Contribution
The paper corrects a taxonomy its own author helped spread (Ward, Silverman & Villalobos 2017). It separates two questions usually run together. One is where the processes underlying cognition are: in the skull, or across brain, body and world. The other is what the meaning of mental states fundamentally depends on: informational properties, or organizational properties distinctive of living things. On the second question the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson & Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (TEM) is organicist. Most other “embodied” views are not. Two further commitments, experiential primacy and reciprocity, set it apart from other organicist views as well.
Key insight
“Embodied” is not the same as “organic”. A view can put cognition in brain–body–world loops and still hold that those loops matter only because of the information they carry. Ward places embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism, cybernetics and most ecological psychology there. Enactivism, by contrast, holds that information processing is meaningful “only in virtue of” its inherence in living activity (§5). The sensorimotor slogan that gave enactivism its usual definition is, on this reading, TEM’s least distinctive commitment.
Assumptions
- TEM is the reference text. Enactivism means the view of TEM as developed by Varela, Thompson and Di Paolo. Ward stipulates that “enactivism” unqualified will mean views combining continuity, primacy and reciprocity (§1).
- “Fundamental dependence” can be weak. The organicist/informationalist split is about what the meaning of mental states “fundamentally depends on”. A methodological reading, that good explanation must appeal to organizational properties distinctive of living things, is enough: “The weaker reading is necessary and sufficient for membership of the ‘organicist’ grouping” (§3). The metaphysical reading is “an optional add-on”.
- Distinctive, not merely characteristic. Organicism requires properties that set living things apart from inorganic nature. Features found in both, such as feedback loops, do not count (§§3–4).
- Information is meant broadly. Informationalism covers any view that treats cognition as processing of, or dealing with, information, and takes information to be precise enough to bear the theory’s weight (§3).
Key results
The paper argues; it reports no data. By section:
- §§1–2, the lump-and-split taxonomy. Enactivism became one branch of an anti-cognitivist “embodied cognition”, defined by “cognition emerges from sensorimotor activity” (Shapiro & Spaulding 2025). Footnote 3 traces this to TEM’s own “nutshell” on p. 173, which Ward calls “a poor nutshell definition of enactivism” when read out of context.
- §3, the second axis. Informationalists hold that the meaning of mental states depends on informational properties; organicists hold that it depends on organizational properties distinctive of living things. The axis is “orthogonal” to the cognitivist–embodied one.
- §4, sorting the views (Figure 1).
- Embodied predictive processing is informationalist: bodily and worldly factors “are important only insofar as they help implement the hierarchical pattern of information flow upon which cognition ultimately depends”.
- Cybernetic views appeal to feedback cycles “found throughout organic and inorganic nature, cycles which can just as well be implemented by non-living systems like autonomous drones, or suitably constituted and embedded LLMs”. Those properties are “characteristic rather than distinctive of living systems”, so these views are not organicist.
- Basal cognition and ecological psychology are split: organicist only where biological self-maintenance, not information processing, is “in the explanatory driving seat”.
- Footnote 6: biological naturalism of the kind that says consciousness depends on computations only an organic substrate can implement (Milinkovic & Aru 2026; Seth 2026) is not thereby organicist. “Such views tend to see biological properties as relevant only as implementations of the computational properties that remain in the explanatory driving seat”.
- §5, continuity. The bacterium swimming up a sugar gradient: a self-producing network whose activity is oriented to keeping itself going, so that sugar has “an organism-relative meaning”. From Thompson & Stapleton: “cognition is grounded on the sense-making activity of autonomous agents”. Ward grants that “Just how and whether this crucial argument for life/mind continuity works is complex and controversial”.
- §6, primacy and reciprocity. Lived experience is both the primary explanandum and the evidential base. But experience is not a fixed point: “the structure of the lived experience that we are trying to understand is malleable and shaped by whatever contingent and evolving cultural apparatus for making sense of things currently surrounds us”. Scientific concepts are part of that apparatus. The illustration is meditation: TEM’s revised introduction prefers a reading on which “mindfulness practices should be understood as skillful ways of enacting certain kinds of embodied states and behaviors in the world, not as inner observation of an observer-independent mental stream”. Hence “Reports of mindfulness practitioners should be taken not as privileged insights into primal experiential truths”. Ward is explicit that whether enactivists are right that informationalism leaves a gap “is not something I aim to establish here”.
- §7, payoffs. Enactivism is both a research programme and a philosophy of nature, and blurs the line between them. It does not ban informational or representational explanation: TEM grants “the need for a symbolic level” while calling such descriptions approximate. Its own claims about minimal subjectivity “are not immutable truths but partial perspectives”. The conclusion: “The lesson is not that informationalism is wrong, or to be unequivocally discarded; it is that it is partial”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The organicist/informationalist axis is orthogonal to the cognitivist/embodied axis | moderate: argued by placing examples in all four quadrants, with the lower-left nearly empty (fn. 6) | §§3–4, Figure 1 |
| C2 | TEM’s enactivism is organicist; most other embodied views, including predictive processing, are informationalist or agnostic | moderate as a reading of the texts; the placement of individual theorists is often indeterminate, as Ward says | §§4–5 |
| C3 | What distinguishes enactivism is continuity, primacy and reciprocity, not sensorimotor emphasis | moderate as exegesis of TEM and Thompson; contestable as a definition | §§1, 5–6; fn. 3 |
| C4 | Lived experience is reshaped by the conceptual vocabularies used to describe it, including scientific ones | weak: asserted as an enactivist commitment, illustrated, not argued | §6 |
| C5 | Life–mind continuity holds: minimal cognition depends on organizational properties distinctive of the living | not argued here; Ward calls the argument “complex and controversial” | §5 |
| C6 | Enactivism offers a needed alternative to informationalism | weak: offered as a payoff conditional on enactivists being right | §7 |
Concepts
- Lump-and-split taxonomy: lumping views that stress embodied sensorimotor interaction as “enactivism”, then splitting them into autopoietic, sensorimotor and radical variants (§1).
- Informationalism: the meaning of mental states depends on informational properties, and “information” can be made precise enough to bear the theory (§3).
- Organicism: the meaning of mental states depends on organizational properties distinctive of living things, at least as a methodological requirement on explanation (§3).
- Characteristic versus distinctive: properties living things have and the inorganic also has, against properties only living things have (§§3–4).
- Life–mind continuity, experiential primacy, reciprocity: the three commitments Ward takes to define enactivism (§1).
- Sense-making: the generation of organism-relative meaning by the integrated activity of a self-maintaining system (§5).
Connections
The paper reads TEM (1991; revised edition 2017) through Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007), Waking, Dreaming, Being (2014) and The Blind Spot (Frank, Gleiser & Thompson 2024), and Di Paolo’s work on adaptivity and sense-making. It sets enactivism against Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism, Noë’s and O’Regan’s sensorimotor views, Clark’s and Seth’s predictive processing, Gibsonian ecological psychology and Lyon’s basal cognition. It names Villalobos (2013) among cyberneticists hostile to informational talk, and Villalobos co-wrote the 2017 taxonomy Ward now disowns. The record holds none of these, apart from Seth’s work: Seth 2014 and 2021 are placed on the informationalist side, which bears on the record’s Seth readings (LIT-1263; LIT-135).
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-413 (grounding is a relation, apart from occurrence). The exchange cited this paper for life–mind continuity and the primacy of experience, and drew from it the enactive challenge to the claim: that an organization can be held without current input does not show it could arise without an embodied history. The paper does not make that argument. It does not discuss brains in vats, development, grounding, or experience without current input. The challenge is the exchange’s inference from the enactive view, and should be cited as such. Read on its own, the paper’s objection to the record lies elsewhere. The claim keeps the developmental question open and says so, which the paper cannot fault. What the paper would contest is the claim’s other half: that what makes an interpretive organization experiential need not be what grounds it. For an enactivist, meaning, and with it experience, depends on the organization’s inherence in a living self-maintaining system (§5), not on its informational structure.
- CLAIM-412 and TERM-073 (interpretation as organization of information). On Ward’s map the constitutive thesis is informationalist. TERM-073 defines interpretation as differentiating information within an operative organization, and A7 separated the thesis from any requirement of biology. That puts the thesis with predictive processing and cybernetics, and against enactivism, however much it speaks of organization. The cut is sharpened by TERM-072: self-maintenance was withdrawn as a necessary mark of perspective, which is the step an organicist would refuse. The paper does not show the organicist is right (§6), so this locates the record’s thesis rather than refuting it.
- Reciprocity as a constitution claim. One strand runs the other way. Ward holds that the vocabularies we use to understand ourselves “pre- and re-shape the experiences themselves” (§1, developed in §6). That is a claim that interpretation partly constitutes the character of experience, at the level of culture rather than of a single system’s processing. It is closer to CLAIM-412’s direction than the exchange’s use of the paper suggests, though it is asserted, not argued.
- QUESTION-254. Ward’s distinctive/characteristic distinction is a ready test for any proposed answer. A condition that drones or “suitably constituted and embedded LLMs” could meet is, for the enactivist, characteristic of life and not distinctive, and so cannot be what makes meaning. The question’s own constraint, that the separation must not be drawn from the verdict on machines, cuts against that test too.
- The meditation readings (LIT-1354, LIT-1351). §6’s reading of contemplative reports, as enacted within a tradition’s vocabulary and not as observation of a fixed inner stream, bears on both. Woods, Windt & Carter code teachers’ descriptions, and Chandia-Jorquera et al. give participants a scale with its top defined as “free from content”. On Ward’s view neither reaches an experience prior to its description.
- THEORY-767 and the Seth line. Ward’s footnote 6 places Seth’s biological naturalism on the informationalist side. The record’s interoceptive-inference reading (THEORY-767; LIT-1263) is, on this taxonomy, embodied but not enactive.
- THEORY filed. THEORY-874 states the taxonomy, as Proposed.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- A taxonomic and exegetical paper. It argues for a way of carving the field and for what TEM meant. It does not argue that organicism is true, and says so (§6).
- The placements are rough. Ward says the partition does not yield “a neat and unequivocal sorting” (§4), and many theorists leave their stance indeterminate.
- Life–mind continuity is described, not defended. The argument is “one way it can be sketched”, and its critics are cited, not answered (§5).
- Reciprocity, the paper’s most striking commitment, is illustrated by the history of TEM’s readings of Buddhism, not by evidence that vocabularies change experience.
- Read in the accepted manuscript, without page numbers.
Open questions
- What would show that a property is distinctive of life rather than characteristic of it? Without a criterion, the organicist line can be redrawn whenever a non-living system meets the last one.
- Can the weak, methodological organicism make any claim about which systems have minds or experience, or only about how to explain the ones that do?
- Is reciprocity testable: does adopting a vocabulary change experience, or only reports of it? The meditation literature (LIT-1351) is one place to look.
- Where does a self-maintaining but non-living system, an organizational closure built in silico, fall on the axis?