Interpersonal synergy offers a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing coordinated interaction in dyads and groups. The framework aims at an inquiry of how individuals contribute to a collective behavior and how, in doing so, they coordinate and co-adapt their actions, hereby establishing specific patterns of interplay. The present review retraces the origins of the notion of interpersonal synergy, assesses its scope, delineates synergies from other forms of interaction, and discusses possible mechanisms (such as mutual affordance responsiveness or shared intentions) that mediate the creation of such synergies. It then presents a contrastive “bestiary” of synergy types, which highlights the many shapes and forms in which the phenomenon occurs (e.g., collaborative vs. competitive, spontaneous vs. planned). The final two sections survey analytical approaches, from quantitative metrics which formalize “dynamic fingerprints” of collective dynamics to qualitative and mixed methods studies, which include 1 st person perspectives on synergy formation.
The coordination of competitively coupled systems is notoriously complex. One-v.-one attacker-defender interactions (1v1s), common in team sports, provide a vehicle for investigating the role of nonlinear interactions between timescales during competitive coordination. This study tracked movements of 20 amateur players in a 1v1 futsal task, modelling the attacker’s leading role and the dyad’s nonlinear interactivity with an anticipatory-synchronisation metric and multifractality, respectively. Anticipatory synchronisation encoded how well an attacker could pre-empt a defender’s movements. Multifractality encoded variability and comparison to linear surrogates encoded nonlinear interactions across scales. Generalised linear mixed-effects modelling showed that attackers scored more points when they anticipatorily synchronised with defenders’ movements and promoted greater multifractal variability in defenders, as well as in a collective variable pooling dyadic variability. Attackers scored more when they themselves constrained their own multifractal nonlinearity to generate targeted attacks. Thus, competitive coordination in invasion games rests on nonlinear cross-timescale interactions, not just linear sequences of perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes. Explanations of 1v1s may need to address both independent-player contributions and shared nonlinear interactivity. Finally, we discuss avenues for future research on the multiscale dynamics of competitive co-adaptation in sport and related contexts.
‘Enactivism’ is usually taken to be an umbrella term encompassing any approach that emphasises the importance of recurrent loops of sensorimotor activity to adequate philosophical and scientific understandings of how minds fit into the natural world. Under this umbrella different variants can then be distinguished. I argue that this is a distortive and unhelpful understanding insofar as it ignores three central commitments of the enactive approach as originally set out in Varela, Thompson & Rosch’s The Embodied Mind. These commitments to life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding set the enactive approach apart from other variants of embodied cognition in science and philosophy, and do so in ways that make it distinctively timely and valuable.
This paper advances an enactive-ontogenetic framework for understanding mental disorders, challenging static and reductionist models. Drawing on the Simondonian turn in the enactive approach, it conceptualizes mental conditions as developmental conditions, highlighting their dynamic character and their relation to the person’s individuation process. The paper integrates the enactive-ontogenetic perspective with dynamical network models, advocating a shift from symptom-based snapshots to diachronic, individualized models. Central to this approach is the role of character traits—understood as diachronically sedimented sensorimotor patterns—in channeling vulnerability to mental conditions. By situating mental disorders within a broader developmental landscape, the work offers a process-oriented account of mental conditions as emergent from the individuation of the person, emphasizing their variability, path-dependence, and irreversibility. This integrative model has significant implications for diagnosis, treatment, and the ethical framing of mental health, advocating for a vulnerability paradigm over traditional pathology-based views.
This article confronts a core challenge within 4E research: the “motley crew argument.” According to this argument, the scientific credibility of 4E research is diminished because the range of factors considered constitutive of a cognitive phenomenon encompasses neural, morphological, and environmental structures. The claim is that the sheer number, flexibility, and interchangeability of the involved variables render cognitive phenomena extremely difficult to identify and study in rigorous scientific investigation. This paper systematically outlines a range of established methods for handling the complexity inherent in situated cognitive phenomena by introducing four key methodological approaches. By deploying this methodological toolkit, the article argues that 4E cognition research can be equipped to empirically investigate complex cognitive phenomena. These methods offer a pragmatic pathway to address the challenge of the motley crew argument and bridge the gap between rich philosophical theory and empirical validation.
The pre-reflective experience of being a body is a fundamental component of consciousness and selfhood. A leading account from the perspective of active inference is Seth and Tsakiris' (2018, see also Seth, 2021, 2024) proposal that this experience arises from instrumental interoceptive inference (III), namely the nervous system's interoceptive predictions about the sensory consequences of autonomic adjustments that continuously sustain physiological integrity. However, this approach does not distinguish between the anticipatory autonomic regulation that keeps us alive even during unconscious states (e.g., dreamless sleep) and the interoceptive predictions that ground the conscious feeling of being a body that arguably allows a distinctly conscious form of adaptive behavior. We therefore suggest two types of III: conscious and unconscious instrumental interoceptive inference (C-III and U-III). After rejecting two potential ways to resist this distinction, and building on recent literature on active inference and consciousness, we propose that C-III can be distinguished from U-III neurocomputationally: C-III might additionally involve in-context, real-time modulation of the precision weighting of interoceptive prediction errors, coupled with temporally and counterfactually deep self-models enabling basic future-oriented adaptive behaviors. We conclude that differentiating C-III from U-III clarifies the border between felt bodily selfhood and insentient allostasis, and provides a tractable framework for future neurobiological and computational investigations on the dividing line between adaptive, minimal forms of self-consciousness, and behaviorally rigid self-regulatory unconscious states.
To some, purposiveness is the core of the enactive approach. Others, however, view the notion of purposes as a pre-scientific crutch - one that will eventually be replaced by mathematical analyses of the kind of dynamical systems that we are. Yet advances in cognitive neuroscience have not vanquished the problem of purpose, only driven it underground. Rather than explicitly confronting this problem, in attempting to uncover the true aims of a target system, contemporary cognitive scientists implicitly rely upon their own aims in informing the construction of experimental procedures, measurements, and models. Such aims are essential for making choices of relevance vs irrelevance or signal vs noise, by means of which essential principles are abstracted from a disorderly biological substrate. Pragmatism is all the rage - why should cognitive science buck the trend? Well, precisely because the targets of cognitive science are the very purposive agents upon which the pragmatist stance depends. The promise of enactive cognitive science is an account of this purposiveness - yet such a project cannot rely solely on dynamical formalisms that are inadequate to the task. Instead, it depends upon the organicist critique of these abstractions and proposal for a thermodynamically-grounded account of the purposive agency that underpins them.
There is no doubt that tools have played a central role in the evolutionary history of hominins, from early species like Australopithecus to the genus Homo. Inspired by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this paper explores the Homo species from a Heideggerian perspective, focusing on two central ideas: (i) tools as ready-to-hand versus tools as present-at-hand, and (ii) technologies (tools) versus Technology (technological mode of being). According to Heidegger, focusing solely on tools fails to capture the deeper essence of Technology, which is not just a tool or a set of devices, but a distinct mode of being that shapes how we perceive and act in the world. This paper argues that tools are essential for understanding the evolution of hominins not just because they reflect cognitive development or facilitate tasks like cutting thick skins, but more crucially because they signify the emergence of a distinct technological mode of being. This technological mode of being represents a fundamentally different way of being-in-the-world-perceiving the world through, and as, Technology. Within this framework, everything is understood and valued as standing reserve. The paper addresses the issue from an evolutionary perspective, examining both the tools themselves and the ways in which chimpanzees and later extinct species, such as Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, used them. The paper argues that a technological mode of being began to develop before the emergence of the Homo species and became more pronounced over time. It proposes that human development should be understood not merely as a growing dependence on tools, but as a transformation in how the world itself is disclosed-namely, within a comprehensive technological mode of being in which everything appears as standing reserve. This perspective reflects a shift in how we understand and treat our environment-not as nature (in which we dwell), but as a resource: As one progresses along the evolutionary tree from chimpanzees to humans, nature is perceived less as a living environment and more as something that stands ready for use.
Despite historical shifts, "science" has consistently meant epistemic authority, perhaps leading enactivists to cast their work accordingly. Yet enactivism sits uneasily with Popperian falsifiability, Kuhnian paradigm shifts, Hempel's standards, and other philosophy of science benchmarks, but does better under Lakatos. Lakatos's model holds that progressive science preserves a hardcore of principles by fiat, aligning with enactivism's reliance on non-negotiable grounding tenets. However, Lakatos also requires testing that generates anomalies and yields novel predictions, exemplified by the postulation and discovery of a new planet to protect Newtonian mechanics. Enactivism struggles on this second step, sometimes ignoring anomalies, as with representational additions to Brooks's robotics, or else engaging in what William James calls halfway empiricism-which definitionally pre-empts alternatives to maintain positions despite, rather than because of, evidence. James anticipates Feyerabend's pluralism and his claim that scientific ideals-unified method, neutral observation, cumulative progress, and empirical fit-rarely match practices. From this angle, enactivism might count as a science, albeit only with diluted epistemic authority. James and Feyerabend offer an additional lesson: logical consistency matters in simple cases like rejecting "square circles," but it is not obvious that the complexities of mind are explicable by a single, internally consistent theory.
Cognitivism, a framework strongly shaped by developments in computer and communication sciences, has dominated the study of cognition since the 1960s. From the 1990s onward, however, alternative frameworks have gained prominence. Among these, anti-cognitivism designates approaches that deliberately reject cognitivist assumptions, with some examples found in Radical Embodied Cognition, Radical Enactivism, and Autopoietic Enactivism. In this paper, a distinction between pluralist and eliminativist anti-cognitivism is proposed. Pluralists regard cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches as, at least in principle, complementary, while eliminativists argue that cognitivism is misguided and should be discarded. The paper starts by clarifying cognitivism to avoid common misunderstandings. After that, focusing on enactive and embodied versions of anti-cognitivism, it analyzes its most influential arguments against cognitivism and concludes that eliminativism fails to provide a convincing case against cognitivism, and that pluralism better reflects the epistemological commitments of at least some versions of anti-cognitivism, namely those that adopt an ecological perspective.
Less-is-more describes a principle underlying decision making. Embodiment, on the other hand, argues that the body plays an important role in processes that have classically been characterized as mental. We argue that decision making is facilitated by reducing the amount of mental computation (less-is-more) through the exploitation of the constant stream of rich sensorimotor information (embodiment), a concept we call LIME. LIME argues that, via embodiment, computation is ‘constrained’ by and ‘off-loaded’ into the body. Constraining involves the body reducing the input or generated options before they enter into mental computation. Off-loading involves the body or the environment performing the computation. LIME underlies cognition generally, but is most accessibly demonstrated in sport phenomena, and we use this domain to sketch out the breadth of this concept in four case studies. LIME connects first principles of cognition to real life phenomena, providing a mechanics to ecological rationality and naturalistic behavior.
Collective biological systems can exhibit surprisingly rich macroscopic adaptive behaviors from their relatively simple components. These behaviors often resemble sensing, cognition, and ecological interaction, as in higher-order organisms. Unfortunately, a normative model explaining cognitive behaviors from the interactions of simple elements is not yet available. We hypothesize here that minimal self-knowledge can be observed from local interactions between simple components if two conditions are given: (i) self-generated, globally shared information and (ii) higher-order feedback loops emerging from the actions of simple elements. To evaluate the hypothesis, a discrete-time, discrete-space computational simulation is developed, modeling simple particles discharging a chemical-like substance (pheromone). The results indicate that unstructured variations introduced through random movements of particles across the arena enabled the formation of clusters with complex, emergent behaviors. Under the hypothesized conditions, these results indicate that a minimal form of self-knowledge emerges, representing a primitive self-definition.
Understanding the organization of complex living systems such as holobionts requires a complementary, pluralistic framework in which the individual-centred perspective of the Enactive Approach (EA), the collective, relational focus of Sympoiesis, and the biological evidence provided by Eco-Evo-Devo can collaborate fruitfully. This paper argues that the individual-centred agency of the EA and the collective focus of Sympoiesis are complementary. The EA provides a robust model of individual agency but overlooks broader ecological networks. Sympoiesis effectively describes distributed, multi-species systems, such as holobionts, but lacks an account of individual agency. We propose a synthetic and dialectical framework - Entangled Agencies - that integrates both perspectives through a tripartite structure: individual agency (S1), collective sympoietic dynamics (S2), and the constitutive 'in-between' of their interactive dialectics (S3). Grounded in evidence from Eco-Evo-Devo and enactive operational models, we describe life and cognition as emerging from the ongoing tension between individual autonomy and collective interdependence. This dialectical synthesis moves beyond a mere sum of parts, providing a richer, multiscale understanding of agency and the organization of life and cognition.
In this article, I demonstrate the value of the pathological complexity thesis for comparative consciousness research. I discuss how Ristau's piping plover research illuminates links between life-history complexity and intentionality. How Sinha's bonnet macaque studies demonstrate how social drivers of pathological complexity predict self-awareness and mindreading capacities. And how Ross's discussion of elephant life histories and consciousness allows us to compare the phenomenology if humans and elephants. Finally, I address Yilmaz's discussion of the case for plant consciousness.
This essay functions as the introduction to the second issue in a two-part special issue on Walter Veit's recent monograph A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023). Here, Veit offers a summary of the remaining six commentaries, as well as his two response pieces.
In this article, I defend and expand my evolutionary account of consciousness developed in A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness against four critical replies. I respond to de Weerd's challenge to the evolutionary bottom-up approach, clarifying what it entails. I address Sachs's discussion of autopoiesis and enactivism, distinguishing my naturalistic framework from these alternatives. I engage Frankish's concerns about my remaining Cartesian commitments. I reply to Suzuki's prediction-based alternative to my evaluation-first view of consciousness, his criticism of my discussion of disunity, and his scepticism that consciousness is an adaptation. Finally, I address Chincarini's comments on the connection between the pathological complexity thesis and animal welfare science.
Affect is a valenced (i.e., positive-to-negative) experience in consciousness that changes each moment and guides what people do, and despite its importance to human decision-making, it currently has no consensus understanding. The recent neuroscience theories of Predictive Processing and Active Inference offer some promising directions in characterizing affect but related accounts of affective valence emphasize either allostasis or the prediction/error dynamics in the brain. In this paper, I argue that these accounts of affect have excluded one affective phenomenon or another and present an alternative perspective on affect, called the Affect Management Framework (AMF). The brain has evolved to compute contextualized goals and capitalize on affordances in the environment, and affect reflects an evaluative common currency in consciousness that helps the brain switch between and track progress toward these contextualized goals. There are different categories of affective influences, including: (1) the goal itself, (2) interoceptive senses (evaluated via interoception, taste, and smell), (3) semantic processes of the brain (evaluated via meaningfulness, certainty, and agency), (4) exteroceptive processing (evaluated via familiarity, processing speed, and capacity), and (5) proprioceptive signals from the body that enable action (evaluated via controllability of the body and spatial orientation). Affect management is anticipatory , multifaceted , and contextual , involving an interplay between the various sources of affect throughout the brain and requiring a balance between attunement to the outside world and acting to change it.
Recent proposals distinguish scientific enactivism, which operationalizes enactive concepts in empirical research, from utopian enactivism, conceived as a broad philosophy of nature. This paper questions that divide by showing how enactive principles can fruitfully guide human-computer interaction (HCI) research. We argue that enactivism offers a dialectical alternative to both cognitivist models, which reduce behavior to utility optimization and internal representations, and Heideggerian accounts, which stress situated embodied coping but often neglect the social and transformative dimensions of collective sense-making. Emphasizing participatory sense-making as the enactment of ecological norms, we propose a framework that shifts HCI from preference optimization to the co-creation of collective norms. A case study of an AI-mediated energy community illustrates how enactive principles inform empirical design. Participants interacted for 1 month with an AI-integrated interface while coordinating domestic energy use, incorporating the sociotechnical system into everyday routines and orienting to neighbors' activities. We show that an enactive framework enables analysis of interaction across multiple temporalities and spheres of experience. The study demonstrates a concrete continuity between enactive theorizing and empirical implementation, suggesting that the enactive approach can be fruitfully mobilized in the study of sociotechnical environments.
Purpose: This study investigates the relationship between phase characteristics of horse-riders and subjective harmony scores evaluated by dressage judges. We aim to enhance understanding of how motion patterns reflect harmony perception, hypothesizing that adaptive anti-persistent motion improves subjective evaluations. Methods: Nine elite dressage riders and their horses participated. Accelerometer data from the rider’s centre of gravity were collected during passage and extended trot. Signals were processed using detrended fluctuation analysis ( H ) and Shannon entropy (Ɛ). Subjective harmony scores were correlated with H and Ɛ using Spearman’s rank correlation. Significance was set at p < .05. Results: In passage , H positively correlated with harmony scores (r = 0.77, p < .01, H = 1.07 ± 0.06), suggesting riders exhibiting greater persistence were evaluated as more harmonious. Conversely, in extended trot, H negatively correlated with scores (r = −0.71, p < .02, H = 1.04 ± 0.06), indicating anti-persistent motion correlated with higher ratings. Shannon entropy correlated negatively with scores in passage (r = −0.62, p < .03, Ɛ = 9.28 ± 0.25) and positively in extended trot (r = 0.61, p < .05, Ɛ = 9.46 ± 0.12). Conclusions: Harmony perception in dressage varies by gait. Collected movements benefit from stable and persistent motion, while extended gaits demand adaptive, anti-persistent patterns. Training should focus on stability for precision-oriented gaits and flexibility for dynamic tasks. Objective metrics like detrended fluctuation analysis and entropy may enhance harmony evaluation, though interpretation requires further refinement to address subjectivity in scoring practices.
Enactivism has recently faced criticism for either leaning too heavily on philosophical speculation without clear scientific grounding, or relying on quite old empirical work in cognitive science, especially concerning sensorimotor actions. While one can push back against such charges, in this paper we take a different approach. We will use metabolic and microbiome research as a case study to help make this problem vivid, and to outline a path forward. First, we contend that a closer look at metabolism and microbiota-host interactions places pressure upon some of the core 'autopoietic' concepts of enactivism, including self-production, autonomy, and operational closure. This research instead appears to emphasise heteronomy and symbiosis in cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary processes, posing in effect an ontological challenge. Second, it also raises some questions about enactivism's traditional avoidance of reductionist explanations, suggesting that there is an epistemic need for a philosophy of science that clarifies how to integrate more reductive biological programs within holistic enactivist frameworks. To meet these challenges, we argue that enactivism needs to moderate its commitments to autopoietic theory.
