Enactivism, Embodiment, Extended Mind, etc.

Zen Koan: A monk was meditating by the pond with his master one day. While meditating there the monk saw a frog jump into the pond. He asked his master who was sitting beside him how this happened. The master replied: "If you can explain what happens when the pond jumps into the frog then you will have your answer". The monk realized, in that instant, the meaning of his master's statement and then began to meditate some more.

As the koan shows, if the monk/student can imagine or fabricate his way to an explanation of how the "pond jumps into the frog," he will understand how the frog jumps into the pond, how it occurs. Please note that it is how and not why. Our knowledge, our experience, our "embodied consciousness" does not stop at the skin. What is known, at this [mostly occulted] level of perception is the manner in which mind extends into living circumstances. Each moment of our sentient living demonstrates an incarnate construal of self-body-mind-world instantiation. These moments provide much of the sediment for subsequent moments of life's movement as living time. As I have discussed in previous blog entries, a process of deposition is at work; we might call it a process of an assimilating deposition. The immediate conditions of each moment, a fractal frame, imposed upon all of the prior frames already deposited, is structured as a new past conditioned by both the present conditions and all of the prior fractal frames. This movement includes a paradoxical looking back to the future thus conditioning all subsequent moment-frames. All looking forward relies upon the present and the past for its vector. All acts of body, speech, and mind—past, present, and future—reside in dependence on the entirety of the past as well as present conditions carrying intentions forward. There is no room for a free will but the all-inclusive present conditions offer novelty in each moment thus offering the possibility of innovation. Nothing remains the same. Given this analysis, there can be no eternal return à la Nietzsche. The past provides the working material from which, influenced by present conditions, the future holds out the possibility for change. We may view this as the unfolding of history or karma. Innovation is made possible by the openness of the present to unique conditions into which the past enters to undergo modification in its vectorial movement to future acts. The process is far too complex to rationally compute. However, it may be said that what we do in the present, which is the result of past acts that have been perfumed all along by unique presents, offers us the possibility of changing our futures. TBC



.