Thomas Fuchs. Ecology of the Brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind
—

«1. According to the enactive approach, living beings generally do not passively receive information from their environment which they then translate into internal representations. Rather, they constitute or enact their world through a process of sense-making (Varela et al. 1991, Thompson 2007, Di Paolo 2009): by actively searching and probing the environment for relevant cues—moving their head and eyes, touching a surface, walking towards a goal, grasping a fruit, etc.—they make sense of their surroundings. In other words, they constitute their experienced world or Umwelt (von Uexküll 1920) through their ongoing sensorimotor interaction and embodied coping with the environment.

2. In addition, through their social interactions and implicit relation to others, human beings are able to transcend their primary perspective and gain access to a shared, objective reality. From early childhood on, experiences of joint attention, pointing towards objects, shared reference to situations, mutual understanding, and cooperative practice result in a participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007). In this way, a shared reality is constituted, which becomes an implicit part of our relation to the world. This is why we perceive a given experiential object as transcending its momentary appearance: it could also be seen by others. The objects are not only there “for me”: even Robinson Crusoe on his island always perceived his surroundings “with others’ eyes,” already before Friday appeared on the scene. This is also what enables us to see things as such, objectively, or in independence from our momentary perception. For objectivity ultimately indicates that the objects are experienced as intersubjectively accessible, in the co-presence of possible other subjects, or “as actually there for everyone” (Husserl 1960, 91). Human reality is therefore always co-constituted or, as we might say, “interenacted.”»