8.9 The Organism Enacts Its World
Cognition is not the processing of representations inside a passive receiver but the enactment of a world, organism and environment co-arising through active engagement, so that even a bacterium swimming toward a chemical gradient is not following a rule but making a world in which that gradient matters.
Cognition is not passive reception. The organism and its environment co-arise.
Proto
Evan Thompson’s[thompson] enactivism, building on Maturana and Varela[maturana-2]: cognition is not the processing of representations of an external world inside a passive receiver. It is the enactment of a world, the organism and its environment co-arising through active engagement.
