EXPERIENTIAL MACHINERY AND COMPUTABILITY

Abstract

Our aim in this essay is to conceptualize experiential machinery based on the theory of Maturana and Varela (TMV) and to present the Enactive Turing Machine (ETM) as Turing-complete and as the core model of the experiential machinery concept. TMV now encounters both old and new interlocutors, namely cognitive representationalism and Jonasian enactivism. Diverging from both, we start from TMV, which, grounded in the phenomenology of biology, sought generative explanations of cognition, exemplified by the autopoietic machine presented by the authors. They describe it as an explanatory mechanism capable of generating the investigated phenomena, even capable of generating phenomena of self-consciousness. In this case, we refer to these generative mechanisms of self-consciousness as experiential machinery. Through a phenomenological analysis of the act of calculating, we argue for the Turing machine (TM) as an experiential machinery. Finally, we present the ETM as the result of the isomorphism between the autopoietic machine and TM.

Keywords: Experience. Cognition. Enaction. Computing. Turing machine.