Varela, Thompson, and Rosch propose that the cognitivist paradigm — treating mind as computation on internal representations of an external world — is fundamentally mistaken. Against this, they develop an “enactive” approach: cognition is the ongoing enactment of a world through embodied action. There is no pre-given world that the mind represents; rather, organism and environment co-arise through their structural coupling. The phenomenological traditions (especially Merleau-Ponty) and Buddhist contemplative philosophy are brought into dialogue with cognitive science to develop this account.
This text is the foundational source for the neurophenomenological tradition that OM’s research invokes through Francisco Varela’s later work. The enactive framework grounds the research program’s insistence on the irreducibility of embodied, experiential knowledge — the argument that cognitive security and the management of virtual capital cannot be fully addressed by computational or representational approaches, but require engagement with the lived, sensory, and relational dimensions of collective experience.
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262720212/the-embodied-mind/