Ezequiel Di Paolo IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, Dept. of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country - UPV/EHU, San Sebastian, Spain Abstract: Dualisms have a way of creeping up on us. One particular form of dualism has found its way into theories of biological organisation. It is similar to that found in transcendental phenomenology and various other disciplines. It is the dualism that radically separates the constitutive and interactive domains of an agent. On the one hand we have the sphere of constructive processes that make up a living system (or analogously in phenomenology, the sphere of immanence) and on the other the relational domain of the agent's interactions with the world, the domain of cognition proper (phenomenologically the domain of intentionality). It is not the drawing of this distinction that is problematic, but its radical interpretation. What an agent is and what it does are phenomena that must indeed be spoken about with different vocabulary (the subpersonal and personal domains). Otherwise, we fall back into the non-distinction of functionalism and its inexhaustible wellspring of mereological fallacies and homuncular variations. Unlike functionalism, enactivism follows the conceptual boundary between constitution and interaction, in order to be able to clearly define such terms as agency, behaviour, sense-making, interaction and mind. So where is the dualism? It is in how we conceive of the epistemic traffic across this conceptual boundary. Traditional autopoiesis, like Husserlian phenomenology, has seen the two domains as non-communicating: a closed borders policy that invites a myriad of paradoxes. This is the anti-thesis of functionalist non-distinction. Enactivism see the domains as non-reducible to each other, but not as explanatorily disconnected. As dynamical systems analyses allow for a wide range of explanatory and conditioning relations between dynamical phenomena (contextual interventionist causality, lawful co-variations, dynamical constraints, enabling relations, etc.) it has become clear that the interactive and constitutive domains of an organism can indeed relate in complex ways while remaining under-determined by each other. There is a border, and there's traffic through it. The enactive body is not merely the autopoietic organism but the history of incorporation of its relational habits back into itself. This allows constitutive process (e.g., physiology, neural activity) to change so as to eventually depend on interactions with the world and with others to achieve autonomous closure. Enactivism is thus the synthetic move between functionalism and dualistic ontologies that forever separate interaction and constitution. It is the not-one and not-two. At II Workshop ReteCog INTERACTION Zaragoza, 17-18 January 2013

• published: 06 Apr 2015
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