Cybernetics, Computationalism, and Enactivism: Lessons from a Forgotten Past
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Date
2016
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Abstract
This chapter describes the development of enactivist thought from its cybernetic origins, via the autopoietic theory of the Chilean cyberneticist Humberto Maturana. It explores this analysis is twofold: firstly, to illustrate that many of the ideas central to enactivism need not necessarily entail an opposition to computational characterisations of cognition; and secondly, to identify exactly how and why enactivism came to be seen as an anti-computationalist tradition. The chapter introduces enactivism and computationalism, and explains why the traditions are usually seen as being opposed to one another. It discusses the respective origins of the several traditions in the cybernetic notions of biological homeostasis and neural computation. The chapter reviews the basic details of both computationalism and enactivism, before outlining the reasons enactivism gives for rejecting computationalism. The computational theory of mind developed out of work associated with cybernetics, but it was given its first proper philosophical articulation by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam in the 1960s.
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Keywords
modern, contemporary, cognitive science, computers
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Downstream publication: Dewhurst, Joe. (2019) "The cybernetic origins of enactivism and computationalism." The Past, Present, and Future of Integrated History and Philosophy of Science.