Code Biology and Enactivism: Bringing Adaptors to Basic Minds

The paper presents a preliminary attempt at exploring the potentially fruitful intersection between Code Biology and enactivist research. As an umbrella label, ‘Enactivism’ designates different strands of research in the radical, anti-representationalist cognitive sciences. The paper begins by motivating the need for nuancing basic claims central to Autopoietic Enactivism and makes the argument that Code Biological insights and notions can be used to deflate the supposedly strong autonomy of individual sense-makers. Then, it goes on to show that Code Biology has the potential for informing Sensorimotor Enactivism by revealing some of the complex codifying mechanisms involved in not just visual perception but virtually any kind of sense-making across the evolutionary board. The paper builds on these insights to substantiate Radical Enactivism’s information-as-covariance and, beyond this, the mechanisms which enable ‘basic mentality’. Finally, a critical developmental perspective is considered.