The world, as Alva Noe says, does not just show up.  It is achieved.  We will bear this in mind.  The achieving is happily called “sense making”, a term of art in the enactive tradition that applies to the self-interested goings on of a cell as well as to the mastering of the world and self exhibited by people.  To speak of sense-making is to eschew speaking of perception and action.  It replaces both.

A second important  point to be established is found in considering the epistemological position of the cell that recurs in the enactive literature.  This oft-recounted tale involves a prototype of dynamical identity and autonomy, embedded in its world through a single gradient: a nutrient gradient.  We can contrast our understanding of what is going on with the perspective of the cell itself.  The subjectivity of the cell is laid bare, and it consists in a single discrimination between this way and that, between uphill and down.

Now we need to take a step back and combine these so that we can relativise our own position in the world.  We can know nothing of the petri-dish and the scientist’s lab, if we are hooked into our worlds (Umwelten) in ways similar to the cell.  As we uncover the nature of our reality, so too we will be describing our selves.  For the Umwelt of the cell is written in the language of its own constitution: its spatial and temporal properties, the timescales of its metabolism.  These are our necessary epistemological limits, but that is no bad thing.  It would be silly to ignore such obvious constraints on our understanding.

So we need to look at how the sense-making occurs, without postulating a pre-existing world, or self, as both arise together in a dance well known to Varela and the buddhists.  We can recognize some useful things:

• The arising of world and self occurs in time.  I hesitate to call it real time.  But it is “real-time” that picks out the sensory basis of experience.
• We seek the interface, but cannot rely on our spatial and temporal view of the world
• One such interface lies in the micro-tremor of the eyeballs, by which the visual system stays in constant dynamic touch with a world
• Another lies in voice: the magic relation between the real and the spoken that arises in real time
• The voice gives rise to a subject

So the goal here, and the reason this Church does not pretend to the practice of science, is that it is concerned with learning how to speak under these circumstances.  As Latour is at pains to point out, we cannot make the fatal fundamentalist mistake of claiming that there are facts that stand and pronounce upon the real, divorced from the business of how we talk, what our dialogue is, and what its limits are.