The work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon is seeing a vigorous rediscovery. His ideas have a richlargely untappedpotential for science, e.g., in origins of life studies, developmental psychology, embodied cognition, and artificial life. I summarise some key concepts of Simondons philosophy side-by-side with ideas in enactivism, an approach to life and mind based on the works of Francisco Varela, Hans Jonas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I hope to show that there is much overlap between the two approaches, which is good, but also many productive complementarities, and some tensions, which is better. Simondon encourages enactivism by making its implications more explicit. He advocates the abandonment of hylomorphic metaphysics (the conceptual separability of form and matter) for an ontology of restless and open-ended materiality, relationality, and virtuality. According to him, being and becoming are mutually co-defined. The subject, in her ongoing individuation, sustains inherently meaningful relations with her world. Physical, biological, mental, and social processes of individuation nicely complement the different kinds of precarious autonomy and sense-making elaborated by enactive theory, concepts that in turn are only implicit in Simondons work. Individuation involves the organization that happens in a milieu capable of abundant potentialities when a process of concrete transduction occurs from more to less metastable states (crystallization is one example). Organisms are processes of individuation prevented from finishing through regulated engagements with the world in search of new sources of potentiality. This coheres with the enactive concept of life as the regulation of the tensions between self-production and self-distinction. Life and mind, for Simondon, entail the neotenic expansion of the early stages of individuation such that its termination is temporarily and progressively delayed. This makes explicit the material conditions of autonomy and introduces new elements for enactivism such as the notion of pre-individual criticality as inherent in the living body.

Research into perceptual and behavioural adaptations to radical disruptions of the agent-environment coupling has long been an interest of dynamical and embodied agent-based modeling. While existing artificial life models draw inspiration from Kohlers experiments on visual disruptions, their sensorimotor instantiation is rather minimal, typically involving two point photoreceptors and a point source of light and so arguably a better match for sensorimotor engagements in the auditory modality. However, studies into human adaptation to inversion of the auditory space are scarce. Here we report on the development and a series of preliminary studies regarding the role of activity and passivity in human adaptation to wearing a left-right auditory inversion device, or pseudophone, in different sound localization tasks. The de-stabilization of sensorimotor contingencies produced by this device allows us to analyze different kinds of sensory activity involved in the auditory system in non-obvious ways. Participants report that their movements induce surprising perceptual changes as if aspects of the auditory scene expected to remain static moved without correspondence to the action. Previous evolutionary robotics work on minimal categorization under ambiguous sensory fields suggests that training with the pseudophone under random presentation of the auditory inversion should result in the development of a single sensorimotor strategy able to actively disambiguate the different modes.