Mainstream thinking in psychology and neuroscience often begins with a familiar picture: something happens in the environment, sensory systems send information about what is going on to the brain, which then processes it, and a response follows. This picture can be useful, but it can also leave out something fundamental about living things. Organisms are not simply acted upon by the world. They are already active, continuously creating and maintaining themselves. And through that activity, some aspects of the world come to matter while others matter less, or not at all.

Enacting Life explores a way of thinking that grew out of the work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela beginning in the 1970s, and that later became an important strand of the approach now known as enactivism. This view begins with the fact that living beings as autonomous, self-maintaining systems rather than passive receivers of information. It then asks what changes when we understand cognition and experience as arising through the ongoing relations of living beings with the worlds they inhabit.

This page links to an openly available set of readings drawing on psychology, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. They can be read in sequence or used individually. The readings begin from questions about living organization and follow their implications for how organisms perceive, think, and act, including what comparisons with artificial systems can help clarify. The aim is to provide a place for thinking differently about familiar questions in psychology and neuroscience.

The readings were developed by Peter J. Marshall at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA, and are offered as an Open Educational Resource (OER). For background on this OER project as well as reading tips and information on licensing and attribution, see this page.  

Embodiment and Enactivism 

Living things create and maintain themselves through their own activity. This document introduces core enactivist concepts including autopoiesis, operational closure, and structural coupling, and shows how meaning emerges through the ongoing relations between organisms and their environments. 

Enacting Worlds

Different organisms bring forth different self-worlds through their embodied activity. Enacting Worlds examines the concept of the umwelt and how aspects of a shared physical world become part of meaningful environments for organisms with different bodies, capacities, and ways of life.

Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience

Living systems are not simply driven by stimuli from an external world. This piece uses enactivist ideas about structural coupling and the cognitive domain to rethink perception, knowing, and action, and to ask how psychological and neuroscientific explanations relate to one another. 

The Active-Dynamic Brain

From the earliest stages of development, nervous systems generate their own activity. This reading considers what happens when we start from a brain that is developing, adjusting, and meeting the world with activity of its own rather than waiting for it. 

What Makes Living Things Different? 

What is distinctive about being alive? This document explores how living things create and maintain themselves, how this gives rise to agency and perspective, and what artificial systems might teach us about the difference between living and nonliving organization. 

Coda: AI and Living Sense-Making

What can artificial intelligence help us see more clearly about what it means for something to matter to a living being? The Coda reflects on information, meaning, agency, and the growing role of artificial systems in human lives.