In this article Maiya Murphy uses the enactive paradigm of cognition to take a fresh look at Edward Gordon Craig’s experiments in the theatre. By focusing on his obsession with movement, Maiya Murphy argues that an autopoietic conception of life can recategorize his problems with, ideas about, and experiments in the theatre as a coherent but multifaceted effort to create a very particular kind of cognitive engagement. She explores how enaction’s concept of the continuity of life and mind can map out a meaningful logic embedded in Craig’s intuitions about the connections between cognition, aesthetic experience, epistemology, and ontology. She also considers how the many media in which he worked and his interest in Asian arts – along with his major concepts such as the übermarionette and the kinetic stage – can be seen as attempts to think through theatre as an embodied and emergent event that is at once concrete, aesthetic, cognitive, and metaphysical. Finally, she traces the philosophical heritages that gave Craig his frameworks for understanding movement, arguing that his limitations and frustrations were fundamentally philosophical. Maiya Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her movementbased collective, Autopoetics. She is author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and of essays in Theatre Survey and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, among others.

Human beings are sensorimotor coupled to the actual world and also attuned to the symbolic world of culture and the techniques of adaptation that culture provides. The self-image and self-shaping mediated by that mirror directly affects the neurocognitive structures that integrate human neural activity and reshape its processing capacities through top-down or autopoietic effects. Thus a crack’d mirror, which disrupts the processes of enactive self-configuration, can be disabling for an individual. That is exactly what happens in postcolonial or immigration contexts in which individuals’ cultural adaptations are marginalized and disconnected in diverse and often painful and disorienting ways. The crack’d mirror is therefore a powerful trope for neuroethics and helps us understand the social and moral pathologies of many indigenous and immigrant communities.

We have developed a chemical kinetics simulation that can be used as both an educationaland research tool. The simulator is designed as an accessible, open-source project thatcan be run on a laptop with a student-friendly interface. The application can potentiallybe scaled to run in parallel for large simulations. The simulation has been successfullyused in a classroom setting for teaching basic electrochemical properties. We have shownthat this can be used for simulating fundamental molecular and chemical processes and evensimplified models of predator–prey interactions. By giving the simulated entities spatialextent in the lattice, the particles do not interpenetrate, and clusters of particles canspatially exclude one another. Our simulation demonstrates that spatial inhomogeneityleads to different results than those that are obtained by using standard ordinarydifferential equation models, as previously reported.

To recognize alien life, we would have to be clear about the defining criteria of ‘life’. Metabolism – in other words, biochemical fine-tuning – is one of these criteria. Three senses of metabolism are distinguished. The weakest allows strong artificial life (A-life): virtual creatures having physical existence in computer electronics, but not bodies, are classed as ‘alive’. The second excludes strong A-life but allows that some non-biochemical A-life robots could be classed as alive. The third, which stresses the body's self-production by energy budgeting and self-equilibrating energy exchanges of some (necessary) complexity, excludes both strong A-life and living non-biochemical robots.

There are many ways of describing and explaining the properties of living systems; causal, functional, and reductive accounts are necessary but no one account has primacy. The history of biology as a discipline has given excessive authority to reductionism, which collapses higher level accounts, such as social or behavioural ones, into molecular ones. Such reductionism becomes crudely ideological when applied to the human condition, with its claims for genes “for” everything from sexual orientation to compulsive shopping. The current enthusiasm for genetics and ultra-Darwinist accounts, with their selfish-gene metaphors for living processes, misunderstand both the phenomena of development and the interactive role that DNA and the fluid genome play in the cellular orchestra. DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand. Both developmental and evolutionary processes are more than merely instructive or selective; the organism constructs itself, a process known as autopoiesis, through a lifeline trajectory. Because organisms are thermodynamically open systems, living processes are homeodynamic, not homeostatic. The self-organising membrane-bound and energy-utilising metabolic web of the cell must have evolved prior to so-called naked replicators. Evolution is constrained by physics, chemistry, and structure; not all change is powered by natural selection, and not all phenotypes are adaptive. Finally, therefore, living processes are radically indeterminate; like all other living organisms, but to an even greater degree, we make our own future, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.