Definition of Enminded / Enmindedness

What is Enminded / Enmindedness?

How, where and under what conditions dtioes agency, cognition or sense-making arise? Classically, the study of cognition proposes that this arises in the brain (see Brain-in-a-vat, below). The Embodied approaches to cognition argue that cognition is always necessarily embodied, embedded and extended (and the Enactive approach takes this further by arguing that the living being actively and collaboratively brings forth its own world through ongoing skilled activity under precarious circumstances). Both the Embodied and the Enactive approaches conceive of cognition in a more distributed, intra-dependent and emergent manner – but they still implicitly place the brain at the center as the origination/center. In essence, it is the brain that is embodied, embedded and extended. But this treats emergent processes as essentialist (which is a category mistake). Rather than considering the mind/brain as embodied, we should understand that a specific relational configuration (an assemblage) becomes emergently enminded. Thought, consciousness, and experience emerge as properties of the whole distributed relational event. Enmindedness is not located at a fixed point; it is "where it is" depending on the context and activity. 

Moving from an Embodied to an Enminded approach to cognition, agency and sensemaking also allows one to recognize that this is a distributed collective process that happens at differing scales. Cognition “in the wild” (as Edwin Hutchins frames it) is best understood to be a distributed relational emergent process that can involve one or many agents in the process – as well as specific environments, tools, practices, etc. We can see that an aircraft carrier, a jazz ensemble, a crowd, a team, or an individual can individuate in an enminded manner. In this manner, at any one time there are many individuations developing overlapping shifting scales with the same participants shifting in, out, through, and across multiple experimental ways…

See also: Individuation, Enaction, Emergence, Assemblages,