Freedom: An enactive possibility

Introduction

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality (FAIR), Raymond Tallis presents a compelling case for a compatibilist theory of human freedom. Tallis finds room in a law-abiding universe for a form of agency capable of envisioning and pursuing genuinely open possibilities, thereby deflecting rather than merely inflecting the course of events, in accordance with intentions, reasons and goals it “can truly own and justifiably own up to” (Tallis, 2021, p. 12). Enactivism – or the enactive approach, as some prefer – advances an alternative to the representationalist, computational perspective which, to Tallis’ chagrin, has long dominated cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind. Gathered around a set of variably interpreted, and continuously refined concepts, the movement aims to replace so-called cognitivist theories postulating brain-bound algorithmic processes over internal representations, with the study of the complex dynamics shaping the “lived (phenomenological) and living (biological) existence” (Froese, 2015, p. 1) of cognitive agents. The movement’s unifying premise is that an agent’s actions are not merely the outward consequences of internal events or states, but constitutive of its cognitive capacities.

As an ardent compatibilist with enactive sympathies, two-hundred-odd pages of violent nodding in agreement came to a neck-breaking halt when Tallis concluded that enactivism eliminates the intentions, beliefs and reasons required to differentiate “things that agents do and events that merely happen in the natural world”. (Tallis, 2021, p. 129) Consequently, the charge continues, enactivism risks collapsing the distance between agent and world, reducing intentional actions to mere responses to stimuli. As such, certain (radical) enactivists are described as proposing an “(over-)corrective to hyper-intellectualized cognitivism” (Tallis, 2021, p. 211), requiring a corrective of its own if it is to capture the distinctive features of human agency which make it capable of free action.

I will presently argue that this corrective is already to be found within the enactive literature itself, and that the approach’s account of human agency is therefore compatible with Tallis’ case for freedom.

Tallisian freedom

Returning to a common theme in Tallis’ work – the explicit nature of human experience – FAIR argues that the reality of freedom depends on our acting on the natural world from a “virtual outside”, at an epistemic distance from the physical world we inhabit. Still amongst its inhabitants, however, we are not free to do anything whatsoever, unabated by material constrictions, nor do we always act out intentions explicitly in mind. Tallis argues that in effect we are not free from the material constraints of our physical bodies and environments, but free to recruit and navigate these very constraints, in the service of our intentions.

Crucially, on this account, intentions – as well as reasons, beliefs, and other so-called “propositional attitudes” – are not just further internal causes of actions, caused in turn by perceptual input. If they were, they would not serve Tallis’ aim of perhaps not breaking, but certainly derailing the chain of physical cause and effect. To capture the irreducibly normative nature of their motivational and justificatory role, Tallis describes the relation between propositional attitudes and actions not in terms of causation, but “becausation”.

Tallis postulates that exploiting the world in accordance with our propositional attitudes requires explicit awareness of it as separate to us, possessing temporal depth, and shared by others. Only by viewing the world from such a “virtual outside” can we bring about envisioned possibilities in accordance with our reasons, goals and intentions – by exploiting, rather than contravening the laws of nature. Thus it is that otherwise merely physical causes become handles by which we can get a grip on, and redirect the course of events in accordance with our reasons and goals.

The explicitness that makes action at an epistemic distance possible depends on several elements. The first of these is what Tallis calls “full-blown intentionality”.

Intentionality simpliciter is the “aboutness”, or “directedness” widely considered distinctive of mental states. Whilst I can think about, or have the perception of an apple, neither the apple itself, nor anything else other than mental content and its derivatives, can be said to be about anything in this way.

Tallis accepts intentionality as the mark of the mental, elsewhere characterising the mind as a “viewpoint” or “take on the world”, and further argues that it “would not be possible without an indissoluble relationship to a body located in space and time [which] must be embodiment” (Tallis, 2018, p. 64). He evokes the irreducibility of our first-personhood to our biological bodies by speaking of “a more intimate ‘ambodied cognition’” (Tallis, 2021, p. 211), which he sees as restoring rightful emphasis on our first-person being, purportedly marginalised by enactivists.

Tallis defines “full-blown intentionality” as such a take on the world which reveals itself as partial. When we perceive an object, we are aware of the perspectival nature of our perception – of the possibility of alternative views onto the same situation. This relation between perceiver and perceived “opens up the sense of possibility – of what might be the case.” (Tallis, 2021, p. 7)

This sense of possibility also involves awareness of currently unperceived objects, sharing an “out there” with both what we perceive, and what could be perceived by others.

This awareness of a “public realm” (Tallis, 2021, p. 97) invites its sharing with others, through gestures and verbal language. Borrowing a phrase from Donald Davidson, Tallis speaks of such joining up of our intentionality with others as our induction into a “community of minds, shaping the flow of meaning and understanding, that directly or indirectly supports the most ordinary decisions and actions of our daily life.” (Tallis, 2021, p. 90)

As we enter the community of minds, we occupy an ever-greater epistemic distance from the natural world – a distance which is both the basis for and extended by the development of language, and “ultimately makes available knowledge that such-and-such is, or might be, the case” (Tallis, 2021, p. 97).

The development of the explicit, declarative take on the world entailed by such “knowledge-that” provides the propositional attitudes at the heart of Tallis’ account with their content: we intend, believe, or fear that such-and-such is or will be the case. Further, explicit awareness that these causes have such effects converts mere physical events into “potential handles by which we might manipulate what happens” (Tallis, 2021, p. 36).

Elsewhere, Tallis has tied this explicitness and epistemic distance back to our embodied nature– such as our upright posture, which both liberates the hand from its locomotive obligations, to become an organ of communication, and by providing us with a landscape to peruse at a distance, thereby privileging vision- “the most epistemic of the senses” (Tallis, 2018, p. 144).

Tallis envisions the development of these freedom-bestowing capacities as a recursive, dialectical process. ^[1] Small advances in one area reinforce and constrain further advances in others, with incremental consequences for both our embodiment and first-person perspective, expanding our epistemic distance from the world in the process.

Fringes and pillars of the research community

Given enactive portrayals of “mind and world as mutually overlapping” (Varela, 1996, p. 346) and of cognition as playing out in the relational domain of organism-environment interaction, there is an arresting quality to Tallis’ claim that this perspective “collapses the distance” between human agents and the world they act on, thereby reducing intentional action to mere stimulus response. However, the reasons given for this collapse, and the “drivers” attributed to enactivism – the marginalisation or even elimination of consciousness and propositional attitudes from our understanding of agency – did not strike me as representative.

Commenting on an early draft of FAIR, I mentioned several concepts strikingly absent from a critique of enactive accounts of human agency – most notably, autonomy and adaptivity. In response, despite still targeting several tenets common to its many factions, Tallis fell back upon a claim about the “radical fringe” of enactivism.

Without disparaging the radical enactivism (REC) targeted by this claim, this focus explains the omission of the concepts necessary to consolidate Tallis’ “ambodied subject” with the enactive account of human agency.

Evan Thompson, a founding proponent of enactivism, has called REC “enactive mostly in name only” (Thompson 2018). Whether we accept this assessment ^[2] or not, the reasons given are key to offsetting Tallis’ negative reading of the enactive approach.

For Thompson, RECists like Hutto and Myin – whose work Tobias Schlicht reviews favourably in the paper Tallis primarily addresses – neglect one of two pillars of enactive research. Whilst they actively critique representationalist accounts of cognition, thereby upholding the first pillar, they fail to ground their alternative to representationalism in the concept of biological autonomy. And yet, it is precisely this concept that grounds enactive conceptions not just of agency – clearly vital to any discussion of free will – but also of the linguistic reconstitution of our engagement with the world, central to Tallis’ own case for freedom.

Thompson also criticises REC for not bridging scientific theories and models with phenomenological investigation. This, alongside Tallis’ focus on REC, accounts for the jarring claim that enactivism is driven by the “desire to marginalise the role of consciousness” in human agency (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 21). As we shall see presently, however, the enactive conception of embodied agents is grounded in a set of technical concepts, absent from Tallis’ critique. With these in view, both consciousness and propositional attitudes are revealed to be at the very core of the movement’s conception of the embodied human agent.

Core enactive concepts

The eponymous concept of enaction frames cognition not as the creation of an internal representation of an external world of “predefined significance”, but as the “bringing forth of a world of meaning”– that is, as bringing into being (i.e. “enacting”) the significance that environments have for agents, in accordance with the form of life they embody. (Tallis, 2021, p. 204)

Rooting cognitive theories in forms of life enacted by specific organisms exemplifies another core enactive tenet: the mind-life continuity thesis. Foregoing the protracted and technical debate regarding its best interpretation, I quote Di Paolo et al. (2018): “The explanatory principles that help us study the organisation of life are continuous with those that help us study the mind, without reducing the latter to the former” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 6). This suffices to make the currently relevant point: that the enactive approach proposes a “non-reductive naturalism that takes our experience as concrete human beings seriously” (Di Paolo et al 2018, p. 6). The primary concept facilitating the study of both mind and life is autonomy. An autonomous system is technically defined as a system which is:

i- operationally closed: the processes that constitute the system form networks of mutually enabling dependencies, such that none of them are free-standing or self-sufficient. These processes may also either be enabled by processes outside the network which do not in turn depend on those within it, or enable outside processes, without in turn depending on them. That is, enabling relations hold between the autonomous system and its environment, albeit lacking the circularity of those constituting the system as such. (Di Paolo et al, 2018, pp. 26–27)

And,

ii- precarious: the networks of processes described above as system-internal, would dissipate in the absence of the other enabling relations under otherwise equivalent environmental conditions. (Di Paolo et al, 2018, pp. 26–27)

This definition of autonomy can be used to explain the defining attribute of living systems: self-individuation. Whilst objects of study are generally individuated according to observer-dependent factors such as convenience, convention, and interest, the self-individuation of living systems depends on the mutually enabling bio-chemical processes by which they distinguish themselves from their immediate surroundings. Such processes take place under precarious conditions “where fluctuations can be unpredictably amplified, events resonate at multiple timescales, and complex spatiotemporal patterns emerge and become sustained over long periods” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 24).

The autonomy of self-individuating systems simultaneously establishes their identity as a living organism, and what counts as their environment. Amongst the processes that straddle the organism-environment divide, we find “those engagements that are appreciated as meaningful by the organism”, constituting the organism’s world. The significance of such engagements stems from the dependence of the organism’s ongoing integrity on their success. The presence or absence in an organism’s environment of elements that are either beneficial or detrimental to its self-production affects the dynamics of the processes enabling its ongoing self-individuation. Perturbations to the system’s self-individuation trigger its evaluation of the environment, and determine the significance of environmental factors to the system.

However, this evaluation cannot depend on these processes of renewal themselves breaking down. Once they do, the organism dies. Therefore, if living systems are to evaluate their environments at all, their self-producing and self-individuating processes must be adaptive. That is, they must be sensitive to whether or not environmental factors are approaching the limits of their viability, and able to respond accordingly by modulating both their self-constituting and environment-engaging processes.

This self-relating adaptivity enables a system’s evaluation of a situation as dangerous to its ongoing integrity before it is too late. This pre-emptive need of living systems introduces virtuality into the enactive account of agency. Virtuality here denotes that which is real, without being actual, such as the tendencies and capacities of objects and processes that might never be actualised, and therefore remain forever as mere potentialities. Even if never fulfilled, such capacities are nonetheless real: the would-be rock-pool on a perpetually waterless planet still has a very real (albeit never actualised) capacity for retaining a given volume of liquid, whilst lacking any such capacity for, say, photosynthesis or locomotion. Similarly, the trends in the concentration in an organism’s physical milieu of the material building blocks required for its ongoing self-individuation may well be bucked, and never actualised, but no less real, and crucially, no less pertinent to the living system’s viability. (Di Paolo 2015)

If this viability is to be maintained for any length of time, living systems must be able to regulate the processes constituting them in response to such virtual consequences of the trends in their environments. ^[3] By regulating its interactions with its surroundings in adaptive sensitivity and responsiveness to such potential outcomes of the current circumstance, a living being transforms the otherwise merely physical milieu into a place of significance, salience, and meaning. These regulative processes constitute what enactivists call sense-making: “the interactional and relational side of autonomy” responsible for the “transformation of the world into an environment”. (Thompson & Stapleton, 2009, p. 25)

Sense-makers, meanwhile, are agents. Clearly, this conception of agency applies at levels of sophistication well below that of the kind of agency addressed in FAIR. Crucially for my claim that there is no unbridgeable gap between the enactive and Tallisian accounts of human agency, however, the enactive attribution of agency to all life forms is not an attribution of full-blown, much less explicit forms of intentionality, nor is it claimed that the basic organisation we share with these is sufficient for accounting for distinctively human forms of agentive behaviour.

Instead, as on Tallis’ view, enactivists frame “know-that” as arising from the recursive, iterative application of various forms of embodied “know-how”. For instance, in their in-depth treatment of the development of language from the basis of biological autonomy, Di Paolo, Cuffari and De Jaegher argue that what they term the “objectifying attitude” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 198) emerges by means not unlike the induction into the community of minds featuring in Tallis’ account.

Thus, on such enactive accounts, the explicitness which for Tallis enables our acting on the world from an epistemic distance features as a capacity of sense-makers enmeshed in the social context, and as a consequence of the linguistic reconstitution of our embodied engagement with the world. So far, so FAIR.

The hard cell

Tallis’ critique of REC includes an attack on the portrayal of single-celled organisms as exhibiting properties in common with human agency. Such accounts often serve to illustrate the above enactive concepts, which RECists largely forgo. Therefore, defending the attribution of intentionality to single-celled organisms is incumbent even on forms of enactivism that are supposedly spared by Tallis’ critique of the movement’s “radical fringe”. Further, clarifying just how the enactive conception of agency applies to single-celled organisms will help bring the uniqueness of its application to human agents into sharper relief.

Tallis’ jaw reportedly drops at Schlicht’s conclusion that “it is only a question of scale to accept a single cell as the bearer of intentionality, since the cell shares the basic organisation as a complex organism such as a human being”. (Quoted in Tallis, 2021, p. 208) Tallis suggests that this constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the proposal to ground intentionality in the characteristic organisation of living systems.

In a footnote, Tallis expands on the perceived absurdity of attributing intentionality to single-celled organisms. “Given that bacteria are not conscious of themselves or of oxygen as an object of consciousness” he writes, “it would appear that intentionality is not the mark of the mental” (Tallis, 2021, p. 214). The only alternative that Tallis considers, and favours, is to conclude that the directedness of bacteria has nothing to do with intentionality. A third, unconsidered possibility is that consciousness of oneself and that which one is directed towards are late-comers in the development of intentionality and mentality alike. Such a conclusion would preserve both intentionality’s status as the mark of the mental, and its grounding by enactivists in the basic organisation of life. Furthermore, as I will presently argue, this conclusion is not only compatible with Tallis’ case for human freedom, but in fact bolsters it.

In the overture to FAIR, Tallis states that intentionality “is the basis of the fundamentally asymmetrical relationship of presence: the material world is present to me but I am not present to the material world; the material world is “there” for me but I am not “there” for the material world” (Tallis, 2021, p. 16).

Without needing to pretend that bacteria are conscious of themselves or the oxygen towards which they are directed in the very way we are of ourselves and our surroundings, one can still trace a deep continuity between the directedness of such cells and the asymmetrical relationship of presence. From the enactive perspective, the cell’s self-individuating identity – and the co-defined alterity of its (oxygen-containing) milieu – proffers a rudimentary form of such presence. Whilst the processes constituting the oxygen molecule merrily endure unperturbed in the absence of any organism, the processes constituting the cell would “run down” or “extinguish” in the absence of any oxygen molecule. This transforms the oxygen molecule’s merely physical presence in varying concentrations into a matter of literally vital significance to the organism; into a salient feature of its environment. Meanwhile, the oxygen molecule, lacking any sense-making capacities, has no environment in which the organism could feature at all.

On the enactive proposal, then, such salience appears as a rudimentary form of the asymmetrical relationship of presence referred to by Tallis.

Whilst we must be mindful of conceiving this rudimentary presence as too akin to our own explicit take on the world, Tallis himself cannot claim that only the explicitly-minded enjoy intentionality or presence at all. It would be a strange state of play if the mark of the mental were hostage to the evolution of explicitly-minded creatures. Fortunately for his account, explicitness is posited to have developed by dialectical and recursive processes from the fully-blown (and presumably, before that, the merely) intentional capacities of natural creatures. Accordingly, Tallis has elsewhere rightly endorsed the idea that we may find “spatters of thatter” – moderate or rudimentary instances of explicitness – throughout the animal kingdom. As such, however, Tallis’ critique demands a principled distinction between such “spatters of thatter” and what we might call the “precedent of presence” that enactivists attribute to the single-celled.

Meanwhile, the enactive framework’s attribution of such primordial presence down at the level of the single cell could provide Tallis’ position with some much-needed ballast, precariously balanced as it is between materialist and dualist conceptions of the mind. The enactive view of mind as continuous with, but irreducible to life, forms a reasonable basis for the kind of dialectical development of “extra-natural” human agency from ultimately natural processes outlined in FAIR. Without it, Tallis risks placing human agents further outside of nature than he intends, enshrining in the process a form of dualism that he has been at pains to avoid throughout his work.

Questions of scale. Dimensions of embodiment

That said, Schlicht’s distinction between bacterial and human intentionality as one of “scale” is less than felicitous. It is better accommodated within the enactive framework as one of “dimensions of embodiment” instead. Where talk of scale implies that we and single-celled organisms stand in the same relation to the world (only more so, perhaps), the enactive framework entails that the explicitness that enables deliberative action cannot be straightforwardly derived or scaled up to from the directedness of the enactive cell. The difference, therefore, is closer to being one of kind than of scale.

Sense-making is fuelled not just by the processes that constitute a system as a living being- the “basic organisation” common to bacteria and human beings- but also by the “intercorporeal dimensions of bodily existence” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 3), which demarcate the intersubjective domain in which the development and acquisition of language occurs.

In humans, we can distinguish three such dimensions of embodiment. At each dimension, we find a reapplication of autonomy, and a novel form of normativity, absent at the preceding level.

The first – applicable to all lifeforms to much the same effect – is the dimension at which we find those regulatory processes that define and sustain a living organism as a unity. Here, as we saw, autonomy applies to the biochemical processes constituting the living system, and normativity is restricted to the vital norms which determine whether the system lives or dies.

The second dimension involves the cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, like those involved in action, perception and emotion. Normativity re-emerges here as more than a “mere” matter of life or death. The concrete nature of a living system’s sensorimotor apparatus will specify just what form these cycles take, and therefore the character of its take on the world. Single-celled organisms are therefore unlikely candidates for full-blown, much less explicit intentionality. For Tallis, full-blown intentionality characterises perception that reveals itself both as partial and as of a world shared by others. Meanwhile, explicitness, arising from the linking together of these manifestly partial perspectives upon a shared world through language and gesture, characterises the declarative take on the world that underwrites propositionally structured beliefs (and intentions, desires, or fears) about it. There is little in either the cycles of sensorimotor coupling or the internal organisation of single-celled organisms to suggest that they relate to their environments in either of these ways.

In the case of human agents, however, Di Paolo et al argue that “the world is experienced as a field of possibilities” (emphasis added) precisely because of how “through [a combination of the world’s] solicitations [and] our own mobilization […] we continuously project an intentional arc that seeks the resolution of a tension.” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 43) This pursuit of resolution is expressed through our constant adjustments of our relation to the world we act on – the way in which we seek alternative, hopefully improved perspectives upon the task at hand. In contrast to the case of the single cell, such sensorimotor engagement with the world is inconceivable in the absence of Tallis’ full-blown intentionality – an awareness of the partiality of our current take on the world, and our deeds within it.

The sensorimotor cycles through which we resolve these tensions between ourselves and our environments introduce a normativity that goes beyond the meeting of the conditions for organic self-individuation. We not only care about our survival, but also about our motivations aligning with the affordances of our current environment, and even something as seemingly irrelevant to our organic unity as pursuing said motives with fluidity and elegance. (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 44).

The third, and presently most relevant dimension is specified in the case of each agent by the cycles of intersubjectivity in which they engage. This engagement between two or more agents, and the interdependence of their sense-making activity that this implies, opens up new domains of interaction, which are not available to each in isolation, and once again, norms inapplicable to the activity characterising the previous dimension of embodiment emerge. It is now the relational patterns of social interactions that form an autonomous system, and those engaged in them – without losing their individual autonomy – now care not just about their own survival, personal motivations and the efficacy with which these are pursued, but the emotions and actions of others. In a turn of phrase strikingly similar to Tallis’ account of our induction into the community of minds, Di Paolo et al state that these new modes of sensitivity and responsiveness “open us up to a universe of experiences whose core aspect is our relations in the shared world” (emphasis added). (Di Paolo et al 2018, p. 62)

By contrast to Schlicht’s characterisation of the difference between how single-celled organisms and humans relate to their environments as “just a question” of scale, Di Paolo et al state that “the experiential structures of moment-to-moment participation with other bodies cannot be derived solely from organic sensorimotor experiences”. (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 63)

As on Tallis’ account, a recursive process of dialectical development enables these participatory, intersubjective dimensions of embodiment to “resignify the organic and sensorimotor world” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 63) within which the preceding networks of activity operate. Di Paolo et al continue: “We are thus confronted with environments full of objects, artefacts, tools, consumables, places, shelters […] as well as norms, rituals and practices embodied in these and in our relations with a community” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 64).

Reformulated in the terminology of FAIR, the world inhabited by agents participating in the community of minds is populated with just the sorts of handles that Tallis suggests enable the deflection of the course of physical events. However, such handles are but partners in the emancipation of the human agent from the habits of nature. For full access to Tallis’ case for freedom, enactivists must also accommodate the (non-causal) intentions we pursue with these handles.

Propositional attitudes

Despite his long-standing anti-representationalism, Tallis explicitly compares propositional attitudes with internal representations in arguing that enactivists eliminate the former:

The idea of ‘an internal state or process that is about something’ is close to that of a propositional attitude, that has been so central to our understanding of agency. [REC] sees cognition as the bodily activity of the whole organism which can be explained without invoking discrete mental states. (Tallis, 2021, p. 205)

The enactive denial that cognition is a matter of transposing a pre-given world to the inside of an agent does indeed entail a rejection of “internal” and “discrete mental states”. A direct consequence of the enactive corrective to cognitivism is that cognition involves no such internal intentional states. As we saw, sense-making is relational, and therefore not constituted by internal states alone, but by processes spanning both organism and environment. Mental “items” (although this term is rather anathema to the relational process ontology of the enactive approach) like beliefs, reasons and intentions, therefore, are likewise to be found in this relational domain.

However, characterising intentions and their kin as discrete, internal states discords with Tallis’ own claims and aims in FAIR. He both insists on the holism of the mental- the view that the content of any given belief or intention is determined by its relation to a whole web of others- and rejects any conception of an agent’s daily life as “strung together out of a sequence of discrete intentions that are the proximate causes of our actions” (Tallis, 2021, p. 206). He also rejects the idea that an intention might be an internal event, especially if it is to be an “intracranial neural discharge” (Tallis, 2021, p. 142). In so doing, Tallis himself portrays propositional attitudes as neither internal (Tallis, 2021, pp. 49, 146), nor discrete.

As such, by Tallis’ own lights, the enactive rejection of “discrete” or “internal” states ought not to imply the marginalisation of intentions, goals, and desires That is, Tallis’ own line of argument entails that we need not posit internal, discrete states to account for beliefs, intentions and other propositional attitudes. And yet, in the absence of any textual evidence of enactivists overtly eliminating propositional attitudes, the claim that they do so hinges on such an implication.

To the contrary, one can in fact find multiple explicit treatments of intentions and their role in action, grounded in the enactive conception of agents as sense-makers. Furthermore, such treatments frequently cast the relationship between intentions and actions as non-causal – just as Tallis argues the reality of freedom requires. I shall conclude by reviewing one such account, courtesy of Ezequiel Di Paolo.

Tallisian freedom: enacted

Instead of a causal account of the relation between intentions and actions, Di Paolo proposes an enactive interpretation of the notion of “intentions-in-action” (Di Paolo, 2015). On this view, intentions and actions are inseparably linked together as qualitatively distinct aspects of a “a systemic whole to which purposes naturally belong, as do its more or less skilful overt and introvert facets.” (Di Paolo, 2015, p. 52)

This systemic whole is the embodied agent’s sense-making trajectory, traced both by its actualised engagements with its material milieu, and its operating within the virtual field that is shaped both by its own adaptive capacities, and the tendencies and traces of the material processes that these same capacities have transformed into meaningful features of its environment. (Di Paolo, 2015, p. 52)

So, sharing both Tallis’ rejection of the view that actions are caused by mental states or events, and his characterising the efficacy of propositional attitudes in terms of non-actuality, Di Paolo proposes to understand an intention as the virtual configuration which is proximate to any actual situation in which an agent finds itself at a given time, and prior to the actualisation of said agent’s sense-making capacities by which it modifies these same virtual configurations in order to sustain its ongoing viability under the actual circumstances. Such virtual configurations and actualisations cannot be separated into sequences of causally related inner and outer events or states, but are instead co-defining, mutually constraining, and in practice inseparable aspects of the ongoing sense-making process.

Intentions-in-action, therefore, involve the entire network of material and normative relations (Di Paolo, 2015, p. 52) on which an embodied agent’s self-constituting and interactive existence in the world depends. It is common for enactive theorists to draw on Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world” to describe the subjective dimension of this self-constituting existence. Our lived experience is permeated by a constantly conjoined sense of both our bodily presence in the world, and our orientation towards it, the two inseparably linked by what Di Paolo et al describe as “a relation of investment in a situation, its history, and its possible outcomes” (Di Paolo et al, 2018, p. 22).

With this final piece of the enactive puzzle in place, we can see how an account of human agency that emphasises embodiment can nonetheless keep both intentions and first-person being front and centre. Di Paolo brings together the enactive concepts outlined herein, providing a model on which “neither acts nor intentions should be seen as discrete, causally linked events, but as time-extended aspects of bodily being-in-the-world.” (Di Paolo, 2015, p. 61)

Given that in the human case, intentions are propositional attitudes, this might suggest that the enactive cell, whose systemic whole contains both qualitatively distinct aspects – action and intention – also enjoys Tallisian freedom. At such a conclusion, Tallis’ jaw would presumably slam hastily back into the ground. However, this threat dissipates when we recall that the explicit take which provides propositional attitudes with their declarative content ^[4] depends on the reconstitution of our bodily engagement with the world – at the third, intersubjective dimension of embodiment, along which our induction into the community of minds takes place.

The virtual field within which we operate is likewise reconstituted. Semantic entailments, and the possibilities to which these make us privy, are even more remote from actuality than are the potential outcomes of current trends in environmental factors. Without such capacities, one could say that the qualitatively distinct aspects constituting sense-making as a systemic whole are indeed actions and attitudes, but not deliberative actions informed, sustained and modified by propositional attitudes.

Thus, the biological autonomy common to all living beings proves after all to be a suitable starting point for understanding genuinely free human actions which, in Tallis’ words, are “conceived, shaped and guided, and modified in a virtual world of possible futures whose origin is in the intentionality – individual and shared – of human consciousness.” (Tallis, 2021, p. 132)

Consequently, the correction to enactivism that Tallis prescribes appears to already be in place – albeit at what one might call the movement’s hard core, rather than its radical fringe.