“Enactivism without autonomy?” – IAS-Research Seminar by Xabier E. Barandiaran


Date and time: 24th November 2014, at 12.00
Location: Carlos Santamaria Building, Room B14.
Speaker: Xabier E. Barandiaran
Title: Enactivism without autonomy? What went wrong at the roots of enactivism and how we should recover the autonomous foundations of sensorimotor agency.
Abstract: Different varieties of enactivism struggle to fill the empty throne after the long reign of representational cognitivism. And the notion of autonomy is one of the central claims under dispute within the different enactivist research programmes, despite the central role that it played on the early enactivist foundations. It is the very autonomy of enactivism itself what is at stake here, if it doesn’t want to be integrated back into a reformed version of representational cognitivism or subsumed under new forms of behaviourism. In this work I will show why autonomy is a necessary component of the enactive programme, I shall clarify some foundational misunderstandings or conceptual obstacles that have made autonomy a difficult notion to assume for some sensorimotor enactive approaches and, finally, I will propose to introduce autonomy back at the roots of enactivism through the notion of habit and sensorimotor agency.
Extended abstract: Enactivism without Autonomy? What went wrong at the roots of enactivism and how we should recover the autonomous foundations of sensorimotor agency.

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Xabier Barandiaran

About Xabier Barandiaran

I consider myself a situated and embodied philosopher, which means that I situate my philosophical practice in close interaction with scientific environments and embodied in the conceptual apparatus that emerges from this interplay. The sciences on which I feel embedded are those meeting in the multidisciplinary crossroad of cognitive sciences and artificial life: particularly the origins of agency, simulation of adaptive behaviour (evolutionary robotics and computational neuroethology), and large scale neuroscience.