How an organism emerges and sets apart from the rest of the environment? How it doesn’t lose its integrity and fade away? — In the previous posts we pointed out the difficulties of finding a fully coherent explanation for emerging unity, autonomy and agency of biological systems — conditions for any form of cognition — in order to sketch out a dynamical model of self-organization, set up upon the naturalistic foundation of autopoietic…

Are organsms self-governed system? Do they produce and follow their own rules? — In the first part of the article, in reference to interaction and selective coupling of autopoietic systems in their environment, we compared two different understandings of autonomy: a strictly biological-material conception of autonomy, endorsed by Autopoietic Theory initiators, and a relational sensorimotor notion of autonomy implied in Enactivism. …

Cognition is believed to derive from the emergence of autonomy in physical systems. But what actually is autonomy? — In the previous article we outlined the origin of the idea of cognition as embedded and embodied, highlighting the general line of continuity between autopoietic theory (AT) and its enactive reinterpretation (EN). However, the most interesting aspects on this matter are those related to the differences and frictions between the…

The autopoietic roots of embedded and embodied cognition — According to the 4E approach, cognition cannot be explained as merely realised by the neural activity of the brain, but since cognitive states and processes are interdependent on the rest of the body and the environment outside the body, cognition should be regarded as embedded and embodied — while acknowledging…

With the 4E approach, the “representation war” goes from being an ontological issue to an epistemological debate. — Through the issue of mental representation addressed in the previous article, it is possible to get a first idea about the theoretical discontinuity between traditional cognitive science and more recent approaches gathered under the umbrella of so-called 4E Cognition. …

New approaches in cognitive science are finally overcoming the restless debate about representation in human cognition. We retrace the evolution of the concept of mental representation until the current reappraisal of its centrality. Traditional cognitive science, in which the classical cognitivist paradigm and the more recent connectionism have been predominant…