Scale Matters: Temporality in the Perception of Affordances

Interoceptive experiences and ecological care: an embodied approach within therapeutical realms

The conventional dichotomy between human health and disease has historically been approached through reductionist models that emphasize the exclusive causal relevance of physiological and pathological processes. Consequently, self-awareness and affective dimensions, integral to a phenomenological perspective, are often relegated to secondary traits, affording little consideration for the causal role of embodied living organization. Our interest lies in exploring the potential relevance of the phenomenology of embodied self-awareness in relation to interoceptive processes within therapeutic settings. As we illustrate, when the unfolding processes of interoceptive awareness and its affective capacity take precedence, the agent assumes an active, rather than passive, role in their own experience of health or illness. Departing from an enactive, phenomenological, and ecological standpoint, we propose a distinctive perspective on interoceptive processes, relying on an affective conceptualization of a spectrum of experiences of bodily being-in-the-world. Our primary argument posits that considering interoceptive processes from an embodied and ecological viewpoint of the self, interacting with the material and social environment, enables an approach to the gradient of affective experiences of embodied self-awareness-where pleasure or suffering is perceived and felt-in a naturalized, non-reductive, and relational manner. We discern two ways in which interoceptive processes interrelate with the experience of embodied self-awareness: sensitivity (self-affective) and affective-laden perception. Drawing on this distinction, we provide a nuanced description of these experiences within communities of cis-women, exemplified through the contexts of menstruation and endometriosis. This exploration seeks to enhance our understanding of the phenomenology of embodied, ecological, and affective self-experience from within diverse and situated bodies. The goal is to contribute to their autonomy and ability to adapt and self-regulate within therapeutic contexts.

Enactive Pragmatism and Ecological Psychology

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum, a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.