Can an Enactivist Approach Entail the Extended Conscious Mind?

Abstract

This paper discusses the enactivist attempt to entail the hypothesis of extended conscious mind (ECM). The enactists suggest that conscious experience is a relational interaction between the subject and the external environment; this personal-level description of conscious experience naturally entails an extended sub-personal characterization of the material basis of conscious experience (i.e. the ECM). However, in this paper, I am going to argue that the enactivist description at the personal level is still open to an internalist challenge at the sub-personal level. In response to this challenge, I suggest combining enactivism with the concept of predictive processing, delineating a sub-personal characterization of conscious experience that corresponds to the enactivist interpretation at the personal level.

Keywords

• enactivism
• extended conscious mind