Xabier Barandiaran

Autonomy Theory characterizes agency as a subset of functions of an autonomous entity that controls the interactions of the living being with its environment so as to maintain its organization, considered as its intrinsic purpose. Yet, this understanding of agency faces a major philosophical and theoretical problem: there seems to be many purposive interactive behaviors that do not directly contribute to survival, or even run contrary to it, such as playing or smoking a cigarette. The challenge, therefore, is to elucidate these more complex interactive capacities within the framework of the Autonomy Theory. In this chapter, I explore three key hypotheses to address this challenge: first, the idea that such behaviors might respond to underlying biological “needs”; second, the idea that, as emphasized by the enactivist perspective, these behaviors are embedded in a sensorimotor level of organization; and third the idea that these behaviors relate to a social level of closure.

In order to maintain themselves as systems far from equilibrium with their environment, organisms must control the operation of numerous production mechanisms. Control involves mechanisms that make or are responsive to measurements of conditions within or in the environment of the organism and that operate on flexible constraints in other mechanisms to adjust their operation. A frequent assumption of humans is that control mechanisms are organized in a hierarchical pyramid. However, control in biological organisms commonly deviates from several principles of hierarchical organization and is better characterized as organized heterarchically. To provide a positive understanding of autonomy, this paper advances several features of its heterarchical organization and illustrates them using control of glucose regulation in mammals as an exemplar.

The concept of autonomy, as the capacity of a system to govern itself according to its own normativity, is central to modernity. Its theoretical significance spans across various scientific and philosophical fields. Traditionally, however, autonomy has been conceived as arising within the boundaries attributed to the individual in an abstract, internalist and self-sufficient manner. During the last decades, this conception has been challenged at different scales and requires a revision that crosses the boundaries of the individual and takes into account the material embeddedness, open interactivity, and deep interdependency of natural and social phenomena. We propose that autonomous systems are better understood as emerging-from and depending-on different scales of interactivity, collectivity, extensionality, environmentality, and through the lenses of integrativity and sustainability. This updated approach we call Outonomy.

Salutogenesis is a theory of health and disease that emphasises the promotion of beneficial measures besides the prevention of risk factors and counteracting pathogens. This paper reframes salutogenesis by situating it within the account of biological autonomy and adaptivity, drawing on recent developments in organisational accounts of living systems. By doing so, the paper provides new insights into the relational, situated and continuous nature of health, and it introduces the importance of supportive ‘salutogenic environments’ to foster adaptivity as the individual and collective capacity to change ourselves, including our environments, to promote health.

Pain science and management have long grappled with significant conceptual challenges, particularly the differentiation of pain from nociception. This chapter addresses this challenge by adopting the framework of biological autonomy, which conceptualizes living systems as self-regulating entities dynamically interacting with their environments. From this perspective, pain emerges as a context-sensitive phenomenon that protects autonomy by guiding adaptive behavior and anticipating future threats. In contrast, nociception is a mechanistic process that transduces and transmits noxious stimuli to elicit protective reflexes. By integrating insights from pain research, medicine, and philosophy, the chapter advances a relational and functional understanding of pain while outlining its practical implications.

This chapter redefines autonomy in bioethics by foregrounding menstrual agency as a relational and embodied capacity, rather than an isolated expression of individual choice. It argues that menstrual health has been reduced to reproductive function, excluding the psychological, emotional, and social dimensions of menstruators’ lived experience. Despite being reduced and overlooked, the way menstrual health intersects with emotional, social, and cultural dimensions reveals that even in health, autonomy can be experienced as both vulnerability and agency. Drawing on a triadic approach to ailments and the enactive concepts of autonomy, agency, and precariousness, the chapter reconceptualises menstrual well-being as a shared ethical and social concern. In doing so, it challenges dominant notions of autonomy and calls for structural transformations that support menstruators in reclaiming agency over their menstrual lives.

This chapter examines mental disorders from an enactive perspective. It explores two key ontological claims—the processual and relational nature of cognition—and their implications for our understanding of mental disorders. Rather than viewing them as isolated brain disorders, mental disorders are presented as developmental sensorimotor trajectories that are shaped by embodied interactions and social contexts. It highlights the dynamic interplay between an individual’s autonomy and their social environment in the emergence of mental disorders.

This chapter examines conceptualizations of the environment in biology and addresses the different organism/environment asymmetries appearing in autonomy views and evolutionary theories. It argues for recognizing the environment not merely as an external background, but also as co-constitutive and relational, insofar as life is shaped by epigenetic, exposomic, and interorganismal dynamics. Two perspectives emerge, environments as surroundings and as entanglements, both required for developing an “outonomy” framework that expands biological autonomy theory to include environmental agency and interdependence.

The first living beings, prokaryotes, were endowed with an extremely complex and dynamic individual organization: a compartmentalized metabolism in which diverse molecular components and transformation processes got functionally coupled, including a selectively permeable membrane, a set of energy currencies and a translation apparatus built upon a common genetic code. Each microorganism neatly distinguishes itself from the surrounding medium and is capable of generating and modulating its own rules of behaviour (i.e., it acts on its own behalf) so it can be interpreted as autonomous in a fundamental biological sense. However, the autonomy theoretical framework only covers part of the explanation for the striking complexity observed in minimal lifeforms. In fact, all known living cells depend on other cells for their sustenance, so they engage in diverse ecological relationships without which their survival would not be feasible. Furthermore, all living cells have arisen from pre-existing cells, through reproduction, within a long-term, open-ended evolutionary process. As we will argue below, the constitution of any biological domain requires a strong –though deeply asymmetric– causal interweaving between individual (metabolic-physiological) and collective (ecological and evolutionary) dynamics, covering different spatial and temporal scales that unfold in the course of abiogenesis.

The aim of this chapter is to review the criticism of the self-sufficient individual and to consider how autonomy can be thought from the subjects-in-common. As Goikoetxea affirms, “one is not born a subject, it is made”. Subjects are not autonomous owners of themselves. Instead, they are constantly overcome and dispossessed by the relationships that constitute them. If the subject is made and determined, how can autonomy be thought of? Our hypothesis is that being determined, done and dispossessed, is a precondition for autonomy instead of an external limit to it, although it is not a guarantee. The question is how to determine it. The question is not, therefore, whether one has or does not have links, but about what kind of links one has. In conclusion, against the model of autonomy understood as a pre-social property of a self-sufficient individual, we propose an alternative model of autonomy: a situated and plural capacity for self-governance developed within, through, and against social relationships.

This chapter encompasses a discussion about the understanding of reproduction in the theory of autonomy, emphasizing the need to expand traditional theories of autonomous self-reproduction to account for interorganismal and ecological interactions. Drawing from recent contributions in the philosophy of biology, the chapter examines some of the limitations of self-reproduction as an endogenous process derived from self-production, highlighting cases such as sexual reproduction or symbiotic dependencies that illustrate the relational and interactive nature of reproduction. I then argue for an extended framework that integrates relational dependencies and distributed organizational processes.

Traditionally, autonomy has been perceived through the lens of individualism and internalism, a view increasingly challenged by contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as by the context of global sustainability. Environmental challenges underline the need to shift from Earth-imposed limits to social-ecological limitations to achieve autonomy, democracy, and sustainability. In the realm of sustainability sciences, the concept of social-ecological systems has been developed to explore the interdependencies between humans and their environments. Despite the significance of autonomy in discussions around sustainability, its exploration within this field remains limited. This chapter aims to discuss the potential contribution of the concept of outonomy for social-ecological systems and the planetary scale and, conversely, to open up the concept of autonomy to planetary-ecological dependencies.

In this chapter, we briefly present different visions of the relationships between technology and autonomy. We accomplish this by a historical and (partly) dialectical exploration of three positions. We start with the modern thesis by which autonomous humans instrumentalize tools and techniques for their own benefit and self-determination. Next, we address the antithesis: the notion that technological systems have become autonomous, subordinating people to their own self-maintenance. Finally, we explore a synthetic position, which underlines that the only space for autonomy in a technologically mediated world is a technopolitical autonomy that takes the individual beyond itself, back to the ontotechnical constitution of its being, and forward into a personal and collective, ethical and political, participation in its becoming.

The performance of complex motor and craft skills is a norm-governed process, reliant on an agent’s sensitivity to standards of correct and incorrect performance. Whilst norm-governed practical skills tend to be understood in terms of social norms, this paper proposes an alternative, pluralistic perspective, which recognises socially underdetermined normative dimensions in practical skills. Specifically, drawing on the enactive approach, we argue that sensorimotor norms, understood as situated patterns of sensorimotor organisation, constitute skill-guiding normative standards which are not fully captured by social rules and expectations. We demonstrate the value of this pluralistic perspective for the explanation of skill-related norms by showing how it delivers a better interpretation of a recent proposal about the skill-based evolution of social norms, namely Jonathan Birch’s ‘skill hypothesis’. Building on this discussion, we then elaborate on the explanatory benefits of our proposal for making sense of cases of norm change and innovation in the context of practical skills and highlight its potential to address challenges connected to the origins and development of social norms. We conclude that a pluralistic perspective which takes account of both sensorimotor and social norms is better suited to explain essential features of norm-governed motor and craft skills than a view which limits itself to the consideration of social norms.

The concept of autonomy, as the capacity of a system to govern itself according to its own normativity, is central to modernity. Its theoretical significance spans across various scientific and philosophical fields. Traditionally, however, autonomy has been conceived as arising within the boundaries attributed to the individual in an abstract, internalist and self-sufficient manner. During the last decades, this conception has been challenged at different scales and requires a revision that crosses the boundaries of the individual and takes into account the material embeddedness, open interactivity, and deep interdependency of natural and social phenomena. We propose that autonomous systems are better understood as emerging-from and depending-on different scales of interactivity, collectivity, extensionality, environmentality, and through the lenses of integrativity and sustainability. This updated approach we call Outonomy.

Traditionally, autonomy has been perceived through the lens of individualism and internalism, a view increasingly challenged by contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as by the context of global sustainability. Environmental challenges underline the need to shift from Earth-imposed limits to social-ecological limitations to achieve autonomy, democracy, and sustainability. In the realm of sustainability sciences, the concept of social-ecological systems has been developed to explore the interdependencies between humans and their environments. Despite the significance of autonomy in discussions around sustainability, its exploration within this field remains limited. This chapter aims to discuss the potential contribution of the concept of outonomy for social-ecological systems and the planetary scale and, conversely, to open up the concept of autonomy to planetary-ecological dependencies.

In this chapter, we briefly present different visions of the relationships between technology and autonomy. We accomplish this by a historical and (partly) dialectical exploration of three positions. We start with the modern thesis by which autonomous humans instrumentalize tools and techniques for their own benefit and self-determination. Next, we address the antithesis: the notion that technological systems have become autonomous, subordinating people to their own self-maintenance. Finally, we explore a synthetic position, which underlines that the only space for autonomy in a technologically mediated world is a technopolitical autonomy that takes the individual beyond itself, back to the ontotechnical constitution of its being, and forward into a personal and collective, ethical and political, participation in its becoming.

In this paper we argue that radically embodied approaches to cognition can be expanded to show that: (a) our sensorimotor engagements with technical objects can be normatively shaped in a direct manner (i.e. not necessarily involving symbolic processes), and that (b) this normativity is not only anchored in the agent but also partially supported by technical objects themselves. We depart from the enactive reinterpretation of Piagetian sensorimotor schemes and his theory of equilibration to establish how both agent-sided and environment-sided support structures (including artefacts) contribute to the autonomous self-maintenance of sensorimotor networks. We will then introduce technical behaviour as a regulatory transformation of the environment enacted to equilibrate certain sensorimotor structures. We will defend that technical objects, as products of technical behaviour, sediment these normative constraints in their material structure. Then, through the dynamics of assimilation and accommodation, we schematize how different scenarios give rise to canonical or alternative uses in the encounter of agents with artefacts. Finally, we will offer a complexification of the normative entanglement of objects and agents by introducing the sociohistorical notion of activity as developed within Activity Theory approaches as collectively articulating individual actions. Based on all of this, we will have offered a picture of technical objects as also radically embodying normative layers, without submitting to an overly-deterministic picture of artefacts as rigidly prescribing behaviour, or to the purely symbolic or culturalist interpretation of them.

This paper investigates the ontological characterization of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Between inflationary and deflationary accounts, we pay special attention to their status as agents. This requires explaining in detail the architecture, processing, and training procedures that enable LLMs to display their capacities, and the extensions used to turn LLMs into agent-like systems. After a systematic analysis we conclude that a LLM fails to meet necessary and sufficient conditions for autonomous agency in the light of embodied theories of mind: the individuality condition (it is not the product of its own activity, it is not even directly affected by it), the normativity condition (it does not generate its own norms or goals), and, partially the interactional asymmetry condition (it is not the origin and sustained source of its interaction with the environment). If not agents, then… What are LLMs? We argue that ChatGPT should be characterized as an interlocutor or linguistic automaton, a library-that-talks, devoid of (autonomous) agency, but capable to engage performatively on non-purposeful yet purpose-structured and purpose-bounded tasks. When interacting with humans, a “ghostly” component of the human-machine interaction makes it possible to enact genuine conversational experiences with LLMs. Despite their lack of sensorimotor and biological embodiment, LLMs textual embodiment (the training corpus), digital extended interface embodiments, and resource-hungry computational embodiment, significantly transform existing forms of machine automatism and human agency. Beyond assisted and extended agency, the LLM-human coupling can produce midtended forms of agency, closer to the production of intentional agency than to the extended instrumentality of any previous technologies.

This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data analytics to enhance user engagement, creating a cycle of attention capture and data extraction. We review contemporary (neuro)cognitive theories of attention and platform engagement design techniques and criticize classical cognitivist and behaviourist theories for their inadequacies in addressing the potential harms of such engagement on user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science, instead, emphasizing the embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological aspects of cognition, offer us an intrinsic normative standpoint and a more integrated understanding of how attentional patterns are actively constituted by adaptive digital environments. By examining the precarious nature of habit formation in digital contexts, we reveal the techno-economic underpinnings that threaten personal autonomy by disaggregating habits away from the individual, into an AI managed collection of behavioural patterns. Our current predicament suggests the necessity of a paradigm shift towards an ecology of attention. This shift aims to foster environments that respect and preserve human cognitive and social capacities, countering the exploitative tendencies of cognitive capitalism.

Teleosemantics explains meaning by appealing to the biological norms that make error possible, but most work in the field still anchors those norms in evolutionary “selected‐effect” functions. We develop an organismic alternative grounded in the self-maintenance of autonomous systems. Building on sensorimotor theory and enactivism, we reconceptualise goals as second-order constraints—attractors in a dynamic sensorimotor field—and show how they are nested into a heterarchy of means–end relations connecting global self‑maintenance of the sensorimotor organization and identity of system with the most basic sensorimotor coordinations. Drawing on this framework, we identify the minimal necessary requirements for genuine teleological behaviour: 1. Initiation that individuates an action in relation to a goal, 2. Modulatory execution that adaptively compensates perturbations or deploys alternative strategies in relation to the goal, and 3. Meaningful termination through successful acknowledgment and transition, goal-sensitive persistence, or coherent abandonment. We locate normativity and error in the dynamic presuppositions among sensorimotor schemes and goals: failure manifests as incoordination within, or across, goal branches. We finally illustrate our account with a detailed analysis of the well known A-not-B error in psychology, showing how infants meet our teleological criteria while revealing incoordination as tension breakdowns inside a heterarchy of goals and sensorimotor schemes. Teleological behaviour, therefore, is the management of tensions and dynamic presuppositions within the goal heterarchy, not a chain of mechanical causes, thus delivering a naturalised notion of purposiveness that opens up an alternative route to teleosemantics beyond evolutionary selection.

In this paper we argue that radically embodied approaches to cognition can be expanded to show that: a) our sensorimotor engagements with technical objects can be normatively shaped in a direct manner (i.e. not necessarily involving symbolic processes), and that b) this normativity is not only anchored in the agent but also partially supported by technical objects themselves. We depart from the enactive reinterpretation of Piagetian sensorimotor schemes and his theory of equilibration to establish how both agent-sided and environment-sided support structures (including artefacts) contribute to the autonomous self-maintenance of sensorimotor networks. We will then introduce technical behaviour as a regulatory transformation of the environment enacted to equilibrate certain sensorimotor structures. We will defend that technical objects, as products of technical behaviour, sediment these normative constraints in their material structure. Then, through the dynamics of assimilation and accommodation we schematize how different scenarios give rise to canonical or alternative uses in the encounter of agents with artefacts. Finally, we will offer a complexification of the normative entanglement of objects and agents by introducing the sociohistorical notion of activity as developed within Activity Theory approaches as collectively articulating individual actions. Based on all of this, we will have offered a picture of technical objects as also radically embodying normative layers, without submitting to an overly-deterministic picture of artefacts as rigidly prescribing behaviour, or to the purely symbolic or culturalist interpretation of them.

We suggest that the influence of biology in ‘biologically inspired robotics’ can be embraced at a deeper level than is typical, if we adopt an enactive approach that moves the focus of interest from how problems are solved to how problems emerge in the first place. In addition to being inspired by mechanisms found in natural systems or by evolutionary design principles directed at solving problems posited by the environment, we can take inspiration from the precarious, self-maintaining organization of living systems to investigate forms of cognition that are also precarious and self-maintaining and that thus also, like life, have their own problems that must be be addressed if they are to persist. In this vein, we use a simulation to explore precarious, self-reinforcing sensorimotor habits as a building block for a robot's behavior. Our simulations of simple robots controlled by an Iterative Deformable Sensorimotor Medium demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of different habits, their re-enactment and the organization of an ecology of habits within each agent. The form of the emergent habits is constrained by the sensory modality of the robot such that habits formed under one modality (vision) are more similar to each other than they are to habits formed under another (audition). We discuss these results in the wider context of: (a) enactive approaches to life and mind, (b) sensorimotor contingency theory, (c) adaptationist vs. structuralist explanations in biology, and (d) the limits of functionalist problem-solving approaches to (artificial) intelligence.

According to the traditional nomological-deductive methodology of physics and chemistry [Hempel and Oppenheim, 1948], explaining a phenomenon means subsuming it under a law. Logic becomes then the glue of explanation and laws the primary explainers. Thus, the scientific study of a system would consist in the development of a logically sound model of it, once the relevant observables (state variables) are identified and the general laws governing their change (expressed as differential equations, state transition rules, maximization/minimization principles,. . . ) are well determined, together with the initial or boundary conditions for each particular case. Often this also involves making a set of assumptions about the elementary components of the system (e.g., their structural and dynamic properties) and modes of local interaction. In this framework, predictability becomes the main goal and that is why research is carried out through the construction of accurate mathematical models. Thus, physics and chemistry have made most progress so far by focusing on systems that, either due to their intrinsic properties or to the conditions in which they are investigated, allow for very strong simplifying assumptions, under which, nevertheless, those highly idealized models of reality are deemed to be in good correspondence with reality itself. Despite the enormous success that this methodology has had, the study of living and cognitive phenomena had to follow a very different road, because these phenomena are produced by systems whose underlying material structure and organization do not permit such crude approximations. Seen from the perspective of physics or chemistry, biological and cognitive systems are made of an enormous number of parts or elements interacting in non-linear and selective ways, which makes very difficult their tractability through mathematical models. In addition, many of those interacting elements are hierarchically organized, in a way that the “macroscopic” (observable) parts behave according to rules that cannot be, in practice, derived from simple principles at the level of their “microscopic” dynamics..

The notion of malfunction is critical to biological explanation. It provides a test-bed for the normative character of functional attribution. Theories of biological functioning must permit traits to operate but, at the same time, be judged as malfunctioning (in some naturalized, non-arbitrary sense). Whereas malfunctioning has attracted most attention and discussion in evolutionary etiological approaches, systemic and organizational ones have been less discussed. The most influential of the organizational approaches (by Saborido, Moreno and Mossio) takes a dual-order approach to malfunctions, as a set of functions that fit first-order constitutive norms but fail to obey second-order regulatory ones. We argue that this conception is unnecessarily complicated (malfunctions do not need to arise as a result of two conflicting orders of norms) and too narrow (it excludes canonical cases of malfunctioning). We provide an alternative organizational account grounded on viability theory. The dynamics of the traits that constitute an organism define the normative field of its viability space: sugar must be replaced at certain rate, blood must be pumped at a certain pace, etc. A trait operates normatively when its effects on the viability space correlate positively with the normative field. Three senses of dysfunctionality might be distinguished: subfunctional operations are those that positively correlate with the normative field but quantitatively fail to match the required speed; malfunctional operations are those that do not positively correlate with the normative field; and, nonfunctional traits either don’t operate at all or operate with null effect on the normative field.

This paper introduces the concept of “generative midtended cognition”, that explores the integration of generative AI technologies with human cognitive processes. The term “generative” reflects AI’s ability to iteratively produce structured outputs, while “midtended” captures the potential hybrid (human-AI) nature of the process. It stands between traditional conceptions of _in_tended creation, understood as steered or directed from with_in_, and _ex_tended processes that bring exo-biological processes into the creative process. We examine the working of current generative technologies (based on multimodal transformer architectures typical of large language models like ChatGPT) to explain how they can transform human cognitive agency beyond what the conceptual resources of standard theories of extended cognition can capture. We suggest that the type of cognitive activity typical of the coupling between a human and generative technologies is closer (but not equivalent) to social cognition than to classical extended cognitive paradigms. Yet, it deserves a specific treatment. We provide an explicit definition of _generative midtended cognition_ in which we treat interventions by AI systems as constitutive of the agent’s intentional creative processes. Furthermore, we distinguish two dimensions of generative hybrid creativity: 1. Width: captures the sensitivity of the context of the generative process (from the single letter to the whole historical and surrounding data), 2. Depth: captures the granularity of iteration loops involved in the process. Generative midtended cognition stands in the middle depth between _conversational_ forms of cognition in which complete utterances or creative units are exchanged, and micro-cognitive (e.g. neural) subpersonal processes. Finally, the paper discusses the potential risks and benefits of widespread generative AI adoption, including the challenges of authenticity, generative power asymmetry, and creative boost or atrophy.

In recent years, (autonomy-centered) enactivism has been used to provide an integrative and relational account of mental conditions. A significant advancement lies in its naturalized and pluralistic treatment of normativity, which transcends traditional objectivist and normativist dichotomies. This article explores the varieties of normativity within this paradigm and their implications for understanding mental conditions. We address purported challenges associated with the integration of social normativity into the enactive naturalistic framework of cognition, particularly concerning mental conditions. Drawing upon the distinction between the constitution problem and the status problem, we conceptualize mental conditions as intersubjectively constituted with an intersubjectively negotiated status. Adopting a participatory sense-making perspective, we address three challenges posed by social movements: (1) Hermeneutical dilemmas related to the ontological openness of mental health categories. (2) The difficulties and urgency to mitigate epistemic injustices. (3) The complex attribution of (social) responsibility in psychological wellbeing. In conclusion, this perspective prompts a reevaluation of epistemological assumptions, advocating for a second-person and engaged perspective on mental conditions.