Emerging from the philosophical matrix articulated by Francisco Varela and subsequently elaborated with Evan Thompson, enactive robotics advances the thesis that intelligence is not the manipulation of internal symbols but the autonomous enactment of meaning through embodied engagement. Rejecting computationalist orthodoxy and its representational architectures, this paradigm transposes the biological logic of autopoiesis into artificial systems, positing that cognition arises from precarious self-maintaining dynamics within sensorimotor loops. Rather than solving predefined problems, enactive robots participate in worlds they help constitute, their behavioural repertoires emerging from adaptive couplings with environmental contingencies. Consider the Iterative Deformable Sensorimotor Medium model: a minimalist wheeled agent, devoid of symbolic maps, gradually stabilises recurrent trajectories—habits—that both define and preserve its operational identity. Here, constitutive autonomy and adaptivity supplant hierarchical planning, demonstrating that coherent action can materialise from dynamical self-organisation. A contrasting yet complementary case is Shimon, the marimba-performing robot, whose improvisatory exchanges illustrate participatory sense-making, where cognition unfolds relationally within musical interaction rather than in isolation. Synthesised, these cases reveal a decisive epistemic shift: intelligence becomes an emergent property of embodied history, not algorithmic prescription. The enactive turn thus reframes robotics as an ontological experiment in artificial life, foregrounding relationality, vulnerability, and historicity as the very conditions of machine agency. Ultimately, enactive robotics gestures toward a future in which artificial systems are not programmable tools but living-like interlocutors, co-constituting meaning within shared ecological and social domains.
