Life and Mind: Between Phenomenology, Enactivism, and the Free Energy Principle

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore the relationship between the project of the naturalisation of phenomenology and the enactive conception of life and mind. Often, to naturalise phenomenology is interpreted as integrating phenomenological analyses and descriptions into the naturalistic framework of the natural sciences, usually by means of mathematisation. A different proposal, the one developed by some enactivists, consists in disclosing how life and mind are deeply continuous, which means that both phenomena share a basic set of organisational and phenomenological properties. This continuity implies that biology, cognitive science, and phenomenology can work in tandem to understand life and mind. Here, I elaborate on both approaches (i.e., the one focused on mathematisation and the one focused on the deep continuity between life and mind) through the lens of the idea that, if phenomenology is to be made continuous natural science (and more specifically, biology and cognitive science), then our conceptions of life and mind must be ‘phenomenologised’. I first argue that, from an enactive perspective, life must be understood as intrinsically connected with cognition, and that cognition must be understood as sense-making. Advancing the enactive literature on sense-making, I argue that a sense-making agent is also a transcendental subject that constitutes a meaningful world. By analysing phenomenologically that constitutive process, I show that sense-making involves two co-emergent subjective structures: affectivity and temporality. I then turn to propose that the phenomenologised conception of life and mind I have developed can be studied scientifically through a research programme I call ‘biophenomenology’. Inspired by Varela’s neurophenomenological project, I argue that biophenomenology allows for circulation between phenomenological and empirical approaches to life and mind by using the formalism of the Free Energy Principle as a generative passage. I argue that an instrumentalist reading of the Free Energy Principle framework allows for models and simulations of life and mind that describe both their phenomenological and organisational dynamics without collapsing them onto each other. I finish this thesis by showing how the Free Energy Principle framework may formalise the affective and temporal dynamics of sense-making.