Uncovering the Face of Nature: Autopoietic Enactivism and a Systems View of Mind, Life, and Language

Abstract

The study of life and the study of mind present us with a causality that is not easily explained. How can we reconcile the non-material purposes and intentions that define life and mind with the materialist explanations on which scientific practice depends? This dissertation project broaches this problem using the autopoietic enactivist (AE) approach to cognition. AE reads “cognition” into the foundations of life, and in doing so avers a profound continuity between mind, life, and the environment—as well as between human beings and all other kinds of so-called “lower” life forms. Using the work of Evan Thompson (Mind in Life, 2007) and his AE approach, as well as Terrence Deacon (Incomplete Nature 2013) and his unique contribution to contemporary systems theory which he calls “emergent dynamics,” this project attempts to reconcile AE’s observer-dependent phenomenological and cybernetic underpinnings with the observer-independent methods of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and thermodynamics. Furthermore, it argues that AE’s focus on system-environment couplings—and the embodied cognitive processes therein—provide contemporary literary theory with a robust framework for moving beyond the trappings of language and ideology inaugurated by structuralist linguistics. This project draws a coherent line between materialist science, systems theory, and the field of literary studies, and does so in a way that combines disparate—and seemingly incommensurable—scales of being and knowing, everything from the phenomenology of simple bacteria to contemporary approaches in literary formalism.