Chapter 30: Enacting Affectivity

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive, the place where we cut through the academic noise to get straight to the knowledge that actually sticks.

You know the drill.

We take a stack of scholarly sources and today we've got a really powerful chapter from the Oxford handbook of 4E cognition and we boil it all down for you.

Yeah we get to the core insights.

Now if you spend any time at all in philosophy or you know cognitive science you are just constantly hit with the 4Es.

All the time embodied, embedded, inactive, and extended cognition.

Exactly and I mean nine times out of ten when scholars debate the 4Es they are talking about cognition.

Right thinking, perceiving, making decisions.

And how the body or the environment shapes what we know about the world.

It's all very cerebral.

That focus though, it creates a massive intellectual blind spot.

It really does.

How so?

Well the running assumption in so many of these debates is that cognition is the primary mental faculty and affectivity.

You know our whole sprawling landscape of feelings, emotions, moods, that's all something secondary.

Like an add -on.

Yeah exactly.

Maybe it's a separate kind of mental faculty that just happens to occasionally throw shade on or boost to smart cognitive parts.

But our source material for this deep dive, a chapter by Giovanna Colamedi, it just flips that entire hierarchy on its head.

Completely.

The chapter argues that the inactive approach, the E in 4E that focuses on the dynamics of life, actually offers these incredibly powerful conceptual tools to understand affectivity.

And the central claim which is, I mean it's frankly revolutionary.

It really is.

Is that our feelings are not just integrated into the mind.

They are the primordial foundation, the very ground upon which cognition or what an activist calls sense making is built.

So that's our mission today.

That's it.

We are going to do a deep and thorough summary of Colamedi's argument and we're going to show why affectivity is intrinsically intertwined with the way we make sense of the world.

Moving entirely beyond that old idea that are just distinct non -cognitive things that happen to us.

Right.

And to do that, we have to start by diving deep into how inactivism defines the living organism.

Because it's that definition that immediately makes feelings.

Our concern, our interest, our simple sensibility, the core operational reality of the mind.

Okay, so let's unpack this.

It's a dense but really crucial framework.

And we have to

We throw the term around a lot, but what does the canonical version of it actually stand for?

It's necessarily complex.

Because it's a really profound attempt at a synthesis of different fields.

You can think of it like an intellectual tripod.

It blends insights from modern cognitive science, deep philosophy, especially phenomenology, and critically, biology.

It's the inaction part of the forese, which refers to the organism's role in bringing forth meaning.

So it's not just a philosophical position, it's a scientific one that's built on biological principles.

Absolutely.

And we have to remember its relationship to the otherese.

It is necessarily embodied, meaning that cognition is enacted by the whole living organism, you know, right down to its smallest cellular processes, not just the brain isolated in the skull.

So not just brain bound.

Not at all.

And it is embedded, meaning the mind is realized through the organism's continual interaction with the environment.

And what about the extended mind?

That's always a point of contention with inactivism, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

A lot of inactivists push back against it.

But we'll see later in the chapter that Colin Betty argues pretty persuasively, I think, that inactivism does allow for the mind and critically our affectivity to extend out into the world.

Okay, but only under the right set of conditions.

Only under a very specific set of conditions.

Right.

To find the source code for all this, we have to go back to 1991.

Varela, Thompson and Rauch.

Varela, Thompson and Rauch.

They're the ones who popularized inaction in cognitive science.

And they laid out the core tenet, which represents this fundamental shift away from

the traditional representational models of the mind.

The computer metaphor, basically.

The idea that the mind is a machine running computations on internal data.

Right.

And they articulated this really

Instead, cognition is not the representation of a given objective world by a pre -given fixed mind.

Okay.

Instead, cognition is the enactment, the bringing forth of a world and a mind.

And it's based on the history of interactions, the variety of actions, and the engagements that a being in the world performs.

That quote is the philosophical linchpin, isn't it?

It's everything.

Yeah.

It tells us that the world we experience is co -created with us, the agent.

So now let's drill down into the three essential components that make up the version of the framework the author uses here, canonical and activism.

And this is the robust version that includes Varela's original three themes, guided action, phenomenology, and biological autonomy.

Exactly.

All right.

So let's start with that first one, the one that's probably most often cited in cognitive science, the idea that perception is fundamentally tied to action.

How did Varela and his co -authors elaborate on this?

Well, they formalized it into two major claims.

That really shifted the focus away from internal brain mapping and representations.

First, they said perception consists in perceptually guided action.

And second, cognitive structures, the patterns and rules our minds use.

These emerge from the recurrent sensor and motor patterns that enable that action to be perceptually guided in the first place.

Okay.

Let's try to ground that for the listener who might still be defaulting to the old model.

In the old model, my eye takes a picture, my brain processes the image, and then I decide to act.

Right.

A linear process.

But the canonical and active view says perception is the action.

How do we explain that dynamic?

Think about what happens when you hold a coffee mug.

Okay.

You don't just passively receive visual data about its shape and its temperature.

Your perception of the mug's stability, its weight, its usability, all of that is entirely constituted by the sensor motor loop.

So the feeling of it.

Yeah.

The subtle muscular tensions in your hand, the way you adjust your grip, the anticipatory movements of your arm.

It's a constant feedback loop.

I see.

So the world we perceive, the stability of the mug, the distance to the table, is enacted through this continuous loop.

It's not a passive intake of information waiting to be copied by the brain.

No, it's an active exploration.

This is the kind of work we see developed by philosophers like Alvin Noe and Kevin O 'Regan, right?

They argued that we don't just see things.

Our visual experience is the knowledge of how our movement will change what we see.

Exactly.

It completely reframes perception from a passive input process to an active exploratory engagement.

But, and this is what Colombetti stresses,

canonical inactivism is so much richer than just these sensor motor claims.

Which brings us to the second theme.

The second distinctive theme.

The centrality of lived experience or phenomenology.

Phenomenology.

The study of how things appear to us, our subjective experience of the world.

Why is that inclusion so critical for canonical inactivism, especially when so much of cognitive science actively tries to exclude subjectivity?

Because Varela and his colleagues recognized that if the science of mind only focuses on mechanisms and neurology, it leaves out the very thing it is supposed to be studying.

Conscious subjective life.

Conscious subjective life.

From the very beginning, they insisted that a new science of mind needed to encompass both the biological structures and the possibilities of transformation that are inherent in human experience.

And this commitment draws heavily from Maurice Merleau -Ponty.

Merleau -Ponty's work centers on the lived body, right?

He was famous for showing that we don't simply have a body, like it's a piece of equipment we own.

Right.

We are our body.

A living subject that's rooted in the world.

Precisely.

And inactivism takes that essential insight and demands a mutual circulation between the biological and the phenomenological.

We have to analyze ourselves in two intertwined ways.

Okay, what are they?

First, our existence as living organisms, the objective observable biological facts.

And second, our experience of ourselves as lived bodies, the subjective reality of how we actually encounter the world.

And that commitment ensures that canonical inactivism remains tethered to the reality of the human subject.

Exactly.

It distinguishes it from purely mechanistic cognitive models.

That makes perfect sense.

If we discard the lived experience, we lose the context of meaning, which brings us perfectly to the third pillar, the biological root in autonomy.

This concept is absolutely foundational, especially for linking life to affectivity later on.

The core claim here is that we are cognitive systems because we are autonomous organisms.

And this intellectual lineage traces back to Varela's work in the 70s and more formally to Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoiesis.

The word itself, autopoiesis, it means self -making.

This was a huge conceptual revolution in biology, wasn't it?

It was revolutionary because it shifted the definition of life away from mechanism.

Historically, we often view organisms like, you know, complex machines.

But autopoiesis defined a living system as one that continuously produces and maintains its own components,

sustains its internal network of relations, and in doing so, it defines itself as a unified entity separate from the environment.

So that self -production is the defining characteristic of being alive.

And it is also the key to being cognitive.

So the very act of existing and maintaining your own integrity, the self -making, is the precondition for having a mind that can make sense of the world.

Yes.

And while later inactivists updated and broadened the concept away from the original sort of rigid mathematical formulation of autopoiesis, they retained the core insight.

Which is?

That we must understand the self -organizing structure of living systems to clarify how that organization makes cognition possible at all.

The organization of lice is the organization of mind.

Okay, so to summarize this first part, the canonical view that this chapter relies on synthesizes these three very dense themes.

Perception as guided action, the inclusion of lived experience via phenomenology, and the foundation in biological autonomy.

And we should briefly address why we're focusing on this canonical view as the author does.

It is often contrasted with what's called radical inactivism.

Which is Hadow and Mazin's proposal.

Right, and radical inactivism rejects all representational talk concepts like mental content or vehicles.

It seems like that radical version, while it's attempting to be pure, might be, I don't know, throwing the baby out with the bath water, conceptually speaking.

I think it does, at least for this deep dive.

The radical approach tends to sideline phenomenology, and that deep commitment to biological autonomy that Varela and Thompson prioritized.

And for understanding affectivity, which is so deeply tied to subjective experience and the precarious business of being alive.

The canonical view provides the most conceptually robust and useful tools.

It allows us to ask the big question.

If the whole living organism is doing the thinking,

where do the feelings fit in?

So now we get to the core provocative thesis.

If we accept this canonical biologically rooted inactivism, the author argues that the mind, including cognition,

is inherently effective.

Now, I have to push back here a little.

That sounds like saying a computer chip is inherently emotional.

For the skeptical listener, why is this distinct claim so central to the inactive project?

That's an essential question, because it forces us to get really clear about our terms.

The claim is profound.

Affectivity permeates the mind.

It's not just a distinct module that, you know, interacts with thinking.

The idea is if you could hypothetically strict away affectivity, what remains is functionally no longer a living cognitive system.

It's just an inert machine, which is exactly what Varela was trying to move away from.

OK, so we have to be extremely precise about terminology here.

When we say affectivity, we're not just talking about emotion.

We're not talking about the big capitalized episodes like rage or ecstasy or deep sorrow.

That's the absolutely crucial distinction.

Emotion is the folk psychological concept of intense categorized, relatively short lived episodes.

And clearly we're not always in a state of intense emotion.

But affectivity is the broader continuous capacity.

Right.

It's the capacity to be affected or touched by the world.

It's a measure of sensibility.

So affectivity in this foundational sense is simply the lack of indifference.

Exactly.

It entails having sensibility, interest or concern.

It is the fundamental requirement for anything in the world to acquire relevance, significance or value to an agent.

That lack of indifference is a continuous fundamental property of the living organism.

And we see this continuous affectivity in non -emotional states too.

I mean, we might be in a certain pervasive mood, slightly melancholic, generally cranky or upbeat, which shapes our perceptions without being a specific emotion.

Or our long term sentiments like love for a family member or basic motivational states like acute hunger.

These are all effective states where things matter to us.

The strength of the inactive approach then is that it provides a theoretical bridge, this concept of biological organization,

that necessitates the conclusion that this broad affectivity is inherent to cognition.

And that bridge is the organizing principle of life,

precarious adaptive autonomy.

Okay.

Let's dedicate some serious time to this principle, because this is where sense -making and affectivity really intersect.

The idea that life is defined by its autonomy and its adaptivity seems pretty straightforward, but what about that third term, precariousness?

That third term is the conceptual key to affectivity.

Let's break down the three characteristics of the living system as Thomson defines them.

Let's do it.

First, autonomy.

This refers to the system's self -defining nature.

The living system is a network of constituent processes that recursively depend on each other for their own generation.

This network defines the system as a distinct unity and sets the boundaries for what the system can and cannot do in interaction with its environment.

It's self -production that closes the loop.

It is.

Second, adaptivity.

This just means the system isn't static.

It constantly monitors and regulates its internal and external conditions to improve its viability.

It maintains its equilibrium and evolves its patterns of interaction to keep going.

Third, precariousness.

This is the killer concept.

Living systems are fundamentally precarious.

Their components, if you just left them alone, will naturally run down, decay, or cease to function.

That's just entropy at work.

Therefore, a living system must engage in continual, active work to maintain its integrity, to counteract these decaying tendencies, and to stay unified.

I think the analogy of the tightrope walker really helps here.

The walker is autonomous.

They define their own path.

They are adaptive.

They correct their balance based on external factors like a gust of wind, but they are profoundly precarious.

If they stop actively working, they fall.

Their entire state of being is defined by that necessary, continuous effort of self -maintenance.

That's a perfect encapsulation.

And what drives the tightrope walker to stay on the rope?

The necessity of survival.

The necessity of survival.

And that necessity is what drives the living system to constantly seek energetic and material resources from its surroundings.

This is where meaning and value enter the picture.

Not as an optional add -on, but as an existential imperative.

The moment you establish precariousness, you introduce significance.

Survival must matter.

The continuous fight against collapse is the origin point of concern, interest, and value.

Exactly.

And now we can connect this biological necessity to the subjective experience through phenomenology.

Inspired by the philosopher Hans Jonas, an activism argues that because of this self -maintaining precarious organization, living systems must have a perspective, a point of view from which their surroundings acquire relevance and meaning.

This sounds like the biological necessity transforms the purely physical world into a world of meaning for the organism.

It does.

We use the terms of Jacob von Uckskuhl to describe this transformation.

The physiochemical environment, the inert physical stuff of the umgebung, is transformed by the organism's concerns into the umwelt.

The meaningful world from the perspective of the organism.

Right.

And this process of creating a meaningful world is the most basic foundational form of cognition, or what we call sense -making.

And if sense -making is defined by the transformation of the neutral umgebung into the significant umwelt,

then the connection to affectivity becomes, well, it becomes undeniable.

It is undeniable because the umwelt is defined as the world as it touches the organism, the world as it affects the organism as significant, relative to its precarious organization.

If a tree in the forest offers shelter or food, it is immediately effective.

It carries significance relevant to the organism's viability.

And if it is irrelevant, it's not even part of the umwelt.

Exactly.

So if the organism is always engaging in this precarious maintenance, there can be no moment of total indifference.

Every interaction, even if it's subtle, carries some valence of significance relative to the maintenance of life.

Jonas called this necessary sensitivity the irritability of life.

Yes, the innate resectivity to the environment.

And he argued it was the germ, as it were, the atom, of having a world.

So affectivity is a primordial phenomenon, foundational to all life forms.

So the ability to judge, reflect, or engage in what we call higher cognition,

these are not separate mental faculties.

No, they're simply more complex, refined modes of functioning of this basic foundational affectivity.

Even our highest intellectual pursuits are just motivated, concerned, interested ways of making sense of the world.

Which brings us back to Heidegger's profound insight.

The human being is always attuned to the world through a fundamental mood, a stermung.

Right.

You never approach a problem from a position of absolute neutrality.

You approach it with curiosity or frustration, dedication or anxiety.

Total indifference, total lack of affectivity, is incompatible with being a cognitive living system engaged in sense -making.

That is a staggering conceptual shift.

It redefines the mind not as a calculator, but as a mechanism for continuous concern.

So having established affectivity as foundational, we can now tackle one of the most contentious issues in emotion theory, cognitive appraisal.

And this is where we really see the contrast between the old disembodied view and the new embodied view.

Right.

In traditional cognitive approaches to emotion,

appraisal is key.

It's defined as a rational internal cognitive process.

You evaluate the situation relative to your goals in your coping capacity.

The fear, the anger they kick in after this intellectual evaluation has already happened.

The problem with that traditional view is that it forces this wedge between cognition and the body.

It does.

Take the early work of Robert Solomon, who championed the idea that emotions are cognitions.

He insightfully argued that emotions are constituted by your evaluation of the situation.

They're world disclosing and personally significant.

But in making emotions purely cognitive, he had to minimize the messy physical components, didn't he?

He had to, exactly.

He characterized bodily changes, the shaking, the constricted breathing, the sudden surge of heat as merely contingent causal concomitant responses.

So just side effects.

Separate side effects.

Empirical responses that follow the essential cognitive evaluation, which was realized in the brain.

That just seems so incredibly dismissive of lived experience.

When I'm terrified, the not in my stomach or the rapid heart rate that doesn't feel like a side effect.

It feels like the very heart of the terror.

You've just hit the key point.

This traditional approach is the disembodied cognitive view of emotions.

It enshrines that cognition versus body dichotomy.

The cognitive appraisal is the smart faculty that evaluates and decides, while the bodily changes are the dumb mechanisms that simply react.

So what is the inactive counterpunch?

How does embodied appraisal resolve this dichotomy?

The inactive view agrees that emotions are personal significant and world disclosing.

But it holds that they are so, because they are processes of a living cognitive effective organism.

The whole system in interaction, not just isolated processes happening in the skull.

And the crucial insight here is that those bodily processes, the shaking, the tightening, are not contingent responses.

They are intrinsically cognitive evaluative.

They are the organism's bodily ways of making sense of the situation.

So the bodily state is the appraisal realized physically.

Precisely.

If you are shaking with jealousy, the shaking, the tightness in your throat, the flush on your skin, these are material components of realizing the appraisal that the situation is upsetting, threatening, and requires a massive energy investment.

The bodily changes are part of the sense making process, not just a reaction to it.

The appraisal is not realized before the body reacts.

It is realized as the organism moves into that new state.

Exactly.

And this requires support from both the hard science side and the subjective experience side.

The author uses two complementary strategies to support this view.

Let's look at those.

Strategy one looks at the sub -personal level, the physiological and neural processes.

The argument here is simple.

If cognition and emotion were truly separate, we should see a clean separation in the brain.

But we don't.

And recent neuroscientific findings from researchers like Lewis and Pessoa show that the functional organization of the brain is far more interconnected than that traditional split suggests.

For instance, you have Walter Freeman's dynamical neuroscientific account, which suggests that perception isn't a neutral input process.

It's always dynamic, context sensitive, and inherently emotion -laden, influenced by the organism's current state, its intentions, its expectancy.

The brain is integrated with the body's regulatory processes from the very start.

From the very start.

And researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett and Mo Chouar using predictive models show that the organism's current state of arousal, that baseline physiological readiness,

actively participates in the construction of visual percepts.

So it's not a passive response.

Not at all.

The state of your body is already biasing how you perceive the world and how you evaluate it.

So at the neural and physiological level, the cognitive and bodily aspects of sense -making just overlap massively.

There is no clean neural divide where evaluation ends and the physiological response begins.

It's all one process.

Okay, so let's move to strategy two.

The phenomenological level, how we experience the lived body.

How does the inactive view change our perspective on bodily feelings?

Well, if we adhere to the traditional view, we treat bodily feelings as feelings of the body.

The body is an object.

If my stomach hurts, that's just a sensation in my body and my mind, which is somewhere else, has to interpret that sensation.

This forces us right back into the dichotomy.

I see.

But the phenomenological tradition, especially Merleau -Ponty's notion of the lived body,

offers the alternative.

Bodily feelings are not feelings of the body.

They are ways of feeling the world and perceiving its effective qualities through the way the body is experienced.

So the body becomes the very instrument through which the world's meaning is disclosed to us.

Can we use that shocking news example again?

Absolutely.

When you get shocking news and you feel a sudden sick pang in your stomach,

the inactive view says you're not feeling an isolated physiological event in your body and then linking it to the news intellectually.

No.

Instead, you're experiencing the situation as painful and destabilizing through the pang.

The feeling is the phenomenal mode of encountering the upsetting quality of the situation.

It's the bodily articulation of the appraisal itself.

So both the subpersonal and the phenomenological analyses converge on the same conclusion.

The emotional episode is a continuous, unfolding process where the cognitive evaluative function is inseparable from the bodily expression.

The mind is a cognitive effect of organism and its appraisals are inherently embodied.

Since canonical inactivism defines cognitive systems as autonomous and autonomous systems are made of these mutually influencing self -organizing processes,

inactivism naturally finds a conceptual alignment with the dynamical systems approach in cognitive science.

Which Thompson labeled embodied dynamicism.

Exactly.

This framework emphasizes flow, change, and interactivity.

It treats cognition and, in this case, affectivity as emergent phenomena that arise from the continuous interaction of brain, body, and environment rather than fixed linear input -output computations.

Precisely.

And within this framework, effective events, emotions, moods are characterized not as static outputs of some fixed internal determining factor but as dynamic self -organizing episodes that emerge from the mutual influence of complex brain and bodily processes over time.

This dynamicist perspective immediately provides a really powerful critique of the major rival framework in effective science.

The highly influential basic emotions framework.

Right.

The basic emotions framework, which is heavily associated with Paul Ekman's work on universal facial expressions,

posits that a limited set of core emotions, anger, fear, sadness, joy, are governed by affect programs.

And these are supposed to be fixed, internal, genetically set instructions that dictate a relatively fixed pattern of physiological and behavioral response.

Yes.

And the strength of that view is explaining cross -cultural commonalities.

But its massive weakness was always accounting for the huge variability of emotional expression we actually observe, both across cultures and over an individual's lifespan.

Right.

To save the theory from this variability, the basic emotions framework had to invent the construct of display rules.

The famous display rules.

These are culture -specific rules that determine when and how one should mask or modify the expression dictated by the internal affect program.

For example, the internal program triggers an expression of disgust.

But culture X demands you mask it with a polite smile.

I always found that so unsatisfying.

It suggests we all have these fixed internal puppets and culture just puts clothes on them or forces them to smile when they feel like scowling.

It feels conceptually clunky and overly complicated.

It requires an infinite set of these ad hoc rules for every subtle social variation.

And the dynamical systems approach offers a far more parsimonious solution.

It grounds cultural variability not in masking rules, but in system organization.

In this view, emotional episodes are organismic patterns.

Physiological, postural, behavioral, that self -organize into specific configurations called attractors.

And attractors are those stable recurrent patterns the system tends to fall into, almost like valleys in a landscape.

Precisely.

And these attractors are shaped by both evolutionary predispositions, universal tendency to attack when threatened, for instance, and developmental history and cultural norms.

Let's use the chapter's comparison of anger manifestations in the UK versus Italy.

There's an evolutionary base, the physiological activation, and the tendency toward hostile signaling that's common to both.

Sure.

But the local norms create a divergence.

Right.

An Italian adult might incorporate much more overt movement of the upper body, arms, and hands when expressing assertive anger because that's a culturally acceptable and implicitly taught expression.

Whereas a British adult, perhaps subject to norms of reserve,

might express anger primarily through subtle facial or verbal changes.

In the basic emotions model, you'd have to argue that the British person is actively suppressing a huge internal gesture program, and the Italian person is applying a massive display rule overlay to add the hand movement.

It's so convoluted.

But the dynamical view says something much more profound.

These variations are simply culturally developed attractors.

The organism's system, brain, body, and local environment has been molded through development into these specific, refined, and often unconscious patterns of self -organization.

So the Italian expression isn't a masked output of an internal rule.

It is the learned, self -organized manifestation of anger for that system in that context.

Exactly.

And this beautifully resolves that rigid nature versus nurture dichotomy.

I love how this framework naturally accommodates development.

We start with broad, evolutionarily prepared systems, and they are continuously refined and tuned by our life history into specific context -sensitive patterns.

And furthermore, the dynamical systems approach naturally models the relationship between different types of effective phenomena, particularly emotions and moods.

Okay, let's define them again pifely.

Emotions are short -lived and object -directed.

I am joyful about this good news.

Right.

And moods are longer lasting and pre -intentional.

I feel generally anxious, which then shapes the entire landscape of the world itself.

The basic emotions framework really struggles to characterize moods beyond simply being a chronic, low -level emotional state.

It does.

But dynamical systems theory provides the conceptual tools to describe this difference using the concept of a state space.

How does that work?

Well, short -lasting emotional episodes can be modeled as relatively short -lived attractor points in the organism's overall state space.

The system falls into the anger valley briefly when the neighbor slams the door, but it quickly returns to a baseline.

But moods are different.

They don't relate to a specific object, but they influence the likelihood of future emotions.

How do we model that?

Moods are modeled as topologies of attractors.

That is, the overall configuration and distribution of these attractor points in the state space.

Think of it like this.

Your state space is a landscape.

If you are in a cheerful mood, the joy valley is deep and easy to fall into, and the frustration valley is shallow and hard to reach.

So a grumpy mood fundamentally changes the landscape.

It makes the flipping one's lid attractor far more accessible and likely.

The entire distribution of possible emotional episodes has been shifted.

Precisely.

The system is in a different global configuration.

And since the system is dynamical, there's a vital feedback loop.

The frequent reiteration of certain emotional episodes will, over time, sculpt the landscape, deepening certain valleys and raising others, thereby inducing a new, longer -lasting mood or shifting the underlying topology.

This framework allows us to connect effectivity across all time scales.

The dynamicist approach even scales up to personality traits and character.

Traits are the longest -term dynamics.

They act as persistent constraints on the types of moods and emotions one is disposed to have.

But they are not immutable.

They are constantly, slowly influenced by the moods and emotions one repeatedly undergoes.

And as Colin Betty suggests, future research has to continue to detail the phenomenology of character and personality alongside the subpersonal accounts of how these patterns constrain on another across years and decades.

Exactly.

It's a huge, exciting area of research.

Okay.

So we've established that affectivity is embodied and embedded, foundational to life itself.

But that foundation, the precarious adaptive autonomy, it seems to rely so heavily on the material processes staying within the organism's boundary.

Right.

So we face the most contentious of the Fourier's extension.

If mind and life are co -located, must affectivity remain strictly internalist.

That's a classic critique.

It was famously raised by Wheeler, who argued that since inactivism links mind cognition, affectivity to life, and life stops at the skin, it must inherently reject the extended mind thesis.

Which is the idea that the physical processes realizing the mind sometimes extend beyond the skull or even the body.

And it's true.

Many inactivists do reject the extended mind thesis because they feel it relies on a functionalist view of cognition that separates processes from their material realization.

But Colin Betty argues that inactivism is not necessarily internalist.

Right.

The key is how we define the living system.

Inactivism allows for hybrid living systems, systems composed of organic and non -organic parts, to enact sense -making.

If an extended system is alive in this hybrid sense, it is also cognitive and effective.

This is where we need powerful, almost counter -intuitive example from the inactive research of Ezequiel de Paolo, the aquatic insect and the air bubble.

It's a fantastic example.

It illustrates incorporation without requiring the artifact to be organic.

So an aquatic insect breathes under water and it achieves this by trapping a temporary air bubble on its abdominal hairs.

Okay.

Oxygen is consumed from the bubble, which creates a pressure deficit.

And this is immediately compensated by dissolved oxygen diffusing into the bubble from the water.

The bubble is non -organic, but it's critical for survival.

It is.

And de Paolo argues that the whole network, the insect plus air bubbles, is a new larger autonomous system.

The bubbles are not just external supports, they are mediating structures that are actively assimilated or integrated into the organism's regulatory processes.

So they become constitutive parts of this new extended form of life because the integrity of the whole system depends on them.

Exactly.

And the logic of effective extension follows directly from that.

If this hybrid system is alive, it must also be a cognitive, effective sense -making system given all the arguments we made in part two.

So the physical underpinnings of sense -making and affectivity can thus correspond to this new, larger, extended living form.

Right.

But for this to be useful in human contexts, we need really strict criteria for when a non -organic part of the world is truly incorporated into the effective system rather than just being a tool we use.

And Thompson and Stapleton provide two necessary criteria for this?

They do.

Criterion one is phenomenological transparency.

The object must cease to be experienced as an object.

Instead, the world is experienced through it.

The blind person's cane is the classic analogy.

When the cane is properly incorporated through training, the blind person doesn't feel the vibrations in their hand.

They feel the texture of the pavement or the edge of the curb out there.

The cane becomes transparent.

It becomes transparent, a sensory extension of the lived body.

It allows the world to touch them in a new way.

That distinction is so crucial.

It's the difference between feeling the vibrations of a phone in my pocket, it's an object, versus the musician's feeling of their instrument.

Which leads directly to criterion two,

intimate coupling and active regulation.

The external resource must be intimately coupled with the body's autonomous dynamics and subjected to active, continuous regulation by the organism.

So the organism has to be the one leading the dance or orchestrating the activity.

Absolutely.

If the saxophone is just sitting there in its case, it's not an effective extension.

It has to be actively used and its outputs must immediately feed back into the organism's ongoing self -regulation.

Okay, so the author uses this compelling example of the skilled saxophone player improvising a sad melody.

They're achieving a specific, complex, effective state, a nuanced sadness or longing that they would likely be unable to achieve otherwise.

Right.

The instrument is integral to the creation of that feeling.

Let's apply the criteria rigorously to the musician.

Criterion two, intimate coupling is clearly satisfied.

No doubt.

The instrument is manipulated, the keys are pressed and the sound produced instantly dictates the next note, the next breath, the next bodily posture.

The musician is undeniably orchestrating the activity in a highly regulated way.

And criterion one, phenomenological transparency is also satisfied for the skilled musician.

They are not experiencing the saxophone as a distinct external lump of brass.

No.

Instead, the instrument functions as a means to articulate and construct the complex, evolving, effective state in real time.

The emotional experience is not occurring in the musician and merely expressed through the horn.

It is enacted by the dynamic system, musician plus saxophone.

Exactly.

That makes the effective state literally extended.

The feeling is a property of the cupboard system.

This is a powerful demonstration of what the author calls effective object incorporation.

And it fundamentally broadens the scope of what we mean by affectivity.

Wow.

This has been a profoundly insightful deep dive.

It's fundamentally changing how we define feelings by rooting them in the biological organization of life itself.

We've moved from academic definitions to the extended, world -shaping nature of our concerns.

To quickly summarize the chapter's main contributions, first, we established affectivity, that continuous sensibility and concern, as the primordial foundational layer of cognition.

Essential for all life's sense -making processes, rooted in that precarious adaptive autonomy.

Second, we applied this whole organism perspective to emotion theory,

advocating for embodied cognitive appraisal and rejecting that deeply ingrained split between cognitive evaluation and bodily response.

We saw how both phenomenology and neuroscience support this integration.

Third, we demonstrated how the dynamic and self -organizing nature of life allows us to utilize dynamical systems theory to explain the complex, context -sensitive and highly variable nature of emotions and moods.

Modeled as specific attractor points or broader topologies of attractors.

And finally, we showed that affectivity is not necessarily bounded by the skin.

It can be actively extended into the world via actively regulated and phenomenologically transparent artifacts, leading to the formation of hybrid living systems that enact complex feelings.

Now, the author provides a framework that is highly developed, but it naturally leaves us with some complex and provocative open questions for you, the listener, to mull over as research progresses in this field.

Yes.

One of the most critical conceptual questions remaining is how to handle the distinction between the canonical inactivism we discussed and the radical version.

That's a big one.

Radical inactivism rejects the talk of vehicles, the identifiable physical processes underpinning mental states.

Right.

But, as we saw with the extended affectivity argument, the possibility of hybrid living systems seems to rely on the identification of these physical vehicles, whether they are organic or non -organic.

Future work has to clarify exactly what notion of physical vehicle, if any, needs to be retained for inactivism to coherently explain the extension of affectivity.

And the second major challenge for future research is developing a comprehensive account of world involvement.

The mind is involved with the world in several distinct ways, and we need to clarify how they all interact.

There's the basic foundational sense.

Yeah.

The organism requires an environment simply to differentiate itself and maintain its autonomy.

Okay.

Then there's the integration of specific mediating structures, like the insect's air bubble or the musician's saxophone.

Right.

And finally, there's the sense in which complex human mental life is scaffolded by diffuse, non -integrated, but crucial sociocultural practices, language, social norms, institutions.

In clarifying the relationships and contributions of these different types of world involvement, from basic differentiation to artifact incorporation to massive sociocultural scaffolding is perhaps the most exciting challenge left by this deep dive.

I think so.

And this framework suggests that your moods, your emotions, and even your personality aren't things that just happen to you inside your head.

They're dynamical patterns co -created by your whole body and your engagement with the world, moment by moment, artifact by artifact.

And that simple realization fundamentally transforms how you should think about your own psychology.

It really does.

Food for thought indeed.

Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into enacting affectivity.

We hope this knowledge helps you see your own continuous concern, your affectivity, not as a secondary disturbance, but as the essential life -defining feature of your mind.

Until next time, keep exploring the connections and keep challenging the old assumptions.

We'll see you then.