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1 Introduction

One of the hottest topics of current debate are the so-called intelligent technologies that include, amongst others, Artificial Intelligence (AI) image generators, large language models, machine learning and natural language processing. Apart from the development and application of these technologies in almost all dimensions of life, there is a heated debate in philosophy and cognitive science about the possibility of general AI, that is, the possibility of such artificial systems becoming conscious and acquiring the same cognitive capacities as human beings.

Some think this possibility is not far away (Kurzweil 2005), while others think it is on the very distant horizon but still theoretically possible. In this chapter I will argue that such predictions cannot be realized unless the artificial systems have organic bodies and aesthetic sensibilities, which make it possible to have experience and produce meaning in ways similar to human beings.

My argument will be that artificial systems and so-called “intelligent” technologies cannot produce meaning or have experiences because they are not embodied systems. After looking briefly at the dominant present-day model of mind, I will look at the concepts of experience, aesthetic sensibility and production of meaning through the lens of John Dewey’s work and the work of the philosopher Mark Johnson, influenced by his thought. Hopefully, this analysis will show why artificial systems and “intelligent” technologies are not capable of aesthetic sensibility, cannot be producers of meaning and, therefore, subjects of experience.

2 The Dominant Model

The predominant paradigm of the human mind is based on a series of dichotomies, especially subject–object, mind–body, mind–nature, cognition–emotion, individual–collective, internal–external, cognition–action and theory–practice, among others. The central idea, with its roots in early modern philosophy, is that the human being is a disengaged subject (Taylor 1989), with his or her mind being separated from the environment (physical and social), body and nature. A consequence of this conception is to separate what is supposedly internal to the subject from what is external to the organism. Thus, what is important for understanding the human mind is located internally, the location nowadays being the brain, with the environment seen only as a source of stimuli from sensory modalities and the body only as a vehicle to carry these stimuli to a supposed internal cognitive mechanism.

These internal mechanisms are usually understood as computational and involve the processing of information that comes from the outside, so to speak. This implies that the information received through stimuli already has meaning, which then has to be decoded and reconstructed by the organism’s brain. Of course, it is possible to keep the computational model and include external factors as constitutive of mind. For a classic view of this kind, see Hutchins (1995). Clark (2003, 2008, 2014) tends in the same direction with the extended mind hypothesis, which I will mention later in this chapter. Even when the model of linear computational processes operating over symbols is rejected, for example in parallel processing models and connectionist neural networks, the assumption is that some kind of computational process is occurring and that this process can be simulated in artificial systems. It is not difficult to see why these assumptions can be found in artificial models of mind. These models think of cognition as the internal processing of information acquired from the environment as stimuli, which are then decoded and reconstructed by internal rules or algorithms that operate on an inductive logic of probability. By analogy, the human mind is understood as operating on the same logic and model.

Without trying to discuss all of these themes and philosophical aspects, something which is impossible in a single chapter, I would like to elaborate a discussion of three central concepts: experience, aesthetic sensitivity and production of meaning. Experience, because it is a central concept for theories of mind and needs to go beyond the notion of the stimulation of sensory modalities; aesthetic sensitivity, to reinstall the body, feelings and emotions in the analysis of the mind and human cognition; and production of meaning, to free this term from the exclusive connotation of a process of information processing, which does not involve the body in movement, the materiality of the environment or affectivity.

3 A Starting Point for Thinking About Experience

In their book Radicalizing Enactivism, Hutto and Myin (2013, p. 15) contest the traditional conception of experience, saying that “perception cannot be accounted for solely in terms of raw stimulation and perturbation of sensory modalities.” They distinguish between sensing and experiencing, defining ‘sensing’ as simply receiving stimuli through the sensory organs and ‘experiencing’ as something that requires elements beyond such stimuli. The term ‘experience’ conveys the idea of a “full-blown experience of worldly offerings,” which is the phenomenon that Hutto and Myin try to analyze in their book.

These authors argue against the idea that experience, at least basic experience of the world such as perception, has semantic content or, indeed, any representational content. This thesis is controversial, of course, but it is important to note that the target of its attack is a well-defined conception of semantic content, that is, a mental representation that satisfies truth conditions or, at least, adequacy conditions. I agree with the rejection of this notion of content as necessary to explain all perceptual experience. I also agree with the rejection of concepts and propositions as essential to such experience. If it is possible that perceptual experience, for example, has no content of any kind, as Hutto and Myin argue, that is another issue, which I will not discuss here.

I would like to suggest that experience does not need to have propositional-conceptual content to have meaning for a perceiver responding to the world. In other words, I think we can accept, with Hutto and Myin, that experience does not always need to attribute semantic properties to objects and situations in the world, in the sense of having truth or satisfaction/precision conditions, being a propositional attitude or even containing concepts. However, experience is still the production of meaning, even without these conditions. I see no problem with referring to this meaning as its content and referring to the process that produces it as the production of meaning. One author (Gumbrecht 2003) calls this process “the production of presence” instead of meaning, precisely to avoid confusion with traditional semantic theories, including those in the interpretative tradition of hermeneutics. I prefer to stick with the term ‘production of meaning’, with the appropriate caveats elaborated above.

Hutto and Myin (2013, p. 81, my emphasis) advance the proposal that “organisms often act successfully by making appropriate responses to objects or states of affairs in ways that are only mediated by their sensitive response to natural signals, where this responding does not involve contentfully representing the objects or states of affairs in question.” The authors also state, “that things look and feel a certain way does not entail that perceptual states possess or attribute content. Perceiving (…) lacks inherent conditions of satisfaction” (Hutto and Myin 2013, p. 134). I agree that content, defined semantically in the way Hutto and Myin define it, does not need to be present in the production of meaning by an organism coupled with its environment. If this is so, how can we explain the phenomenon of perceptual experience? Hutto and Myin do not discuss the aesthetic dimension in their analysis of experience, at least not in the book mentioned here. That’s what I intend to do in this essay.

I would like to present an analysis of the basic experience and production of meaning that starts from aesthetic sensibility, therefore offering an extension of the explanation of experience that does not involve representations or semantic content in Hutto and Myin’s sense. My analysis will be a form of Enactivism, therefore, in the same line as Hutto and Myin, but in dialogue especially with American Pragmatism and Autopoietic Enactivism, strands of thought either ignored by Hutto and Myin (in the case of the first) or to which they give little attention (in the case of the second).

4 Experience

I begin with the concept of experience in Mark Johnson, a philosopher who has developed incisive analyses based on the insights of John Dewey’s Pragmatism. Dewey’s concept of experience is notoriously difficult and even vague, despite its centrality to this philosopher’s writings. Johnson helps develop and clarify this central concept, developing analyses in several books over the last few decades (Johnson 1987, 2007, 2017, 2018; Johnson and Tucker 2021; Johnson and Schulkin 2023) in dialogue with contemporary cognitive sciences. The result is a conception of experience that involves the brain, the body in movement and the environment in its analysis. For Johnson:

Experience is what happens when an active complex organism engages its multidimensional environments. Experience is neither exclusively subjective nor objective, cognitive nor emotive, theoretical nor practical, mental nor physical. (…) Experience is all these dimensions interwoven—not as ontological or epistemological dichotomies, but as inseparable yet distinguishable threads of an ongoing process of organism-environment interactions or transactions. Experience thus includes both what is experienced as well as how it is experienced (…) and it encompasses every aspect of our bodily being in the world. (Johnson 2018, p. 207, emphasis in the original)

Immediately, we see the attempt to overcome the dichotomies mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. An experience is a quality, and how it is experienced is through aesthetic sensibility by the organism, in ways that do not necessarily involve verbal language, concepts or even symbolic signs. To understand this, we need to go back to Dewey and his analysis of how we produce meaning in interaction with the world. Dewey argues that advanced cognitive abilities, such as thinking, are rooted in more primitive experiences that we have when we engage with our environment. At the beginning of his article “Qualitative Thought,” Dewey (1930/1984, p. 243) says:

the world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed and are defeated is preeminently a qualitative world. What we act for, suffer and enjoy are things in their qualitative determinations. This world forms the field of characteristic modes of thinking, characteristic in that thought is definitely regulated by qualitative considerations.

But what are the “qualities” that permeate the environment for Dewey and regulate thought? Unfortunately, Dewey is not as clear as he could be about the qualities we encounter when we interact with the world. At one point he says that these qualities are not something exclusively internal to the feeling subject, but are qualities in which things and organisms participate, making it impossible to separate the qualities from the organism that feels them (Dewey 1930/1984). In other words, qualities are not only in the environment or only in the subject; they are relational and enacted in the coupling of the organism with its environment.

But are qualities simply particulars we encounter in the world? This raises the normative question of how we are guided by qualities that already exist, so to speak and, indeed, how they can exist independently of individuals. Can these qualities be understood as patterns that regulate our interaction with the world? At the same time as Dewey, but independently, Merleau-Ponty also said that “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its own way of achieving balance,” and each organism “modifies its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, pp. 148, 154).

There is obviously a need for norms here, for perception and action, otherwise we would have to enact qualities based on singular encounters with particulars in the world, something that would make even the simplest of acts almost impossible. According to Dewey, to the extent that certain objects and events, etc. become important for the survival of human beings—in the prevailing situations in which they need to live—these objects and events are fixed and identified by the sensorimotor patterns of movement and in the interaction between the organism and the environment, being sedimented as established norms in the constant interaction between organism and environment, and subsequently guide a particular individual’s action. This applies both to the meaning created by feelings and sense and to the meaning created by the verbal language used between individuals, in the formulation of concepts, language and communication.

Dewey (1930/1984) gives us some insight into how we make sense of the world and survive in it by discriminating certain objects and their properties from a situation we confront. We do this, firstly, through feelings, resulting from the aesthetic sensibility we have towards the “felt qualities” of the situations in which we find ourselves.

The feelings Dewey refers to “blend with the general situation”; they are “tones of the overall tone of a situation,” in the background, so to speak (1926/1981). Another dimension of meaning Dewey called “sense,” a form of meaning that has a reference, but that cannot yet be formulated into a proposition, because we have not yet discriminated properties and relations that could be articulated with concepts and included in propositions. Dewey reserves the term ‘signification’ for the meaning created by verbal language, developed in the evolution of human beings because of the complex interactions we have with the environment and which require a more complex regulation of our interaction with the world. However, the other terms he uses (‘feeling’ and ‘sense’) for our capacity to interact with and comprehend the “felt qualities” of a situation are extremely important for our understanding of how we make sense of the world. This is because they are grounded in our bodily and affective capacity to react to the world.

It is important to emphasize that there is no metaphysical necessity operating here. Established patterns of meaning, in all of the connotations mentioned here, are contingent. The fact that we discriminate between objects of different types is a matter of the meaning attributed to those objects by human beings who have a certain sensitivity to the environment and need to pay attention to objects and events for their survival. Both sense-making and its normative dimension emerge from the coupling of the organism with its environment, a precarious situation within which the organism has to choose and create the necessary conditions to achieve equilibrium and adapt to the environment through its own agency. Of course, it is not the case that each individual does this ex nihilo. The infant is born and grows up in an environment where standards and norms are already established by previous generations and in which his or her organic constitution makes possible a sensitive interaction with the world. Of course, these standards and norms can be criticized and/or modified. But, to the extent that they are sedimented, they act as (partial) determinations of our experience of the world. The important point here is that we are organisms for which things matter. In contrast, nothing matters to an artificial system. I’ll come back to this point later.

One consequence of this is that certain experiences are historical and culturally sedimented. They capture the felt qualities of a time or culture. We see this clearly in paintings, an analogy also used by Dewey. Vermeer’s works, for example, capture the felt qualities of everyday life in seventeenth-century Holland. Picasso’s works do the same thing for the felt qualities of the twentieth century. Our reaction to these works depends on our aesthetic sensitivity. It is more difficult to have an aesthetic reaction to a work of art from a previous epoch because we no longer inhabit the environment in which it was produced. Therefore, its meaning is not clearly captured by our sensibilities. The same thing can happen with works from different cultures, when the sensitivity to capture their meaning is not available to an individual from another culture. As much as our world is (partly) historically constituted, it is not homogeneous. Watching a film from another culture, for example, can produce perplexity, which is sometimes felt as discomfort, for someone who does not share that culture.

It is our aesthetic sensibility that, according to Dewey, allows us to perceive the qualities that permeate any situation and, therefore, perceive the world and attribute meaning to it. For Dewey, this sensitivity is then transformed into feelings, a kind of susceptibility to the useful and harmful aspects of our environment. It is its manifestation as feelings and emotions that produces the valences that lead to action.

And, as counterintuitive as it may seem, our aesthetic sensitivity, our feelings and our emotions guide our reasoning too, even the most sophisticated and abstract. Furthermore, both aesthetic sensitivity and emotions and their normative dimensions change historically, creating new norms for the production and understanding of meaning. What we need to understand for now is that it is through our aesthetic sensibility, expressed in our feelings, and our affective response to the world, during our bodily engagement with it, that we are able to make sense, on a basic level, before we use verbal language to express and communicate concepts and thought.

5 Aesthetic Sensibility

Starting once again from Mark Johnson’s (2018, p. 7) analysis, we can say that “aesthetics is fundamentally about how we are able to have meaningful experience.” He goes further, saying that “we have a deep visceral, emotional and qualitative relationship with our world (…). This visceral engagement with meaning (…) is the proper scope of aesthetics” (Johnson 2018, p. 1). This focus on the visceral and the aesthetic brings the body to the center of the analysis of experience.

It also brings the body to the center of the analysis of meaning production. Once again, Johnson, following Dewey, argues that meaning is based on bodily experience. It arises from the qualities we feel and the sensory patterns our bodies acquire over time. Of course, it is not limited to bodily engagements because we produce meaning with language as well (perhaps the most sophisticated kind of meaning) but our bodily engagement with the world is always the ground of meaning; meaning depends upon the qualities of situations and our bodily experience of them.

This is important because Analytical Philosophy, especially, has reinforced the mistaken idea that all meaning is a matter of verbal language and that only words and phrases have meaning. It is also assumed that only sentences have meaning because they express propositions using concepts, which map states of affairs in the world. In short, meaning is seen as a matter of how words and sentences can represent the world (have reference and meaning); that is, meaning is seen as propositional-conceptual and involving truth conditions (Johnson 2018, p. 243). We need a concept of ‘meaning’ that goes beyond this model, as Johnson himself argues. If we do not accept the restriction of meaning to this mistaken model, and to semantics in the sense of linguistic meaning, we open the possibility of finding it in experiences that do not involve verbal language, nor conceptualization, in their constitution. This is exactly what Johnson does in his work.

For Johnson, then, meaning emerges from our embodied experience, especially its structure, qualities and felt direction. This means that meaning is first linked to our affective, sensorimotor processes, which have valence and an emotional charge. The meaning of the world for us is, in the first instance, produced by sensorimotor and affective processes and other forms of meaning are extensions of these primordial meanings. Johnson speaks of “schematic images,” which are the way in which the organism registers the meaning of something in the world. An example of an image-scheme would be “inside-outside,” produced by the repeated movements of putting things inside containers and then taking them out again. This is how concrete concepts are formed in a child’s mind, for example. Afterwards, such concrete concepts are expanded, through mechanisms that include metaphorical extension, to abstract concepts. For example, the concepts ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ will be expanded to the abstract concept of ‘containment.’ Furthermore, metaphors are considered basic cognitive elements, without which it would not be possible to talk about the world. For example, the concept of containment is expressed metaphorically in the phrase “he is trapped by a certain idea.”

The main point here is that it is embodied experience that is the primary source of meaning. It is not the sensory stimulus, which supposedly carries with it a meaning (or information encoded in some way) of something in the world that is then reconstructed by the organism’s brain, as if it were meaningful information to be processed by an internal intellectual machine. Rather, basic meaning is constituted in the relationship and coupling of the organism with its physical and social environment. I think Johnson’s explanation helps fill in the details of Hutto and Myin’s (2013, p. 81) suggestion when they say “organisms often act successfully by making appropriate responses to objects or states of affairs in ways that are only mediated by their sensitive responding to natural signs, where this responding does not involve contentfully representing the objects or states of affairs in question.” This sensitive response can be understood as the production of embodied meaning, as analyzed by Johnson.

6 Coupling, Affordances and Meaning Production

Of course, for meaning to be produced in this way the organism needs to be coupled to the environment and such coupling is not arbitrary. Appealing to James Gibson’s theory of affordances (1979/2015), we can say that the environment ‘affords’ certain couplings and not others. Referring to a concept from Uexküll (2020), we can say that the organism builds an umwelt from its couplings with the world, a niche in which it is easier to survive. Thus, the meaning of an object is based on the affordances for possible experiences related to that object. Furthermore, our descriptions and analyses of affordances need to contain the crucial role of the qualitative dimension of any experience, which is its aesthetic dimension.

Here we are reminded of Dewey’s analysis when he starts from the concept of situation. Unlike most thinkers before and after him, he does not start from already discriminated objects, with referents, properties and relationships, and then explain an experience as the construction or assimilation (synthesis) of these atomic parts to produce something more complex, be it a concept, proposition or other meaning-carrying entity. Unlike this, Dewey starts with an undifferentiated situation and explains the process of producing meaning as one of discriminating the elements contained in the situation. In other words, the process is the opposite of synthesis or association, which is assumed as the predominant mechanism by many philosophers.

Instead, Dewey says that we always start from a situation that has qualities that permeate it and give the situation its overall quality. As already said, an analogy here could be a painting, which always carries qualities that permeate it, to the point where we generally recognize the artist from the qualities that permeate his or her works. In a somewhat similar vein, Taylor (2016) speaks of a work of art “portraying” something. Our experience of the world is “portrayed” in the work in a way that produces a feeling in us, as we saw in Dewey. Dewey goes further, saying that our feelings vary, depending upon the directions and phases of an activity. Activities can be started or carried out in various manners and they can be gratifying or frustrating, depending upon how we are connected to the environment. Consequently, our feelings can vary as the activity proceeds.

In addition, and in reaction against the analysis accepted at his time (and for a long time after), that experience is the result of processing information received by sensory stimuli, Dewey (1896, pp. 358–359. Emphasis mine) says:

Upon analysis, we find that we begin not with a sensory stimulus. But with a sensorimotor coordination, the optical-ocular, and that in a certain sense it is the movement which is primary, and the sensation which is secondary, the movement of body, head and eye muscles determining the quality of what is experienced. In other words, the real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light.

This idea points in the direction of analyzing how the body and the environment together constitute certain cognitive capacities, in this case perception of the world. It also points in the direction of understanding meaning production as co-constituted by the organism and the environment, a topic I will now turn to.

7 Embodied Schemas

Johnson uses the term “embodied schemas” to name the bodily structures necessary for sensorimotor coordination. They are patterns of recurring structures of experience that humans (and other animals) have through bodily engagement with the environment. In other words, the contours of feelings are embodied as sensorimotor schemes in the body of the organism that reacts to the world with affectivity.

The term “affectivity” deserves some attention here, because it can refer not only to the feelings and emotions generated in engagement with the world. As Colombetti (2017) reminds us, the term means anything and everything that affects the organism in its coupling with the environment. As she herself says:

“affectivity” refers to the capacity or possibility of having something done to one, of being struck or influenced (the term comes from the past participle of the Latin verb afficio, “to strike, to influence”—itself a compound of ad, “to”, and facio, “to do”). This influence is not merely physical or mechanical (as when one says that the daily amount of sunlight affects the air temperature) but psychological. It refers to the capacity to be personally affected, to be “touched” in a meaningful way by what is affecting one. In this broad sense, it is not necessary to be in a specific emotion or mood to be in an affective state; one is affected when something merely strikes one as meaningful, relevant, or salient. (Colombetti 2017, 448)

In other words, things strike us as meaningful in our encounters with the world. Without this dimension, nothing would have any meaning; it would be mere sensory stimulus without meaning.

Can we safely say that artificial systems are not affected in this way by anything in the world, that nothing matters to them? Is this an important aspect of human intelligence and cognition that cannot be simulated in artificial intelligence? Colombetti’s definition of affectivity could be interpreted by some as including artificial systems in its scope. When a neural network “reacts” to inputs and alters itself (as in machine learning systems, for example), can we attribute affectivity to it, in this broad sense? But note that Colombetti says that the influence here is not mechanical or merely physical but psychological. And it is implausible, at the least, to attribute psychological reactions to inanimate structures. I would suggest that for something to strike one as meaningful, it has to be created by an aesthetic sensibility that machines do not have. Indeed, Colombetti (2017, p. 2 my emphasis) states that “enactivism holds that all living organisms, as autonomous and adaptive, are sense-making systems and that, as such, they are cognitive.” Cognition as sense-making is restricted to living organisms and not artificial systems.

What we need to understand for now is that it is through our aesthetic sensibility, expressed in our feelings and our emotions, during our bodily engagement with the world, that we are able to make sense, on a basic level, before we even use concepts and verbal language to express and communicate thought. The aesthetic dimension of understanding, then, is present since our most primitive experience of the world. It is in the coupling with the world that we feel it and this feeling-the-world is a primordial way of making sense. Johnson (2007) goes further when he argues that emotions are our main means for us to be in contact with the world. They make aspects of the environment present to us and, therefore, meaningful in the most basic sense of this term, because our bodily state shapes the contours of our experience. All of this takes place on a pre-reflective level but, nevertheless, has profound meaning for us.

8 Embodied Schemas and the Production of Meaning

If what has been said so far is on the right track, we can begin to understand how embodied schemas, the most primitive and primordial meanings, can help in our attempts to understand the world and survive in it. What is the relationship between embodied schemas and our understanding of the world?

Johnson (2018) elaborates on some embodied schemas that are central to our interaction with the world. First, he urges that we start with movement. As he says: “we learn the contours of our world and the possible ways of interacting with it through movement.” Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2011, p. 114) says something similar when she states That “movement is the generative source of our primal sense of aliveness and of our primal capacity for sense-making.” As she says, we are in movement since before birth, not just the disposition to move but the real thing.

If we start with movement, we can see how embodied schemas, created in movement, can lead us to interact with the world in ways that allow for successful engagement. For example, balance is a body schema that refers to the body’s internal homeostasis and physical balance. If we remember Gibson’s concept of ‘affordances,’ mentioned earlier, we can say that physical structures in the environment ‘afford’ certain movements and not others; they afford balance, for example, and, when they do not afford balance, we get disequilibrium. Phylogenetically and ontogenetically, with repeated movements within physical environments, human beings develop a sense of bodily balance. As Johnson (2018, p. 218) says: “given our upright stance within a gravitational field and our proprioceptive and kinesthetic senses, we humans have developed a sense of bodily balance as key to successful transactions with our world.” Such transactions require spatial orientations, for example, verticality, and the sense that the world is (at least most of the time) up and down.

These body schemas and the spatial orientations they promote allow for certain experiences within space. Johnson gives the example of architecture. Entering a cathedral, for example, with its vaulted ceiling, we not only orient ourselves by the columns going towards the sky, but we can also produce meanings of something beyond our human proportions, that is, a “spiritual place,” through the metaphorical extension of the notion of balance. We often say, for example, that entering such places is an “uplifting experience.” It is no surprise that cathedrals are built in this way, to stimulate an experience of looking beyond the world in those who enter them.

The cathedral is an example of how our physiological structure, together with the structures of space, can produce meanings and experiences that would be impossible without these characteristics of the body and the environment. In the same way, we can understand why some interactions are impossible for us. For example, before inventing the airplane, it was impossible for humans to have a bird’s-eye view of the world. It is still impossible without machines that help with this. For the same reason, it would not be possible for a human being to live in the environment imagined by Escher in his lithograph “Relativity,” shown in Fig. 10.1.

Fig. 10.1
A sketch of relativity by M C Escher illustrates the ascending and descending postures of human beings.

“Relativity” by Escher Source: Wikipedia

Full size image

The sense of balance developed in the interaction between organism and mind cannot be used to guide us in this space, except on the plane closest to the viewer (where the figure is starting to climb the stairs). If this world existed, it would be impossible for human beings to be successful in their transactions with it. As Johnson (2018, p. 255) puts it: “Every architectural structure will present us with a felt qualitative unity of the whole that, in essence gives us a world (however small), and a certain way of inhabiting that world. (…) The building’s particular affordances—based on its particular structures, forms and qualities—provide the possibilities for meaningful engagement with the building or constructed space.”

One more embodied schema analyzed by Johnson needs to be mentioned here, which is the affective contours or patterns of feeling that we create during the process of human development. Once again, Johnson (2018, p. 215) is insightful when he says the following: “Emotions arise within the flow of our ongoing experience with our environment and are a primary way by which we assess the quality, meaning, and development of our experience. (…) [E]motions are a key part of how we gauge the meaning of what is happening to us.”

We saw in Dewey the importance of feelings and emotions for the production of meaning. Our emotional reaction to the world is the most basic way of evaluating our experience as well as a contour of the experience itself. Taylor (2016) also says something similar when he states that what he calls “intuitive reactions” are ways of producing “human meanings” as well as evaluating these same meanings. I will come back to this.

9 Art, Technology and the Production of Meaning

How should we think about art and technology in light of the discussion above? In a similar way to Dewey (1934), Johnson (2018) argues that a work of art is grounded in our everyday aesthetic experience when he says: “The performance of the work of art has meaning in the same way, and through the same neural and embodied means, as our ‘ordinary’ experience is significant.” Works of art can provide us with possible ways of being and inhabiting the world and, by extension, mold our everyday existence. A good work of art opens up possibilities for growth and enriches meaning rather than simply reproducing meanings that already exist.

Music is a good example of what is at stake here. When we listen to music, patterns of feeling are directly experienced as a “tonal analogue of emotional life” (Langer, apud Johnson 2018). Yet again: “[W]e are drawn in and carried along by the music, not just in intellectual comprehension, but also through our whole animate bodily feeling of the affect contours enacted in the music. We are swallowed up in the music, moving and feeling in and through the music. Music can give us an experience, on steroids, of our vitality and the felt contours of our emotional being” (Johnson 2018, p. 220).

How exactly this happens is still a mystery as far as I know, but the phenomenological experience is something that every human being feels. Music is a way of understanding the world and producing meaning since the earliest times.

What is the role of technology in the production of meaning and experience? The theory of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2003, 2008) shows us that technologies can function as extensions of the mind and, therefore, a constitutive part of the production of meaning. Cognitive technologies, as Clark (2003, 2014, chapter 8) argues, make us natural-born cyborgs, in the sense that we have always used technologies to augment our cognitive capabilities. Malafouris (2013) also notes that we have used devices, such as tools, to help with calculation, for example, since the Babylonian culture (around 7000–3000 BC) and that the mind is, at least partially, shaped by things outside the body. The extended mind thesis, by Clark and Chalmers (1998), advances the idea that cognitive technologies can serve as constitutive parts of the human mind, in specific situations and uses. The material engagement theory of Malafouris shows how considering the world of things—artifacts, material signs—as constitutive of cognition challenges consecrated ideas about human cognitive evolution and capacities.

Take a contemporary example such as word processor programme in a computer. This technology allows you to alter texts easily, substitute texts and position images, etc., without having to erase letters on the page, as in the days of typewriters, or even to rewrite the entire page in long hand. More than this, the process of writing—however messy it may seem—helps with thinking, trying out an idea here and there in the composition of the text. It is not uncommon for people to say that such technologies aid in the writing process. Artists use cognitive tools in a similar way. A painter makes sketches of paintings, or parts of them, before executing the final painting. Not only do they experiment with colors, etc., but they create the painting itself with these sketches. In a certain sense, we can understand the materials and instruments used by the artist as cognitive technologies. With these examples, we can see that the use of technology is not foreign to art or to human cognition. In a slogan dear to Enactivist theories of mind: “we create a path in walking.” The written text or the painting is not there, in the head, before we start executing it on paper or some other medium: it is enacted in the process of experimenting with artifacts and mobilizing our emotions.

But here we have to be careful. The extended mind hypothesis could include artificial systems within its scope and consider them, at least in principle, as intelligent agents capable even of emotions. However, Colombetti (2017, p. 5) notices that the extended mind hypothesis rests on a computational-functionalist view of cognition, while the Enactivist conception “offers a very different account of cognition—one that rejects computational functionalism in favour of a view of the mind based on a specific account of the organization of living systems.”

In order to understand this latter conception, we have to understand some of the concepts employed in elaborating it. Specifically, it is important to deal with how the organism individualizes itself, that is, forms itself as an autonomous organism, separated in its organization and characterized by operational closure. These concepts of ‘organization’ and ‘operational closure’ come from the theory of autopoiesis, by Maturana and Varela (1980). For an organism to maintain its identity (individuation), it needs to maintain its internal organization. This organization is of structures and processes that are related in a way that forms a network of reciprocal relationships with each other. It is this network that is operationally closed. If it ruptures, the organism dies. However, this does not mean that it is separate from the environment in which it is living. On the contrary. In addition to the self-distinction involved in individuation, there is the need for self-production, that is, adaptation to the environment, to survive. In other words, although the organism is operationally closed, it is thermodynamically open; the exchange of energy and matter between it and the environment is necessary to keep it alive. In short, there is a tension between self-distinction and self-production, which is constant throughout a person’s life (Di Paulo 2018).

Can this analysis be applied to artificial minds? Here, I think, we need to introduce two more concepts developed by Di Paulo and colleagues. Within the Enactivist paradigm, the concept of sense-making is “the basic mark of the cognitive” (Thompson 2011: 211). Di Paulo and colleagues (Di Paulo et al. 2018, p. 33) define sense-making in the following manner.

Sense-making is the capacity of an autonomous system to adaptively regulate its operation and its relation to the environment depending on the virtual consequences of its own viability as a form of life. Being a sense-maker implies an ongoing (often imperfect and variable) tuning to the world and readiness for action.

This definition reminds us of some of the central ideas of Dewey on the creation of meaning through interaction with the environment. Colombetti (2017, p. 6) observes that “This account thus departs significantly from the one provided by approaches in cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind that characterize cognition as a computational process operating over representational items.” As we have seen, it is exactly this last characterization of cognition that is assumed in artificial “cognitive” systems.

Another central concept here is that of agency. Di Paulo and colleagues (Di Paulo et al. 2017, p. 127) say the following.

A live organism—through its dependence on interactions with the environment for its own self-individuation—has a world of significance to which it is sensitive and in which it acts. In order to sustain its precarious hold on itself, this entity must turn outward and engage this world. These engagements or behaviors are part of what constitute the agent as a whole, not just something they do apart from their being agents.

An agent, therefore, “is defined as an autonomous system capable of adaptively regulating its coupling with the environment according to norms established by its own viability conditions” (Di Paulo et al. 2017, p. 127). It is my contention that artificial systems cannot be autonomous agents in this sense; they are not live organisms. They are not sense-makers, nor do they regulate their interaction with the environment as agents in the full sense of this term.

Of course, in very simple organisms this sensitivity involves no consciousness, not even pre-reflective consciousness. However, as the organism becomes more complex and its interactions with the world more complex, the sensitivity to the environment is expressed in feelings at the pre-reflective level of interaction. Alternatively, we could refer to this as sentience, an essential capacity for sense-making. In even more complex animals, sensitivity to the environment is also expressed in emotions and, in humans, also in language; the complexity of sensitivity is determined by the complexity of the interactions involved. In human beings, it is manifested in a complex and comprehensive repertoire of feelings, emotions, sensorimotor acts and linguistic practices (Di Paulo et al. 2018).

Here, a critic could raise the same objection encountered before: what prevents artificial systems from exhibiting the characteristics of being an autonomous, operationally closed system that responds to the world through affectivity? Why can’t it be considered a “live organism” as defined by this theory? One possible response to this is to say, together with Colombetti (2010, p. 146), that “emotion must be conceptualized as a faculty of the entire embodied and situated organism. Evaluations arise in this organism by virtue of its embodied and situated character, and every situated organism carries meaning as such—not through some separate abstract cognitive-evaluative faculty.” In other words, “there is no room for cognition without emotion” (Colombetti 2010, p. 151). If the critic continues to argue that machines can also have emotions, I think we have to contest the computational-functionalist assumptions on which such a statement rests. My own view is that no artificial system can have or exhibit emotions because no such system can have subjective experiences, be an agent or make sense of the world, in the manner analysed by Enactivist theories of mind.

10 Artificial Art?

But what about the “art” being produced today by AI image generators? Recently, a work produced by such a system won an award in the USA. Also, there is a lot of excitement these days about the possibility of AI writing texts, as can be seen from the explosion of interest in large language models such as ChatGPT.

Now, someone might ask: How is this possible if Johnson’s analysis, set out above, is correct? Doesn’t this analysis imply that only living organisms, with aesthetic sensibility, feelings and emotions, can produce art? If AI systems can produce art, does this mean that aesthetic sensibility is not necessary for the production of meaning in art and, by extension, the production of any meaning whatsoever? My answer to that question is the following: AI cannot produce meaning precisely because it is incapable of aesthetic sensibility and is not a living organism. It simply copies and does not produce real, authentic art. I’ll finish my discussion by elaborating a little more on this.

It is known that AI systems need to be fed by huge quantities of data to generate results. The latest ones, such as ChatGPT, need Big Data on a gigantic scale in order to display the performance that leaves so many people captivated. However, although humans need some experience and practice to produce something reasonable, the time and quantity required is much less than an artificial system. This suggests that it is not the amount of data or experience that is important but the human capacity to sensitively engage with the world. History is full of individuals who displayed exceptional talent when they were still children, with little experience. Mozart is one of the most striking examples of this.

A central dimension to authentic art is originality and imagination, with the aim of exploring something new or “portraying” something to us that has not been perceived before. No system that simply manipulates what already exists can contribute in this way, although, of course, it can produce a passable copy that, at times, could be confused with the original. Also, no artificial system would use tools and other material things to develop its art, as cognitive technologies in the way described above. Artificial systems only combine things already known and stored in data by using inductive, probabilistic procedures. They produce no new human meaning. This point requires more detailed elaboration.

In his book The Language Animal, Charles Taylor (2016) argues that language, in the broad sense that is not restricted only to verbal language, but includes gestures, embodied schemes, etc., allows human beings to produce human meanings, that is, meanings that create ways of being and values necessary for human flourishing. He calls these meanings “human senses” and argues that they are totally different from the meanings produced by rules or algorithms. If we understand this, we can understand why artificial systems cannot produce “human meanings.”

Taylor distinguishes between two functions of language: describing the world and constituting the world. It is the constitutive purpose of language that allows new experiences and new ways of being. In this function, language constitutes our world, in the sense of a world that matters to us, of our involvements, what is important to our lives. This world exists before our birth and we are part of it. We do not create it ex nihilo with every use of language. However, we can transform it and create new meanings and what Taylor calls “strong evaluations” that guide our path in life. In this sense, the change that occurs is existential, the creation of a new way of being and new “human meanings.”

These are meanings that the world has for us because of our bodily and affective interaction with the world, “in our relationships with [things] (…) [T]his understanding is rooted in our bodily know-how, which allows us to make our way in and around our immediate surroundings and deal with the objects that appear” (Taylor 2016, pp. 148–9). The main mechanism for this is what Taylor calls “articulation” via language, in the broad sense, which includes body language, eye contact, tone of voice and several other embodied ways of enacting a world and its meaning. Furthermore, “human senses” are always accompanied with a “felt intuition.” In Taylor’s (2016, p. 183) words: “what this means is that there is no dispassionate access to these meanings; that in the case of the first person, for them to be meanings for me, values that I recognize and that move me, I have to experience their felt intuition.”

If something like Taylor’s analysis is correct, and it is compatible with everything outlined above, we can easily see why artificial systems are incapable of producing human meaning—whether in paintings, verbal language or any other means. As I have written elsewhere (in press): obviously, an organism capable of interpretation and articulation, in the way elaborated by Taylor, is an organism that cares about its own life and the environment in which it lives. An artificial “cognitive” system, although it can perform calculations and even manipulate the logic of description—even through verbal language, as in translation systems—is not capable of the constitutive logic of language. Nothing matters for such a system; nothing affects the system, in the sense of being affected by something. Only biological cognitive systems have full linguistic capacity. Of course, such ability has levels; a simple organism can make sense at the level of bodily expression, but not through verbal language. This ability is exclusive to more advanced animals.

To sum up, artificial systems can imitate human meaning production, but they cannot produce the real thing.

Someone may complain at this point, saying: but if it can be imitated, what is the difference between the imitation and the real thing? Does it not have equal value as produced meanings? The answer to that question is “no.” We can draw an analogy with art. A copy of a work of art does not have the same value as the original, because it is recognized that the original contains previously unexpressed “human meanings” and products of the artist’s way of being and expressing self. The same applies to any copy, whether made by a human or an artificial system, including “works” in someone’s style. As Johnson tells us, and as I mentioned earlier, an artist’s work is the expression of the qualities in a situation felt by him or her and, even when copied, still belong to the artist. These are meanings produced by the artist’s aesthetic sensibility.

The fact that we can be fooled by artificial systems does not mean that there is no difference between what they produce and the production of “human meanings” by human beings. Such systems are not capable of producing human meanings, even though it seems that they can. This is important, because the introduction of such systems into more and more aspects of our lives can have unintended consequences. This is because to the extent that we believe that artificial systems are producing “human meanings,” we may “interact” with them in a way that reduces our own possibilities of producing such meanings. To the extent that we assume that meanings are produced by a human, we react with “felt intuitions” and our own productions of meaning, hoping for the possibility of regulating the meanings that mediate our interaction with the world. However, the artificial system cannot respond to the “human sense” embedded in our meanings. Thus, our own humanity can be diminished in the false interaction promoted by artificial systems.

11 Conclusion

In this essay, I have tried to present an approach to the human mind, drawing mainly on the work of John Dewey and Mark Johnson, that emphasizes the body, affectivity and aesthetic sensibility in the production of meaning. The objective was to show how human experience implies the production of human meaning, which, in turn, requires an aesthetic sensibility and an organic body. This, in turn, implies that artificial systems are not capable of experience, aesthetic sensibility and the production of human meanings.

If this analysis is correct, or at least along the right lines, we can understand why art is perhaps the paradigm of human meaning-making and why the aesthetic dimension of human experience is pervasive. We can also understand why artificial systems are not capable of producing human meaning. However, I would like to end with a word of caution: if this is true, we need to be aware of the constraints on “human meaning” production that artificial systems may create for meaning production now and in the future.