of Absolute Contradictories. His theory is also explained by my theory of Nothingness and Love that I expounded in “Philosophy of Nothingness and Love” (Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrucken). The pure experience, that is the flow of life in the subject-object no-distincted condition, is an undefined conscious state prior to our judgment. As the pure experience is flow of life in the world, it is adapted to the theory of Biocosmology. Further, it is the conscious experience that is not defined by words. So to speak, it is the intuitive experience of nothingness as reality. This intuition of nothingness was experienced by Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu in ancient China, Buddha in India, Solomon in Israel who said, ”Vanity! Vanity! All is vanity”. Jesus Christ and in Europe Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, Nietzsche, Heidegger and o...

The idea of knowledge-creation and knowledge management has become an important area of research in management studies. This preoccupation with the creation and accumulation of knowledge in its explicit representational form is underpinned by the epistemological priorities of an alphabetic-literate1 culture that takes written knowledge as the only reliable basis for effective action. Documented knowledge necessarily precedes and hence determines action and performance. Such a metaphysical orientation precludes the possibility of attaining a form of direct unmediated knowing through the relentless perfecting of action. In traditionally based oral-aural communities or in non-alphabetic East Asian cultures knowing is more often achieved directly through the immediate engagement of tasks rather than through the acquisition of abstract written signs and symbols: learning by direct observation and doing is the order of the day. Consequently, there is little systematic documenting and reco...

The idea of knowledge-creation and knowledge management has become an important area of research in management studies. This preoccupation with the creation and accumulation of knowledge in its written form is underpinned by the epistemological priorities of a literally-based Western culture which takes such prior established knowledge as the only justifiable basis for effective action. Knowledge necessarily precedes action and performance. This metaphysical orientation precludes the possibility of attaining direct unmediated understanding through the ongoing perfecting of action. In predominantly non-literal cultures such as in East Asia, knowing is more often achieved directly through the immediate engagement of tasks rather than through the acquisition of linguistic signs and symbols. Consequently, there is little systematic documenting and accumulation of knowledge in the explicit written form that one finds in abundance in Western cultures. Yet this apparent lack has not prevent these predominantly non-literal cultures from achieving exceptional levels of performance and productivity both in leisure and business. This, in turn, suggests that the presumed route of knowledge creation-application-performance can actually be bypassed if effective action, and not justification, is what is ultimately sought. Performance often depends upon direct sustained application and not on the acquisition of written knowledge. The implication of this for understanding the world of business practice is explored here in some detail.

In this chapter we consider attention from an enactive-ecological perspective in which the organism-with-environment interdependencies that emerge in the process of living are fundamental and necessary for understanding cognition (Thompson 2010). While technological advances have often provided an impetus for empirical studies of attention, we propose, moreover, that such developments have enabled the facilitation of new highly participatory forms of musicking. In these types of technologically-mediated musical interactions, there is fertile ground for exploring attention within the types of organizational dynamics that emerge over time between group members within musical situations, especially those related to improvisation.

We propose three enactive-ecological themes that we develop in terms of three ranges of timescales of attention modulation. The purpose of the three themes and associated timescales is to provide a way of making distinctions and disentangling processes while doing justice to the complex interdependencies of organizational dynamics (Gahrn-Andersen et al. 2019). Firstly, we consider the notion of habit which affirms the interdependencies between organism and environment as a fundamentally embodied process of identity generation (James and Loaiza 2020). Secondly, we consider the role of attention within social interactivity, whereby attention can be said to emerge within the processes of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). Finally, we propose that while attention has often been articulated through ocularcentric metaphors of focus or illumination, a more fruitful approach might involve articulating the speed, strength, or amplification of such dynamics as a processual, non-static paradigm. Technologically-mediated musical practices, particularly ones which involve improvisational modes of playing, offer not only an environment in which these ideas can be studied, but also provide participatory and experiential platforms for interdisciplinary research (Hayes 2019).

We provide conceptual clues for one promising Artificial Life (ALife) route to Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on the notion of habit. We draw from an enactive approach that considers habits as the building blocks for mental life and, consequently, as the foundation for a science of mind. By taking this standpoint, this approach departs from the conventional view of intelligence in AI, which is based on "higher-order" cognitive functions. The first part of the paper addresses the idea of taking habits as the foundation for modeling intelligent behavior. This requires us to consider the so-called "scaling up" problem and rethink the concept of intelligence that still pervades in mainstream cognitive science. In the second part, we present the enactive approach to habits, emphasizing their adaptive and complex nature, as well as their fundamental role in guiding behavior. Finally, we acknowledge some limitations in the current enactive models of habits: either they are disembodied and decoupled, but allow for a rich landscape of attractors, or they are embodied and coupled, but remain too minimal. We propose a bridge between existing models and point to the need to go beyond the individual to include a social domain. We conclude that to better model intelligent behavior, embodied and situated agents must be capable of developing an increasingly complex network of habits from which an intelligent self emerges.

This is a shortened presentation version of a chapter published in Erik Champion (ed.), The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places (Routledge, 2018). It was presented in Honolulu, Hawaii, 2019 at the annual IAJP (International Association for Japanese Philosophy) conference.

Abstract: Kyoto School Philosophy on Place: Nishida and Ueda
Nishida Kitarō, the cofounder and central figure of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced.  Nishida’s second generation Kyoto School descendant and current representative of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru, furthered this concept to understand both place and implacement in terms of a twofold world or twofold horizon.  Nishida initially understood the self in its unobjectifiability as a kind of place wherein subject and object correlate.  But this placial self came to be seen as itself implaced within a contextualizing place wherein it can interact with things in the world and with other subjects in an “I-thou” relationship, but which ultimately is further implaced in an abyssal place of absolute nothing.  He developed this understanding of place in terms of the socio-historical world and ultimately in terms of the divinity that negates itself in kenōsis to make room for the world of many.  Roughly speaking and in a variety of versions, Nishida takes the system of places to involve the following: the place of beings or objects, the place that is consciousness, the place that is the world of human interactivity, and finally the place of absolute nothing.  Ueda on the other hand, focuses on the twofold structure of place itself as involving the twofold structure of the horizon of experience.  We are implaced in the world that in turn is implaced in a boundless openness.  Our place is twofold in that there is the world of significances on this side of its horizon and the a-meaning of the nothing beyond its horizon.  While Nishida formulates the system of places in terms of place of being, place of relative nothing, and place of absolute nothing, Ueda uses the fraction symbol as world/open expanse to convey his idea of “world amidst the open expanse.”  I will explore this legacy of place as Nishida first formulated it and then as developed more recently by Ueda. 
While doing so I will also discuss each of their relations to phenomenology.  Nishida was developing his theory of place cotemporaneous to the careers of Husserl and Heidegger.  While he was aware of their work, it was only to a limited extent and he was quite critical of both thinkers and phenomenology in general.  On the other hand, Ueda is quite knowledgeable of the phenomenological movement of Europe, having studied under Nishida’s student, Nishitani Keiji, who had studied under Heidegger and, himself, having studied in Germany.  He incorporates the insights of Husserl, Heidegger, Bollnow, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Eliade, and others, in developing his own understanding of place.  What both Nishida and Ueda offer vis-à-vis a phenomenology of place is a sophisticated analysis of that other to being that place as defined and limited must assume: what Nishida calls the absolute nothing (zettai mu) and what Ueda calls the open expanse (kokū).  I will then end by looking at the implications these ideas have for our current situation of globalization in the contemporary world.

What do we see, hear or sense? Do we experience the world around us as structured and rich with meaning or do we perceive it thinly in basic sensorial properties that are grasped and interpreted non-perceptually? Questions of this kind are in the center of the debate about the contents of perceptual experience. This begs a very fundamental yet surprisingly difficult question. What is perceptual experience? How it is to be described? How do these aspects of our experience relate to cognitive processes of our mind? Where is the line drawn between these, or more generally: is there a clear line to be drawn at all?

Nishida Kitarō's view of religion (shūkyō 宗 教), as both an epistemological standpoint and as an ontological category, can be read as a form of resistance against the totalizing functions of the secular as theorized within European modernity. Unlike European modernity, which positioned religion on the side of delusion and superstition, Nishida believes that the defining logic of religion, a logic of affirmation qua negation, constitutes the structure of historical creativity, and therefore, a necessary vector for personal and cultural transformation. What I will show in this paper is how Nishida problematizes the European notion of the secular as a universal category by putting forth a view of the global world that depends on the logic of religion for its development. Nishida argues that secularization within European history seeks to transcend religious traditions and heritages and to shift the historical world in the direction of scientific rationality. But in the drift towards secularism, as Nishida argues, is the foreclosure of religion as a mode of inquiry that could otherwise bring the particulars of the historical world into what he calls a 'world-historical standpoint' (sekaishiteki tachiba 世界 史的立場)-a global world where this is a proliferation of cultural, ethnic, and individual differences that exist dialogically, without any consolidated core or center. The implication of Nishida's critique of the secular standpoint is that if religion remains subordinate to the secular in a global world, then there is no possibility for this unity-in-diversity, there is only the de facto universalization of European categories and logic, which can set the stage for another cycle of European colonialism.

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal inter-identities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilize and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency toward an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realize relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending toward a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them.

We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the 'social mind' is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached 'social cognition' (conceived as a process of theorizing about and/or simulating another mind) is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of 'social interaction' in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory (IT) could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research.

Two major philosophers from the first half of twentieth century for whom the nothing is a significant ontological issue are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger.  Nishida's basic concept is the absolute nothing (zettai mu) upon which the being of all is predicated.  Heidegger, on the other hand, while known as the thinker of being par excellence, thematizes the nothing (Nichts) as an ulterior aspect of being.  Both are responding to the tradition of Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real.  However, ever since Nishida's reduction of West and East as cultures of form and formlessness, nothing and being, and his critique of Heidegger for the objectification or abstraction of fact, Nishida's Kyoto School descendants have had an ambiguous relationship with Heidegger's thought, mixing fascination for his ontology and dissatisfaction with his treatment of the nothing.  Yet neither Nishida nor those Kyoto School critics of Heidegger appear to have been familiar with Heidegger's later works.  In this presentation, I thus compare and assess Nishida's and Heidegger's discussions of the nothing by examining their oeuvre as a whole. 
Both thinkers are striving to express what is fundamental and must be assumed by the ontic.  A misunderstanding may arise in how one understands what Heidegger-as the thinker of being-means by "being" (Sein, Seyn).  Yet his position approaches that of the Kyoto School in his own reluctance concerning the very use of this term (e.g., crossed-out Sein) and his characterization of it as "nothing" (Nichts).  Neither Nishida nor Heidegger means by "nothing" a literal nothing, but rather that which permits beings in their relative determinacy to be what they are and wherein or whereby we find ourselves always already in our comportments to them.  Both Heidegger and Nishida seem to have in mind something like a context that that must be assumed in the background of the foreground of beings-a ground, however, that is unstable and hence, an unground.  Nishida characterizes that ultimate context wherein everything is implaced as a place of absolute nothing (zettai mu no basho) that negates itself to give rise to, or make room for, beings.  For Heidegger, being as an event (Ereignis) that clears room for beings, releasing each into its own, is not a thing, a nothing (Nichts).  Perhaps a distinction here is that in Nishida the emphasis is on the place itself wherein beings arise, whereas in Heidegger the emphasis is on the event that clears room for beings.  On the other hand neither does Nishida ignore the dynamism involved in place in its self-negation and creativity nor does Heidegger ignore the placiality of the event that he characterizes in terms of the open and a topology.  Nevertheless, we may contrast and assess the thinkers on the basis of a more evident distinction in the language they employ in discussing the nothing.  Yet each, in their distinct ways, seemed to have had an intuitive grasp of an un/ground, foundational to the human experience and being and permitting such differences.

This chapter explores ‘presence’ in performance as a quality that is both aesthetic and morally relevant. The claim is that ‘presence’ is an important element in relating to others and relevant to relating ethically. Drawing on ‘the enactive process’ from perceptual and cognitive studies, ethics is conceived of as a process in which we humans ‘enact’ both the world, and ourselves as moral beings. Zarrilli applies this approach in working with actors to train them to bring an embodied sense and their full attention to their performance task. He relates this to ‘presence’ as it is experienced by the audience (although not as a quality that an actor should strive for). In parallel, ethics is conceived of as practices that involve bringing attention, acumen and skill to an interaction with another person. A review of a performance by Martina Abramović is discussed as an example of a (potentially) transformative and ethically relevant power of ‘presence’ as so enacted. Also discussed is the place of affect in relation to ‘presence’ and the importance of affect in ethics. Woven together these threads present a conception of ethics as creative and retaining the aliveness of performance. It is an approach that opens to enacting moral ideals in life as contrasted with a more minimal approach of fulfilling one’s moral obligations.

In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines 'autonomy'. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved.

Nishida Kitarō (1870–945), a prominent Japanese philosopher linked to the Kyoto School, produced a massive body of scholarship whose themes and ideas were shaped by a broad stream of cultural-intellectual influences from Aristotle to Nāgārjuna to Hegel and Marx. Prior to the publication of five essays in two volumes in 2012, a limited sample of his work was available in English. While Nishida’s life works were quite eclectic and wide-ranging, these recently translated essays give particular attention to his conceptual understanding of dialectics, the individual, society, and social transformation. Working with these essays, our aim is to demonstrate the rich potential for adapting elements of Nishida’s dialectical-conceptual analysis of society and social transformation for the analysis of North-South relationships in general and the roles of individuals across the global South as local agents of social transformation in particular. To this end, we first examine several key concepts driving Nishida’s analysis, before applying these to our consideration of a 2010 Mozambican food riot.

Agency detection is studied in a simple simulated model with embodied agents. Psychological experiments such as double TV-monitor experiments and perceptual crossing show the central role of dynamic mutuality and contingency in social interactions. This paper explores the ongoing dynamical aspects of minimal agency detection in terms of the mutuality and contingency. It is investigated how the embodied agents can establish a live interaction and discriminate this from interactions from recorded motions that are identical to the live interaction but cannot react contingently. Our results suggest that the recognition of the presence of another's agency need not lie on complex cognitive individual mechanisms able to integrate past information, but rather on the situated ongoingness of the interaction process itself, on its dynamic properties, and its robustness to noise.

Rutgers Philosopher Peter Kivy maintains that there is only one foundational kind of meaning: the meaning that we convey in the shared kind of intellect-mediated symbolism that we call 'language'. But, it is precisely by lacking this reductively intellectual version of a truth-function that human's musical perception and production is a power that explicitly—yes, explicitly—admits of human, terrestrial, ecological, physical, and cosmic mystery. This a mystery in the sense to which we animal creatures (plant/animal/mineral), and especially we humans, are at once subordinate to, and participant in, a power, and a knowledge-source, which is infinitely greater than that of whatever amount and depth of knowledge and power that we humans may, at a given point, attain.

Kivy argues against musical meaning on grounds that propositional meaning is the province of shared language. I argue that the logical possibility of linguistic meaning, and thus of language as a personal and social good, is afforded by intellectual and motivational empathy, both for self and others. Language, in its merely quasi-philosophic denotative function of ‘meaning’, is not empathic, nor particularly affective---which is why the vast bulk of most instances of most spoken languages can effectively, if not so conveniently, be conducted purely in monotone, or the ‘robot voice’ of Computer in the original Star Trek TV series. But, it is for reasons of the greater efficiency in communication afforded that we put elements of human sonic affect in our speech production and perception. This is because we are not intellects to which biological senses are merely tacked. On the contrary, any intellect that can possibly know anything must be an intellect that is itself based on natural, intuitive, emotional, even visceral, 'subjective' knowledge. If an intellect was purely void of such natural knowledge, that intellect would be an  indifferent Blank Slate incapable of any sense of genuine value; It would be an intellect in name only, with no functions, because it would be incapable of evaluating real things. Human sonic affect, or musical perception of sounds, is a real thing. And given humans' capacity and drive for artifactive production, humans refine their bio-sonic-affective artifacts into its own realm of activity-perception, especially in the form of human artefactual musics, or 'music'.

So, on logical and etymological grounds, I show that shared language is the province of the meanings we persons have in any case, not in shared language itself as a special entity or action.

Kivy, in contrast to this, argues as if text is the standard of language, and as if culturally persistent speech acts, such as plays, are more foundationally linguistic than is basic, live, personally originative linguistic interaction. This reversal of the natural priority of meaning fails to treat language as the denotative, and socially mediated, act that it is. The instances of speech in a conversation are mediative forms for what those persons’ have in mind: their meanings. This is the origin of the very term 'meaning': 'That which oneself, or another, has in mind'. So the reversal here leads to reasoning as if the meaning in a given instance of language more foundationally inheres in a given instance of language, apart from its author, than in its author!

So I argue that our meanings originate in, and never actually exist outside of, our persons and how we relate to our physical external world and to each other as persons. The idea that the mere empirical forms of language are what possess meaning is, at best, a projection of our own internal meanings. Therefore, our reference merely to language’s ‘possession’ of meaning is, at best, a linguistic and neuro-cognitive convenience and manner of expression, or is the use of the term ‘language’ to denote a type of 'extended' cognition.

I demonstrate that a preference for the empirical forms of language as denoting meaning, over a holistic sensitivity to our inter-subjectivity, not only falsely renders music meaningless, but undercuts the effectiveness of language itself both as an innate tool of personal valuation and reasoning and as a social means of realizing, creating, and developing meaning.

Cognitive neuroscience has been driven by the idea that by reductionist analysis of mechanisms within a solitary brain one can best understand how the human mind is constituted and what its nature is. The brain thus came to appear as the creator of the mind and the experienced world. In contrast, the paper argues for an ecological view of mind and brain as both being embedded in the relation of the living organism and its environment. This approach is crucially dependent on a developmental perspective: the brain is conceived as a plastic system of open loops that are formed in the process of life and closed to full functional cycles in every interaction with the environment. Each time a new disposition of coherent neural activity is formed through repeated experience, structures of the mind are imprinted onto the brain. The brain becomes a mediating organ or a window to the mind, for it is structured by the mind itself.

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavily weighted terms such as intentionality, rationality, or mind. However, most of the available definitions of agency are too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific research program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: (a) a system must define its own individuality, (b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry), and (c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable of meeting the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook for the road that lies ahead in the pursuit of understanding, modeling, and synthesizing agents.

This essay by Nishida Kitarō from 1927, translated into English here for the first time, is from the initial period of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku), when Nishida was first developing his conception of “place” (basho). Nishida here inquires into the relationship between logic and consciousness in terms of place and implacement in order to overcome the shortcomings of previous philosophical attempts—from the ancient Greeks to the moderns—to dualistically conceive the relationship between being and knowing in terms of subject-object or form-matter. During the course of articulating his novel approach to consciousness and cognition, Nishida discusses what he takes to be the weaknesses of Greek hylomorphism, Kantian (and neo-Kantian) dualism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Dissatisfied with the attribution of mere passivity to placiality, and turning away from consciousness objectified as a subject of statement, Nishida imparts to consciousness qua place a certain logical independence as an active yet un-objectifiable “predicate.” This investigation of consciousness as the unobjectifiable place for objectification leads Nishida to the notion of what precedes consciousness itself, a “place of nothing” (mu no basho) that envelops the dichotomized structures of subject-predicate, being-nothing, subject-object, universal-particular, et cetera.

This paper brings into relief the hallmark characteristics of Nishida’s philosophy by tracing the transformations his initial stand of “pure experience” came to undergo through his endeavors, spanning over 30 years, to provide it with logical and historical dimensions, which resulted in such seminal notions as “logic of place” and “acting-intuition.” In order to draw out their educational implications in terms of Nishida’s persistent search for the “true self,” we take into consideration, at first, the significance of Nishida’s Buddhist background for his initial encounter with James’s philosophy, and secondly the distinctive features of the later Nishida’s thoughts in contrast to the basic tenets of Jamesian radical empiricism characterized by its emphatic advocacy of pluralism as well as other related thoughts such as James Gibson’s ecological psychology.

An inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behaviour of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself. We illustrate this position with examples drawn from phenomenological observations and dynamical systems models. On the basis of these examples we discuss some of the implications of this inter-enactive approach to agency for our understanding of social phenomena in a broader sense, and how the interenactive account provided here has to be taken alongside a theory of largerscale social processes.

Sato and colleagues make use of an innovative method that combines robotics modeling and psychological experimentation to investigate how tool use affects our living and lived embodiment. I situate their approach in a general shift from robotics to human-computer interface studies in enactive cognitive science, and speculate about the necessary conditions for the bodily incorporation of tools.

The enactive approach to cognitive science aims to provide an account of the mind that is both naturalistic and nonreductive. Psychological activity is viewed not as occurring within the individual organism but in the engagement between the motivated autonomous agent and their context (including their social context). The approach has been developing within the fields of philosophy, artificial life, and computational biology for the past two decades and is now growing within the domain of psychology more generally. In this short paper we outline the conceptual framework of the enactive approach. Illustrative research questions and methods for investigation are also broached, including some existing examples from theoretical, behavioral, and computational modeling research. It is suggested that an enactive psychology provides the basis for the conceptual framework of the enactive approach.

Keywords: enactive approach, enaction, unifying psychology, theory of psychology, perception-action systems

It has been argued that the worldwide prevalence of certain types of geometric visual patterns found in prehistoric art can be best explained by the common experience of these patterns as geometric hallucinations during altered states of consciousness induced by shamanic ritual practices. And in turn the worldwide prevalence of these types of hallucinations has been explained by appealing to humanity’s shared neurobiological embodiment. Moreover, it has been proposed that neural network activity can exhibit similar types of spatiotemporal patterns, especially those caused by Turing instabilities under disinhibited, non-ordinary conditions. Altered states of consciousness thus provide a suitable pivot point from which to investigate the complex relationships between symbolic material culture, first-person experience, and neurobiology. We critique prominent theories of these relationships. Drawing inspiration from neurophenomenology, we sketch the beginnings of an alternative, enactive approach centered on the concepts of sense-making, value, and sensorimotor decoupling.

In this paper, I argue that later Nishida's analysis of self-awareness (jikaku) provides a new perspective on the nature of self-awareness as understood in the philosophical literature today. I argue that the contemporary literature deals with two kinds of self-awareness; the higher-order theory understands self-awareness to be an objectified awareness and the phenomenological tradition generally understands self-awareness to be, at least primarily, a non-objectified awareness. In light of this, I first give an account of Nishida's ‘acting-intuition’ with reference to the ‘historical body.’ Then I argue that later Nishida's analysis of self-awareness depicts the inadequacy of the two kinds of self-awareness as both being stuck in the subject-object dichotomy which, according to Nishida, is but one mode of experience, namely the mode of difference. Nishida provides an account that ultimately foregrounds the experiential mode of unity that negates any sense of differentiation between the subject and object.

We introduce a series of evolutionary robotics simulations that address the behaviour of individuals in socially contingent interactions. The models are based on a recent study by Auvray, on tactile perceptual crossing in a minimal virtual environment. In accordance, both the empirical experiments and our simulations point out the essential character of global embodied interaction dynamics for the sensitivity to contingency to arise. Rather than being individually perceived by any of the interactors, sensitivity to contingency arises from processes of circular causality that characterise the collective dynamics. Such global dynamical aspects are frequently neglected when studying social cognition. Furthermore, our synthetic studies point out interesting aspects of the task that are not immediately obvious in the empirical data. They, in addition, generate new hypotheses for further experiments. We conclude by promoting a minimal but tractable, dynamic and embodied account to social interaction, combining synthetic and empirical findings as well as concrete predictions regarding sensorimotor strategies, the role of time-delays and robustness to perturbations in interactive dynamics.

We report on a set of minimalist modeling experiments that extends previous work on the dynamics of social interaction. We used an evolutionary robotics approach to fine-tune the design of a recent psychological experiment, as well as to synthesize a solution that gives clues about how humans might perform under these novel conditions. In this manner we were able to generate a number of hypotheses that are open to verification by future experiments in social psychology. In particular, the results indicate some of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on social factors for solving behavioral tasks.

A recent study by Cunningham et al. (Cunningham et al., 2001, Psychological Science, 12, p. 532) has shown that human subjects adapt to delayed visual feedback in a visuomotor task both behaviourally and experientially, i.e., the behaviour is altered in such a way that successful performance on the task relies on the presence of a visual delay (negative after-effect) and that the experience of simultaneity is re-adjusted to incorporate the visual delay. This adaptation effect is similar to those observed in experiments with visual displacements, but contrasts with earlier experiments with sensory delays, in which no such adaptation occurred (e.g., Smith and Smith, 1962, Perception and Motion, Saunders).

This essay by Nishida Kitarō from 1927, translated into English here for the first time, is from the initial period of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku), when Nishida was first developing his conception of “place” (basho). Nishida here inquires into the relationship between logic and consciousness in terms of place and implacement in order to overcome the shortcomings of previous philosophical attempts—from the ancient Greeks to the moderns—to dualistically conceive the relationship between being and knowing in terms of subject-object or form-matter. During the course of articulating his novel approach to consciousness and cognition, Nishida discusses what he takes to be the weaknesses of Greek hylomorphism, Kantian (and neo-Kantian) dualism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Dissatisfied with the attribution of mere passivity to placiality, and turning away from consciousness objectified as a subject of statement, Nishida imparts to consciousness qua place a certain logical independence as an active yet un-objectifiable “predicate.” This investigation of consciousness as the unobjectifiable place for objectification leads Nishida to the notion of what precedes consciousness itself, a “place of nothing” (mu no basho) that envelops the dichotomized structures of subject-predicate, being-nothing, subject-object, universal-particular, et cetera.