Enacting Life

Enacting Life is a freely available set of online readings by Peter J. Marshall about living organization, cognition, and meaning. What follows from being a living thing that must continually produce and maintain itself? How do aspects of the world become significant for an organism, and what does this mean for understanding perception, knowing, and action?

These questions grew out of my teaching and research in psychology and neuroscience. The readings draw on biology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, following a line of thought that began with the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and became one important strand of enactivism. They are organized into four readings and a coda.

Embodiment and Enactivism

What does embodiment mean beyond having a physical body? This reading introduces Maturana and Varela’s ideas about how living things produce and maintain themselves while remaining dependent on their surroundings. It then considers how later enactivists connect living organization with sense-making and agency.

Enacting Worlds

Different organisms share a physical world, but what becomes food, shelter, or danger depends on how each lives. This reading explores how meaningful environments arise through relations between living things and their surroundings. Drawing on Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt and later enactivist accounts of sense-making, it asks what studying another animal’s senses and behavior can tell us about its world, and what remains beyond our access.

Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience

How does explaining the operation of a nervous system relate to understanding what an organism is doing? Maturana’s work on vision provides a starting point for examining perception and knowing. The reading also considers his account of language and the role of observers in describing and explaining living activity.

What Makes Living Things Different?

Machines can respond to changing conditions and pursue goals. What, then, is distinctive about living activity? This reading explores how the need to maintain a living organization bears on agency and perspective. It also considers development: how each generation builds a viable way of life using resources and relations inherited from earlier generations.

Coda: AI and Human Sense-Making

Language models raise questions about the relations among embodiment, language, and understanding. The coda considers what their abilities give us reason to reconsider, and how exchanges with AI can change what people understand, what matters to them, and what they become able to do.

Start with Embodiment and Enactivism. A short reading guide suggests where to go further.

For a complementary account of how living beings develop, see About Development.

For background on the readings and their preparation, see the Preface.