L&P Beyond Dichotomy: An international collective exploring the power in caring beyond bounds. (Love & Philosophy Subscriber Stream) - Détails, épisodes et analyse
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L&P Beyond Dichotomy: An international collective exploring the power in caring beyond bounds. (Love & Philosophy Subscriber Stream)
Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological & poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Deeply human, friction friendly, & daring to care. Past and future show hosts include Andrea Hiott, Mirko Prokop, Fotis Tsiroukis, Henry Kramer, and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. Regular podcast links at https://loveandphilosophy.com/
Détails sur L&P Beyond Dichotomy: An international collective exploring the power in caring beyond bounds. (Love & Philosophy Subscriber Stream), podcast de Conversations across traditional divides. Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological and poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds.
Persona Fog, Passion, Estrangement, Endurance (and Carl Jung) with Patricia Martin
dimanche 11 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:17:47
By now we know that online life, with its endless content, algorithmic polarization, and pressure to present oneself publicly, is detrimental to our well-being; countless books and articles have dissected these angles. But after a decade of empirical research, Patricia Martin argues the damage goes deeper. We discuss her book Will the Future Like You?, which makes the case that the capacity to form and sustain an identity is itself being eroded by code built to keep us uncertain about who we are and cut off from our own inner authority. She calls this condition persona fog.
In Jung’s model, the persona is the thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life: useful, but never meant to be load-bearing. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study with roughly 100 participants and a decade of data on online self-presentation, she describes what happens when we pour our whole sense of self into multiple online personas: fragmentation, chronic self-doubt, and estrangement from a core self.
The conversation with philosopher and author Andrea Hiott moves through Patricia’s own “undoing” (divorce, three moves in 18 months, her mother’s sudden death, her child’s transition, and the loss of a major project), her path into Jungian psychology, and the difference between resilience and endurance. Passion, she reminds us, once meant the capacity to suffer and hold steady amid uncertainty. Along the way, Andrea and Patricia touch on Csikszentmihalyi and flow, social pain research, Winnicott’s attentive gaze, and why everyday attention to one another may be a form of love.
About Patricia Martin
Patricia Martin is a cultural researcher, author, and Director of the Institute for Psyche and Culture, a depth-psychology think tank based in Chicago. She is the founder and host of the podcast Jung in the World, now in its sixth season with over two million cumulative downloads. Author of four books, including RenGen, featured by the New York Times, and her latest, Will the Future Like You? (Karnac, 2026), which Kirkus recommended as an “incisive, fresh work.” For the past decade, she has led independent research on the erosion of selfhood through digital persona management, advancing her theory of persona fog. She completed postgraduate training in Jungian theory at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and holds a certification in Medical Narrative from Duke University, an MA in Irish Literature and Culture from University College Dublin, and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College. She is a Research Affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.Chapters
* 00:00 Introduction: persona fog, endurance, and the art of enough
* 04:00 Missing the school bus and a childhood moment of transcendence
* 08:00 What the persona is, and why it was never meant to be load-bearing
* 11:30 The self as product and the post-identity era
* 17:00 What changed since our grandparents’ generation; the three factors of identity
* 23:00 From public libraries to the early internet
* 25:00 Patricia’s personal undoing and the question “Who am I?”
* 29:00 Fragmentation, resilience, and endurance
* 34:30 Persona, brand, and optimization; passion as endurance
* 37:00 Social pain online and the neuroscience of rejection
* 38:30 Movement, the body, and the micro-singularity of the self with its devices
* 41:30 Who listens to Jung in the World, and a yearning for depth
* 44:00 How Patricia found Jung; Jason’s story
* 48:00 Jonathan’s descent story and preparing to endure the AI era
* 50:30 Csikszentmihalyi, flow, and 45 minutes offline
* 53:45 The transcendent function, and the Jung lecture that inspired Csikszentmihalyi
* 55:00 Why high achievers can be the most fragile; chronic self-doubt
* 59:45 Janet’s story: auditing her “wardrobe” of personas
* 1:05:30 Love, attention, and Winnicott’s good-enough gaze
* 1:08:30 Why the self still matters; persona and romantic love
* 1:11:00 Listening as love, participatory sense-making, and stewarding attention
* 1:16:30 The spiral: returning to where we started, but anew
Andrea (Intro): [00:00] Hey everyone. Today I’m joined by Patricia Martin, a cultural researcher who has been tracking a big shift in our society over the last three decades, and especially over the last 10 to 15 years, relative to what being online has been changing for us. She was there around the beginning of the internet, working with public libraries in America as they began to implement the web. Today she hosts Jung in the World (as in Carl Jung), a podcast that applies Jungian psychology to contemporary living, and it has reached listeners all around the world.
We’ll talk about that a little today, but mostly we’re going to talk about her book, Will the Future Like You?: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention. It comes from research she’s been doing over the past decade, including a three-year ethnographic study with about 100 participants. She even created an early tool to help her analyze the data.
The book also came from some [00:01] personal undoing, which we talk about: some really hard things she went through in her own life, in her relationships and her family. She woke up one morning thinking, “Who am I?” and set off to figure out what it really means to build a self in this digital age.
One of the main themes this conversation revolves around is persona fog. In Jung’s model, the persona is a thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life, and it was never really meant to bear all the weight we’re now putting on it. We’re almost trying to put our bodies into this simulated interface online, and that is causing strange feelings for some of us, and for our society overall. We’ve created personas that are nothing more than a film or [00:02] a layer over us, or maybe a screen is a better way to think of it, and somehow that’s making us feel disembodied.
We talk about a lot of that. It relates to some of my own work too, but it’s really interesting to get Patricia’s views on this, and on the way we end up talking about resilience and endurance: what matters, and what continues to matter in our lives. Holding steady even when the ground is moving, as she points out. I think that’s a skill we’re all trying to learn in different ways. It’s part of why we try to think beyond either/or here, and to develop a way of staying balanced and still connecting to what matters to us even as we connect with the world. This connects to flow a little, and ideas like that, which we also talk about.
We even get to Winnicott at the end, [00:03] the idea of the good-enough parent or good-enough mother, the attentive gaze, and what it means to just be with “enough.” Enough is a word that comes up in a few upcoming conversations. The art of enough is something I’ll talk about with Jonny Thomson and his upcoming book. We’ve already recorded that, and I’ll be publishing it.
So we’re trying to think about what it means to find balance, but also to feel excited, to feel the amazing consciousness that is our life. We talk about that here too: how to really notice each other and notice what matters, and what it means to be human. Those are the themes we’ll be exploring in these next episodes, starting with this one, thinking of the spiral of how we move through life and always return anew. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope you’re doing well out there and not experiencing any persona fog. But if you are, you’re not [00:04] alone, and we can get through this together.
Missing the bus
Andrea Hiott: Hi, Patricia. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. I’m so glad you’re here today.
Patricia Martin: It’s my pleasure.
Andrea Hiott: We’re going to talk about Will the Future Like You?, which is such a wonderful title, Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention. There’s a lot in this book I want to get into, but I also want to give people an idea of who you are.
One scene that really struck me is when you were helping your teacher at school, I think in second grade, and you lost track of time. You came out of the school and realized you’d missed the bus home. The way you write about this moment, I feel like there’s a lot in it, because you sort of freeze, which reminds me a bit of things that come later, like persona fog. But the moment I want to start with is when you make the decision: “Okay, I missed the bus. I’ll just walk home.”
Patricia Martin: Yes. Which took me miles out of my way, but it was what I knew.
Andrea Hiott: Coming from this navigational [00:05] mind of mine, that’s interesting on so many levels. And then, having made that decision, at some point you saw the environment differently. You describe it so beautifully in the book, and I really hope everyone will read it, but it has to do with another level of consciousness, as you describe it. The trees suddenly came alive, and the water, almost like going through a portal and seeing life differently. For some reason I want to start with that moment. Could you tell me why that memory is important to you?
Patricia Martin: The reason I used that example is that I wanted to make the point that I’m not anti-tech. I don’t think phones should be ripped out of teenagers’ hands, because once we culturally make something taboo, they want it more. I think what we’re facing now is an issue of consciousness, [00:06] of understanding how we contribute droplets of consciousness through attention, and then find out later that we’re not capable of some of the very types of consciousness we yearn for most, which is transcendence.
What I describe in that scene is that as a little kid I had a moment of transcendence where everything around me came alive and scintillated. The air was thick, and I was part of this spinning world. I can still put myself back in that moment: standing at the top of the bridge, looking out at the river, a flock of birds taking off, and throwing rocks and hearing the gong as [00:07] they hit the water. I felt immensely alive.
There’s a Jungian, Robert Johnson, who says that sometimes we have that moment of consciousness when we are part of the world and it is in us, when the psyche resonates within us (psyche in this case meaning soul), and we’re too young to really grasp what it means. We have to revisit it at another time in our adult life. I found myself writing about it because I was trying to convey to the reader what this level of consciousness is, and I believe everyone has these moments. You’ve probably had one yourself, I’m guessing?
Andrea Hiott: Oh, yes.
Patricia Martin: Where suddenly everything is alive.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. I feel like I live more and more in that state. But this story is also metaphorical, [00:08] in a way, for the progress of the book, because there’s a kind of freezing with persona fog, which we’ll get into, and the stuckness. The word persona seems like a good way to start getting into these ideas. How should we think about what a persona is, or how it develops?
The persona and persona fog
Patricia Martin: First of all, in Carl Jung’s model of the psyche, the persona is the externally facing self, and it is the thinnest layer of the psyche. It’s like shellac. Or, to use a tech word, it’s your GUI, your graphical user interface, and it allows you to interact in the social world. It was never designed to be load-bearing. One of the problems of living in the digital age is that we are operating more and [00:09] more from the [persona], and we are asking it to be load-bearing. To use an oversimplified metaphor, it’s like trying to move a piano on a skateboard. It’s not meant to bear that weight.
This is why people feel fragmented, and it’s also why people are starting to develop what I call persona fog. Persona fog is a set of signals from the psyche telling us that we’re losing touch with any sense of inner navigation. Because it’s been fogged over, we can sense the core self, but we can no longer feel it, nor can we hear its signals, because the noise floor we’re living in has muffled it. This is [00:10] creating a lot of pain for people, and I heard it over and over.
I started with 200 participants in the ethnographic part of this study, and it winnowed down to a little under 100. There were 97 who stayed loyal over a three-year period. They revealed what was happening to them by spending so much time online, creating so many identities that they parceled out across various platforms, then having to mount personas for all of them, sustain them, and reinvent them. They were investing more and more identity into those personas and processes, and they were losing track of any [00:11] sense of a core self. It was like a hollowing out. This is where consciousness is demanded of us: we have to start paying attention to these symptoms, because they are signals. It’s the core self pounding beneath the noise floor, trying to tell us that something is radically wrong.
Andrea Hiott: I love how you frame identity. I can see a contrast between generations. There used to be a kind of identity where certain things were more regulated, or there were fewer categories. But now, as you say in the book, there are so many options and we have to be so many people, and we’re also living in this persona, or it becomes very confusing what isn’t the persona. And as you said, it wasn’t made to take the whole weight of life. Could you talk about what I think you call [00:12] a post-identity era, where the old scaffolding of who I am, which was a little more containable, has become something different?
The self as product
Patricia Martin: Yes. It’s something we just have to be conscious of, because what’s happening to us is unprecedented. In the digital age, the self has become a product. It’s an economic unit for sale, and the supply chain is social media. The more positive selves you can generate, the more money you make. And when you generate an identity, a persona, that is less popular and has fewer likes, you tend to abandon it, even though it might hold promise for exploring who you really are. So we begin to [00:13] edit the self.
The very definition of persona fog is when we have become so enchanted and entranced by the performance of the self, and the performance of multiple versions of ourselves, that we can no longer access the part of us that is genuine. This leads to a kind of self-estrangement.
It’s interesting to me, because for 30 years I’ve been tracking the culture. I track big civilizational shifts, and that’s why I wrote about this. I had no idea this was going to become the psychological prepper’s guide for entering the AI era. But here we are: fragmented, fragile, shrouded in chronic self-doubt, and yet we’re entering an age that is about to blow everything [00:14] open. That’s how much force it’s going to have on the culture, and here we are fragmented. So we need to pay attention to these symptoms.
Where I think this matters most is for people to understand a myth they have to let go of. It’s unspoken, and yet it’s so operational: the idea that what you put out there has no effect on who you are in here. It does. I tracked the data over 10 years. In fact, in 2016 I harnessed a rudimentary form of AI. I had a custom AI developed so I could gather large swaths of intent and preferences across 500,000 posts at a time, and have them bucketed and [00:15] analyzed, so I could see what people’s intentions were for themselves, what they saw in their future selves, and what they didn’t believe about themselves.
So I feel I stand on good authority, in terms of the rigor of my research, in saying that we’re entering a part of the century where the self is not only productized, commoditized, and optimized. It has also become a performance, which is a degraded sense of self. We’re no longer in search of the self, as we were in the 20th century. We’re confusing ourselves, because we’re interested in the performance of a self, and that’s a very fragile place to be.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think a lot about this. Even when I think back to my [00:16] grandparents, they were definitely performing in a way. They would go to church, and that was a real part of them, maybe even the most important part. But there were always roles you played. I remember them not feeling like they could live up to that, and it was stressful. They wanted to always be the person they were in church, and they couldn’t always be. I’ve seen this in other ways too, with jobs and so on.
You describe what’s happening now as different. You talk about an ambient uncertainty, and even the fog itself seems like a different condition, the way you describe it. Is it because of the medium itself, which seems so disembodied? I think now it’s almost paralyzing: we want so much to live up to who we are, and online we’re also supposed to create these worlds that nobody can live up to. There’s a natural peril in that. You’re creating a situation that can never feel satisfied in some [00:17] kind of way. But we don’t think of it like that, which is part of what you point out is the problem. It’s the consciousness of it, understanding what’s happening, that actually makes an agential shift. Do you see what I’m saying?
Then and now: three factors of identity
Patricia Martin: I do. You’ve got a couple of questions in there. One is the before and after: what’s the generational difference? The other gets to the heart of how the coding has been engineered to create a sense of inner chaos, because that chaos is useful and can be monetized. Let me take them one at a time.
First, what’s different from our parents’ generation. They played fewer roles than we have to play now. There was a communal clarity that was shared. [00:18] You mentioned your grandparents going to church: there were roles within communities, and there were ways communities saw each other. The famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said this about any rite of passage: first you have to see yourself, and then you have to see yourself in community with others. That’s why there’s always some mirroring exercise in a ritual, and then you have to look out and see your community.
That’s what church did for people. That’s what community did for people. That’s what going to school did for people. And now even the idea of going to school was tested through COVID; online learning has become a bigger and bigger approach. So there’s less community. We live more and more [00:19] virtually, and we work more and more virtually. We don’t go into an environment with others and test ourselves in that communal way that gives us a sense of who we are. So the virtuality of our lives is vastly different from our parents’.
Then there’s the sociology at work. Women’s roles are radically different. We now have science that lets people change gender. We control our ability to reproduce, scientifically and biologically. These are big shifts that add up, and I’m only touching on some of them. I think this has created a current cosmos where there are just fewer ways to really understand who you are.
And if I may, [00:20] I want to toggle over to the second piece, which is how the internet is programmed. I feel like I’m talking a lot, but you’ve asked some really provocative questions.
There are three factors to identity. This is a little oversimplified, but I could get agreement from most psychologists on these three. One is how we see ourselves. The second is how other people see us. The third is our will to shape ourselves.
How we see ourselves has become fogged, so it’s not holding us up the way it used to. What has become primary is how others see us, because we’re willing to hyper-reinvent in order to please an audience. [00:21] And the third, human will: James Williams, a former senior person at Google, admitted publicly, and it was quoted in The Guardian, that the internet has been coded to reduce human will.
So some of this is just what we’re in. It’s not something we’re doing wrong. We’re just now starting to suffer the symptoms of what we’re in.
Continuity, scripts, and breaking them
Andrea Hiott: As you were talking, I was thinking about how far-reaching the implications are, as you show in the book. I was describing my family performing in a social environment, whether church or something else. Now it’s very strange, because a lot of us wake up and feel like we have to start performing online, or [00:22] check how our performances are going in all these different areas, which are very amorphous. We’re presenting all these versions of ourselves because each of those environments has been sculpted to work in a certain way, so you need to sculpt yourself to fit it.
I don’t do any of this, by the way, and a lot of friction comes from that. It’s hard if you go against it, because you will see it and feel it in the likes or the lack of likes.
I’m trying to get at how this started to matter to you. I think continuity is a word that’s coming up here too. It seems like this is a very continuous thing; we’re building our self-esteem through this sense of continuity. A lot of what we’re addicted to is the continuity, and that’s what many of the coders and builders have latched onto: we get on these scripts and we have to stay on them. We wake up and want to log back into [00:23] them. It’s a very physical, bodily thing that happens, beyond reflection. But sometimes in our own lives we need to break that continuity in order to realize we were stuck in those scripts.
Patricia Martin: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: You show this in the book, but how did you get to a point where you could do that?
From libraries to the early internet
Patricia Martin: Well, it wasn’t pretty, I’ll tell you that much. I’ve been researching big civilizational shifts, and what they mean for people in their daily lives, for 30 years now. I was the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time. I was in my early 30s and working with libraries in America. The United States has been very blessed with a network of public libraries. Public libraries are a larger franchise than McDonald’s restaurants.
Andrea Hiott: Wow, I [00:24] didn’t know that. I love libraries. I just have to say that, everyone. Libraries are so wonderful.
Patricia Martin: They are so wonderful. It’s such a treasured resource in every community, and it is unparalleled anywhere in the world. So I was working in that function and, lo and behold, this thing called the internet came into being. We were the installed base for information sharing in America, and we became allies of the early internet. I found myself sitting in meetings with Al Gore’s team, figuring out how we were going to get people to use the internet. I know that really dates me, so I’m an elder stateswoman in some regards. And I worked with Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, on a project.
So I was an early adopter, and I became more and [00:25] more intrigued by the internet as a cultural force and how it was going to shape us. I decided I wanted to research it and write about it. But I didn’t realize I was going to take this psychological bent until I went through a series of personal setbacks. It was really an undoing of everything that defined me.
An undoing: “Who am I?”
Patricia Martin: Within a short period of time, I went through an amicable divorce. I had to move three times in 18 months. Through this process, I heard from my brother that my mother had taken a fall and died immediately. Our mothers are really the anchor to who we are, in [00:26] many regards, so that got untethered.
Then my youngest child, who was in college at the time, sat me down and told me he wanted a name change. He was no longer going to be Molly; he wanted to be Hank. I could never have anticipated how much investment I had made in the gendering of my child. I don’t feel shame around it now, but I’m kind of stunned at how much parents project gender onto their kids.
Oh, and then a major project that was a lifeline to my bank account [00:27] got canceled, and I was going to have to reinvent how I made a living.
All of this happened within a three-year window. I woke up one morning staring at the ceiling, asking the age-old question, “Who am I?” That’s when I decided I wanted to study what it means to build and rebuild our sense of self in a dynamic digital age. I lit out like Huck Finn, determined to go to every stop down that river to get to its mouth, where the big thesis lay. And that’s what I did.
Andrea Hiott: You sure did. You really left nothing unexplored. I can feel the research. A lot of it is very bodily and in person, too. You did a lot of interviews with real people, not just [00:28] collecting and sifting through data, but actually looking at stories and narratives. That’s why the word continuity seems so important.
That’s a lot of what you went through. I just want to give it a minute and respect that, because a lot of people have times in life where they wonder how they could possibly get through it, and you just keep getting through it.
The continuity there is interesting, because in a way that was a break of continuity in your life in so many ways. Even spatially, moving between apartments: how that affects what we’re capable of being as thinking, feeling bodies is so disruptive. But at the same time, I feel like you were exploring paths in a way that brought something. You were almost covering the surface, finding a continuity that’s not about linear continuity. Does that make sense to [00:29] you? It’s almost like you start reaching toward what you thought were edges and fringes, because you’re now able to look at them. Maybe because you love the people in your life and you’re having to see them differently, you start to see the world differently.
Fragmentation: resilience versus endurance
Patricia Martin: Oh, yes. You’re making a lot of sense, and I want to talk more about your idea of continuity. What we keep as our core self and choose to expand, as opposed to what we discard: we’re organically building identity all the time in that way. That’s normal.
But you’re hitting on one of my key findings, which was about fragmentation. Being so many selves, projecting them out on various platforms, enhancing them once they [00:30] get attention and discarding them when they don’t: this put us through a gauntlet of hyper-reinvention. And what was it costing us?
One thing that relates to continuity is the sense of endurance. Over the last three decades we talked a lot about resilience, because there was a lot of disruption caused by the internet, and that disruption was episodic. Amazon took over the book world and sort of crashed publishing, to give just one example; there are many others. But now I think the [00:31] body politic, the collective, as Carl Jung would call it, is facing a different problem: endurance, being able to endure the chaos and the complexity.
That’s different from resilience. Resilience is: I get the wind knocked out of me, I catch my breath, I pick myself up, and I march on. Okay. But now the ground is moving underneath you so fluidly and so quickly. Bounce back to what? You’re not standing in the same place once you stand up.
What I was feeling in people was a yearning for what you might call continuity. I would call it being able to endure [00:32] the pain of deciding and sticking to what they understood as their core self, and letting that be self-determined. That’s harder and harder to do.
Culturally, there’s a lot of messaging right now that all this discussion of the self comes from the self-help porn sold to us starting in the 1980s, and that it’s all just self-indulgent. There’s some truth to that. I’m not trying to take us back to the “Hey, go find yourself” age. I’m merely reporting what I found out in the field. People felt [00:33] like a box with a bunch of fragments inside, and they couldn’t get the fragments to cohere in a way that let them endure difficult situations, like having their entire careers upended.
So as we enter the age of AI, I’m sounding the alarm: we can’t just abandon the self, because it’s our operating system, and something has happened to the operating system. It needs coherence so we can endure what’s about to happen.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. You talk about entering a new period, and you start talking about identity more as a movement, and that we’re realizing it’s a movement. I’m still not sure how to talk about the persona here, [00:34] in the Jungian sense of the social mask, or how it relates to what you’re saying about endurance, because endurance is such an important word. For me, it puts things back in the body. Continuity is almost more like a measurement, and endurance is how it feels to try to keep going and persist.
What role is the persona playing in that? It’s a social mask, and it’s necessary, as you’ve said, but it’s only a veneer of the self.
Patricia Martin: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: It’s not what’s enduring. But we’ve somehow misplaced endurance, so that now we think the persona is what has to endure. We’ve created all these personas that we’re trying to keep going, but we don’t feel them as the self in our body.
Passion as endurance
Patricia Martin: Yes. We’ve relegated the self to the persona, and then the persona has been relegated to a brand, [00:35] and we’re either on brand or we’re not. We’ve accepted optimization instead of development and growth, because it’s easier to have a listicle of five things to do to make the psychological pain go away than to endure.
I want to lean into this idea of endurance, because I think you and I are on common ground with your notion of continuity. The idea has ancient roots. It comes from the Latin pati, which is to be able to suffer amid uncertainty and hold oneself stable. [00:36] And the word for it wasn’t actually endurance; it was passion.
We think of passion as an emotion, and the internet is full of a lot of fake passion. But passion really meant endurance. That’s where the phrase “the passion of Christ” comes from: he was willing to endure for some greater transcendence to occur. Each of us, in our own ways, needs to be able to endure uncertainty, and to endure what comes of deciding, in a self-determined, sovereign way, who we are, and of [00:37] coming forward with that self in a way that’s self-loving and honest, and enduring whatever hardship comes of that.
Social pain online
Patricia Martin: We’re not willing to do that. There’s a fascinating set of studies from UCLA’s Naomi Eisenberger, a social psychologist who studied social pain. She found that social pain, which also translates to social pain online, when a persona you’ve put out there meets rejection, travels the same neural network as physical pain. So when you’re rejected or bullied online, it’s akin to a punch in the face.
So we’ve become very worried about erring online with the wrong persona, [00:38] and meanwhile we’ve put our core self out of reach. And it’s not leading us anywhere good. That’s the conclusion I come to in the book.
Movement and orientation
Andrea Hiott: So many exciting things in there. Two things are so important to what I’m doing philosophically, and to why I even do this work. One is what you brought up about being able to sit in ambiguity, or holding paradox. It’s not about trying to dissolve things. It’s sitting with what you were describing as the passion, or the suffering, in a way.
The other is movement. We’re learning how to orient within what is already moving. It’s almost like feeling into the movement enough that we can then orient ourselves, instead of always being oriented by the algorithms or whatever is [00:39] getting our attention. Does that make sense to you? I’m thinking of those moments when nature becomes alive. There’s a kind of presence, or consciousness, that comes through being able to sit with the suffering or see the world differently, and that can maybe help us feel that movement and orient within it.
Patricia Martin: When you say movement, do you mean a sense of physicalization?
Andrea Hiott: Well, that’s another point you raised. For me, we are bodily moving in a lot of spaces at once. The online world, like in those studies you mentioned, is one world we’re moving through, and our bodies are affected by its set of regularities just as they would be in a geographical space. But we don’t think of it like that. Because these regularities are so different, when we’re online our bodies are experiencing it the same way, but the actual [00:40] regularities are so different that it can feel isolating and strange. If you get off your computer or put your phone down, it can feel like you’ve given up a part of your body at this point, because the body is so literally part of it. But we don’t think of it that way.
So when I say movement, I really mean it in all these spaces, psychological, emotional, and bodily: the way we make our way through them, or encounter them, and the scripts we build with them.
Patricia Martin: This is reminiscent of Kurzweil’s theory of the singularity, but at a micro level. The singular self now has attachments. It has a phone, it has earbuds, it has technology in order to be whole. So when we set our phone down, we don’t feel [00:41] whole. There’s a micro-anxiety about that, which many people don’t want to experience.
I think you’re onto something. I didn’t write about that per se, but I think we’re riffing on where this is going. These are my early sensations as I continue to research these topics.
Jung in the World and a yearning for depth
Patricia Martin: Here’s what I’m seeing. I have a podcast called Jung in the World, where we apply Jungian theory to contemporary living, and I have a wide variety of guests. When we studied who was listening, we found listeners from around the world, which isn’t unusual. But among those 2 million, we had [00:42] mostly 18- to 30-year-old men.
What this said to us is that there is a yearning for depth. Jungians are depth psychologists. They’re not about small behavior changes that add up to something. They take you deep into your dream world, into the symbolic journey of building a self, and into your shadow work.
This was a big signal to me, and I’ve started to follow it. Now I’m studying what it means, in digital culture, to reintegrate the pieces, [00:43] what symbols and myths we have around that, and what self-mythology we have about wholeness in the midst of the singularity. I know this is all very ethereal, but this is what does it for me.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, I love it.
Patricia Martin: It makes me really boring at a cocktail party, I might add.
Andrea Hiott: I would say the opposite. You’re the one I’d want to talk to. I think it’s exactly what I’m trying to get at with endurance, and the way you linked it to passion. There’s a depth there, and there are already paths that connect us, that we want to feel back into, especially a lot of younger people. Jung has that archetypal quality. And the chronic self-doubt, the cascading crossroads: there’s a lot of movement and navigational metaphor in your work. All this feels a little detached from that, but if you feel into it, [00:44] it shifts how you see those things.
I also seem to remember that, although you have this wonderful podcast about Jung, you discovered Jung through having to endure, and through doing this research. I remember it was snowing and you were going into the archive or something. When did Jung come into your life?
Finding Jung
Patricia Martin: Yes. I had to endure the shame of not knowing. As I started talking to the cohort of participants I’d built for the study, and we live in a very confessional time, it didn’t take long for them to start confessing to me their agony, their confusion, and their anxieties. [00:45] I was in over my head, and I felt some shame around that. I decided I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore for not fully understanding, and I didn’t want to be a passeur and just say, “Well, I’ll figure out a name for this.” So I decided I would have to anchor myself in a school of thought in psychology.
At its foundation, psychology has two founding fathers, if you will: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. That was kind of a no-brainer, because Jung advocated for the soul in a way Freud did not. I also found Freud less friendly to women in general; that was just my take. So I signed up for a two-year course of study at the C.G. Jung Institute in Chicago, where I live, [00:46] and I became hooked on Jung’s work as a way of living and a way of seeing the world.
Jung was a scientist. He was an MD, as was Freud. But Jung took his work toward understanding that the self is a seed. The self has its own sense of direction. The psyche is self-healing. I studied the canon of Carl Jung for two years, and that gave me a basis. It also gave me the courage to start listening differently.
People were telling me their woes about having lived online for so long, with such intensity. Take [00:47] the story of Jason, who wakes up one morning and his beard is falling out in handfuls. His anxiety is cranked up to such a pitch that he’s afraid he’s dying. He’s 27 years old and has a big online life. This is not normal. And it was case after case of this. When you hear cases like that lined up one after another, just from this random cohort, you have to start saying to yourself, “There’s something civilizational happening. There’s something happening in the collective,” which is also accounted for by Carl Jung. That’s when I became a Jungian.
Andrea Hiott: Is Jason the one who decided not to take the big VC [00:48] deal, changed his life, and started looking for smaller things that made him happy?
Jonathan’s descent story
Patricia Martin: No, you’re thinking of Jonathan.
Andrea Hiott: Jonathan, okay.
Patricia Martin: He had built an online community where people could tell stories, and he could track the patterns in those stories. He was a data genius as well as a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist offered him a big deal to buy his online community. He woke up the next day and realized it wasn’t who he was or who he wanted to be, and he canceled the deal. That won him no favor with people, who thought he was nuts for doing it. [00:49]
Then he had to undergo his own descent story. He lost his girlfriend. He lost his apartment.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, I remember.
Patricia Martin: It was one thing after another. These descent stories also started adding up.
Andrea Hiott: A hero’s journey kind of thing.
Patricia Martin: Yes. But here’s where we’re asked to endure. I worry that these descent stories are going to be really common in the next five years, once we become a world operated largely by artificial intelligence, and we’re not equipped the way we should be.
So what can we do about that? I don’t have a set of listicles; the algorithms love those. [00:50] I can only say what I know after studying this for 10 years. Number one, we have an obligation to ourselves and to others to be conscious of how we use AI and what it does to us. That’s on us. The other thing I’d say is to drop the myth: whatever content you’re putting out there affects you, and whatever you give your attention to is a droplet of consciousness.
Flow and 45 minutes offline
Patricia Martin: I had a profound meeting with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi during this research. He developed the theory of flow, which is about entering a state of heightened consciousness. He studied [00:51] artists, musicians, and athletes, who entered a place of transcendence in their work where time disappeared and boundaries disappeared. They became the best versions of themselves, and they did that through focus.
His worry was that we were entering a world where his theories would become irrelevant, unachievable even, because we had so tampered with our ability to focus by dribbling out our consciousness without knowing it. So being conscious is really important, and so is attending to our ability to hold consciousness. That gets to the third point we’ve touched on: the ability to endure what it feels like to [00:52] not be on the internet for 45 minutes.
I think we should all be able to do that. It’s like sit-ups. I practice it every day. I’m not on social media, and people think that’s a joke, as if I’m being insincere. No, it’s a choice. I understand what it’s doing to me. I think we ought to be able to bear that. It’s good for us to be able to bear it.
Andrea Hiott: I absolutely agree. I think this is the skill of the future: being able to stay with the tension. Not even sit, because you’re still moving, but stay with the trouble, hold the tension, hold the paradox, whichever way you want to say it. Then, of course, we want to reorient, because we’re always moving; we don’t just stay stuck in there. But first you have to come into it, as you show in the book with your own examples and with the research.
You also talk about how attention is something we [00:53] channel. I think there’s a quote, maybe yours or maybe Christof Koch’s, about attention being something we channel ourselves into. It becomes action; it’s actionable. So reclaiming your attention, noticing that it’s been taken by all this stuff you maybe don’t care about, is uncomfortable and not easy. I think it’s good to know that it’s okay that it’s not easy, and that we can help each other. That’s why your book is so helpful: “Okay, this is hard, and maybe I’m going to go through some hard stuff, but other people are there too.” Just knowing you’re not alone can be so helpful, can’t it?
The transcendent function
Patricia Martin: Yes. And this gets back to Jung and the passion of endurance. It’s holding that tension that births the transcendent function. [00:54] If you can just hold it long enough, and feel the discomfort of it, something else emerges that is completely of its own creation.
This is where Csikszentmihalyi started to write about flow. It’s really interesting to me, by the way, that when Csikszentmihalyi was very young, he sat in on a lecture Carl Jung gave.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Patricia Martin: Yes. He went home and decided he wanted to be a psychologist.
Andrea Hiott: Wow. I hadn’t thought of that. I think everything we’re touching on is very connected: flow, his work, the role of attention, Jung as the source, opposites that aren’t really opposites. It’s all in this kind of movement we’re talking about.
There are two or three [00:55] other things I really want to talk about, but we don’t have a lot of time left, so I’ll put a few out there and you can take whatever you like.
One is fringes and edges. You explored all these different things that hadn’t been central in your life before, talking to a tattoo artist and so on. I’m not sure how it connects here, but it seems to.
The other is something so interesting in your book: the people with the most self-esteem are often the most fragile. We usually think it’s the opposite. We think that if we become the super-person online, or in whatever world we want to become great in, then we’ll have confidence. But I’ve definitely seen in my own life and in others that you actually become more fragile. That’s a really [00:56] interesting point in your book. And I think it connects, because once you’re in that space, it becomes harder to explore and be messy. Those two things kept coming up, especially the second, which is a really important insight.
The self-esteem paradox
Patricia Martin: The idea of self-esteem was very much in vogue in the 2000s: the notion that most psychological problems could be boiled down to self-esteem issues. Culturally, it made its way into television, storytelling, and schools. People believed that if you could just raise someone’s self-esteem, they could self-correct, [00:57] not only socially and economically but psychologically.
I found that the opposite was true. I was talking to people you wouldn’t describe as having low self-esteem. They were high achievers with every reason to be confident about who they were, and they had a lot of agency in the world. These were people who could make things happen: entrepreneurs, artists, people who could manifest physical things. And yet they suffered from an inability to create a sense of a future self. When I asked them, “How do you see yourself in the future?” I was met with silence.
Andrea Hiott: Hmm.
Patricia Martin: This stunned me. They were uncertain. Following this chronic self-doubt issue, I sensed that what had seeped [00:58] into their mindsets was a shadowy sense that failure could be around the corner at any time. They had built worlds upon worlds inside the internet, and somebody was at the switch with the algorithm, and the bottom could fall out of everything at any minute. Because we’re all workers on the plantation; we don’t own the plantation. It’s not collectivized. And that has real economic, cultural, and creative consequences for people.
That’s when I really began to see how much of ourselves (our aspirations, how we see ourselves, who we want to become) has been invested in how we’re perceived by others, and this is unprecedented. [00:59] There’s nothing in history like it; I looked. So this isn’t a self-esteem issue. In fact, people felt a lot of discomfort around it: “I can solve all these other problems, and I have all this agency. Why don’t I feel better about myself? What’s not working?” They had no understanding of what these signals meant, and neither did I. We had to figure it out together, in many ways.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, you were moving through it too, discovering these things and now sharing them, which is part of this wonderful journey.
You also present self-regulation, and you talk about prototyping. As you said at the beginning, you’re not saying technology is terrible. [01:00] It can be used for terrible purposes, but it’s about being conscious of it, what we want people to create, and what we choose.
Maybe you could talk about Janet. There are people in this world who are getting tons of followers and making it, and they start to realize they’re losing that endurance, that passion, that will. The persona becomes like a balloon floating over there, no longer connected to them. And they decide, “Okay, I’m going to sit with the friction. I’m going to sit with this not being comfortable.” Somewhere you have the idea that doubt is the ego’s language of rebellion. So: “I’m going to go against the grain and see what I can discover for myself.” Then they start using these online tools to do that, which might mean [01:01] fewer likes, or bad comments, because they’re not fitting the algorithm. In a way that becomes a rebellion, a beautiful rebellion, if you’re doing it from your own movement, from what really moves you and what you care about, having been able to sit in the discomfort and reorient. That’s a very positive part of the book we haven’t gotten to yet, one that offers a path forward.
Janet’s story
Patricia Martin: Yes, and I’m so glad, because this is a great place for us to end, on the high note of what we can do. This is the story of Janet. Very quickly: Janet was a rock star online. In high school she was a STEM student, so she learned to code early. I can’t even number the platforms she was on. She adopted every new platform as it came along: Instagram, [01:02] Facebook, the typical ones, but also multiplayer games. She had all these archetypal identities: her avatars, all her different social selves.
Now she’s 17, she has a very promising future, and she has to apply to college. She has to write an essay about herself, and she draws a blank. She doesn’t know how to talk about herself. And this isn’t a writing problem; it’s a self-image problem.
So she decides to spend a weekend looking through every single persona in her wardrobe [01:03] and assessing each one on how true it feels to her, not to anybody else. She set the boundary that it didn’t matter how many likes something got. That was not her benchmark. Her benchmark was, “Is it true to me?” If it wasn’t true to her, she decided to get off that platform.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you, Janet. What a smart young woman. I just love it.
Patricia Martin: Right? So smart. At 18 years old, she’s hitting no, or pause.
Then she looks at the parts of herself she had negated. Self-negation is a big part of persona fog: you begin negating parts of your true self that hold a lot of promise for who you might become, because they haven’t gotten a lot of likes, reinforcement, validation, popularity, or shares. This is where the title of [01:04] the book comes in: Will the Future Like You?
She decides to take her future into her own hands. If something was true to her and it fell on deaf ears, she was going to bring it into the wardrobe and keep it there. Then she sat down and wrote a sovereign paragraph saying, “This is who I am now.” She had clarity, and from that she built her essay.
Needless to say, she got into an elite university with a merit scholarship. The rest is history. But what stunned me about her was that she was taking command of her identity at such a young age, because she had the consciousness to see what the internet had done to her sense of self. And she took control.
Andrea Hiott: That’s what I was about to say. For me it’s not about the [01:05] credentials and getting into college, which is wonderful, and I’m happy for her. It’s such a powerful thing because she was able to reorient her attention at such a young age, and at such a crucial time, and feel her power again as herself. So many people want to do that, and it’s so hard, especially at that age, when you’re literally going against what you think everyone is telling you is cool, or what they like. It’s such a powerful thing to be able to do that and continue.
I think it also connects to caring and mattering and love, which is important to me and part of all this. It’s definitely part of the story you tell; I feel it in your story. It also seems to have directed your story, whether with your family or otherwise. So I want to ask you about that word, and whatever comes up for you.
Love, attention, and the good-enough gaze
Patricia Martin: [01:06] Are you asking me about the word love?
Andrea Hiott: Yes. What role does it play in these themes? Maybe in writing the book, but also when we sit in this tension: is love there too? Is it a kind of attention? What do you think?
Patricia Martin: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Love has always been tied to what we attend to, what we give our gaze to. I love the work of Donald Winnicott, who was a Freudian psychiatrist. A little tidbit: I find that psychiatrists tend to be Freudian in their early years and then mature into Jungianism. They rise to Carl Jung’s work after they’ve lived enough and seen enough to say, “Oh, he’s onto something.” [01:07] And so he became a Jungian later in his career.
He was a child psychologist, and his was the theory of the good-enough mother. The good-enough mother is one who can put her gaze on the child and see the child for who the child really is. This isn’t about cheering the child on. It isn’t about praise or validation. It’s strictly giving one’s attention to the child as a nurturing form of love and sustenance, and that gaze builds in the child the confidence to endure, the confidence to become who they really are.
I’ve really taken this on in my daily life, in everything I do. Before sitting down with you today, I picked up a [01:08] cup of coffee at my local coffee shop, and I consciously made eye contact with the person taking my money and pouring my coffee. I attended to them with a sincere gaze, because that’s what I can do as a human being to make the world go round. If we all understood the power of our gaze and our attention, I think there’d be more love in the world.
Why the self still matters
Patricia Martin: I may have drifted off course, but what I also want to say about love is this. There’s the Lacanian idea that [01:09] there really is no self: that we’ve over-invested in the self, over-indexed on it, and we shouldn’t worry about it so much; what we should worry about is how the self gets translated into the world, what we can do for others. There’s truth to that. But this negation, the idea that the self doesn’t matter, is very convenient, because the internet would love you to believe it. Then, when you start to lose your sense of self, you won’t notice. You have less at stake.
I’m telling people it’s time to update our sense of self, and why it matters, for the 21st century. Because if we can’t do that, we can’t genuinely love anybody, and we certainly can’t love ourselves. And the science [01:10] bears this out. People who had over-invested in persona also faltered at love, because they didn’t believe the other person really loved who they were. They believed the person they were in a romance with had fallen in love with their persona, so the love couldn’t be trusted. I think that’s so sad.
And I often wonder, Andrea, whether that’s part of what’s at play in all the tension online around heterosexual romance and love, with the genders widening the gap of understanding. I wonder what role persona, and the lack of real, [01:11] genuine human attention and focus, has played in that. What do you think?
Listening as love
Andrea Hiott: I think what you just said is so important. You said you were meandering, but I think you’re right on point with listening as love. Listening is such a gift, if someone is attentive to you. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give each other. Attentive in the sense of not asking what you can get out of this person, and not looking because something is cool and everyone else is looking. It’s your bodily, full, enduring, uncomfortable self orienting and mattering toward someone. That’s how I think of it. Your very life force [01:12] is moving toward the person, or able to sit with and listen to them. When you can just be there and not be trying to get something or shift something, what a gift that is. For me it’s very connected to what love is, in a bodily, caring, mattering, becoming sort of way.
I think that’s the hard puzzle: how to let each other matter in that way without first looking at each other’s stats.
Patricia Martin: Their [unclear] scores.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, all of that. I do think everyone is hungry for it, but everyone’s afraid to do it, partly because we don’t see it modeled. And it is hard. It takes a lot of energy to be present.
Patricia Martin: It does. But you’re wasting that energy [01:13] someplace else, so be a steward of your own attention resources, is what I’d say. And by the way, this is incremental identity development. This is identity formation you have chosen. This is your will being reclaimed. Remember, you’re living day to day on an internet designed to upend your sense of will.
So I’m practicing, in small ways, deciding who I want to be: when I pick up my groceries, when I pump gas, when I meet someone on the street, when I get a haircut. Wherever I am, I’m deciding who I want to be by giving [01:14] my gaze to another human being and making a connection. Because, just like Janet, that’s who I want to be, and I won’t become that unless I take back my will. And we do it in small ways.
Andrea Hiott: That’s very beautiful, and thank you for that. It’s a wonderful way to live, isn’t it? It’s actually much more satisfying than what we’ve seen modeled and confused ourselves into thinking is the goal. What you’re describing is very sustaining. It’s a wonderful way to be alive, especially if you’re in community. You talk about belonging as a kind of survival, this nestling-in feeling. When you’re in a community that supports that, it feels like a great life. It seems kind of strange: why would [01:15] we... we don’t even need all the online stuff.
Patricia Martin: If you go back to where we started in this interview, you were talking about your grandparents having a sense of belonging to a community that was ritualized, maybe through going to church or other kinds of belonging. That’s how they saw each other: I see you, and you see me, and that is very confirming. This is what we reclaim when we give our gaze in a meaningful way. And the bonus is that you unlock the flow of life force in the other person.
Andrea Hiott: It resonates with participatory sense-making.
Patricia Martin: Yes, exactly. [01:16] Now you’re in the generative flow of it. And what are you doing? You’re buying a coffee and having a moment. It only has to last three or four minutes, but it’s going to get you through your day. This is how we’re going to rebuild what it is to be human. I believe this to my core.
Closing: the spiral
Andrea Hiott: I believe it too, and I thank you for your work. I think we don’t even know what’s possible when we really do that. We’re not going back. We’re coming back to where we started, but it’s a spiral, so it’s never really where we started. We have Jung now, and all these things, and maybe we can sense into the world even more than we thought possible. It’s not that we want to become like our grandparents, because they also had a lot of pressure and conflict. But even in this conversation, we’ve come back to where we started, and it’s a very different place, right?
Patricia Martin: Right. It’s been a [01:17] great journey. Thank you for taking it with me.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you. Thank you for your book and for all that you’re doing. I’ll point everyone to your wonderful podcast and, of course, the book. If there’s anything else you’d like to share before we go, please go ahead.
Patricia Martin: I look forward to your book coming out too.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, thank you.
Patricia Martin: Yes, I’m eager to read it. This has been a great connection to make. I appreciate that the two of us are intellectual omnivores who see the big picture. It was really fun to be in conversation with you, Andrea. Thank you.
Andrea Hiott: Same, Patricia. Thank you.
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Love, Attention & Meaning with John Vervaeke (and Iris Murdoch)
dimanche 4 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:39:27
On Love, Attention, and the Good: Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (University of Toronto) and philosopher Darius Parvizi-Wayne (Macquarie University) talk about love as a way of paying attention, starting from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. They discuss John’s idea that getting out of the meaning crisis means “falling in love with being again,” Murdoch’s famous M and D example, what “unselfing” really means, Simone Weil, Heidegger, the Kyoto School, and pilgrimage as a way of knowing. They end with a personal conversation about mentorship, vocation and the love of wisdom.
Introduced by Andrea Hiott from the Philosophers’ Way in Heidelberg.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction from the Philosophers’ Way, Heidelberg
02:30 Darius and John introduce themselves
07:00 “Falling in love with being again”
12:00 Love as volitional necessity
17:00 Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good
27:00 The M and D example
37:00 Can cognitive science explain loving attention?
43:00 Unselfing: Murdoch vs. Simone Weil
46:30 The Kyoto School: self-power and other-power
52:00 The two-worlds mythology and nihilism
1:08:00 Nishitani and absolute nothingness
1:20:30 Place, basho, and the sacred
1:23:30 Pilgrimage and theoria
1:27:30 Darius’s story
1:32:30 Mentorship, vocation, and the love of wisdom
1:38:00 Closing: dialogos and Middlemarch
MENTIONED
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Sophie Strand and Henry Kramer on Imaginal Empathy, Consciousness and Re-Enchantment
samedi 19 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:05:11
Sophie Strand and Henry Kramer explore consciousness, mind, and the porous boundary between inner and outer experience. The conversation ranges from panpsychism and animism to imaginal empathy, ecology, myth, and why modern life makes it so hard to stay open to mystery.
Sophie brings a wide ranging perspective shaped by writing, spirituality, ecology, the history of religion, and Eros. The two ground the discussion in consciousness, reenchantment, and the question of how language and labels can flatten lived experience.
00:00 Andrea Sets the Stage00:33 Meet Host Henry02:14 Why This Episode Matters05:41 Henry Introduces Sophie09:43 Sophie on Being a Lover10:31 Re Enchantment and Mind12:15 Symbiosis and Selfhood14:23 What Is Consciousness18:35 Myth Archetypes and Reality25:29 Language Labels and Weirdness27:37 Conspiracy and Ontological Shock34:13 Species Humility and Long Story38:31 Crab Universe Joke38:53 Disorientation Teaching Tactic39:53 Nacirema Defamiliarization42:12 Taliesin and Shapeshifting45:44 Spiderweb Mind Ecology46:55 Imitation Builds Empathy48:52 Against Anthropomorphize52:36 Utility Addiction and Mushrooms56:28 Inner Biodiversity and Stories01:00:47 Panpsychism Resurgence01:04:43 Hard Problem of Consciousness01:07:47 Trickster Ending Farewell
On challenging the individual self: Jeff VanderMeer, , Emanuele Coccia, , Amitov Ghosh
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Systems Neuroscience & why Automaticity Matters for Cognitive Evolution
samedi 12 septembre 2026 • Durée 02:08:19
James Mac Shine, Professor of Systems Neuroscience, University of Sydney.
Philosopher Andrea Hiott talks with neuroscientist Mac Shine about how the brain works. Shine works in systems neuroscience, which tries to describe the brain at many scales at once instead of focusing only on single neurons or only on whole-brain images. He explains that the field does not yet have simple, agreed-upon explanations. Part of the reason is that researchers from different backgrounds (for example, physicists and biologists) often use the same words to mean different things.
Most of the conversation is about a paper Shine wrote with his father in 2014. The paper argues that an important change in human evolution was the ability to hand off, or “delegate,” repeated tasks to lower parts of the brain, especially the cerebellum. Learning to walk upright is used as the main example. Once a task becomes automatic, attention is freed up for other things.
Shine and Hiott then apply this idea to driving a car, playing chess, and playing sports. They argue that thinking and body movement are not two separate systems but one connected process. They also discuss what makes human expertise different from simple repetition, the limits of AI tools for real learning, and the value of curiosity, care, and teamwork in running a research lab.
Runtime for this show is about two hours.
Find Mac at https://macshine.github.io/publications/
Mac Shine on Systems Neuroscience, Automaticity, and the Cerebellum’s Role in Human CognitionUniversity of Sydney systems neuroscientist Mac Shine in conversation about systems neuroscience and the challenge of linking single-neuron explanations with whole-brain network accounts. Shine describes his path from evolutionary biology influences and medical training to a search for simplified, cross-scale principles in brain science, noting how terminology like “representation” or “integration” can hinder communication across disciplines. They discuss his 2014 paper “Delegation to Automaticity,” inspired by observing his son learn to walk, which argues that cerebellar architecture supports the delegation of difficult skills into automatic control, freeing resources for higher-level cognition and potentially shaping human cognitive evolution alongside bipedalism. Shine contrasts basal ganglia habit findings with cerebellar predictive control, uses driving and chess to illustrate deliberate versus automatic processes, and emphasizes embodiment, learning through struggle, and collaborative, caring lab culture.00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro00:27 Automaticity and Evolution Teaser02:48 Why This Conversation Matters05:02 What Is Systems Neuroscience10:24 Mac’s Path Into Systems Thinking18:42 Language Gaps Across Fields26:15 Are We Assuming Cognition33:35 Delegation to Automaticity Paper37:19 Cerebellum as Automation Engine46:09 Bipedalism and Coevolving Mind Body47:29 Bipedalism And Cognition50:05 Natural Selection Good Enough52:37 Frozen Accidents And Delegation55:06 Humans Adapt Not Excel58:33 Repetition To Automaticity01:00:19 Habit Versus Automatic01:08:18 Driving And Chess Layers01:16:18 Beyond Motor Cognition01:21:57 Flow States And Expertise01:27:26 Scientific Humility Ethos01:29:16 Curiosity Over Credit01:30:57 AI And The Value Of Being Wrong01:33:07 Learning Through Struggle01:37:59 Embodiment And Driving01:40:56 Cerebellum Body Brain Coupling01:48:14 Expertise Through Variation01:53:31 Lab Curiosity And Next Questions01:59:49 Care Love And Leadership02:04:44 Closing Reflections
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#95 Inventing Temperature, Operational Coherence, Articles of Faith, Clarity & Care: A Discussion with Cambridge philosopher of science and history Hasok Chang
vendredi 28 août 2026 • Durée 01:07:32
A research conversation with Hasok Chang and Andrea Hiott
Love & Philosophy · Research Conversations series: This episode is part one with philosopher of history and science Hasok Chang of the University of Cambridge
Episode summary
Philosopher of science Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge) joins Andrea Hiott to trace the through-line of his work — from Inventing Temperature (2004), through Is Water H₂O? (2012), to Realism for Realistic People (2022) — and to think together about what it means to treat knowledge as something we do rather than something we merely possess.
The conversation begins with why Inventing Temperature has quietly become an inspiration for neuroscientists: it shows how a felt quality (hot and cold) can become a trustworthy number (temperature) — not by discovering a pre-given fact, but through a messy, iterative, bootstrapping process of invention. From there, Chang and Hiott move through the ideas that organize his mature philosophy: epistemic iteration, operational coherence, active/activist realism, path dependence, conceptual engineering, and a pragmatist re-reading of truth that no longer leans on correspondence to an inaccessible reality.
A recurring theme: Chang describes each of his books as costing him “an article of faith” — first foundationalism, then monism, then the ideal of pure science — and how each loss opened onto a more dynamic, practice-based, and pluralist picture of knowing. Hiott connects these moves to her own , where cognition is understood as a body’s coherent, aim-directed action in the world rather than the storage of static representations.
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#94 Action without Attachment, Conversational Care, and the Bhagavad Gita with Keya Maitra (Audio and Shownotes)
mercredi 19 août 2026 • Durée 01:32:27
Keya Maitra is the Lenney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa.
Keya joins Andrea to talk about the Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. They discuss this text as a living philosophical conversation. They move from ‘action without attachment’ and ‘yoga as a redirection of attention’ to why the Gita’s dualism isn’t the mind-body split we know from Descartes. Per navigational mind, they also discuss how holding tension (rather than dissolving it) opens an expanding circle of care. By the end, they’re calling it a love story: not romance, but caring, vulnerability, and the way real conversation itself becomes a form of care.
* How Keya came to the Gita. Growing up in a Bengali-speaking Hindu household, first encountering it via her mother and also in a middle-school Sanskrit class, then never in an Indian philosophy classroom—through a PhD on Hilary Putnam and philosophy of language, before finally meeting it academically while teaching Joel Kupperman’s comparative philosophy course in Connecticut.
* Philosophy as “being one’s whole self in writing.” Keya draws on feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman to describe her journey as coming to be her whole self with philosophy, with the Gita quietly anchoring that path.
* What the Gita actually is. A 700-verse, 18-chapter conversation set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, narrated by Sanjaya, unfolding between Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna (who is revealed to be reality itself).
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#93 Is there a Cure? Rethinking Freud, chemical imbalances, and the power of love via embodied participation: A conversation with neuropsychologist Mark Solms
samedi 8 août 2026 • Durée 01:36:40
Mark Solms began translating Freud’s neuroscientific writings in the late 1980s, then gave twenty-nine years to revising the translation of Freud’s psychological works. In this episode, Solms joins Andrea Hiott to talk about his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — and to make a surprising case: that far from being the discredited figure many take him for, Freud built a model of the mind, from the inside, that modern neuroscience is now confirming from the outside.
Together they explore multiple memory systems and the unconscious as things we repeat rather than remember; why transference is a far bigger phenomenon than its jargon suggests; the damage done by the “chemical imbalance” story of depression; the stubborn role of time in real change; and, in the end, care — the idea that psychoanalysis is ultimately a cure by love. Throughout, they return to the show’s animating theme: holding paradox, and refusing the false choice between the subjective and the objective, feeling and fact.
They discuss dual-aspect monism, subjective and objective perspectives, multiple memory systems, unconscious processing, state-dependent memory, and transference as the enactment of non-declarative “action policies” that therapy makes visible and revisable through repeated working-through over time. Solms links these ideas to care, politics, and mortality, ending with Freud’s “cure by love,” followed by Andrea reading Seamus Heaney’s “From The Cure at Troy.”
About the guest: Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst, and world-leading pioneer of neuropsychoanalysis. He discovered the brain mechanisms of dreaming, serves as science director of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is the translator and editor of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. His previous book was The Hidden Spring (2021).
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro03:50 Freud Translator Journey05:20 Why Call It Cure07:00 Reframing Freud Today11:41 Freud as Neuroscientist19:57 Memory Systems and Unconscious31:41 Subjective Meets Objective39:08 Chemical Imbalance Myth43:23 Needs Feelings and Therapy51:03 Pills Versus Talking52:09 Limits Of Medication53:31 When Pills Help54:41 What Is Transference56:04 Infantile Amnesia57:17 Interpreting Patterns01:01:25 Why Therapy Takes Time01:04:46 Cost Versus Care01:10:59 Teddy And Polypharmacy01:19:20 Short Termism Trap01:23:13 Cure By Love01:25:37 AI Therapy Limits01:31:25 Mortality And Meaning01:34:55 Closing Thanks01:36:09 Heaney Poem Easter Egg
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Molyneux's Enduring Question with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney
dimanche 2 août 2026 • Durée 01:52:38
Molyneux’s Question & reconsidering the Perception/Cognition Divide with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney
An Irish scientist named William Molyneux sent philosopher John Locke a letter in 1688. That letter had a question in it people are still talking about 300 years later: Suppose someone is born blind and has learned by touch to tell a cube from a sphere. If a surgery gives that person full sight, and the two objects are set on the table in front of them, could that person tell, just by looking alone, which is the sphere and which is the cube?
Locke said no, and put the question into the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley said no more emphatically. Leibniz said yes, but as you’ll hear, with a catch. Three centuries later the question is still open…and now it’s made it’s way into scientific labs.
Janet Levin and Brian Glenney have been in conversation about this problem since Brian’s dissertation defense in 2007, where Janet was on his committee. They still disagree (productively) about some aspects but their combined work seems to also be offering a new view on many of these old rationalist vs. empiricist issues.
At USC, philosopher Janet Levin was on Brian Glenney’s PhD committee and helped shape his career. He’s now become one of the leading thinkers on this issue….and much more.
Andrea Hiott keeps her promise to do impromptu introductions. The main part of this conversation, however, is between Brian and Janet. Janet has been on the podcast before. And Brian returns this Autumn to go into his work in more detail.
Guests
Janet Levin is recently retired from the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. She works on the mind-body problem, phenomenal concepts, and what she calls the philosophy of philosophy: whether thought experiments are worth anything, and whether they can absorb empirical information and still count as philosophy. Her 2008 paper introduced the distinction between temporal and immediacy that has shaped how the Molyneux question is tested ever since.
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Meaning-Making and the Hidden Layers of Biological Agency with Charlie Munford & the Agential Biology Institute
vendredi 17 juillet 2026 • Durée 01:32:00
Charlie has been gathering some of the best scientists in the world to rethink what agency is together and form new connections outside the usual academic constraints.
ABI includes Dennis Noble, Michael Levin, Richard Watson, Josh Bongard, Oded Rechavi, and Stuart Kauffman on its board, among others. Links to talks with them below, and also one with Andrea.
Charlie never got the PhD people kept urging on him. His conviction is a pretty fitting one for this moment, when what school is is in such a shift: Charlies says that “you become qualified to work on problems by working on them.” You don’t wait until you’re ready; you gather good people and begin.
Charlie says this openness was “forged in a crucible of intense suffering.” The hard years made him more patient, more open-minded; fatherhood taught him even more, and still does. The whole ABI project, he insists, only matters if it invites the world in rather than pronouncing answers at it.
Andrea Hiott and Charlie have a personal, meandering conversation that moves from family life stories to foundational questions in biology, education, evolution, and meaning. Munford recounts growing up in Mississippi, wilderness canoe trips, Yale literature and polo, organic agriculture studies in Cuba, farming and a New Orleans wild boar sausage business, and a later personal crisis that pushed him into researching chronic disease and biological agency. He argues mainstream gene-centered biology assumes blind variation, but evidence for inherited acquired changes and directional adaptation (horizontal gene transfer, planaria pattern memory, small-RNA inheritance in worms and mammals, maternal grooming effects, genetic assimilation) suggests a missing causal layer and universal cellular learning. They discuss natural selection, Darwin and Lamarck, Barbara McClintock, a Karl Popper “active Darwinism” lecture, ABI’s testable hypotheses, and openness, creativity, and care.
00:00 Welcome and Brooklyn Invite04:20 Meet Charlie Munford04:35 Banana Couch Story05:49 Kids and Creativity08:48 Mississippi to Yale Adventures15:17 Farming Cuba and Sausage Business18:40 Crisis Sparks Biology Questions21:38 Agential Biology Explained30:04 Lamarck Darwin and Natural Selection36:45 Evidence for Inherited Change46:21 McClintock and Popper Teaser47:51 Cells Sense Not Code48:36 Genes Aren’t Difference Makers49:45 Popper Versus Selfish Gene54:06 Agency Without Theology55:11 Horizontal Gene Transfer58:34 Three Testable Agency Ideas01:00:00 Popper And Falsification01:06:05 Episolution And Cellular Mind01:12:58 Harmonic Resonance And Sleep01:17:12 Attention And Surprise Learning01:20:33 Personal Journey And Meaning01:26:24 Love Openness And Invitation01:30:16 Otter Story Farewell
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Collaboration Across Art, Philosophy and the Sciences: Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger & Marcus Neustetter on The ZoNE
mardi 7 juillet 2026 • Durée 02:14:46
Andrea, Yogi and Marcus are forming Paradoxis. This is one of the conversations towards that, a Third Space episode of Love & Philosophy. You can find Part Two on the ZoNE here.
Andrea Hiott sits down with artist and facilitator Marcus Neustetter and biologist-philosopher Johannes “Yogi” Jaeger for a wide-ranging conversation about working in the space between art and science. The two have collaborated for about six years as part of The ZoNE, a transdisciplinary collective they run in Vienna alongside artist Bronwyn Lace and curator Başak Şenova.
Marcus and Yogi introduce each other, then talk through how their collaboration actually works: not illustration-for-hire, but a genuine co-production where a text and a drawing “wrap themselves around each other” into something neither could have made alone. From there the conversation moves through constraints and “staying alive,” productive tension, performance and vulnerability, the trickster, space and context, institutions and gatekeeping, conflict and tolerance, and finally care and love.
The episode also introduces the paradox project (referred to in the audio as “Paradoxis”), a shared piece of writing on treating paradox as a practice and performance, and the idea of building offline “circles of trust,” a concept drawn from Andrea’s earlier conversation with Parker Palmer.
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Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good · Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love · Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses and Faith and Place · Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention · Taliaferro & Evans, Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent · Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology · Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God · John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is a conversation between John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. They will introduce one another. Darius, who knows both of us, offered to put us in touch, but I thought that Darius and John might have an even better conversation, and wow, it’s a good one.
And they talked about Iris Murdoch, who is one of my favorite philosophers. So, three amazing voices in this conversation. I just wanted to say something: so many students listen to this, but also a lot of professors and teachers, whether you’re an academic or a teacher in some other way. In a way, many people are teachers without even knowing it.
Listening to this conversation, and also to some of the notes I get from you asking me to talk to John Vervaeke, I realize how important mentors are in our lives, whoever they may be for you. We all have different ones. [00:01:00] We all come from different paths, and different people speak to us at different times.
But that relationship in general is so important, and I really felt that in this conversation in so many ways. There’s an old story about Honi, who sees a man planting a tree, a carob tree, and teases him: it takes, what, seventy years to bear fruit, and you’ll never eat from it.
And the man shrugs and says, “I found these trees when I came into the world, so I’m planting them for my grandchildren.” Then, I think, Honi lies down and goes to sleep for seventy years, and wakes up, and there’s the man’s grandson eating from the tree. Anyway, I think there’s even more to that story than that, but it comes to mind because, for one thing, if you’re watching the video, I’m up here on the Philosophenweg, the Philosophers’ Way, in Heidelberg. I’m at the university here.
And so many people walked here on this path. Hölderlin, if you [00:02:00] know the poet, was up here, and Hegel, who I talk about a lot, but also Karl Jaspers, who’s one of the reasons I came to this town. Hannah Arendt was his student, and both of them are so important. I could go on and on. Max Weber used to live nearby.
Anyway, there’s a tradition in these hills of philosophers walking, and I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for this conversation between John and Darius and Iris Murdoch. So here we go. I hope you love it as much as I did.
Darius: Well, I think we should just do this spontaneously, right? And then, Andrea, you can edit as you see appropriate. Well, John, this is a complete honor for me. On a public platform it’s been, what, two and a half years since we spoke for the Active Inference Insights podcast, in, I think, December ‘23.
John: I think that’s right, yeah.
Darius: So quite a lot’s [00:03:00] changed. Just for the audience, people should know who you are. I imagine many people know who you are, but of course you can introduce yourself. Many people will not know who I am, though. My name’s Darius Parvizi-Wayne. I’m about to enter the third year of a PhD in philosophy here at Macquarie University in Sydney.
I’m obviously not Australian, if you can’t tell from my accent. I’m originally from the UK, and I’m very inspired by John’s work, as well as other people’s, of course. My PhD is on active inference, or predictive processing, and the problem of relevance, which is something John has worked on extensively for decades now.
But I have a range of interests that very much align with John’s: flow and insight and intuition and skillful coping and Heidegger, and someone I hope we get to touch on quite a lot today, which is Iris Murdoch.
John: Yes.
Darius: [00:04:00] But John, is there anything you would want to add about yourself?
John: I guess, if people don’t know me, I’m an associate professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, where I teach cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I’ve been the director, the associate director, and the assistant director of the cognitive science program, so I have a long history with that program.
In psychology, I work on intelligence, rationality, wisdom, meaning in life, and mystical experiences. In cog sci, I work on, as Darius said, relevance realization, its connections to predictive processing, and its connections to what’s called 4E cognitive science. This is the idea that cognition is inherently embedded, enacted, embodied, and extended.
I would perhaps add another E: it’s exapted, in an important way. And then both of those come together. I’m a [00:05:00] long-term practitioner: 35 years of Tai Chi Chuan, Yiquan, Zhan Zhuang, meditation, contemplation, Neoplatonic practice. I’m also a facilitator. I facilitate various retreats and intensives.
I co-facilitate with other people. All of this work is marshaled together towards wrestling with what I call the meaning crisis, which I’ve been talking about for quite some time. I have a YouTube series on it that’s become somewhat famous, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And by meaning I don’t mean semantic meaning; that’s a metaphor for what I’m talking about, which is this sense of existential, spiritual meaning.
What makes life worth living even when we bump up against failure and frustration and futility. Many people are struggling, increasingly so: issues around loneliness, ideological capture. I could go on with an entire symptomatology. [00:06:00] And more and more people have taken this up and are discussing it actively.
So all of my work is basically aimed at trying to help people address and ameliorate this. Part of that is theoretical work, scientific work, understanding meaning better and all of these other processes I talked about. Part of it is practical, in the deep sense of practice: giving people an ecology of practices.
Part of it is educational. I do that at the lectern, and on my online teaching platform. Right now we’re going through the Kyoto School: how can their integration of Zen and Heidegger, and through Heidegger, Neoplatonism, perhaps help us with the problems of nihilism and cynicism we face?
So that’s a lot of what my work is. And I get to bump into some really excellent people, and one of them is Darius. I think of you as a friend now, and I hope you think so too. [00:07:00] We talk quite often off camera. We’re collaborating on several things.
He’s much faster than I am. I’m an extremely busy person. I’m sure he’s busy too, but I’ll use that as my excuse. We talk a lot, we share a lot, and I always enjoy his company. I know we’re supposed to be talking about love today, and I think that’s actually relevant to everything I said, and I’ll say something initially provocative.
I have proposed, and this requires a really deep recovery of what we mean by love, and we can talk about that, and Murdoch will play an important role in that, but I have proposed that ultimately, awakening from the meaning crisis requires us being able to fall in love with being again. You can hear Heidegger in that proposal as well. So the topic of love has been very central to me because of that particular proposal.
Darius: Good. That’s excellent. [00:08:00] I think there’s a nice way of making a convergence here between someone like Heidegger and Murdoch. Just to add, of course, I feel exactly the same.
I definitely see us as friends. You are in many ways also a mentor and an idol, in the least glorifying or sacrilegious way possible. And I think at the end of this chat it would be nice to talk a little bit more about the personal dimensions of this stuff.
John: Happy to do that.
Darius: But to go to the philosophy. One thing that Heidegger makes very clear is that we are beings that care. We are Dasein, and at the very foundation he wants to say Dasein’s constitution is temporality, but at least at the intermediary level he says it’s Sorge, it’s care.
We are the beings for whom being is itself an issue. And one way you could cash that out is to say we are the [00:09:00] beings who love things, who are projective, who care about things, who take things seriously, who give a damn, to use John Haugeland’s phrase. This brings us nicely to Murdoch.
You’re trying to draw an interesting relationship, I think, between love and something like care, or love and relevance. And this isn’t just in Murdoch and Heidegger. Someone like Harry Frankfurt is very interesting here.
John: Yes.
Darius: In the beginning of The Reasons of Love, he says the more fundamental question is not “what is the moral life?” We need to pay attention to what we actually care about.
We can only really get to the ethical context by first understanding what matters to us. So I want to start by asking: how do you view that relationship between love and care, or love and relevance? This is interesting in the case of Murdoch, because it seems like Murdoch’s sense of love, where she talks about it with respect to attention, is not just about [00:10:00] accruing as much propositional information about another as possible.
This is a point that’s really nicely made by Chris Cordner. I want to read out the famous M and D example to put meat on the bones. But before I do that: Chris Cordner and others have made clear that love is not just this excruciating acquisition or extraction of as many details about someone as possible.
That can actually be used, as I think he puts it, to turn the screws of humiliation, right? If I pay attention to every fine detail of you. But that being said, that acquisition of fine detail does seem to mirror or reflect how relevant you are to me. So there does seem to be a slight disjunction between what’s relevant to me and what I love. How do you see that relationship?
John: Well, first of all, you and I both, and if we need to we can go into the [00:11:00] detail, think that relevance realization is primordial. You and I are also on the same page that we think it’s even deeper than the framework of predictive processing.
This is some of the work I’ve done with Dan Chiappe: that fundamental orientation that makes any predictive processing possible. So we’re talking about something very primordial. And I want to say that because it’s clear that Heidegger is talking about care in this primordial sense.
He’s not talking about it the way I care about ice cream or something like that. At least not initially. Because it is, as you say, bound up, and this is why it relates to the meaning crisis, with the fact that we are the beings for whom being is in question.
It really goes to the guts of our existence. This is why I want to say that relevance realization can meet Heidegger’s notion of care, because it is [00:12:00] equally, to my mind, primordial, and has to do with our fundamental orientation and connection to reality.
We don’t need to get into the mechanics. I want to make a connection first to Frankfurt. This is a notion he uses, although I think you see equivalent notions in John Searle and in Hans Jonas. Jonas talks about needful freedom, and John Searle says that in a good argument we find the conclusion compelling, but it’s not compulsive.
There’s this weird state, and Frankfurt has a great term for it: volitional necessity. This is the idea that when I’m loving something, I feel very bound to it. There’s a necessity to it. If you were to ask me, I cannot help but love Sara. She’s my beloved.
But I don’t feel like I’m losing my agency [00:13:00] in this. I feel like my agency is flourishing. And there are other examples of this. Like I said, for Searle, reason seems to be a volitional necessity. Many people have talked about beauty as a kind of volitional necessity. And as I said, Hans Jonas talks about something very similar, at least when he talks about life itself as a needful freedom.
In the needful there’s a kind of necessity, but there’s a freedom in there too. And I think all of these plug into something central. I think relevance realization is exactly like that, because of the way it works. It’s not algorithmic; it doesn’t work according to standards of necessity.
You know this: for technical reasons, that would often commit us to a combinatorially explosive search of the information. So we’re not working according to logical or causal standards of necessity, but neither are we just arbitrarily picking what we will pay attention to, what we will remember, how we will act.
So it’s that volitional necessity. And I think there’s something really [00:14:00] powerful here, and I’ll get to your detailed question in a second. There’s something about love and relevance realization, care, being caught by beauty. And I remember talking to Bishop Maximos about this, and I said, “Is that perhaps what was originally meant by people like Clement when they were talking about faith?”
Faith as more of a faithfulness, almost a fealty, a loyalty to something, a volitional necessity, the way I feel this tremendous loyalty to Sara. And he said, “That’s exactly right. Faith isn’t about believing things without evidence. It’s this sense of being committed to something because it appeals to you as fundamentally good.”
And I think that’s important, because I want to bring in this notion of commitment to supplement care: that love has an aspect of commitment to it, [00:15:00] because something appeals to us as good. And then one more point. Somebody I find very helpful around this is Wynn.
Mark Wynn, in Renewing the Senses. He’s often almost explicitly influenced by 4E cog sci. He talks about what’s happening in religious conversions, in which people feel deeply committed to a new way of life. They go through a transformation, and they recommit their identity in a fundamental way.
And he says, “People talk about seeing God, but they’re not seeing a focal object in an adjectival way.” What’s happening, and this is language you and I both like, is a change in the salience landscape and its hue, and in the sense of connectedness. It’s very adverbial.
And the way he explains it, which I found personally very helpful, is that “the universe goes from being a container of things to being something that faces us.” Because in a [00:16:00] face, it’s not that we’re picking up on every detail, but wherever we focus on a detail, the whole is present. It’s pregnant in that face. And it’s present in a way, and this is a Heideggerian thing,
that is also withdrawing. We get a sense of the mystery of the person in their face. So that’s how I’m trying to bring it together. When we’re in volitional necessity, we are called because something appeals to us, and that’s Smith’s work: appeal actually means to call to us, right?
And with volitional necessity, when we’re called, the care is called into commitment, and I think that means we start to face someone. It’s not that we’re picking up every detail, but we are facing them. We are experiencing them as facing us, rather than as a thing in Cartesian space just filling up space in the universe.
So that’s a proposal I would give back to you. [00:17:00]
Darius: Yeah, this is excellent. There’s plenty of convergence here, I think, with stuff that I’ve been thinking about. It brings me nicely to my little bit of a battered copy.
John: Beautiful book. Just for people who are only listening, he’s holding up The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch.
Darius: This is probably about the fourth time I’ve read it, in preparation for this, and I think it’s the first time I’ve felt its more spiritual dimension come to the fore.
John: Excellent.
Darius: What I mean by that is I would want to add that there’s a volitional necessity, at least for Murdoch, though I wouldn’t go fully fledged myself, although I was quite convinced: it’s one’s orientation to the good.
John: Mm-hmm.
Darius: Murdoch interestingly says, and I made a note of this in preparation, “The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very [00:18:00] much more like obedience.”
John: Mm-hmm.
Darius: So she talks about the necessity of the good, as a form of reality, as constraining you, right? It’s not that I’m just open, in an existentialist, Sartrean way, to interpret things on the fly. Actually, my orientation to the good is a form of volitional necessity.
It draws me in, and yet, as you say, it’s not an impediment to my freedom, my agency. And what I found particularly spiritual about this reading of The Sovereignty of Good is the notion, which I think you’re getting at when you bring up Wynn, of excess, of concealment.
In “The Idea of Perfection,” she says a fundamental aspect of being a human being is that there’s always this orientation towards improvement, towards bettering oneself, recognizing that there is a standard towards which [00:19:00] one can always aim upwards. That strikes me as another form of volitional necessity, and it also makes me think of Merleau-Ponty and the notion of an optimal grip.
Our existence is in many ways normatively structured, even at the most deeply pre-reflective level, towards something better. And she’s very careful not to reify this betterness.
John: Oh, yes.
Darius: She talks about how it has to be a small seed that is formless, but that has to continue to occupy more of a role in our life.
This “there is more than this,” as she puts it. And so for her, ultimately, to love something is to be, as she puts it, confronted with an endless task. So I’m wondering whether that resonates with you, for us in this world where things are transient and changing, which I think is [00:20:00] also important to pick up on, right?
We do not exist in the Platonic realm, and Wynn wants to do careful work at dismantling that dichotomy. It’s not as if love is an effort-free orientation. It requires work, and it may never come to total fulfillment.
John: Oh, that’s very rich. Let me try to pick up on various threads. First of all, I think there’s a potential connection between Wynn and Murdoch that you pointed me towards. I mentioned that for Wynn the sense of the sacred is adverbial, not adjectival.
And I think that’s maybe also the case for Murdoch: the good isn’t an adjectival, focal object. It’s an adverbial thing that is constantly transforming what we find salient and how we understand ourselves. And I think that comes out in Wright’s notion, which he derives from the M and D example, of what he calls sensibility transcendence.
I think [00:21:00] that’s deeply right. I think this notion of facing up is really important. John Russon does some work on this, right? This is our primary metaphor for maturation, and notice it’s got the facing language. When we face up to somebody, again, we’re not just confronting an object in Cartesian space.
I am proposing to integrate this with a Vygotskian perspective. There’s an awareness, and this is the Callard idea of aspiration, right, as in religious conversion. Think of a child. They have an awareness that the adult has a perspective they do not have.
So from their perspective, what the adult is doing doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense, and there are some classic experiments showing that kids will imitate even when it doesn’t make any sense to them. But they do it because that individual is trustworthy, and they imitate the perspective-taking, and then that gets internalized [00:22:00] as metacognition.
The child eventually can take the adult’s perspective on its own. So there’s a lot packed into this facing up to reality. It brings in the facing again. But the other thing is, if we understand Murdoch as proposing that the aspiration towards the good, the adverbial aspiration, is maturational in nature, because we are facing up to something we don’t completely understand and yet we’re trying to internalize it,
it sounds a lot like that Vygotskian machinery. And if that’s the case, that might help to explain another important component of what we typically understand by love that’s not addressed that directly. But correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m very open to that. I mean, she’s not very familiar with it, because it comes towards the end of her life. [00:23:00]
This is the psychological notion of attachment. Maturation and psychological attachment are deeply bound up. And I would say that the commitment I have to Sara is not only conjoined to care; it’s also reaching into my attachment system, the very machinery by which I internalize other people in order to mature. I’m facing up to them, they face me, and I interface with them.
The language here is really quite proper. And I think it does feed over into Murdoch, because I wouldn’t know if it’s exclusive, but I think that’s the proper way, meaning most of the way, in which we achieve the particular kind of metacognition we call conscience, where the normativity of our world and of other people becomes a part of how [00:24:00] we direct and understand ourselves.
What do you think about that? I was trying to play with...
Darius: Yeah, good. So she certainly doesn’t mention attachment. There’s been a complaint, or a concern, in the secondary literature that Murdoch doesn’t take enculturation seriously enough.
John: Yeah.
Darius: I think Blum mentions this, perhaps in the SEP entry on Murdoch.
There are slight mentions of it in the book, but there is very little on what someone like Gibson would call the education of attention. For Murdoch, what matters is that we mature in our attention such that we can look on the world with a just and loving gaze, but there’s very little on how we might do that.
I think she’s aware of that, and she’s aware of the predicament she’s in, which is that we can’t now resort to capital-G God to guide us. She does invoke things like prayer, and questions whether that [00:25:00] might be our route to purifying our attentional schema.
But there’s very little by way of others training us. That doesn’t mean she’s not aware of the import of the other. To go back to the attachment point, one thing she’s very clear on is that just and loving attention is not about consumption. It’s not about getting the other as a kind of commodity that you can exploit in your scheme.
And again, this comes back to Heidegger and the notion of standing reserve. There are interesting questions there about what kind of attention that is. This is a tension I try to pull out in some of my work that’s under review, about Murdoch and attention: attention does seem in many ways to reflect our individual preferences.
So there’s this continuous tension in Murdoch, I think, between this notion of unselfing, but also
John: psychological commitments. We’ve got to talk about that, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding [00:26:00] about unselfing. And we’ve got to talk about the fact that self-reference isn’t a single phenomenon.
There’s a big difference between narrative, egocentric self-reference and the kind of self-reference I need in order to get up and walk around the room. So I think we’ve got to tread very carefully there. But I do want to come back to the point you made about non-consumption.
I have tended, and I’m prepared to defend it, although we can talk about it, to map that onto a Frommian distinction between the having mode, which is needs of consumption, and the being mode, which is needs of maturation: we need to become honest, we need to become wise, we need to become, right?
Many people have said it should have been named the becoming mode rather than the being mode. And then you talk about a different kind of attention, and this is where I think of... [00:27:00] I want to come back to enculturation, because it’s odd that a woman who writes dialogues, who actually writes Platonic dialogues and considers herself a Platonist, doesn’t really bring in the dialogical aspect of this.
Darius: Well, and even if we look at the M and D example...
John: Well, the M and D...
Darius: Let me just read it out. I hope it doesn’t take too long. I’ll just read it and then we can see where we go.
John: Please, please do.
Darius: It’s a classic moment. “A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement.
D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D [00:28:00] dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘correct’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way.
We might underline this aspect of the example by supposing that the young couple have emigrated or that D is now dead: the point being to ensure that whatever is in question happens entirely in M’s mind. Thus much for M’s first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl.
However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention” (that’s in italics) “to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous.
Let me look again.’ Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until [00:29:00] gradually her vision of D alters. If we take D to be now absent or dead, this can make it clear that the change is not in D’s behavior but in M’s mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.
And as I say, ex hypothesi, M’s outward behavior, beautiful from the start, in no way alters.” So this comes off the back of her critique, or her scrutiny, of Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, and that argument ultimately being expanded to concepts and all forms of behavior writ large, which only make sense in the context of public ceremony, of the ways of going about the world.
Because ultimately her interest is in reinstating the importance [00:30:00] of the internal constitution of a person to one’s ethical life. So it’s not just about outward behavior. It’s not, in a pure utilitarian sense, just what happens in the world that determines your moral life.
There’s almost a Kantian element here, about the intention to treat another with dignity, as worthy of one’s respect. So she wants to say: if that’s the case, then we have to look at the internal constitution of people. And so she gives this example of M, for whom seemingly nothing has changed in terms of external behavior, and yet everything has happened internally.
Now, as you probably know, I too have a slight problem with the pure Wittgensteinian picture of externalism, basically. I think it’s unfair to pin this entirely on Wittgenstein, because I take the quietistic picture of something like the Investigations quite seriously.
What he’s trying to do is talk to us about our use of [00:31:00] language and tell us about the role of therapy. It’s a much more therapeutic text than an expository one. So I think she’s right to invoke something like internal mechanisms. But the reason this becomes problematic comes back to this point about enculturation, and the lack of anyone influencing M in her decision to change her mind. I think it runs into classic issues like circularity: does M not already have to be good to recognize her deficiency?
So is just and loving attention making one good, or is it a marker of one’s already-established goodness? If it’s not a difference-maker, if it’s just an epiphenomenon of one’s already established goodness, there seems to be an issue of essentialism, right?
It’s as if M was always already good, and this was always going to happen, and that doesn’t quite seem right either. [00:32:00] Sorry, I’ve gone on for far too long.
John: No, no, you haven’t. Not at all. I’ll let you know if I think you’re going on too long.
Darius: Okay, thanks.
John: So first of all, Davidsonian charity to Murdoch.
She’s writing at a time when behaviorism is the dominant psychological paradigm, and even the dominant philosophical one. Ryle and so forth are very active. And she’s trying to make a case for the inner life, and in that I agree with her. But I do think she’s sneaking some stuff in.
She does talk about this, and other people talk about it quite naturally, as an inner dialogue taking place inside of us. And that is already to smuggle in something that we acquire, presumably both the knowing how to do it and the normativity of it, from our interactions with others.
And this is in fact a central Platonic claim. Somebody asks [00:33:00] Antisthenes, “What did you learn from Socrates?” “I learned how to talk to myself,” right? It’s only by practicing, with shared meaning and mutual correction, that we get good at external dialogue, to the point where we can feel comfortable applying it internally, to different temporal states of ourselves.
So I think she’s smuggling something in there. I completely agree with the rejection of the behaviorist rejection of the inner life of the mental. But I think she’d be a more consistent Platonist if she acknowledged that
the inner dialogue is inseparable from the outer dialogue. Those two are constantly playing off against each other. And if she did that, she could avail herself of something like Buber: what we’re talking about is not I-It attention but I-Thou attention, and the I of the I-Thou [00:34:00] is a very different I from the I of the I-It.
And I think that’s actually what she’s trying to put her finger on: that the I is changing in a fundamental way. That’s an inner change, but I think it’s happening dialogically and relationally. And what’s always bothered me about the example is that she says, “Well, what if D is dead?”
For me, I’d want to know if any of those insights land or track, because insights can be wrong. This comes up a lot in practice. People will be in a dialogical practice and they think they have an insight about the other person, and the other person will say, “No, sorry, that’s not landing. That’s not what’s happening.” Right? And other times they’ll go, “Yeah. Yeah.” And then you can feel the I-Thou just spring up between them.
Darius: Yeah, there’s a lot there. I think the first thing to say [00:35:00] is that you’re right that she would actually be not only more faithful to Plato, but more faithful to her own notion of loving attention as recognizing the alterity of the other,
John: Yes.
Darius: if she recognized the dialogical aspect of self-improvement, right? Recognizing that the other has something to teach you that you may not already have known, and that is a lifelong, endless task, as she puts it. And it comes back to the notion of the face, and this notion of excess.
The other is beyond my consumption. It makes me think of Levinas, right?
John: Yeah, of course.
Darius: So the M and D example here is almost doing violence, one might say in the Levinasian sense, to the constitutive role of the other in something like self-formation. And I think it runs into...
Bergson has this really lovely example. He directly counterposes his notion of becoming to, and it’s very much of the time, [00:36:00] the model of the French ladies with their fans, where everything is contained right at the first fold
and then it ultimately unfurls and shows up. In some Laplacian sense, it was always already there, just waiting to be revealed. And that doesn’t allow for genuine change or genuine transformation or genuine novelty, right? If it’s always already there, just waiting to be
John: Yeah.
Darius: catalyzed. That’s not what we’re talking about. And I think that runs into some of my issues around what I’ve been calling the diachronic problem of relevance: how we develop idiosyncratic preferences, and the problem of grounding that in a first-prior story of always up-weighted homeostatic priors. I think that’s true both of active inference and of autopoietic enactivism, so it’s very cool to see these things converging.
So there’s plenty there. But I want to come to this thing about attention, and [00:37:00] Buberian attention, the I-Thou attention you mentioned. Murdoch makes it very clear, and it’s clear here that she’s influenced by someone like Anscombe, that moral philosophy needs what she calls a philosophical psychology.
It needs to make sense in the light of what we know about mentation and cognition. And she uses Freud, although at one point she calls Freudianism an “embryonic muddle,” and in some ways she’s probably right.
John: That’s wonderful. She’s such a good writer.
Darius: She is a good writer. She is.
So my project in one of these papers was to think about whether the reconciliation of Murdochian ethics and philosophical psychology is still licensed.
John: Mm.
Darius: And I look at that from a predictive processing angle. I’m not sure I’ve sent you this paper, but I can if you’d like.
John: Please.
Darius: And one of the issues there is that [00:38:00] in our taxonomy of attention, we have exogenous and endogenous attention, although I think that dichotomy is worth dismantling, feature-based attention, spatial attention, and so on. We don’t have receptive attention.
We don’t have orientational attention. We don’t have opening-up-to-the-moral-worth-of-others attention. So one question I would have for you, as someone who is interested in naturalizing phenomenology and, in this case, ethical philosophy, but who also has an eye to the transcendent, is how far can our accounts of cognition and our scientific worldview, when it comes to...
I’d say the closest we can get to what Murdoch is talking about, in terms of our scientific account, is feature-based attention. I’m going to love someone differently depending on what part of them I focus on. Do I focus on the aggression in their face, or do I focus on the vulnerability in their face?
But even then, that still seems to be a very [00:39:00] object-centered, detail-oriented, extractive process. So I’m wondering what you think about the prospects of cognitive science even getting close to explaining the type of attention she’s interested in?
John: Yeah. Dan Chiappe and I were doing a lot of work on orientation, and we’re both also reading Panizza’s book right now.
Darius: Yeah.
John: On the ethics of attention. She mentions Wu’s theory, but she seems to be most in line, as far as I’ve read so far, with Watzl’s idea of attention as prioritization and the structuring of consciousness. And I think that’s getting very close to relevance realization and the kind of orientation that Dan and I are talking about, that Stegmaier is talking about.
And Kant bumps into it famously in the critique, where he realizes that when I list all the features of my left and right hand, all the propositional descriptions, there’s nothing that distinguishes them, and [00:40:00] yet my orientation clearly picks them out as different from each other, because I orient to them.
It’s completely adverbial, and that’s the point I want to make. It’s an adverbial kind of qualia rather than an adjectival qualia. And I think that’s really important, because Kant realizes that you can’t reason, you can’t do anything until you’re oriented, and then he panics a little bit and says, “Well, it must be a feeling,” and he puts it aside.
But we’ve got the work of Stegmaier, Sass, and others, and I think it plugs in nicely to the work Panizza is doing on Murdoch and Weil on the ethics of attention. And I think the orientation language just lands very naturally in Murdoch, really, really well.
So I think there is work being done on what’s going on in orientation. Now, I think it has [00:41:00] something to do with prioritization, but it also has to do with other aspects of relevance realization. The thing I would want to put here, though, gets me back to Wynn and his proposal for a more adverbial understanding of the sacred.
When you move to orientation, you’re moving to this adverbial sense, to hereness and nowness and valence and connectedness and foregrounding and backgrounding, the kinds of things that I think are actually really relevant to describing a lot of the phenomenology people experience when they’re having very transcendent experiences.
And I proposed this argument to you, and we’ve been bashing it back and forth: even in things like mystical states, where we might think that something like relevance realization goes quiet, no, you still find the adverbial aspects of [00:42:00] orientation at work.
In fact, you find them enhanced. Enhanced presence, enhanced nowness, enhanced orientation, to the point of at-one-ment, and things like that. So I think we can connect the cognitive science to the phenomenology, and to some of the work people are doing on the phenomenology of the sacred, in a way that I think is very viable for amplifying a lot of what Murdoch is trying to put her finger on.
The way she talks about the magnetic pull of the good seems to fit really well with that adverbial alteration in salience and orientation and hereness and nowness and connectedness, and my sense of being called into volitional necessity. So I think 4E cognitive science, allied with phenomenology, can actually say a lot about attention, and especially attention to [00:43:00] the sacred. I would make that argument.
Darius: Yeah, nice. You’re mentioning plenty of researchers, and I like that. I very much align myself with this. I’ve got very minor critiques of Watzl’s view,
John: Me too.
Darius: but I really loved his Structuring Mind book and all the articles as well, so I think he’s great. And Wayne Wu as well. But I think Watzl’s picking up on something. Wayne Wu’s view is a selection-for-action view: what attention is doing is selecting a datum for action.
I think what Watzl’s picking up on is that that might be true, but at a more fundamental level, attention is picking up what is most relevant to you.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Darius: Because that actually acts as a kind of condition of possibility for action in the first place. And what I also like about your notion of adverbial orientation is that it doesn’t extricate or annihilate the self.
Not the “fat relentless ego,” as Murdoch would talk about it, but the kind of pole, let’s say, [00:44:00] that is stretched. As you’ve also talked about, a pole that is stretched, a mind-world fittedness. I know you like that term as well. So there are plenty of researchers here, and I think it’s right, as you mentioned, that it’s worth unpicking some of the misconceptions about what Murdoch means by unselfing.
John: Yes.
Darius: You mentioned Panizza, but there are other people I think are worth flagging. She wrote a paper with a researcher called Fredrickson, but there are other people like, it’s a Finnish name so I’m going to get it wrong, Hämäläinen, I think in Hypatia about ten years ago.
John: Yeah.
Darius: Chris Mole, who’s also done fantastic work on adverbial attention.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Darius: And they all point to the fact that what Murdoch means by unselfing is not that, at a process level, there is no receiver or receptor of the world, right?
John: Yeah.
Darius: Panizza talks about [00:45:00] how Murdoch offers, and I wonder whether this is slightly unfair or a poor term, a tamed version of Simone Weil’s notion of décréation, decreation, or unselfing, right? And I’d love to talk about this, because you will be much more in touch with the more mystical, spiritual tradition that Weil talks about, where for her to receive God is to undergo kenosis, right?
It’s to self-empty and become a receptacle. Murdoch doesn’t think that, right? Murdoch thinks the self is still an important thing that is going to be engaged, at a processual level, with the objects of just and loving attention. It’s just that, as you were saying right at the beginning, we need to be careful about distinguishing the levels at which we talk about the self, right?
What she wants to say we should not be paying attention to is the self as object, as I’ve called it in certain places. The self as the object of self-concern. These are the kinds of things that go away in flow states, without flow completely eradicating consciousness, right? [00:46:00] Weil, on the other hand, seems to really want to talk about not being there.
So the self is removed not just from the content of consciousness, but from the process of engagement wholesale. And I wonder about the feasibility of something like that.
John: Yeah, I think that’s right. And you’re right to invoke the flow state. You and I both do work on that. Obviously not all forms of self-reference go away in the flow state, or you’d be really bad at sparring
and getting into the flow state while you’re sparring. So we have to go here very, very carefully. I don’t know about Weil; I haven’t read her deeply. I know about other mystical traditions. I’m going through the Kyoto School right now, people like Nishida and Tanabe
and Nishitani. And I’m finding Tanabe is actually very helpful for understanding Murdoch, and vice versa, [00:47:00] because Tanabe talks about the fact... and you can see this is even relevant to the M and D example. Tanabe is very concerned, because he’s influenced by Pure Land Buddhism rather than Zen,
and this is one of Shinran’s concerns. Shinran is the founder of Pure Land. One of his concerns, and it sounds very much like Kierkegaard and Augustine, and Tanabe is very influenced by Kierkegaard, who also talks a lot about love, is that we can have such complex and powerful forms of self-deception, and super-salience of a kind of narrative egocentrism,
and our attempts to get out of it can feed back into it. That can become extreme, like perhaps in Luther or Calvin, and I don’t think Tanabe goes there. But the reason I’m talking about it is that Tanabe talks about the need for what’s called tariki, other power. And the lens for [00:48:00] me, and I don’t think this is foreign to his understanding, is that when you’re having an insight, you don’t just make an insight.
You don’t manufacture it. You do stuff. You redirect your attention, but there’s this other spontaneous thing. There’s an other power at work. It comes to you. It beckons to you. The light flashes. It’s got a spontaneous self-creation aspect to it. And the same thing with some of our spontaneous intuitions, our sense of our deep intelligence.
Where did that come from? Plato talks a lot about that too, in ideas around anamnesis, and inspiration, and aspiration. We have this relationship to something calling us. And Paul Ricoeur did an excellent thing on that in The Symbolism of Evil, when he says, “When you’re being tempted, who’s tempting you?”
Right? So it’s this idea that there’s self-power and other power, but they’re not substantial entities that are [00:49:00] separable from each other. I like the way you put it: they are poles within a pulsating polarity. They’re interpenetrating in a significant way.
And I don’t see how Weil can get rid of that, because what is bearing the relationship to God? What is bearing the call to responsibility? What is bearing the call to virtue? What is bearing the call to love? When I talk to people in the Eastern Orthodox tradition about kenosis and theosis, there isn’t the sense of that happening.
It’s not that there’s the eradication of the ability to be in relationship to God. That would actually be a profound heresy, right? There’s a sense in which we never stop being a lover of God. And I think Murdoch is being more [00:50:00] consistent.
Murdoch is really emphasizing that love requires a lover as well as the beloved. And as I started with, love is a virtue. It’s not an emotion or a feeling. It requires commitment and loyalty, right? That requires self-direction of some kind.
There has to be some kind of self-machinery, not a substantial self or a soul, but some kind of self-machinery at work, because agency and self-direction are being invoked by both Murdoch and Weil throughout all their work, as far as I can tell. And I think Tanabe is very clear about that.
The self-power and the other power: we have to take them both into account. We can attribute the origin of our metanoia, of our conversion, to the other power, but that doesn’t mean there’s other power without self-power receiving it and being called by it.
Darius: Yeah. And I like your invocation [00:51:00] here of responsibility.
John: Yes.
Darius: The self is also implicated in its past activity, right? We have to credit it with all it’s done to have come to the state where it has purified attention. So ask me where I’ve come from, you know? It’s the Jungian thing of being suspicious of unearned wisdom.
The self is not just responsible as a synchronic whole, in that pulsating polarity, but also in a diachronic sense. There’s work that’s been undertaken to get to a point where you can be receptive. Yeah, that’s good. Excellent. Yeah, I mean,
John: And also on the other side, if I could just say one thing.
Darius: Sure, sure.
John: From the theological side, God’s agapic love is not that which annihilates that towards which the love is given. It is creative of it, right? And that’s also part of the notion of theosis. So I really would want to challenge her interpretation of the Christian notion of kenosis [00:52:00] very, very strongly.
Darius: Yeah. She may well not advocate this view, so I don’t want to speak unfairly. But one thing one might want to charge her with is an excessive reliance on the two-worlds mythology. So this brings us back to Wynn,
John: Oh, yeah. Very much.
Darius: and Renewing the Senses, right? For Weil, one certainly gets the impression that this world is the one... And one understands it with Weil, because she was in the Spanish Civil War and wanted to fight on the front line, and she had oil burned on her, and then she had to go home, and then she worked in the factories.
And all of this she’s actively bringing upon herself, right? She wants to suffer in order to purge herself and allow God in. There’s a sense there that this is the world of transient corruption and impermanence, and [00:53:00] if only I can purge myself of that, then I will become receptive to, or at one with, the higher realm.
And I think Wynn’s work on this is very meaningful. With Murdoch, one senses that it’s happening here, you know? The spiritual dimension is happening here. Wynn has all these beautiful examples from James, where it’s not as if, after their spiritual transformations, people like Tolstoy think, “Oh, actually I should commit suicide and
await salvation.” It’s like, no: this world, the gestalt, the all-things-shining world, is alive once again, right? That’s what he had lost: the sense of color and vibrancy. And again, it’s what you said: the sacredness of the world is contained even in its smallest morsel. One thinks of William Blake, and seeing heaven in a wild flower,
and all that stuff. And I think Iain [00:54:00] McGilchrist has done really careful work on the relationship between diversity and unity, and how that is also at play here. You know? Right here.
John: I think that’s excellent, because... I’m trying to think of where I want to go with this, because I’m at this optimal point of multiple paths.
I guess the first thing is that I’ve been a staunch critic of the two-worlds mythology, even though I’m a fan of the Axial Revolution and all the legacy religions that came out of it, and how it gave us the notion of transcendence, and wisdom as transcendence, and things like that.
I won’t go into those arguments. However, I do think Nietzsche is right. As the two-worlds mythology ossified, and it strands God as [00:55:00] completely and absurdly separated from the world, that’s a driver of nihilism. Because if this world only exists instrumentally for the upper world, and we come to find that our connection to the upper world is absurd, then of course we’re thrown into nihilism. This world has no value, because its only value was to get us to the upper world, and there is no longer a passage to that, because the upper world has been rendered absurd. I think that’s nihilism.
Now, I would point out, and I’ve argued this elsewhere, that the vertical absurdity has just been displaced in modernity, and I think Heidegger is responding to this. We try to recapture what the vertical dichotomy did with the one and the many, and where normativity comes from, and appearance and reality, and we displace that into an equally absurd dichotomy of the
inner subjective world of value and the outer objective world of fact. And we [00:56:00] know that Murdoch is a deep critic of the fact-value dichotomy, right? As are other people, like William Desmond, who I have had the great good pleasure of having several discussions with. I got to meet one of my heroes, and he lived up to it.
So I think that’s right, but I think both the vertical and the horizontal two-worlds mythologies have to be called into question in a very, very serious way. And I think this is where Ursula Goodenough’s notion of transcendence into comes in,
or Wright’s notion of sensibility transcendence, which is not transcendence to some view from nowhere, but this sense of the opening up, the reciprocal opening of depth, between two people. I think that’s what I’m proposing here, and what Murdoch was perhaps reaching towards. There’s a book called Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent, by, [00:57:00] is it Taliaferro and Evans?
I can’t quite remember. It’s a new book. It’s one of those wonderful little Cambridge Elements books.
Darius: Right. Cool.
John: And I think Murdoch is coming to do, at least implicitly, what people like Goodenough and Wright are doing. We’re trying to give ourselves, I don’t know what to call it, a post-axial grammar, leaving behind the axial grammar of transcendence understood in a two-worlds mythology,
Darius: Mm.
John: vertical or horizontal. Can we recover transcendence in all of its richness, its philosophical, existential, spiritual, even phenomenological richness, without adopting either a vertical or a horizontal dichotomy? I experience and read Murdoch as a precursor, for me, of that project which [00:58:00] I have undertaken.
I’m trying to deconstruct the vertical and the horizontal in a paired fashion, because I think that is what is needed if we’re going to recover the sacredness of the world, such that we love it in a way in which nihilism no longer seems to be a default we will descend to if we don’t keep ourselves distracted and busy.
Darius: Right. Yeah, that’s good. That’s interesting. And of course, this interest in dismantling the dichotomy is not just in the continental tradition. Putnam, you know...
John: Well, Catherine Pickstock, in her book Aspects of Truth, goes through Quine and Putnam, and there’s Case Beer, and all the...
It just keeps happening. And all the work on relevance realization: I’ve argued, you’ve heard me, that relevance is a transjective phenomenon. It’s before, beneath, between, and beyond the subjective and the [00:59:00] objective. I think that dovetails perfectly.
I would argue that, in order to be consistent, Murdoch has to move to that transjective domain, if she is really talking about love in the way we’re talking about it: as something that’s plugging into the volitional necessity of relevance realization itself.
Darius: Right.
Yeah, good. To do some self-promotion, I’ve also tried to push this. One of my earlier papers, in 2024 in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, is an attempt at dismantling the endogenous-exogenous dichotomy in the attentional literature.
John: Oh, yeah.
Darius: That’s from an active inference perspective, but the epigraph at the start is from Simone Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
John: Right.
Darius: And that’s something I really want to hold on to, and it’s interesting given that we’re critiquing her: prayer involves active [01:00:00] orientation on the part of the one praying.
John: Totally.
Darius: And so even something like “pure” exogenous attention, and for those listening I’m putting that in scare quotes, evinces a kind of relevance-realizing orientation on the part of the agent. It makes sense why I’m suddenly attracted to the sound of an alarm going off, right?
It’s not that staggering. And yet, at least in the empirical work, they’re desperate to hold on to this dichotomy, because it allows them to slice nature at its artificial joints, I would say.
John: Yeah. I get to speak as a psychologist, because I’m officially one, and I love psychology and I’m grateful for how it has homed me, so I don’t want this misinterpreted.
But the philosophy of science in psychology is really moribund. Their model of science is a kind of Machian interpretation of Newtonian [01:01:00] physics. It’s really not in proper relationship to all the work being done in biology right now.
Darius: Yeah.
John: Philip Ball’s excellent book How Life Works is a great canvas of all of that work.
The work of Michael Levin, the work of Denis Walsh at the University of Toronto, and all that sort of stuff. And this comes up a lot. There are endless courses, and there should be, by the way, I’m not saying stop doing this, on how we get measurement right and how we set up our experimental design.
And then I’ll ask my students, “Okay, where do you go to do good theoretical psychology? Where do you go to get an education in that?” Because coming up with a really good, clear idea that has been properly placed in relationship to the landscape of other ideas [01:02:00] is a hard, difficult task.
That’s why physics has theoretical physics as well as experimental physics. And something like that is taking shape in biology. And they have no answer. There’s this almost purely Lockean empiricism that I think bedevils psychology.
And I think that’s actually what’s at work in that distinction about attention. Lockean empiricism: a commitment to it being completely from the outside or completely from the inside. You and I are both involved with 4E cog sci, and rejecting that in-out model is one of the core things that 4E cog sci argues for.
Because it’s just not adequate to the data, both the empirical, experimental data and the phenomenological data. It’s not adequate to it at all.
Darius: Right. But I guess I sympathize, [01:03:00] in the sense that holding the dichotomy of subject and object is so easy.
John: Yes, yes.
Darius: And I think here about Charles Taylor and Sources of the Self. It’s built into our, as you would say, cognitive grammar,
John: Cultural cognitive grammar, yeah.
Darius: this Cartesian detachment, this Cartesian split. And it serves us in some sense as a modeling tool. But it’s reifying the model at the cost of misunderstanding the phenomenon.
John: Well, it’s powerful. I’m teaching a fourth-year seminar course on consciousness, and I’m talking about when all these dichotomies came online, and I’m saying, we’re going to criticize this at length.
But I said, “Stop and note,” and here you can hear the Heidegger in me. “Look around you. Look at all the technology. Look at all the empowerment.” Because if we take [01:04:00] meaning and value and everything out, and all we leave in the world is measurement and manipulation, whoa, does that ever orient you and empower you towards technological conquest, right?
And I don’t want to do without all this technology. But like Heidegger says, the enframing, right? It’s insidious. That ontology, that onto-epistemology, just gets woven into us. And this is Desmond’s work, and Taylor uses the same language, and you see it in the mystical traditions.
There are other cultures, other ways, in which there is not this dichotomy. Instead, and this is a term used by both Taylor and Desmond, there’s porosity. And there isn’t truth as correspondence; there’s truth as participation, truth as disclosure, and participating in that disclosure that Heidegger talks about.
Darius: Yeah.
John: So it’s powerful, but we have to remember [01:05:00] that, both cross-culturally and cross-historically, it is aberrant, which means it shouldn’t be given the unquestioned status it’s given, for example, in psychology. Because we should ask: why is it aberrant? Why is it problematic?
And I buy Desmond’s argument that if you separate fact and value, back to Murdoch, you get what he calls the argument for default atheism. Because the external world, the objective world, the real world, has no values. The only values are subjective, and I’m projecting them, but projection is illusion, so meaning and value are an illusion.
And objectively, I’m just a meaningless thing inside a meaningless universe. You get this default argument. Of course, it’s more sophisticated, and he builds it out, but that’s his basic point.
Darius: And Taylor critiques this as well, in
John: Sources of the Self.
Yeah, the buffered self. The buffered self is extremely problematic, because... [01:06:00] just think about this phenomenologically, you know? This is Kearney’s work, and others’, right? It goes back to Merleau-Ponty too. We use touch as our primary metaphor
for a proper relationship to reality. Are you in touch with reality? Are you in contact with it? And there’s a reason for that, right? Because touch is the sense in which, while we’re realizing, we’re always being realized.
It’s inherently porous, by its very nature.
And so the phenomenology, I think, is calling us back: no, porosity is actually our primordial experience of realness.
Darius: Good. It strikes me that part of the issue is holding the tension. And again, I think of McGilchrist, and these metaphors, which don’t come from him, of the bow having to be taut for it to actually
be efficacious, right? It’s [01:07:00] so easy for us to let the slack out and end up in that dichotomy. And for all of the problems with Heidegger, I’m rereading Being and Time for a paper I’m writing, and I could go on for days about Heidegger and Being and Time.
But one of the things I’ve written about, and this is in print, and Heidegger is so central to my PhD in many ways, is that Heidegger is wrestling with that tension. There’s a reason he calls Dasein “Dasein” and not “man,” right? In the earlier works, he doesn’t use the word Dasein.
It comes in, I think, in ‘23, and initially it’s only hyphenated, Da-sein, Being-There. And there’s this constant tension about not wanting to do what he calls vicious subjectivizing. It’s not idealist. It’s not all the projection of Dasein, right? Dasein is at the same time Being-with, and das Man,
the “they,” is a kind of superordinate force, [01:08:00] and yet the fundamental sense of normativity is also a kind of purposive, temporal, projective one. So for me, that tension one sees in Heidegger is in part why he’s so damn difficult. Of course you can talk about Dewey and Dewey’s notion of the situation, but Heidegger, I think, is really wrestling with holding that tension when it comes to the essential question of being,
which is porosity, right? Being is porous. And so this was going to come to a question I wanted to ask about Tanabe, because I don’t know enough about the Kyoto School. I’ve only heard you talk about it, read about it in different places, and listened to other people talk about it.
Particularly Nishitani. If I’m correct, Nishitani has this critique of Nietzsche that he doesn’t go far enough, right?
John: That’s right.
Darius: He doesn’t recognize the productive aspect of nothingness.
John: That’s right. He [01:09:00] doesn’t get to absolute nothingness.
He only stays within a kind of relative nothingness. That’s how Nishitani would put it, yes.
Darius: So how can you square that all is nothing? Murdoch talks a little bit about this: we can’t just throw up our hands and say, “Well, all is vain nothingness,”
John: Yeah.
Darius: but recognize that that’s not a reason for despair, but perhaps a reason for creativity.
And I think you see some of this in people like Deleuze and Simondon and that French tradition. And yet how do we hold on to what we want to say about the importance of... We’ve already spoken in this conversation about the importance of the self, and the self’s reception of alterity, and not doing violence to the other, and not doing violence to the self.
And I know Dan Zahavi is really pushing this view as well: that being we does not mean we are subsumed into the they, and does not mean the they is a projection of us.
John: Exactly.
Darius: How do we hold that tension, if all is nothing?
John: Okay. [01:10:00] So absolute nothingness is different from relative nothingness because, for Nishitani, relative nothingness is still within the subject-object dichotomy, and it hasn’t discovered the porosity.
And the porosity actually gives us what we are seeking, which is participation. And this is the thing I think Heidegger was wrestling with, but he never quite... You know Heidegger perhaps better than I do, though I’ve read Being and Time too. And this is a point that Desmond and other people make, right?
And this is the Platonic point, or the Neoplatonic point. With participation, you replace a correspondence model of knowing with conformity. You are taking on the form, and form doesn’t mean the shape; we use shape as a metaphor. Eidos meant aspect, look.
And [01:11:00] what Plato’s trying to get at is: here are all the aspects, and you can never get all the aspects, yet they’re not cacophonous. Somehow there’s a through-line running through them. Russon talks about musical intelligibility. And somehow when I know the bottle, I have that music in my head as much as it’s in the bottle.
It’s a conformity. It’s a co-instantiation rather than a representation. And Nishitani’s point, and this is Zen too, is that if you push into the great doubt, you follow it all the way down, what you start to doubt is the very subject-object dichotomy that’s making you suffer nihilism. And what happens is you open up, through the porosity, to the possibility of a profound participation.
I take it that this is the argument: that is the affective and existential need that is not being properly met. Nishitani’s definition of religion is the [01:12:00] real self-realization of reality. We actually participate. I would put it this way, and you and I have been playing around with this in our conversations:
it’s when our relevance realization is completely at one, completely in conformity, with the self-realization of reality itself. And for us, this satisfies what I call an onto-normative need. This is what you see in the work of Yaden and others. When people experience the really real, they will change their relationships and their lives, often for the better, by the way, because they want to enhance this participation in realness for its own sake.
And this is what I think Murdoch can mean by why we love the real. We don’t love the real for this or that. We love it the way we love a Thou. We love the real for its own sake, for being real. Just being real. And so I think that realization is actually the alleviation of nihilism, and it moves you from this relative nothingness [01:13:00] to a kind of no-thingness.
Why is no-thingness being used? Because they’re trying to point to something like Desmond’s notion that being is communal. A moment of technicality here for people listening. You can have a substance ontology, Aristotle, and obviously there’s a lot more to Aristotle, so I’m doing a slam-dunk compression here just to make a point.
So give me some charity on this. You’ve got substances that own their accidents, that own their properties, right? Things that in some sense independently exist and can be understood on their own terms, à la Spinoza, and that own their properties. It’s an ownership model, and it comes back to center again in the Scientific Revolution.
But Filler and other people have argued that’s a very problematic model, because you can’t get relations out of substances. Relations are not properties or accidents or acts of substances. They have a non-reducible [01:14:00] existence. And you should think relations are real, if you want to think information is real,
and intelligibility is real, truth is real, meaning is real. And I did this with Filler. I know James, and I said, “James, you’ve got these great arguments that you can’t get relations out of relata. But isn’t there an exactly symmetrical argument that you can’t get relata out of relations?
And isn’t it the relata that actually distinguish one relation from another?” And he went, “Whoa,” he was kind of taken aback. But that’s exactly Desmond’s notion, and he uses community as a metaphor. There are no persons without communities, but there are no communities without persons.
They co-dependently arise. So the relations and the relata emerge out of something more primordial. That’s no-thingness. It’s no kind of thing, and it’s not just a relation. It is kind of the pure, primordial ground of porosity itself. [01:15:00] And that’s why the realization of absolute nothingness ushers us in,
into profound participation, and that is what alleviates the relative nothingness of nihilism. That’s the argument, as I understand it.
Darius: Yeah. Splendid. I’m hearing resonances with James and radical empiricism, and the importance of patients in consciousness,
John: Of course.
Darius: and Husserl and the notion of the co-presence of the other side of an object. But just on Heidegger, I don’t know enough about the actual history here. Nishitani definitely went to study with Heidegger, right?
John: In Germany. So did Tanabe.
Darius: And Tanabe.
John: So you’re right. Nishida is directly influenced by Husserl and by James’s radical empiricism,
Darius: Right.
John: and obviously Tanabe and Nishitani are influenced by Nishida. But Tanabe is deeply influenced by [01:16:00] Heidegger, and through Heidegger, by Kierkegaard.
Nishitani studies with, and is influenced by, Heidegger, but through Heidegger, by Nietzsche. So you get this interesting progression. In Nishida, it’s about consciousness and abstractive intelligibility. In Tanabe, you move into existential meaning, like in Heidegger, right?
And then, almost like in Jean-Luc Marion, you move to givenness, right?
Darius: Yeah.
John: That’s what Nishitani is talking about.
Darius: And Merleau-Ponty and the flesh.
John: Yeah. Totally.
Darius: But Heidegger is interesting here, because I wonder whether there’s an influence here on Tanabe and the Kyoto School more broadly, in the sense that...
The book I would recommend here is Jeff Malpas’s book, which is an amazing book, called Heidegger’s Topology.
John: Oh, yeah.
Darius: It’s from 2006. Malpas has this argument that what Heidegger is really interested in is place, not [01:17:00] space. Heidegger has his critique of Kant’s use of spatiality, but it’s place.
John: Wynn makes a similar argument, by the way.
Darius: Right.
John: He’s got a book called Faith and Place, but go ahead.
Darius: Oh, cool. Awesome. So the argument would be that in Being and Time, Dasein’s ultimate constitution is this threefold temporality, which is the condition of possibility for care, and bish bash bosh.
And then he scraps the project, right? He does the first two divisions, and then doesn’t do Division III, or the second part with its three divisions. And there’s been a lot of work on Heidegger’s temporality. William Blattner has his great book, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, where he thinks Heidegger fails in doing a form of idealism.
And Malpas says, “Well, actually, what happened to Heidegger is that he realized place was more fundamental than time.” The [01:18:00] risk that time posed was, again, that Dasein becomes a kind of vicious subject, that Heidegger falls into a vicious subjectivization. And so the later Heidegger, post-Kehre, or post-Turn, as they talk about it, is one where Dasein takes very much a backseat.
He stops talking about Dasein, and he talks much more in terms of disclosure, aletheia, the unconcealed coming out of the concealed, the Lichtung, the clearing. Dasein plays much more of a participatory role
John: Yes.
Darius: in the disclosure of what he calls the fourfold, right? Which is the earth, the sky, the gods, and the mortals. And I think that’s getting very close to what you were talking about with respect to participation. And that’s also where his critique of technology comes in: that Dasein is exaggerating its role, you know?
We have to let things disclose themselves as they are, and that was, of [01:19:00] course, his account of phenomenology: letting things be seen as they are, from within themselves. So there’s loads here in Heidegger where I think you can trace that history quite nicely. In Being and Time, yes, Dasein is participating, and there’s this story about Dasein’s disclosure of intelligibility, or its contact with intelligibility, and that’s not this Cartesian leaping out of an internal sphere into an external one.
Rather, Dasein is in the world as a unitary phenomenon. But it’s still quite Dasein-centric, compared to the later Heidegger, where these different components of the unconcealed are much more on an equal playing field. And then behind all of that is the concealed, right?
John: Yes.
Darius: The lethe out of which you have aletheia. And I’ve been thinking a little bit about how this is also very resonant with relevance realization, right? The concealed and the unconcealed is, [01:20:00] for me, a beautiful description of the relationship between relevance and irrelevance.
They only make sense in a symbiotic relationship. Something is only relevant insofar as you are, as you would put it, intelligently ignoring something else. So there’s a whole strand there.
John: No, that’s great. I want to pick up on that. I really want to reverberate and resonate with that.
And since we’re mentioning resonance: Hartmut Rosa says resonance requires both self-power and other power, the uncontrollability of the world. So that’s another
Darius: Yeah.
John: connection. But the connection I want to go to first is Wynn, and then back to Nishida. Wynn has got Faith and Place, and he makes the argument throughout that place is another kind of thing we have a personal relationship to, even though place is not a person.
We give places proper names, we bind our identity to them, we have attachment relationships to them. We are homesick, which is an attachment relationship. And he says, “Look, this is a good example of how something can be personal without being a [01:21:00] substance.” And then he makes the bold move. He says, “I want to propose that we should use place, rather than thing, as a metaphor or symbol for God or the sacred.”
And then there’s the way I think I can amplify that. Wynn doesn’t do this, but I’d like to know what he thinks. I’m trying to get Wynn on my channel, so hopefully I’ll be able to ask him directly.
Darius: That would be awesome.
John: Yeah. So Nishida’s central notion is basho, which means place.
It’s the place where intelligibility takes place, and it is a no-thing. Carter, in his The Nothingness Beyond God, gives a great example. You have the intelligibility of the color system. You have all of these differences and identities, all swarming around, and you can participate in that in relevance realization.
But then he says: is that intelligibility itself a color? [01:22:00] No, it’s not. So with respect to color, it is a no-thing. And then what you do is keep opening up the place in which intelligibility takes place. And then you have the place of no-thingness.
This is basho. This is Nishida’s summative idea of how we understand intelligibility, sacredness, God, reality: the basho, the place of intelligibility. Of course, he doesn’t mean spatiotemporal place; he means the way color takes place within the basho of the color system, right?
And so place is very central to the Kyoto School all the way through, because of Nishida’s notion of basho.
Darius: Right. And it also makes me think of “being is not a being.”
John: Oh, of course. Totally.
Darius: [01:23:00] This idea... That is the question, and Heidegger never comes around to answering it, right? Answering the question of the meaning of being. But one thing he’s very concrete on is that being is neither a being nor some hidden substance that emanates through all beings.
John: Nor the abstract property shared by all beings.
Darius: Or the abstract property, and so on and so forth.
He does the negative, apophatic cutting away, and then never actually tells us what it is in the end. But I think it gets close to that thing of, well, it is no-thing, and that’s okay.
John: And you said, as we’re moving towards the end, and I think we should start doing that,
we’d make it a little bit more personal. So here’s a personal connection for me. I’m taking this notion of place, and Wynn does talk about it in Faith and Place and elsewhere. As you know, I’m doing a pilgrimage right now, the Philosophical Silk Road, in which I [01:24:00] go from place to place, in this profound sense of place we’re talking about here.
That’s how pilgrimage is different from tourism. In tourism, you go to a space and you consume it, and then you go back home. In pilgrimage, I go to a place and I have a personal relationship with it. I am vulnerable to it, and I make myself available to it appealing to me, so I can fall in love with it.
And what that gives me is what Taylor’s talking about, right? If you’re trying to argue somebody out of a paradigm, you can’t do it within the paradigm. You have to move them to a different place. That’s what he often does. He moves you to a different place.
He calls it an ad hominem argument, which is a very bad naming. It’s one of the most infelicitous namings in the history of philosophy, because everybody jumps to the wrong conclusion. So I call it a metanoetic passage. You go to a different place, you get different glasses, you know?
And you do the recovery, the [01:25:00] T.S. Eliot or Tolkien recovery. I can see how I was biased and limited, and that allows me to start to internalize a credible perspective other than my automatic one, like we were talking about earlier. That’s pilgrimage. And what’s really interesting is the word theoria. We get our word theory from it, and many people know that theoria doesn’t really mean what we mean by theorizing.
It means something more noetic, more perspectival. But Nightingale and Ward have argued that’s right, but the deepest, ancestral meaning of theoria is pilgrimage. It’s used for pilgrimage. That this is the deepest way in which we can come to know things, and know things at their depth:
that we can go on pilgrimage. We can commit ourselves to falling in love in a highly personal way, undergoing that transformation, reflecting, looking up to the place in an important way, and then going [01:26:00] on and looking back, and trying to find a through-line, and letting that whole through-line, that eidos of all these places, come alive and start to call to you.
And so this is how a lot of this work is being translated into something like a meta-practice for me: how you take an ecology of practices and put it into a theoria, in order to afford a more profound transformation, and hopefully a better ability to orient to the way sacredness is trying to be born in the world, past the constraints of modernity or even postmodernity.
So you wanted a personal connection. That is a personal connection for me.
Darius: Awesome. Just to resonate again with that, the one thing I would add is that I love the invocation of Eliot, and the Little Gidding bit where [01:27:00] he talks about not ceasing from exploration,
but returning to the place and knowing it as if for the first time, right? That might be a butchering, but what I think is important not to lose there is the sense of returning. And I know you talk about this with respect to Plato, and recovery, and remembrance.
John: Yeah.
Darius: And that’s not to say we’ve made no progress. That’s why the image of the spiral is useful here. And I think McGilchrist, again, is useful here; he talks about this spiraling. And of course this is in Orpheus and Dante.
I could go on for hours about Dante, so don’t get me started. Dante’s amazing on all of that.
John: Oh my gosh, yeah. Don’t get me started on the reciprocal narrowing and the reciprocal opening... Oh my god.
Darius: Right.
Well, I guess, a personal reflection on my part, and Dante will play a role in this. In many ways, speaking with you feels like this kind of recollection, because [01:28:00] it’s probably very evident to the listener that you have played an extremely central role in my intellectual formation.
Everything I say is Vervaekean, which is awesome. Again, it’s a volitional necessity that I’m quite willing to endorse. And it’s not just you, it’s everyone...
John: I do want to interject. Darius is quite capable of criticizing, and frequently will criticize, arguments and points I make.
Darius: I will, yeah.
Well, we should say, actually, that probably the text I’m happiest about having published, or most proud of, is the critique of active inference and its capacity to resolve the frame problem, and that does involve a critique of your paper with Mark and Brett.
So yes, I’m not just an acolyte, just to make that clear. And hopefully that’s coming out in texts where I’m becoming far more critical than I thought I had the capacity to be, and I think that might just be courage. But of course, it all comes from a place of love and respect.
John: Yes.
Darius: But on a [01:29:00] personal level, I don’t think I’ve told this story before. I’ve told you this story, but I haven’t told it publicly. I was very, very lucky that I studied philosophy at school. In the UK, it’s quite rare to study philosophy at school.
We have A-levels, and philosophy is a kind of rarefied one, but I was very lucky to be able to do it, and it was awesome. Now that I’m teaching philosophy to undergrads, I kind of wish they had more of what I had: classes with three or four people, with extremely passionate teachers, reading the texts, reading Kuhn, reading Feyerabend, reading Descartes, reading Berkeley,
and really getting down to earth. And I loved philosophy, I really loved it. And I wanted to go to Oxford. If this is all too self-referential, let me know, but it’s an interesting story.
John: No, no, please, please.
Darius: I wanted to go to Oxford, and they don’t do a pure philosophy course.
Cambridge does, but Oxford doesn’t. So I thought, “Well, I did a lot of Latin at [01:30:00] school, so let me do an ab initio language.” I wanted to do Italian, because I really liked Virgil and I wanted to read Dante. So I applied for Philosophy and Italian, and I went into my philosophy exam, and two things happened.
One is that I just choked, which is interesting now that I work on flow, since it’s the opposite of choking in many ways. And also, it was a style of philosophy I wasn’t used to. It was very analytic. Transitivity relationships, I remember, was the test.
And it wasn’t in that spirit of open curiosity. It was very much: if you make a mistake, you’re out, you know?
John: Yeah.
Darius: And it just freaked me out. Then I went to my Italian interview, and that went really well, and we actually spoke a lot about philosophy. Nicola Gardini, who won’t be watching this, a professor of Italian at Oxford, is another hero, and he was my tutor.
Anyway, I went to Oxford. They didn’t offer me philosophy, but they offered me linguistics, and I did Italian and linguistics. Then I had some mental health troubles, and off the back of that I did a [01:31:00] master’s in psychology. And then I was really very unclear about what to do with my life. And all this time, from Oxford on, it wasn’t just you; it was people like McGilchrist and Jordan Peterson and others I was watching and paying attention to, listening to their philosophy lectures.
And I didn’t know what to do with my life. And I remember very much being on the train to Edinburgh. I probably hadn’t watched any of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis for a couple of years, and I just put it on. The train from London to Edinburgh is four years... four hours, not four years.
Feels like it. And I watched four of the lectures and I went, “That’s what I want to do.”
John: Ah.
Darius: And I was very lucky, having not actually studied philosophy as an undergrad or master’s student, although at Oxford they were very generous with what we could look at, to now be doing a philosophy PhD. And I get to speak to you.
In many ways, you were a conduit to living this life, which is extremely fulfilling and [01:32:00] nourishing. So it is a kind of return in many ways, as we were talking about, but seeing things from the spiraled ascent. For me, it’s totally remarkable and a kind of dream come true that I get to work with you.
So thank you again. And that’s not just from me. I know plenty of people, even in this office, which is currently empty, who admire your work, and admire you and your intellectual spirit and curiosity and openness and supervision and all of this. So yeah, it’s a massive thank you from me, really.
John: Well, I had heard this story before, and when you first told it to me it touched me very deeply. It still touches me very deeply.
That’s what I most want to do in terms of my vocation. I want to do what I seem to have helped do for you. I want to afford you coming into a [01:33:00] philosophical life, which doesn’t necessarily mean academic philosophy. It does for you. And this is where I’m influenced by Pierre Hadot.
Everybody is in some sense called to a philosophical life, because we are all beset by self-deception, by vice, and we need to cultivate wisdom and virtue, and we need to interact in dialogical I-Thou relationships and all that sort of thing. And in that sense, we need to be lovers of wisdom.
This is my allegiance to that guy right there, Socrates. To the degree that my work can call people to philia sophia, right? The community, the fellowship, the love of wisdom that people get called into, the kind of partnerships you’re talking about, the fellowship and shared orientation towards the cultivation of wisdom. If I do that, that’s what makes me [01:34:00] feel that I’m living as I am called to live.
And that is what I most want to do. So you thanked me, but I’m telling you as sincerely as I possibly can: I’m very grateful for the way hearing that from you affords me a deep sense of my life, at least my vocational life, being a meaningful life. Because that’s the measure by which I measure whether it is meaningful or not.
So I want to thank you for that. More and more, I try to hone and craft my professional work, whether it’s dialogical or theoretical or practice, to be the person who can do that. Many people come up to me and say things like, “You know, I disagree with a lot of your ideas, but your language and your way of thinking and your manner have been so helpful to me.”
And I’m very happy [01:35:00] with that. I’m really very happy with that. So thank you for sharing that. It means a lot to me. It makes a difference for me. It’s not the case now. You know this: there’s now a lot of professional interest in my work, and a lot of public interest in my work.
But that’s only since about 2018, so the last eight years or so. Before that, it was a very lonely kind of existence for me,
Darius: Mm.
John: wrestling with this. I was working on the meaning crisis and trying to do this kind of work with my students, and I was helping them.
And, God love them, many of them have written to me, because people are hearing that I’m retiring from the university, and they want to thank me for stuff from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. But the fact that now it seems I’ve been [01:36:00] gifted, blessed, with the opportunity of affording the call to a philosophical way of life to a much greater number of people, and I get to hear...
Darius, you’re going to be a superstar. The quality of your work...
Darius: Well, thank you.
John: No, I mean it. I’ve been teaching a long time. I’ve had something like 30,000 students. There are certain students I recognize.
Mark is another one. I’ve told Mark, Mark Miller, he’s going to be a superstar. And the fact that my work can be taken up, not only by a lot of people, and I’m very grateful for this too, and their lives are getting better, but that my work might help lift people like you into your proper calling, which I think is going to be a series of masterpieces.
Of course, I just find that so rich and meaningful [01:37:00] and valuable. And I think I’m going to have at least five or six more productive years, but I’m starting to face the Galadriel moment. At some point I’m going to have to fade and go into the West.
So if you’ll allow me, and I hope this isn’t condescending, it’s not intended to be: if I can Socratically help to give birth to people like you, that is so, so enriching for me.
Darius: It’s not condescending at all. And I think you have more than five or six years in you, but that’s your call.
But I think the nourishing of that community, where we are all oriented towards something beyond us, and, as Murdoch, who we started with, talks about, “there is always more than this,” you know? That constant progress, [01:38:00] the pilgrim’s progress,
is just a joy and fun and a complete pleasure. So we should wrap up, because I’ve got, unfortunately... well, not unfortunately. I have undergraduate students to teach, and I will try to facilitate a love of wisdom in them.
Thank you so much, John, and Andrea as well, for hosting this. I know we’re going to do this kind of partnership. Total pleasure on my part.
John: Well, it’s been an honor on my part, Darius. Every time we’re together and get into what I call dialogos, mutually transformative dialogue,
Darius: Absolutely.
John: I find it deeply enriching, maturing. I’m reading Middlemarch right now, by George Eliot. And the reason I’m reading it is that I’ve read so many reviews of it; many people say it’s the best English novel ever written and all this sort of stuff, [01:39:00] and it is incredibly well written.
And several times the review said, “Read Middlemarch; it will make you a better person.” And I think these moments of dialogos are also like that. They make us better people in a really profound way. So I thank you for that.
On the imaginal and its relationship to reality: JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and William Blake, “Double Vision”
On panpsychism: Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error, Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
On trickster pedagogy and weirding the ordinary: Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” and Viktor Shklovsky on “defamiliarization
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.” You can follow her work on Instagram (at) cosmogyny
Henry Kramer is a scholar, educator, and artist exploring wonder, imagination, and our relationship with the more-than-human world. [Name] teaches in the Program in Religion at CUNY Hunter and is Academic Dean of the Strother School of Radical Attention, where their Radical Imagination course was featured on the New York Times’ Hard Fork. Henry is also a ritual and immersive theater designer, songwriter, storyteller, and (most recently) a bit of a puppeteer.
“When people say the arc of the universe is towards justice, I laugh so hard. I’m like, ‘Justice for who? For us? For me? For you?’ If anything, the arc of the universe is towards crabs, because things tend to co-evolve into the shape of crabs.” — Sophie, 00:35
“We are new, and we are misbehaving. I think it’s important for us to begin to really open to not even holding competing ideas, but holding the ‘I don’t know, and I may never know.’” — Sophie, 00:31
“Go outside and start imitating the heron, the oak tree, the salamander. The exercise will always fail, but the empathy muscle it strengthens is absolutely crucial.” — Sophie, 00:44
“Conspiracism is like doubling down on rationalism, weirdly enough. Someone’s in charge, someone’s doing this — rather than pivoting towards the mystery and saying, ‘Wow, things are a lot weirder and stranger, and I do not yet have a framework robust enough to explain this.’” — Sophie, 00:26
“The injunction against anthropomorphizing is secretly a way of saying, ‘Don’t realize that they’re alive and have agency and thoughts,’ so that we can keep killing them and keep using them.” — Sophie, 00:46
“Probably the best way of introducing myself is as a lover. I follow the breadcrumbs of my love, and I end up in extraordinary places making new connections.” — Sophie, 00:06
“A tree stops being a strange other that we encounter full-bodily, and instead becomes the idea of a tree that we think can contain that tree totally. It becomes a locked box that keeps us from wonder, real relationship, openness.” — Henry, 00:22
“We’re all addicts of this culture, which is to utilize, to turn into a tool, to turn into calories. So I actually love poisonous mushrooms and plants, because they interrupt utility.” — Sophie, 00:50
“We can read books, but we can’t read the emotional, physical state, the weather patterns of the beings around us.” — Sophie, 00:45
“Machines are things we create, in a completely separate genealogy from the creatures we are all kin with. So it seems very bizarre to choose the machine over the person if you’re going to decide between those two.” — Henry, 00:47
“We should actually approach the world more like a really hard sci-fi book: ‘Oh, I’m going to have to work really hard to understand this, and pay attention to the magic systems.’” — Sophie, 00:57
“We’re using consciousness to study consciousness. It’s going to slip out of our grasp every time. For me, that’s beautiful. That’s the trickster pedagogy.” — Sophie, 01:04
“The illusion of selfhood is just that: a brief, temporary fiction” (Sophie, 00:09)
“I want to make myself useless to AI, illegible” (Sophie, 00:51) .
Cold open and introduction
Andrea’s opening intro is left out; the transcript starts with the Sophie clip that opens the episode. For Andrea’s intro, see the original audio above or on any podcast platform.
Sophie: You know, when people say the arc of the universe is towards justice, I laugh so hard. I’m like, “Justice for who? For us? For me? For you?” If anything, the arc of the universe is towards crabs, because things tend to co-evolve into the shape of crabs. And we, unlike horseshoe crabs or bdelloid rotifers, don’t actually have a good track record of adapting to extinction-event collapses or to shifting climatological pressures. We are new, and we are misbehaving. I think it’s important for us to begin to really open to not even holding competing ideas, but holding the “I don’t know, and I may never know.”
Henry: Hello, and welcome. I’m very pleased to introduce this episode with Sophie Strand. Sophie is a very dear friend of mine and an extraordinary, accomplished eco-feminist writer, poet, educator and world-weaver who writes both fiction and nonfiction.
Her books are The Flowering Wand, on rewilding masculinity through mythopoesis; The Madonna Secret, a retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth with a more earthy, animistic bent; and The Body Is a Doorway, a memoir about her experience with chronic illness. It’s about finding an earth-based spirituality, a way of thinking about her own illness, a way of opening the body and mind to the more-than-human world. I hesitate to say healing, but something necessary in the crisis she was experiencing.
I always appreciate talking to Sophie about these topics because of her urgency in getting these thoughts, stories and ideas out there — she’s written about this too. I appreciate that urgency in philosophy, because philosophy can feel disconnected from the real world. If ideas can’t be applied to our lives and can’t help us navigate those lives, if they’re not restorative in some sense of our relationship with truth or with each other, then I wonder how truly rich those ideas are. If they can’t be embodied or enacted, then what are we even talking about? What are we even doing? That’s never an issue with Sophie. With Sophie, it’s always grounded, always real, always important, always urgent.
Our conversation went a number of different ways. We talked about shape-shifting and imaginal empathy, and the importance of training the muscle of imagining what it is like to be other beings. We talked about consciousness and panpsychism, and our feelings about the rise of panpsychism in academia lately. We talked a little about conspiracy theories, and how tempting it is to be literalist and dogmatic in a time of ambiguity and confusion, when the way we think the world should be isn’t the way it actually is. And we talked about language: the labels and assumptions we make about the world, and how we mistake the world for our ideas about it and our ways of describing it.
The conversation ranged far and wide and could have gone, I’m sure, much further and wider. I hope you enjoy it. With that, here is the conversation between myself and Sophie Strand.
The conversation.
Introductions (00:06)
Henry: Hey, Sophie. Welcome. It’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming on Love and Philosophy.
Sophie: My two favorite things. Thank you so much.
Henry: Do you want to share a little about your work generally, and how you see your project in the world? I’m sure it will relate to both love and philosophy, and to the show’s other theme, which is beyond dichotomy —
Sophie: There we go. Perfect.
Henry: — which always comes up in our conversations, too.
Sophie: It would be very easy to introduce myself as a writer. I write books, stories, fiction and nonfiction. I always call myself genre-promiscuous. But probably the best way of introducing myself is as a lover. I follow my love, the breadcrumbs of my love, and I end up in extraordinary places making new connections. I’d say I’m a lover more than I am an expert or a writer or anything. My projects are informed by spirituality, ecology, the history of religion and civilization, and love and eros. What about you, Henry? How would you capture yourself today? A man of very many hats.
Henry: Good question. I think today I’m putting on the hat of a deep interest in consciousness and mind. I think you and I share this: the idea that my mind is locked inside my head as an individual thing has always felt insufficient to my experience of a world that is wildly interactive with both my body and my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot this morning about some of what we’re going to talk about — the distinction between inside and outside, and different ways of conceptualizing mind.
If I relate that to what I’ve been doing lately, it would be the larger project of re-enchantment: thinking about the deep inner world — myth, story, folklore, archetypes, dreams, images — and how it relates to the outer world. How the inner ecology is connected to, and maybe not so distinct from, the outer ecology. That’s something important to me that I’m interested to explore today.
Symbiosis and the self (00:09)
Sophie: Beautiful. I love that: the inner and the outer as photo negatives of each other. It’s something I’m thinking about a lot. One of the themes I’ll be thinking with my whole life is symbiosis. I just read a wonderful new nonfiction book called Togetherness, a history of evolution and symbiosis. You walk away from it realizing that the illusion of selfhood is just that: a brief, temporary fiction. It’s a reproductive technology, perhaps, but it collapses so quickly. We are quorum-sensing bacterial cells. We have a legacy of botched cannibalism, prokaryotes trying to eat each other. Most beings are weird, incomplete mergers of many different species. That can be a kind of body horror, but it can also be a way of really expanding past this idea that we are rugged individuals who do or think anything alone.
Henry: That reminds me of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation —
Sophie: Yeah.
Henry: — and how easy it is to read a book like that as horrific. Nature, or Area X, breaks apart identity and meaning, turns us into other creatures and spreads us out over the landscape. It’s horrific if you come at it with the mindset that there’s a candle inside my skull that is me, and if it goes out, I’m no longer me. But when you approach it through the lens of “I am so many,” or “what is me,” with the self as something multiplicitous and shared, then that possession by the many doesn’t feel as scary. Maybe it still feels a little scary.
I’m curious — and this is probably a big question without a set answer for either of us — how would you articulate your current working feeling about what mind is, or what consciousness is?
What is mind? (00:11)
Sophie: Such a good question. I’d say I live in the question and have no certainty. I’ve been very interested in a bunch of recent books, especially Michael Pollan’s most recent one, about different theories of consciousness. I do believe we have conflated brain and body with mind. For me, mind is something I inhabit, something I walk into with many other beings. It isn’t contained or possessed by my singular soma. It’s the ecotone where many different species are thinking together.
I’m also compelled by the paradigm that says our brain is like a radio that picks up a signal. That’s why things can glitch in and out, why people sometimes have dreams that seem to correspond. It explains a lot of the glitchiness our mechanistic paradigms can’t. I’ve had experiences in my own life that don’t seem to map onto the idea of my brain being in my head and in my body.
I also look at Indigenous traditions, and the history of folklore and myth across the world. I think of Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind —
Henry: Mm-hmm.
Sophie: — a pantheistic mind, where we heard voices in our heads and the gods spoke to us; where people regularly report hearing the plants talk to them, hearing ancestors talk to them. These are not aberrant experiences. It’s only in recent history that we’ve narrowed our epistemological frame to a Euro-patriarchal paradigm, where we only know things when we can measure and quantify them, and have disregarded most of our ways of knowing. All those other ways of knowing are deeply porous and intra-dependent, to borrow a term from feminist quantum physicist Karen Barad. Mind doesn’t belong to beings; it emerges when beings interact, in the ecotone, the overlap of beings coming together. How would you answer it today?
Henry: Very similarly. Let me think on that a little. As you were speaking, I was pulling up your wonderful essay “Supercellular” in Emergence Magazine. You quote Evan Thompson there, writing about our misconceptions of mind: “Part of the problem, however, comes from thinking of the mind or meaning as being generated in the head. That’s like thinking that flight is inside the wings of a bird.”
That’s a lot of what you were just sharing: mind more as process than as noun. Maybe the noun could even be the brain, but the process happens with the brain; it isn’t identical to it. A process always takes in the stuff around it, like wind. Wind blowing through moves everything it touches but isn’t any of those things. It might take the shape of a whirlwind of leaves, and you think, “Oh, that’s the leaves,” but really it’s the wind.
Sophie: The movement, yeah.
Henry: You mentioned the receiver idea too, which reminds me of Huxley and his notion of Mind at Large. I’m fascinated by all these ideas of mind as something more expansive, breaking open the dualism of the inner and outer worlds a little. So how do you think about the imaginal world — story, myth, archetypes, gods — in relation to this breaking open of inside versus outside? Those are often framed as psychological concepts, deep in the unconscious but still inner. Once we talk about mind as a collaborative process with the world, maybe those things exist in a less discernible, less categorical relationship to inner and outer.
Other worlds and the imaginal (00:16)
Sophie: I have a bunch of different feelings, and they all run concurrently. One brings in one of my heroes and secular saints, Tolkien. By the end of his life, Tolkien would basically say that Middle-earth existed — that he didn’t make it up, he went and got it. Tolkien was also skilled at giving multiple answers that were often in complete disagreement. But from spending a long time with his work and his letters, I do get a sense that he believed in some overlapping multiverse, some other world.
I’m always fascinated that people who take psychedelics, DMT in particular, seem to go to the same place and interact with the same paradigms and archetypes. When people meet each other in dreams, there’s a sense of other wheres. Are they here at the same time? I’m also fascinated by how we interpret these things through our cultural signposts and the vocabulary of our belief sphere, differently in different times and places. We have a preponderance of UFO sightings and alien encounters, but if you look at the actual descriptions, they’re very similar to people describing angels, ancestors, fairy encounters and Marian apparitions elsewhere.
So for me, we experience rips in reality — ontological ruptures in our idea of how being comes to pass, of what is possible — on a pretty regular basis. And I think it takes a lot of work to pretend these things aren’t happening, things that totally destabilize our sense of mechanistic predictability, of a Newtonian universe.
Henry: Mm-hmm.
Sophie: It’s interesting to think about a multiverse, and about the fact that we have a very narrow umwelt, a narrow sensory-perceptual space, to borrow a term from Jakob von Uexküll. We think we’re experiencing reality, but often it’s our sensory output of a prediction of what reality is, based on a pretty narrow ability to read our environment. So we can think of moments of widening psychedelic hallucination, people who hear voices, people who see visions, as actually having access to more of reality.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: I think our bounded mind is an organismic survival mechanism, but not the full picture. Very often that process of mind glitches; things rupture our predictive processing and get in. We see angels. Time seems to reflux from the future into the present, like Libet’s delay, in experiments where people anticipated randomized electroshocks before they had even been programmed to happen.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: Then of course the third feeling is the idea of archetypes and myth you’re talking about, and evolution. What is the purposiveness of our hand? How do we come to be? Why are there co-evolved spirals that happen again and again? Where do these patterns come from? I’ve always been intrigued by morphic resonance and Rupert Sheldrake’s idea that there are patterns and motifs that exist well beyond matter. Some of those patterns are thoughts and ideas, and the more they happen, the more likely they are to pull matter, and us, into their shape. So I’m compelled by the idea of certain thoughts, ideas and archetypes as fields rather than things.
Henry: Yeah. William Blake, who saw many angels —
Sophie: Yeah.
Henry: — what you were saying reminded me of his lines, “For double the vision my Eyes do see, / And a double vision is always with me.” And elsewhere he says, “May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!”
Newton’s sleep (00:21)
Sophie: Newton’s sleep, yeah. We’re all in Newton’s sleep to some degree. I think it’s very interesting that we consider the way we relate these days as normal, when actually it seems to require a great amount of effort, create a lot of mental and physical dysfunction, and not be our normative consciousness. If we lived as our bodies evolved to live — in physical contact with leaves, animals, babies, other beings, living outside, living seasonally — we might have brains that we would pathologize today.
Henry: Yeah. I’m also struck by what you’re saying about the Newtonian, mechanistic idea of the body or brain. It reminds me of Merleau-Ponty on the anatomical body: it’s the idea of the body, but it isn’t the body at all. It’s not the phenomenological body, the body as we move through the world. It’s not the weirdness of the world and our relationship to it, which constantly defies description. In fact, description used to be a kind of phrase for death: to describe something, as on a gravestone, is to kill it.
Sophie: That’s amazing.
Henry: This makes me think about language and labels — the equivalent of the anatomical body for everything in the world. The labels we put on things so we can stop seeing them. A tree stops being a strange other that we encounter full-bodily, and instead becomes the idea of a tree, which we think can contain that tree totally. It becomes a locked box that keeps us from wonder, real relationship, openness.
I imagine some of what we’re discussing — mind as a process, something between self and world, blurring the inner/outer boundary — could be tough for a lot of people. We’re so used to imagining the mind locked in a very specific place, between the eyes, maybe two inches back. But I wonder how much of that difficulty is less “that’s not my experience; my experience is that I’m locked in my head,” and more the ideas, labels and belief claims that suffuse the way we speak about mind. They make us forget, in a kind of amnesia at every moment, how weird our experience always is. At every moment we encounter a vastly strange, ambiguous, shape-shifting field of experience in which inner and outer aren’t clearly delineated. But we’re so used to conceptualizing them as delineated that we stop paying attention to our own experience.
Conspiracism and the strangeness (00:24)
Sophie: Absolutely. That’s an incredibly good point, Henry, especially because I think what we’re seeing in the past year or so is that the deluge of information, unpredictability, chaos, competing worldviews and paradigms, competing studies, not knowing what you can trust, is destabilizing people’s ability to keep this Newtonian sleep tranquil. The amount of daily ontological rupture a normal person experiences is pretty high. It takes an extraordinary amount of physical and emotional effort to keep that at bay, and we’re seeing people really crack and burn out because they can’t deny the strangeness.
I think a lot of conspiracism is symptomatic of this. I forget who the theorist was — it was on the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity podcast —
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: — a great theorist talking about how conspiracism is actually the best available way to describe the amount of information we have today, and that we have no paradigms that can properly explain the connections in this deluge. So the impulse to create a coherent narrative, to stabilize things, to create meaning, even though it creates crazy stories, is very understandable. We don’t have a better way of handling this onslaught of information that has nothing to do with our real bodies and our real lives, but decides who lives and dies. It’s very dissonant and destabilizing.
So for me, conspiracism is like doubling down on rationalism, weirdly enough. It says: this can make sense, there is cause and effect, someone’s in charge, someone’s doing this. Rather than pivoting towards the mystery and saying, “Wow, things are a lot weirder and stranger, and I do not yet have a framework robust enough to explain this.”
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: People are extremely anxious and upset right now because, day to day, things are happening. A great example is the recent flooding in Nepal. On one hand it was predictable, given how the few techno-overlords in charge are doing nothing to halt our ecocidal climatological disruption. Is it predictable as an off-ramp effect of that? Yes. But it also isn’t predictable, and it ruptures our sense of how things happen and are supposed to happen. So you see people trying to make sense of it, back-forming. And I think we’ll see more and more people waking up the less able they are to maintain a tranquil predictive processing.
Henry: What you’re saying about conspiracy reminds me of how, in my religious studies classes, we often talk about what idolatry really is, if you look at the theology of it. It’s often used as a political tool to dismiss other people’s faiths. But it’s also used in an interesting way, a little like the Buddhist idiom, “Don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon”: don’t confuse the thing you use to gesture with what you’re gesturing at.
When you say conspiracy is doubling down on rationalism: all these mysterious things are happening, there’s an invitation, a breaking open of the world as we know it, expect it, or think it ought to be. Our idea of the world has been put in a box and closed. When that’s cracked open, it’s almost like we grab everything to stuff it back in the box and make the box fit. We take symbols for what they symbolize. We take something ambiguous — disconnection from the earth or ourselves, these climatological disasters, feelings of alienation — and come up with a literalist, almost fundamentalist story: this must be the work of lizard people. Because the felt experience is so real. In the body it’s real and incredibly valid. It’s when it gets translated into the language of the anatomical body, into labels, the stickers we stick on things, that we start getting conspiratorial.
So how do you think we can move through with a little negative capability, a little mystery, into an unknown space — a kind of cultural underworld, where things are getting way messier and our sense of how things ought to be is dissolving — without holding tight to symbols of order, whether conspiracy or hyper-rationalism?
Species humility and the long story (00:30)
Sophie: Henry, isn’t that the question? I feel like that’s what you and I are talking about all the time. If I had a quippy answer, I’d give you one. I have some feelings about it. How do we stay with negative capability? Or, to summon F. Scott Fitzgerald, can we hold two opposing ideas in our head at the same time without letting them drive us insane? The issue right now is that it’s not two opposing ideas; it’s four million on your phone, scrolling every day. So it’s kind of impossible.
I think we need species humility right now. That’s what I want to give to other people. We are a relatively juvenile species on this earth, and unlike horseshoe crabs or bdelloid rotifers, we don’t have a good track record of adapting to extinction-event collapses or shifting climatological pressures. We are new, and we are misbehaving. It’s important for us to begin to open to not even holding competing ideas, but holding the “I don’t know, and I may never know.”
One way we can hold this is by shifting the way we tell stories about a life. There’s a recent book by one of my favorite climate writers, fiction and nonfiction, Amitav Ghosh, called Ghost-Eye. It’s a novel set in India and the Sundarbans, very much about paradigms of reincarnation, and about how impossible it is to think about climate change, or anything, when you’re stuck within a single species arc, a single life. We need to think with deep time, deep ecology, and material reincarnation: our very cells will die, but our material will be recycled into other beings. And especially if mind or spirit or pneuma, whatever it is, isn’t contained in me, maybe it will be poured back into the soup of becoming and scooped up into a different shape. Maybe I will continue on.
One of my favorite pieces of science, now getting more widely recognized, is that caterpillars retain their memories through the cocoon even though their brains dissolve. We have no idea how. They can remember bad scents associated with — well, torture, weird science experiments that I hate. “Let’s torture this animal to prove something” is my least favorite thing. But it has shown that butterflies, even though they effectively liquefy and die in the cocoon, still remember.
I think we’ve discounted experiences of reincarnation. But all across the world, so many traditions that showed they know how to live sustainably in a place without degrading it for thousands of years —
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: — so they’re doing something right — have a sense of reincarnation. You’d better be really nice to that kid or that animal, because it could be your grandfather reincarnated. Or: you may not get everything you want in this life, but you have a lot more lives, so you have to keep working at it. So one paradigm that feels really important to gift people is the long story, as my mom calls it — she’s written about this in her own work — the long story of evolution, deep time and reincarnation.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: In a single meteor-streak life we will never see or understand everything. The impulse to explain, label and identify everything is very understandable: that’s your organism trying to protect itself, reading its environment for safety. So we can understand conspiracism and this doubling down as a deeply biologically understandable impulse, and then also say, “I’m woven into a biospheric becoming that has included several massive extinction events.” Whatever paradigm is happening well exceeds my value dualisms.
When people say the arc of the universe is towards justice, I laugh so hard. I’m like, “Justice for who? For us? For me? For you?” If anything, the arc of the universe is towards crabs, because things tend to co-evolve into the shape of crabs. That’s what I like to say in counseling.
Henry: Carcinization, right?
Sophie: Carcinization, yeah.
Teaching through disorientation (00:35)
Sophie: Okay, Henry, I have a question for you. You work with students at the School of Radical Attention and at Hunter day to day, so you come up against people who are really open to this and people who are really closed to it. How do you interrupt that? How do you work with it?
Henry: I’ll share this briefly, and then I have things I want to respond to in what you said. I love disorientation as a teaching tactic. Trickster pedagogy is one of my favorite things.
Sophie: Absolutely.
Henry: Here’s one way I often start class, especially when I teach Indigenous religions, or myth and ritual, or any course where students need to understand their own cultural assumptions and not assume they’re the default. There’s a wonderful piece by Horace Miner called “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” It was written in 1957, published in American Anthropologist, and it’s a parody of how anthropologists talk about Indigenous cultures. Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards. It describes going to the therapist, the dentist, the hospital, bathrooms and bedrooms — things ordinary to us — in a way that’s completely unrecognizable, because it’s told from a distant anthropological stance that wants to see superstition and dismiss these practices as too bizarre.
Students read it and don’t recognize that it’s about themselves. They think it’s about some bizarre culture we’re going to study. Pulling the rug out works especially well with students who come in a little closed off, taking things at face value and not questioning their prior assumptions. I love that piece as a tool for disorienting students and weirding the ordinary, so they can approach animism, or different ideas of mind or self, with more humility.
I’m glad you brought up humility. What I believe can be described as so bizarre, contextual and fringe that I shouldn’t dismiss an idea out of hand just because it feels strange or ridiculous to me. I can explore it, especially from the position Miner’s narrator doesn’t take: from the inside. What is it like to actually inhabit this belief or worldview? What is it like to live and experience the world that way? I find that very useful for getting people into ambiguity, into questioning and living the question.
Taliesin and imaginal empathy (00:39)
Henry: What I wanted to respond to is what you shared about reincarnation and imagining other forms. In “Supercellular” you write about imagining what it’s like to be other beings, and you mention Taliesin, whom we’ve talked about before. Taliesin is one of my favorite mythic figures: a sixth-century Welsh bard who drinks three drops of the awen, the potion of poetic inspiration and prophecy, and also gains the ability to change shape. Interestingly, shape-changing isn’t listed among the awen’s effects —
Sophie: Right.
Henry: — it’s supposedly a side effect of being that aware. As if the ability to imagine yourself into other shapes comes from realizing there wasn’t much difference to begin with, that there’s already a door into those other shapes. So Taliesin becomes the shapeshifter, turning into other creatures — supposedly still doing so — representing a kind of mythic reincarnation, an ever-presence of divinity and poetry in the world. I’d love to hear your thoughts on imaginal empathy, this ability we all have to imagine what it’s like to be other creatures and beings.
Sophie: Oh, this is my favorite topic. I also love trickster pedagogy. There’s a great Russian literary theorist I always call on, Viktor Shklovsky, whose big idea was defamiliarization: you should be able to write about the most ordinary thing in such a particular way that you make it fresh and new for someone else. The writer’s imperative is to defamiliarize the mundane. I love that.
As for imaginal empathy: across traditions and cultures, to be a healer, a king, a priest, a queen, to hold any role of authority, to be an interlocutor for other beings or for a place, you usually need some kind of chimerical experience. You do a tutelage with a place or an animal, and spend time thinking about what it might be like to be another being. We see the motif of the theriomorph — the half-human, half-animal hybrid — on cave walls. It predates the divine feminine, predates all the “fertility goddesses,” to use the ubiquitous phrase. The first thing we see is not a man, not a woman; first we see animals. Then we see the Trois-Frères spirit worker in France, with antlers, owl eyes, the lower half of a lion. To be human means to be symbiotic with other beings and made of other beings. In other traditions, to eat animals is to become them, to ingest them, to be related to and responsible for their thriving. This understanding that we’re built by other beings and species is preponderant across the earth. It’s weird that it isn’t a more dominant framework now.
If we look at all these traditions, we can see it’s our imperative to try thinking like other beings and imagining what they experience — to think with our whole web. The metaphor I use is a spider, which thinks with its entire web. Damage part of it and the spider can act as if it’s had brain damage; it works with that entire extended embodiment. My personal belief is that we think with our entire web of beings in our situated ecology. So it doesn’t surprise me that people are experiencing illness and mental disruption when every day species around them go extinct, wildfire smoke hurts birds that can’t escape it, and insects are killed by pesticides. Of course we can’t think or feel in a way that feels healthy. Our extended body and extended mind are being interrupted all the time.
To understand that harm, and also to access much wider somatic and cognitive ability, I think the best way is physical imitation. We understand mirror neurons: when we imitate on our face what other people are doing on theirs, we read their emotion more accurately, with an interoceptive, felt sense of what they might be feeling.
Henry: Mm.
Sophie: People who get Botox, with their faces frozen, have a much harder time reading others’ emotions, because they can’t imitate microexpressions. It extends to the whole body: if we put ourselves in someone’s stance, we get a better sense of what they’re feeling. Oh, that’s a little awkward — are they in pain? What’s that feeling on their face? So I tell people: go outside and start imitating the heron, the oak tree, the salamander. Use your whole body to internalize these different states. The exercise will always fail, but the empathy muscle it strengthens is absolutely crucial. And you will become literate again. We’re very illiterate right now. We can read books, but we can’t read the emotional, physical state, the weather patterns of the beings around us. It’s a full-bodied literacy we need to reclaim: imagining the experience of other beings in our heads, and also in our whole bodies. I know this is something you really practice in your own life, too.
“Don’t anthropomorphize” (00:45)
Henry: I love the line, also in your essay, that we’ll always fail at this.
Sophie: Yeah.
Henry: I think it touches on a cultural, perfectionistic abstraction, and on the fear a lot of people have about doing this — like the admonition in a lot of science: don’t anthropomorphize.
Sophie: I think that’s a little bit of a psyop, actually.
Henry: I agree with you. If you actually talk to many scientists, they’re happy to engage in it.
Sophie: I think what it’s actually saying is, “Don’t think this has any feelings, so we can do a vivisection on it, extract from it, and pretend it doesn’t matter.” In most cultures across the world, animals are anthropomorphized in legends and folktales, made to talk and act like humans, and called peoples. And lo and behold, we have much better relationships with them. So I think the injunction against anthropomorphizing is secretly a way of saying, “Don’t realize that they’re alive and have agency and thoughts,” so that we can keep killing them and keep using them.
Henry: What often gets left out of the warning is what fills the space where you would have felt a connection or relationship to the other. Stephen Harrod Buhner had the term “mechanomorphizing.” We’re actually applying a different metaphor to other creatures, just one that makes far less sense.
Sophie: Way less sense.
Henry: Machines are things we create, in a completely separate genealogy from the creatures we’re all kin with. So it seems very bizarre to choose the machine over the person if you’re going to decide between those two.
Sophie: That leads into a whole other feedback loop: how we use machine metaphors to describe brains and consciousness. Brains and consciousness are not machines. They predate machines. So it’s interesting to think about downloads and software and hardware. No. We need different metaphors for consciousness and mind.
Useless attention (00:47)
Henry: I want to circle back to consciousness, because there’s more to dive into there. But on this idea that we’ll always fail, and the fear of expanding into another being’s self: to some people it feels presumptuous, and that’s the scary part. “I don’t want to assume I can understand what it’s like to be something else.” That becomes a justification for the distance. The nuance — do it knowing you’ll fail, for the muscle it strengthens — might reassure that worry. This isn’t about fully understanding what it’s like to be the bird outside your window, or having the arrogance to pretend you know. By engaging the exercise of what it’s like to have wings, you create a thread of connection. Your mind is extending outward. Like the mirror neurons you described, that can be strengthened and widened. So it’s never a total failure. There’s always something you understand. Another creature’s umwelt is never going to be 100% different, because we’re all alive in the same field of experience.
Sophie: Hearing you say that, I was struck by something: that fear reminds me a little of the alcoholic who doesn’t want to go to the bar.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: Can we put our attention on something and imagine it without using it, without exploiting it? I’m a mycophile, and people always ask, “Which mushrooms can I eat?” And I want to say, “Stop. No. Let’s not start with how these beings can be useful to you. Let’s start with who they are, and meeting them,” rather than which ones you can eat or pick or master. I think people who feel that fear are often recognizing a very real cultural addiction. We’re all addicts of this culture, which is to utilize, to turn into a tool, to turn into calories, to claim ownership of anything we imagine. So I actually love poisonous mushrooms and plants, because they interrupt utility. We can imagine them, be with them, but we can’t touch or eat them. How can we make this exercise useless?
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: I’ve been thinking about that in terms of AI, too. I want to make myself useless to AI, illegible. I don’t want to be able to be eaten by it. So as we imagine these other creatures, first, we shouldn’t assume we suddenly get to use them, or get to say, “I am the expert on this being.” It’s more about whether we can interrupt this cultural impulse to digest and co-opt everything. That’s what I was thinking: there’s an element of the addict in there.
Henry: That’s a fascinating way to look at it. And from the addict’s side there’s also: what’s the point? Imagining I’m a bird seems like a waste of time. That’s not going to make me any money. It’s not useful. But you make a big claim in your essay, which I like a lot. Responding to Taliesin, you write that it makes you think all poetry, all mysticism, all great wisdom comes from a willingness to leak into other beings’ minds.
Sophie: Me and my wild pronouncements, yeah.
Henry: No, it’s great. So what do you feel is the most profound loss in cutting ourselves off from imaginal empathy?
Inner zoology (00:52)
Sophie: I think we think in smaller and smaller loops. AI is actually an interesting example. AI is iterative; it learns on past knowledge and creates smaller and smaller feedback loops. It doesn’t predict something new. I think we predict our own tragedy, and create smaller feedback loops and more limited sensory gating, the more we gate out these influxes of otherness. That’s okay day to day. But when we confront shifting climatological pressures and unpredictable, unstable social conditions, we need to think and feel better. Cutting ourselves off precludes the wild, biological, interspecies creativity that might help us think on our feet.
Henry: When I let in another being’s perspective — writing as something else, or trying to see and blend in that way — it always leads to a creative opening, an expansion of my own psychological richness. Paul Shepard talks about an inner zoology of forms. I love that idea, and I suspect, along with Shepard, that our inner biodiversity mirrors outer biodiversity, what we’re exposed to and experience. If that particular cardinal hadn’t landed, and I hadn’t imagined what that being might be like, the cardinal within me that it opened up could never have existed. That restriction of how we can think, feel and experience seems disastrous. It’s both crises in parallel: the more we render invisible the parts of ourselves that are coextensive with other beings, the more we render invisible the stakes of what we do to those beings, and vice versa. That seems critical in multiple ways.
Sophie: And we have such an outsized ability to change our environment. If we can only imagine sterile environments because they’re all we’ve ever seen, we create hell on earth again and again. We have to repopulate that inner zoology. That can happen in many ways. It’s been shown that reading fiction increases people’s ability to empathize with other people and species, and makes people kinder across the board. So read stories — any kind, high or low, it doesn’t matter. It will help you think about what it’s like to be other people and beings. Storytelling is a really powerful tool right now.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: It’s not surprising that a lot of people are reading right now who haven’t before, through audiobooks too. I think audiobooks are no different from reading. They’re the original reading.
Henry: A professor in grad school once described the whole field of literature as layered subjectivities. I love that. Whenever you read and imagine yourself as a character, the whole construction of the book is building an umwelt, a world to be in that isn’t yours. That enhances our capacity to go out and recognize other worlds. If you read about a character very unlike you, and then meet someone like that, you have a richer capacity to broaden your sense of relationship and belonging in the real world.
Sophie: I read a really great essay in an anthology about how people become sci-fi readers. It’s hard to cross the boundary, because there’s a lot you need to know, an inherited understanding of certain technologies across the genre. But the more you read it, the more you understand going in how hard you have to work to understand the world. I love that. We should approach the world more like a really hard sci-fi book: “Oh, I’m going to have to work really hard to understand this, figure it all out, and pay attention to the magic systems.”
Panpsychism and consciousness (00:57)
Henry: In our last few minutes, I want to loop back to consciousness. We talked about panpsychism ourselves, maybe a year or two ago, and I’m curious about your perspective on its resurgence — philosophers really taking seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental in some way. There’s a whole smattering of panpsychisms that differ in various ways, but academic rigor is becoming apparent in the idea. What do you make of that culturally, and what do you think of the arguments metaphysically?
Sophie: What is it Niels Bohr said? You sip the cup of science, and at the bottom is always God. I always felt we were going to end up here. I think a lot of it is emerging from quantum physics: understanding that things are so much weirder than we think, that elementary particles seem to have agency and behave in ways we can’t understand. Actual scientists trend towards a kind of panpsychism or animism. I’ve met a bunch of chemists. One, a synthetic chemist, told me most chemists are to some degree animists, because they’re looking at things under a microscope, working with them, and going, “Wow, this is agency.” When you look at the fabric of reality on a quantum, chemical, microbial or viral level, you understand that thinking, agency and storytelling happen on macro- and microcosmic levels far more complex than our human brains initially thought.
Henry: Mm.
Sophie: So it seems inevitable that the more powerful our tools, the more powerfully stumped we’d be by what we see. I also think we’re seeing hyperobjects act in the world. Oil, ancient compacted matter, is suddenly fueling climate change today. There’s a new-materialist idea that materials have outsized agency and effect in ways that destabilize our idea of what’s alive.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: I also think it’s the pendulum swing of colonialism. We killed off this perspective, and as we begin to take responsibility for the harms of colonialism, we look at what we killed off and go, “Oh yeah, maybe that paradigm of panpsychism, of animism, was actually more sustainable.” What’s your sense of it?
Henry: I’m with you in that analysis. What I’m curious about is why it took so long, because in my view the analytic argument for taking this perspective seriously is very strong.
Sophie: Mm-hmm.
Henry: But its strength only becomes apparent when you can separate the anatomical from the experiential. It comes down to the definition of consciousness, and really understanding the implications of the hard problem.
Sophie: Yeah.
Henry: I notice people get tripped up by mistaking consciousness for the contents of consciousness. Take Daniel Dennett and illusionism, the idea that consciousness is an illusion. Of course that makes no sense. But his argument isn’t really that experience is an illusion; it’s that the contents of experience — yellow, say — can be broken down further, that you can see the mechanisms behind why we experience them. Which is fine, but it doesn’t touch the actual question of felt experience, on which there has been and can be no data, because it’s definitionally qualitative.
Philip Goff writes about this in Galileo’s Error. Galileo said the goal of science is to analyze the outer world, while the inner — the world of the soul, of experience — is something science can’t touch. That was the approach all along, and somehow the second half dropped out of the conversation. To get back to what we discussed earlier, the fundamental weirdness of being and existing has never been touched and cannot be approached scientifically. As Bertrand Russell describes science — it’s always someone taking out someone else’s laundry — it describes what things do, not what they intrinsically are. And with consciousness, all we have is the feeling that there is some, and no experience of there being none anywhere. That seems like all you need to say. But this could be a whole other conversation.
Sophie: It’s something I think about a lot. Terence Deacon, one of my favorite writers on consciousness, says so much of consciousness studies is description dressed up as explanation. It’s no explanation. He says if you look inside these theories, there’s a homunculus within the homunculus operating the brain. We can’t use the tool to study the thing. We’re using consciousness to study consciousness, and, as on the quantum level where the observer affects the experiment, it’s going to slip out of our grasp every time.
Henry: Hmm.
Sophie: For me, that’s beautiful. That’s the trickster pedagogy. We’re going to have to use different tools. We’re going to have to dance with this in a very different way.
Henry: And with that — this has been so wonderful, Sophie. It’s been great to talk to you.
* 00:00 — Introductions; what “systems neuroscience” means
* 04:00 — Why the field is still young; the single-neuron vs. whole-brain problem
* 05:00 — Shine’s background: his father the evolutionary biologist, medical school, systems thinking
* 13:00 — Why brain words (”thought,” “representation,” “information”) cause confusion across fields
* 20:00 — The “cognitive-behaviorist” problem: naming a function, then hunting for it
* 28:00 — The main topic: the 2014 “Delegation to Automaticity” paper
* 31:00 — The origin story (his son Tyler learning to walk; his father’s question in the park)
* 33:00 — Why the basal ganglia story didn’t satisfy him; the cerebellum as a better fit
* 44:00 — Evolution as “good enough” solutions; the inefficient human eye; frozen accidents
* 1:03:00 — Learning to drive and playing chess as examples of automaticity
* 1:11:00 — Counting without moving: cognition without overt action
* 1:17:00 — Flow, expertise, and knowing when to switch between automatic and deliberate
* 1:22:00 — Running a lab; curiosity, humility, “wanting to be wrong”
* 1:26:00 — AI, large language models, and why process matters more than answers
* 1:33:00 — The body and brain as one coupled system (cerebellum experiments)
* 1:45:00 — Expertise as adaptability, not exact repetition (Schöllhorn’s training method)
* 1:54:00 — Care, love, and community in science
The central paper
“Delegation to automaticity: the driving force for cognitive evolution?” J. M. Shine & R. Shine (2014), Frontiers in Neuroscience 8:90.
* Open-access full text (PMC): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010745/
* DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00090
* PDF on the author’s site: https://macshine.github.io/publications/2014_delegation.pdf
Core idea: humans became distinctive not by being “better” than other animals but by being able to transfer well-practiced tasks from higher brain centers to lower ones (notably the cerebellum). The huge challenge of balancing on two legs may have favored brains good at this kind of “delegation,” which then freed up capacity for higher-level thought.
Mac’s work and his lab
* Mac Shine — ShineLab:
https://shine-lab.org/
* Lab members (”People”): https://shine-lab.org/people/
* Full publication list (with PDFs):
https://macshine.github.io/
Lab papers mentioned in the episode:
* The “multiple species” / renormalization paper (Brandon Munn’s project): Munn et al. (2024), “Multiscale organization of neuronal activity unifies scale-dependent theories of brain function,” Cell. Borrows the physics idea of renormalization and finds a consistent scaling pattern across five very different animals (zebrafish, C. elegans, fruit fly, mouse, macaque). https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)01152-8
* The thalamus / arousal modelling line of work (Eli Müller): Müller, Munn & Shine (2020), “Diffuse neural coupling mediates complex network dynamics through the formation of quasi-critical brain states,” Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19716-7 · Eli Müller’s full list (incl. the brain-temperature/metabolic work referenced): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=h1gl_ckAAAAJ
* Neuromodulation and large-scale dynamics: Shine et al. (2021), “Computational models link cellular mechanisms of neuromodulation to large-scale neural dynamics,” Nature Neuroscience. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00824-6
People, papers, and books discussed
* György Buzsáki — raised by Hiott regarding the “cognitive-behaviorist” habit of naming a mental function (like memory) and then searching the brain for it. See his book The Brain from Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-brain-from-inside-out-9780190905385
* Germund Hesslow — his paper on doing “cognitive work” without any overt movement (e.g., a child learning to count and then counting silently). Hesslow, G. (2002), “Conscious thought as simulation of behaviour and perception,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(6):242–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01913-7 · Full text: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(02)01913-7
* Matthew Larkum — Shine’s collaborator (lab at Humboldt-Universität / Charité, Berlin) on how single cortical neurons integrate signals; the basis of the Dendritic Integration Theory of consciousness (Aru, Suzuki & Larkum, 2020). Overview: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2023/01/13/redwoods-cortex/ · Theory paper: https://philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phimisci/article/view/8946
* Wolfgang Schöllhorn — the sports scientist whose Differential Learning method trains athletes with constant variation instead of identical repetition. Meta-analytic review: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.533033/full
* Nuo Li — collaborator whose mouse experiments silenced the cerebellum during a delayed-response task and disrupted short-term memory. Accessible summary: https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/11/15/the-cerebellum-more-than-just-muscle-control/
* Wade Regehr (Harvard) — collaborator whose cerebellar-inhibition experiments were paired with markerless video pose-estimation of body movement (mice on a “rotarod”). Regehr Lab: https://regehrlab.hms.harvard.edu/
* Richard (”Rick”) Shine — Mac’s father, an evolutionary biologist/herpetologist, now at Macquarie University; co-author of the delegation paper.
* Karl Friston — mentioned as an influence Hiott has also interviewed; known for the free-energy principle and predictive processing.
* Marc Tittgemeyer — the colleague who pointed Shine to the myth of Prometheus.
* Valentino Braitenberg — cited for the 1990 argument that the cerebral cortex is essentially an associative memory network (also known for Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology).
* Jeremy Schmahmann — referenced for cognitive dysmetria and cognitive/affective symptoms after cerebellar damage.
* The Santa Fe Institute and the idea of a “frozen accident” (a term associated with Murray Gell-Mann). https://www.santafe.edu/
Concepts and ideas referenced
* Systems neuroscience — studying the brain across scales rather than one neuron or one brain image at a time.
* The scale problem — reconciling single-neuron recordings with whole-brain methods like EEG, MEG, and fMRI.
* Basal ganglia vs. cerebellum — the standard “habit” story centers on the basal ganglia; Shine argues the cerebellum fits automaticity better.
* Habitual vs. goal-directed and automatic vs. deliberate — two separate axes that can combine in different ways.
* Embodied, extended, and distributed cognition — thinking is not sealed inside the head; external “scaffolding” (language, tools, the car, the road) does some of the work.
* Ecological psychology / affordances — J. J. Gibson’s tradition.
* Representation-hungry problems — the philosophical worry (Clark & Toribio) about tasks like imagining or planning.
* System 1 / System 2 — Kahneman’s fast/slow framing (Thinking, Fast and Slow).
* Predictive processing — the brain constantly anticipates the next state and acts on prediction errors.
* Dynamical systems / basin of attraction — expertise as a wide, robust “river delta” rather than a single fragile point.
Also mentioned in passing: Spinoza (”God, or Nature”); Merleau-Ponty (phenomenology of the body); Kurt Vonnegut (the hippopotamus joke); J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil); Claude Code (as an AI tool that saves time but can make knowledge feel “flimsy”).
TRANSCRIPT
Mac Shine on Love and Philosophy: Brain Dynamics
Love and Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy · Host: Andrea Hiott · Guest: James M. (Mac) Shine
Lightly edited for readability: timestamps, filler words, false starts, and backchannel interjections removed; wording otherwise preserved. Misheard proper names corrected against published sources.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. Hi, Mac. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Thank you for joining us today.
Mac Shine: Hi, Andrea. Thanks so much for having me.
Andrea Hiott: So I’ve been following your work for a while and, one thing I guess I wanna introduce to people who might not know your work is the idea of systems neuroscience. If you just had to give a kinda general idea of what that is in relation to neuroscience what would you tell people who’ve maybe never heard of it before?
Mac Shine: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a tough one to define, succinctly and it’s a broad church as well. You often find quite different people calling themselves systems neuroscientists. I think to me what it means is that you’re making a commitment to try to look at the brain from a variety of different perspectives and really to try to capture as much of the brain in your explanations of behavior as possible. So one of the challenges we’ve faced as a field of neuroscience, which I think is really still quite a young field, no matter how you look at it, we feel like we’re old because there’s so much rich history so many Nobel Prizes that have been won but we’re still really even just figuring out all the parts of the brain. What are all the different neural types, what are all the different glial types, how are they connected together? We don’t really have a simplified story about how the system works. And part of the challenge, I think, has been that because it’s so difficult to record from a brain, you’ve got to really make a choice when you go down to understand, your question, your neuroscience question. And so you can start at the animal level and you can, basically for a long time you were forced to make a choice to study a particular neuron or neural population and let’s say stick a probe into the brain of some part, let’s say the hippocampus and just get all the neural spikes you could and do whatever you could to try to understand that spiking behavior. You’d throw out things that didn’t quite fit. You’d select neurons that responded to the stimulus or something and you’d end up with a smaller and smaller subset. And then at the end of it, you’d want to make this really strong claim about the behavior that you were interested in. Let’s say it’s navigation or something. At the end of the day, you’re really tempted to say, “This neuron is doing the navigation.” You want to make this link between this neuron and this behavior. But they’re really different scales of understanding of a system. If you in contrast, you’re a human imager. Let’s say you’ve got access to something like whole brain EEG or MEG or fMRI. Now what you’ve got is really pooled activity, or it might even just be blood flow or an indirect measure of that blood flow, something that’s really much harder to pin down to an individual cell. But now you’ve got the entire system and you can make that same Let’s say you have the same type of task, you get the same type of behavior, something navigation-wise. Now all of a sudden you’ve got this broad network of regions that are now responsible for that behavior. And it’s well, how on earth could both of these things be true at the same time? How could it be that one individual neuron is important but now a whole network and system of neurons is important for this same behavior? And I think this enduring mystery is staring us in the face as neuroscientists. We have to have explanations that accommodate both of those perspectives and understand how can we even speak about them In the right way. And to me, what systems neuroscience as a whole, as a field is doing is really like taking that challenge on, right? It’s trying to scale up the neural recording so it’s not just one neuron or 10 neurons but now thousands, hundreds of thousands of neurons with clarity, or taking the people that are working on the human imaging side of things and forcing biological constraints into their explanations. So it’s not just the default mode network did this, it’s the default mode network, which is comprised of these types of pyramidal neurons and those pyramidal neurons project down to the brainstem in this area and control the activity of this set of neurons that then change this set, right? It come it’s coming with these constraints. Pulling I like to think of these as pulling from both ends and forcing the answers onto the same playing field. And to me, that’s what I really admire about modern systems neuroscience, is it’s taking that on. So to me it’s, as you can see, it’s a broad church, right? It’s, it’s people from all different backgrounds trying to find that common language to describe how it is that a brain could work, taking all these recordings and all of the benefits that come from each of them but then trying to find a way to bring them together
Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say because a lot of this show is about those tensions, trying to hold what you just said, that it’s, it’s, it can be some very specific part of the thalamus or even some very specific set of neurons that matters, completely for wakefulness or whatever. But at the same time, it’s a whole system at you can’t just look there too and it’s very hard, I think, for us to hold that. And isn’t it also hard in academia to figure out how to do that? I mean, that you’re trying to do that and that there’s a lot of people trying to do that, feels really important to me because it’s more, efficient to focus on one thing, maybe the hippocampus or maybe the thalamus or and just know everything about that, which you still can’t, you can’t read every paper. But, trying to hold all this at once is not an easy thing to do. So I’m, I’m, I’m wondering how you came into wanting to do that, first of all and maybe we can get into how you’re doing it. But first of all, just how did you start want why was that the thing that you knew you wanted to do,
Mac Shine: Yeah. I think it comes with a large dose of foolishness a complete inability to see far in front of my face. Yeah, look, I think the seeds were planted for this quite early in my life. My father’s an evolutionary biologist but he works on what he would call evolutionary ecology. So taking principles of natural selection and using the constraints of natural selection as an explanatory principle to explain why you see the kinds of variation that you do around you. Why is it that this particular lizard has a very wide shaped head versus this other group of lizards that has a very narrow shaped head? What were the benefits of that in terms of its adaptation? And but using the explanation of the environment around it, its predators, the kinds of prey that it was trying to eat and the kinds of problems that it was trying to solve as your explanatory set. So I’ve, I was exposed to that for my upbringing. You know, I’m the son of an academic so we got to follow Dad around the world, to amazing places, New Caledonia, to Africa, to the Northern Territory. We lived up in the Northern Territory for about six months when I was about 12 years old and went to a little school there with about 12 other children, half of whom were Aboriginal, half of whom were, the sons and daughters of the local people that worked in the little station there, in an area called Middle Point in the Northern Territory. And just me and my brother were just inundated with this. It was just, around us all of the time and you couldn’t help but be curious about what Dad and his colleagues were doing. Oddly enough, my father, studies reptiles. That’s his main passion. So back then he was really interested in water pythons, Wow different types of monitor lizards and neither my brother or I have shared this interest. Anytime there’s a snake, that my kids see when they’re out on a walk, I call my dad and get him to come take care of it. I don’t, I don’t want anything to do with it. So it wasn’t the interest in reptiles that stuck but it was this interest in this really the beauty of the natural world and the complexity of the answers that you need to understand it. So I had that baked into me from a really early age and then went through a bunch of different things in undergraduate. I did a really In high school, I loved chemistry. In undergrad, I loved biochemistry. I really loved the molecular biology and thinking about proteins and RNA and DNA and all this, beautiful world you couldn’t see. But I was hopeless in the lab. And I also really liked thinking about psychology and and neuroscience but again, didn’t really wanna work as a psychologist. So I ended up going to medical school. And in medical school, in many ways it was an incredibly good training for someone with a interest in systems thinking, because what you’re doing in medical school is you’re, you’re forced to do this challenge of learning this major amount of information really quickly. And so you’re constantly having to take complex, detailed information that has all these different features to it. It has different scales of explanation, like a physiological level as well as a systems level but it’s also got, anatomy and it’s got pathology and it’s got all the different details of all the different systems. You’re constantly having to compress them down into a real gestalt understanding. You have to really get what’s going on. You have to think of the kidney as a filter, quite simply but you’ve also got to be able to understand how the countercurrent exchange mechanism works and the loop of Henle and all these fascinating things which I’ve long forgotten the details of. But the point is that I think that study in medicine like really invigorated that systems thinking that I was exposed to as a child and let me learn that quite systematically about the body But the funny thing is, when you then get up to above the neck and into the brain, a lot of the simplicity and elegance of the explanations that we had in other systems in the brain in the body, like in the cardiovascular system, in the lungs, in the kidneys, bones, the immune system, a lot of that explanation just flitted away. And all of a sudden, when you got to the realm of psychology, you started getting into this stuff about minds and, concepts like symbols and things like that. And these things just felt so foreign to me. I To me, I should have been able to start from where I was in medicine and just like extend a step, “Okay, we’ve got the cardiovascular system. It works like this.” Then the neuroscience is just like a, something like that. And you ended up just not seeing that anywhere. And so I think when I first started, I, I essentially had this really naive, expectation that I’ve kept with me ever since I started in research, that I should be able to find similar types of simplified, compressed, yet still poignant explanations about how the system works. And the real I mean, we can you can ask other questions if you like. I feel like I’m, I’m probably at the point of rambling now. But, the thing that’s really fascinating, I think, in neuroscience is that we don’t have those. They’re missing. There’s like this empty space in the textbook. And I think what I’ve been trying to do slowly over time and now I think much more rapidly now that I’m surrounded by this incredible team of young scientists that are working with me to push this idea forward, is to start to build those building blocks. Like what part what are the parts that we need? How do they work together? What can we do to scale them up? What types of analogies are really good analogies that don’t trade off all of the things that you really had to work hard to learn by studying an anatomy textbook, or really reading the modern literature on physiology, or thinking about things across scales? And I think in the process of developing that language and developing that conversation, the best part of it is that all the questions you can ask afterwards are like thousands of times better than the ones you could have asked beforehand, that you get this real benefit of the nuanced compression for that next step. And that’s what we’re really excited about at the moment and we’re starting to try to build that program out, organically. But yeah. So I, Sorry if that’s a longwinded answer to your question but it’s, it’s been a long time growing, I think, for me.
Andrea Hiott: No, it’s wonderful. I mean, a lot of things come up but first it’s funny because, often when I would try to go to your website I would get your dad’s with, the lizard? Yeah. And it’s so awesome that the both Shine Labs. But so I was thinking a lot about-
Mac Shine: You, you say that but, Dad was at the University of Sydney until I came back from the States and I started my lab and then he immediately moved to Macquarie University across town. So he’s running away from me and my neuroscience. Oh,
Andrea Hiott: He’s trying to get away. So not two Shine Labs in one place. But it’s fun. I mean, that speaks to it though, that same tension, because it’s a really interesting tension. It’s the same one you brought up, I think, that I want to try to understand. It’s hard to talk about Mm but, something like what your dad’s doing, it’s, it’s biology, it’s physical. And then what you did in medical school, it’s physical. But then like you said, you get to the mental and you’re still dealing with the brain. It’s very physical. I mean, you know that when you do the medical science of it. But at the same time, there’s that weird gap in the way that we consider it or even the language we use in our papers but also, just everyday life. And is that what you’re talking about when you say that space, or how can I better understand from your perspective? Because as a philosopher, for me, I see that as not a real gap but more a, way that we switch, into a different mode, of even speaking about all of these things that can be very hard to somehow connect in a way that we were just talking about, where you’re actually looking at the larger picture. Maybe you can tell me a little more about what you meant by that. Like, what exactly are you clarifying in your lab in the way that you just expressed relative to that?
Mac Shine: Yeah. Great question and I wish I had a really lovely, succinct answer for you. I think One of the things that’s really stood out to my group over the last few years and we come back to this again and again and again, is that the words that we use, we’re often fumbling for them in different subfields to “Oh, I don’t quite know what I mean so until I’ve got that word, I’m gonna use thought,” Or, “Until I’ve got that word, I’m gonna use representation,” Or, “Until I’ve got that word, I’m gonna use information or something like integration,” These kinds of really loaded words. We don’t begrudge anyone for using them, right? We appreciate that it’s really difficult to put your finger quite on what you mean. And if you hold anyone accountable in any one of those different terms, they would almost certainly, unless they’re completely heuristic, be willing to back down from the strongest version of it, right? The I don’t think if you talk to people that think symbolically about intelligence, that they really believe that there’s a little icon like something on our computer desktop sitting in the brain somewhere or in this mystical mist that’s our mind. But they just mean it in a way that helps you talk about it rather than not talk at all. So I understand that a lot of these things are grist for the mill for discussion But one of the problems that comes with this is that these words get used oftentimes in completely different fields, in completely different contexts, such that you’ve now got no ability to actually communicate with one another meaningfully. And we found this out the hard way and we’re still finding it out the hard way, by populating the lab with a group of physicists that are trained in the, statistical physics, in first principles, oversimplification, take all the details and throw them out and I wanna be left with a little process, some little compressed equation that hopefully will generalize and extend to everything in the whole known universe. And then on the other side, we have people that I’ll call biologists for now but they’re all types. We have philosophers in this group. We have people that are medical scientists. But I think the biologists’ core principle at the, at, at its, at its like nugget, nuggety, center is this notion of the idiosyncratic detail mattering. Like, to my father, it matters so much that this lizard is not the same as this lizard, right? It’s I wanna characterize them as different things and they’re basically the same to any Like, you and me wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. But my father would say, “Oh, actually, the dorsal stripes on this one are there’s three for every fourth scale and we This one’s three for every third scale or something.” And we’d be “Oh, okay, fine.” But maybe that matters to them deeply because this one likes to eat, this type of bug and this one likes to eat that type of bug and it matters for some ecological question. But so the biologist’s answer is something about the idiosyncratic detail that they wanna pull apart and the physicist’s answer is, “Don’t tell me about the details. I just wanna extend. I just wanna go I wanna know F equals MA. Does that count everywhere or are there places where it breaks?” And The tension between those two fields is not even just a terminological one. It’s, it’s almost like I don’t, I don’t even think the ontology is the right word. It’s like the flavor of the ontology is different for them. The kinds of answers they like are so different that there’s this weird tension between them. Yet, I think as neuroscientists, we’re right at that coal face because what we’ve got is we’ve got this big, complicated, more complicated than we could imagine system of a bunch of different eukaryotic cells working together and being indelibly marked by our experience, like shaped over billions of years of phylogeny, played out over the course of our lifespan, of our massively complicated social world in front of us and we’re trying to understand how that thing works in a detailed way. But yet we also want principles, like how is it that brain networks interact in a particular way? How is that different than what a large language model does? ‘Cause it’s really different but how is it different? How can we put our finger on it? And so we need these really different levels of explanation that are like almost to me written in different languages, not even in terms of the words we use but in terms of the types of answers we’re looking for. And I think that this tension point doesn’t get enough airspace. It doesn’t get enough discussion as a, as a whole for young scientists, young philosophers, young people interested in this space. Because without that discussion, I think we’re just We oftentimes just like hide in the area that we like. The mathematicians hide out here and the biologists hide out here and we just do our work. But what we need is answers that communicate in between. And I, I promise you I’m answering your question but this preamble helps me. So Without that tension resolved, I don’t care what words we use, because how can I ever tell you whether or not your use of the term integration is equivalent to mine or is counter to it? Because now I can’t cash them out because I don’t even know if you care about the answer that I care about and the flavor that I care about it. And so I think there’s massive growth for us to make as just a field. What answers are we looking for, right? What do we, what do we want this to be giving us, right? Do we At the end of the day, are we gonna be happy if we can say this sensory neuron is pain? That’s not gonna be what the answer’s gonna look right? It’s, it’s The answer’s gonna be sometimes in some context that neuron can end up being involved in a big complicated cascade that ends up in the person, you, feeling something that you would call pain because it’s like these other things that you’ve had in the past. Like, these longwinded answers, they don’t really satisfy. And so I don’t really think we’ve developed that part of this enough yet to really be able to get at the kinds of beautiful questions that you can ask that you, that you wanna get towards as a philosopher. Like, why is it that I feel this way and you feel that way? Or why, is this feeling that I had now comparable to the one that I had 20 minutes ago or two years ago? Or is it the same as the one that my friend’s having right now across the world or something? These are really beautiful, deep questions but they require to me, if we wanna use neuroscience to help them, a maturation of our ability to know what we’re even dealing with or how to frame it properly
Andrea Hiott: Thank you. I agree. A lot of what I was hoping to talk about and I know, György Buzsáki and his work and, -
Andrea Hiott: This whole cognitive behaviorist problem of the way we name something like memory and then we look for it. And I think that’s similar to trying to find the cells and name them for what they do, I understand all of that and probably a lot of good has come from that. But it does feel like we’re somewhere different now, where we have to hold this tension in a different way
Andrea Hiott: Ask those questions, like you said, of what are we actually trying to look for? Because just finding, as you said, the neuron for pain or memory or whatever, doesn’t actually help us with the, what we’re actually trying to do, which might be, help those who have cognitive issues live better or, -
Mac Shine: Mm
Andrea Hiott: Help, social groups know how to do something different that doesn’t require violence. Or, I mean, you could think of a million ways that these have very real practical implications that we lose somehow. I mean, or memory loss, all of these things that a lot of people are making real progress for. But what I wanna get at a little bit with you is are we assuming in that cognitive behaviorist way what we’re looking for? Is that part of the problem here? Is it that we are almost assuming a, That we already know what we’re looking for because it’s such a personal experience for us.
Mac Shine: Hmm.
Andrea Hiott: I know that seems like a really basic wrong assumption but I feel like it’s a really hard thing to actually notice that we’re doing even in our experiments, even in the way we set up the experiments. Yeah. Does that make any sense to you, or is that just too abstract?
Mac Shine: No, absolutely. I think that, yeah, every neuroscience experiment, I think in a way, has an, indelible elements of the experiment are baked into them. So I, I’m probably a bad example here because, my group mainly does analysis on existing data. We’re like recyclers of data. We work with lots of really brilliant collaborators that are extremely talented and put in the hard work to collect these incredible data sets and we like to try to find ways to ask questions that could then be using those data sets to help us refine our understanding of how the system could function. But so I don’t really design experiments the same way that someone would say, “Oh, I wonder if, I notice that I can multitask sometimes but I can’t multitask another. How could I design an experiment to test that?” Mm-hmm. I don’t really do that type of science. But I think that when people do that, they’re often tapping into something that they’ve seen as a a real thing. They’ll say to themselves, “Oh, I notice when I’m driving home and there’s lots of distracting lights, it’s much harder for me to notice the stoplight. Maybe having lots of, distracting things will make my stop signal performance degrade. Now I can build a little task that does that or something.” And so I think a lot of this stuff comes from your natural experience in the world. And, there’s no reason to deny that as a good starting point. There is a variety of experiences and it’s, a good enough place to start and say, “I wonder if this experience is dissociable from this other one,” And now I can go and compare the brain patterns and things like that. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable way to start. And, as a son of a, evolutionary biologist, ethology’s an extremely rich and important field and one of which I think we forget about to our detriment. We should not pretend like mice are little mini humans. We should ask what do mice like to do and what are the kinds of things that they’re really good at and what are the things they’re bad at. And, same for monkeys and same for, different types of monkeys. Some, some monkeys are, carnivores and some are herbivores and they have very different types of prey predator behavior. And all these kinds of things are really rich. And so I think I deeply care about ethology and taking that very seriously. But I also really admire where Yuri’s coming from in saying that if we take this terminology that was defined back, by William James and contemporaries and try to see if we can hunt for the patterns that best map onto that, you can see that’s not really leading us to a place that I think we’ll feel like we can really build something from it. It’ll have a You can almost then imagine there’d be like a bunch of little lockers and the lockers could have a bunch of fact stuff in them. You know, the working memory locker’s got a bunch of things in it. It’s got dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the pinging model and it’s got dopamine and it’s got all these other things. But what I’m really interested in and I think this is where the medical physiological training really helps, is that, the heart is really fascinating but it’s just a pump. And, it’s a weird complicated pump and it’s got four different chambers and the inflow and the outflow look different and the outflow’s got little muscles on it and the inflow doesn’t and there’s all these different kinds of weird things with the pressure of the lungs versus the pressure of the head and the body and the legs and things like that come along and mess with the pump. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to understand that the pump’s also made of eukaryotic cells that are specialized for that function, right? Some of them zap along, once every second or so and then other ones are really good at conducting that zap. And then other ones are just really good at clenching really, effectively and causing force. And other ones are just structural. Some of them you need just to like keep the thing held up so that it makes the shape of a pump. But all together, all of those specialist cells make a pump And being able to understand both of those perspectives at the same time, right? That you’ve got this simplified story of a pump but also the detailed information about all the different cell types and that they’re not It’s not either/or, right? It’s both at the same time. Being able to understand that type of a, that, the dichotomy I think is so deeply important. And I think if we don’t have those types of explanations, then how are we ever gonna find the right kinds of terms that are gonna come up, that are gonna naturally, define the natural kind Mm, emergent properties of our of the system of a brain or a brain embedded in a body in an environment, what have you. I just think we’re gonna really struggle to find those just by guessing. So I kinda see it from both sides, that I think we need, It’s almost like we need to I like your term before tension. It’s almost like we need there to be an ethological tension that deeply respects behavior and emergent behavior in all of its gory details and like tries to be as precise as it can about it. But also on the other side, a like system first perspective that says, what are all the different ways that this thing can express its degrees of freedom? What is it allowed to do? And then we’ve gotta find the that tension and like hold it tight and then figure out afterwards, okay, now what happens if I break this part? What happens? Or if I like turn this part off, let’s say I have some, dementia syndrome, now I can’t, remember where I am or something. Oh, it, that’s likely to be these three things and not these other 17 things. And I think until we have that tense match, we’re, we’re, we’re just gonna be, a young a young field. That’s our real next step of maturity, I think.
Andrea Hiott: Yes and it is very hard. And in a way I think you’re saying this but I was thinking we have to get much more specific in the sense of we need to take it feels impossible because we need to take all this context into consideration in every situation so for this specific lizard in this specific moment and the whole replication thing falls apart a little bit if you really start to do that because you’re gonna have a different experiment every time you do an experiment. There’s that. That’s very hard. We have to get so specific and maybe we can now with the technology. If this technology’s good for anything, maybe it can help us do that. But at the same time, I feel like we have to get more abstract in the sense that we notice that we’ve been assuming we what cognition is, that it’s something in the brain or something we’re looking for and maybe open that up a little bit too of what are we actually noticing in our experiments. And to that point and too, you brought your dad up, there’s a paper I really love that you wrote with your dad and it’s called What is it called? Delegation to Automaticity. Is that the right the driving Here it I know I have it here somewhere. I have it. Yeah. Delegation to Auto Automaticity: The Driving Force Behind Human Cognitive Evolution. Now, I love this paper. I don’t know Oh, thank you how you feel about it, ‘cause you wrote it over 10 years ago and I know, sometimes we write papers and 10 years goes by and they’re really different. But what I love about this paper is you’re talking about all these things we’ve been talking about together and you’re holding the tension. I mean, first of all, becoming bipedal is a tension, right? Mm. Mm. Mm. It’s almost impossible. And the same feeling that we’re having here. And it does make a strain on the body that’s, a constraint that seems to be creative in a similar way to what we’re talking about here. But I love this paper because it actually starts with what, why are we doing this? What does it matter? I mean, we’re trying to understand what’s different about the human in a way, right? We wanna know how can we be sitting here having a conversation now, thinking about all this stuff and why Like, my dog is here asleep, that She doesn’t care about reading books and thinking about what neurons are and So this paper is saying, okay, what’s different about humans that it is all I mean, for me, this is why we do neuroscience. We wanna understand that because it causes Mm so much joy and wonder and it’s incredible, almost hard to take but it’s also very hard and painful and we want to do it better. So you start out with this in the paper and actually, the wonderful answer, or not answer but you say, okay, well, maybe the difference is delegation.
Mac Shine: Hmm.
Andrea Hiott: Maybe that’s the thing that’s actually happening differently in a human body, in a context, in an environment, as a creature that started to walk upright. Maybe there’s something different with the delegation that’s going on. For me, that feels really exciting and grounding instead of doing something like looking for, which I do, by the way but looking for memory in the hippocampus or something like that.
Mac Shine: Hmm. Hmm.
Andrea Hiott: So I wanna talk about that paper a little bit. Maybe you wanna set it up better than I did and maybe, is it okay we talk about that paper 12 Oh, - 14 years after you wrote it?
Mac Shine: Yeah. So, first off, let me say thank you so much. It’s actually, stood up as one of my favorite papers, for a few different reasons. So, there’s a lot and there’s a lot to talk about with it so I’ll, I’ll do my best to touch on points but we can come back to the details. But so the story of that paper, was actually, a really, a really fun, experience. It’s part one of the reasons it’s so close to my heart, is that, it actually really sprung out of a question that my father actually asked me while we were walking around a park near my parents’ house, in Sydney as my son, Tyler, who’s now 14 years old but at the time he was just over a year old, was walking around in the park stumbling around. And, my father as he’s, as he’s want to do, asked a very blunt question, which was, “Mac, about a couple months ago, Tyler was stumbling around. He looked like he was a bit drunk. He was hopeless and tottering around and now all of a sudden he’s fine. He can run around the world like nothing and having a conversation with us and he’s not looking where he’s going. He’s looking off to the side and, playing a game. He’s, imagining that he’s some, imaginary character while we’re playing a game.” He’s “Whoa, what a major change in his, whole capability of, dealing with this complicated world around him.” He’s “What changed? Like, what a, how did that happen so rapidly?”, he’s “You know, what part of the brain has, has developed and matured in this, in this in this little window?” And if you go and look in the literature, for, what has changed in, as we develop what people would call habits, as we become more effortless at performing these different types of tasks, you typically find, the answer and it’s almost exclusively 99% of the literature is focused on an area of the brain called the basal ganglia. And this is a set of different nuclei. They’re deep to the cerebral cortex. They sit at this way station between the outer layer of the cerebral cortex and the thalamus and brainstem between them. And they’re, they’re notorious in medical textbooks because they’re extremely annoying to learn because the basal ganglia are a collection of nuclei that all inhibit one another in a complicated circuit. So you get these weird, this one inhibits this one but that one also inhibits this other one but then goes back and inhibits this one. You’re “.” Like, why can’t you just like sit down and just become like a little feedforward circuit?
Andrea Hiott: I thought I was gonna go crazy actually trying Yeah do those tests. Seriously. Like, that was really hard to learn. It’s
Mac Shine: Brutal, right?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Mac Shine: Yeah. Look, in part I feel it’s a little bit I don’t know if you’re a parent but for any of the parents out there, they’ll know the time when your child’s annoying you so you give them a really hard task so that they’ll go and focus on it for a little while. I feel like the, medical tutors were “Go figure this circuit out and see if you can come back to me.” But one of the things that, I so I studied the basal ganglia really closely in my PhD. I worked on Parkinson’s, Parkinson’s disease. This is a disorder where you lose a lot of the neurochemicals in the brainstem, like dopamine, that project into the basal ganglia and disrupt its internal function. And so I’d learn a ton about the basal ganglia. And one of the things that really stands out when you look at it, is that the basal ganglia is this has this massive collapse in the number of neurons that are at every single station along the, along the path. So imagine I’m like in the outer surface of the brain, the cortex. I’ve got a, let’s say hundreds of thousands of neurons. They project into about 1,000 or so neurons and then in the striatum and then those inhibit a much smaller set, let’s say something like on the order of 50 or 40. And then those go down to an even smaller set in the globus pallidus internus, let’s say 10, which then go and inhibit the thalamus or the brainstem or some other structure, which then has to come back and complete a loop But to me, that collapsing is about exactly the opposite of the circuit that you’d want to build if you wanted something to run relatively autonomously, right? If you wanted to have something that you’d learnt a habit be played out by a system, the last thing you’d want to do is blend it in with all the other things and smoosh it down and smoosh it down again. It’s like taking a JPEG copy of something and then another JPEG and another JPEG. You’re removing all this information as you go. And good luck when you go back to expand it. I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried this before but if you take like a JPEG copy of a high resolution image and it’s really small, like a little thumbnail and then you try to blow it up, it’s like what even, what even was this, right? You can’t even tell it’s a Rorschach test. So to me, this There was just this fundamental, incompatibility with this story, right? I was my son Tyler can now do this thing that he couldn’t do before and I really don’t think it’s because he’s like smooshed it through this compressor three times and then spread it back out again. So I had to go looking for explanations. And if you go looking around the brain, you think, well, the cerebral cortex would be a great place to look. But the cortex is, as Valentino Braitenberg, really beautifully said in a book chapter in 1990, it would’ve been really great if the cerebral cortex was the answer for how well brains were able to process information the way that we, that we do, that represent or like cognition and understand this complex information processing. But really it’s an associative memory network, right? The It There’s a lot of Hebbian plasticity. The rule is that if you’re a local neuron, you pretty much connect to almost every other neuron around you. Now, there’s exceptions to this. Some neurons prefer to project to here rather than there but generally speaking, there’s lots and lots of connectivity. There’s not a lot of selectivity so it’s not a really good place either But if you go looking down at the base of the brain in the cerebellum, now all of a sudden you find an architecture that is almost tailor-made for this function. You’ve got, inputs that are being received by the cerebellum from every single motor output that comes from the cerebral cortex, these big layer five cells. They come into these, this pontine nuclei, this big bulge that’s expanded in humans, spread out into the granule cell population, which is about half of the neurons in your brain. Those granule cells then communicate with via parallel fibers with these things called Purkinje cells. There’s these big, beautiful cells that project down to the cerebellar nuclei that then send that message back up into the thalamus, then back up into the cortex. They can also go down into the brainstem. And to me, I didn’t know much about the cerebellum then. I knew, some surface level details about, just for example, the fact that you had half of the cells in your brain sitting in the granule cell population. And I thought, whoa, here’s the answer, right? What’s happened is that my son Tyler, as he stood up, has gone, this is really bloody hard. You know, toddle around trying to move his big gigantic head forward on his tiny little shoulders and hips. He’s tried to navigate around this world that’s not flat, right? There’s bumps and and hills and everything everywhere and that’s a difficult problem. But what he’s learned is every single time he’s done it, his cerebellum’s gone, “Oh, you tried that. It didn’t go like that. Maybe try this next time.” And then he’s tried this next time, whatever and as he’s done that enough, he’s learned that the cerebellum can now anticipate what will happen in the circuit. So now as he takes the step forward, rather than him having to think, oh crap, there’s a little hill there or a little hill, like I’ve got to like walk this way, his cerebellum just knows how to handle that And it occurred to me, it hit me like a ton of bricks, if I had that in my system and I didn’t have to worry about all those little details, that’s exactly why I could look up to my grandfather and wave to him or pretend like I was Buzz Lightyear or whatever Tyler was doing. And it’s funny, sometimes this thing these things happen when you’re, when you’re working in science and I think if you remain open to the serendipity of being naively wrong about things, right? I didn’t have any preconceived notion about what the answer was. I looked into the literature. I wasn’t satisfied with the kind of mechanistic explanation that came from the basal ganglia story. I looked around a few, dead ends, then stumbled onto the cerebellum and thought, “Oh my Lord, I was looking for something with this shape and here’s something with this shape.” Bang. And immediately you can then see the, a bunch of steps into the future. If that’s the case, what happens if we go back and look in phylogenetic history and asked, how long since we started walking on two legs do you start to see an advancement of the cerebellar, volume in the brain and then social and cognitive, expansion and they lined up really beautifully. You can start to look into the literature of what happens if people have cerebellar damage. There’s these massive, cognitive sequelae. There’s this really beautiful work by Jeremy Schmahmann. His idea is a cognitive dysmetria. So there’s this really long list of phenomena symptoms that happen with people that have cerebellar damage, like strokes or tumors. There’s also this really beautiful literature showing that, if you scan people’s brains while they perform tasks where they’re learning them to become automatic, you can actually see different parts of the cerebellum taking over, like areas like the cerebellar nuclei become much more active and require more blood flow as you become better and better at performing the task. And there’s some really awesome studies in animals like monkeys and mice that really started to drill down into this, particularly recently. So this story, started 15 years ago with my son standing up, with my father taking an interest in, my son and the neuroscience of it and us having this conversation. But what it really led to was this platform to start thinking about a different way to think about what it is about our cognitive lives that makes us unique. So yeah, it’s just been such a fun one to have, both because of the fact that it was a part of, my family life and my being a father and everything but also because it gave me this new set of lenses to put onto all these other problems that I think have led to really fascinating next questions that I think we’re only really just starting to scratch the surface of.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I saw in the acknowledgments that you, Tyler gets a thank you in the paper. It’s very cool. No, I love that but I love this paper so much and actually I think you were already saying a lot of what is now coming out in different studies, maybe even relative to the hippocampus or to the way that we move through the world, the way that we study that. And it’s interesting, that you, when you were telling the story, you’re talking about your son learning how to walk. So this is a very hard thing to do actually, to stand up from all fours and to walk. It’s hard for the body. It’s almost like Oh, yeah you wouldn’t think a body would try that but of course life tries everything and somehow this has been good. This has done something good. And we usually try to explain it the other way around but maybe it’s doing something, as you suggest in the paper. It’s causing some tension that then causes this expansion, collapsing, architecture to do something different,
Andrea Hiott: Which, because as you were telling the story, you’re also saying, “Oh but he’s also starting to imagine and think about things and “ So as you told the story, you were already holding what we usually think of as mental and physical as coevolving together.
Mac Shine: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: So actually, those, that’s not really a separate thing that was happening. Those were happening at the same time and you were noticing that. So it wasn’t like cognition was changing and movement was changing. We were noticing, assessing it as cognition and as movement. Mm. But actually it was the same ongoing change in the body. I think that’s a really hard nuance to hold. In the paper you say that. You, I mean, you correct me. I’ll be really messy and too over general but it seems there’s an idea that it’s very rare for mammals to try to walk on two legs. Mm. That this happened obviously would’ve changed the way the body is encountering the world, the way that it’s sensing and dealing with that sensation. Let’s just be really like general. And of course the brain is a huge part of this. And it’s not that the brain suddenly grew a cortex, which is what a lot of people would think. They’d think, oh, you’re a lizard and you have a lizard brain and then when you stand up you grow a cortex. That’s actually not at all, I don’t think, the way that evolutionary science tells the story but somehow we get that story. But instead what was happening was something different was happening with the function of what was already there. I think what you’re saying is, Because we were moving differently, our cognition was different. Not that they’re separate in the way that your son was literally experiencing the world differently in a way we would assess his cognition as he was moving differently. Those, we have to assess those differently because we can’t hold it all together. But the body itself was doing the same process maybe. Is that at all close to what you were saying? Or maybe you can-
Mac Shine: Yeah. No, there’s lots of threads to pull on there. I think the way that I like to think about it is that there’s, there’s some, there’s times when you think of something as a impediment but it opens you up to a new set of opportunities afterwards just because you’ve now learnt that trick. And looking back at the phylogenetic history, of all the species around us, God, there’s some weird looking things out there, right? Like, do you ever It’s amazing stop and think about how strange it is to see a bloody hippopotamus? Like, it’s, it can, that thing can motor, man. Like, it goes but it’s huge. Like, it’s, like I used to So I, I’m, I’m not a religious person. Like, as I said, I grew up as a, in an evolutionary biology household so to us, the natural world was curious enough. We didn’t need, to have other explanation. It’s like Spinoza’s
Andrea Hiott: God, right? Nature.
Mac Shine: Yes, exactly. And but, there’s a, there’s a lovely line from Kurt Vonnegut that I’ll completely butcher where he just laughs at how silly it is. Like, how funny would it be? Like, God must have a sense of humor if he created something like the hippopotamus and the platypus and all these other funny things. But so one of the funny things about, natural selection, I think we oftentimes think of natural selection as finding, this perfect answer. Like, it’s gonna find the ultimate solution. Yeah. And I think a much better way to think about it is that it finds a good enough answer. It finds a good enough solution that works to give you a little bit of a benefit over, your contemporary, right? And it’s, it loves frugality. If you ever want to look at, in, if the, look under the definition of inefficiency in the dictionary, you could put the human retina there, right? The light sensitive cells in our retinal ganglia are sitting behind something like three or four layers of other cells so all the light has to go through the lens and all this, murky humor before it hits a bunch of cells and then finally gets back to the one that, responds to the photon. So this is, deeply inefficient and if you were gonna start from scratch and build a light sensor, the last thing you’d do is put it where you put it in the, in the human eye. So when, if you read books that would put the, human eye as this pinnacle of there’s no way that biology could have created this, must be created by some allknowing God. I would say natural selection did it and man, they had a sense of humor when they made it, ‘cause, who on earth would put it, the light sensitive cells behind all the other ones?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, the blind spot and everything. Everything’s being tried, it’s like everything is being tried. There’Yes there’s not one line, or at least how, as I see it. I don’t know.
Mac Shine: Yeah. Look, I like to think that, Evolu-, natural selection likes to try lots of things and there are certain things that if it tried with them, it would be in big trouble if it changed it. Like, you don’t wanna go ahead and change your immune system. Those genes should probably stay about the same. And you don’t wanna change your cardiovascular system. It’d be a really bad idea to maybe see what it’s like if you put your heart down in your knee. Like, that’s, let’s not mess around Yeah with that infrastructure. But there are certain things that you can get away with trying. Like, you can make people a little bit taller or a little bit shorter, or you can make people a little bit more muscly or a little bit more lean, or you can make their hips a bit wider or a little bit thinner, right? All these different axes of variation now don’t cause necessarily a short-term problem,
Andrea Hiott: That’s a really good point a different advantage. Yeah Because it’s, it’s not about trying everything, I guess I mean in the way it’s always embedded in a historical movement. So you’Absolutely. You’re trying whatever you can from where you are, which But it can get away with I mean, we wouldn’t suddenly try to go from where we are to the putting the heart in the knee. So it’s always constrained by everything that’s come before. Yes, absolutely. I’m trying to get towards the repetition in the paper, too, ‘cause I think this connects but
Mac Shine: Yes. No, absolutely. And so there’s a lovely word from this, that, was I think popularized at the Santa Fe Institute called a frozen accident and so the idea was there were lots of different ways that things could be, right? There’s a big axis of variation and then one of those little parts of that space worked really well. So let’s say it’s, something like the if we keep it on the delegation story, as you stood, as the, humanoids stood up for whatever reason, it may have been to peer over the savanna, it may have been to throw rocks at things, it could’ve been so that they could highfive one another. Who knows, right? We weren’t back there. We can’t tell. But one of the things that was beneficial for them is once they figured that part out, once they got good at it, their brain had now learnt, or the people that had a slightly bigger cortico-cerebellar system to handle more complexity in that domain, all of a sudden could do that a little bit quicker and now they didn’t have to worry about that little detail of walking. They could now free up their conscious mind to start focusing on a higher level detail, “Oh, I wonder if that broken twig over there means that there’s a buffalo on the left rather than the right,” Or, “I wonder if that smell that’s on the breeze and the breeze just changed five minutes ago means that we should actually go right rather than left,” Right? You could imagine that all those higher order variables, which are extremely important if you wanna actually eat tonight, ‘cause you can then actually hunt your prey, would’ve been completely lost to the person who’s stumbling around trying to figure out how they keep their feet up because it’s so bloody hard to take this huge head and balance it on these, on these unstable hips. So the idea was and this is where really my father’s thinking was so crucial because he is so welltrained in adaptionist thinking and, thinking about the kinds of small incremental changes that can actually make a big difference for species, was you could think about those little tiny differences in that circuit having these amazing nonlinear benefits, right? A tiny More improvement in your ability to delegate meant you can free up your conscious mind for so much more stuff and that stuff doesn’t have to be predefined, right? It could be that as I stand up and I don’t have to think about it, now if I’m hungry, I can find the food. If I wanna find a place to sleep, I can look at all the different places I could sleep. If I wanna chase down that person that called me a, a funny name, I can chase them down. I can do whatever it is I want. I’ve freed up this capacity for cognitive variance that was just wasn’t available to me before. And I think this is a really beautiful notion and idea that really helps us to understand what it is about us that makes us special. Because, there’s this really, lovely idea, which a good friend of mine, Marc Tittgemeyer, told me actually dates back to the, myth of Prometheus. I’m not that much of a Greek scholar. I didn’t know this ahead of time. But the idea is that humans really aren’t all that special at good at almost anything that is around us in the natural world, right? We can’t swim as well as sharks. We can’t fly at all. We can’t see as well as eagles. We can’t run as fast as cheetahs. We can’t jump as high as frogs. Like, we can’t, breathe through our skin. You know, we’re completely dependent on the external world around us for food and all these things that just make us completely hopeless. So you can’t go looking for this like human exceptionalism and find evidence for it almost anywhere. But one thing that we are really good at that I think we do much better than most species is we adapt to new situations. We’re able to take information in and make it useful to the system but then spot new patterns of information and then take advantage of those Whether that’s related to our brain’s anatomy and the weird quirks of having a big cerebellum and a big mega dorsal and thalamus and pulvinar and big dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, what have you, or whether or not it’s related to having really nuanced, rich social environments that were really catalysts in the early days to create proto-language that then augmented those, features of our neurobiology, or whether it’s the fact that we had all this beautiful bountiful earth to work into that other animals didn’t ‘cause we were able to walk around and move and be nomadic or something like that, right? There’s Who knows what the actual answer was as to what the critical feature was. I think what I’m more interested in is that now we have a language that we could start to talk about what makes humans different rather than better, right? It’s not that being able to delegate makes us better than a hippopotamus or a platypus. It just makes us different in an interesting way that we can start to actually put our finger on and start to ask really interesting questions about, what have I knocked out this part of the brain? Maybe if I try to understand someone with Parkinson’s and their deficits as not being able to tap into this more automatic mode of thinking and they had to become much more deliberate, you’re “Oh, wow, that actually helps to explain why certain types of tasks are really difficult for someone with Parkinson’s.” And before I thought about the brain that way, I thought about it as this deliberate system. You know, I push a button here and I move my left arm and I push a button there and I see something and I push a button there and I remember a face and I push a button there and, I, smell a smell. Now I can think about that as a layer but now this more delegated layer as what I wanna tap into to actually execute and now you’ve got these systems working together. Sometimes I’m reliant on one, sometimes on another and now we have this richer language to explain this really nuanced set of phenomena out there in the world that I think have so far resisted really good description.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It’s putting everything on the same track and without needing to call it-
Mac Shine: Some new thing, yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And or even just the way we study I think I’m going a little farther than even you might go. But even when we’re studying, how we move through the world and how we think, those don’t have to be on different tracks. They could be part of I mean, you say that in the paper that, that it could I mean, you say it before. A lot of people who are now saying it said it. That, which I was surprised to read it again but you say something like you describe how, which we should get into, how when we repeat things, like learning how to walk, let’s go to Tyler. Mm. The more you repeat it, then the more when we look at this, system that you describe between, for those who don’t know, just, this one part of the brain and another part of the brain. There’s three parts really. You could maybe describe it better. But something is happening with this, we call it a loop but it’s really a lot of loops and a lot of movement in different directions. But somehow when you’re repeating it, when you’re learning how to walk Once you get it, once it freezes in the right way, you don’t need to give it so much energy, right? And something shifts in this, cycle or this loop such that it’s like delegating it, right? So then as you were saying, then you have more energy, let’s just say, or more, bodily sensual attention to give to other things. So then your son can He’s, he’s learned how to walk so he doesn’t have to think about, “Oh my gosh “ He, it’s not even that he’s thinking about it. It’s more like his body doesn’t have to when encountering the world, be so awkward. It becomes habitual is probably a word people would understand better. And then other things can start becoming habitual and you can actually see this happening in the architecture of the body and the brain. And I guess what I’m saying is That, in your paper that you wrote with your dad, it already feels like a continuity that would then also become ways we move through conversations or ways we move through, whatever we happen to be moving through. Because for the body, it’s still that same system. It’s still you’re still taking in the same regularities and you’re trying to make habits of them so that you can take in more. Does that make sense at all?
Mac Shine: No, totally. Totally. So one quick, point of, terminology we should be careful about. People oftentimes don’t like using the word habit in this context because habit often means something very specific to a rewarded behavior. So you can imagine, if you gave an animal, a particular, food pellet in this part of their cage rather than that part of their cage, you’ve If they go back to that part of their cage, it’s a habitual behavior because they expect that there’ll be a reward there. But it’s not necessarily automatic. They could do it deliberately. They could say You know, you could imagine a little mouse going, “I wonder where I should go today. Oh, I’ll go to the part that’s where I’ll get all the food.” And so the habit and the deliberate part can be connected together. It may not be, we don’t know. But they can connect together in a complicated way.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Mac Shine: So I prefer the term automatic.
Andrea Hiott: It’s such a complicated word. Also in philosophy super
Mac Shine: Complicated
Andrea Hiott: I mean, I’m thinking about, like Merleau-Ponty and stuff. No, it’s But how else would you I mean, there’s something about the body Well,
Mac Shine: So I like the term automatic
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. What would you say I guess?
Mac Shine: So I I like to have, habitual and goaldirected as on one set that you could use and I like deliberate and automatic on the other. And you could imagine a deliberate habitual or a deliberate goaldirected, or you could imagine automatic habitual, automatic, goaldirected. These things can all be, cross-matched. And oftentimes they’ll relate but they can be dissociated. And this is where, I don’t wanna belabor terminology too much but it’s just important to click on that as like a-
Andrea Hiott: No, it’s really important
Mac Shine: As a point of interest. -
Andrea Hiott: Actually, I would like to try to understand it better. So if the body is just moving through the world, locomotion, right? Learning how to walk. Yeah. You would say it becomes automatic.
Mac Shine: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: That this thing. And then-
Mac Shine: And you could do it deliberately too, right? If you were walking on a bunch of Lego pieces and you wanted to walk on the least sharp ones, you could deliberately place your feet down, right? And you’re now not just going through the motions and walking. But if See, yeah weren’t thinking about where I’m gonna place each of my feet, you’d now just, automatically walk on the sharp Lego pieces and probably Well, who knows? Maybe you’d cause yourself more pain or not, I don’t quite know which one works better. I try to avoid Lego pieces. But the habitual versus the goaldirected is something that you can really dissociate quite cleanly in the literature by lesioning different parts of the brain. There’s a beautiful literature on this where they can overfeed animals and then they don’t want food anymore. And then if you lesion a part of their basal ganglia, now all of a sudden they wanna eat more. And so you’ve removed their habitual drive to not over, to not overeat ‘cause they’re full. And so there’s all these kinds of really clever experiments you can do and I think a lot of the reason that we thought that the basal ganglia was where habits are is that it probably is a is really crucial for that whole process of, taking a action in the world and translating it into behavior that is then repeated. There’s no doubt about that whatsoever. I wanna make it clear that I’m not, trying to go against that entire literature. It’s more that I don’t think that’s the same thing as my son’s ability to walk without thinking about it so that he could then free up his, other resources in his brain to have a conversation Yeah with me and my father. Can you say why Can I say why?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, why is it So why is it different Yeah. What’s the auto what makes that different? Just to be really clear ‘cause-,
Mac Shine: I think the way that the terminology has been used in the field has been really based on the operationalization of the terms that were in the context of the experiments that could be run in rodents. So in rodents you could, through a lot of really hard work and ingenuity and, it’s This is like decades of really clever neuroscience that’s been done here. They would essentially train animals, in a, in a cage. They would train them to they like this type of food pellet, they don’t like that one. They can get them to make that choice. They can then overfeed them. They can then go in and put, do a very targeted lesion in some part of their basal ganglia and now the animal will keep eating. They’ll overeat. In fact, they shouldn’t eat ‘cause they’re satiated. They should stop eating and now they’ve got, essentially a completely habitual response. Yeah. I know
Andrea Hiott: Those studies but I don’t Because, I mean, the rat doesn’t learn how to walk in the same way as a human in the bipedal way. So I find that a little hard to I see what you’re saying and I know it’s really important and I’m glad you brought it up. And I know we don’t need to dwell on this but I do think it’s actually very important in terms of what I was trying to say about putting it on the same track. Okay. Because the What you’re saying there seems to assume that the cognitive side is somehow not on the same track. I don’t think you’re saying that but what I mean? Mm. Because you could-,
Mac Shine: I’m not trying to say that so maybe you can clarify. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: So if, I mean, when you damage this part of the brain, you can also have movement issues. So the same Yes in a human, the same things that would’ve been automatic when you damage that part of the brain in the human would no longer be automatic and maybe they would actually compensate or overcompensate in the same way that the rat would be eating. Yeah. So I see in the literature why those words are different but if we really were taking this very, radical thing Yeah that I was saying before seriously, you would have to look at that very differently in the human, I guess.
Mac Shine: Okay. Yeah, no, I take
Andrea Hiott: Your point. Because of the way we learn how to move through the world versus a rat.
Mac Shine: Yes. I think there’s tons of differences in the way that a rodent engages in the world versus a human so you’re right, that’s absolutely got to be there at the start of any conversation. The second thing to say is that even though there are, equivalent regions in the same parts of the basal ganglia that if they lesioned them in the area that subserves a motor domain, that it would cause an impairment in execution in terms of motor execution. It’s not exactly the same regions that they, impair when they’re actually trying to alter the decision-making of the animal. So it’s, the nucleus accumbens in the decision-making task and it’ll be something more like the globus pallidus internus, or areas like that, or the parts of the stri like the putamen versus the, the, nucleus accumbens and the and the ventral stratum in, in the decision-making task. So there are some similarities and differences there. And I think, the, topological argument that I made before about the compression of information as opposed to the expansion, I think is a really important feature of the kinds of, explanatory factors that we’re looking for when we want to understand how is it that particular, movement could have been executed without there being, a supervisory role played by some cortico-, thalamic loop on top. So I think there’s a number of arguments there that dissociate those but I certainly don’t want to making a claim that there are divisions in this space. To me, cognition is really best thought of as an embodied, or a factor that, results through the embodied interaction, of the agent in the world as we learn and navigate with all this complex opportunities around us for action. We take for granted the complexity of the natural world around us with all of the different weird things that are there, gravity, cause and effect, all these other kinds of strange phenomena around us. We learn to anticipate though the, sequelae that show up again and again and again. And my argument and the argument that we make in that 2014 paper, is that if you have a system that is capable of taking those situations and anticipating what the likely sequelae is so that you don’t have to deliberately think about them and calculate them but you can just take them for granted, that frees up, resources to do other kinds of things that wouldn’t have been available to you. So maybe give a concrete example, because I think walking is a tricky one, right? Unless, some of the listeners here have had a stroke recently or a loved one that’s had some form of neurological impairment, they probably haven’t had to learn to walk at a time when they’re actually selfreflective and thinking about it. But one thing that we all probably can remember is learning how to drive. And if you remember learning how to drive a car, it’s an extremely overwhelming experience. You have sat in many cars before that point. You’ve probably not paid very much attention other than the fact to know that sometimes your parent or the person driving honks the horn and says some rude word to someone who drove in a weird way around them, or screeches to a halt or sees a light or something. But you’ve not thought about it. And now all of a sudden, you’re thrust into this space where you have to hold the steering wheel, push different things on different sides, look at a bunch of mirrors that you didn’t even notice before, push this pedal but not that pedal at exactly this right time. If you are unlucky like me to have to learn on a manual car, you also had to worry about gears and gear sticks and clutches and all the timing of that. And
Andrea Hiott: When you first Is that normal in Australia? The gear Sorry? Is that a norm I’m, I’m just Because in America, we never have to learn on the manual, in Europe It
Mac Shine: Used
Andrea Hiott: To be normal everyone has to. So it’s a, it’s a real And how is Yes is it there, this-
Mac Shine: It used to be normal. It’s now no longer normal. And-
Mac Shine: The newest car that we just got, you push a button to start Oh, okay. Well you flick a little thing to go into different gears and I find it I still find it so odd that I, flick a button to change gears. It’s so weird. I used to I used to really like changing gears.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah but this is a great example though. Yeah. So it’s very hard to learn how to drive no matter what but especially when it’s normal
Mac Shine: No matter what, right? It’s a very difficult information processing challenge. But if you then forward to the last time that you drove a car, I can almost guarantee that you spent almost no time thinking about what you were doing. You didn’t think about where your feet were going. You didn’t think about where your hands were going. You just flicked the different things at the right time. And this is a, is a reality when you switch cars and all of a sudden you drive a European car where the indicator’s on the left and the windscreen wipers are on the, windscreen wipers are on the right. Because what will happen is as you go to turn you’ll hit the windscreen wipers and go, “, shit.” And I and you mess it up all the time because you’ve got all of these inbuilt automatic responses that you don’t even think about that’ll let you do other things. And the point that I wanna make here is that when you get in a car to drive, you don’t think push pedal down, release gas, brake, whatever. You think, “I wanna drive to the store right now and buy the milk that I need for my son’s cereal in the morning,” Or, “I can’t wait to go to work and have that meeting ‘cause we’re doing this really cool project,” Or some other thing. Or, “I don’t wanna be late for the train.” So you’ve got all these now higher order cognitive tasks that you’re performing that I would argue if you didn’t have the capability to actually drive your car automatically, you’d have no hope in doing. In fact, if you asked someone asked you when you were learning how to drive to actually do some form of extra task on top, you probably would’ve smacked them and said, “No, I’m trying to learn how to drive.” This is an auto-, already an overwhelming, complicated thing to do. So to me, this is a much more prescient example because it’s something that we all know and we all experience. But I don’t think that One thing I don’t like about this example is that driving feels very sensory motor-based, right? It’s like an input comes in and then I push the things in the right way and then the car drives. But I would actually like to go much further than that and say that, very cognitive tasks, things that we would think of as purely mindbased, something like the game of chess, has exactly this same type of structure to it. If you ever Have you ever played chess? And the first time you played chess, you look at these pieces and you’re “What are these things?” There’s these weird lumpy objects and there’s two horses and two things that look like castles and weird pointy ones and one’s got a little, cross on its head and these little small ones. But you so you first learn the names of all the pieces and then you kinda learn what the rules are of how they move and there’s still, you sorta think about, you’re “Wait a second. Can the horse go up two and across one but it can also go across two and up one but it can’t go up three? That’s not allowed.” So it’s gotta have these very particular rules, right? But then as soon as you start to play a few games of chess and you start to get that under your belt and you start to learn those rules, now all of a sudden you can start to think, “Oh, my opponent’s trying to take my pieces. I really would like to take theirs instead. I wonder if I could line it up so that I can get my bishop to roll down and get that piece that Get that horse of theirs. That’d be great.” But then as soon as you start to get that down, now you start to realize, “But wait, my opponent can see me doing that. They can see me setting up the board to take their piece. Now I’ve got to be subtle about it and now I’ve got to send this horse out to look like it’s attacking before I send out the bishop and now I can take their piece because they were so focused on my, on my knight.” And so you can see now you’re going up now in layers of abstraction, layers of complexity in this very cognitive game. And I’m willing to bet that the experts that play at the highest levels of chess have got so much automatized knowledge of the different ways that games can play, that they’re not sitting there thinking, “Oh, gee, I wonder if a pawn could move one or two rows.” No, of course not. They’re thinking, “Oh, I’ve seen thousands of games like this and when they start out like that, they’re almost always trying to do this thing. So I now I’ll get around that and I’ll do this other thing but I’ll do it in a way they can’t see me do.” And so you’ve got this like layers upon layers of complexity to the task that I would argue cannot be achieved if you don’t already have that automatic knowledge built up to actually get you to that higher order. So I think this is just a different way to start thinking about framing the cognitive capacities that we take for granted. But I think if you put, any cognitive capacity through this lens, it could be playing chess, it could be mind wandering, it could be composing a symphony, it could be trying to struggle for that right word in the next sentence. All of those, I think fall prey to the exact same type of an architecture where you can rely sometimes on automatic fill in the gap type responses and sometimes on more deliberate, effortful, detailed extraction of information. And it’s the interface between those that really defines our cognitive capacities and what makes us really interesting as a species.
Andrea Hiott: Great explanation. And you said you don’t like the driving you like the driving example but you don’t like it because it’s sensory motor. So I think-
Mac Shine: I just Yeah, it’s just not, it’s not like purely cognitive in the way that I think we’d often think of chess as like a really cognitive game. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah but I think that’s what I’m trying to explode a bit here and what I’m I’m being annoying a little bit but I actually already mentioned No, please do in your paper because I don’t I mean, that’s what I was trying to get at first, even bringing up the cognitive behaviorist thing and the way Mm take things for granted. Like, why should we imagine that the sensory motor action is somehow different than the chess action? Because even when we’re playing chess, we’re literally moving and so our bodies are also habituating to regularities. When I move it this way, or even when I hit the button, ‘cause a lot of people play online now but then actually, it’s, it doesn’t feel different to me. It feels, that we are what we’re basically If we, if I make it really general, is the body is encountering certain regularities and the more often it encounters them, the less it has to focus on them because it just There’s a habit I mean, sorry, an, there’s an automaticity that just develops in the interaction between the body and, whatever it’s encountering. And that doesn’t matter if it’s a car or chess or learning what, how the basal ganglia works? Yeah. I mean, for me, that was about going over and over the material of how, of the anatomy of the brain in a similar way. But do you see a break somewhere where you’re, you’re learning how to drive a car and then you’re learning, how to play chess?
Mac Shine: Not necessarily. I think one of the reasons that I want to make sure that we can put examples into this space that don’t rely on sensory motor interaction is that I think that there are skeptics out there that may be skeptics that really fell in love with the idea of a symbolic language of cognition, this idea of, the human, the pinnacle of evolution, the human mind somehow finding a way to run computer programs, in our wetware, is that I think you can come up with quite trivial examples where you don’t need to have any form of interaction with the world and you can still do cognitive work. So, Germund Hesslow has a really beautiful paper, in Trends, from back in the day that I can dig up if you’re interested, where he argues that, one of the really, prescient, examples in cognition is learning how to inhibit otherwise prepotent motor responses. And so he gives the example of a child learning how to count and when you learn how to count, you see five things in front of you and you go one, two, three, four, five and then maybe you put a different finger on each of them. And then you go one, two, three, four, five. And then I, let’s say I remove the sounds And now I can just instead of flicking my hands, I can just nod at them And then I can do all of that without having to do any of those movements, right? And so what I’ve done is I’ve systematically now pulled away each of the different motor responses. First, overt in the world. Secondly, my fingers. Thirdly, naming them, removing that and then actually moving the fingers at all. And yet I’m still doing something, right? I’m still counting. And we’re all capable of doing this with this like inhibited potent motor response in the world. Now, whether or not physiologically in our brains there’s still something that is doing exactly all the same parts Imagine we can, like Let’s say we could, lay out in a row all the different elements that were important of that sequence of five all the way from over here to being out in the world and all the way in here to being that part in the brain that’s stuck around at the end. I’m slowly paring these away but these parts in my brain are still probably doing something pulsatile and going, one, two, three, four, five, probably. We don’t know how to test this exactly yet with any precision. But we can do it without there being an overt movement in the world. And I think a lot of times when you talk to people that are interested in understanding cognitive phenomena, they’re not so interested in whether or not we can pick up a bottle and move it around. They’re interested in whether or not without even moving it I could imagine what it would be like without even doing that. They want an answer that has no motor response at all, no engagement in the world at all. And so I think as someone that’s really interested in those deeper answers and how we come up with a constructive, process model that fits all these things, I think we need to be able to make contact with them. But I don’t think for a second that, you can get to those same levels of cognitive complexity without that natural interaction in the world. At least, that’s my best guess as to how our intelligence is developed, is through that interaction, failure, development over time. But I’m not a developmental, neuroscientist so I don’t want to speak too closely to a lot of that nuance.
Andrea Hiott: No but it I think it’s important in so many ways what you just said. I mean, for a philosopher, it reminds me of, the representation hungry arguments, where, okay, you can explain everything through embodied movement in the world but then when you get to something like where you’re just sitting in your room imagining and planning, how do you explain that there’s no representations in the brain or something? Mm-hmm. I think these are really important questions but for me, there’s a a thing that gets, ignored there, even when you’re accounting and so on and it has to do with delegation, I think, in the same way that it is in your paper. Which is that we as humans, one way we’ve learned how to do more of exactly what you explain in the paper is that we create other, external, scaffoldings or, we can create language, for example, or images-
Mac Shine: Mm-hmm
Andrea Hiott: Which does some of the delegation in a different way. So we have these external representations. We have this situated, all these words that get used but basically what we’ve done is create some scaffold that’s external that can do a lot of the same delegation work that maybe is happening in the body, or at least can cue it or something, in a way that’s less, takes less of our attention. So when we when we speak, we’ve done that And then it would be, okay, then I don’t need to move my fingers maybe, because for the body itself, I’ve, I’ve tagged it to a external or a sensory representation. The weird thing is, how can I turn my own attention on my own, patterns? Yeah. And that’s where it all gets very crazy. But maybe not, right? Like, we can turn our attention to walking. Yep. We can turn our attention to driving and that doesn’t feel weird. So why is it I guess what I’m really saying is if you really took it literally, it actually wouldn’t be that weird. It would just be that humans, that the same thing is happening, it’s just that Mm-hmm from a our own position trying to understand it, we’re figuring out how to do that but-
Andrea Hiott: Does that make any sense to you at all? Do you see that No,
Mac Shine: No. No, absolutely
Andrea Hiott: Like a shift in that -
Mac Shine: No, absolutely. I was I was just thinking that, a lot of the, a lot of my intuition comes from sports and playing sports for a lot of my life. And, one of the things that we like to talk about a lot in the lab is that sometimes that, reflective attention as a sports person can be really helpful. Like, if you’re in flow and you’re playing in a game and you have set a defender up three or four times with one thing, you could think, “Now’s the time to get them with that other thing,” And you can deploy it. But other times it can be quite counterproductive and if you’re not in the right brain state, if you think, “Oh crap, when I shoot a free throw, do I do I put my elbow out or in? Like, where, what’s the exact angle that I put before I shoot?” All of a sudden, now all that automatic architecture just disrupt It’s like the house of cards crumbles and you’re “What?” And you just miss the shot. And it’s, it’s really, I think, a an art form to knowing when to deploy deliberate versus trust the automatic. And I think, just watching, elite athletes and I think musicians are very similar and I’m sure it’s the same in a lot of vocations, being able to trust that the system will do what you want it to do when you want it to do it exactly the way you want it done is such a, it’s such a beautiful thing to think about, that, experts have like found that stability, that calmness, they can kinda keep themselves there but then they know how to like tweak it a little bit and, they can put the little tremulo on the guitar solo or they can, tweak the ball just so it avoids the Like, I just love watching these things of like in slow motion the defender’s hand comes and the ball goes like that and you’re “Oh, how did they know how to do this?” And there’s just this elegance to learning how to deploy a nervous system at its highest level. And, I’m really, excited by the ability to the fact that we can like move towards better understandings of how that works. And I’m with you. I don’t think there’s a strong fine line between things that are cognitive or abstract and things that are concrete. I think it’s a, it’s a a line that can stretch in many different dimensions and it really comes down to the kinds of questions you wanna ask and what you’re satisfied by in terms of an answer.
Andrea Hiott: And also to what you were saying at the beginning about being able to really think, More specifically about, holding the tension, I guess, is what I was saying too and not Some of the, what you just described reminds me of that. I mean, even, I love sports too and there’s a I mean, it can be music, it can be writing books, whatever, where you do get into a flow state, right? And you don’t want to get out of that. You don’t wanna, be disturbed. But at the same time you can also watch yourself in that state and there’s a different steering that happens. Is maybe that what you’re talking about too? Yeah.
Mac Shine: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Which feels to me like you’re able to hold the tension and you’re not trying to resolve something. Does that?
Mac Shine: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think the real virtuosos out there, have figured out not just how to automatize all of the details and also, if you’re a sports person, you have to be, the right height and have the right body mass and the right kinds of, kinds of, physiology to even be able to compete and I’m sure the same for a lot of different, areas. Like, great musicians have to have the right ear and the right kinds of, dexter dexterous control and things. So there’s, a bunch of other factors that come into it. But there’s something that I think that we, if we think of, our favorite, expe experts in all the different domains that we were interested in thinking about, there’s something else, I think, that they are learning how to wield, which is exactly this capacity to know when to deploy which resource. The, there’s like a taste to it? Like, when will I go all out versus when do I hold back? And, when do I get aggressive versus when do I go passive or. And there’s there’s real, there’s like an art to this that I think is really quite beautiful. And probably what draws us into it as, spectators, is this yeah, it’s hard to put your finger on it but when you see it, you can see it across all the different domains, this ability to deploy the ballots in a way that, yeah, is beautiful.
Andrea Hiott: It reminds me, actually and not to try to flatter you but when you were talking about, I’ve heard you say it a few times, where you have these moments of things click.
Mac Shine: Mm.
Andrea Hiott: To me, like with Tyler, I mean and your dad saying that there’s a state you’re in, right? Where you’re-
Andrea Hiott: Open and you’re, attentive and you’re actually I mean, a lot of people might be stressed and not listening to their father, or maybe they would feel, as we do, like we need to prove to our father our knowledge. So you basically just start giving him a You know, the knowledge and here’s the answer. It’s the cerebral cortical loop and the basal ganglia is doing this. And even, -
Mac Shine: His eyes glaze over,
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. But like those could have been the responses. So I just there seems to be something with your stance in the world or your way of being that you’re able to take in a lot. Does that make sense? I mean, it’s even what you’re doing with the systems neuroscience, or what we started with in a way but do you see what I mean? Like, there’s a way of being where you’re, you’re ready To know that you need to flip the ball in this way. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Mac Shine: Well, I mean, that’s very lovely of you to say. I think one of the things that I’ve really loved about this recent phase of my scientific career and there’s many different phases of careers as you go, is that when I first started out, I was so young, right? Learning and didn’t know how to write, didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know statistics, didn’t know, linear algebra, didn’t know fMRI, SPM, all these other You know, I saw you interviewed Karl Friston, right? I’d read so many Karl Friston papers, technical, philosophical, right? And just, how on earth can we fit all this in together? And you just feel like this, little pebble in this, canyon. And as you go along, you don’t I don’t think you grow much bigger in terms of being a pebble. What you end up doing is finding other pebbles that are a bit like you and you coalesce together. And I think one of the things that I’ve really loved about the last, few years is that by being By giving into that, right? And by trusting that those kinds of things you’re talking about, that susceptibility, that humility, that curiosity and really trying to essentially just check your ego and just say, “You know what? I’m gonna be wrong so much more than my students. Like, I want to be the wrongest. I want to demonstrate to them that I’m the most ignorant. I want to ask the dumbest questions, because my thinking is if I ask the dumb question now, the next question I ask is gonna be better. That’s my, that’s my hedge.”, we end up naturally bringing in more and more people that share that same type of a, ethos and it’s not really explicit. We don’t put in our, in our papers, “Please reach out if you’re like this.” But what we’ve found is that more and more students that have that same passion, that same curiosity and are just not They just don’t care whether or not you say that they’re the one that came up with the answer. What they want is to be part of a group that is trying to figure it out. Man, it’s so It’s amazing. Like, I mean, the people that I get to work with now are just brilliant and hardworking and enthusiastic and just they challenge me all the time. Like, I’m their student, right? They’ll They know about the thing that they’re studying so much more than I do and I get to have a new PhD where I get to learn about nonlinear dynamics and, mean field modeling and I get to learn about the arousal system and the cortico-thalamic system and the cerebellum and all these other details that, I wasn’t trained as an anatomist and I could never do that in a million years. I couldn’t do physiology. These are all things that are, way beyond my ken. But by being open to that And be susceptible to it. Now you get to work with people that have all those levels of expertise so that now working together you get to compress that information down into a ball and carry it forward in the hope that it helps you ask a better question next. And so I feel so fortunate. I honestly pinch myself that I get to be in the situation that I am working with these beautiful people and just learning from them every day. And I think it’s a lesson for students out there that if you have something like that in you and you’re curious about it, just lean into it and try to find those elements that you find selfrewarding and just go with it. Trust your, trust your gut. And you’re gonna find way more fun looking for ways that you’re wrong than you are by trying to reinforce that you’re right, ‘cause odds are you’re wrong. It’s a pretty big complicated world out there and, there’s, biology and nature has got, lots and lots of, answers in store for you that you never would’ve guessed ahead of time
Andrea Hiott: It’s almost becoming exciting to be wrong or, I think I really appreciate what you just said and I actually think it’s more the future than we realize because, I mean, everyone’s very worried about AI and all of this. But actually-
Andrea Hiott: I think it’s actually showing us that’s always been what’s important. And just to this narrowing and delegation, thinking of the, what you were saying about even the basal ganglia or this condensing thing, that’s an important thing to do. But we can now have other ways of, technology and stuff can help us do that in a way but nothing can really help us open, to what we don’t already notice? Yeah. You, the, anytime you’re using technology, it’s narrowing you based on everything that’s come before. But only when you’re in situations like you described where you’re literally with people that are challenging you and you’re learning how to sit with that tension and be challenged, does this magical stuff happen. Like, we don’t even have a clue what’s possible, actually, with the body and the brain. As you said, it’s so young and it’s so exciting to think about that. Mm-hmm. Not to try to find the right answers through old frameworks, which is pretty much what we would be doing if we just think AI’s gonna answer everything. It can help, of course. Yeah. I know it can be creative. It’s not I don’t wanna get into a fight about that with anyone, listeners. But, the thing I’m trying to say here is, just to I don’t know if we can relate it to your paper but I think it is related in a way to the delegation. And, what’s the point of that? The point seems to be to have ways to expand what you can be attentive to. -
Mac Shine: Yeah. No, I love that. That’s a really lovely way to put it. We’ve, we talk a lot about, what people call AI in, in the lab, in our discussions. And I sometimes, I, we think about this practically as well with we’ve got, two teenage, well, a teenage boy and a another son who’s about to become a teenager. Mm-hmm. And, language models and the like are just ubiquitous challenges for them to grapple with. I almost, I almost begrudge the world a little bit for laying that at their feet, ‘cause, it’s, it’s hard being wrong. It’s hard to gain knowledge. It’s hard to read difficult texts. It was hard to read Lord of the Rings when I first read it. It was long and boring in lots of parts and, I couldn’t quite get through it.
Andrea Hiott: Oh.
Mac Shine: But when you I
Andrea Hiott: Started with The Hobbit and it was so great
Mac Shine: No, The Hobbit was great but The Lord of the Rings, right? Lord of the Rings is hard getting to Tom Bombadil was like a slog, right? But when you get through the end, you’ve, you’ve you’ve gone through this process in the, in the literature and nowadays I feel like the equivalent of that with the way that we’ve been processing and treating information is to go, what was the point of Lord of the Rings? And you could just like get the summary and then you could be, you could be disparaging of it. You’d be “, Frodo was grumpy the whole time,” Or something. You’re “That was the point. You know, you missed the point. You didn’t have to be a hero to be a hero,” Right? And so there’s all these things that come from the process of like grappling with these things over time. I think we’ve gotten to this position, in large parts ‘cause it probably makes a bit of money for whoever was trying to build the thing, where we just want the answer all the time. Answer, answer. And I don’t think I’m alone in saying this. I think there’s a lot to be gained by the process, by not necessarily getting the answer but having to go through the process of trying to discover it I, I tell this to my students all the time, people don’t wanna hire you when you get out of this PhD program because everything there is to know about, automaticity in functional MRI cognitive tasks. They’re, they’re looking at you as someone who’s dove into a really difficult problem, read a ton of stuff, made a bunch of mistakes, learned a bunch of things and then come out the other side with some form of, understanding of what they could do with knowledge. Like, you’ve learnt how to grapple with this complexity of the world and I think that’s really important and I think you can’t fake that, right? Like, you can’t, you can’t just, like If I just woke up tomorrow and downloaded phd.pdf or something, it’s not like I’ve, got all the things that I would get if I do a PhD. There’s something about walking the walk and going through the steps that matters. And I think at the moment we’re really obsessed with, outcome, outcome, outcome. And I just think that’s selflimiting and I love lots of parts of what we call AI. It’s really fun to be able to ask questions of things and get things done really quickly. Claude Code is incredible to use and, saves me a lot of time. But it also feels like it’s making my knowledge really flimsy. It’s like pointing every putting everything I know now on, little sticks. Whereas if I went through the process of learning, I could build these kinda, mud brick houses that are just, stuck on hills of stuff and if you try to knock it over, it would just stay stuck on the hill. Whereas if you take my knowledge that I learnt through a large language model and smacked it would just fall over. Like, I don’t know how to defend anything around it. And I think that’s a really big problem for us to figure out how to solve and I don’t think it’s easy ‘cause it’s not gonna be economical to do it. It’s not gonna be a It’s not gonna be, a satisfying, quick answer for people. You can’t just tap in some tokens and then have the answer come back. It’s more like if you really wanna be, the best violin player in the world, you can’t download the answer on YouTube. You’ve gotta go and do the practice and I think we haven’t, yet grappled with how to deal with that. Yeah, it’s hard though.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think, I really feel all you’re saying. I actually had thought about I wonder if your kids are going through that, ‘cause they I imagine they are right at that age where it’s just, insane. I mean, nobody knows what’s going on. It’s ubiquitous, yeah. There’s something that strikes me too when you’re saying this, is that I think for a long time we all were being told that if you had the answers, you would get hired. And it was all about having the answers. Yeah. And I think there’s a hangover right now where we had I think, I mean, I even remember just, 10 years ago or whatever, you really think I mean, I remember being in school and you really think, especially as a philosophy, you just need to know everything. You need to have at least You need to have read everything and the only way you’re taken seriously is if someone brings up a term and you already know it? Yeah. And so now I feel like there’s a hangover where that’s getting satiated, where everyone can just be relieved because all of that stuff is just right there. But after this hangover of that, maybe we realize what actually mattered was something else. -
Andrea Hiott: Maybe the friction and the tension and-
Mac Shine: Yep
Andrea Hiott: All that stuff we started with, which is really feels like what makes us human and what is life. And, maybe we can actually notice that differently. I, I wonder how we do that but I guess before we go, I just wanted to bring up, the bodily aspect, because-
Andrea Hiott: You’re a neuroscientist and we didn’t talk about it that much but you really know a lot about the parts of the brain. But also this paper I can
Mac Shine: List them for you if you’d like. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I know you can. It is amazing. But the, this paper’s about the body in a way. It’s about a changes in the body that then, And I just, I know it can be annoying a little bit, to think, oh, it’s embodied cognition and all of this but And you said before you think it’s relative to the body. But even right now in light of all that we’re going through-
Andrea Hiott: And in your work, as you’ve continued this, ‘cause I know you’re still, you’re probably doing much more with this, these ideas now. Do you try to consider, the body too? Or is it’s just too much for you in the lab or in your-
Mac Shine: No, look, it’s, we definitely do. And, I think bringing it back to the driving example maybe makes a interesting controversial claim but I think one that underlines exactly your point. The next time anyone is driving somewhere and they catch themselves, not thinking about what they’re doing, I would challenge you to pay attention to just how little you actually do with your body while you’re actually driving. And what you actually find when you’re driving your car is it’s actually the car that’s driving and you’re just doing little adjustments, like your hands will move a little bit like this or something, or you’re like You obviously have to flick the indicator but the indicator then has an entire machination inside that then turns a little light on and off at the right frequency that then people can see out the back behind you. You had nothing to do with that. And if you really think about it and you remove yourself from the piece, you couldn’t drive the car without the car being able to do all of that. And you actually probably also needed the road to be set up and smooth and have little lines on, done the right way and be a certain width and a certain, a rugosity and all these different kinds of things. And so your capacity to drive, you might say, “Oh, I’m good at driving a car,” But what you’re really good at is being in the right position to take advantage of the fact that the car can drive itself on the road that’s already ready for you. And I think this is just a silly example but it, I think it speaks to exactly what you’re talking about, that, we love to be able to pull out the driving, right? We love to pull out the variable cognition, like let’s say working memory or something and say, “Oh, here it is. I’ve found it. You know, here’s the brain bits that did it.” But none of that would have happened without the entire system of an agent in a world that had lived for however long they could do before they could do that task to actually perform the thing and your body is a huge part of that. And so for things that my group are really interested in About delegation and trying to understand deliberate behavior versus automatic behavior. We absolutely think about the body. Just recently in an experiment, we had access to neural recordings from, an animal from a collaborator, a mouse, a collaborator in the US, Nuo Li, who had essentially gone in and inhibited the output of the cerebellum while a mouse was performing a working memory task. And they actually show that the mouse can’t do that task particularly well. The task explicitly was they get their whiskers, tweaked and they have to wait a particular point in time and then they have to lick to the side that they got the whisker flicked on. So they have to It’s called a delayed match-tosample task. And if you inhibit the cerebellum during that delay period, it basically can’t do the task anymore, which is consistent with this idea that the cerebellum has to feed back the information that you need to actually do something protracted in time. But we also had data from a different group, Wade Regehr’s group, that had actually done a, inhibited a bunch of the cerebellum in mice but not recorded anything from their brain. They just take little videos of them while the mice try to walk along what’s called a rotarod. It’s this like small little rod that rolls out into the, into the distance and rotates around. So it’s a little bit of a tricky task for them. It’s a little bit like a jungle gym. They have to walk down the little rotarod. And what they found was that when they inhibit their cerebellum, all of a sudden, instead of the mouse, mice being able to like scramble across this rotarod, it starts to stumble along and its legs don’t move quite wrong and its tail’s wobbling all over the place and it basically stumbles along like it’s drunk. And what we were able to do was to take markerless pose estimation recordings of its body movements and we could do the same analysis that we ran on the brain to show that the brain activity was not predictive of the future state to do the same thing with the neural recordings. And you can actually find that very similar types of, explanations are possible from both. So essentially that both the body and the brain are evolving according to that same algorithm of trying to anticipate the next step and doing a poor job of it is both related to the body not doing a good job of predicting and feeding that information back to the brain, the brain processing it and feeding it forward to the body. But they’re really a coupled system that’s inextricably linked. And so I really personally think that thinking about them separately is, it’s possible and if you have a question that’s about, the meaning of justice and, what it’s like to do abstract reasoning or something, then yeah, you can probably get away without thinking about the body. But if you want a really deep, rich understanding of how it is that humans can do that or other animals can do it, you’re probably gonna need to start thinking about how the body’s involved in that process. Otherwise, you’re just gonna not have that same holistic understanding of how it actually works. You’re gonna have a like slice of the pie rather than the whole thing and for people like me, I really just like the answers that have that can touch everything and that’s just something that I really enjoy
Andrea Hiott: We didn’t, we don’t have time now. It’s already been a long time. But, I really wanted to ask you about this because I love what you do in your work when you’re talking about Actually, I think it’s probably the work you were doing with Matthew Larkum. I was at the Charité Oh, yeah by the way and I love Oh,
Mac Shine: Great
Andrea Hiott: What they’re doing. And, -
Mac Shine: Matthew’s amazing, yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, my gosh. I mean, I could That’s another thing. But but the, the point is I’ll try to give, a really general example. In this way that the body is doing what we’ve been talking about, a lot of those predictive models would say, if everything is going along as normal, then you just go along as normal. But you’re saying, well, okay, if you’re, if Like, if you were gonna predict that, you’re a monster Not a monster. A lion is about to come eat you or something, then you need to act, right? You don’t just-
Andrea Hiott: Say, “Okay, I was right about my prediction.” Yes. So I guess what I’m saying is already the body and all that stuff we’re thinking of as predictive isn’t separate, because of course we move out of the way-
Mac Shine: Yeah, absolutely when
Andrea Hiott: We predict. And I think you’re showing that in a way with your work. I would almost call it, ecological or Gibsonian in a, in a, in a Not in the way that Gibson meant it but that In a more immediate sense of, what you were saying before, like the body is part of what’s becoming the delegated activity-
Andrea Hiott: Already. Like in the example with the driving even, I know that if I had to go drive a car standing up, I would feel very awkward. Or like you said when you go to another country and everything’s in a different way, you’re suddenly Oh, yeah I mean, I feel like totally weird. Like, oh. So actually even though you take it for granted, you’ve posit your body, bodily position is part of what’s-
Mac Shine: Oh, yeah
Andrea Hiott: Being regulated. I don’t, I know you’re very messy with it, I
Mac Shine: Learned how to drive in Texas when we were living there and it was so weird sitting on the other side of the car, right? Oh. Oh my God. And so you’ve got the wheel and the same indicators but now with your right hand rather than your left hand you have to move the gear stick and I That was so strange but the pedals are in the same order. It was so weird That’s so weird ‘cause I was like half of my body is doing one thing and the other half’s And I’m “What is going on?” Yeah. There And don’t
Andrea Hiott: You feel crazy then? I mean, you lose the, the things you’ve been taking for granted. I even have it happen sometimes I’m in so many different countries and like the computer keyboards or something, right? Oh, yeah. Are different in different countries and you’re used to where everything is and then suddenly everything’s in a different place and you’Typo’s
Mac Shine: Everywhere.
Andrea Hiott: And you and you can’t think properly.
Mac Shine: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: You know?
Mac Shine: Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree.
Andrea Hiott: But these are,
Mac Shine: The example I even have two different sized laptops. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: What, where, what do
Mac Shine: You mean? Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. No. I have two different sized laptops. I have Oh, you do MacBook Air and a MacBook Yeah and they have different sized keyboards and so I actually realized I was really struggling to write on my MacBook Air and then I was “Oh, I got “ I one day I spent the, time on my MacBook Pro. I was “Oh, this feels so good,” And I was like just churning out writing. And I was “Oh, that’s what I’m used to writing on.” I’ve written on a MacBook Pro for 15 years or something. So yeah, it just takes time. I think so
Andrea Hiott: Much of this has such so much to do with even the problems that we study. I mean, this, these are trivial but if you think of it in terms of something like when you’re starting to have memory issues or just And the what’s actually happening and better than me, I mean, in the brain, right? Mm. When you’re doing that and you think of these, loops and what happens when they’re disrupted by the world changing?
Mac Shine: Mm. Mm.
Andrea Hiott: That’s a really interesting thing because especially if you start thinking about amnesia or, or when you think about memory loss or when you think about, Parkinson’s or something, we don’t really take it for gran we don’t really think about that bodily posture That part of it or poise almost. Yeah. -
Andrea Hiott: In terms of actually what the brain is used to. Do what I mean?
Mac Shine: Yeah. No, totally agree. And, -
Andrea Hiott: I don’t know how we do that but
Mac Shine: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, we’ve got a lot of work to do, right? We’re still super young as a field. And there’s also other sides to this as well which, people say sometimes traveling can, knock you out of ruts. I think sometimes it can be these things where now all of a sudden you were doing things automatically for so long that now you’ve got to redo them, in this more deliberate way. And in doing so, there’s like this opportunity now for refinement and sculpting of this thing that was otherwise just, sitting there gathering dust in the back of your brain? This is how I drive and this is the way I do it. Maybe that was suboptimal. And, there’s a, there’s a great line in, an old paper from John Krakauer which I really love which, pushes back on automaticity as synonymous with expertise, which says, “If you automatize at a point which is not at expert performance, you are no long you’re not an expert,” Right? Like, the thing that we would say defines an expert is that they’ve not been satisfied with their first level of automaticity. They’ve sculpted and refined it. They’ve put the time in to make sure that their jump shot looks exactly the same every single time, even if they’ve been knocked over and they’re tired and they’ve got a bruise on this thigh and, there’s a person right here versus right there or something like that. It’s the people that can deploy that skill at so, at, such an automatic way and with such precision despite all of the other variables moving around them. That really defines their expertise. And I think this is part of why, traveling and trying new things can be really fun and c ‘cause it can kinda, force you to resculpt that whole weird, complicated brain environment thing that defines kinda who we are. Well,
Andrea Hiott: You have to switch your attention back to it, too, which is-
Andrea Hiott: Within itself already something. But actually to that point you were just saying, in the paper, you I got the feeling, the one with your dad that we’ve been talking about I got the feeling that, it’s not necessarily that you do the jump shot exactly the same way every time, it’s that you can almost do what you were talking about before where you’re somehow able to know how to adjust relative to what’Yeah changing. So it’s not that you’re doing exactly the same thing even when the conditions change, it’s that actually there is no expert condition? Because every new situation will be requiring a little bit different, posture or poise. And so there’s something about that actually that at least in when I was reading your paper, I felt like that’s more what you’re saying, which we don’t like to hear because we wanna say, “Okay, you do it this way and it’s the right way,” Or this-
Mac Shine: It’s the way it’s done. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: Yeah but that’s not actually the case in any of these probably, situations. There’s,
Mac Shine: We probably don’t have, time to get into it in great detail but there’s, there’s this really incredible, sports trainer, Wolfgang Schöllhorn, who was involved in a bunch of Olympics training teams, back in the day and has all this incredible run of success training elite athletes. And he had this very different philosophy for training athletes. Rather than training them to do exactly the same thing every single time, pick up the javelin, throw it exactly the same way, what he would do is he would say, “Now I want you to take the javelin. I want you to aim Instead of aiming for the target, I want you to aim for that thing over there on the left. I want you to hit that, the side of the,” Like the little thing that they, they throw in. “And now I want you to do it off one foot. Now I want you to do it with your eyes closed. Now I want you to do it with, this really heavy weight on your shoulder,” Or something like that. And what he was hoping to do was to provide them with so much different grist for the learning mill that by the time that they’d learnt what it was that they’d learnt, they’d now learnt the robustness to all the different things that could change. And then the hope would be that on the day when they had to throw the javelin, it wouldn’t matter if there was wind. It wouldn’t matter if someone just came up and called them a dirty name. It wouldn’t matter if they had a bit of a sore hamstring. They’d already trained in so many different ways and so much variety that they could essentially execute under pressure. And I think this is a really beautiful idea. It If you wanna link this to dynamical systems thinking, it’s about shaping the basis, basin of attraction so that rather than there just being this like tiny little flimsy point, it’s now this big like river delta where no matter where you try to start, it always gets you to the right answer. And I also think it reflects on this idea that, an expert is not someone who can execute exactly the same thing every single time but someone who’s mastered the process and knows how to get from A to B, whether that’s getting the ball in the hoop, getting the sound to come out of the violin, whatever it is. But yeah, it’s a different way of thinking and, it’s, it’s fun to start thinking that way. If you start looking at the world through that lens, a lot of things look really different and different kinds of questions pop up to you afterwards.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah and just one thing I also wanted to say to your other points was, it can I think travel and all of this does open up our attention in the way that you said. But also it makes, I think it’s interesting to think about it through different diseases too, why some people need everything to always be exactly in the same place. And why those kinds of, shifts in what you have to do with your body every day can be so disturbing. There’s definitely so much more that we could explore there but I do feel like the work you’re doing is offering a different way into thinking about all of that. And so I just wanted to put it out there. But also to the point you just said about the expert, that reminds me of what I was trying to say about the, your approach, right? Not only the systems approach and dynamical systems but also the way you do your lab and the way that, you can talk about anything with anyone and you can find a path in. That feels like a similar, action that I was trying to describe before. I don’t know if it feels like that to you, if you see in your own lab that’s a, like you were saying, a, the pebbles, are attracting in that an environment. I don’t know. I just, I guess what I’m trying to get at is, since you wrote this paper with your dad and and you do have this very big scope of what that we’ve only barely touched on here Where has your attention, gone now that you’ve, delegated so much over such time? What what’s, what’s like the thing that you’re caring about right now? Is it, is it the people in the lab? Is it a certain idea? Is all of that already one thing, is what I’m trying to get at, I guess.
Mac Shine: Yeah. Great question. I don’t think there’s a unidimensional answer. A lot of it is, finding the curiosity and just trusting in it. And so a lot of that comes from people that join the lab and so they’ll have their own interests, their own fascinations, their own, confusions and really enjoying learning and learning with them. You know, try to find the thing that they find, driving them. One of my,
Andrea Hiott: You have so many cool papers, by the way. I’ll try to list them in the show notes. But like the one about temperature I wanted to talk to you about, I can’t remember which postdoc or-
Mac Shine: Oh,
Andrea Hiott: Sweet graduate.
Mac Shine: Oh,
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Eli’s amazing And then, the recent one from last year Yeah, I was just about to mention him, yeah where there were like six different animals that you all, or s-
Mac Shine: Oh, yeah. That was
Andrea Hiott: Super fun. Oh, I mean, there are so many great papers That was Brandon. You have a lot of cool stuff. Oh, thank
Mac Shine: You.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Thank you. So I just, I just wanted to give your students some Or your team-
Mac Shine: Oh, yeah. So so the two that you just, mentioned so Eli and Brandon, were postdocs with me. They’re both now fellows. They’re running their own groups. Oh,
Andrea Hiott: Wow
Mac Shine: They both came from physics and they both took the, I think, quite brave choice to come with an early young PI, right? I, didn’t really have much experience when they joined me and, they were willing to come in. And, I didn’t have like a research program that I could point them toward and say, “Hey, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this.” In fact, we took the things that I’d been doing in my postdoc. I was working on functional brain imaging and networks and these kinds of things and these kinds of analyses and cognition and we pivoted more towards really baselevel questions why on earth would the thalamus be sitting there connected to the cerebral cortex? Like, what would that do to the system? And asked quite really baselevel questions. And I have to say, when If you’re lucky enough in your career to have young, intelligent, welltrained and egoless people trust you enough that they’ll meet you in the middle and ask a question with I mean, you just have to like throw your hands up and be “Let’s go. Let’s try to figure out where this leads us.” So where we’re at now is the questions that we’ve asked and the papers that we’ve been able to work on together that have been really fulfilling and interesting almost invariably to a paper and we almost define them according to this, ask more questions than they answer. And so then you get busy trying to answer those questions. And so, for the temperature one, you can ask, well, if the thalamus can do that, what about the arousal system? And if the arousal system’s different to the thalamus ‘cause it has chemicals and G protein-coupled receptors as opposed to glutamate as the main and ion channels as the main executor, what does that do? What is the difference between those? How would you control one versus the other? What does it mean to have a system that can control this one slowly and this one quickly? How do you combine them, right? You can ask lots of questions like that. For the paper you talked about with the different species, that was Brandon’s baby, taking a beautiful concept from physics called renormalization and applying it to neural data and just finding this consistent scaling pattern across all these different animals. You then ask, well, is that there in humans? Is it that there when we’re doing these different types of cognitive tasks? Is it there when you look specifically inside a task versus generally inside a task? You can ask all these different questions. Is it there when I give a person this drug and that drug? There’s all these things you can ask that are just natural questions and you don’t know where it’ll lead you. But I think we trust the process in that the kinds of questions we’re asking, feel like they’re leading towards more coherent stories. So to bring it back to the delegation, what we’re really fascinated by now is trying to put some of those ideas down into, like real concrete terms. So rather than just saying, “Look at this beautiful story of the corticocerebellar circuit,” And, it fits plausibly that it could do that, let’s go out there and try and test it. So I mentioned those experiments where you can lesion the cerebellum and see what happens to the brain, see what happens to the body. That’s one line. Another line is to try to actually like in silico build something like this, like a little toy model of it. It’s easier said than done because the cerebellum is an exquisitely complicated circuit. You can’t just like a You can’t take like a RNN style approach and just say, “Let’s have just a bunch of random nodes randomly connected to each other and let them all wire.” The cerebellum has so much broken symmetry in that this neuron projects to that one and not to any of the others and it does it in this way at this timescale. So there’s so much detail there but we’re trying to extract the main details that we think matter and we think we’ve made really good progress there. And so the hope is that if we can come up with a version of that we can actually use to play around with, now we can start putting it into contexts and testing some of these ideas and seeing if they actually play out the way we think they do. And, man, that’s so much fun and exciting. Like I really don’t know what we’re gonna find but I can’t wait to see.
Andrea Hiott: It is really exciting and I think it goes along with so many different things that a lot of people have been doing. You talk about system one and system two, for example. Yeah. And even though I, I wanna get past the dual duality of that and think in more multiplicity, I think that model and even thinking of the delegation paper that we’ve been talking about and what you just said, there’s so much richness there that I could imagine in terms of the way we look back at our data. And I don’t know if you care much about, the hippocampal literature but this, idea now that the way we move through the world and the way we think actually aren’t that separate, is there too very strongly. So it feels like we’re trying to see the puzzle and if anyone’s gonna see the puzzle from a wider perspective, it’s probably gonna be you. But the last thing, because I really need to let you go now but the last thing is just as you were describing your lab and what you’re doing, I was thinking about care because I do always try to bring up, care and love and these words that we’re not supposed to talk about really. But that I think is probably why education is still important and will become more important in a way that we can’t foresee because it has to do with that, what we were talking about with the sports and everything, that-
Mac Shine: Mm
Andrea Hiott: Really have this urge to to collaborate and communicate and you can’t really say exactly what it is that’s moving you but you feel so moved, right? And you’re part of something. And I know it’s not every day in the lab. These are hard stuff. But, I guess I wanna say thanks for, telling students and telling people that you, approach the world in this way because I think it’s important to hear that part of teaching and being a good leader is actually asking the questions and letting the questions be asked. And I, I see that will be a sign of strength in the future. But I wonder what you think about that and just in general if that word makes you uncomfortable to think about, caring and love about what you’re doing and about, what a lab is even? Why we’re doing all this.
Mac Shine: No, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. I much of my intuition for how to navigate the responsibility of being a lab, leader or, someone who is a mentor in the lab, I think it’s really difficult in We have a very flat architecture in my group and try really hard to ensure that the different people get chances to play all the different roles. That’s very important to us. Well, it’s an example
Andrea Hiott: Of your work. You’re almost like a distributed cognition lab. Yes. I mean, you’re actually an example Yeah, of the stuff that you’re studying, which is super cool.
Mac Shine: Yeah. Well, yeah, art imitates life, right? But, in, in many ways that’s very deliberate. And it’s because we want to try to bring out the, unique expertise of each individual to make something that’s synergistically better than everything that we could have done on our own. That’s really important. But that intuition is really, built on, sports and my, my time in sports over the years. And I played a lot of sports over my life. I’ve almost never been the best player on a team. In fact, I tell my kids that the one team I was on when I was the best player back in high school, we were terrible and I think we only won one game or something. But on teams when I was, a good player but not one of the best, we won a bunch of different games, won a bunch of championships in different sports. And the to me, the thing that set us apart from the other teams that we beat wasn’t because we had the best, fastest, strongest players or whatever. It was a sense of community and care and, we wouldn’t use that term in sporting context but I think it is a version of love that we would essentially want to fight for one another. We want to make sure that my teammate doesn’t, suffer that indignity of loss or something like that. And I think that type of caring about your contemporaries and, banding together is something that we do really amazingly as a species but many other species do as well. And I think, not to get too, inside of the times, I think we’ve forgotten a lot of this, as a species and we’re very divisive and look for the worst in each other rather than trying to find the things that we can do to actually combine together. So the hope is that there’s gonna be ways forward through this and I share your intuition that it’s not gonna be through looking for who knows the answer but it’s gonna be about figuring out how to value the process and trying to find ways to bring in each of our special abilities and yeah, find out how to make the most of all of them together. But, easier said than done. We’re, we’re just, I’m just very I feel very fortunate to be able to do this job and, work with such an amazing group of people, collaborators, students, very, supportive wife who, lets me make lots of messes around the house with all my papers and things and and be absent-minded professor. But and very supportive, loving kids as well. But it’s, it’s a, it’s a great job if you can get it. Very lucky.
Andrea Hiott: Well, thanks a lot for what you do. There are a few people who everyone always says, “Gosh, they’re, they’re such great people and it would be so great to work with them.” And I know that’s flattering but I think it’s important for students and people to hear that matters. Because when you’re in an environment, it matters so much. Half the time you might not see it or hear it in the paper but there’s so much mental issues right Oh, yeah, for students and just someone who’s trying to create a caring or appreciating a caring atmosphere, I think matters so much. So anyway, Is there anything Thank you very much that we should talk about before we go? From you?
Mac Shine: No, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to read it and to ask such interesting questions. And, it’s fun to have someone coming from the philosophical perspective and pushing on some of the things that were interesting. Like, that paper wasn’t really setting out to be philosophical but I think it does have a bunch of philosophical implications that are really hard to speak about. So yeah, I’m, I’m all ears. If there are specific things, I’d be, very happy to chat again and discuss with them.
Andrea Hiott: Awesome thanks for spending time with me today.
Hasok Chang is the Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Trained first in physics (Caltech) and then in philosophy (Stanford), he is known for “integrated history and philosophy of science” and for what he calls complementary science — using historical and philosophical study to recover scientific questions that mainstream science has forgotten or foreclosed. His three main single-author books are Inventing Temperature (Oxford, 2004; winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award), Is Water H₂O? (Springer, 2012), and Realism for Realistic People (Cambridge, 2022). He is a founding figure of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) and the Committee for Integrated HPS.
Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She is one of the hosts of the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and project, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Chang throughout as part of her research, whereby she references his work.
Books mentioned:Chang, Hasok. Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.Chang, Hasok. Is Water H₂O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012.Chang, Hasok. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.Selected shorter works:Chang, Hasok. "Operationalism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online), July 2009.Chang, Hasok. "The Myth of the Boiling Point." Online hypertext paper, first posted 18 October 2007.
Key terms & concepts mentioned:
The definitions below are ordered roughly as the ideas surface in the conversation. They’re written to be listener-friendly while staying faithful to Chang’s own usage.
Epistemic iteration. Chang’s name for how inquiry actually makes progress: we don’t begin from a secure foundation, but knowingly start from an imperfect position and then use the results of inquiry to correct and refine that very starting point — a self-improving loop with no bedrock underneath. In Realism for Realistic People Chang invokes Peirce’s image that inquiry “is not standing on the bedrock of fact… It is walking upon a bog, and we can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present.” The aim is not coherence as such, but the ongoing improvement of coherence. (In the conversation, Chang stresses that he first thought iteration solved only the narrow problem of validating measurement standards, then came to see it as a very general pattern of learning.)
Operational coherence. Roughly, “a harmonious fitting-together of the elements and aspects of an activity, which is conducive to the successful achievement of the aims of that activity.” It is Chang’s practice-based replacement for truth as correspondence: instead of asking whether a proposition matches reality, we ask whether an activity’s parts hang together well enough to reliably achieve its aim. Coherence is always defined relative to an aim — without a stated or assumed purpose, the word “coherence” has no meaning. This relates to the navigational framework in that it means we always have to determine position and aim and landscape in any assessment.
Epistemic activity. “A more-or-less coherent set of mental or physical operations that are intended to contribute to the production or improvement of knowledge in a particular way, in accordance with some discernible rules (though the rules may be unarticulated).” Examples: measuring, detecting, predicting, hypothesis-testing, but also mundane actions like lighting a match.
System of practice. A coherent, interacting set of epistemic activities carried out with a view to achieving certain overall aims. (This is the unit Chang argues can be legitimately plural: several incommensurable systems of practice can coexist productively within one discipline.)
Active knowledge / “knowing how.” Chang’s term (also found in Realism for Realistic People) for knowledge that resides in ability and action rather than in propositions (this is where the pragmatism comes in) knowing how to do something rather than knowing that some statement is true. He argues proposition-based epistemology simply isn’t the right tool for evaluating methods, instruments, or institutions; for that we need to look at the coherence of what we do.
Active realism vs. activist realism (a terminology note discussed in the conversation, too). In Is Water H₂O? Chang introduced active realism: the view that realism shouldn’t be sitting back satisfied that we know a lot, but should be an attitude committed to continually learning more and better about reality. In Realism for Realistic People he renamed it activist realism, to avoid confusion with his separate notion of active knowledge (someone might wrongly hear “active realism” as “any assured possession of active knowledge”). “Activist” better captures the ever-learning, never-shrinking commitment. (The two terms are easy to run together in conversation; Chang clarifies how this has evolved for him in the conversation.)
Correspondence theory of truth (and Chang’s departure from it). The traditional view that a proposition is true when it corresponds to how the world “really is.” Chang’s two-part response: (1) For propositions, he brings correspondence “down to earth” — in real practice we only ever check the correspondence between two accessible things (a model’s prediction vs. an observed measurement; like the predicted vs. actual position of a star), never between our statements and an inaccessible metaphysical reality (Kant’s noumena, the “Platonic world”). (2) For active knowledge (”knowing how”), the very notion of correspondence “evaporates”, so the right question becomes operational coherence, not truth-as-matching. This fits well with an approach that understands any cognition as from some position in some landscape with some aim (which is the theory Hiott expresses in the navigational approach.)
Foundationalism. The idea that knowledge must rest on some ultimate, self-justifying foundation — either the fundamental laws of nature (a rationalist version) or raw sense-experience with final authority (an empiricist version). Chang says writing Inventing Temperature dissolved his attachment to foundationalism (he lost this aritlce of faith) because he saw that there is no ultimate authority in science; we start from what we’ve inherited and work our way out.
Monism (vs. pluralism). Monism is the assumption that there is a single true account of the world for science to converge on. Pluralism (Chang’s alternative, developed in Is Water H₂O?) holds that maintaining several coherent, sometimes incompatible systems of practice can be more productive than forcing premature consensus — he argues the historical evidence in the Chemical Revolution never actually compelled the single answer it’s remembered as compelling.
Operationalism. The view which was introduced by physicist Percy Bridgman in The Logic of Modern Physics (1927) is that a concept’s meaning is tied to the concrete operations (measurements, procedures) used to apply it. In Bridgman’s strict formulation, “the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.” Long dismissed as a naïve historical dead-end, it was not part of Chang’s physics or philosophy curriculum when he studied. Instead, he found Bridgman by accident. Chang recovers a non-strict, generative reading of operationalism where it is the striving to create more opportunities for learning about reality, and where a coherent multiplicity of operations is a richness of meaning rather than a problem to be eliminated.
Percy Bridgman (1882–1961). Nobel-laureate experimental physicist (high-pressure physics) at Harvard and originator of operationalism. In the conversation, Chang recounts finding a $5 used copy of The Logic of Modern Physics in a Berkeley bookshop as a graduate student and reading it on the train “like a revelation” — struck that a Nobel experimentalist could doubt everything about specific bits of physics (e.g. worrying whether the one-way speed of light there and back is really the same) with a rigor comparable to Descartes or Wittgenstein.
The one-way speed of light / relativity of simultaneity. Chang’s illustration of operational thinking: when we measure light’s speed we bounce it to a mirror and back, and simply assume the “there” and “back” speeds are equal — but we can’t independently check that. Einstein’s 1905 move (special relativity) was to show that “two events are simultaneous” is meaningless until you specify an operational procedure for determining it — and different procedures or reference frames yield different answers. This is the conceptual shock Bridgman reported having when asked to teach relativity at Harvard.
“Inventing” (why the title works). Chang notes Inventing Temperature wasn’t his title — he’d proposed The Philosophical Thermometer; an Oxford editor or reviewer suggested “Inventing.” He embraced it because invention is not “making shit up.” A genuine technological invention works only because we design it in a way nature allows to work — so invention is an “earnest engagement with nature.” We learn about the world by finding out which of our inventions (instrumental and conceptual) work out and which don’t. (Example from the book: which of William Thomson / Lord Kelvin’s competing definitions of absolute temperature survived, and why.)
Conceptual engineering. A now-popular movement in philosophy holding that our job isn’t only to analyze existing concepts but to improve them — to make them “more fit for purpose.” Chang traces its roots to Carnap’s notion of explication (tidying, sharpening, disambiguating a concept, not just describing it) and to the socially engaged strand associated with Sally Haslanger (rethinking concepts like race and gender). Chang’s twist: scientists have always been conceptual engineers — “what is science except continually inventing better ways of thinking?” — and every engineered concept is built for some epistemic aim (calculation, explanation, application, connection to other fields).
Instrumentalism (reconceived). Usually treated as the dull “opposite” of realism — the idea that theories are mere tools, not descriptions of reality. Chang wants to revalue it: if concepts and theories really are tools we do things with, that’s exciting, not deflationary — and it need not be the enemy of realism at all. As he puts it, instrumentalism is not really the opposite of realism.
Path dependence. The idea that where you can get to depends on where you started and the route you took. For Chang this is not incidental to scientific progress but essential to it: because inquiry proceeds by epistemic iteration from an inherited starting point, history is built into the structure of knowledge. “History is not just curious facts about the past… This path dependence of progress is essential to the kind of progress we have achieved.”
“The given” (reinterpreted). Not the traditional epistemologist’s “given” (raw, foundational sense-data), but what we have inherited — historically, biologically, and through the specific accumulated knowledge of a field. These are the starting points “it doesn’t make any sense to try to escape”; we begin with them and improve them.
John Dewey & the classical pragmatists. Chang credits Dewey with erasing the sharp boundary between content-learning and method-learning: we learn how to do things by doing them, and we learn method in the same process by which we learn content. This anti-dualism about knowing-that vs. knowing-how underlies Chang’s whole practice-based epistemology.
Ian Hacking — Representing and Intervening (1983). Hacking’s influential book whose very title splits science into two irreducibly different kinds of doing — representing the world and intervening in it. Chang draws on Hacking’s point that experiments are done for many different purposes (creating new phenomena as an end in itself, testing theories, clarifying what phenomena exist) — reinforcing that we must always ask what the aim of a given activity is.
Thomas Kuhn, paradigms & the descriptive/normative line. Chang is “strongly inspired by Kuhn” but deliberately avoids the word paradigm, which he thinks accumulated too much conflicting baggage. He reads Kuhn as opening up the question of the plural values scientists hold, then narrowing back to “problem-solving ability” without quite saying why that’s the point of science — leaving a “hidden normativity behind the surface descriptivity.” Chang’s alternative vocabulary — epistemic activities and operational coherence — is designed to keep aims explicit so they’re never forgotten.
Progress (aim-relative). For Chang, “we’ve made progress” means nothing until we specify what we’ve gotten better at, and to what end. Likewise “rigor”: people have “a very narrow notion of what rigor means” — the real questions are rigorous for what purpose, from what position, toward what aim.
Meaning, purpose & aim in science. A throughline: Chang argues that bringing aims explicitly into the center lets science talk rigorously about purpose and meaning without lapsing into mysticism. Hiott links this to science writer Philip Ball’s work on biology, meaning, and agency, and to her framing of these conversations under the (deliberately science-cringe-inducing) banner Love & Philosophy — the claim that what we care about in the moment legitimately shapes inquiry.
Further connections to Andrea Hiott’s “navigational approach to mind” work (whereby she references Chang and uses his ideas as inspiration, which is also the reason for these research conversations)
Hiott’s questions check with Chang’s philosophy of science to be sure she properly attributes credit to him for inspiration for her navigational approach to mind, where cognition is a body’s coherent, aim-directed movement through spaces — physical, emotional, social, conceptual. Several bridges surface explicitly in the conversation to be further explored in the future:
* From felt quality to trustworthy measure. Why Inventing Temperature resonates with neuroscientists or philosophers of neuroscience: it models how something felt (hot/cold) becomes a number you can trust, without leaving the felt origin behind. Hiott is interested in Chang’s more iterative, bootstrapping picture of how a rigorous measure can grow out of lived experience.
* Movement as the thing we can trust. Where losing foundationalism can feel like losing solid ground, Hiott reframes Chang’s “act of realism” as trustworthy precisely because it moves — a dynamic regularity “you find as you go,” not one “laid down at the start.” This maps with her navigational embodied approach to mind as ongoing rather than static representation.
* Coherence over correspondence, applied to mind. Chang’s shift from truth of propositions to coherence of actions gives Hiott a rigorous, non-mystical vocabulary for treating mind as bodily action. In her “meta-application,” she applies operational coherence not to thermometers but to different operational systems — the aim-directed bodily motion (of an insect, a dog, a person) that, on her view, is what we are assessing as mind from some position with some aim in some landscape.
* The science of colors, not thermal physics. A key distinction they draw: thermal physics can largely leave behind human bodily experience, but a science of mind (like a science of colors) cannot — subjective experience is the target, not a ladder to be kicked away. Chang suggests a relevant analogy is the physiology of temperature (which keeps the human) rather than thermal physics (which abstracts away from it).
* Holding paradox / beyond either/or. Hiott’s signature move — allowing apparent contradictions and constellating from those rather than resolving them — echoes Chang’s pluralism (resisting forced monist consensus) and his refusal of the descriptive-vs-normative and realism-vs-instrumentalism either/ors. Both treat “constellation” or plural coherence as a strength rather than a failure to decide.
* History / path dependence as constitutive. Hiott’s interest in each body’s “historical sensory trajectory” (her notion of phenomenological heritage) dovetails with Chang’s insistence that path dependence is essential — that where mind or knowledge can go is shaped by the route it has traveled.
Full Transcript (lightly edited)
[00:00] Andrea Hiott: A lot of people are thinking about these ideas of navigational mind now — there’s going to be a symposium, and a conference about it. It’s more neuroscience-related, and I could send you that; it’s a lot about propositional thought. But — well, thanks for being here, thanks for doing this.
Hasok Chang: You’re welcome. It’s wonderful to meet you.
Andrea Hiott: I’ve heard a lot of neuroscientists talking about Inventing Temperature, the book you wrote.
Hasok Chang: Really? That’s — what, twenty-two years ago now.
Andrea Hiott: I don’t know if you know this, but it’s a pretty inspirational book for people in neuroscience.
Hasok Chang: I didn’t know that. I know a couple of people in neuroscience who know it, but I didn’t know it was widespread at all. So what do they find useful in it?
Andrea Hiott: I think it’s because you show that you can start with something that is felt — and then actually get to a point where a felt quality can become a number you can trust, scientifically. Right now, a lot of the ways we do neuroscience use EEG or fMRI to talk to each other — and that’s not what you show happened with temperature. There’s also something about the iteration. It’s kind of messy, and the story you tell in that book — you never could have imagined it would get to where it got.
Hasok Chang: Right. And sometimes you don’t get anywhere very nice from the mess — sometimes the mess just remains messy. Other times you find ways of tying things together and tidying up, so you get a clear enough view of where you’ve got to. And then you can use that little [00:02] island of order as a platform to take the next step from.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly — and I think that’s part of the inspiration. Thinking of science that way isn’t how we necessarily learn it in school. You’re supposed to follow the linear path and find the answer, and if you don’t, you didn’t succeed.
Hasok Chang: Right. And generally — not just that book — what a lot of people find interesting in my work is that I tend to show that the allegedly simple things in the physical sciences are really not simple at all. When people say, “Oh, biology is so complex, living systems are messy” — well, yes, but something apparently simple [00:03] is also very complex once you start looking at it seriously. Temperature was one clear example.
Andrea Hiott: I wonder what’s resonated most with you over these years. The next book even — Is Water H₂O? — that title almost sounds like a paradox at first, which I like. A lot of what I’m trying to figure out is how we can hold what seems like contradiction and then see it differently. And I wonder whether that book became an invitation for you — to see the world, and what knowledge is, differently.
Hasok Chang: Yeah, certainly. [00:04] Something I’ve said to people is that every time I write a book, I lose an article of faith. In writing Inventing Temperature, what I lost was foundationalism, which I’d been very wedded to. I had this naïve notion as a physics student that we just find the fundamental laws of nature and the rest follows — that’s the foundation of knowledge. You can also have an empiricist version: the foundation of everything is experience, which has ultimate authority, and we build on it. But when you go through a story like the one in Inventing Temperature, [00:05] you realize there is no ultimate authority. We just have to get on with what we’ve got and find our way out of it to a better place.
And when I wrote the second book, Is Water H₂O?, the article of faith I lost was monism — the idea that there’s one world, one truth, and it’s the job of science to find it. So that book became a common reference point for people trying to think more pluralistically about science. And with the next one — Realism for Realistic People — [00:06] what I lost was the ideal of pure science: the idea that you can just have knowledge and then apply it to practical things. That’s why I went more positively into pragmatism there. Each major research project should be a way to teach yourself to see things differently. That’s what’s valuable about philosophy.
Andrea Hiott: It’s interesting you frame it as a loss, because as I read your books, it’s not a loss — it’s a reckoning. A clarification.
Hasok Chang: Right.
Andrea Hiott:[00:07] With foundationalism, when we lose it, it seems like we’ve lost the foundation. But your movement toward movement itself — the act of realism — actually starts to feel more like something we can trust. It’s not a foundation in a static sense, because it’s always moving, but there’s something regular about it.
Hasok Chang: Yeah — and I think it’s a more dynamic kind of regularity. Not a regularity laid down at the start; a regularity you find as you go. What you’ve been telling me about your work — this attempt to understand knowledge with a [00:08] sense of movement — is very much in line with how pragmatists have thought: knowledge is something we achieve as we go on doing things. Knowledge is what crystallizes out of coherent activities. You don’t start with a roadmap for how to achieve that coherence of action; you only learn it by twisting and turning. This is what I especially appreciate about John Dewey — he [00:09] erases the sharp boundary between content-learning and method-learning. For him, we learn how to do things by doing them, and we learn about methods in the same process. That’s a real lesson from the classical pragmatists.
Andrea Hiott: I think so too. And I wonder how you’d put grounding knowledge — I’m thinking of Percy Bridgman a little. I’m wondering when he came into your world; it seems like it was before you got into pragmatism, but maybe they were coming together.
Hasok Chang: Long before, yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I’d love to hear that, because for me it seems you’re grounding knowledge in what we do — if “grounding” is even still the right word — rather than in some higher reality. I feel Kant in you, in the framing aspect — that’s important when you get to mind-independence. And I also feel we don’t need the other world, the Platonic world, [00:10] as part of the explanation. I’d like to understand how that’s related to how you had these “losses,” and how Bridgman came into your life — this move into a more practical, active way of thinking, which is very different from Kant, and yet I can see how you could have gone through Kant to get there.
Hasok Chang: How I got where I am is a complicated story, probably not worth anyone else’s while. But Bridgman I found literally by accident. I’d heard of operationalism, and I’d heard his name, but he wasn’t part of any curriculum — neither in physics nor in philosophy. Operationalism was supposed to have been [00:11] popular in the early twentieth century, mistakenly, and something people quickly grew out of — that’s what I thought. But during the first year of my PhD in philosophy at Stanford, I happened to go to a used bookstore in Berkeley, where we sometimes went to hang out. And I came across The Logic of Modern Physics, Bridgman’s first book. I thought, “That’s going for five bucks — I’ll just buy it, why not?”
And reading it on the train back, [00:12] it was like a revelation. There are so many amazing things about Bridgman, but one that immediately popped out: here’s a Nobel Prize–winning experimental physicist who also knew how to doubt everything. It’s the same scale of resolute doubt you see at the opening of Descartes’ Meditations, or in bits of Wittgenstein — but Bridgman was doing it about really specific bits of physics. For example, he agonizes forever about the [00:13] one-way speed of light. When we measure the speed of light, we reflect it off something and back, measure the time, and assume the speed going and coming back is the same. But he says: how do we know it’s the same? We don’t.
That’s exactly the kind of thing Einstein taught us — that we don’t know what we’re saying when we say two events are simultaneous unless we specify the operational procedure for determining it. We have the metaphysical notion that if two things happen at the same time, they do, whether we know it or not. And what Einstein showed in his 1905 special relativity paper [00:14] is that such a statement is meaningless without a specific procedure — because different procedures give different answers. Einstein settles on the light-beam convention: take two points in space, put an observer at the midpoint, and if light flashes from two events arrive at the observer at the same time, the events are simultaneous. It sounds like an elaborate, pointless exercise — [00:15] but if you define it differently, or view it from a different frame of reference, you get a different result. That’s the relativity of simultaneity.
Bridgman goes through all of that. When his department at Harvard made him teach relativity — because someone was on leave — he read the original Einstein and had a conceptual shock. [00:16] We’d all naïvely believed Newton when he said that things like space and time are well known to everyone and don’t need to be defined — which is literally what he says in the Principia. Bridgman instead says: no, we have to define everything, and the most secure way of defining something is through the operations we actively perform — even if those operations are mental, or what he called “paper and pencil.” Sorry to go on —
Andrea Hiott: Please do, I love this. It says a lot about Inventing Temperature, too — that temperature is another thing we take for granted. It seems like you can’t have “inventing” in front of it.
Hasok Chang: That’s right. And in a way, philosophy is the art of doubting. If we don’t doubt [00:17] what’s taken for granted, where’s the philosophy? On the title, by the way — Inventing Temperature wasn’t my title. When I sent the manuscript to the press I’d called it The Philosophical Thermometer, which I thought was nice. When everything was accepted and we were about to go into production, the Oxford editor said, “We’re not sure about your title — what about Inventing Temperature?” And I immediately thought: that expresses precisely what I was trying to get at. To this day I don’t know whether it was my editor or a reviewer, [00:18] but it was a good idea.
When I explain the sense of that to people, I say: you may think invention is just making things up, but it’s not. An actual invention, in the technological sense, only works because we design something in a way nature allows it to work. Invention isn’t make-believe — it’s an earnest engagement with nature. We don’t know nature directly, but we learn something by learning which of our inventions work out and which don’t. So in Inventing Temperature you see many conceptual inventions as well as instrumental ones — [00:19] for instance, which concept of absolute temperature (William Thomson invents more than one) works out. The second one does, partly because it fits the new thermodynamic theory and partly because it agrees numerically with the older gas-thermometer standard. I didn’t put all of that in terms of operational coherence back in 2004, but that’s what it’s about.
Andrea Hiott: In the newer book you’re being more philosophical in a specific sense. The others are philosophical, but they’re historical — you tell it through history. This one [00:20] is about concepts and truth and reality — you’re facing the questions directly. And it makes Inventing Temperature make more sense to me. You’re putting words on things you had to assume were there.
Hasok Chang: I think that’s right. I haven’t written this up, but I recently gave a talk revisiting my work on measurement in terms of operational coherence, and it made sense — to me and to the audience. One thing I’ll add about “inventing”: through all these turns I’ve come to appreciate [00:21] conceptual engineering, as people call it in some philosophical quarters now. How much exposure have you had to that idea?
Andrea Hiott: It comes up a lot more in the past year, I’d say.
Hasok Chang: It’s becoming really popular, and for good reason. Part of the inspiration goes back to Carnap — his notion of explication, where he says that in explicating a concept we’re not only explaining what it means, but tidying it up, making it more precise, disambiguating, [00:22] improving it. He kind of leaves it there. The conceptual-engineering people picked that up, along with the more socially oriented strand from Sally Haslanger and others on race and gender. That point of view gives a more active sense of what we do in philosophy: we’re not just doing analysis, we’re trying to make our concepts more fit for purpose — which makes you ask, [00:23] what is the purpose? We often treat philosophy as a realm of eternal truths and forget to ask why we’re trying to solve a given problem.
But shift your gaze to science, and it’s obvious scientists have always been conceptual engineers. What is science except continually inventing better ways of thinking — new concepts, refinements of old ones? And scientific concepts are put to purposes: [00:24] calculation, explanation, application, connection with other fields. There are particular epistemic aims we’re trying to achieve with these concepts. This also puts a new spin on instrumentalism — usually seen as the not-very-exciting opposite of realism. But the idea that concepts are tools, theories are tools, and we do things with them — I find that really exciting.
Andrea Hiott: So do I. And you use the word inventing there, with concepts. You’re also a philosopher of history, and I think the historical aspect matters, because — as you said — [00:25] we’re not just coming up with things out of nowhere, randomly. There’s also how it relates to language itself. You brought up Carnap; there’s a confusion I’d like to see dealt with, about how much of this is about propositional knowledge, and how much is conceptual engineering in the sense of language. But either way — whether we think of it in a wider active-real sense or a more propositional, traditional sense — there’s a historical aspect, [00:26] which has a lot to do with how we’re going to use a concept in the moment we’re using it.
I bring that up because a lot of what we’ve been discussing can still sound like everything’s just floating. But with active realism and operational coherence, I feel this takes the historical aspect to heart — and gives us a way, as you were describing with Einstein, to see from different perspectives and still understand that the whole is real, is connected. That’s been a very hard tension to hold in philosophy and science. And I think you address it through — is truth correspondence? — and how you’ve eased into operational coherence instead. Does that make sense? Do you see what I’m trying to unpack — something in your work that doesn’t fit into instrumentalism or conceptual engineering as we typically think of them?
Hasok Chang: I’d hope instrumentalism or conceptual engineering could rise to meet this.
Andrea Hiott:[00:27] It could add something, expand — so we don’t have to choose between. But there’s something you’re offering that isn’t in that conception, as I’ve read it at least. Though I haven’t read everything.
Hasok Chang: Your emphasis on history is really important — a big part of my methodological work is worrying about how to bring history and philosophy of science together, but we won’t go into that now. At the end of your abstract you mention epistemic iteration, and I think that’s quite important. I didn’t realize this when I was writing Inventing Temperature: I thought epistemic iteration was [00:28] just how this particular problem — validating measurement standards — got solved. I thought it might have more general applicability, but I left it there. In the years since, I keep seeing it in other people’s work and my own. What I’ve come to realize is that there’s something very general about that iterative pattern. Whenever we go from some very imperfect starting point to something better — how else would it work? [00:29] Other than to start from what we’re given.
And this isn’t “the given” as traditional epistemologists mean it. It’s what we’ve inherited historically, what our biological constraints are, what we’ve learned so far in our specific fields. These are starting points it makes no sense to try to escape. We start with what we’re given, find clever ways to learn something, and that lets us come back and improve the starting point. Looked at this way, [00:30] history is part of what we’re trying to achieve — because without history the whole process has no place to exist. History isn’t just curious facts about the past, or incidental to what we’ve achieved. This path dependence of progress is essential to the kind of progress we’ve achieved. That’s the point.
Andrea Hiott: Very well said — path dependence is exactly the right term. I was also thinking that Is Water H₂O? starts to talk about systems of practice, which is a step toward operational coherence, isn’t it? It’s like turning anti-foundationalism into a stance. [00:31] And that’s where you start to develop active realism, right?
Hasok Chang: That’s right. There are some terminological difficulties, because I’ve been making up the terminology as my thoughts developed. That’s why in the recent book I relabeled my brand of realism as activist realism.
Andrea Hiott: May I ask you about that? It’s interesting.
Hasok Chang: What I meant by active realism already in Is Water H₂O? is that scientific realism shouldn’t be sitting back, satisfied that we know something well. It should [00:32] be an attitude, an outlook — even an ideology — committed to learning more and better all the time. Then, because in Realism for Realistic People I used the phrase active knowledge to mean, roughly, “knowing how,” I didn’t want active realism confused with that — someone might think active realism is just any assured possession of active knowledge. It’s not. So I changed it to activist to indicate more clearly that what we want is this ever-learning attitude, [00:33] rather than shrinking to preserve what we think we already know. But the sense of active realism from Is Water H₂O? is still there.
Andrea Hiott: It’s still there. And maybe this is a point where you could tell me about correspondence — because as I see it, realism isn’t about correspondence. It’s about an activity, and that’s a big difference — especially compared to traditional ways of thinking about knowledge. So in a way, that’s what the people in Inventing Temperature are doing: they’re not just finding pre-given things, they’re constructing a system that keeps helping them understand things better. [00:34] It’s not that we don’t find what’s true, in each moment from each position — but because it’s real, and because we’re all part of it, it’s going to change too. So it’s like finding ways to measure it accurately through the regularities that don’t change. I know that’s a complicated way to say it. What I’m really interested in is how you got from correspondence to — how to think about active knowledge such that we don’t need correspondence.
Hasok Chang: Right. There are two things to say about correspondence. One: even for propositional knowledge, I’m trying to get away from the standard [00:35] correspondence view of truth — correspondence between what our propositions or theories say and how the “Platonic world” out there is. Because it’s a common complaint that such correspondence is never checkable.
Andrea Hiott: And just for listeners — this is what science has kind of assumed: that we’re going to find things that are then always going to be true.
Hasok Chang: That’s how scientists often think. But if you look at their practice, yes, they’re always checking correspondence — but what are we checking? [00:36] The correspondence between two things that are both accessible. If we’re painting something in a naïve-realist way, we have the object as I see it and the object as I paint it, and we compare the two. But there’s no checking the correspondence of anything to an inaccessible reality — the kind metaphysical realists or Platonists imagine. So there’s always checking for correspondence, but it’s a mundane activity: checking the predictions of our models against [00:37] what we observe in the lab; checking predicted positions of stars against what actually appears tomorrow at 8 p.m. Both sides of the relation are accessible. So one thing I’ve tried to do is bring propositional correspondence down to earth. Correspondence is here and now — we know how to check these things. We’re not talking about correspondence between phenomena and noumena; that’s not the business of science.
That’s one side. The other: when we go into knowing how — active knowledge — the whole place of correspondence [00:38] evaporates. That’s how my thinking about pragmatism started, because I found standard proposition-based epistemology not useful for thinking about how scientific practices develop, or how we evaluate the quality of methodologies, instruments, even scientific institutions. There’s this whole other dimension of doing and knowing where a proposition corresponding to anything [00:39] isn’t going to get us far enough.
When we ask how to evaluate propositional knowledge, at least in principle we ask whether the propositions are true. But when we ask about the quality of active knowledge, that answer won’t cut it — which is why I started thinking instead about the operational coherence of what we do. So instead of the truth of propositions, we think about the coherence of actions. And when you think like that, correspondence enters only [00:40] peripherally into the notion of the quality of knowledge.
Andrea Hiott: Because one thing this is all measured against is: how do we know we’re progressing? Your artwork example is interesting — there’s the way we compare, “does it look like this?” But instead you can switch to: as I’m actively working — because we never stop creating this artwork; it’s never done, and the artwork itself is always changing — it’s like you’re trying to paint something that’s alive. So how do you think about whether you’re progressing? As you show: is each iteration achieving more coherence? It’s like we’ve shifted how we’re considering it. [00:41] And it’s incredibly helpful — instead of thinking there’s a static thing there that I have to find and replicate, which we all sort of know isn’t really how it works.
Hasok Chang: And it’s certainly not how modern people think about art. When we have the naïve view of art as reproduction of what we see, what we don’t think about is the question of purpose — why are we doing art? In that view it’s taken for granted that the purpose is to reproduce the shape we see. But we’ve left that behind in the world of art. [00:42] Likewise in science, we have to ask: what is the purpose of the activities we’re carrying out? People like Ian Hacking were very useful here — take the title of his famous book, Representing and Intervening: already there are two wholly different kinds of things scientists do. In his chapters on observation and experiment, he points out we do experiments for all kinds of reasons — sometimes creating new phenomena is a goal in itself, [00:43] sometimes we test theories, sometimes we just want a clearer picture of what phenomena there are. Same with theory, same with anything in science. The one thing I was trying to achieve with operational coherence is to bring the question of aims explicitly into the center — because coherence is only defined with respect to an aim. Without an aim that’s articulated or at least assumed, talk of coherence makes no sense.
Andrea Hiott: This is what I love. There’s a way of doing science that needs to open up and take all of that into consideration — instead of, say, in neuroscience where we’re doing [00:44] stimulus–response. It’s a lot more like the artwork example. And to do that, we really need these new ways of thinking, which I think you’re offering. I started this as research conversations, but I publish it under the title Love and Philosophy — which makes people in science cringe, on purpose, because we’re not supposed to talk about care and love. For me it has to do with what we care about in the moment. I bring it up because I talked to Philip Ball — he’s talking about biology through [00:45] meaning and aim, and it resonated with what you’re saying. A lot of people want to do that, because purpose and meaning clearly matter — but we’ve been told we shouldn’t use those words. Frameworks like operational coherence, and thinking of knowledge as active, give us a rigorous way to do that which doesn’t fall into mystical patterns.
Hasok Chang: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: You can be mystical — but if you’re doing science, it’s like you have to be more rigorous, because you have to say from what position, toward what aim, in what context — rather than have all that assumed, which it is right now. It feels like what you’re showing with all your books: getting more rigorous about how we understand what we’re doing.
Hasok Chang: People often have a very narrow notion of what rigor means. Rigorous for what purpose, in what way? That’s the question. Same with progress: when we say we’ve made progress, that means nothing unless we specify what we’ve gotten better at, [00:46] and to what end. The whole philosophical debate on scientific progress had a sense of futility. Kuhn started opening it up when he talked about the different competing values scientists have — but then he wanted to bring it back down to problem-solving ability, without quite saying why that was the most important thing about science. [00:47] He’d have said, “Well, it just is,” and retreated to the position that he was only describing what scientists do, not dictating what they should do. That was a very fine line between the descriptive and the normative. In the end I think he was saying: science as we know it is great, so if we describe how that great enterprise works, we’re saying what’s actually good. It’s a hidden normativity behind the surface descriptivity.
Andrea Hiott: With paradigm, I feel he was opening up beyond either/or, [00:48] but it’s very hard for us to do that — so even his work gets lumped onto one side. Maybe some of that is pushback, to bring it back to the other side.
Hasok Chang: That’s one reason I’ve been strongly inspired by Kuhn but didn’t want to use the paradigm concept — it had accumulated too much baggage in all kinds of directions. With my talk of epistemic activities and operational coherence, I wanted to put aims at the center explicitly, so we never forget them.
Andrea Hiott: That’s so important — as is the way you tell what I think of as the real story of pragmatism, which is another thing that’s gotten distorted.
Hasok Chang: That’s a whole other issue.
Andrea Hiott: It depends where you are, on what position. [00:49] A lot of people have loved it forever and get it, but at different points of analytic philosophy or neuroscience it seemed like something else. That’s another discussion — but it has to do with that historical aspect: seeing things in a context, and seeing that we have to see the context each time. We don’t just assume there’s one context that always applies.
Hasok Chang: That’s right.
Andrea Hiott: That’s also the hard thing. I was going to ask you, in a general way — a lot of the frameworks start with sensation or feeling. There are many ways to use those words in neuroscience and psychology, but in Inventing Temperature it’s hot or cold, and then we get to temperature. That’s overly condensed —
Hasok Chang: That’s chapter one, yes.
Andrea Hiott: — but you don’t leave the feeling part behind.
Hasok Chang: No, never. You never leave it behind.
Andrea Hiott: It’s always part of it. But when I think about [00:50] something like mind, or consciousness, those words are a little different from hot/cold. And yet, trying to think about it through your frameworks is very helpful — until, at a point, it starts to feel like subjective experience itself is the target. There’s not going to be a ladder to kick away. So I had this thought: could there be an “inventing mind” way of thinking about this — if you know what I mean?
Hasok Chang: I guess some people would want that. All these post-humanists would think our mind was just an accidental step along the way to something greater —
Andrea Hiott: Oh, I really don’t mean it like that —
Hasok Chang: I know.
Andrea Hiott: That’s exactly the difficulty — I wouldn’t want it taken that way. It’s more almost linguistic, whereas [00:51] temperature is a measurement that’s not linguistic.
Hasok Chang: Something you said a minute ago is very important — that with the science of mind, it’s always going to be about subjective experience in some way. It has to be. With temperature, thermal physics isn’t really about our bodily experience of hot and cold. So the neuroscience you’re working in isn’t like thermal physics — it’s more like the physiology of temperature, where you’d [00:52] never want to leave behind the human experience. When it comes to thermal physics, scientists really want to leave the human origins behind, and to a large extent they can — not entirely. Another parallel would be optics: if you’re doing lasers, you can leave behind the visual experience humans started with. But if you’re doing the science of colors, it makes no sense to leave human experience behind. [00:53] I tend to think neuroscience or psychology is like the science of colors. It won’t mean anything if you leave behind the human experience that got it all started.
Andrea Hiott: I agree — and that’s why I’m trying to pick up that whole scaffold and shift it a bit, thinking about mind as a bodily action. If it already is a bodily action, you can’t leave the body behind. And you can have many different kinds of bodies — an insect, a dog, a person — each with a different bodily action that is mind. Then — and we’ll have to talk about this next time, because I’m too excited but I have to go — what happens when I use your work is almost a meta-application: I’m applying the coherence to those different operational systems, which would be the bodily motion in context, with an aim.
Hasok Chang: Yeah. Well — next time. Does that make sense? Yes. [00:54] Next time we talk I’d love to hear much more about that, and how you’re navigating those treacherous waters.
Andrea Hiott: That would be wonderful. I just want to express my appreciation. When you described finding the book in Berkeley, on the train — I’ve had a moment like that. A lot of what you’re doing is putting words on things a lot of people are trying to understand. So thanks for spending time with me.
Hasok Chang: Thank you, I appreciate that.
Andrea Hiott: Good luck with all your work. That talk you mentioned — relating operational coherence to Inventing Temperature — isn’t recorded, I guess?
Hasok Chang: I’ll ask the organizers whether it was recorded; I don’t think it was. I’d be happy to share the slides if that would be of interest.
Andrea Hiott: I’d love to see that — because the “meta” thing I described has to do with that iteration.
Hasok Chang: I’ll send that. Well — till next time.
Andrea Hiott: Till next time.
Hasok Chang:[00:55] Very good to meet you, Andrea. Thanks so much.
Andrea Hiott: Very good to meet you, and thanks so much for the time. Be well.
Hasok Chang: Take care. Bye.
Notable quotes & clips
* “What is science except continually inventing better ways of thinking?” (~[00:23])
* “The path dependence is essential.” (~[00:30])
* “Every time I write a book, I lose an article of faith.” (~[00:04])
* “Invention is not make-believe — it’s an earnest engagement with nature.” (~[00:18])
* “Each major research project should be a way to teach yourself how to see things differently.” (~[00:06])
* “The allegedly simple things in the physical sciences are really not at all simple.” (~[00:03])
* “Philosophy is the art of doubting.” (~[00:16])
* “Instead of the truth of propositions, we’re going to think about the coherence of actions.” (~[00:39])
Further reading & sources
Hasok Chang’s books
* Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford University Press, 2004) — winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award.
* Is Water H₂O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Springer / Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2012).
* Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Key sources referenced in the episode
* P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (1927) — origin of “operationalism” and the “operational definition.”
* Hasok Chang, “Operationalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
* Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (1983).
* Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
* Rudolf Carnap on explication; Sally Haslanger on conceptual engineering of race and gender.
* John Dewey / classical pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey) — the “walking on a bog” image is Peirce’s.
Andrea Hiott’s work
* Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness (forthcoming).
* “Radical Embodied Relation at Any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating,” Topoi (2025).
* Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast & Substack; bibliography at andreahiott.com/inspirations.
* Why another translation? Keya’s modest but pointed goal: a Gita that works in a Western philosophy classroom. Why she keeps every name for the characters (relationality matters—Arjuna as “son of Kunti” keeps his mother present) rather than flattening them the way some translations do.
* Action without attachment. Not indifference, not Kantian action-for-action’s-sake, but how you act—without being consumed by the fruits of action (karma phala) while still holding your relationships close.
* Yoga as a redirection of attention. Why Keya refuses to translate yoga as “discipline,” and how Krishna’s call to “be a yogi” points toward union at multiple levels—self and body, self and Krishna, self and everything.
* Beyond dichotomy. The dualism of the Gita isn’t Cartesian mind-body dualism but self-body dualism—opening room for embodied cognition, embodied relationality. And Krishna’s repeated call to “go beyond dualities” of good and bad, not by transcending them but by understanding them.
* Prakriti and Purusha. The Samkhya framework of nature/action and consciousness/witness, and how the Gita folds them under Krishna as “lower” and “higher” nature. Equanimity (samatvam) as groundedness that isn’t experience-lessness.
* Tension as potency. Reframing tension not as a negative but as possibility—and caring itself as a kind of tension we learn to hold without dissolving the paradox.
* The Gita’s difficulties, honestly. Its problematic verses on caste, B.R. Ambedkar’s scathing critique, and how the same text can hold radically different readings—including those of Gandhi (who called it his “eternal mother”) and of the people who killed him.
* The expanding circle of care. Why going inward, on Keya’s reading, doesn’t make us less socially responsible—it widens responsibility, because the “self” one turns toward is not a private inner space but something that dissolves the limits between self and world.
* A love story. Not a romance, but love as deep caring, vulnerability, and growing together—including Krishna’s own vulnerability in telling Arjuna, in the end, to “do what you think is the right thing to do.” And conversation itself as an act of care.
* Feminist Philosophy of Mind (co-edited with Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford UP, 2022) — background for the care/feminist threads
About Keya: “Her intellectual journey bridges continents and traditions. Trained in both India and the United States, she holds two Ph.D.s—one in Philosophy of Language from the University of Hyderabad and another in Philosophy of Mind from the University of Connecticut. She has been a professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she also served as the director of the Humanities Program and Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities (2018-22). Her research and teaching facilitate critical conversations across cultural and disciplinary boundaries....”
Mentioned:The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Keya Maitra); Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation; Joel Kupperman; Daniel Kolak / Wadsworth Philosophers Series; Hilary Putnam; Naomi Scheman; the Mahabharata; Vyasa; Gandhi; B.R. Ambedkar; Thoreau and Walden; Samkhya philosophy; care ethics and non-ideal theory.
Paid Subscribers can also access the early video with Andrea and Keya here.
Action without Attachment, Constellating Different Dualisms, and Conversations as Care
Love & Philosophy, with Andrea Hiott and Keya Maitra
Open [00:00]
Keya Maitra: I think we sometimes assume tension always means something negative, but tension can also mean a potency, a possibility. It’s a love story, if love means caring, deeply caring, which also means a kind of vulnerability. Loving is giving a part of yourself, an opening, a vulnerability. Of course we see Arjuna’s vulnerability. But maybe we could also speak of Krishna’s vulnerability, because Krishna doesn’t say to Arjuna, “You need to do this.” At the end he says, “Do what you think is the right thing to do.” That’s what makes it a conversation. Conversation requires a kind of vulnerability, a kind of growing together.
Introduction [00:01]
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone, this is Andrea Hiott. Thank you for listening to Love and Philosophy. As you know, I promised to do these intros improvised, wherever I am, off the cuff and from the heart. So for those of you here for the first time, that’s why this might sound a little in the moment: it is. I want to speak with heart.
Today I’m talking with Keya Maitra about the Bhagavad Gita, a very important text in Hinduism. We’ll tell you all about it in a bit. Some of you already know that I’m trying to think of a constellatory approach to what we’ve thought of as dualisms. Those are big words, but think of things like either/or, like mind/body. We often think through those either/or contrasts. A lot of this show is about how we can let those be: not dissolve them into each other, but see what else they constellate with, what other constellations are part of that either/or.
This conversation gets into that in a very beautiful way. I think the conversation itself becomes a way of doing it. We also talk about the power of conversation, what conversation is, and how it’s a kind of portal. This relates a lot to the Gita, because the text itself is a conversation, and also to the way Keya translates and discusses it in her book.
It’s funny, because I fumble a little at the start and call her book a philosophical commentary, since that’s what you usually call translations that include a section discussing each part. But as she corrects me, it’s definitely not a commentary. It’s what she calls a Philosopher’s Corner. That little fumble is actually wonderful, because it opens us into talking about what really matters: what’s so philosophical about this text, and how we can think of texts in ways that still relate to us. This text has kept going for a very long time. There’s obviously a reason. So why? And what does it mean for how we think about who we are in the world?
An important phrase associated with the Gita is action without attachment. How do you act without being attached? If you’ve ever felt really attached to something, you know how much pain comes with that: wanting a certain outcome, or loving someone very much and then going through some kind of loss. What we get to here is that you’re not getting away from the feeling, the care, and the love. Instead, you can act in a way that actually feels expansive. Action without attachment isn’t about cutting yourself off. It’s about realizing that what you are is beyond what you had thought, that you’re more expansive.
I’ve been going through a lot lately (I’ll tell you about it some other time), and what’s helped me, in this conversation and in reading through the Gita, is thinking about how what I see in the world and the people around me are part of something I’m also part of. When you let go of your attachment to what you think you are, you feel more of this wider, bigger, moving, amazing… some would say spiritual, you could also think of it as philosophical; think of it however comes naturally to you. This bigger movement that we are literally in, and as, and part of. What I might think of as way-making. A movement you can’t really describe, but that we’re all part of.
So a lot of what we discuss is about rethinking our connection to that more powerful, but also part-of-us, ecological world or multiplicity, whatever you want to call this force, and how we can become more specific within it. We talk about how, in her translation, she kept many of the very specific names. Connecting to that expansive nature that is ours is also about being more precise and more specific in each moment. There’s always a truth in each moment, but that truth changes as we change. That’s another theme that comes up a lot on this show: how to be more specific and also more expansive.
I know this is getting abstract. That’s the danger of me talking while I’m on the road about to go to the airport. But this is what comes up: this conversational aspect, how messy and nested and kaleidoscopic our relationships to ourselves and one another are, and how that’s the beauty of it. It’s like a ladder that goes in all directions, and we can explore ourselves and our connections to each other and this deep love that is conversation. If you really think about what conversation is (and it’s one reason this is Love and Philosophy), it’s a kind of care. If you really care about something and you’re trying to explore it together, you’re trying to learn, you’re listening. Listening is a very big part of it. And as you do that, you move beyond the either/or.
I think Keya expresses this in her philosophical work on consciousness and the Gita, and in the book we talk about here. That’s one reason I wanted to have her on. You can also tell she really cares about people, about her students, about these ideas, and about being a philosopher. She started in analytic philosophy and wrote her dissertation on Hilary Putnam, a wonderful philosopher I’ll have to tell you about another time. I love her work because it doesn’t stay within the usual bounds, but it respects them, and it’s very rigorous.
I hope you’ll check out her work; I’ll put some in the show notes. Mostly I hope you enjoy this conversation, and that it helps you connect to what is more expansive around you, which is also you. I hope it helps you care more about yourself and realize that you’re not just in your head. You are part of an ongoing, co-creating, embodied, beautiful world. It can be very painful and very hard, and that’s why we need conversations and need to help one another: conversations that help us better understand this powerful, sometimes very difficult flow-world we’re part of.
So wherever you are today, if you love someone, think of it, feel it, let it be. Let yourself expand with it. Maybe tell them, or show them, or just look at them with that love in your heart. It makes a big difference in the world. If anything, it’s the reason we’re here; we just don’t understand it yet. The more we can do that, the more potentials open in the world. And everybody has it, no matter who you are or how you define yourself. You have this power just by being alive, by being a body.
I send you lots of love today, and good feelings and strength to get through whatever you might be going through. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
The Conversation Begins [00:08]
Andrea Hiott: Hello, Keya. It’s so great to have you on Love and Philosophy today. Thank you for being here.
Keya Maitra: Thank you, Andrea. It’s beautiful, and I’m so happy and honored to be here.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you. Today we’re going to talk about Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction, published by Bloomsbury in 2018. It’s a translation with philosophical commentary, and so many connections could come out of that. But to start, I’d love to think about this work, and about you growing up: how you came to write dissertations on philosophy in different countries, and what this work meant to you as you were discovering yourself and discovering philosophy.
Keya Maitra: Thank you. One thing I do want to say: it’s not a philosophical commentary.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, okay.
Keya Maitra: I call it the Philosopher’s Corner.
Andrea Hiott: Right, the section at the end of each chapter.
Keya Maitra: Right. The reason I say it isn’t a philosophical commentary is that the Gita has had extensive commentaries written on it, starting at least in the medieval period in India. I’m not doing that kind of Gita scholarship.
But to your question about growing up: I grew up in a Hindu household, a Bengali-speaking household. My mom didn’t know Sanskrit, but that didn’t stop her from memorizing the Gita in Sanskrit, and she would read some verses in the morning. My first encounter with the Gita was in my middle school Sanskrit class. We read some parts, chapter 11 actually, for translation. But honestly, doing philosophy in India, I didn’t encounter it at all in a philosophy classroom: not in undergraduate, master’s, MPhil, or PhD. I knew the Gita existed. I had heard it sung and recited, and I had read some of it. But academically, I really met it when I was doing my second PhD in Connecticut. As a grad student I was asked to teach Introduction to Comparative Philosophy for Joel Kupperman, and he taught the Gita. I was using his syllabus, and I said, “So you do the Gita?” And Joel said, “Yes, of course.” That was my philosophical encounter with the text.
Since then I’ve done a lot with it. I don’t know whether I want to call it a love story, but I do want to call it a story of discovery. Every time I go back and read it, I find something. I don’t agree with everything in it.
You also asked what I was doing in India, if not the Gita. Even in my master’s, I was introduced to Western analytic philosophy. I had a professor who had just come back from, I believe, a year in Boston, so we studied the history of analytic philosophy. I went on to write a PhD on Hilary Putnam, so very much philosophy of language. I always loved philosophy. Maybe I’m a slow learner, but what philosophy means, and what it means for me, still intrigues me, and that’s why I love your angle: love and philosophy. The feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman wrote about philosophy as being one’s whole self in writing. I feel my journey with philosophy is about coming to be my whole self with philosophy. I love philosophy of language, I’ve done philosophy of mind, and now I’m also trying to do virtue epistemology. And the Gita has somehow anchored this journey for me, knowingly and unknowingly: this coming to be my whole self. I spoke too much, so I’ll stop.
Andrea Hiott: No, that’s beautiful. You can keep going if you want, because there’s so much richness there. Maybe we should tell people what the Gita is, for those who don’t know. One way to do that might be to think about what’s different about what you’re doing with it. I like that you corrected me about the commentary, because I was a little flustered and basically reading from my notes. But that’s actually a really important point about your book: the way it’s translated, and that you have a corner. So maybe we could say a bit about what the text is, and then why you wanted to do a different sort of translation, because in my very limited experience this is a very different sort of translation.
What the Gita Is, and Why Another Translation [00:15]
Keya Maitra: That’s a very good question. It’s a conversation, written in Sanskrit. It’s part of one of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata, in its sixth book. It’s a very dramatic setting. Two sets of cousins are trying to figure out who has the right to the kingdom. They couldn’t work it out, especially for one side, so they’re getting ready for war at Kurukshetra, where the battle will happen. Krishna is serving as the charioteer of Arjuna, one of the major fighters. They are all Kshatriyas, and Arjuna is a renowned archer, among other things.
We don’t get all of that in the Gita itself. As the Gita starts, the characters we hear from are, interestingly, a narrator called Sanjaya. There is an author, Vyasa, but in the Gita we don’t hear the author. We hear Sanjaya narrating to the king on the throne, Dhritarashtra. He is blind, so Sanjaya has been given divine eyes; he can see anything that happens, and he narrates. What he’s narrating is this conversation between Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna starts out as a human being, the charioteer, but in the course of the Gita it’s revealed that he is the supreme god. He’s reality, basically.
The Gita is an 18-chapter conversation, 700 verses. It’s kind of funny that everybody stood still until these two worked it out over 700 verses!
Andrea Hiott: That’s true.
Keya Maitra: Some Indologists, at least the ones I’ve read, argue that the epic’s storyline circulated in various parts of India in various versions before we got a critical edition. One argument is that it used to be very much a Kshatriya story: warfare, and of course ethics, right and wrong. And the Gita is a kind of insertion by the Brahmins: it’s about thinking and contemplation, and questions about why we should do what we do. So that gives your audience some idea of what the Gita is.
As a separate point, I’m just starting a project on what we teach in Indian philosophy, what an Indian philosophy curriculum typically includes, and I’m finding all kinds of interesting things about how that has evolved, why some things have come in and others gone out.
But why my translation? If anybody reads my introduction, I open with that question, because I think it’s a very important one. The Gita has been translated hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, in all languages. My mom read it in Bangla. It’s in all the Indian languages and in European languages. And every year there are two, three, or four new English translations. So why mine? I had a very modest aim, and I still do. I was teaching the Gita in a Western classroom in America. When I first taught from Joel Kupperman’s syllabus, he used Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation, so I did too. It’s in poetic form, beautiful and accessible, students loved it, and it has some of the drama. But having grown up in India, I knew more of the storyline and context, and I wanted more from the Gita. Then there are translations plus commentaries that are more involved than I would like. So my goal was to translate the Gita so it would work in a philosophy classroom. That’s why the Philosopher’s Corner comes after every chapter.
One thing I can point out right away: Krishna uses all kinds of different names for Arjuna, Arjuna uses different names for Krishna, and Sanjaya also uses different names. Barbara Stoler Miller essentially says, “Yes, they’re different names with different meanings, but it doesn’t matter to us.” For me it does matter. Whether you call somebody one thing rather than another in a particular context: I want to at least give the reader a sense of that relationality. For example, Arjuna is often called the son of Kunti, referring to his mother, and it was important to me that that relationality comes through. So I kept all the names. And the Philosopher’s Corner is where I wanted to show, especially for the Western classroom and for cross-cultural purposes, how the Gita is still philosophically relevant for people who haven’t studied Indian philosophy for years and years. I do think it’s very philosophically relevant. That doesn’t mean everything in it has to be agreed with, or shouldn’t be critically engaged. But it’s a text with a lot of potential for philosophical engagement.
Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. I love how it feels conversational, if you agree with that, and I wonder if that’s how you teach too, with a lot of dialogue and discussion. I also think it fits the text itself, even in the way you described it: that situationality, even the example of the names. In a way that’s a conversation with time and with the past that we’re respecting, and it becomes part of the book. I can see how a translator might think, “That’s not important; no one will get it.” But part of it is getting how important it is. So there’s almost a nested conversational quality that you carried into your translation. Does that make sense to you, and do you teach that way too?
Keya Maitra: That’s beautiful, Andrea. When I’m successful, I think it’s because I never lose that sense of conversation. And for the role of conversation in philosophy, you don’t have to look further than Plato and his dialogues.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly, that’s what I was thinking. It’s a beautiful blend with what you’re doing in relation to the Western tradition, and that conversational aspect is a very natural place for it.
Keya Maitra: Yes. I’m so thankful Joel gave me that opportunity to teach, and then that I published my own translation. It seemed like an audacity. My mom was alive at the time, and when I told her I was going to publish it, she was horrified. For her this was a very religious text, and I’m not very religious. She said, “How can you translate something like that? It’s not just some kind of philosophy.”
Andrea Hiott: That fits these themes so well for me, because as you were talking I was thinking a lot about your mom, and the mother part of all this. It can seem very masculine, but it really isn’t. I was picturing you as a child listening to it, and wondering whether that was a conversational experience of a different kind, more situated, even bodily. You said it’s affected you in ways you’re only starting to realize, and I wonder whether growing up with it, and it being so important to your mom, is another conversational layer of all this for you.
Keya Maitra: Yes, I agree there are all these layers. People sometimes say that with certain texts, you turn every corner and something comes to you. It feels that way with this one. It was very important to my mom. And there was serendipity in my translating it. Daniel Kolak used to edit the Wadsworth Philosophers series, and I was writing something on Putnam for him. He learned that I read Sanskrit and was also a philosopher, and he said, “You have to translate the Gita.” I said, “No.” He said, “Why not? It’s true the Gita has been translated many times, but for Westerners, for a philosophy classroom, why don’t you? Please do it.” That’s how I started, and it’s how I’ve kept my focus. The people who have translated it over hundreds of years: I can’t measure up to them in terms of Gita scholarship. But for me it’s an amazing text.
So how do I teach it? It is a conversation, though Krishna does most of the talking. Arjuna talks for all of the first chapter, but after that it’s mostly Krishna. That’s true in some ways of Plato’s dialogues too. But what I’ve seen in the Gita is that there are moments where Arjuna asks a very potent question. So you don’t already know where it’s going. In the conversational element there’s flexibility, receptivity, an openness to where it goes. Henry David Thoreau, apparently, took only a few books with him to Walden Pond, and a translation of the Gita was one of them. This book has spoken to people from all walks of life, not just philosophers. Why? I think one reason is that different people can see themselves in it and become part of that conversation. So the conversational element you point out is essential to this text.
Action without Attachment [00:31]
Andrea Hiott: It is. And that gets into dialectics; there are many ways to think about how that opens worlds. It’s especially interesting in this book because there are, in a sense, two parts, and we often think of that as a dualism. It’s mirrored in a way, but it’s a very different kind of dualism, and we can get to that in a minute.
First, I want to say that even the way you tell the story of coming to translate this, and of coming into philosophy, reminds me of the feeling I get reading the book: learning action without attachment, openness. Even the way you said, “No, I can’t do that,” and the people in your life who maybe wouldn’t have expected you to do it. You said serendipity, and that feels like part of it. So why don’t we think about action without attachment? It relates here, and it can lead us into the dualism theme. Is that the main theme you’ve seen people remember or pick up on from this book in the Western world, or any world, really?
Keya Maitra: I think so. In Indian philosophy, and the Gita is very much situated there, action, karma, produces residue for which you have to be reborn. So one argument could be: I should stop acting. Then I’m not producing any more residue. The Gita is very clearly not impressed by that argument, because Krishna is asking Arjuna to take part in this war, not to go off into the forest.
Early on, Arjuna essentially tells Krishna, “You’re telling me all these things about the self being real and the body not being real, and then you’re asking me to do this violent act?” Because these were two sets of cousins. Arjuna goes onto the battlefield and sees his cousins, his teachers. They grew up in the same royal court. So he says, “These are people I should be worshipping. How can I take up a weapon against them, fight them, possibly even kill them?” It’s a very compelling argument.
Andrea Hiott: Very intimate. And I think we all feel that in different ways: maybe not this exact situation, but feeling like we have to do something that doesn’t feel right.
Keya Maitra: Exactly. It’s a moral dilemma. In response, Krishna says, “Of course you have to act.” And he develops a huge ontology for why: the nature of the body is such that, like it or not, you will act. You don’t have much control there, because you have a body and the body acts. But where you do have some control is the attitude with which you act. Do you act attached to the fruits of action, karma phala, the results, the outcome? Can you act without being consumed by a particular result? So action without attachment means not being attached to the results or outcomes of action, versus acting simply because you need to act.
I published something a while ago on this, because people often think it’s somewhat like Kant’s deontology: action for action’s sake. And there’s something to that, but it misses the point. Krishna is saying: do your action, but not by abstracting away all your relationships. Hold on to your relationships, but see that you can act without being consumed by, or fixated on, a particular result. That’s where the whole yoga he’s talking about comes in. He tells Arjuna to cultivate yoga, and I think that yoga is a kind of redirection of attention. Maybe I’ll stop there; I don’t know if I’m answering your question.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, there’s so much. It’s so exciting to me, because I really want to talk about yoga and attention. But this also makes me think again about why the conversational aspect matters so much, and the relations, the way you kept the names. Because it’s not abstract, as you said. It’s not that we’re just letting go. It’s so intimate, so bodily, so unavoidable, that we’re learning to hold the tension. You talk about this in the book, and I’m having to stop myself from going into all of it or we’ll run out of time.
Here’s a generalization: we often think, “Oh, we just go with the flow,” maybe something like the Dao in Chinese thought. And, like you said with deontology, there’s something to that. But I feel part of why this text has lasted so long and affected us so much is the conversational aspect. It’s too messy. We understand that there’s always tension, always another way to look at it, always another connection coming in, and you can’t get away from it. So it becomes something else, which I’m not quite sure how to handle. But I think the way yoga is used is doing it: the conversation itself becomes how we hold this and transform. Does that make sense?
Keya Maitra: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. You can comment on that, but I also want to look at the word yoga, and karma too, because these words are so popular now that I feel we lose the tension in them. But I get it reading what you’ve written. Even the way you leave certain words untranslated, I feel the tension in that, and I wonder if you felt it too, and whether these words are as important as I’m so excitedly proclaiming.
Letting Go, Equanimity, and Tension as Potency [00:39]
Keya Maitra: This is lovely. There’s so much in what you said. I want to mention two things. One is letting go, and tension. People often say, “The Gita tells you to let go.” Yes. In that way it’s like a Daoist text, though I’m not commenting on Daoism here. But for the Gita, what you are letting go of is also very important. One could argue it’s even more important.
As a side note, in my most recent work I’m working a lot on equanimity, samatvam, which the Gita talks about. I think it’s such an important concept. Samatvam is letting go, but not letting go such that you don’t care. You care a lot, but not simply about particular selfish outcomes. So yes, the Gita says let go, but what you let go of matters, and how. I think the beauty of the Gita is its focus on how you do it.
And then the tension you mention, which is beautiful, Andrea. The setting itself is one of huge tension. Arjuna is a renowned fighter, and he says, “No, I’m not going to fight.” Mahatma Gandhi did his own translation and read the Gita every morning. He called the Gita his mother, his “eternal mother.” Elsewhere he said the Gita is like the Hindu Bible. In Hinduism you don’t have one text; you have many, and the Gita is one of them. But he thought it was so approachable that a practicing Hindu mired in a moral dilemma could go to it, the way he thought a practicing Christian might go to the Bible. So the Gita has that potency, because it’s a relatable conversation. And conversation itself has a kind of tension in it. I think we sometimes assume tension always means something negative, but tension can also mean a potency, a possibility.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, I think about that a lot.
Keya Maitra: I want to hear what you think, and then I’ll talk about yoga, since you asked.
Andrea Hiott: I was going to go to yoga too. But exactly: that’s what I meant by tension with a T, since we’ll also talk about attention, and the two sometimes sound alike. I often think of caring as a kind of tension, and I know you bring that out a lot. Not in a bad way. It’s getting away from thinking of things only as good or bad. That we’re connected is hard. Loving the people around me, my family, everyone: it’s not easy, and yet it’s wonderful. We talk a lot on the show about how to hold that, how to hold the paradox without dissolving it. I think that’s a common confusion, and it’s what I find really exciting about this text and your work with it, both in terms of the dualism I mentioned and in the way yoga matters so much.
I’m still figuring out how to articulate this, but in the way it’s already helped me, the yoga as it’s presented is a way of holding the tension so that we recognize ourselves in Krishna, or in what’s around us. And that’s how we can act while still caring. For me that’s a huge revelation. It’s so different from it all being about me letting go. I think that has to do with yoga, and also with this very different idea of what we’d call dualism. That’s a lot, so take it wherever you want.
Yoga as Union, and a Different Kind of Dualism [00:45]
Keya Maitra: The text has so much. Let me try to touch on each of your points. Yoga is very important. It’s mentioned throughout the 700 verses, maybe more than 150 times. One reason I kept the word yoga rather than translating it (Barbara Stoler Miller, for example, translates it as “discipline,” and that’s the typical choice) is this: if you translate it as discipline, you get the popular meaning of yoga today, physical exercises and stretches, maybe with some pranayama or meditation, as in some yoga studios. But when Krishna keeps telling Arjuna, “Be a yogi; once you’re a yogi you won’t be so bothered by this,” he isn’t telling Arjuna to learn to stretch. Arjuna was in very good shape, I think! I’m being flippant, but I think it’s important to point out.
Andrea Hiott: No, it is.
Keya Maitra: What Krishna has in mind is yoga as union, an ultimate union. I love your phrase “holding together,” because the tension itself isn’t simply erased. At the end of chapter 18, Arjuna says all his doubts have been answered and he’s ready to fight. Remember, the Gita begins with Arjuna Vishada Yoga, Arjuna’s despair or dilemma. So there is a resolution, but it doesn’t come from denying the question. It comes from understanding it. It isn’t necessarily pure transcendence. It’s holding things together while also seeing them clearly, seeing your relationship with Krishna and everything else.
So, yoga as union. In many verses you can see almost two levels of union, or perhaps an awareness of union and then a comprehension of it, which are different things. One union is that the self is in me. The body has things that are mutable, that will die. But there are also parts of me that are undying, eternal. That’s one union. Then there’s the union in which that same self is in Krishna and in everything else. So union works at multiple levels. Yoga here isn’t just physical exercise. Physical practice might help you understand some kind of union, but you also need philosophical clarification.
That brings me to the dualism. There’s a beautiful verse in chapter two. Arjuna has just said, “Krishna, I’m not going to fight, because this is horrendous. Yes, our enemies want to fight. But if I give in and fight too, how am I any different? The result won’t be good.” Then early in chapter two, Krishna says, in effect, “You sound wise, but you’re grieving for those who should not be grieved for. Our bodies change. We were children. We change clothes.” And in this system you also believe in rebirth: when one body ends, you become somebody else. So why is that so worrisome? There’s something in you, in me, in all of us that no weapon can touch.
I’m not suggesting this is a foolproof argument. My students often say, “But he doesn’t answer Arjuna’s worry about killing his revered teacher,” not just anybody, but a particular person. People make arguments like that, and I think Krishna doesn’t do a great job there, or maybe doesn’t think he needs to. But the argument is: why are you so worried about killing? If you think killing ends someone’s existence, well, these people go on existing. You’ll kill their bodies, yes. But in chapter 11, Krishna says, “Guess what? They have all already been killed by me.” And he says, essentially, “Be my instrument.” What does that mean? People have said many things about it. I think maybe they are killed by their own actions: the karma they’ve created, the decisions they’ve made and how they made them. This is the accumulated effect they have to face.
So, the dualism. In Western philosophy of mind, usually from Descartes (not so much Aristotle or Plato, though Descartes scholars might disagree with me), we have mind-body dualism: mind is one thing, body another, or mind versus the physical. Interestingly, that distinction appears in other Indian philosophical schools too. But in the Gita, mind, body, everything goes into one category, and then you have the self: eternal, undying, unchangeable. So there is a dualism, but it’s not mind-body dualism. It’s self-body dualism, or self versus the physical. And here’s the consequence: if you go with mind-body dualism, how do you explain psychophysical interaction? I think of saying X, and then I physically say it. Mind and body seem intimately connected, but how is that possible? The Gita doesn’t have that worry. You’ve mentioned embodiment several times, and I think the Gita can embrace embodied cognition, embodied action, even embodied relationality, in a way that the typical understanding of mind-body dualism may not have the conceptual resources for.
Prakriti, Purusha, and the Witness [00:55]
Andrea Hiott: These are words I can’t really pronounce, so you can help me: prakriti and purusha?
Keya Maitra: Purusha. Prakriti and purusha.
Andrea Hiott: So one of them is what you were describing: almost everything we’d put into mind and body. I don’t know if you’d call it nature. And the other side is the self. This seems to be what I was trying to get at with what yoga helps us feel into. It’s beyond the body, but it also sort of is the body, isn’t it? It contains it. I don’t feel a separation where there’s a cut.
Keya Maitra: That’s my reading, though of course people often read their own philosophy into it. There’s a school of Indian philosophy, Samkhya, that talks about this dualism of prakriti and purusha. And you’re right: prakriti is often translated as nature. That’s one meaning of the Sanskrit word. But nature here doesn’t just mean the beautiful ocean or a tree. It means basically everything; in Krishna’s usage, everything that changes or can change. Mountains and all.
Andrea Hiott: Sorry to interrupt, but is it everything that’s active? Is it all action, in a way?
Keya Maitra: Yes. All action.
Andrea Hiott: That’s very helpful for me, because this dynamism is such a big part of all this.
Keya Maitra: Yes. And in Samkhya, purusha is the seat of consciousness. In the Samkhya school, liberation comes through discriminative knowledge: realizing that our troubles, our ignorance, arise because we confuse these two.
Andrea Hiott: So it’s a kind of discernment? Could we even call it a feeling of witnessing, of growing in the capacity to notice? Which leads us toward attention, I guess.
Keya Maitra: That is in the Gita. It gets confusing because the same words are used. What I was trying to say is that in the Samkhya system, the dualism of prakriti and purusha actually remains.
Andrea Hiott: I see.
Keya Maitra: In the Gita, Krishna does say, “That is my prakriti,” the three gunas, and so on. And he identifies himself as the highest purusha. But there are also verses where he says, “This is my lower nature; this is my higher nature.” So most of the time they’re subsumed under him.
The idea of the witness is very much there, because of the atman that remains in all of us. Is it something that simply witnesses and doesn’t experience anything? I’d argue it does experience. Witnessing is where samatvam, equanimity, comes in. What does it mean to be duḥkheṣv anudvigna-manāḥ, sukheṣu vigata-spṛhaḥ? It means that in success you’re not overjoyed or carried away, and in failure, when you’re sad, you’re also not deeply perturbed. It’s a kind of groundedness. And I want to argue that groundedness is not experiencelessness. Of course I’m having the experiences; what matters is how I engage with them. That’s the sense in which the witness, the atman or self, is distinct from all the action.
At the end, Krishna says, in effect, “I don’t need to act at all, but I act. Why doesn’t my action bind me? Because I don’t act for particular outcomes.” So the problem isn’t action itself. It’s the attached way we typically act. He isn’t saying, “Let’s subdue prakriti, and everything will be hunky-dory once we’re rid of it.” I don’t know that we could do that. Action in itself isn’t the problem. How we act is. And witnessing matters here because it highlights that evenness, remaining unperturbed.
Beyond Dualities [01:01]
Andrea Hiott: That makes me think of how I always sense a kind of multiplicity here. Kaleidoscopic or constellatory are words I’m trying to use in my own philosophy, so, as you said, I’m reading things in. But I do feel it in the text. Even though there’s this dichotomy, I wonder if it creates a kind of suspicious spirit around it, as in, maybe there isn’t a dichotomy. Because even with all these contrasts, and, as we said, it’s not about dissolving them but learning from them, there seems to be something else we can’t quite talk about.
Even when we ask why we’d want good karma if it means we keep coming back (isn’t the point to transcend?), that’s complicated. Or think about what’s happening here: Krishna is convincing Arjuna to go kill people he cares about. That’s awful to even think about; it’s hard to talk about. And yet as you read it, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about constellating that. It’s not about making a choice, or even about all of us being separate. It’s very hard to put into words. But I wonder if you’ve sensed that: a way this text might nudge us beyond some of the very categories that seem so important to it.
Keya Maitra: That’s a very astute observation, and it’s one of the things I find most inspiring about the Gita: not religiously, philosophically. In many places Krishna says, “Go beyond dualities.” Doubters don’t do very well in the Gita, because it’s Krishna’s message and Krishna has an agenda. But on dichotomies: go beyond the dualities of good and bad. You might say Arjuna’s anxiety, his initial hesitation, his perplexity, come from not being able to get beyond good and evil. He understood good one way and evil another, and he asks Krishna, “How can you ask me to do this evil thing?” And what Krishna does (and as a philosopher this is self-serving) is show the importance of ontology, of metaphysics, for ethics and for making sense of one’s life. You don’t do metaphysics because you have spare time. You need it because it gives you meaning; it makes life worth living. So there’s a way of going beyond dualities here: not necessarily transcending them, but understanding them. You may disagree with Krishna’s metaphysics, but that’s one way to think about moving beyond dichotomy.
Andrea Hiott: That’s true, and I love that you bring up meaning. I was thinking of how Krishna tells Arjuna, “Your nature will lead you to fight; you’ll get there,” but then also says, “Reflect on this, and do as you choose.” So there’s this constant paradoxical spirit, with the tension that, as you said, is already there. Being able to deal with that differently becomes very meaningful.
You mentioned Gandhi, and I know this text was hugely important to him. But is it true that it was also very important to the people who killed him?
Keya Maitra: Yes.
The Gita’s Difficulties, Honestly [01:06]
Andrea Hiott: These things are very hard. The subject of this book, this battle: people still face these things, and we face them in different ways. Maybe not life and death in this context, but I find them really hard, and not easy to fit into two categories in any absolute way, because we can always come at it from a different position. Whoever wrote this, the writers of the book, whatever we put into that—as you said, sometimes we put things into a book we don’t even know we’re putting there. Many people say it carries some political message. Leaving that aside, reading this book you can start to feel how much we have to accept that life is complicated, far more complicated than we’ve been able to deal with. That’s why we put things into contrasts. But maybe we can start to feel into something else, which connects to karma and the different lives, the constellating and the multiplicity. I’m rambling, but I wonder if that makes sense to you, and whether it’s been hard for you, especially with students, to think about this, given what I said about Gandhi but also given the subject matter and current events. Have you felt that tension?
Keya Maitra: You weren’t rambling, Andrea. Let me say a little about me personally. I think this text, perhaps more than others (other people must have other texts), shows the importance of authenticity: really resonating with Arjuna’s dilemma. Krishna could have just said, “Blah, blah, blah, let’s fight.” But no, he takes the time to convince him. And you’re right, it is convincing, because at the end Arjuna doesn’t say, “I’ll fight because you say so, but I still have worries.” He says, “My questions have been answered. I’m ready to fight.”
Andrea Hiott: But he still doesn’t win, right? Or does he? I’ve always wondered.
Keya Maitra: They win, but at such a cost. The Mahabharata itself is an incredible text, because it too is trying to go beyond dichotomies.
Andrea Hiott: That’s what I’m getting at. Even that becomes a wider, nested complexity.
Keya Maitra: Very much so. That’s why I think about authenticity: understanding that I have worries, and all of it is me. That’s why I really resonate with the Gita’s idea that everybody is your friend: don’t treat friends differently from foes. Talk about today’s world!
And about me: honestly, Andrea, this text has grown on me. Again, not because I’m enamored with it. For example, there are at least two verses in chapter 18 that, as I read them, really codify the caste system: these are the castes, and these castes should do these things, because of karma theory and the three gunas. I find that absolutely problematic. B.R. Ambedkar, from the Dalit community, was chairman of the drafting committee for India’s constitution after independence in 1947. He was an “untouchable” (Dalit is the word we use now), and he was scathing in his criticism of the Gita, and I see many of his points. So I’m not enamored with it. But over time the Gita has become, for me, less somebody else’s text and more a philosophical text that, like any philosophical text, has its own foibles and blind spots. That doesn’t take away from the fact that it can be read in ways I find very philosophically inspiring. That’s my relationship to it.
You mentioned the people who killed Gandhi. I believe it was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. They’re supposed to be devoted followers of Hinduism, and there’s now a holiday for the Gita, Gita Jayanti, in the Hindu calendar. But my reading of the Gita and theirs are very different. And I take it as a capacity of this text, maybe a virtue, that it can accommodate all these readings. That has given me, not consolation exactly, but a kind of clarity: I don’t need to worry about how others read the Gita or use it. I have my own relationship with it as a philosophical text. The tension is still there, but I don’t see it as a problem. I see it as a source of renewal, of new ways of reading.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, that’s what I was trying to get at by picking out the word meaning. By sitting with the tension, and cultivating a different kind of attention (which is a big part of your work), you can do what you just did: see this text as something we read differently depending on where we’re coming from and what we’ve put our attention on. Learning that this happens is what I’m trying to think about with constellating, and with the tension that is caring. Right now we often think there are only two sides, so we have to prove each other wrong, and we get nowhere.
I agree with you. I tried to read this when I was 17 or 18, in a kind of spiritual moment, and I felt really hurt by it. I felt a bit like Arjuna at the beginning: I can’t deal with this, I can’t hear this. Now that I’m older (not really wiser, but I’ve been through a lot more), it reads very differently. And it has to do with exactly what you just demonstrated: we start finding meaning when we allow what seem like opposites to constellate. That’s my way of saying it. And I feel this text, through its conversational nature and the historical, situated nature you bring out, is a way into that.
Attention [01:15]
Andrea Hiott: But we have to talk about attention, because without it this doesn’t make much sense. We won’t go through all the theories of consciousness, though that’s another important part of your work. But I think you’ve approached consciousness from an empirical perspective that brings attention into this discussion in an important way. Would you say something about attention (A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N, not tension) and what it’s meant for you in relation to this text?
Keya Maitra: Thank you, yes. When people come to the Gita, they often repeat, “Action without attachment, action without attachment.” And in the classroom, students would ask me a very good question: “Isn’t action without attachment kind of indifferent, uncaring? How can that be good?” I’d say, “You’re absolutely right to ask.” And it emerged for me that action without attachment is really about how you act: where you put your attention. When Krishna asks Arjuna to be a yogi, he’s really saying, “Cultivate this redirection of your attention.”
Normally, when we act for a particular outcome, our attention is on making that outcome happen. We work toward it; that’s what effort is. So what does it mean if I’m not attached to the outcome? It means I’m redirecting my attention to the nature of the world: not just to me, but to who I am, according to Krishna, my relationship to everybody else, and, in the Gita, my relationship to Krishna. So becoming a yogi, the whole project, becomes redirecting one’s attention. And I’ve argued that consciousness is where that redirection happens. Awareness is where you can be aware.
I want to argue (I have argued, and maybe I need to argue it better) that our actions, our being in the world, don’t suddenly lose their intentionality. They’re still about something. I’m still talking to you, so there’s a certain aboutness. But redirected attention means that even as I talk to you, I’m talking in a certain way. The way I’d put it: I’m really enjoying this conversation because of its dynamic: constellatory, open, receptive. Some people call it deep listening. It’s a conversation where your attention isn’t fixed only on the end result, but on the process, and also, for Krishna, on certain ontological truths.
Andrea Hiott: That reminds me of what we were saying about the self and what’s usually thought of as dualism, and what I was trying to say about yoga, feeling into that connection. A different kind of attention happens when you feel into a self that isn’t limited in any way, that doesn’t speak the language of limitation. Those contrasts stop making sense, even though they still exist at the same time. So attention is kind of the magic power. And it’s what we cultivate and practice through certain kinds of conversation.
Care, Non-Ideal Theory, and the Expanding Circle [01:21]
Andrea Hiott: We need to start wrapping up, but there’s a lot of care in all this. You write about care ethics, and I said earlier that caring is a kind of tension in itself. In your other work that word feels very present, and it seems connected to attention, and maybe to a different kind of autonomy than the one we usually think of in Western philosophy, or as Westerners (that word is strange, but you know what I mean). How can we ease into that? Your students raised something powerful about this seeming passive, and it’s something I’m constantly trying to express: when we hold contradiction, we don’t become passive. We become more caring. We feel into ourselves as caring. It’s almost too much, which is almost why we can’t do it. So non-attachment can sound like the opposite of caring, but the way you’re expressing it, it’s actually about more caring, and taking full responsibility.
Keya Maitra: Absolutely, it’s definitely caring. Think about love: Krishna says to Arjuna many times, “You are my friend. I love you. You are my dear friend; that’s why I’m telling you this truth.”
I’ve argued, and others have too, that part of what explains the Gita’s shelf life, its staying relevant for so long (especially in Hinduism, where there are so many texts), is a kind of internal diversity. The message has a simplicity, but once you understand it, there’s diversity in how you get there. There are the three or four yogas people talk about: the yoga of action, the yoga of knowledge, and bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, where Krishna says, essentially, “Knowledge is difficult, action is difficult too, so don’t worry about those. Just act as my devotee, as if acting for me.” So devotion and relationships are absolutely important: how caring matters, and what caring might mean.
There will be some differences to work out with the typical secular understanding of care ethics, because secular care ethics has nothing like the role Krishna plays in the Gita. Krishna is Brahman, the ultimate. We don’t have that, so there’s an ontological difference we need to be careful about. But overall, there’s the importance of relationship, of holding different things together, and you also see a kind of non-idealism. We don’t live in an ideal world. In feminist theory now, and elsewhere, non-ideal theory is important, and I think the Gita could go along with it, at least as I read it. Life isn’t ideal. If it were, Arjuna wouldn’t have to kill his own people. But how does one act with the hand one is dealt? So we’re back to authenticity, and acceptance. There’s deep caring, and the importance of relationships runs all through the Mahabharata, and definitely through the Gita.
Andrea Hiott: I think that’s part of the constellatory thing. I was also thinking of intersectionality and the many ways feminists have come at that idea from different angles, which would fit really well. And is it in your paper where you address what your students raised, the idea that going inward makes us less socially responsible? You’re saying that’s actually the yogi’s way of attention, because that objection still treats the self as some inner space, and the self is actually a dissolving of that. So responsibility widens, and so does the circle of care. Isn’t that in your paper?
Keya Maitra: Yes. I was actually responding to one of the reviewers.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, that’s where it came from.
Keya Maitra: And you’re absolutely right: it’s the circle of care. That’s why those verses matter to me: of course love your friends, but also your enemies, and don’t be so affected by success or failure. Those are very hard things to do. But if you try, what does it mean? What kind of cognitive shift does it require? And in many places the Gita says it isn’t just about knowing, just filling your head with certain beliefs. That’s fine, but you have to practice it, to cultivate that realization. And it’s important to act while holding all of it together. I love how you put it: an expanding circle of care.
A Love Story [01:29]
Andrea Hiott: Well, it feels like that. This may be going too far for you, but there’s a way to think of this as a love story: coming to love more of our enemies, or the world, or the difficult parts of ourselves, or what we’re supposed to do. Or even, going back to where you started, showing me how interested you are in so many kinds of philosophy: that curiosity, letting that constellation be. For me this could be a kind of love story. But to end, I’m curious what you’d say about that word, love, if anything.
Keya Maitra: Lovely. I would call it a love story. Maybe not a love story in the Erich Segal sense…
Andrea Hiott: Not a Hollywood love story.
Keya Maitra: Nothing against that! But a love story if love means caring, deeply caring, which also means a kind of vulnerability. Loving is giving a part of yourself, an opening, a vulnerability. Of course we see Arjuna’s vulnerability. But maybe we could also speak of Krishna’s vulnerability, because Krishna isn’t saying to Arjuna, “You need to do this.” At the end he says, “Do what you think is the right thing to do.” That’s what makes it a conversation. Conversation requires a kind of vulnerability, a kind of growing together. So yes, I’d say it’s a love story.
Andrea Hiott: I hadn’t thought of that before: how conversation, real conversation, is actually a kind of caring. That’s very beautiful, and a nice way to end, since we started there. Thank you for your work, for taking up the offer to do the translation, for teaching, and for talking with me today. I’ve really enjoyed this, and I really appreciate your work.
Keya Maitra: Thank you so much, Andrea. I loved this conversation, and the time flew, which is a good sign for me. Thank you for inviting me. I’m so happy to have had this opportunity.
Andrea Hiott: Be well. Bye.
Keya Maitra: Bye.
Closing Verse [01:31]
Andrea Hiott: Hey everyone, here’s a little excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 47. It’s a famous, frequently quoted verse. I wish I could say it in Sanskrit. It’s spoken by Krishna to the warrior Arjuna, and it’s about your duty, your dharma. It’s been helpful for me today, so I’ll just give it to you:
“You have a right to do your duty, but not to the results of your work. Do not think you are the cause of the results, and do not try to avoid your duty.”
All right. Bye.
Links and References
This episode and the show
* Episode page and show notes (#94): https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/p/action-without-attachment-with-keya
* Love & Philosophy: https://loveandphilosophy.com/
* Andrea Hiott, “way-making: the Navigational Approach to Mind”: https://communityphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-navigational-approach-to-mind
* UNC Asheville faculty page (includes the Gita and Kant paper): https://go.unca.edu/faculty/keya-maitra-ph-d/
* Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018): https://bookshop.org/books/philosophy-of-the-bhagavad-gita-a-contemporary-introduction/9781350040199
* “Consciousness and Attention in the Bhagavad Gita,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2022), the paper discussed near the end: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association/article/consciousness-and-attention-in-the-bhagavad-gita/7D21BDE28AA9A606EA2F51A74BDC2642
* New Books Network interview on the book: https://newbooksnetwork.com/keya-maitra-philosophy-of-the-bhagavad-gita-a-contemporary-introduction-bloomsbury-academic-2018/
* Partially Examined Life episode on the Gita: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2018/12/03/ep204-1-bhagavad-gita/
Verses mentioned
* Bhagavad Gita 2.47, action without attachment to its fruits: https://shlokam.org/bhagavad-gita/2-47/
* Bhagavad Gita 2.56, the equanimity verse Keya recites: https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/56/
People and works mentioned
* Barbara Stoler Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War (Bantam Classics, ISBN 9780553213652)
* Joel J. Kupperman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_J._Kupperman
* Naomi Scheman, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege: https://www.routledge.com/Engenderings-Constructions-of-Knowledge-Authority-and-Privilege/Scheman/p/book/9780415907408
* Gandhi, Anasaktiyoga: The Gita According to Gandhi (free PDF): https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/gita-according-to-gandhi.pdf
* Thoreau and the Gita at Walden Pond: https://yogainternational.com/article/view/why-did-thoreau-take-the-bhagavad-gita-to-walden-pond
* B.R. Ambedkar’s critique, “Krishna and His Gita” (excerpt): https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/?p=4347
* Scholarly essay on Ambedkar’s reading of the Gita, “Ambedkar’s Inheritances”: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/ambedkars-inheritances/25536ABA831C58F679C3B7C4D9E4CF04
Background on concepts
* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Indian Philosophy entries (Bhagavad Gītā, Sankhya, and more): https://iep.utm.edu/category/traditions/indian/
* Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. 4: Samkhya (Princeton): https://press.princeton.edu/isbn/9780691604411
* Ethics of care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_care
Freud was a neuroscientist first. Over 23 years he contributed to neuron theory, neuroanatomy, and clinical neurology. His 1891 work on aphasia reframed language as a psychological function — the seed of psychoanalysis. Because his neuroscientific writings were never translated into English, this side of Freud stayed invisible.
Two perspectives on one thing. Solms argues for dual-aspect monism: the subjective and objective are two views of a single reality, not rival teams. Feelings can only be empirically observed through introspection — leave them out and you lose half the causal picture.
Memory, the unconscious, and transference. Freud anticipated the modern model of multiple memory systems decades early. Unconscious memories aren’t recalled as images; they’re repeated as “motor policies.” Transference is that repetition made visible — and naming it gives the patient the freedom to revise it (”free won’t”).
Against the “chemical imbalance” myth. The claim that depression is a serotonin deficiency is, for Solms, both conceptually incoherent and empirically disproven. Bad feelings are signals of unmet needs. Medication has a real but limited role — it changes your state, not who you are.
Time, care, and cure by love. Real change is slow because procedural memories are “hard to learn and hard to forget.” Therapy works partly as re-parenting, drawing on the mammalian capacity for care. Cure and care share the Latin root cura — and Solms ends on Freud’s phrase that psychoanalysis is “a cure by love.”
NOTABLE MOMENTS
“One doesn’t cure symptomatically. One cures causally.” “They’re not remembered, they’re repeated.” “It’s called not free will, it’s called free won’t.” “Computers don’t give a damn.” “Reality always wins.”
MENTIONED & FURTHER READING
(fun fact: both Karl and Andrea’s books are blurbed by Karl Friston)
* The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — Mark Solms
* The Hidden Spring (2021) — Mark Solms
* The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (2024) — translated/edited by Solms
* Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness — Andrea Hiott
* Referenced thinkers & ideas: Sigmund Freud, Baruch Spinoza (dual-aspect monism), Hilary Putnam (functionalism), Edward Tolman (multiple memory systems), B. F. Skinner, Donald Hebb, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 4E cognition and enactivism, Philip Ball, and Freud’s letter to Einstein.
The single most influential recent paper is the umbrella review by Moncrieff and colleagues. Published in Molecular Psychiatry on 20 July 2022, it synthesized systematic reviews and meta-analyses across the main areas of serotonin research and concluded there was no consistent evidence of a relationship between serotonin and depression. It subdivided the hypothesis into six areas: serotonin and 5-HIAA levels in body fluids, serotonin receptor activity, serotonin transporter activity, tryptophan depletion studies, serotonin transporter gene levels, and the interaction between the transporter gene and stress. It became enormously visible — downloaded well over a million times and cited more than 900 times.
* Moncrieff J, Cooper RE, Stockmann T, Amendola S, Hengartner MP, Horowitz MA. “The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence.” Molecular Psychiatry 28:3243–3256 (2022/2023).
Rebuttals and critiques
Several substantial responses argued the review was flawed or attacked a strawman version of the hypothesis:
* Bartova L, Lanzenberger R, Rujescu D, Kasper S, et al. “Reply to...” Molecular Psychiatry 28:3153–3154 (2023). A methodological rebuttal.
* A large Comment written by 36 experts, led by researchers at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, published as part of a series in Molecular Psychiatry. Their core arguments: the serotonin theory was never meant to claim depression is caused by an imbalance in a single chemical, but rather described brain changes that could help explain how some antidepressants work; and the 2022 review was methodologically inconsistent with the conventional umbrella review process, summarizing existing results without new analysis and including selectively chosen individual studies.
* Rihmer Z, Dome P, Katona C. “Serotonin and depression — a riposte to Moncrieff et al. (2022).” Neuropsychopharmacol Hung 24(3):120-125 (2022). Argues the paper can cause misunderstandings, since the serotonin hypothesis in its original form is not what was tested.
* Möller HJ, Falkai P. “Is the serotonin hypothesis/theory of depression still relevant? Methodological reflections...” Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci (2023). Notes that the hypothesis was first proposed in 1967, was later refined, and was eventually folded into more complex neurobiological theories — so the review’s critical findings come as no surprise, and the areas it addressed cover the main theory but not all aspects of it.
Work supporting a serotonin–depression link (the “links” side)
* Kraus C, Castrén E, Kasper S, Lanzenberger R. “Serotonin and neuroplasticity — Links between molecular, functional and structural pathophysiology in depression.” Neurosci Biobehav Rev 77:317–326 (2017). Argues that serotonin modulates neuroplasticity, especially during early life, and that dysfunctions in both systems contribute to the pathophysiology of depression — with SSRIs triggering reactivation of juvenile-like plasticity, though how this translates to clinical treatment remains unclear.
* A “treatment-resistant depression” hypothesis paper (PMC4033019) proposing that TRD may not be a simple serotonin deficit state but rather an excess of midbrain peri-raphe serotonin with a subsequent deficit at fronto-limbic projection sites, compromising serotonin-mediated neuroplasticity. A useful example of a more nuanced serotonin model.
The shift toward neuroplasticity frameworks (where the field is moving)
Much contemporary neuroscience reframes the question away from “serotonin levels” toward how antidepressants change the brain:
* Casarotto PC, et al. “Antidepressant drugs act by directly binding to TRKB neurotrophin receptors.” Cell 184:1299–1313 (2021). A landmark paper showing that chemically distinct antidepressants — fluoxetine (an SSRI), imipramine (a tricyclic), and ketamine — all interact with the BDNF receptor TrkB, suggesting a shared mechanism not reducible to serotonin reuptake.
* “Beyond the serotonin deficit hypothesis: communicating a neuroplasticity framework of major depressive disorder.” Molecular Psychiatry (2024). Explicitly proposes reframing the public and scientific narrative around neuroplasticity rather than a serotonin deficit.
* Saarelainen T, et al. “Activation of the TrkB neurotrophin receptor is induced by antidepressant drugs and is required for antidepressant-induced behavioral effects.” J Neurosci 23:349–357 (2003). An earlier foundation for the neurotrophin view.
* A 2026 preprint, “Revisiting the SSRI–TRKB Mechanism,” updates the debate over whether SSRIs bind TrkB directly and at what concentrations, noting fluoxetine binds TrkB with micromolar affinity enhanced by cholesterol.
A couple of accessible overviews if you want the debate framed for a general reader: The Pharmaceutical Journal’s “The serotonin theory of depression: how the media got it all wrong” (2022), and the Psychopharmacology Institute’s summary of the Moncrieff review.
One framing point worth keeping in mind as you read: much of the disagreement is about what the “serotonin theory” ever actually claimed. Critics of the simple “chemical imbalance” story and defenders of a more sophisticated serotonin-and-plasticity model are often not disagreeing about the same proposition.
If you love someone and have not told them so recently, tell them again today.
Brian Glenneyteaches at Norwich University in Vermont. He wrote his dissertation on Molyneux’s problem at USC in 2007 under James Van Cleve and Janet Levin, wrote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the question, and has since argued for a pluralist answer — that the question has many correct answers depending on who is being asked about, and how. He also works on skateboarding, urban space, and the sensory expertise he calls the skater’s eye.
Click here to listen to it on YouTube for free. The video below is for YouTube members but will go live for everyone in about 11 days.
PAID MEMBERS OF ANY AMOUNT TO THIS SUBSTACK CAN ALSO WATCH IT FREE RIGHT NOW AT THIS LINK:
Chapters
* 00:00 — Why a navigational approach to mind keeps running into this question
* 02:20 — Introductions: phenomenal concepts, sensory expertise, and Bernie at the skate park
* 05:20 — Janet reads Locke’s own statement of the question, and his answer
* 08:00 — Why this was supposed to be the crucial experiment for empiricism vs. rationalism
* 10:30 — The 1688 letter Locke never answered, and the 1693 one he did
* 12:00 — Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, and the attempt to give empiricism experimental oomph
* 14:00 — Why Locke buried the question in a passage about perceptual learning
* 15:00 — Common sensibles: what touch and sight might share
* 17:00 — Locke’s “at first sight” trick, and what it forecloses
* 19:30 — Passivity vs. activity: if you move your head, is it still perception?
* 20:40 — Leibniz’s cheat code, and the birth of epistemic immediacy
* 22:20 — Janet’s distinction: temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy
* 24:15 — Held (2011) and the best evidence for a “no”
* 27:30 — Andrea’s caricature: two languages, or one idea?
* 29:30 — Why restored vision isn’t normal vision — and the paradox that follows
* 31:00 — Vision and touch as English and Russian; Leibniz as the bilingual child
* 33:30 — Janet on phenomenal concepts and why Molyneux caught her
* 35:40 — Did you know Adam Smith had a theory of perception? He wrote it at fifteen
* 37:50 — Brian finds his own ancestor in the archive: George Glenny, Aberdeen, 1796
* 40:15 — The moon illusion, and how Janet and Brian actually met
* 41:20 — The dissertation with six chapters, and the one revision that changed everything
* 42:30 — Maybe there isn’t a single correct answer
* 47:15 — Project Prakash: five subjects, three days of play, and a fast yes
* 51:30 — Janet’s counter-proposal: what if you only tweak vision?
* 55:20 — Bumpy pacifiers, baby chicks, and the ten-hour-old infants who disagree
* 58:50 — The six-month-old who recognizes its own hand
* 01:01:00 — Nobody frames it as empiricism vs. rationalism anymore
* 01:03:20 — The couch potato perceiver and the sentient statue
* 01:05:50 — Could virtual reality run the experiment we can’t?
* 01:07:00 — Path dependency: every subject arrives with a history
* 01:11:20 — The blind Rubik’s Cube puzzler, and whether expertise transfers
* 01:15:00 — “Give me something I care about”: motivation as the missing variable
* 01:19:10 — Why does perception have to be passive at all?
* 01:22:20 — Andrea: what if it isn’t yes or no?
* 01:26:50 — Ned Block and the border between seeing and thinking
* 01:29:20 — The skater’s eye: knowledge in the heel rather than the head
* 01:33:00 — Enactivism, affordances, and the motivation Brian adds to them
* 01:36:30 — Janet puts a lock on the back gate
* 01:39:20 — Do you still care about this? Plato’s cave, Reid, and the seduction of the external world
Some words that come up
Empiricism / rationalism — The organizing quarrel of the era. Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) hold that knowledge is built up from sense experience. Rationalists (Leibniz) hold that some ideas are innate and amodal — not owned by any single sense. Molyneux’s question was supposed to settle it experimentally.
Common sensibles — Properties like shape, figure, and distance that seem accessible to more than one sense. Colour isn’t one; neither is roughness. The question is whether a common sensible is genuinely shared, or whether you have to learn to correlate two separate streams.
At first sight — Locke’s three-word addition, and, as Brian argues, a trick: it more or less guarantees the answer is no, if perceptual learning is needed to make the correlations.
Temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy — Janet’s distinction. Temporal means the first instant after the bandages come off, which is probably what Locke meant. Epistemic means the identification is made by perception rather than by inference or association — so you wait until the person actually has the wherewithal to see, and only then test. It reframes what a fair experiment even looks like.
Perceptual learning — Changes in what you can perceive that come from experience rather than reasoning. Locke’s newly sighted person sees a flat, variously coloured circle before they see a sphere.
Passivity vs. activity — Locke assumed perception is passive reception, and that anything active is cognition. So: is moving your head still perceiving? Is watching an object rotate? The whole episode circles this.
The perception/cognition border — The contemporary form of the same question, now central to philosophy of mind through Ned Block’s work.
Phenomenal concepts — Concepts of what it’s like to have an experience: to see red, to feel something smooth. Janet’s long-standing interest, and her route into Molyneux.
Affordances / enactivism — Gibson’s idea that we perceive the world in terms of what it lets us do, developed by Alva Noë and others. Brian adds a motivational layer: the skater doesn’t just see that the handrail is skateable, they want to skate it.
Everything mentioned, with links
The question and its history
* Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; Molyneux’s question added to the 1694 second edition), Book II, Ch. IX, §8. Full text at Project Gutenberg
* Molyneux’s first letter to Locke, 7 July 1688 — the one Locke never answered. The second, in 1693, is the one that made it into the Essay. Molyneux had in the meantime dedicated his optics treatise Dioptrica Nova (1692) to Locke.
* Marjolein Degenaar & Gert-Jan Lokhorst, “Molyneux’s Problem”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the standard scholarly overview. plato.stanford.edu/entries/molyneux-problem
* Brian Glenney, “Molyneux’s Question”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Brian’s own entry, and the best place to start. iep.utm.edu/molyneux
* Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge, 1977) — the classic history.
* Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749) is where the two-dimensional version of the question first appears — roughly fifty years after Locke, as Brian notes.
Janet Levin’s work
* “Molyneux’s question and the individuation of perceptual concepts”, Philosophical Studies 139(1): 1–28 (2008). The paper that introduces epistemic immediacy, and argues — against Evans and Campbell — that a carefully designed Molyneux test can be a crucial experiment. doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9072-5
* “Locke on Molyneux’s question and perceptual concepts of shape”, in Brian Glenney & José Filipe Silva (eds.), The Senses and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 2019).
* Read the paper here.
Brian Glenney’s work
* A Pluralist’s Guide to Solving Molyneux’s Problem (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2024) — the case that the question has many answers, not one.
* “Philosophical Problems, Cluster Concepts, and the Many Lives of Molyneux’s Question”, Biology & Philosophy 28(3): 541–558 (2013). doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9355-x
* Gabriele Ferretti & Brian Glenney (eds.), Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 2020) — twenty essays and one poem.
* Ferretti & Glenney (eds.), “Molyneux’s question today” — special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (2024), open access. philosophymindscience.org
* “Adam Smith and the Problem of the External World”, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9(2): 205–223 (2011) — on Smith’s little-known essay. Abstract · PhilPapers
* “Perception by Sympathy: Connecting Smith’s ‘External Senses’ with his ‘Sentiments’”, in The Adam Smith Review. Chapter listing
* On the skater’s eye: Sander Hölsgens & Brian Glenney, Skateboarding and the Senses: Skills, Surfaces, and Spaces (Routledge, 2025); “Of skills and tools: skateboarding as city craft”doi.org/10.1177/10126902251360438; and “The skater’s ear” on the sensory complexity of skate sound tandfonline.com. The term “skater’s eye” comes originally from Iain Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001).
Adam Smith’s theory of perception
Adam Smith — yes, that Adam Smith — wrote an essay called “Of the External Senses”, published posthumously in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795). It argues that we see, hear and smell objects by simulating what they would feel like to touch. Brian dates it to Smith’s mid-teens; the dating is genuinely contested (see Kevin L. Brown, “Dating Adam Smith’s Essay ‘Of the External Senses’”, Journal of the History of Ideas 53(2), 1992). Text at the Online Library of Liberty
The experiments
* Held, Ostrovsky, de Gelder, Gandhi, Ganesh, Mathur & Sinha (2011), “The newly sighted fail to match seen with felt”, Nature Neuroscience 14: 551–553. Five congenitally blind subjects, cataract surgery, controls for touch-to-touch and vision-to-vision matching. No immediate transfer — but rapid learning afterwards. doi.org/10.1038/nn.2795
* Project Prakash — Pawan Sinha’s initiative at MIT, which treats curable blindness in India and studies visual development in the newly sighted. The Held study came out of it.
* Meltzoff & Borton (1979), the “Molyneux babies”: newborns habituated to a nubbed or smooth pacifier by mouth, then shown both shapes, looked longer at the familiar one. Meltzoff’s fuller treatment is “Molyneux’s Babies: Cross-modal Perception, Imitation, and the Mind of the Preverbal Infant” (1993).
* Streri & Gentaz (2003, 2004) — the contrasting result Brian describes. Newborns habituated to a shape by hand looked longer at the novel object. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2004.02.012
* Elisabetta Versace’s work on chicks — the baby-bird version Andrea was thinking of.
* William Cheselden’s 1728 cataract report — the eighteenth-century case Berkeley and Voltaire took as confirmation of the “no.”
* George Glennie and James Beattie (1796) — Brian’s own ancestor’s research on a boy whose couched cataract floated back into place, presented to the Royal Society.
* The half-hour video of the six-month-old learning to see, whose first recognition is its own hand — not yet traced. Ask Brian.
The contemporary debate
* Ned Block, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking (Oxford, 2023). Argues there is a real joint in nature between perception and cognition. Free to read under a CC licence. global.oup.com
* Susanna Schellenberg’s sentient statue — a perceiver who cannot move at all. From “Action and Self-Location in Perception”, Mind 116 (2007).
* Alva Noë, Action in Perception (MIT, 2004) — the strong enactivist yes.
* Gareth Evans, “Molyneux’s Question”, in Collected Papers (Oxford, 1985).
* John Campbell on amodal concepts, and why the phenomenology may block them.
* Bence Nanay on visual imagination in blindness — the reference Janet reaches for at the end. (Rendered “Benson and Nee” in the raw transcript, and “Bent Nannay” earlier.)
* Matthen & Cohen, “Many Molyneux Questions”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98(1): 47–63 (2020) — a parallel pluralist argument. doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2019.1603246
* Shaun Gallagher, “Molyneux and motor plasticity”, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5 (2024). Open access
* Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) — direct access to the world, without the intermediary of an idea. Where both Janet and Brian’s underlying stake lives.
* J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), and Edward S. Reed, whose ecological psychology Andrea wants to put alongside all of this.
* James Van Cleve, who was also working on Molyneux at USC when Brian arrived, and was on his committee alongside Janet.
Also mentioned
Aristotle and the “new knowledge.” Berkeley’s two-languages metaphor. Hume. The moon illusion. Bees, bats, dolphins and electric fish. Locked-in syndrome. Cortical recruitment of the visual cortex during blindness. Virtual reality as a possible experimental apparatus. Plato’s cave. A concrete block in a backyard in Los Angeles that affords the opportunity to shred.
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Molyneux’s Question
Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy
With Janet Levin and Brian Glenney, hosted by Andrea Hiott
This has been lightly edited for readability.
[00:00:00]
Brian Glenney: You’ve really picked this out. Why are you interested in it?
Andrea Hiott: Well, because I work on this whole navigational approach to mind. I’m coming out of hippocampus research, but I’m really a philosopher. I went back to get my neuroscience degrees because I wanted to better understand this part of the brain, the hippocampus. Mind in motion. And I mean, it’s part of why I do this podcast. It’s about thinking beyond these typical either/or categories. But I also just think it’s a really interesting question that, you know, three hundred years later we still talk about it.
And I love what you did in the spatial paper, Janet, where you sort of flipped the script about what people were assuming. That’s the kind of thing I think this problem is really good at. You did that. But I think Brian’s doing that too — definitely instigating different ways of thinking.
Janet Levin: I think you and Brian will see eye to eye on this, on the navigation. I’m hoping.
[00:01:00]
Andrea Hiott: Well, either way. But Brian, I think we should talk another time too, because I also have a degree in urban planning, and I see that you are really interested in these things. I stopped reading some of it because I was getting a little bit excited and I didn’t want that to take over this conversation. Just cities in general, because obviously that’s a whole huge part of what a navigational approach to thinking about cognition is doing. If you’re interested, we could go into that another time. Maybe this will lead towards that by the end, too. I don’t know.
Brian Glenney: Oh, I think it will. I’m excited to — I think the last time that Janet and I really talked about Molyneux’s question was in my dissertation committee hearing in 2007. She might not remember this, but she’s the one [00:02:00] that led me into this kind of pluralism way of thinking, even though she won’t ever take credit for it. I don’t know. Should we just jump in?
Andrea Hiott: Oh, that is so interesting. I was wondering, because of the amodality. It naturally leads there if one is thinking of it in a certain way. But let’s — do you want to introduce each other? Let’s go with the one, two. Do you want to introduce yourselves? How would you like to start?
Janet Levin: Okay, I’ll start. My name is Janet Levin, and I’m recently retired from the philosophy department at USC. I’m interested in mind-body problems, and I’m interested in what could be called the philosophy of philosophy — that is, are thought experiments in philosophy worth anything? Can they accommodate empirical information? If they accommodate a lot [00:03:00] of empirical information, can they still count as philosophical issues and philosophical questions? And I’m particularly interested in how we form and whether we can change our concepts of mental states and mental activity. I think that’s one of the things that got me interested in Molyneux’s problem.
Brian Glenney: And I’m Brian Glenney. I teach at Norwich University in Vermont. And I mean, I see Bernie Sanders, like, every month or so at the skate park. Of course, he’s not skating — he’s walking by. Very active, very active young man.
And I did my dissertation on Molyneux’s problem and finished in 2007. [00:04:00] Janet was on my committee, and I’m just excited to talk with her again about it. I guess my interest has lately been how the senses can specialize and pick out really fine-grained attributes out in the world. There’s a famous example of a sailor who can identify a ship that a landsman can’t even see. I think we have all these kinds of sensory specializations, and most of us don’t even know it, or where they came from, or how we could acquire more of them. So I think that’s kind of where my interest in Molyneux’s question has been leading me. But let’s go back to the beginning here.
Andrea Hiott: I can’t believe you see Bernie Sanders all the time at the skate park. That’s already — what? He’s just walking by?
Janet Levin: Was he wearing mittens?
Brian Glenney: In the winter, yes, Janet. He’s very bundled. Can’t even recognize him.
Andrea Hiott: I like thinking of him actually hanging out at the skate park, but he’s just [00:05:00] walking by.
Brian Glenney: And he always gives a little wave. “Hello, skaters.”
Andrea Hiott: That’s awesome. Okay. So we’ve mentioned it — Molyneux’s question. What is this, and why did both of you get interested in this, or how?
Janet Levin: Well, maybe we should start out by just reading what Locke says when he introduces Molyneux’s question in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Do you want to read it, Brian, or shall I read it?
Brian Glenney: Yeah, go for it, Janet.
Janet Levin: Okay. Well, the official question is:
“Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. [00:06:00] Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube.”
And then:
“Not. For though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet attained the experience that what affects his touch so or so must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube.”
Okay. Now, that’s how Locke presents Molyneux’s question. [00:07:00] And Locke says:
“I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this his problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them.”
So — you wouldn’t be able to recognize, as they say, at first sight, with [00:08:00] certainty, which is the cube, which is the globe, if you had only felt them, if you were to see them for the first time.
And Locke and Molyneux and Berkeley thought that this was a really big deal because it showed the truth of — I mean, if the blind man wouldn’t be able to distinguish these things, it showed the truth of empiricism rather than rationalism. That is, that you can only get ideas of spatial figures, and time, and mind, and body, and all these things that might have seemed amodal and universal, by experience. And the experiences that you get of these things visually are very, very different from, and not connected at all to, the ones that you get [00:09:00] by touch.
Now, continental rationalists like Leibniz say that, well, we do have at least some innate ideas that are amodal. We have an amodal idea — that is, one not determined by experience in various sensory modes. We’ve got an idea of the cube and the idea of the sphere. And so we can get that very same idea both from touch and from sight.
So supposedly this was a crucial experiment to determine the truth of rationalism versus empiricism. Now, there are lots of questions that arise. What exactly does it mean to be able to know these things with certainty? What is it to be able to do it at first sight? [00:10:00] And what exactly are the conditions under which the man born blind and made to see can try to identify it? Can he move around a little bit? Can he move his head? Exactly what is it that’s going on?
So that’s the question. That was Locke’s answer. Leibniz answers in a different way. He predicts that yes, under certain conditions, the man born blind would be able to distinguish the cube from the sphere. And so people have been talking about this three hundred years later.
Brian Glenney: And you might wonder —
Andrea Hiott: That’s a long time. Was it first in a letter that Molyneux wrote to Locke? Is that how it started, and then he put it in the —
Brian Glenney: In the essay.
Andrea Hiott: In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding? So that was before 1700, right? Sixteen-ninety-something. That’s a long [00:11:00] time ago.
Brian Glenney: 1693, yeah. And that 1693 letter was preceded by another letter that has a different Molyneux question —
Andrea Hiott: Oh, really?
Brian Glenney: — that Locke never responded to.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, what was that?
Brian Glenney: It basically asked a similar question, but it was a little bit more general. It was like, “Hey, would the newly sighted be able just to know by sight alone what the shapes were?” And there was a second question — would he be able to know how far away they were? Whether or not, for instance, the newly sighted man could reach out and touch the shape, whether it were, I think he says, a hundred feet or a thousand feet away, or something like this.
Andrea Hiott: So let’s try to go back to that time period. What do — I mean, for people who are just kind of coming into this, there’s this whole empiricist, [00:12:00] rationalist sort of separation. But how would one of you, both of you, explain what that is, and why this is such an amazing question to ask, and also why, if it’s answered in the way that Locke answered it, that’s so much part of the empiricist program?
Janet Levin: You want to go first, Brian?
Brian Glenney: Well, I’ll give it a shot here. Molyneux was part of the new knowledge, which didn’t really think Aristotle had figured out the way the world works — and that you can’t just do it by reasoning from substances and causes, that you actually had to go out in the world and touch it and feel it and figure things out. And so I think what Molyneux was trying to do here was take empiricism, which was really still theoretical, and give it some experimental oomph. Like proto, proto-experimental. [00:13:00]
And he had previously written a book on optics called Dioptrica Nova. Molyneux’s question never comes up in that, but what Molyneux did do was dedicate the book to Locke. And I think this was kind of — he dedicated this sophisticated optical book to Locke after not getting a response from Locke from the previous letter. Then he rewrote the letter, and then Locke was like, “You’re a genius. I’m going to put your question into my essay, the second edition. Let’s do it.”
And even that’s kind of weird. A lot of Locke scholars think Locke should have answered yes to Molyneux. After all, shape seems to be a common idea. We have an earlier section in the essay where shape seems to be something known [00:14:00] by both sight and touch. So why does Locke say no? Well, it’s likely to agree with his friend, right? And he puts it in this weird section that’s about perceptual learning rather than about common sensibles.
And in that section, just before he inserts Molyneux’s question, there’s this famous passage about what a newly sighted person sees when they see a sphere. They see a circle colored variously, and then over time and experience it looks like a sphere that’s of a single color. And then he uses Molyneux’s question as kind of a backdrop, or an extra context, to support that claim of perceptual learning. So — I actually think for a while, for about two decades, there were more papers on Locke’s response to Molyneux than on Molyneux’s question [00:15:00] itself.
Janet Levin: Yeah, but the Locke response is interesting because it really opens a way to think about the Molyneux question, and also to think about what perceptual learning is. And Locke does in many cases — I won’t say most cases, but many cases — sort of waver between two views. Sometimes he’ll say things that are not quite consistent with what he had said before.
But here it does seem that he thinks you need to be able to correlate your — I mean, you can think of a common sensible as something, some item in the world or some property that can be accessed by touch and sight, even though you might not be able to know, [00:16:00] if you can just access it by sight, what it would feel like. But you come to correlate the results of visual perception with the results of tactual perception.
And so you can do that for certain things like shape, figure, and in the case that you quoted earlier, distance, presumably. But you can’t for color, and you can’t for certain purely tactile things like whether something is rough or smooth, a kind of texture.
So common sensibles could be read as either something that is out there in the world that you just can determine the existence of in both ways immediately, or something that’s out there in the world but that you can’t [00:17:00] necessarily do by vision and by touch unless you correlate the two.
Brian Glenney: I mean, you’d find the correlation. So Janet, I make a big deal about Locke and his little trick when he answers the question — of adding at first sight. And that kind of ensures that it’s a no answer, right? Particularly if perceptual learning is going to be required in order to make these correlations.
Do you think eventually, just by sight alone, Molyneux’s man would have been able to work it out?
Janet Levin: I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible. Well, it depends on what he’s allowed to do and what “at first sight” means. And I know we’ve talked about that, because even though Brian and I haven’t [00:18:00] talked specifically in person, we’ve communicated a lot through emails and reading each other’s papers and things like that. So we are at least somewhat more familiar with each other’s more recent views than circa 2007.
One of the questions is what the man born blind is allowed to do. That is, when he regains his sight, can he move his head around? Can he see the objects — you know, Locke says they’re put on a table, in front of him. Well, what if it was a rotating platform? Would he be able eventually to identify — [00:19:00] Or also, there’s the question of whether it’s only a matter of distinguishing the two, or identifying the two as a cube versus a sphere. I do think he wants the identification.
But what exactly does “at first sight” involve? Is it only by sight, or is it at first sight — and “at first sight” might mean being able to see without touching? And then if you’re allowed to move your head a little bit, or see the thing on a rotating platform, then maybe you could figure it out.
But then figuring it out [00:20:00] would mean that you’re not doing it at first sight. That is, perception is supposed to be just passive reception without any intellectual activity. So one of the questions — and this is a question that Brian has been interested in with Reid and Adam Smith — is what exactly can you do here, and what counts as passivity versus activity?
And that’s really a question that is really, really important now, when people like Ned Block are thinking about the distinction between perception and cognition. That’s a really hot issue now.
Brian Glenney: I was going to add another cheat code that Leibniz produces. He says, well, what if the experimenter [00:21:00] also told the newly sighted person what shapes were before them? Gives them a hint. And then Leibniz is like, “Oh, yeah. For sure.” That they could work it out.
And there’s this additional thing which relates to what it means to be at first sight, which I think is where you get your epistemic immediacy. Because Leibniz adds that hint, and then he also says, “We shouldn’t expect this newly sighted person to just immediately make this kind of recognition. We should give them time so that they can learn what it’s like to know what it’s like to see.” And then once they’ve kind of got this epistemic visual ability, then we should test them.
Is that where you think you got the — you know, Janet has this famous distinction between what “at first sight” [00:22:00] means temporally, which is what Locke probably meant, and then this: once the newly sighted has the wherewithal to know what it’s like to see, boom, we should test him. That’s the epistemic immediacy that you kind of brought to the table with Molyneux’s question.
Andrea Hiott: That was right around the time you were working together, then.
Janet Levin: Probably, yeah. But the idea is, what counts as epistemic immediacy? And I think you’ve gotten me to rethink that, Brian.
One thing that I think is important — and this is where the passivity versus activity comes in — is whether whatever you do can count as perception alone, rather than perception with the addition of some sort of intellectual putting things together. And [00:23:00] that is really an important question that has endured through these three hundred years. That is, what is perceptual learning? Does perception have to be passive? And if it does, can looking around and “learning” how things look from different directions — does that count as an intellectual activity, or just part of, sort of spread out in time, of perceiving?
And again, this is going to be more relevant when you’re talking about three-dimensional objects rather than two-dimensional objects. Which is a reason why people often talk about the Molyneux question as a matter of distinguishing between a square and a circle rather than a [00:24:00] cube and a sphere. Anyway, I’ve talked too much.
Brian Glenney: No, no, no. It’s so funny — it took fifty years for that 2D move to be made, by Diderot.
Janet Levin: Was it fifty years?
Brian Glenney: Yeah, around fifty years. But now that you’ve brought up epistemic immediacy, I’m going to keep going, because Held has this 2011 paper where he essentially presents the best evidence for a no answer to Molyneux’s question. That’s because he uses five different subjects — it’s like real experimental data. Five different subjects, many trials. He uses standard statistical analysis to determine whether it’s chance that they’re making the recognition or not.
And there are these two controls. One control is that once they’ve gained their [00:25:00] sight, they’re able to match shapes by touch alone. And then the second control is that they’re able to match shapes by sight alone — vision to vision. It seems to me that that’s sufficient for epistemic immediacy, right? Once you’re able to match shapes by sight alone after being newly healed from these cataracts, you have the wherewithal to see. You know how to see.
Then, of course, they’re not able to match the visual objects before them with their previous tactile knowledge of the shapes, suggesting a no answer. So does that vision-to-vision matching count as epistemic immediacy for you? Does it pass that threshold?
Janet Levin: Well, what I was worried about is whether [00:26:00] you can get epistemic immediacy from touch to sight — when you’re looking at figures that you’ve touched. I think that the vision-to-vision was just to make sure that people could recognize shapes. Because in many of these cases — and one of the reasons I think that this question hasn’t been empirically answered — is because it’s very hard to get subjects who are legitimately, genuinely blind from birth but without any other problems with their visual systems, with their optic nerves or their receptors, that would prevent them from seeing at all, or seeing certain kinds of shape.
Also, removal of cataracts seems to be a very good way to do it, because there’s no evidence that anything else in [00:27:00] the visual system has been afflicted. But this is just sort of running a check. Can these people see? That is, are there any other damages that would prevent the recognition and the identification of these figures? So that’s, I think, why they do that.
But the immediacy that I’m interested in is whether you could distinguish these things that you’d felt before, by sight alone. And that’s a really big question. What does that mean, really? Really hard questions about it.
Andrea Hiott: I really love that you’re both just going into this, and I want you to actually keep doing that and go deeper. But just for some people who are maybe a little bit lost — so I’ll try to make a really caricatured kind of thing, and then maybe you can improve and correct me.
If we’re thinking about Locke and then Berkeley, we’re almost thinking about [00:28:00] vision and touch as two different languages, something that just wouldn’t connect. And then you have someone like Leibniz — who I think, Brian, you’ve given a different take on what he was really trying to do — but in the caricature version, that would just be sort of a rational — like, what we’re calling rational, which for me none of this makes any sense anymore, but I’m going to bracket all that. But from this rational point of view, you could figure it out. So these things wouldn’t be like different languages. They would be something you could figure out pretty quickly, intellectually — what we traditionally think of as cognitive, or intellect.
So that’s the caricature: Locke saying, and then Berkeley even more radically saying, “These are completely different, so no is the answer.” And then Leibniz saying, “Yes, you could figure it out intellectually, rationally.” That’s my caricature.
And then you brought up the Held and Sinha experiments — the Project Prakash thing. And that’s interesting, because [00:29:00] that’s when cognitive science gets brought in. And this is a really interesting thing that I just want to bring out for people, because very rarely do you have a thought experiment that then actually becomes part of empirical science that can be tested. So I just want to mark that, but I’ll let you fill that in.
But just for people who are maybe a little lost, those are the two sides. And then, Brian, maybe you could say again how Janet — I really love what she did with this idea of the temporal and the epistemic, which basically, for people that don’t know, that’s just sort of this knowledge. Maybe you could unpack that just a little bit too, and I’ll be quiet and let you talk. But before we get too far in, I wanted to make that clear to people.
Brian Glenney: Yeah, no, thanks. This problem is so seductive for me that going into the weeds is what I do right away.
So, I think Janet mentioned this about these cataract surgeries — that it seems like once [00:30:00] you’ve removed this blockage from sight, you should be able to just see. But we know that, one, if there’s any kind of issue with your visual sense, it essentially brings about abnormal vision for the rest of your life. Why? Because the visual cortex gets recruited by these other senses, like touch and sound. And so in order for vision to come back online, it has to re-recruit these centers that seem reserved for it. All this work has to happen.
And so this is where the epistemic immediacy does so much good work, because it allows the newly sighted to gain the familiarity with vision in a way that allows them to have robust visual experiences again.
But the real question, [00:31:00] I think, is whether you need touch to help educate the visual organization of reality. And this is something that comes up with these two sensory languages that Berkeley uses as a metaphor.
Can we push this a little bit farther, since it seems really graspable? I know English. I know a little bit of Russian. Do I think in Russian? No. I need English to help me with my Russian. In that sense, I really have to translate things all through my English all the time. It would seem like if you’re newly sighted, you need touch to translate all the visual information for you for a long time — until you get to a point maybe where you think in the visual [00:32:00] language, which happens eventually. Someone can speak Russian enough to where they just think in the Russian language. And so I think at that moment is when you can have this kind of epistemic wherewithal. But you need touch in order to make that happen.
But once you bring touch into the picture, you can’t run Molyneux’s experiment anymore, right? And so I think this is the paradox of Molyneux’s question and the experimental approach — that when that visual ability comes back online, it’s not normal vision, for one. And secondly, you’ve already —
Janet Levin: The vision is impure, because it’s been educated by touch.
Brian Glenney: Right.
Janet Levin: Well, here’s a question. Does it have to be educated by touch?
Brian Glenney: I think it does. This is the worry I have.
Janet Levin: Okay. Well, [00:33:00] this is then Molyneux’s question, or the contemporary version of it. But I think you can think of Leibniz as saying — well, think about somebody who is bilingual almost from when they’re learning language. Like, one parent speaks English, one parent speaks Russian, and they learn both at the same time, and so they can think in both languages, and they’re thinking about the same thing. So I think you could think about Leibniz as saying something like that. I mean, this isn’t quite right, but —
Brian Glenney: It’s very close.
Janet Levin: Yeah. But maybe we should talk a little bit about why you and I differ in these ways, particularly in this question.
And my interest, as I think you pointed out, Andrea, a while ago, is that I’m [00:34:00] first and foremost interested in so-called phenomenal concepts. That is, concepts of what it’s like to have various experiences, like visual experiences. What it’s like to see red, or to feel something smooth, what it’s like to feel pain, et cetera.
And these phenomenal concepts seem very, very different from physical concepts — like where you give a description of what’s going on in the brain when all these things happen — and they just don’t seem to be linked at all. But could our phenomenal concept of what it’s like to see red really be picking out some brain state? Some stimulation of the cones, let’s say? And even though it doesn’t seem as though you can translate between them at all — that there’s nothing more that you can learn about what it’s like to see red that’s going to give you [00:35:00] any insight into what’s going on in the brain, or vice versa.
And so the Molyneux question started intriguing me, because here was another case in which, at least allegedly, you could see something and feel something, and what it’s like to feel something is so different from what it’s like to see something. Or maybe not. Are perceptual concepts different from phenomenal concepts — that is, phenomenal concepts of the brain and what’s going on inside one’s head?
And so that’s how I got interested in it, and I’m also interested in how perceptual learning works. But Brian, you got interested in it for another reason.
Brian Glenney: For many other reasons. I was a very young thinker [00:36:00] when I came to it, and I wanted to be like a Scottish philosopher, you know, like Thomas Reid or Adam Smith. And they both have these theories of perception that are based on answers to Molyneux. They were really intrigued by responding to Berkeley and his no answer, and they were trying to respond with a yes, and figuring out different ways to do so.
Andrea Hiott: Sorry, did you say Adam Smith was too?
Brian Glenney: Yeah. Adam Smith.
Andrea Hiott: The economist? Oh, I didn’t know that. I knew Reid. Sorry, that just kind of blew my mind.
Brian Glenney: It is mind-blowing. He has this whole other dimension. And Adam Smith writes this little paper when he’s fifteen, and comes up with a theory of perception that’s similar to Reid’s, but it’s before Reid. [00:37:00] So I work a lot on that Adam Smith theory of perception. I mean, we could say I’m the world’s expert on this fifteen-year-old’s essay.
Andrea Hiott: We have to talk about that another time, then, because I don’t know anything about that. You have to send me that so I can read it, because that is — also Reid, I think that’s a whole unopened world for so many people. Everyone’s talking about Gibson, and me too, but with the immediacy. So that could be a whole other very interesting conversation. But anyway, I interrupted you. That’s how you got into it.
Brian Glenney: I kind of got into it that way, and now I’m thinking about sensory expertise. And it does seem like, even though we take it for granted, the way that we see the world is its own kind of sensory expertise. And it suggests that we all see the world in very different ways. Objects have different meaning for individuals [00:38:00] and for different cultures, and I think that relates to your interest in perceptual learning, Janet. How is it that we come to learn these different meanings and different interpretations of these objects?
Also, I can’t help but mention this. I was working on my last book on Molyneux and I came across some research by one of my ancestors, George Glennie of all things. He was doing research on this boy who was born blind, with cataracts in his eye. And then in his right eye, his cataract was couched — moved out of the way — and he was able to see for a little bit. And then it floated back up and blocked his ability to see. And so George was instrumental in trying to understand what happens when you go back to blindness after having sight. [00:39:00] What does it change about your world? And he sent all of his research to James Beattie, who then presented it to the Royal Society. And so I’m like — this was in 1796.
Andrea Hiott: And you found this back when you were a student, or you found it even more recently?
Brian Glenney: No, like two years ago.
Andrea Hiott: What?
Brian Glenney: Like two years ago.
Janet Levin: Brian just told me about this a few days ago, and I said, “We’ve got to talk about this. This is really cool.”
Andrea Hiott: That is wild. That is wild on so many levels — that you’ve been doing this and didn’t even know that, and yet it’s sort of part of the path. But sorry, I keep interrupting. You keep saying things that are sort of blowing my mind.
Brian Glenney: I didn’t even know I had an ancestor that taught philosophy. He taught philosophy for forty years in Aberdeen. [00:40:00] I feel so ignorant and foolish to not have known this seemingly cool thing.
Andrea Hiott: It seems confirming in a way, though, too, somehow.
Brian Glenney: It’s confirming. There’s a genetic basis for my interest in Molyneux, maybe.
Andrea Hiott: Some kind of flow that’s going on beyond what you thought.
But Janet, how did you find Brian, or how did Brian find you? What’s that moment? How did you two connect on this? Or did you connect on this? I’m thinking this is what you connected on, but maybe it was something else too.
Janet Levin: Well, just being in the same place, taking classes. I mean, Brian was interested in other issues in perception too, like the moon illusion, right? You really were interested in that.
Brian Glenney: I really thought I could solve that one. And the moon illusion is just that the moon on the horizon looks huge, and then as it creeps up, it goes smaller and smaller. But of course, the moon doesn’t change in size or distance. It’s a purely cognitive illusion. And so I had all these [00:41:00] experiments and was trying to figure it out. And then I’m like, “Man, maybe Molyneux will be an easier problem to solve.” So Janet was working on it. James Van Cleve was working on it as well. I’m like, this is perfect. And so Janet really helped me think through these issues at a deeper level, of course, and was on my dissertation committee.
And that was a blast. I wrote — it was six chapters. Five of the chapters were these different ways of answering Molyneux, and the sixth chapter was my way, which was the right way. And then I presented my oral exam, and — well, I don’t know who it was that said it, but I had one revision to make, and that was that my answer wasn’t [00:42:00] the right answer, and that I should be much more open to the possibility that there are many ways of answering it. And I was like, “Yes, this was you, I think.” And I was like, “Hmm, actually, that might be right.”
Andrea Hiott: Well, that sounds really familiar, having just read some of your newer work.
Brian Glenney: Yeah. And that kind of started me on this idea that maybe there isn’t a single correct answer to Molyneux’s question, because it’s such a general question. And as we learn more and more about vision, we know there are so many different ways to see, so many different processes that are required to see, and we all see the world in a different way. So it could be that we need many different answers to Molyneux’s question, in accordance with the interests that we have, [00:43:00] the subjects that we’re studying, in terms of the particular individual that we’re studying.
And so the more I think of this pluralist kind of context for answering Molyneux, the more interesting Molyneux becomes — because, boy, it really expands your horizon of all the different ways to see. And lately I’ve been really getting into animal experiments that basically perfectly map Molyneux’s problem and try to solve it through — I mean, we’ve got bees and bats, dolphins, electric fish. So once you start —
Andrea Hiott: Before we get into all those animal experiments — I know, there are so many exciting experiments. But Janet, that’s very, very interesting. If Janet’s the one who sort of turned you on to this, maybe we have to leave that as a mystery if it’s part of your dissertation. But somehow she seems to have opened you into this very interesting different world of thinking [00:44:00] about this problem — which, frankly, I think is very important and sort of of the moment. Like, we could actually handle this now, maybe even with technology, but also just, we can maybe handle holding that kind of weird tension of letting there be multiple possibilities.
But that’s interesting, Janet, because — I mean, maybe I’m wrong about this, but I feel like in your work, you’re trying to find the answer, not opening to multiplicity. Is that wrong?
Janet Levin: No, I am trying to find the answer. But part of — well, I’m interested in whether we can have different unconnected concepts that pick out the same thing, whether this is true for sight and touch with [00:45:00] respect to spatial figures. So that’s one thing that I’m interested in.
The other thing I’m interested in is, as we said before, perceptual learning. Can we do certain things to vary the angle of vision, or touch for that matter, and get a fuller picture of what the perceptual experience is, or the perceived object is, without that counting as adding some kind of intellectual activity? So those are the things that I’m interested in.
Now, whether or not there can be a crucial experiment to determine these things is really, really hard, and I think a lot of Brian’s work shows [00:46:00] why it’s hard. Number one, there are all sorts of things that have to be intact in the visual system in order for a person to be able to see in this sort of ideal way that Locke and Berkeley and Leibniz were thinking about when they posed or tried to answer the question. And so, as Brian points out, there are various parts of the visual system that can be out, and then you’re going to have a different question to answer. There are, as he puts it, different kinds of blindness — different ways that the visual system can be impaired so that you’re not seeing, and so you have to make sure all those things are fixed.
Whereas my view is more the theoretical view, the theoretical question. Could somebody do this, [00:47:00] rather than would somebody do this, if they were presented with the objects of sight when first allowed to see, if they were familiar with the objects by touch. So my question is more — is it possible for them to do it?
Andrea Hiott: I think it’s really interesting how these are coming together in a strange way that’s still very messy for me to try to articulate. So I’m thinking about maybe going to that experiment — I think it’s called Project Prakash, the Held one, Held and Sinha — which, Janet, I think you were in your paper answering to, in a way, because that came down on the side of no, and you were saying, “Well, maybe,” in the way that you were just explaining. If we look at it a different [00:48:00] way, amodally, there’s another way to look at it — which sounds familiar to some of Brian’s work from a completely different perspective, to me right now. And I’m not sure how to connect those.
But maybe we could talk about that experiment for a minute, because there are a lot of interesting experiments, and it leads into the bees and the birds and how that’s open. But also maybe just to understand a little more about how you both responded to this.
So maybe you can help me, but that experiment was with, I think, some neuroscientists at MIT, but the project was in India, with children in India who had congenital blindness. I don’t know if it was ocular or cortical. I mean, as you both brought up, there are lots of different kinds of blindness — already we’re in very multiplicity territory there. But to try to stay general, they were born with this, so that was unusual, I think, right? And they were maybe seven to sixteen or something. [00:49:00]
And they did a test on it. Maybe you could just — I don’t know if you remember better how to summarize why that ended up on a Lockean sort of view, and then how Janet actually opened that up and made people — I think what you did was show people there’s a whole other way to think about it, which to me leads towards what Brian is doing. But I don’t know what you both would say about that.
Janet Levin: No, that sounds right. So do you want to talk about the experiment, Brian? Because you’re probably closer to it.
Brian Glenney: Yeah, I can give my take, but your take is different and interesting.
I make a lot of hay about the fact that, yes, all five of the subjects failed to identify shapes that they had never seen before but they knew by touch. And that was a very big deal. But then [00:50:00] they allowed these boys to go and play. They had real-world experience for about three days, and then three of them were retested, and they had very good ability to visually recognize objects they had never seen but they knew by touch — three days later.
And the cool thing about the authors of that paper is they say, “Wow, this is shockingly quick.” It seems like there was probably some kind of innate connection between sight and touch that the real-world experience essentially unlocked and allowed them to quickly achieve visual ability.
And so that’s why the authors even end the paper: at first sight, no, but eventually, yes. [00:51:00] And that “eventually” requires, or includes, tactile experience at the same time as visual experience — which in some sense undermines what Molyneux is trying to do, but at the same time seems required if we’re going to have what might be called pseudo-normal vision. So I make a lot of hay about this idea that perceptual learning, particularly for vision, seems to require having a translating language, like touch, in order to educate vision.
Janet Levin: But you do something really different with that. To go back to what you were saying — so if you have the touch-to-sight correlation for a few basic things, then you’ve learned the language, and you can then recognize new objects by sight alone, [00:52:00] not having touched them. So that’s the big deal there. Does that mean — is that a yes or is that a no? It seems like it’s probably a yes.
But one of the things that I was interested in is whether you could get the same result just by tweaking vision. You don’t let them out in the world touching things — I mean, if that’s possible at all. But you allow them to see these objects from different angles. Would that kind of experience in the world that is sight — I mean, I don’t know how you tie them down — [00:53:00] but you let them move their heads, or at least move their eyes, or look straight at the table but have the objects on a rotating platform. Would you be able to recognize the cube as a cube and the sphere as a sphere, if you had that, without the touch?
So they didn’t do that, but I’m wondering if that’s possible. And a lot of people say it’s not — that you need touch. And I think that’s Brian’s view, and that’s Alva Noë’s view. And I think it’s Gareth — well, it’s hard to say what Gareth Evans’s view is, but a lot of people say that. And that leads to the idea of embodied perception, which I’m a bit [00:54:00] skeptical about, but it’s something that Brian has really done a lot of work on.
Andrea Hiott: Well, yeah — Brian, when you were saying, is there some innate connection between sight and touch, I was thinking: the body. It is both, which we tend to just kind of skip over. There’s sight and touch as if they’re not part of the same thing. But it is much more complicated than just saying that.
But also, Janet, when you were explaining what you were just explaining, I was thinking about how it’s also a very plausible, obvious kind of thing in a way. Even just thinking of amodality in a more caricatured way — like, if someone shows me a picture, if I’ve never been in an airplane, and someone shows me a picture from above of something, I wouldn’t recognize it. But if that same object you could move around in front of me, I would probably get it. I mean, that’s a little bit too simple, but [00:55:00] there’s some way in which those things are connected too, because we’re already putting sight in a category and touch in a category.
But actually, in that situation, if you’re moving what’s in front of you, the whole body and your sensory body and everything you’ve touched up to that point is going to be playing a role in what is happening with just looking at the thing moving. Does that make sense at all? I have trouble now even seeing how that could ever be separated — except perhaps in animals that were just born, because they haven’t learned all that stuff yet, and we do have very clear examples there. So I’m getting a little bit messy, but what does that bring up?
Janet Levin: Yeah, that’s right. There’s Meltzoff, about the Molyneux babies that are given these bumpy pacifiers. You know those experiments? They’re so good. Do you know those experiments?
Andrea Hiott: I thought you were talking about the bumpy — like the ducks or the birds that have bumpy touch [00:56:00] or smooth touch. I didn’t know about the bumpy pacifiers. Is that another version of that?
Brian Glenney: You’re talking about the Versace baby chicks experiment. Janet’s talking about Meltzoff’s old experiment, where he used a pacifier that was bumpy and habituated the bumpiness — the bumpy mouth-feel — in a newborn, and then dangled bumpy and smooth figures, and the newborn looked at the bumpy figure the most. And that’s supposed to suggest a yes answer for the infants.
Andrea Hiott: We’re supposed to be philosophers and not talk about this, but I’ve had experiences that make me feel like that could happen — but it doesn’t depend on these clean cuts between what sight is and what touch is. It depends on everything I’ve experienced up to that moment. And as a baby, when you have that in your mouth, that is not just [00:57:00] like touching. That’s a lot going on there. And it’s from the time that you’ve just kind of started to create your habits, and with the regularity. So you’re not separating things. It’s not like suddenly at age nine I can then see this thing, which of course will be dissonant with everything up to that point that I’ve known. Does this make sense? I think, Brian, you’re getting into some of that with your work too, but I also feel it in what Janet’s saying.
Brian Glenney: Well, there’s a contrasting experiment with the infants —
Andrea Hiott: Okay, good. I wasn’t hearing people for a few minutes, but now —
Brian Glenney: Oh, okay. Sorry, it’s probably my computer that’s the problem.
Andrea Hiott: Glitched out a little?
Brian Glenney: It was glitching. But there’s this contrasting experiment where they actually did use the hand. They tactually habituated [00:58:00] ten-hour-old infants to a cube shape with the hand, and then dangled the cube and the sphere before their eyes, and in that case, the infants looked at the novel object more frequently — the circle. Whereas with Meltzoff’s experiments with the mouth-feel, it was the familiar object that they looked at the most.
Janet Levin: So we don’t know what looking at things the most means, in short.
Brian Glenney: It really confounds what exactly we’re supposed to be identifying with these Molyneux experiments. Does familiarity matter? Does novelty matter? Does the fact that it’s a hand educating the brain mean that now the brain wants novel visual objects, whereas with the mouth, it wants familiar ones? Maybe because the pacifier is supposed to emulate food. So anyway, I think these infant experiments, when you start looking at them, [00:59:00] raise more questions than they answer.
And actually, the most recent Molyneux experiment was with a six-month-old baby that was blind from birth, and they filmed this baby essentially learning sight. It’s like a half-hour-long video, and the first thing that the baby seems to recognize is its own hand — which I think Moore would love.
Janet Levin: Now, I don’t know these experiments. So they were able — at six months — to get the baby to see?
Brian Glenney: Yeah, it was just another cataract operation. And around the four-minute mark, you just see this baby spacing out on its own hand, moving it around, and it’s this thrilling moment where — wow, it seems like it does identify something that it knows by this kind of touch, [01:00:00] the movement of its own hand.
Andrea Hiott: What did they say? So that was on the side of yes or no?
Brian Glenney: Of a yes.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. Because it’s very — I mean, if you think about when you’re born and you’re just learning what we’ve already categorized now, but it’s not categorized in the way that we’ve now categorized it. So I think it’s really interesting. This is why this question is so interesting, because it can make you think of all of these things, and why it’s even interesting that there’s not one answer.
But I wonder what you both think about that, or if you disagree on this idea of even — I mean, do you still really see those categories of empiricist and rationalist as really clearly separate? Especially if you’ve both mentioned the body too. I just wonder if this question has raised anything [01:01:00] interesting about that, especially in the kind of — I don’t want to say the communication between the two kinds of work that you’re doing, because they actually are much more different than we’ve really shown, and yet I think they’ve both created, co-created, some new things. So I’m trying to bring that out a bit.
Janet Levin: Yeah, well, I think the issue of empiricism versus rationalism that so motivated Locke and Molyneux and Berkeley and Leibniz — I don’t think people think about the question in that way anymore. They think about it in terms of what perceptual learning is, and what the connection between visually produced concepts of shape and tactually produced concepts of shape are. Whether there are connections that we can just get a priori or not. [01:02:00] A priori meaning without any other sort of knowledge — that we can just kind of examine these concepts and determine whether or not they’re concepts of the same thing. But that’s independent of the old questions about rationalism versus empiricism, I think.
But so one thing that I think separates me maybe from Brian — I mean, I don’t really have that many fixed ideas about this — is whether you need some sort of action, or capacity for action, capacity for movement, to be able to see three-dimensional shapes. And many people say you do, a lot of people that [01:03:00] Brian just quoted. Some people say you don’t, or you may not, and I’m not quite sure where to go. I’m interested in exploring whether you can learn to identify these things by sight alone, by just moving your head around, or looking at the object on a rotating platform.
Now, the idea though that you need touch, I think leads into some really interesting questions that Brian has a lot to say about. About embodiment.
Andrea Hiott: This gets you to the skate stuff. Which I think is very interesting.
Brian Glenney: Yeah. Well, I think, Janet, your interest — you have, like, maybe a couch potato version of perception, where it seems like you could just sit there, [01:04:00] and perception can do the work that it needs to do to get the ideas acquired. But I think I’ve gone to more of these action theories, where your body has to somehow be involved, be part of the process of seeing or touching. And without that movement, you’re not going to get that. It’s the facilitator of these two different languages.
Janet Levin: Which I really like — thank you. Yeah, it’s definitely the couch potato view, but I’m interested in whether it’s possible for a couch potato to recognize three-dimensional shapes.
Andrea Hiott: Sorry — the couch potato view. That’s just wonderful.
Brian Glenney: Yes, that’s really good.
Andrea Hiott: But you did say even the couch potato was moving its head, so... [01:05:00]
Janet Levin: Yeah, but could — now, Susanna Schellenberg has this idea of what she calls a sentient statue. That is, an individual who just doesn’t move, or can’t move, but still can have experiences. Visual experiences, let’s say. Now, can the sentient statue recognize three-dimensional objects? And so that’s the question. And she thinks that you need at least the capacity to move. But I wonder, in one of the papers that I wrote, whether the sentient statue could do a little bit better, at least, if the world were moving [01:06:00] around — even though the sentient being was statuesque, in that she couldn’t move at all. So that’s one of the things that I was trying to think about, but I really don’t have firm conclusions.
Brian Glenney: Well, there’s a way to combine our two ways of thinking, maybe, with virtual environments. What if our actual analog body doesn’t move, or our analog world doesn’t move, but we’re placed into a digital world that does move? And we have a digital simulacrum that becomes our world. That’s all we know. Shapes are presented to us, three-dimensional — would we be able to identify them?
Janet Levin: Yeah. The way that this dovetails with questions about virtual reality [01:07:00] is really, really interesting. And that’s something that I think everybody’s going to be wanting to talk about, as you can get these much, much more realistic three-dimensional worlds. Or three-dimensional simulacra.
Andrea Hiott: But even there, I feel like — what do you both think about the sort of path dependency of all of this? That would be a way I would say it in a navigational approach. That even if we go into a virtual world, we’re coming with a history as a body, of a lot of stuff. We don’t just leave that outside the virtual world. And I feel like that’s the case in all of these, even — I can’t remember what you just said about the statue. I haven’t read those papers. What was it called?
Brian Glenney: A sentient.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, a sentient statue. Okay. Well, I guess that’s always been [01:08:00] a sentient statue, but it’s a little bit like a zombie or something, because do you have movement inside if you’re a sentient statue? Have you always been a sentient statue? I also think, just coming out of neuroscience, or even a lot of phenomenological studies about locked-in syndrome or something like that, where you can’t move anymore — but of course you would recognize a three-dimensional object.
So, all to say, it’s already a little bit what we’ve talked about. It depends on a million different things, in a sense. But I wonder about that path, that historical, if I dare say, kind of aspect to it. Do either of you think about that much?
Janet Levin: By historical, do you mean what happens if you live your life normally and then can’t move?
Andrea Hiott: We can have a lot of thought experiments, but if we’re really looking at this as we do now in the lab — a lot of these experiments don’t consider [01:09:00] when the changes come, according to when they’re done in the subject’s life, which means they’ve had a whole very different experience up to that point. If they’re just born — whether it’s an animal or a human — there’s a very different result than if they’re ten or twenty or thirty or whatever. And all those results aren’t necessarily the same, but there are some very similar things to them. But we don’t talk about it like that at all — that temporal kind of thing, that you’re a developing body from the moment you come, and that that is actually the more defining and the more coherent way of looking at the data. But we don’t do that. Or I don’t see that coming into the discussion. Which is fine when you’re just doing the thought experiments, but we’re really doing empirical studies now too.
Janet Levin: Well, I think that’s really important, to get clear about what the person has experienced up to the relevant [01:10:00] point. Because if you have a lot of touch-to-sight correlations or whatever, then it’s easy to see how they could be extended, that they could be extrapolated. And so you get a yes, I think, even for individuals who haven’t seen those particular shapes. I mean, that was what your question was, Brian, I think, about the Held experiments.
Brian Glenney: Yeah. No, that’s right. If they’re running around the world, then they’re getting a lot of that experience.
Andrea Hiott: I want to hear about that. And also, I just want to say, I also think that’s where your work, Janet, could be reinterpreted in a really interesting way. Because the kind of idea that you’re presenting there, if you try to think of it through that lens I just presented, it opens up a different way of doing the experiment. It’s just that there’s going to have [01:11:00] to be a different shift in what kind of data we’re actually looking at — if we’re looking at it through a kind of developmental lens rather than almost like slices of experiments, not taking that development into account.
But maybe — does that relate at all to what Janet just brought up about your work there, Brian?
Brian Glenney: Well, it relates to most theories of perception in philosophy today. Bence Nanay has a nice paper where he talks about how some people with blindness have some degree of visual imagination. If they have that capacity, their ability to answer Molyneux’s question with a yes seems more apt, seems more possible. And so this just adds to the pluralist take on Molyneux’s [01:12:00] question — that you really have to be open to looking at the subject. What kind of blindness do they have? Is it ocular? Is it cognitive? Is it based on some kind of lesion in their visual cortex? If so, you have to take those two subjects differently. What kind of specialized abilities do they have?
So maybe one example — I just wonder how Janet would actually answer this. Imagine you have a blind puzzler who knows how to do a Rubik’s Cube using braille, and they can solve the puzzle in a minute. They’re given sight, the braille is removed, and all there are are colors. Of course, they’re maybe not seeing the colors, but they’re able to match which colors fit, which have similarity. So are they able to solve a visual Rubik’s Cube at first sight? Does the puzzling specialization transfer across the senses? Doesn’t that [01:13:00] seem to pick up on something you’re interested in regarding conceptual capacity?
Janet Levin: Yes, but I’ve got to confess, I’ve never really tried a Rubik’s Cube. I know that it’s a challenging, interesting thing. But I take it that you use colors, that you memorize what colors are on one side, and then you maneuver it a little bit, and you’re picking up on color changes. Is that right?
Brian Glenney: Yeah, but you wouldn’t have to identify the colors necessarily. You just have to match — same color — while you’re trying to solve the puzzle.
Janet Levin: So for you, that’s the interesting, or the problematic feature — the color bit?
Brian Glenney: I guess for [01:14:00] me, does the puzzler’s capacity to solve a Rubik’s Cube transfer? That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t see the color matching as problematic.
Janet Levin: You do?
Brian Glenney: Well, not necessarily. I’m interested in what it’s being used for.
Janet Levin: So you’re suggesting that somebody who had done a Rubik’s Cube in braille could, if they had their vision restored, be able to do it — [01:15:00] or at least tell when it was done, just by looking at the colors?
Brian Glenney: Yeah. And I think, as you think about it, there’s this additional feature: when I read lots of people with blindness and their thinking about Molyneux’s problem, they essentially say, “I don’t care about shapes. I have no motivation to think about shapes. Leave me alone.” I think that’s a really standard response from people with blindness. Like, you’re just using me as a guinea pig — give me something I care about.
And I think that motivational component to see — think of that baby who sees its own hand for the first time. It’s very interested in its own hand, and all the other objects that the scientists — I mean, you haven’t seen the video, I know, but they pass all these other objects around the baby. The baby doesn’t care about those objects at all. I just think that this motivational feature of the [01:16:00] puzzler — it cares about the Rubik’s Cube. It cares about solving it. It’s motivated to solve it. And I think that additional feature gets lost in Molyneux’s problem. But it can be brought out with this new kind of Rubik’s Cube, or any of these other kinds of specialized abilities that the newly sighted might be able to transfer from their previous blind status.
Janet Levin: Well, I think the motivational issue is very interesting, but I think that’s a separate issue. Suppose somebody really is motivated to solve a Rubik’s Cube and were just shown the different — again, I’m really speaking from ignorance, because I don’t really know how it works, but presumably they see the colors and [01:17:00] they can tell...
I’m hesitating because I’m not exactly sure what the experiment would be, since I really don’t know that much about Rubik’s Cube. How are you thinking about it? They see one colored surface and then they see another one?
Brian Glenney: Yeah, they see all these multiple colored surfaces and they’re like, “Oh, that’s just like the various dots that I previously touched.”
Andrea Hiott: If the colored surfaces were somehow regularized to — whatever the patterns of the dots are, if the colors are somehow regularized to that, they wouldn’t need to be the dots, but you would pick up on the same patterns, right?
Brian Glenney: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: That’s the idea.
Janet Levin: And when you pick up on the patterns, it’s that you see one surface that has colors that correlate to [01:18:00] the braille dots that you’ve been feeling — and then is it that you see the next panel after somebody manipulates the cube?
Brian Glenney: As they start to solve the puzzle, which they know the algorithm for, right — they’ll just turn the Rubik’s Cube in certain ways. That behavior helps them make this transfer of specialized knowledge on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. And I think that’s a kind of conceptual achievement that moves from touch to sight in an interesting way, because it’s translated through this bodily movement. And that actually seems, given what we know of sensory perception today, like the right kind of Molyneux problem to be asking, as opposed to this [01:19:00] sentient passive statue.
So I guess maybe the question is: what is that passiveness controlling for? Why is it important to be a couch potato perceiver for the conceptual transfer?
Janet Levin: Well, that’s a really good question. A lot of early modern philosophers like Locke want to distinguish between perception as being something like passive reception, versus cognition — where you can use either information about the relation between sight and touch, or other information that’s just visual, or perhaps even more information about the way the world is, or the way people now think that the world is, to influence [01:20:00] what you say that you perceive, your recognition of objects.
And so there are two questions. One is the one that Brian raised, and I agree completely: why does perception need to be passive? Why should that be the distinction between perception and cognition? Couldn’t it be something else? Couldn’t perception be a matter of where it is and how it is that you get the information about the world — that is, through sensory modalities of various kinds? And then cognition is a matter of how, in later stages, that information is processed, even if the information comes in not just passively, but with either some sort of innate way of categorizing these things, or something that is very rudimentary [01:21:00] learning. So why should that distinction matter? That’s a question. And that would be a question that you could raise to the early modern philosophers like Locke, who think that it has to be passive.
But then the other question — and this is the one that I believe comes out at the end of that article that you were talking about, Andrea, that I wrote about Molyneux — is whether... I mean, let’s accept the passive-active distinction, even though it seems really stupid to do it. But let’s accept it for now and ask whether seeing something from different angles when you’re not moving, et cetera, but you are getting more visual information about it — does that count? And suppose you are able to learn more in that way. [01:22:00] Does that count as passive, or does it count as involving some kind of intellectual activity? So that was the question I was interested in, and that’s why I brought up the sentient statue. But of course, you have to say something about how long the sentient being has been a statue.
Andrea Hiott: I think it’s really interesting if you try to hold both of these together without deciding, without the yes/no, which has kind of guided this whole problem and question. But what if it’s not about yes/no anymore? What if it’s about being more specific and robust about each way in which we’re asking the question? And when we do that, then we get more information, which all together gives us something — which I think is what your paper actually does there.
But even if I try to be more specific about — a lot of those experiments, even ones I remember recently, which I can’t remember what it was exactly, but [01:23:00] humans had their vision surgically restored. And then this cross-modal matching was really hard, but then they learned it really quickly. Kind of like what you were talking about, Brian, with the kids. It’s as if at first it’s very dissonant, but then you have some kind of more experience, which is actually empiricist there. And then it makes sense. It all kind of fills in or something.
I think this was even with newborns — from the very beginning, they had that cross-modality. But when you go through life, you become patterned, right? And so then you lose the kind of ability for the amodality. It’s the same way we prune in the brain and things like this. This seems very much demonstrated in science, that this happens, and that then, of course, if you’ve been going through life in that way, when you suddenly have a change, you’re going to be almost frozen for a bit, and [01:24:00] you have to relearn it.
That to me seems like — we have to stop thinking about cognition and perception as opposites. And if we do that, then we look back at something like what you present in that experiment, Janet, and I think that’s opening us up into some way in which we can intellectually move while passive, if that makes sense at all. And that to me feels very exciting. But I don’t know if that made any sense to either of you.
Janet Levin: It did, yeah. Whether seeing things from different perspectives, but without you moving, is — first of all, is it enough to give you the ability to perceive three-dimensional objects? Question one. Question two: is it perfectly passive? [01:25:00] If the ability to identify these three-dimensional objects from just looking at it from different perspectives — you know, watching it rotate on a platform, let’s say — if you can get an idea of a 3D object from that, does that count as introducing some sort of intellectual activity to it?
Andrea Hiott: I think it introduces a new experience, a new form of learning. I can see a way in which that kind of setup could show us that we can learn in a new way — which, I mean, I don’t believe in this cognitive-perceptual divide that a lot of us assume. But even if we stick with that, I just think that [01:26:00] kind of experiment shows what you’re trying to get it to show, just maybe in a different context. Because you would have to still have moved up to that point, I guess, is the point, if you’re going to think of it in the same context in which you present it. But it’s still actually a novel way to show how that same kind of process can be done in these spaces that are three-dimensional, or that we don’t think of as empirical. So I’m almost flipping what you say. Does that make any sense, Brian, from an embodied point of view, or even Janet?
Janet Levin: I mean, it’s empirical because this thing is rotating in front of you and is presenting itself to you via your visual system. But can you — if the thing turns around, can you still regard that as the object having presented [01:27:00] you with an experience? Or is it that you’re doing something? So I think that’s a good way to put it.
And does this matter? I’m not sure. But it does matter, I think, if you are thinking that there is an important distinction between perception and cognition — and that has now come to the forefront, given Ned Block’s new book about the border between thinking and feeling, where he says that there is one, and there’s been a lot of commentary about it and a lot of attempts to show that he’s wrong. So that sort of Molyneux question, I think, is relevant to that debate.
Andrea Hiott: And I guess what I’m trying to say is: why do we have to say it’s either/or? Of course, there’s a difference between thinking and feeling, or these different ways that we’ve presented how we come into new knowledge. But if we [01:28:00] take this whole picture into view of how we’ve gotten there, we’re actually getting different kinds — more like a pluralistic, or a multiplicity. We’re getting different knowledge in each of those cases, and to pit them against one another is seeming to me a little less — like, why would we do that? Does that make any sense to you? Or is it too kind of —
Brian Glenney: No, no. It makes a lot of sense.
Andrea Hiott: I just feel like there’s something there about the way that we can — I almost feel like it’s showing that cognition is a continuance of experience, that you’re experiencing in a different way. Because I do think what you show in that experiment is possible. But it doesn’t fit into the ruts of trying to make it yes or no, either/or, in that old model.
Janet Levin: I think that’s right. But then you have to [01:29:00] get clearer what the new questions are, and that’s something that I’m not quite sure I’ve got, but it’s something that I’ve tried to convey. So suppose you get to a yes, or a possibly yes — how do you do it? So it’s not so much that there’s a yes or no answer, but what would it take to get what these days you could count as a yes answer?
And I’m toying with the idea that you don’t need movement, although I’m not sure. Brian is vehemently of the mind that you do, and has a fascinating paper called “The Skater’s Eye,” which talks about this. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Andrea, but it’s really pretty interesting.
Andrea Hiott: I’m very interested in Brian’s skateboarding stuff. We’re going to have to talk about that in [01:30:00] another episode. I want to hear about it, though, Brian — she’s brought up a few different of your papers. I don’t know how much time you all have, though, because we said till 8:00 and now it’s 8:05.
Brian Glenney: 8:05?
Andrea Hiott: Maybe. We’ve been going. Well — I mean, not 8:05. Whatever time it is for wherever you are in the world.
Janet Levin: But maybe Brian could just present, for like five minutes, and then you two could set up a time for him to continue. Just to present that.
Andrea Hiott: We could do something like that. I’m fine, so you just tell me. But yeah, go ahead.
Brian Glenney: Yeah. So this paper, “The Skater’s Eye” — it’s this strange ability that skateboarders have to identify objects out in the urban landscape that are particularly suited for an individual’s skateboarding maneuvers, skateboarding tricks. So, like, a handrail, ledges, a set of stairs. [01:31:00] And then skateboarders who see a handrail that affords a certain trick have this crazy motivation to then skate it. And that feature adds to this — like, what is the skater’s eye, such that it makes them want to go and risk bodily injury in order to perform this trick?
So we’re on our third paper, and it’s in Cognitive Science. This third paper — we’re finishing the reviews for it. So it has this upshot where we’re —
Janet Levin: In the Journal of Cognitive Science.
Brian Glenney: Yeah, in the journal. Where we’re trying to understand what might be the brain processes involved. Is the hippocampus involved? Premotor cortex? What are the [01:32:00] operating conditions for the skater’s eye?
But it actually comes back to Molyneux’s problem in a way that is different from this perception-versus-cognition distinction, where I don’t see perception, so to speak, in the eye, or in the head — but rather, I guess, for the Rubik’s Cube puzzler, it would be in the hand, right? Their hand would just know how to do the work, rather than the head. And then for the skateboarder, their knowledge that produces this ability to instantiate the skater’s eye, that’s in the heel rather than the head. And so our body is able to produce, or is itself a repository of, this knowledge. And [01:33:00] that’s kind of a third move away from this perception-versus-cognition distinction — that maybe the body itself does a lot of this work. And I think this is enactivism, right? It’s kind of a well-trodden way of thinking about reality for the last twenty years.
Janet Levin: Yeah, but enactivism is one thing — that is, that you see the world in terms of what it allows you to do, how it allows you to move, et cetera. And that’s a view that’s controversial. It comes from Gibson, as you said, Andrea, and it was taken over by Alva Noë, and I guess Bence Nanay. I haven’t seen the latest of Bence Nanay’s stuff.
But then Brian adds this motivational aspect to it — that what you see is not just affordances, not just ways that [01:34:00] the environment allows you or prompts you to skate, but that you get this motivation to do it. And I’m wondering about that too. I mean, what if you’ve had a horrible accident and you really, really don’t want to do it, but you see these things. You go, “Oh, God, that’s where I did whatever it is that I did, and I fell, and oh, God, keep me away from that.” So maybe you want to say that there’s some sort of underived but tamped-down desire to do it.
But is this hippocampus? Where would a motivational component come from?
Andrea Hiott: Oh, gosh. Well, there are so many different theories. The motivational part is different than the spatial part of it. In a bigger way, you could think of it coming from [01:35:00] the hippocampus, because it’s kind of how you’re navigating. And it’s also connected to your memory. And so for me, I would start in a very different place than any of this, but actually all of this would inform it in a really interesting way. So if you just think of it navigationally instead of cognitively or experientially, then you already have all that cognitive-experiential stuff in there.
And I think what Janet just brought up about the care and the urge — I’m saying care, but you have this urge. Brian, you said the skater — you said something about, they just want to do this trick. They see this. And I love skating, by the way. I love it, and I’ve watched, like, every video about it, and I did it when I was a kid. But more, I just love it. I love the interaction of the environment with the body, and also the edge work of it is interesting too, which is what Janet’s bringing up a bit.
And it’s interesting you brought up enactivism, [01:36:00] because there are so many different kinds of that too. But that ecological sense, and that participatory sense-making with the world, which can seem like an abstract idea, but I think it fits here. So then, to go back to the living — if you’re just thinking of it as the way that you are experiencing the space, you know, you and Janet and I have had very different experiences with what we think when we hear “skateboarding,” or when we see a certain staircase relative to what we’re going to do with a skateboard. It’s going to be really different for all three of us, right?
Brian Glenney: Good example.
Janet Levin: There’s a bit of concrete block that comes down in our backyard to the back gate, and I once saw a skater on this, and I just freaked out, [01:37:00] because I was thinking, “Oh my God, they’re going to fall.” And so we put a lock on the gate. I mean, they could get up if they wanted to. But so every time I pass that, I think, “Oh, God, this affords the opportunity to shred. Never let it happen.”
Andrea Hiott: I love that. I mean, of course this is about reading the environment in a sense — but Reed. Edward Reed. I haven’t read that much. I would be very interested in how putting that with Gibsonian affordances and all the rest of the stuff that we’ve been talking about might illuminate something very interesting in all of this. Because there’s a connection I can’t quite make, but I see something very fascinating in trying to hold both of these things together a little bit.
In terms of — I mean, what we’ve been thinking about is, can you gain knowledge from two different modalities without those modalities being connected? But [01:38:00] then we kind of got to a place where we’re understanding that the body is already the connection. And yet at the same time, I think we’re realizing that you can create new connections without moving your body. Which I think a skateboarder does too — you’re imagining what could happen there.
So in a way, maybe the body doesn’t need to move, Janet, but there’s movement in the environment, which is actually what you’re saying when you’re talking about the table moving. So I guess the question is, how could we not think of this through an either/or framework? What would that look like for both of you? Is it possible?
Janet Levin: Yeah. And then, if it’s not either/or, then you have to be very clear about where the movement is. The question is, can it be just environmental movement, or does your own body have to move? And so that’s a different question.
Andrea Hiott: But doesn’t that [01:39:00] feel very exciting? If you start thinking of that question, and looking at your papers and Brian’s papers, then something very interesting opens up.
Brian Glenney: Yes. So that’s definitely something for further discussion. But this has been a lot of fun for me.
Andrea Hiott: And just before we go, I do want to bring it to — you know, care, or whatever. Do you still care about these issues after all this time? What is it about this question, or even doing philosophy in a way, that you can still keep having these conversations about it after, what, twenty years or something that you’ve both been talking about it? Does anything come up about that before we go, just to kind of end? Or anything else you might want to say about your connection, but also this problem, this idea?
Janet Levin: Yeah. Well, I think I’ve gotten more interested in questions about perceptual learning, [01:40:00] and whether perception can be distinguished in any way that’s reasonably sharp from cognition. And I’m not sure it can, but it’s really now come to the front of philosophical discussion about perception and cognition. And so that is an avenue I’d like to explore more.
Still interested in phenomenal concepts, which is kind of interesting, because Leibniz could say — and John Campbell does say this, who thinks that there are amodal concepts — that the phenomenological distinctions between what it’s like to see a cube versus feel a cube are so strong that it blocks out what could be a perception of something that’s [01:41:00] amodal. You know, the phenomenology rules, but it shouldn’t. It’s like Plato’s paintings on the cave. That’s not what’s important. What’s important are the forms. But you get distracted by all these paintings in the cave. So you just have to step outside, and then you can see what’s real.
But I’m not sure how you step outside of these phenomenal concepts to see what’s real, though some people say that that’s true. Anyway, that’s a digression. Brian, you’ve got different issues.
Brian Glenney: It’s not a digression. That’s where it’s at. In some sense Janet’s right. Everything kind of does come back to this question of what real knowledge is, right? It can’t be the cave knowledge of these images on the back of the cave wall — or at least, please, I hope it’s not that. I hope we’re [01:42:00] not in a simulation.
And this is something that — you were mentioning Reid. Reid thinks that we have direct access to the world, like to this cup, rather than through some kind of intermediary, like an idea. And I think this is probably what drives both Janet and me with respect to Molyneux’s question. Is our contact with shapes out in the world mediated by something, like experience, or like concepts? Or do we have some kind of immediate contact with the external world?
And I think that’s what drives my interest in Molyneux’s question. It’s still so seductive in the sense that you can change it in slightly different ways, and its meaning completely changes. Like Janet was [01:43:00] saying — just, what if we move the shapes just a little bit? What does that do to our appreciation of what the newly sighted see, and what their capabilities are? There we have it: the seduction of getting to the external world, I think, is the draw into Molyneux’s problem.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I find it wonderful and inspiring, and I feel like we just barely even got into it, actually — all the really interesting threads. And I’m thankful to you, Janet, for introducing me to Brian, because I had not been aware of all this work, and I’m very excited about it. So thanks for that.
Janet Levin: Yeah, but Brian’s the man. He’s doing the SEP entry. He’s written many books about it.
Andrea Hiott: Well, yeah, now I’ve got a lot to explore. Hopefully, Brian, we can talk about that some time. We can make a time to talk about it, because there’s so much interesting work.
Brian Glenney: Thank you so much for thinking of [01:44:00] me.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Thanks, Janet. It’s so good to see you.
Janet Levin: Good to see you. Have a great next two weeks in Hawaii. So I’m sure now, since you’re such a great skateboarder, you’re a great surfer too.
Brian Glenney: Well, I don’t have the surfer’s eye. Let’s put it that way. I’m terrified. I’m right by Pipeline right now.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow. But did you grow up surfing, just to continue the theme?
Brian Glenney: I did, but then I had an injury.
Andrea Hiott: Ah — to Janet’s point.
Brian Glenney: Yes, it is to Janet’s point. But I’m trying to recover, and so we’ll see. I have two weeks to do so. This has been a joy. Thank you so much.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, thank you both. I’ll be in touch about when we go live, and you can both see if you need to edit anything, or send me all the links. But Brian and Janet, both of [01:45:00] you, thank you for your work. It’s been really fun to talk to you both and see you both interact. That’s kind of wonderful too — just to see you, over all these years, that you’re still in conversation about this work. That means something, I think.
Brian Glenney: Yeah. It really is. And you know, when you’re thinking about philosophy and love — we both love this subject, and you can see it.
Andrea Hiott: To me, that’s inspiring, to see that that continues. And I feel that too, and I know a lot of people who are interested in these subjects do. So thanks for being here with us.
Brian Glenney: Thank you, Andrea, for this wonderful session.
Andrea Hiott: All right. And have a good morning and good day, and good Hawaii vacation.
Brian Glenney: Thank you. Bye.
Andrea Hiott: Bye.
Molyneux’s Question, with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney. Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy, hosted by Andrea Hiott.
Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy. It’s reasonable to care.
Discusisng the hidden causal layer. The Agential Biology Institute (ABI) is built on a provocative premise: there’s a missing causal layer in biology — something that gives cells an intentional direction as they develop — and the dominant gene-centric story can’t account for it. The standard picture treats a fertilized egg as a gene-driven robot that only later, somehow, acquires a mind. Charlie argues that agency is there far earlier and far deeper, and that this is a testable claim that can be explored rigorously.
Charlie walks through a sequence of examples of organisms rewriting their own inheritance in directed, non-random ways. Some examples he gives are: horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotes (by some estimates the source of the large majority of their cumulative genetic change); Michael Levin’s planaria that “remember” how many heads to grow in the electrical dynamics of their bodies rather than in their genes; Oded Rechavi’s C. elegans passing down stress- and diet-responses through small RNAs across generations; diet effects carried into mammalian sperm; and mother mice whose licking and grooming reprograms their pups’ stress biology outside the egg-and-sperm pathway entirely. The recurring punchline: the program is set up to change the program — which a purely blind, Darwinian story shouldn’t allow, and which points to some agential mechanism underneath.
A secret history, and a lost Popper lecture. For listeners who love intellectual history, this is the jewel of the episode. Charlie tells it as a story with “four heroes and two villains” (the villains, he’s quick to say, aren’t really villains — just people whose mistakes got too popular). The heroes: Lamarck and Darwin — yes, Darwin, who genuinely believed use and disuse shaped variation and even proposed “gemmules” to carry that influence into the germline — plus Barbara McClintock, whose “jumping genes” were dismissed for decades before a very late Nobel, and who said the luminous line, the genome is a sensitive organ of the cell. And then Karl Popper, who near the end of his life gave a Medawar Lecture arguing that you cannot explain life without explaining the intentional creativity of organisms. That lecture was written down, placed in a box at the Hoover Institution marked “to be opened in 2029,” and later found and published (as Karl Popper and the Two Secrets of Life) by scholar Hans-Joachim Niemann. It reads as startlingly in tune with what we now know about epigenetics.
Charlie’s reading of Popper is the opposite of the rigid, gotcha version some fans adopt. Yes: scientific ideas can be falsified but never finally proven, because we can never observe the whole universe. But for Charlie the lesson isn’t caution — it’s wildness. New theories don’t come from the data; they come from creativity and imagination, which we then test against the world. That demands real humility and a genuine welcome for strange ideas, since today’s untestable metaphysics can become tomorrow’s experiment.
There are some points where the conversation is narrative and deeply connecting to everyday life and others were it reaches for some surprising speculative beauty.
Threads to follow: the Agential Biology Institute; Karl Popper and the Two Secrets of Life (Hans-Joachim Niemann); Barbara McClintock’s Nobel address; Michael Levin’s work on bioelectricity and planaria; Oded Rechavi on transgenerational RNA inheritance; Dennis Noble’s The Music of Life; Richard Watson on natural induction; David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree.
The ABI main website has a great description of their science, evidence for the problem of agency, and lots about the community we are developing.
TalkingOctopus.Com is Charlie’s personal website, including a page (/essays) with many essays and the unpublished book, “The Human Body is a Guess,“ also a page (/music) with lots of songs Charlie has written, including “River Song“ which includes the rhyming couplet, “A wise man said you can never step in the same river twice / Because you know it wouldn’ta been the same river and he wouldn’ta been the same Heraclitus.”
* Agential Biology Institute (ABI) — Charlie’s nonprofit — https://www.agentialbiology.org/
* Charlie Munford, “Episolution: a new principle necessary to a learning-first theory of life” (open-access paper where he lays out the idea discussed in the episode), Communicative & Integrative Biology, 2024 — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19420889.2024.2366249
* Agential Topics — the talk/discussion series Charlie hosts, where several of the scientists below have appeared. (No single fixed homepage link; ABI and the Levin lab media page index the recordings.)
* Hans-Joachim Niemann, Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life: Including Karl Popper’s Medawar Lecture 1986 and Three Related Texts — the book containing the previously lost Medawar Lecture (”A New Interpretation of Darwinism”) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22530221-karl-popper-and-the-two-new-secrets-of-life (published by Mohr Siebeck; also on Amazon). Note: Charlie refers to it in conversation as “the Two Secrets of Life”; the full title uses “Two New Secrets.”
The ABI scientists Charlie names
* Michael Levin — famed biologist, bioelectricity, planaria, the two-headed-worm work — https://drmichaellevin.org/
* Oded Rechavi — transgenerational small-RNA inheritance in C. elegans (Tel Aviv) — https://www.odedrechavilab.com/
* Richard A. Watson — inventor of “natural induction” — https://www.richardawatson.com/ · key paper: Evolution by natural induction, Royal Society Interface Focus, 2025 — https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/15/6/20250036/366154/Evolution-by-natural-induction-II-further
* Josh Bongard — https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/team-builds-first-living-robots and author of one of the books Andrea often references: How the Body Shapes the Way We Think
* Denis Noble — legendary scientist, physiologist, critic of the selfish-gene view; his book The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/546661 (also debated Richard Dawkins, referenced in the episode)
* Stuart Kauffman — complexity theory; on the ABI board (no single fixed link — search “Stuart Kauffman complexity theory”)
Other people, books & concepts mentioned
* Barbara McClintock — “jumping genes”/transposition; 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; source of the line “the genome is a sensitive organ of the cell.” (Nobel lecture archived at nobelprize.org — search “McClintock 1983 Nobel.”)
* Jean-Baptiste Lamarck — use and disuse; “Lamarckism.”
* Charles Darwin — “gemmules” (his pangenesis theory of inheritance).
* Jacques Monod — the lac operon; Chance and Necessity (the selfish-gene-adjacent view Popper argued against).
* Richard Dawkins — The Selfish Gene.
* Conrad Waddington — genetic assimilation (the 1950s fruit-fly experiments).
* Terrence Deacon — “constraint closure”; his book Incomplete Nature.
* David Quammen, The Tangled Tree — popular book on horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis (referenced by Andrea).
* The Dutch Hunger Winter studies — the post–WWII famine natural experiment on transgenerational effects (search “Dutch Hunger Winter epigenetics”).
* Deep Springs College — the wilderness college Charlie credits for the “you can work on any problem” ethos.
Andrea Hiott: Hi, Charlie. It’s wonderful to see you. Thanks for being on Love & Philosophy today.
Charlie Munford: Hi. I appreciate it. I’m excited to be here.
Andrea Hiott: So tell people — who are you? What are you doing? What do we need to know about Charlie Munford?
Charlie Munford: I want to start with a story, because it paints a picture of who I am right now and what my life is like. Last night I was down in the basement watching TV with my two kids. The girl — she’s eight — went upstairs to get a banana, a snack. She brought it down and I was real proud: she shared it with her little brother. She peeled it and gave him half. He’s going to be three on Monday.
Andrea Hiott: Aw.
Charlie Munford: So a while later he comes up to me and goes, “Where’s my banana?” And I said, “I don’t know, buddy.” Then I saw him go over to the sofa, lift up the cushions, and say, “There it is.”
Andrea Hiott: Oh — and it was there.
Charlie Munford: Yep. It was there.
Andrea Hiott: So that’s your life right now. Is there any intentional creativity in that? Because that’s a term you’ve been using in our discussions. What do you see in your kids, and in your own life, relative to that?
Charlie Munford: With kids it’s nonstop. They’re the most creative creatures on earth. Being a dad — every minute is exciting. That’s the most exciting thing in my life, I’d say.
Andrea Hiott: Could you ever have imagined it would be like that before it happened?
Charlie Munford: No. I had a buddy — a pretty rugged guy, we ride horses and shoot guns together — and when I was about to have my daughter, my first kid, I asked him, “What is it like?” He’d had a daughter a couple of years before. He said, “You can prepare — you know your life is going to change, you’ve made plans, you’ve seen it happen to other people. What you can’t prepare for is how you’re going to change.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Two years ago I could never have predicted that on a nice Saturday morning, when the fish are biting, the one thing I’d want to be doing is sitting on the living room floor playing dolls with my little girl.”
Andrea Hiott: That’s very sweet. What’s your life like other than kids right now? What’s happening?
Charlie Munford: I feel like I’m in the middle of the most incredible adventure of my career. And I’ve had a pretty adventure-filled life — I’ve done a lot of unusual things, had a lot of experiences most people haven’t.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, you have to name one or two.
Charlie Munford: I’ll tell you three stories. The first — I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, spending a lot of time outdoors hunting, fishing, and trapping with my granddad, my dad, and my friends. My parents were both lawyers, well-to-do, but they really believed in public education, so they sent us to public school in Jackson. Some of the schools were pretty rough around the edges.
There was a boy in my middle school — and this is relevant to parenting, to wondering how much to protect your kids. I used to wonder how bad you had to be to get sent to juvenile detention, because all this bad stuff would happen. There was a boy named Two Pants Kelly. Do you remember sagging — wearing your pants really low? Back then it was a big deal. He sagged so much they made him wear two pairs of pants to school, so they called him Two Pants Kelly. He punched a teacher in the face. He’d pull the weave out of a girl’s hair and run around the gym with it. He threw another boy off the bleachers — and he was still there, never got sent to juvie. Then one day he brought a loaded gun to school, mad at some boy, and went from classroom to classroom looking for him. They did a lockdown — this was before all the school shootings. Our history teacher, Mr. Martin, chased him out of the school barehanded, across the street, caught him, and took the gun away.
Andrea Hiott: Oh gosh.
Charlie Munford: And then they sent him to juvie.
Andrea Hiott: So that’s what it takes. Don’t do that, anyone.
Charlie Munford: I had a great family. My parents took care of me and gave me a lot of opportunities. In high school I went to a camp called Keewaydin and paddled canoes — I paddled all the way to Hudson Bay with a group. For six weeks we didn’t see a single other person. That’s how far up in the wilderness we were. Afterward I went to a college that was also in the wilderness, and then I went to Yale. At Yale I was invited to join the Elizabethan Club — a place where people serve tea on really nice china, wait on you, and you sit around looking at the original Shakespeare folios. That’s the club. And I joined the Yale polo team and played horse polo.
Andrea Hiott: Why did you go to Yale? What was your subject?
Charlie Munford: I was interested in literature. I was reading poetry.
Andrea Hiott: So that’s why you were reading Shakespeare folios.
Charlie Munford: Yeah. It was all very incongruous, because I’d just come from working on a ranch in Nevada, working as a driller at the bottom of a gold mine, packing mules in the Sierra Nevada — all this gritty stuff. And then there I was at the Elizabethan Club and on the Yale polo team, traveling to Oxford and Cambridge to play polo.
Andrea Hiott: Was it hard to suddenly be in such a different world?
Charlie Munford: It was very hard. Cognitive dissonance. But it was fun too. I paid my dues to the polo team by mucking out the barn, so I felt a little different. But that’s how you take on new things — as adventures — and you see where they go.
Andrea Hiott: I like that you were in a lot of different worlds that didn’t really fit each other. I moved a lot as a kid, so I compare it to that — completely different regularities around you, and you figure out how to deal with a lot of them.
Charlie Munford: Exactly.
Andrea Hiott: You said this time of your life is so exciting and powerful. What’s that about?
Charlie Munford: Many years later I had a business — a wild boar smoked sausage company down in New Orleans.
Andrea Hiott: Wow. How did you end up in New Orleans? You were at Yale and then you’re doing sausage?
Charlie Munford: I moved back to Mississippi and started farming. As an undergrad I’d gone down to Cuba to study organic agriculture — behind the communist curtain. Cuba had this amazing system. It probably doesn’t exist anymore, but when the Soviet Union collapsed they lost their food subsidies, so they allowed private enterprise, but only in local farming. They had this incredibly vibrant, entrepreneurial local food system.
Andrea Hiott: Amazing that you got to see that.
Charlie Munford: It was very cool, and I got obsessed with it. So I moved back to Mississippi to start a farm and raise food. One thing led to another and it became a local meat company. New Orleans has some of the best restaurants in the world — hundreds of world-class restaurants — and my business sold meat to them. That’s how we started the wild boar sausage company. It was all connected.
Andrea Hiott: Did you ever publish any books or poetry? You’re a very good writer — your Yale training paid off.
Charlie Munford: Thank you. No, I haven’t. I’ve written a lot but never collected it into anything. Part of it is that my interests are so specific. I’ve become so enmeshed in this particular problem at the foundation of biology that I’ve been impatient to work on it with other people, rather than writing about it in a context where no one sees what sort of problem it is. Now that I’m president of the Agential Biology Institute, we’re actually raising money to do the empirical experiments that will demonstrate what we’re talking about. That’s becoming the main focus of my life. I feel like I’ve been looking for 25 years for some way to make this real — and now it’s here.
Andrea Hiott: How does the agency and the biology fit into everything you’ve said so far? Were you already thinking about these ideas? Did you study biology?
Charlie Munford: When the wild boar sausage company failed — tragically —
Andrea Hiott: I have to laugh because you’re laughing. “The wild boar sausage company failed tragically” is a funny statement.
Charlie Munford: It did fail tragically. That year was really bad for me. I’ve always been interested in nature and our place in it — that’s how I got into local food. But that year was terrible. The business failed, I was going through a divorce, I’d just had my first kid, I got a presumptive diagnosis of cancer, and my dog died. All these things happened at once. I got falsely accused of things and sued. It was the worst constellation of things that’s ever happened to me. But I was really pushed out of my worldview — pushed into asking, “What are we? What are we doing here?” I’d been thinking about chronic disease, because I’d struggled with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, weight. And I was very dissatisfied with the explanations you could find. So I got drawn into the question of biological agency, and it got deeper and deeper and more interesting. There’s a whole hidden story — a secret history of biology — that I’d love to share.
Andrea Hiott: Where did you start? Reading books about Darwin?
Charlie Munford: I started with chronic disease research — what’s at the root of these conditions? The questions were already all around me, because the whole premise of the local food movement is that the needs of modern society are out of sync with the environment, and we’re even out of sync with our own physiology. There are received ideas about that which I didn’t find satisfying, so I was primed to look for deeper explanations.
The premise of the Agential Biology Institute is that there’s a hidden causal layer in biology — a missing causal layer that gives an intentional direction to cells as they develop. The project I’m in now is about building the infrastructure to study that missing layer. It’s necessary because the fundamental theory we have — the gene-based theory — makes predictions, and those predictions have been refuted. The prediction is that variation is blind. Instead we’re finding all these examples of organisms changing themselves and their DNA in heritable, directional ways. That’s not allowed by the theory, so we need a deeper theory that incorporates it. And that implies there’s a universal mechanism for learning in all cells. If we uncover that mechanism, it reframes everything that has to do with cellular coordination.
Andrea Hiott: And what problems come from cellular coordination?
Charlie Munford: The hardest problems we have: cancer, autoimmunity, neurodegeneration, aging itself. And beyond that — we’re groups of cells, so the same principles apply when we coordinate with one another and with the world. Now you’re into addiction, mental illness, crime, war and peace. A much deeper and more expansive set of consequences. But they all emanate from the story biology tells: that life begins with no agency. A human begins as a single cell — a zygote — and a single cell is supposedly just following genetic instructions.
Andrea Hiott: You’re saying that’s the normal story we all accept?
Charlie Munford: That’s the dominant view across the life sciences: at the beginning of development it’s just a gene-driven robot. Then the human gets larger, and at some unspecified moment there’s a mind. From then on the human follows instructions from their mind, independent of just DNA and environment — an intentional directionality they follow through learning. That leads biology to ask questions like: what gene leads to what protein, what protein to what mechanism, what neurotransmitter to what behavior, what enzyme to inflammation? Piece by piece. But because of this evidence of Lamarckism, we need a more synthetic set of questions — what are the common features of all cells and organisms that could produce a universal learning mechanism?
Andrea Hiott: You mentioned Lamarckism — you’re partly talking about epigenetics. For those who don’t know: that’s the typical story you just laid out, but you’re questioning it. How would you describe the shift that’s been happening in how we think about genes?
Charlie Munford: There’s a short part and a long part. The short part: people have been finding results showing inheritance of acquired characteristics — that’s called Lamarckism — and setting them aside. There are two criticisms of the idea that we need to study biological agency.
The first: “If those changes are in the direction of reproductive fitness, they must have gotten there from prior natural selection.” That’s not logically necessary — there are other ways they could get there — but it requires imagining some outside-the-box theory involving time reversal or multiple universes. I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to that criticism, because I don’t think this directional change is necessarily in the direction of reproductive fitness. I think that’s a correlation, not a cause.
Andrea Hiott: You don’t think life is all about that.
Charlie Munford: No — although it is a hypothesis, and a testable one. The second criticism: “Suppose this variation is either in the direction of reproductive fitness — in which case natural selection put it there ahead of time — or it’s blind to reproductive fitness, in which case it has no evolutionary salience.” But that’s wrong, because organisms could be trying to do something else, and from that set of variations natural selection chooses the ones that have reproductive fitness. So the whole purpose of life could be something other than reproductive fitness, and it would still require reproductive fitness to get into the future as a lineage. Those are two separate questions. What we’re trying to do as individuals — that’s the question of our creativity, our intentional directionality — is separate from whether we get into the future. Natural selection is a perfectly good mechanism; there’s nothing wrong with it.
Andrea Hiott: What is natural selection, for people who think they know but might be thinking of something else?
Charlie Munford: They almost always are, because they’ve been misled. This whole history has four heroes and two villains.
Andrea Hiott: And the villains aren’t really villains — this is the novel you’ll write of it.
Charlie Munford: Right, they’re not really villains — just people who made mistakes that turned out to be way too popular. So: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a biologist around 1800–1810. His work was really good for its time, because science didn’t even have a theory of organic change yet. People thought every species had been there for as long as life had — they were operating from the assumption that God created them all in seven days. Lamarck’s theory said it’s not like that; life changed through geological time. That was radical, and that’s what he was known for in his time.
What he’s known for now is something he’d be shocked to find attached to his name, because everyone believed it and he didn’t invent it: the idea that use and disuse shape variation. That’s a common-sense idea — good solutions to a problem in nature look like the organism got there by trying to solve that problem. His example was the long legs of wading birds: it seems like, in the course of trying not to get their feathers wet while hunting in shallow water, the birds achieved longer and longer legs through their intentional creativity. Virtually all biologists believed use and disuse influenced variation until maybe the 1890s. Darwin believed it too — it wasn’t a fringe view for him, it was core to his theory. In The Origin of Species he mentions use and disuse as a source of variation eight times, according to [Denis] Noble.
Andrea Hiott: This is definitely not the story most people tell.
Charlie Munford: Not at all what you learn in school. Darwin then invented a theory of how those bodily influences could wind up in the eggs and sperm — he called them gemmules: small particles circulating through the bloodstream carrying the influence of the use and disuse you choose to do.
Andrea Hiott: Gemmules — G-E-M-M-U-L-E-S? And Darwin came up with this?
Charlie Munford: Darwin. Lamarck and Darwin shared the view that use and disuse had some influence over variation. Neither believed that everything you acquire in your lifetime is inherited.
Andrea Hiott: What were the gemmules doing?
Charlie Munford: Carrying some influence from your physiology, through the blood, down to your germline cells — your eggs and sperm — where it could be transmitted to your children.
Andrea Hiott: And Darwin wrote this? In The Origin of Species?
Charlie Munford: In a later book. This was his theory to explain variation. Darwin and Wallace co-invented natural selection: there’s variation in populations, and nature decides which ones perish without reproducing and which reproduce most. Through heritability, that affects the future makeup of the population — it explains evolution. Lamarck already had a theory of evolution; Darwin and Wallace added rigor by pointing out that nature selects between variants. But Darwin believed those variants were not blind with respect to use and disuse. What’s now called Lamarckism didn’t come from Lamarck, and it was believed by Darwin.
Andrea Hiott: That’s confusing, because you learn that Darwin was just about selecting for traits that lead to more reproduction, and that Lamarck was the one saying your engagement with the environment can change your body in a way that’s passed on. But we now have evidence for that, right? At least short-term, in animals — the way we live and certain conditions actually influence what passes down.
Charlie Munford: The current theory says changes to the inherited program must be caused by blind chance and filtered by natural selection — otherwise the change is caused by the program itself, which is circular and can’t be valid. A program can’t say “scramble me,” or you could only run it once or twice before it self-destructs. So we need to add an agential mechanism to explain the program adding information during the organism’s lifetime. I have six examples that prove this happens.
One: the most typical organisms on Earth are prokaryotes — the majority of the cells in our body, and the majority of organisms in every natural environment. Single cells can’t help but inherit acquired changes, because the whole organism becomes the offspring when it divides. When they’re challenged by an antibiotic, they acquire resistance — how? They trade genes with one another. That’s horizontal gene transfer. The best recent estimates are that about 81% of the cumulative genetic change in prokaryotic genomes is due to horizontal gene transfer. Does that sound accidental? If life were Darwinian rather than agential, every aspect of the organism’s lifestyle would be organized to prevent that kind of change. Instead it’s the main cause of genetic evolution. The program is set up to change the program in response to stress — and that requires an agential mechanism.
Two: body-plan information is supposed to be written into the genes, where it can’t be altered. One of our strategic partners at ABI, Mike Levin, studies planaria, which reproduce by being cut in two — both pieces regenerate. He’s shown that if you block the transmission of electricity between cells at a critical time, you can make them regenerate into two-headed worms — and then indefinitely, every time they’re cut, they regenerate into the two-headed form, without any genetic change. The pattern memory for how many heads to have is written not into the genome but into the attractor states in the electrical dynamics of the worm’s body.
Three: another ABI partner, Oded Rechavi in Tel Aviv, showed that C. elegans worms produce small RNAs in response to viruses and to starvation, and in both cases they’re inherited for several generations. The longer the heritable response persists, the more likely it is to continue into the next generation — a kind of epigenetic momentum. He also showed the cytoplasm alone is sufficient to carry the inherited signal. The worms are set up to change their own program to adapt to diet and stress.
Four — now mammals: the Rando lab at UMass showed that male mice on a low-protein diet delivered small RNAs to their sperm, giving the offspring different cholesterol synthesis in their livers. Other labs have shown human sperm contains abundant small RNAs produced in the epididymis — produced by the body — that correlate with the father’s diet, his metabolic state, and even IVF embryo quality. So the program is set up to change the program in response to diet and stress — in humans.
And one more, even more amazing: studies in mice show that the licking and grooming behavior of mother mice stably programs adult stress reactivity in their offspring, by methylating a particular location on the genome in hippocampal neurons. That reprograms the young to grow into mothers who lick and groom to the same extent. The behavior is transmitted from mother to daughter entirely outside the normal sperm-and-egg pathway — the licking reprograms the genome in the hippocampal neurons directly. That’s the program rewriting the program without even touching the genes in the zygote.
Andrea Hiott: How long did that last — into the next generation?
Charlie Munford: Often it doesn’t last very long, but in principle that doesn’t matter, for two reasons. First, if the stimulus doesn’t persist across generations, then removing the change when the condition is gone is also adaptive. If an organism is changing in response to its environment, it’s not just keeping changes forever — it removes them when they’re no longer useful. Second, there’s genetic assimilation: if an organism adopts a new trait or habit or lifestyle epigenetically and stays in it for a while, the selective pressures on its genes are to recapitulate that same behavior. Conrad Waddington discovered this in the 1950s with fruit flies — he could induce a change, then by selecting for it, cause it to happen without inducing it. It became genetically encoded through selection alone. So a trait can move from “something I discovered through my creativity, intentionally” to “something genetically encoded that I have a propensity to do.” That shows how learning can give directionality to evolution, even with a genetic underpinning.
Andrea Hiott: “Learning can give directionality” — that’s a good way to say it. Why is this so controversial? Epigenetics is a terrible word to some people. Isn’t there a Dutch study from after World War II, where wartime starvation caused changes in the next generation?
Charlie Munford: Yes — a natural experiment where the experience of starvation changed the phenotype of the children and grandchildren of the people who lived through it.
Andrea Hiott: So we’ve seen this in animals and in humans. Why do people freak out about the idea?
Charlie Munford: Because it removes the whole grounding teleology of life. People are incredibly attached to the idea that life is about survival and reproduction — competition, red in tooth and claw. This challenges that whole framework of what we’re doing here. What ABI has done is figure out ways to make that empirically testable — with all the repercussions we think will follow.
Andrea Hiott: This reminds me of Popper, and “active Darwinism.” How does that relate?
Charlie Munford: In the 1980s, two people really tried to alert the world to this way of thinking. The first was Barbara McClintock, a Nobel laureate who did her work in the 1950s on maize — corn plants. She found that when they were stressed, they could reorganize their chromosomes.
Andrea Hiott: The jumping genes.
Charlie Munford: Jumping genes — transpositions.
Andrea Hiott: Of course, everyone thought she was crazy, because she’s a woman talking about jumping genes. But she eventually got the Nobel Prize and it was all confirmed.
Charlie Munford: Exactly. Because it wasn’t supposed to happen — but it did. In her Nobel acceptance speech, 30 years after the work was published — around 1983 — she said, “The genome is a sensitive organ of the cell.”
Andrea Hiott: Beautiful. Let’s pause on that. We think of DNA as a computer program that just gets read off. She’s saying it’s a sensitive organ — the cell is interacting with everything around it in a living way. Sorry — and then Popper?
Charlie Munford: Right — the cell is feeling and sensing the world, and part of that is how it uses its genome. Genes are supposed to be difference-makers, but now that we can read genomes, we see they’re not difference-makers in the way we thought. In principle they can’t be, because every cell in your body — hair, blood, muscle, teeth — has the same DNA. So something else is making the difference.
Andrea Hiott: DNA is obviously very important and there’s an amazing continuity through it. But the living, the action, the rest of the cell — I heard you say once that if you squished the DNA up into a football, the rest of the cell would be all of Central Park. We’ve been thinking everything is this little bit of DNA.
Charlie Munford: Right. So Popper spoke out against the selfish-gene view, articulated in the 1970s by Jacques Monod and by Richard Dawkins with The Selfish Gene. That idea took hold and still holds sway — the idea that sure, there’s flexibility as DNA is interpreted, but the DNA causes itself to be interpreted a certain way. Monod discovered the lac operon: a place in the DNA of E. coli that gets encoded one way in the presence of one sugar and a different way in the presence of another. It’s an on-off switch built into the genome. He extrapolated from that to say the whole organism is basically an operon — everything we do is just genes switching themselves on and off to reproduce the genes. We’re just a program the genes are orchestrating to get themselves into the future. It’s backwards, and counterintuitive, but it was persuasive enough because it let scientists avoid the whole question of teleology — of where our purpose comes from.
Popper was wise enough to be aware of this trick. In his Medawar Lecture he argued against the idea that blind mutation plus the action of the environment is all we need to explain. He said it’s impossible to explain life without explaining the intentional creativity of organisms — they get themselves into situations that affect the conditions of their own natural selection. He didn’t say where that energy and intention came from, but he had a deep epistemology of how knowledge arises.
Andrea Hiott: Did he actually call it “active Darwinism”? And this was the late ‘80s, near the end of his life?
Charlie Munford: It was two years before he died. He gave this Medawar Lecture; it was written down, but the transcript was put in a box at the Hoover Institution marked “to be opened in 2029.” I don’t know why. A scholar named Hans-Joachim Niemann found it and published it — the book is called Karl Popper and the Two [New] Secrets of Life. It’s Popper’s thoughts about Darwinism, and they’re totally in tune with what we know now about epigenetics and Lamarckism, and the way organisms are clearly upstream of their DNA sequences in some way. We don’t yet have a scientific theory of how that can be.
Andrea Hiott: Can we read that lecture now?
Charlie Munford: Yes, you can buy the book. It’s great — Karl Popper and the Two Secrets of Life, or something like that.
Andrea Hiott: So who are the heroes and who are the villains again — although I try not to put things in dichotomous terms?
Charlie Munford: Lamarck and Darwin, and McClintock and Popper, were all trying to tell us there’s a way to have natural selection and agency. It’s not one or the other. It’s not natural selection versus God — you don’t have to leap to “God directs everyone what to do.” You could have a biological mechanism for agency, and that’s a testable possibility.
Andrea Hiott: Is this related to gene transfer — that book The Tangled Tree?
Charlie Munford: Yes. You have to think about it from the selfish-gene perspective first. There’s supposed to be an inherited program, and its instructions are supposed to be faithful to themselves. You can’t have a program that says “scramble me.” So they built intellectual scaffoldings to protect that idea. One: there’s no Lamarckism, only blind variation — which never made much sense. Another: the Weismann barrier, the idea that the germline is locked away and unaffected by variation. Both scaffoldings have been destroyed. Horizontal gene transfer means most genetic change in prokaryotes comes from borrowing from other lineages — the program shouldn’t say “break me and borrow from another program,” but that’s exactly what’s happening.
Andrea Hiott: Horizontal — meaning it’s not coming from your parents. You’re getting it from someone not even related to you.
Charlie Munford: Exactly. And then there’s transposition — McClintock — and symbiogenesis, and symbiosis, all of which call into question where the beginning and end of an organism really is.
Andrea Hiott: The point is, the “gene as programmer” idea is running into a lot of trouble now, from all kinds of directions.
Charlie Munford: Right. Denis Noble debated Richard Dawkins on stage recently and totally demolished him.
Andrea Hiott: Denis Noble also brought Lynn Margulis and others to debate those guys way back — he was onto this a long time ago. And The Music of Life is a beautiful book, which connects to some of what Richard Watson is doing too. But most people still think “gene as programmer.”
Charlie Munford: So far there are three testable hypotheses within agency — and there could be more. One I’d call “evolution-first agency”: agency isn’t universal to the whole tree of life, it evolved, but it’s still very important. I think that one’s refuted, but it’s worth testing. At ABI we want to make as many of these ideas testable as possible — to parse them into actual physical experiments that can decide one way or the other.
Andrea Hiott: Are you really trying to decide one way or the other, or also to open up the space beyond a rigid way of thinking?
Charlie Munford: A deep part of rationality, which is overlooked, is that ideas can be proven wrong but not proven right.
Andrea Hiott: So we’re back at Popper.
Charlie Munford: Back at Popper. This is core to how we try to approach things at ABI — open-minded but rigorous and logical. We’re not saying, “There are many possibilities, so we’ll just write papers and not decide.” Popper was writing about the difference between math and science. In math, all of it is one big tautology; if you prove something, it’s proven. But a theory that attaches to the world always has predictions you can’t verify, because you can’t look at the whole world — the whole past and future of the universe. So there’s no proof like that. What instances can do is prove your theory wrong: if you’re rigorous about what your theory says, you can look for a case where nature disagrees, and then throw the theory away. And crucially, looking at the world doesn’t hand you the new theory. The new theory comes from creativity — from your wild imagination — trying to integrate the facts you know into something testable.
Andrea Hiott: I like this. Popper was resisting Hume and induction — falsification, theory-ladenness. But your turn on it is interesting: it means we need to be more creative and wild.
Charlie Munford: So many people — even fans of Popper — take it the wrong way and become rigid and hard to talk to. The attitude I’d criticize is “what I see is all there is, and it will last forever.” When Monod looks at E. coli and sees an operon, that’s the attitude. Dawkins too: “This is the only possible explanation for life; everything else is theology — it’s either this or God.” That’s not rational. Rationality is imagining all the consequences of your idea and then checking whether the world agrees — and it always eventually disagrees. That’s why there’s no end to science. To me, that gives us tremendous humility, and makes me want to welcome crazy ideas — because, as Popper said, metaphysical ideas often become testable much later. It’s not worth dismissing ideas that sound crazy; they might be worked into something, and turn out closer to the truth.
Andrea Hiott: So it’s not that you’re saying everything is wrong. You’re opening up the way that everything we do changes everything that can be done. The experiments and falsification matter, but you’ve put the wildness back in — and the idea that we might never fully solve this, even as we make progress. That’s a kind of holding of paradox.
Charlie Munford: If we wait for the evidence, we’ll never solve it — we have to have a guess before we know where to look.
Andrea Hiott: At some point you even say the body is a guess, or life is a guess.
Charlie Munford: Right. I see the whole problem in those terms — but that’s one hypothesis about agency.
Andrea Hiott: Is that where your term “episolution” comes from?
Charlie Munford: Episolution is a family of possible solutions to agency — not the only one. Within it there are at least two testable ideas. Episolution is the idea that there’s a universal mechanism for learning in all cells, and that it’s prior to evolution — a foundational core principle of life.
Andrea Hiott: So you’re saying mind is there from the beginning?
Charlie Munford: That’s accurate — though not necessarily conscious mind. It’s not the same as the problem of consciousness, but it is intentional directionality, and I think it implies a certain curiosity — a willingness to be epistemically active, to get better knowledge from the world.
Andrea Hiott: Is that why you say it requires a self?
Charlie Munford: Natural selection presupposes a self, plus reproduction, inheritance, and variation. But you don’t just find a self — a self is something that has to be maintained. If it’s not maintained by a genetic program, it has to be maintained by some other physical process, or we don’t have a scientific explanation. There are families of solutions for agency that involve multiple mechanisms. Terrence Deacon has a theory of constraint closure, for example, in which life has directionality but it’s essentially put there by natural selection. Episolution is the other option — a universal learning mechanism in all cells, where the directionality is put there by the organism, present from the beginning. The purpose of life is learning about the world, not necessarily surviving and reproducing. Of course you don’t become a lineage unless you survive and reproduce — but that’s not necessarily what you’re trying to do.
Andrea Hiott: So what’s holding it all together? A self doesn’t just come by itself from evolution — can you walk me through that?
Charlie Munford: There has to be something that accumulates knowledge. Within episolution there are two possibilities. One is a Bayesian, inductivist picture: an organism is a network, deformed by contact with the environment; the deformations follow an algorithm that lets the system generalize — that’s learning. Richard Watson calls that natural induction. It could be a very deep network that learns something deep about the world in a multidimensional way, and that explains life’s directionality.
The other possibility is more Popperian — my personal preference, though these are all testable. And you’re working with a lot of biologists to test them.
Andrea Hiott: You’re working with quite a team.
Charlie Munford: Let me name some. Denis Noble, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who debated Dawkins on stage. Michael Levin, one of the most famous biologists in the world, published in Science and Nature. Richard Watson, the inventor of natural induction. Josh Bongard, who built the first living robots. Oded Rechavi. Eloy Campuzano, Joanna Javier. Stu Kauffman — one of the inventors of complexity theory — is on our board. Serious people. We’re trying to make these questions testable, with that Popperian open-mindedness that there may be an even better way to formulate things.
So: deep natural induction is one hypothesis. Constraint closure is another. The third is my favorite, because it’s closely based on Popper: the idea that harmonic resonance maintains the self. Harmonic resonance passes through things, so there’s a boundary to it, but it integrates information in an analog way, unlike any other physical process. The reason I think it can explain the origin of the self is sleep. That’s actually how I came to this problem in the first place — thinking about sleep. Why do we spend eight hours asleep? From a reproductive point of view that’s totally unfit — why can’t we just pursue mates and food until we starve? We can’t. And all cognitively complex beings sleep — even cephalopods, squid and octopus, and they do REM sleep, and our common ancestor with them was back in the Cambrian.
The hypothesis is that harmonic resonance has two modes. One is a sleep mode, where you’re cut off from sensory perception so that the internal harmonic resonance within your body can become phase-locked — constructive and destructive interference in the oscillations until they become a congruent whole. Once they’re congruent, you wake up and enter the world as a congruent being. But your interaction with the world through perception changes your harmonics again and degrades them — introduces disharmonies. That’s why you can’t stay awake forever: the disharmonies would overwhelm your congruent system and you’d disintegrate.
Andrea Hiott: That relates to certain ways the brain works. And there’s the theme of oscillation all through the body — Denis Noble talks about music, Richard does too. In a general way, are we oscillating with the environment and with ourselves at all these different scales? Or is that going too far?
Charlie Munford: That’s not going too far. It’s a testable hypothesis, and there are at least two other ways it could be — but it’s my favorite, because it would explain the largest number of mysteries.
Andrea Hiott: You said something about sleep being conjecture and waking being refutation. What does that mean?
Charlie Munford: A conjecture is a guess — it has consequences. We form a guess about the world, about what’s possible and impossible, while we’re sleeping. Then we wake up —
Andrea Hiott: With our bodies, literally — our bodies are the oscillating possibility, and when we wake we falsify the day?
Charlie Munford: It sounds like a category error, but it’s not. We literally are a physical guess about the world. The problem I think this solves is that attention is scarce. We’re not like the cameras on a Google Street View truck — we don’t take in very much. My favorite example: when I drive into town, a 20-minute drive, I pass maybe five to ten million trees — I live in a forested region. On a normal day I don’t notice any of them. But if I saw a tree made of glass, or turned upside down with its roots in the air, or painted purple, I’d remember it for the rest of my life — because it was something I thought was impossible. Those refutations become part of our body. We have a general sense of what’s possible out there. It’s not a specific prediction — if I turned a corner and a school bus came instead of a fire truck, it wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s a sense of what’s possible and impossible, built from certain moments — the ones that stick with you and become foundational, because they changed your whole sense of causation.
Sometimes they’re surprising, painful moments. I didn’t realize that the moment I stepped on someone’s knee when I was 17 and really hurt them would stay with me forever — I still feel a cringe of guilt. Why was that the moment I learned that people are sensitive, that people are vulnerable even when they don’t seem it? It wasn’t that I predicted one thing and was wrong. A whole new possibility opened up.
Andrea Hiott: That reminds me of the stories you told at the beginning, and of how you’ve described philosophy as being about avoiding mistakes — very Popperian. You’re not really noticing, in the way you said, and something comes along and shocks you, and you never forget it, and it changes your trajectory.
You said you started this whole exploration into agency and biology because you were having a really hard time. You seem healthy now — I hope everything’s okay. How do you see that very difficult moment leading to where you are now, testing big ideas with some of the most important scientists in the world?
Charlie Munford: I feel incredibly lucky. Blessed. These questions are so important, and I feel lucky to have found something to work on that really matters. I don’t have the problem some people have in midlife, feeling that what they did has no meaning — everything in my life has an extreme amount of meaning, and I’m very lucky for that. Part of it is also the sense that problems usually can’t wait until you’re ready to solve them. When I discovered all this, people kept telling me, “Charlie, you should go get a PhD, become a professor.” And I thought, “There’s a problem to be worked on here. You become qualified to work on problems by working on them.” So I started gathering people together with Agential Topics, inviting luminaries — like yourself — to speak.
Andrea Hiott: I was lucky to be included.
Charlie Munford: It’s just a willingness. I was blessed with a sense — partly from Deep Springs College — that if you try, there’s no problem you can’t work on. You just have to start.
Andrea Hiott: I love that, and it reminds me of intentional creativity. We’re at a strange moment where everything is changing about what school even is, what degrees mean, how we educate ourselves — you can go on YouTube and basically go to Harvard now. So it’s beautiful that you just decided to do it — and not by yourself. You went looking for people with knowledge in all these different ways: philosophers, biologists, everyone. What would you like to leave people with about that idea?
Charlie Munford: The main thing: a lot of people who want to be taken seriously adopt an attitude I really dislike — “what I see is all there is, and all there ever will be.” They try hard to convince you there’s nothing more out there. That’s dogmatic and judgmental, but it’s also irrational. We can’t look at the whole universe, so we have to be humble about what we can look at, try our best to look at the things that really matter, and then take them seriously. In biology, people have been believing and disbelieving the same theory at the same time — instead of taking the theory seriously, saying “here’s what it says,” looking at nature, and being honest when that’s not what’s happening. Let’s take our own results seriously and invent new possibilities, because it’s wide open now.
Andrea Hiott: I like the wildness coming back in. And one thing I really appreciate about you is that you clearly care about all this — you can feel it — with a kind of humbleness, even as you do so much. Since it’s Love & Philosophy, I want to ask: is this coming from a place of care, even love? How do you see those words in relation to what you’re doing and what you’ve been through?
Charlie Munford: So much, yes. It was forged in a crucible of intense suffering. I had an intense period of suffering, and it made me really open-minded, and a lot more patient with other people. I was very impatient when I was younger — I’m still a little impatient — but being a dad is part of that. You just realize.
Andrea Hiott: It’s interesting you started with your kids. That love and care is how you wanted to open this conversation — which is about rethinking even reproduction as the driving force. You’re trying to expand that, even as you get more particular and more falsifiable.
Charlie Munford: That’s exactly right. Richard is a co-founder, and Joanna, and there are other really good people — Josh Wolk, Dina Rudick, Lizzy Devane. We all share a sense that this is a bigger thing: that if we just do experiments and don’t interpret them for the world — if we don’t invite the world in — we’ve missed it. It really has to be inviting, bringing everyone in to look at this, experience it, and help us learn what it means. That’s everything. We’re all in a situation now that we don’t understand — societally, politically, everything. We’re in new waters; things change quickly. We can’t afford to be too rigid. We have to open up to other people and listen.
Andrea Hiott: I appreciate that you opened instead of closed. A lot of us go through hard times and it’s hard to stay open, to open our hearts. It’s interesting that your heart opened through the suffering. None of us is perfect and life is still hard, but you can see what the opening brings in — things you never could have imagined back then. And thinking about your kids, and all the generations to come, reproduction can mean something else too: your ideas, all of this, set paths forward for what’s possible. Is there anything else on your heart you want to share before we go?
Charlie Munford: I’ll share something special that happened to my daughter recently, because of love. My daughter loves otters. She’s really into otters — she’s always had an otter stuffy, it’s her favorite. She has an otter and a possum, and they’re friends, and she’s very proud of them. Her mom recently took her to a zoo in Belgium that has an amazing otter exhibit — and a hotel room built into the otter exhibit, where you can spend the night, and the window of your room is the otter tank.
Andrea Hiott: Whoa. She must have been thrilled.
Charlie Munford: She put her otter stuffy up in the window, and the real otter came over and said hello to it.
Andrea Hiott: That’s so sweet. I love that — and it brings the other creatures of the world back in, along with your beautiful daughter. That’s a very happy way to end. Thank you, Charlie. I really appreciate all you’re doing, and thanks for inviting me into your world a little bit. It means a lot.
Charlie Munford: Thanks so much. I appreciate it, Andrea.
* The emerging book Beyond the Age of Machines / Expanding Possibilities — the manifesto and chapters referenced throughout, published chapter by chapter
Care is not the opposite of love. It is the very urge of life. ‘Caring for what?’ is the primary question. That we have a choice about what we care for and how is what makes us human, but it’s quite the challenge and responsibility. Let’s help one another handle it. —Andrea
* “I love messiness and tension and understanding that this is life.” — Andrea
* “Evolution rarely solves the problem. It reframes it.” — Yogi
* “It’s not a dialectic like that. It never resolves anything. It just spirals on and on and on.” — Yogi
* “The beauty of it is when… this piece of text and the sculpture somehow wrap themselves around each other and they become a nice mess — something that you cannot define anymore.” — Marcus
* “The point of infinite play is not to win a game, to be the best… but it is to stay in the game.” — Yogi
* “We call it coherence from difference.” — Yogi
* “We do need to sometimes burrow ourselves into the very things that have conquered us… eat it up from the inside like termites, reappropriate it and transform it.” — Marcus
* “Let me reveal how I’m doing it so that you and I can learn together — as opposed to just protecting myself from that which could shatter my little world.” — Marcus
on care, love, vulnerability, & the shadow
* “Love is a labor of love… trying to see the person behind the persona, and still accepting them after you’ve seen all the ugly parts, the shadow.” — Yogi
* “It’s how we go about with that which we don’t understand.” — Marcus, on love and care
* “Care… that’s the currency of what we’re doing.” — Andrea
* “You cannot go back into the cave and pretend that you’ve never seen the light.” — Yogi
* “Wittgenstein was right about philosophy, but he was wrong about life.” — Yogi
* “I don’t want the last word, because I would never want to assume that there is a last word in this kind of process — because it goes beyond the words.” — Marcus
Concerning navigational / way-making approach (paths, orientation, situations over problems)
* “The authenticity is in going your way, in way-making — in finding your journey in a way that is really good for you in the circumstances that you’re in.” — Yogi
* “If you do that alone, the grass is not gonna get trampled — so let’s trample the grass together.” — Yogi
* “Living is having problems more than solving problems… and always having new problems.” — Yogi
* “It’s learning that this is not a struggle, but this is life.” — Yogi
* “Instead of always rushing towards the most optimized path to a solution… what we need to do right now is reformulate the problems.” — Yogi
* “It’s better to draw the lines around actions or character traits than around people.” — Yogi
transcript:
Marcus Neustetter
Yeah, it’s okay. You know, and I think this is what we, what one needs to learn, that the ego that tells you that you have to be in control of it and that you are number one, and that you’re competing with other artists or other philosophers, and that you have to look good in the room, and that you have to try and understand everything or not look stupid in a gallery.
Whatever those things are that drive you to fit those social norms, you have to leave that at the door. You know, you cannot let that, influence the way that you go about a process. Otherwise, you’re just doing it for show, and you’re just performing another role. I love messiness and tension and understanding that this is life.
This tension is life. And, but I also understand that so many of us want to resolve that because it’s a precarious place. It’s a vulnerable place. It’s a difficult place. We can have a performative vulnerability. So we’re open to others’ idea. We’re humble in public. But you know these kind of people who are humble all the time, but they’re really not.
I mean, we have a society now where everybody’s supposed to be an influencer or something, and that’s... It’s not gonna be a very functional society. So this is also in a bigger context, our performance, our artwork is about recognizing roles rather than saying that we should all be authentic. You don’t want most people around you to be authentic with you, to be quite honest.
You wanna carefully choose those.
Andrea Hiott
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today, I’m talking to Artist and facilitator Marcus Neustetter and Biologist and philosopher, Johannes Jaeger, otherwise known as Yogi.
They will be introducing one another soon, so stay tuned. You’ve probably seen both of them around on the Love and Philosophy Substack, or part of the project in different ways. And we’re also working on something called Paradoxus, which, I would love to introduce you to.
There’s an article that we wrote, which you can read. It’s, in the show notes. You’ll find the link, or it’s on the blog. But we’re trying to think about paradox as a practice and a performance and how might we approach paradox in our science and our philosophy, but also just in our everyday lives.
More importantly, however, is how might we come together offline, in private, together in groups of trust or circles of trust. We got the idea after I talked to Parker Palmer. I’ll also link to that conversation. But philosopher Parker Palmer talks about circles of trust, coming together with people that you can be honest and open with to talk about what you care about and what’s hard for you in your academic life, your work life, your personal life, whatever.
There would be so much more to say about that, but I think I’m just gonna let you go into it through this conversation because it’s part of what this conversation is. Although we talk about a lot of other things, for example, The Zone, which is a project that Yogi and Marcus have been doing for about six years, which we’ve talked about before, and which Fotis and Yogi talked about in a previous episode.
And we talk about this as a sort of third space, which is another theme that comes up a lot here. We talk about developing this methodology that, is part of already both of our, or all three of our work in different ways. And we talk about staying alive, how that’s about working with constraints, embracing tension, adapting rather than trying to solve problems, linking that to other ideas that have come up quite often here Also vulnerability, trust, performance. That’s a very big word, performance, which, I talked to others about which I haven’t published those podcasts yet, for example, with Sophie Fiennes and Declan Donnellan, but those will come at some point too.
So there’s a lot of themes here resonating past, present, and future. The trickster comes in, embodied practice, of course, context, space. We talk about space and gatekeeping and institutions and Just on a kind of personal note, I know, some of you have, even noted that you’re surprised that Johannes and I get along and work so well together because we’re such different sorts of people.
I don’t really know what that means, but I actually do get it. I mean, just to caricature it, I’m a bit overly, what? Yep, optimistic, and I’m talking about love, and I’m a little breathless. And Yogi’s more of a punk mentality, you know, not afraid to kind of, ruffle some feathers, And it’s not that he and I agree on everything. Certainly not. We’re not 100% on the same side of anything, but that’s actually the point. And we do care about similar things, and we have a really easy connection because we’re coming to our discussions through care, and this is one of them. I’m just really thankful to have met Marcus and Yogi and to have this relationship with them.
We’ve been talking a lot over the past year or two, but we haven’t really made those conversations public, so this is the first time we’re making a couple of them public. There’s one here on Love and Philosophy today, and if you just can’t get enough, you can get even more hours, more me talking and them kind of asking me questions about navigational mind and way-making and so on in the caring aspect, on The Zone podcast.
But even if you don’t listen to me on The Zone, I really recommend The Zone. Some of my favorite thinkers and writers and, philosophers are already on there. So if you don’t know about it, check it out. But, this is just a real demonstration of what I think Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy is at its best, bringing people together who might not have otherwise come together towards really exciting, transformative things, ideas, movements, actions, or even just conversations.
I’m really thankful, again, I know I keep saying that, but I am. I’m thankful for you all too, and I would love to hear what you think about this. Please read the piece if you are interested in this practice and paradox. Let us know what you think. Let us know what ideas you have. Reach out anytime, even though I’m completely overwhelmed with emails, but I do get to them eventually.
Speaking of that, I’m also thinking to try to hire someone else. If you are a student out there and you’re looking for a very mini sort of job helping with some administrative stuff, then also reach out. But mostly, I just wanna say that I hope you’re having a good summer I hope you’re finding some practices in your own life that are opening you to ways of seeing the world beyond traditional either/or dichotomies, but also just maybe opening you to the magic and the wonder that’s there when we start to notice the frames with which we see the world, and we start to open them up a bit, no matter who we are, because we all have them.
And there’s so much waiting for us to discover if we can sit in the tension and let ourselves open up. That’s part of what we talk about here So instead of a poem today, I want to share with you a little bit of the beginning of this document that Marcus and Johannes and I are sharing with you on the blogs, on both of our blogs. So I’ll just read the first part of this, but if you wanna find the full thing, go to our blogs, either one of our blogs, which are linked below Life is paradox.
In every cell of our body since the beginning of life, metabolism simultaneously builds up and breaks down. At every moment of your lived experience, thoughts tussle for dominance and attention in your mind, constructing and deconstructing a turbulent stream of ideas. Every love we’ll ever have must die.
Species come and go in the perennial dance of evolution. Every ecosystem on Earth complexifies and then simplifies. Every civilization rises and falls. Life renews itself. This is its meaning. Some of the most destructive acts force healing.
Some of the best-intentioned art is patronizing. None of these are opposites. The opposite of each can also be true. Paradoxical is the logic of life.
So we’ll just start and let you both introduce one another or introduce yourselves. How would you like to do it?
Johannes Jaeger
We would like to introduce one another, if that’s okay.
Andrea Hiott
Okay. Good. I was hoping you’d say that.
Marcus Neustetter
Well, we could... We’re gonna start with introduction of one another and the other one’s gonna interrupt to say, “But that’s not me. I’m actually me.”
Andrea Hiott
So then we just have an hour and a half of you fighting about who you are. That’s also
Marcus Neustetter
Kind of interesting.
Johannes Jaeger
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Performance art. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott
All right.
Johannes Jaeger
Marcus, great.
Andrea Hiott
Hello Marcus, hello Yogi. I’m so happy you’re here on Love and Philosophy. Thanks for being with us today.
Johannes Jaeger
Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
Andrea Hiott
Let’s see how we negotiate who talks first. Who’s gonna introduce who first? I want you to introduce each other, so
Marcus Neustetter
So Yogi, do you want to kick it off or should I?
Johannes Jaeger
Oh, I can do it if you insist. So this is Marcus over there, and he’s an artist I met six years ago, and he does crazy stuff with live projections, performance, somewhere between performance and visual art. So he, for example, can do, projections outside live to some sort of event while, you know, he’s drawing at a speed that you can’t believe, and that makes you really depressed if you are like me and you like to scribble yourself every once in a while.
So I’ve given up on that completely because I’m just too impressed. And we met, about six years ago, being frustrated about, art and science, and immediately clicked together because we are looking for that third space between art and science. Marcus?
Marcus Neustetter
And so while I’m looking for that third space between art and science, Yogi’s standing there with a flag saying, “I’m here.
I’ve moved out of my silo and I’m looking for another space to occupy too.”, but genuinely, that’s how we kind of, intersected., and Yogi’s background is quite an impressive one from an academic side in terms of his, evolutionary biology work that he’s done over many years, and his shift into philosophy, and kind of combining the experiential knowledge of both fields in an interesting way, and subverting both fields by working with an artist.
I love it. So the relationship of, has been a really interesting one because if I had to describe Yogi or introduce Yogi to you, I would say that, primarily he’s a person that’s curious about all that which he doesn’t know, and he immerses himself headfirst into a world which I as an artist have often invited people to join me in, but they’ve really struggled because, it’s the space of not knowing that, causes anxiety.
And, dearest Johannes Jäger is a thinker and a writer and a doer that, is willing to take that step. And in that sense makes him a unique individual for all kinds of wonderful collaborations. Good enough, Yogi?
Johannes Jaeger
I think so, and we can say one or two things about our ways of collaborating. The important thing Mm-hmm Our art/science collaboration is not that, I employ Marcus to do the drawings for my papers, although I also do that sometimes. But, he does that voluntarily. The main thing is that we actually produce, work together. So the point is to get to know the world and ourselves at the same time because you cannot ever do one without the other.
And the amazing thing about combining art and science is I think we think of it, these two ways of getting to know the world as the two most divergent ways that you can possibly do this, right? And so it’s just amazingly challenging and interesting to see when we do some work, how we bounce ideas back and forth, how Marcus goes about, something influences how I write things.
So he’s not the illustrator of my writing and I’m not the caption writer of his art, but this is a true co-production and it’s sort of hard to describe. Which, we also have now put into a sort of a methodology for working with other people in a collective. Marcus, you wanna say something about that quickly?
Marcus Neustetter
Yeah., the realization that actually we have something to offer beyond our conversation, is manifest in this openness to developing a studio space or a creative space in which conversations are welcome and people are welcome to join, and, I guess afford them the possibility to do what we do.
And that is be open and collaborative in a common space. We call it the Perspective Studio, and it’s a space that harnesses, I guess, your own creative impulse, even if it’s very deeply hidden. But also matching that with the current reflections on what you want to deal with in life and how you want to connect to each other by finding the common human, issues or ideas or concepts to deal with.
And, it comes from... And I’m wearing the T-shirt here, so it’s worth mentioning it. A collaboration for, with, a group that we founded, kind of just as I moved to Austria, and, we met six years ago, called The Zone. And The Zone is exactly this art-science collaboration where we look at the space between the two disciplines and between the two silos and saying, “What is The Zone?
What is that space that sits between?” And so working with Bronwyn Lace and Vasyukhinova, a curator and artist, that we formed this project together, we very quickly realized that there’s a lot of curiosity about this topic. I mean, both of us have also worked long before that with other, scientists and artists, et cetera, and realized that this space of curiosity is really something that we have found a way to not only inspire us, but become very productive in the way that we see the world and start to make sense of it.
And it’s about opening up those doors and asking others to join us, and see whether they don’t bring other inspirations into the mix, but also how we can then impact other people’s lives, and then how we can collectively see, if this doesn’t propose alternatives for framing what currently might be a crisis or, a challenge.
Andrea Hiott
You both said something about third space, or one of you did, and the zone, of course. And all this interdisciplinary, experience and research that you’re both bringing. I mean, gosh, that’s like art and science. I mean, Yogi alone has, like, a huge kind of thing going.
But then Marcus, you too. I mean, you’re quite the intellectual. I mean, even though you’re... You seem like a bit of a speaker and stuff. So, between all of you, or both of you seem to have a lot of things covered, but also just a lot of potentials. And I wonder, you know, these third spaces can become really chaotic or, ungovernable quite quickly in my experience if you don’t have certain constraints.
And yet you also don’t wanna have constraints that kind of keep it in the boxes that we’re coming from, because I know you’re trying to get somewhere new, as you said, and address issues in a different way. So I’m wondering if both of you could talk about that. You know my thing is this holding paradox, moving beyond dichotomies, and I wonder how you’ve been able to kind of, hold an interdisciplinary space in a way that’s staying alive and not, collapsing into one side or the other.
You know, getting this kind of field force that makes you have to define yourself in opposition to something else. Maybe you could tell me how that’s been going or how that feels for both of you.
Johannes Jaeger
Can I pick up on the staying alive with that you just said? Sure. It stays alive literally, because I study, the organization of life.
And one really important part of that is it’s based on constraints. So the physical processes that make up our bodies are being they mutually constrain each other to produce what is a living being. And to do that, they have to constantly co-construct each other. So they constantly change what they are, and the organization is constantly changing.
That is a prerequisite for staying alive for an organism. And so this is what we’re doing. We’re playing with these constraints. We’re recombining them. We’re building them in ways that are, supportive of our journey, but we never want to get anywhere, in that zone., it’s not like we’re mapping the zone out and, with a little, measuring tape and then, publish it as a paper.
We’re exploring it, and we will always keep exploring it, because there’s always new gaps between the disciplines that we can, explore, and new, constraints that we can, move around or, construct ourselves. So that’s the kind of game we are playing in the zone. I,
Marcus Neustetter
I think the, The process part of it is very important to me, that on the one hand, the co-constructing and the, I guess the reframing and the remeasuring and, or constant-- not ever being in a state of, accepted comfort. You know, it’s as soon as there’s something that we feel, becomes too defined, we say, “Well, you know, this is not the space.
The zone is not the space to define it. It’s the space to stay within that murky territory and actually enjoy that as the quality that it offers us.” And in the same way, I think it’s about trusting the process, and it’s-- it seems like a quite a bold thing to try and do when you’ve got a group of people in a room together.
You say, “Let’s just trust the process and see what happens,” and then chaos comes., but it’s in that- honest, uncertainty and I like to use the word vulnerability that I feel trying to hold a space or that Yogi feels trying to make sense of the space, that we offer that into the room.
So we offer into the room the fact that we ourselves are not coming with the solutions. We are also just making the next line in the drawing or the next expressive mark, or the next move or whatever the case might be, with the hope that it will be met by someone else’s. And so what happens is a kind of a little dance of ideas that funny enough, don’t explode into one chaotic moment, but very quickly find some kind of, harmony in the way that they exist in the room.
It’s not to say that they’re resolved, it’s just a coexistence that then doesn’t try to trample the other one. So even sometimes having opposing views in the room about very touchy subjects, I think by, creating this cradle of safety or this space that says we have a certain amount of respect for each other, that isn’t necessarily always said.
It’s sometimes just a gesture or an opening moment or a, or a little exercise or something., I think very often just gets received with a sense of empathy, in the room. And so I think we do play not only with the, with, trying to guide a process, but actually also realizing that sometimes the process to guide us or the people in the room have to give us a nudge in the right direction.
It’s a very difficult space to be in especially if you are making art or you coming up with an argument, a philosophical argument, or you have a scientific pursuit in mind., but that’s exactly the point, that we are in this system at the moment where everything has to have a particular outcome and has to have a certain methodology to it.
And sometimes the methodology is about just trusting the next step.
Johannes Jaeger
I mean, the point about the tension is that in this organization of the living as well, and especially in evolution, you have all these different strategies that are being applied to... So evolution rarely solves the problem. It sort of, it reframes it, right?
And in the process of a population of, organisms experiencing a problem, they themselves change and this is what we’re applying quite literally., this is the kind of evolutionary thinking that we’re applying to our own practice, that we are not in the business of solving problems anymore because that just gets us to over-optimized singular, sort of solutions and liabilities and long supply chains and whatnot, a brittle world.
But instead, we have to sort of, acknowledge the tensions that the oppositions, that are in the room and sort of try and find, when we work or we work with a group that- What are the tensions that are productive, right? I mean, this is what life does. It sort of doesn’t, it’s not a, you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
It’s not a dialectic like that. It never resolves anything. It just spirals on and on and on and on. And, all these opposing, processes are used in a way that is, in the end somehow flowing into whatever’s happening, which is not a straightforward problem solution, but sort of adaptation. Like in evolutionary biology, we adapt to the problems at hand, and we can be quite diverse.
And we don’t have to agree. So I don’t want to turn, Marcus into a bad scientist. He doesn’t want to turn me into a bad artist. But, we want to, profit from the kind of differences in the approach that we have. And this is exactly difficult because there’s so much, opposition. There’s so much tension.
And you have to let go of this idea. I’m sure you like this idea, of a dichotomy. And just, when you go with that flow, you don’t have to resolve the tension, but you productively use it. That’s the basic idea.
Andrea Hiott
Oh, I love what you both said. And it brings up a lot of things., the idea that we’re not trying to get rid of the opposites and the contrasts.
Also you said evolution..., you said something that made me think, Yogi, it sounded like, we’re outside of evolution, and I know you don’t think that.
But it sounds what both of you are saying is sort of being this, ongoing process. And, like, when you’re attentive to it, you have more agency over, or some agency over, or some even, agency over is a weird word, but, or a weird phrase, but you have some different kind of power, in this, development, if that makes sense.
That’s a thought that was coming to mind. And also within that, the contrast, because you know, you would get labeled as a scientist, Yogi, and an artist, Marcus, but actually you’re both doing both of those, in different ways, but never at the same time, right? So there seems like something about your relationship that would be able to bring out the kind of attention that helps that orientation in a way.
Or, I mean, I’m just thinking about Marcus, what do you do? Do you read Yogi’s work and then you kind of respond to it? Or is it more immediate? Or Yogi, do you say like, “Oh, here, I have these ideas and this is my idea of what I’m thinking”?, because those are such different contrasts of visual element and a writing element, and yet they’re never separate.
This is kind of messy, but do you see what I’m saying a bit? And what comes up for you when I say all this?
Marcus Neustetter
The first thing that I wrote down on a note here while you were talking, I’m always drawing and writing, so forgive me if I’m looking down and not in your... At you. The, is the acknowledgement that- We ultimately as humans, we all are doing similar things all the time., but it’s just the language that we use that’s different.
So yeah, I tend to use my expressive language is my drawing. You know, Yogi’s is to write. And I would say that even the disciplines, the way they’ve been categorized, over time has caused a rift between that which we should be able to recognize it from each other. So the fact that, I might have to read some of Yogi’s text 10 times to get it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have to look at my picture 1,000 times just to understand what I was really feeling in that moment.
Yeah, it’s just a-- it’s okay. You know, and I think this is what we, what one needs to learn. That, the ego that tells you that you have to be in control of it and that you are, you know, you’re number one, and that you’re competing with other artists or other philosophers, and that you have to look good in the room, and that you have to try and understand everything or not look stupid in a gallery.
Whatever those things are that drive you to fit those social norms, you have to leave that at the door. You know, you cannot let that, influence the way that you go about a process, otherwise you’re just doing it for show and you’re just performing another role. And so what’s been so interesting to, in response to what you’re saying, in interesting in trying to match our media that we work with, is that yes, this first spark somewhere along the line is an idea or an expression or a moment that tickles you that you go, “Oh, there’s something about this that I want to respond to.”
It could be good or bad. It doesn’t matter. And naturally, one person then goes and reads 1,000 books and writes 1,000 words, and the other one goes and explores the world in another way, puts his hand in the mud and makes a sculpture. And so the beauty of it is when the two things happen simultaneously, and then they meet each other, and they look at each other, this piece of text and the sculpture, and somehow they wrap themselves around each other and they become a nice mess where it’s something that you cannot define anymore.
And for me, that’s when the artistic work is enriched by that which someone else has thought about, and it’s what happens in our minds. We look at an artwork, and we come with all of our stuff that we’re thinking about, and we impose it onto this work. This is not my role as an artist. I just made this work for myself so I can make sense of the world.
You’re the one that’s reading it differently. And I would say it’s very similar to when I read Yogi’s text, and I don’t have the philosophical background that he has or the scientific one, and I read it with completely new eyes. And I go, “Well, let me bring my baggage to this, and now let me throw it back at you and see what you do with that.”
Because why is your way the right one and not mine? Just because you call yourself something, why is my reading of your text incorrect? And The first, I’d like to do the anecdote, Yogi, when the first time you sent me a text, and you said, “Oh, just, you know, started with this, you know, I’m gonna send you my first chapter to the book.
I’d like you to respond to this, if you feel like it. You know, whatever you want to do, just think about it.” And it was interesting because I’d been thinking about similar things in my practice, not, or not that far away from what he was doing. I mean, I think there’s some synergy in looking at the world, as a, in a certain way.
And so when I read this, I was a, very enthusiastic about it. So I naturally, as I do, took a massive sheet of paper, put it up on the wall, and started to draw as I was reading this, and I would add some more, and I’d think. And so these three, I mean, there were probably about three meters by two meters, somewhat kind of massive drawings evolved out of this.
And, Yogi came to the studio thinking he might get to see a little drawing that he could put into his chapter as a kind of illustration or reference or something like that, and he stood in front of this work going, “Okay, now we’re in trouble.” And I think that is-- Yeah, it-- I was amused by that because that was my natural response.
And what’s been beautiful since then is the evolution of this, that I’ve intentionally not stuck, and this is what’s interesting for me, is I’ve not stuck with that medium in further conversations. I’ve decided I’m gonna try and find the medium that most represents that which I’m reading. So rather than trying to stick with one format that then becomes the language between Yogi and Marcus, it was about saying, “Well, you’re coming with different approaches to your texts.
You’re coming with different influences and different references and quotes, et cetera. I would like to do the same so that these things can meet each other with other influences and references.” And so the medium that’s chosen is everything from short films all the way through to sculptures and clay, to performances, to projections, to sound pieces and it is about breaking away from the stereotypical idea of we have to respond in the following language that we know and rather saying, “I know a bit of this language.
I know a bit of that. Let my practice also mix it up just like it does in Yogi’s texts.”, yeah, that is a
Johannes Jaeger
Very long
Marcus Neustetter
Answer
Johannes Jaeger
So I see these big paintings, drawings, they’re just monstrous drawings in the studio, and I think, “Okay, so we have to...” This is the manifesto of the book that we can link, below in the show notes, and we have pictures of those in the manifesto part of the book now.
And so then the next time I come into the studio, Marcus has cut up all three pieces and made a big puzzle out of all of them. And so the whole, this was a starting point for this inquiry in the book where we said we’re gonna reframe, everything we think about science and have a new science for a time in which we no longer think about the world as a machine.
So to do that, we have to draw the windmill and machines, the gears, and we sort of, destroyed it., not really, because it’s now a piece that we also show, have shown in exhibitions. But the nice thing about this book and the exhibitions that we’re doing is that we’re no longer producing art for the gallery or for the website, but that the website and the gallery become a sort of a footprint, of the journey that we’ve gone through.
And that’s why we also published the book chapter by chapter, a bit slower, lately for various reasons. But that’s important because writing a book is such a bizarre thing. At some point you have to stop. While explaining the world is, as you said before, we’re part of the evolution, we’re part of, the process that adopts us to the world and adopts the world to us.
This is what doing science is really about for me as an evolutionary biologist. It’s not, about a theory of everything a sort of an optimal solution to some kind of problem, but it’s about, the process of adapting, right? And continuing to adapt, to our environment in better and better ways.
And better is always defined by the current situation. It’s never gonna-- We’re never gonna arrive at a point and say, “We have learned everything about the world that we should ever learn about.” I mean, that’s the end of humanity. I mean, what will we do? I mean, and not just as scientists and artists, but as creative human beings, we would just not have anything to do anymore.
We would lose all our purpose. And so we’re trying to both visualize this, the very nature of this process. That’s-- that is our existence, right? And what more beautiful, way to do this, than through these tensions? I mean, another tension is the, this tension of play. I just wanna very briefly mention two, ways in which play creates tension.
One is this James Carse’s old, tension between finite games and infinite play, right? I mean, evolution is an infinite play. Think about Calvinball in Calvin and Hobbes, that, the only rule is that you can never play it by the same rule twice. So the point of infinite play is not to win a game, to be the best, like some people, some very powerful people on Earth think at the moment, but it is to stay in the game.
So we have to sort of change the rules themselves., and in the city of Wittgenstein in Vienna, this is also appropriate because that was Wittgenstein’s idea of how rules are made: by doing. So we’re creating new constraints, new rules, by which we do whatever it is we’re doing, right? And so that’s a lot of fun, but it’s also not completely structureless because we have-- our play is not just play, it’s serious play.
So this is a term that, introduced by meta modern philosopher Hanszy Freinacht. It’s existential play. It’s like it’s not, we’re not just, you know, fooling around. We’re, actually using important concepts and insights, and we’re just trying to deal with them in a more, appropriate way for human beings by playing with them instead of just, immediately going for some kind of solution that isn’t even there to a problem that’s not well-defined.
And that seems to be a picture of the human existence much more than this idea that we’re sort of machines in a machine world that need to, act in an optimal way, and everything at some point will be perfectly, oiled and optimized, the gears of the machine. That is a, it’s a, it’s a anti-human world.
And so this is our vision of science, and this is our way of working, and this is how we do workshops with people for collective co-creation.
Andrea Hiott
I love that. I love messiness and tension and understanding that this is life. This tension is life, and but I also understand that so many of us want to resolve that because it’s a precarious place, it’s a vulnerable place, it’s a difficult place.
I mean, we can get pushed to our limits in these when we, let ourselves feel what really is, which is that tension. It’s so generative, and there’s a flow that you can get in, which is really, exciting. But a lot of the time, you know, you’re sort of dancing and learning, and that’s that serious play, I think, idea that comes up a lot, on this podcast.
But I’m thinking about the, your relation... I’m thinking about two things. I’m thinking about your relationship, which I’ll talk about first for a second, but I’m also thinking about space, because you both brought up, you know, names of cities or the studio itself, which can be a physical place, but also kind of an activity.
I wanna get into the space, ‘cause you know I’m obsessed with space, spatial ideas. But first, I was thinking about your relationship, and I was wondering if that’s helped you hold the vulnerability or if it’s also been challenging in the same way, because as Marcus was talking about sort of challenging you a bit, Yogi, and you were talking about, a similar sort of notion in the way that you were responding both to him but also in environment.
Has it helped to have a long relationship with someone who does come from a different place but still shares, you know, similar views that you can be in that tension with? I’m wondering about how that’s sort of evolved. So maybe we can start there with what that has meant, if this is new for you or if this is something you’ve been doing your whole life, you know, for the listeners, because this isn’t something that a lot of people have.
I just wanna know about that sort of relationship, and also maybe opening that up into kind of other spaces that you are both in together.
Marcus Neustetter
Mm-hmm. Good question. I think the natural tendency of trying to find someone that can mirror some of your thoughts, and respond appropriately or inappropriately, doesn’t really matter, but respond, full stop, to what you’re putting out there and makes the effort to respond, I think that’s part of it, has some kind of form of empathy that what you’ve actually done is take the first step and it comes back, with or without the same rigor, doesn’t matter, but it comes back and then there’s a kind of a ping pong, a back and forth that’s always present, is I think a very important component to any relationship or conversation or exchange.
And, I mean, I’ve been very fortunate, just on a personal note, that I’ve grown up in the context of South Africa, born and bred there, and tried to find my way around in kind of my own artistic career in the kind of post-apartheid South Africa that’s supposed to bring people together. And I realized very early on in my own as an artist, even though I trained to be a visual artist, my parents are artists, so I always had this notion that this is what I’m going to do.
And I realized how the Western commercial world of art has really, continued to colonialize the notion of what art means in these contexts, and really separate people out from the collective agency that they have by creating these superheroes, these artistic, visionaries that- that are obviously feeding the commercial market, and that we need to kind of consider each artist a, an important individual.
And that within that, it did not refer to context and place, and did not react to what the people needed in the context and place. And so very early on already as a white South African is one component, but also as an artist, I said, “What is my role in society if it’s not trying to take that first step towards someone that doesn’t even understand who I am?”
And if I want to get to know the world, there has to be a reciprocal way of doing this. And so what I as an artist have learned very early on is that I need to take my work to people and hope that something comes back, and not the other way around. And come with it with a certain humility and I guess, respect, and as I said before, kind of leave that imposed ego that’s created for us somewhere else, because that- that is the one thing that’s going to cut it down.
And why I’m saying this whole thing is that, yes, I’ve come across many people in that environment, including a collaborator of mine for many years, Steven Hobbs, who I started an organization with in South Africa that did exactly this kind of collective work in public space, very effectively for many years, is that my tendency is always to work with others.
But to find individuals that are able to be in it, be in it for the long haul is a completely different thing. So you go in and you do a project together, and then you move on, and everyone finds their way. But somehow working outside of the artistic discipline becomes really exciting for me because I’m realizing that the amount of, stigma attached to that which we do within the world of art, for example, in the side of art that I mentioned before, or in this industry, Makes it more difficult to find an ongoing dialogue with someone that’s, shares similar views, but from another point of view.
And, so I think it’s been really rich in not only on a personal note, getting along well. I mean, we are friends. You know, we’re not just working together, but we actually share more than that. Yogi and I kind of, we understand each other in other ways, and we’ve helped each other through our own difficult times, through reflecting on things and sharing things, and we’re able to be vulnerable in the same space, and I think that’s very important.
But more than that, over and above that, it’s,... I do think that people have these counterpound points in their life. They just can’t take that first step to reach them. I often come across this, that someone will come up to me and say, “I don’t know why, but we need to talk, and I’ve got no idea what the relationship is between us or why, but there’s something there, and, let’s figure it out.”
And it... That is very rare, and, I almost think that I need to take the first step very often to do that., and somehow I think we’ve done it so many times, Yogi. You and I keep on bumping into each other going, “Oh, there was this one other thing that we have never spoken about that would be really interesting to address.”
Or, “Why do you talking to that person? This is a strange other person. This Andrea person, who’s she? What’s going on here? Is this a threat to our friendship?” No, quite the contrary. I think that, and it opens up, and that’s the point. It’s being open enough for it to grow, you know., anyway, that’s just an immediate response to your question.
It’s quite a complex question and will require a bit more thought. Yeah.
Johannes Jaeger
Well, wherever Marcus goes, he makes friends immediately. He’s really annoying. And, you know, you stand there in the corner and you think, “Okay, so he’s just got this sort of ability.” So, and I think that’s also important. Again, the tension, I come, from a place of utter alienation.
I grew up in a non-academic family. I mean, my dad was the first person in the family to go to university from a small village in Switzerland, where I just thought everybody was really weird. I do appreciate the people and the place much more now. But when you’re a teenager in such a rural, conservative place with very well privileged and everything, but just, like, not your people, then you move away and you move on and on and on, and it’s so easy nowadays to do that and, adopt some sort of, performativity that we talked about.
I know, Andrea, that you’re very, fascinated by the role of performance, and I think one sort of performance that has come to become so important in today’s society is this sort of presenting yourself, the persona that we sort of project on other, on, you know, in different, areas. And now with online social media and everything, we have, these sort of, different, performances that we’re playing all the time, and they are in a weird way now coming back into our actual lives So for me, it was always sort of finding my way this way as a sort of a person who felt a little alienated.
And the thing that we have with, the collaboration with Marcus is that we were both interested in what the other was doing, and it wasn’t,... So the point of our art, and this is very important, this is what I want to mention here, is not to sort of make that into a performance, right? So when we say we wanna document the process of what we’re doing, we wanna put that to work with people for their purposes.
But we don’t want to do what other artists have done and make their private life, especially, in recent times, a sort of a show online or on a stage or something like that., that’s a very old tradition, in the arts., and I think it’s not real because it’s a performance, and it’s deliberately so.
So what we’re talking about here is a, sort of a form of trust and openness that can only be, had in private. And it’s sort of funny to talk about it on the podcast now, of course, but we’re only talking about it. We’re not performing it out. And we would also like, to continue, talking, to you, Andrea, about these possible, circles that we could have in more private settings where people...
So the idea is the following. If you pretend to be someone that you would like to be in public all the time, your actual needs get blurred out, get, fuzzy, get, hidden away. And the kind of, vulnerability that Marcus is talking about is not the sort of openness. We can have a performative vulnerability, so we’re open to others’ idea, we’re humble in public.
But you know these kind of people who are humble all the time, but they’re really not. And so, it’s when you’re really not in charge of your, you know, in control of your projection to other people. That’s when you’re vulnerable. This is, this can be... It doesn’t necessarily mean to be weak, right?
It means to be unpleasant sometimes or grumpy or angry. Nowadays we have all kinds of reasons to be in a state that’s not very presentable. But we’re sort of also at the same time forced by our setup in society to perform in those. I mean, there’s no way around this. This has always been the case.
Humans have evolved to do this. We’re highly social animals, so we have to do this So that’s another tension that you discover, between having to do this performance to actually exist in this world and be seen by other people, and at the same time finding your niches where you can actually, open up and say, “What is the real problem here?”
Because if we have only this performative, sort of openness and vulnerability, we start to really see the wrong kind of problems and tackle, the wrong kind of problems. You know, do I get enough likes, on social media instead of, do I get enough appreciation where it really matters? And, so these are super complex minefields that, I have been really-- I mean, this is a recent thing for me.
Unlike Marcus, I don’t make friends easily, and so it’s easy-- It’s really beautiful to see the contrast of when you go weird places and you have really weird interests and it’s hard to explain those to other people., you find other people on the way. I think this is where I discovered your way making philosophy and find that really beautiful because we make, these ways.
We walk through these parks, and then the path become where we walk together, not alone. If you do that alone, the grass is not gonna get trampled, and so let’s trample the grass together. And but you have to really find the right pe-people and have the right, sort of social norms to do that, know when you should, dump your inner emotional life on others and when not.
Please, do not do that all over the place in public. That would be terrible, and it’s part of the problem of what we have today, right?
Andrea Hiott
Yeah, Yogi, gosh, there’s so many things. Both of you, I mean, this is... It’s hard not to jump in and say things when you’re both talking. But I’m doing okay so far. But yeah, I think, yeah, we’re all weird, right?
Us three, and that’s a great thing. I think everyone’s weird in different ways and, but we don’t like to show it, and it’s just hard, right? I mean, I... It’s, the performance and the vulnerability and the space and, all of these themes I feel like I wanna get into a little bit because Do you feel like performance is a bad thing, both of you? Because I’m starting to realize that so I’ve always, I was really shy as a kid, and I’ve had to like learn how to perform in order to feel into myself being able to be myself, and I didn’t realize I was doing that actually. But, and the performance isn’t, false.
It’s just more like getting on the stage part of it, like letting yourself be seen part of it, if that makes sense. Mm. Because that’s part of performance too, is just actually getting on the stage and letting yourself be seen. And so I just wanna bring that up because I feel that in what you were saying, Yogi, about that being harder for you or at least it was always really harder for me.
And then Marcus, it feels like you started from a early age thinking of that almost as a service to show people they could do that or to be the one who initiates the contact, which we all need. So those are interesting contrasts for me that I wonder, I feel in our work, in your work, especially together.
And I guess I should say that we had talked about, after I talked to Parker, us three had talked about, “Oh, maybe we should do something like a circle of trust,” because that’s what Parker Palmer does. So we have been talking about that a bit too and trying to figure out what does that mean, what is the space of a circle of trust, how private is it, how public, how performative?
So just for the audience, like maybe that’s coming into the conversation a bit because that is something we’re doing together. But I guess I wanna ask you both about this performative thing and what I just said about being seen, and if that’s, if there’s something positive about performing. Even you, Marcus, you’re performing when you’re...
You often do a lot of art in the moment, And then also you, Yogi, I think you’ve, You’re doing something as a scientist, by becoming a philosopher. A lot of people just think of you as a philosopher now.
That’s... Is that a performance, or is that a switch? Is that... Are you still both? And also the public aspect. I just put all that out. You can say whatever comes. You don’t have to answer to all of it.
Johannes Jaeger
I will give a very short answer because I wanna give the answer, about performance to the artist here.
But for me, I’m the least diplomatic person I know. But then that’s also performance, at the same... You know, you’re the joker, you’re the mischief-maker, and you’re performing that as well. So no, performance isn’t a bad thing. Performance is something you have to do. What’s a bad thing is when we mistake, performance for that inner life that we also have that is not perfect, and when it takes over our online and private life completely.
And online, this is transparent, this is being discussed everywhere, but the sort of seeping. There’s a bunch of things., Patricia Martin just, wrote a book called, Will the Future Like You?, that’s sort of about this seeping into our private lives. So we have to perform for... Am I a philosopher? I actually was always a philosopher.
I performed as a scientist for a while, and I still do that. But my questions are more, philosophical and have always been. But, yeah, where is the... There is no strict line, right, to draw. And I also don’t believe in this authenticity cult that you have some sort of essential self somewhere.
The authenticity is in going your way, in way making. Is in finding your journey, in a way that is really, good for you in the circumstances that you’re in. And it’s a balance, right? So a performance is important, but I think it’s gone overboard, and it’s invaded places of our lives that are not appropriate.
Marcus.
Marcus Neustetter
Yeah., I mean, the question of whether I’m performing has always been sitting there because I am not a performer, in the artistic sense of it. I, have never regarded myself as someone that does performance. And very often when it comes to, you know, people writing about my work or I have to go and put a label up somewhere or kind of give something a credit or whatever, I will put a line through the word performance, and I’ll just kind of consider it you’re watching me doing what I’m doing.
It’s not,... It’s what I need to do. So if I’m gonna wear a white overall and go and do a drawing in a public, against a public wall, and it happens to be expressive because I want to, like, really get myself into it, and I go and I pick up the mud and I squeeze it into the wall and I scribble over it and I scream at the wall because I’m upset with it’s because that’s what I need to do, not because you’re watching me.
And I think that is, that I really... And it’s a fine line because sometimes I find myself doing it and then going, “Ooh, did I do this because I’m doing it for the sake of an audience, because I’m trying to get a rise out of them, or am I doing it because I genuinely feel this way?” And it’s, very difficult to separate the two out.
There’s no... And I think we perform, as you said, we perform every day in life., you know, we behave a certain way towards one. In one scenario, you go to a shop and you do one thing. You’re sitting at home in front of the TV, you do something completely different. And so you even in these small micro-moments in life, you put on a different personality in order to attain something or feel comfortable in that.
But I wouldn’t say that it isn’t, at least most of the time, I think, being untrue to that which you need to be doing. So if I am trying to get the woman at the counter in the local shop down the road here, who for the last years I’ve been trying to get into a conversation with just ‘cause I’m used to in South Africa talking to everyone, and this person does not wanna talk to me.
She wants to check me out, beep, so much, goodbye. And I keep on coming to her and asking her how her day was., I’m completely putting a performance because I want her to answer me how her day was and I want her to ask me how my day was because I see her every day and I want to make a human connection.
And so sometimes I need to perform for that. But I’m not doing it with the intention of playing the clown or playing the silly one or, yeah, coming in dressed up as something else just in order to make that stand. But if my efforts as an individual doing this cannot be met eventually, and I have to resort to putting on a clown outfit and doing a performance so that she looks at me, maybe that’s what I have to do.
But then it comes from my need to do something, not, servicing her need. Yeah. And I think there’s a very, it’s a very complex thing in my brain in terms of why I make art in the first place. And it’s, Yeah. We sit and draw, and we make, and we perform, and we make films and whatever else happens in the art world that’s, that gets put out there.
And I often look at this, and I genuinely ask the question, is this because the art world expects it or because I genuinely want to make it? And I think society’s no different., and so I think that is, for me, where the word performance is just such a bumpy kind of a complex term that I struggle with.
And sometimes in the studio, funny enough, when I’m by myself and I’m drawing, here’s a vulnerable moment. I will, I will do things that are not natural to me because I’m testing my own boundaries. Because I think if I did it this way, it will make me feel very uncomfortable, but I need to try this because I won’t know how far I can go, and it’s a very complex and difficult thing to do.
If I do that in public, it becomes even more difficult, but you kind of need to fall into that meditation of the world is not out there, and I’m just making what I have to make. But, there are sometimes things, sometimes I perform more for myself than I do for others. It’s an interesting concept
Johannes Jaeger
I, if I can just Yeah.
One thing that I would like to add is that I come from the mirror world of that. I was a group leader, I had a research group, and I was thinking I was in a performance, right? I was, performing the management role, and, it... I was really stressed about the future of my career because I had to come up with these new problems that I needed to study scientifically, and what I really wanted to do is question the way we study, these problems in the first place, and that, there was no place for that in that role that I had.
And then I realized that this thing that I wanted to do more than anything else my entire life, this was the most authentic thing that I... The path that I had chosen had changed now, and I wanted to do something completely different. And funnily enough, I didn’t, go that way on my own. I got kicked out of a academic position, and that kicked me into that new direction.
So I needed help from the outside to do that, and I think we are questioning ourselves. Maybe the younger generation now is more, finally waking up to that and is sort of questioning more and more. But I mean, our generation was probably questioning ourselves a little bit too little in these, career paths we, that we were in, even absurdly in the creative, businesses like science and art, and we were, getting into this rut.
And what we’re doing every day now is, un-rutting our lives and that’s not easy to do because you are always, encountering resistance, but, it’s so gratifying., it’s just amazing.
Marcus Neustetter
Yeah, and can I add? Sorry, it’s just, burning., the thing that’s so difficult is that you need the measuring device, or what do you call it?
The bullshit monitor, yeah, to tell you, yeah, there’s something going on here, and sometimes it’s a good conversation between us, you know, that helps that, or with a, with your life partner, or with your daughter, or whatever it might be. You know, there’s always these influences that’ll tell you, “Eh, you’re going, you’re going somewhere where, I can smell it.”
But funnily enough, just again in context- Being within, for example, a situation in South Africa in a kind of, again, in a kind of poorer neighborhood doing a public artwork or a community engaged process and asking critical questions about life on the streets, et cetera. If you go in there and you perform, you get taken down.
I’m sorry, that’s... There is a monitor for whether you’re serving your honest truth or something wrong that can... Society has learned, society that needs it, has learned to read whether you’re being honest or not. And it’s not, you know, a little white lie here or there is not the issue. It’s what intention you come to a process with.
And I think coming to your questions of space, I really would like to go there, because context and space, and acknowledgement of context and space is really important in that you cannot even begin to think about whether you’re performing or not if you don’t consider where you are and the environment that you’re in, and the people that are around you, and having empathy for them.
Because, yeah, it is a symbiotic relationship. You’re coexisting in a space. Something has to, inform you and the other way around. So yeah.
Andrea Hiott
Both of you brought up a couple words there. I, Clown maybe, and sort of, a jokester kind of sense.
Also the idea of performing for yourself. I think that’s really important. Marc, I think you said that about... That’s kinda what I meant about letting yourself be seen. You sort of first have to be able to see yourself, which is very hard. It’s very hard to, like, really see who you are. And of course, other people will see you differently, but that’s still all connected.
It’s all nested. And Yogi, I really appreciate what you said about, like being in a university sense, because I hear that a lot from people, of feeling like they have to perform, and indeed we do. We’re in high pressured environments with, like, real deadlines and our livelihood on the line. And, you know, also we’re just teaching, and teaching is a kind of you are standing in front of people and you are trying to present something to a lot of different diverse people in a way they will understand, and there’s an element in that of A kind of performance, but not really too.
The... So I really think this is something, this is an example actually of holding tension. The very word performance and how it never can’t, we can’t actually ever decide if that’s good or bad, is the kind of tension I think we were talking about at the beginning. And I just wanna link that to the playfulness, the serious play, and the jokester, and the clown in my life, I don’t know about in both of you, but I’ve found that’s very helpful for being able to see yourself. Mm... To be able to see, like, “Okay, I failed,” or, “Okay, I succeeded,” or, “Okay, I’m not what I thought I was,” which is wonderful stuff, right? That’s rich tensions to kind of grow from.
I think there’s a, that playfulness or that trickster sort of quality, is part of that space of getting out of trying to put things in either/or. So I just wanna put that out there a minute before we go into kind of actual space context related subjects. I don’t know if you have any feeling about that
Marcus Neustetter
So the either or intentional relationship, there’s so many examples and case studies that I can talk about play and performing as a way of breaking that down. You know, I mean, the amounts of role-playing exercises and experimental, joke telling, you know, like, or making fun of a situation that becomes a really interesting way of breaking down these, like a polar opposite positions or yes or nos, you know, these either-or situations, to be in that space in between.
I think the performing component that, the acknowledging that you are a trickster in that moment, whether you’re teaching or you’re facilitating a workshop or,... And, but doing it with a sense of self-iron- irony, humor, and acknowledging it to everyone that we all know, really breaks all boundaries down.
Yeah, because the moment that the pers- the other people in the room recognize that you are playing with them, and that the whole thing is an experimental performance in one form or another, magic happens. And I think we-- some people do it naturally every day, you know, in the way they engage with the world, and others need to do it within a structured environment.
But either way, I think it’s, again, the honesty about it is to say, “Hey, I’m playing this role now because I need to play it in order to disrupt something.” And it’s especially today, I mean, I think we’ve got the biggest town in the world at the moment doing performances every day for us., knowing full well that it’s, that’s, that play is about a kind of,...
It doesn’t have cons-, it’s void of the consequences that make for a better society. And I think that’s where it’s on us to play very carefully, and to play very consciously, and to understand the either-or scenarios also exist because of people’s conditioning, and because of context, and because of experience.
And to be in-- a trickster in that environment, takes a or should come with a huge amount of responsibility and, acknowledgement., and that’s where it gets difficult, because so quickly it can be abused. And so I’m, yeah, it’s, I feel uncomfortable sometimes in that role because I know that there’s another person next to me who’s got the same approach, but is doing it for completely different reasons, and doesn’t take responsibility for it.
Because it unlocks something deeply problematic in society and with individuals when you do it, and people recognize, and they can laugh at themselves, and they can laugh with you, and they can unpack something. And then what? You have to hold that, because if you don’t hold it’s going to fall even harder.
And this is, yeah. Anyway, an interesting point. Yeah.
Johannes Jaeger
I would love to follow up on that because the trickster, Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, which I dearly love, writes this, a thesis about Western society from an, a Australian Aboriginal point of view, and says basically every indigenous society had the trickster god, Loki, the emu in Australia, to warn you of the narcissism, to not put, them in charge.
And what we’ve done, especially in the last 50 years in the West, is we’ve put the narcissists in charge. So this is a wrong way to go about the trickster. The trickster in a traditional village, it then becomes the shaman, of course, or someone who is leading you through crisis moments, or who has to also, was a traditional role of shamans to negotiate between tribes.
Because that person is slightly outside and can reframe, your role in society. And so we have to sort of almost take that, once-removed view of the trickster itself nowadays, and say how can we, put the trickster back to where the trickster belongs? That is, to entertain us, to shock us, and to maybe, sometimes make us think about, what we, are doing ourselves, but not, definitely not to run the world.
And so this is also another thing we can do. And in a way we’re both, have, we have to be trickster figures in our jobs. And, we have to, provoke, in art and in philosophy and get people to think differently about things. And that always includes a certain amount of, narcissism.
If you don’t like to be that, like you’re in the spotlight somehow, right? And that’s not necessarily, again, that’s not a bad thing. But it’s just like the recognition that should be there. And if we don’t recognize this anymore we, demand of everybody to fulfill this certain role. I mean, we have a society now where everybody’s supposed to be an influencer or something, and that’s, it’s not gonna be a very functional society.
So this is also in a bigger context our performance, our artwork is about recognizing roles rather than saying, “Oh, we should all be...” I don’t think this idea that we should all be authentic, you don’t want most people around you to be authentic with you, to be quite honest. You wanna carefully choose those.
Andrea Hiott
Or maybe- And only, yeah... Maybe authentic but not fully always all of the roles they are Yeah... All things. Or fully one role. I think that’s really important what you’re bringing up about, I mean, I think of it as the multiplicities that we are but that we pretend we’re not. So we try Mm... Kind of always be consistently one thing, which none of us can ever be.
And so that already becomes a kind of an illness. And the trickster, we all have that in us, but no one is supposed to make that the whole role and everything- Mm... Like we’ve done. And to see that as, I mean it is powerful, but to see that as That it can be a whole thing, that we just only become tricksters and therefore that is the power, is such a perversion of the power of it.
And actually you know, in all kinds of teachings you do find, okay, when you tap into this source, there’s always a warning. You know, because it’s very hard not to, identify as that power and want more and more of it.
But you’re gonna go off a cliff, not only in your own ability to be sensual and in your space, but also just off a cliff in terms of where you’re gonna be leading whoever’s following. So I think that’s a really important idea of that multiplicity and that being careful not to abuse. You both keep bringing us back to just you have to be attentive of what you’re doing and where you are, and that you are part of, something, a self that is multiple and a social self that is multiple and a space that is multiple. Maybe that leads us into space and context a bit. You can say whatever you want, because I’m also thinking about how you’ve both been in many spaces, often at the same time.
Maybe that’s a mental space and also a geographical space, a studio, an artwork, a text that you’re reading, a text that you’re writing. All of these I think of as spatial and contextual, and you’re doing all of that, in the zone when you’re bringing people together too. So
Marcus Neustetter
Can I try a little exercise for a second as part of this? This also goes to the listeners, that it’s usually an acknowledgement of the space that’s around us. So, I think we can spare 10 seconds. Can we have 10 seconds of a time where you are just taking in the space that currently connects us through sound?
So just listen to each other’s space for 10 seconds, whatever that is. So we’re gonna stop talking for 10 seconds, and we’re just gonna enjoy the silence and really listen to the space that you’re in. Let it speak to you. And we are now currently connected by a microphone and speaker, so we’re listening to each other’s spaces, so it’s an extension of where we are.
Here we go. 10 seconds starts now I will stop it even though I don’t want it to. It’s so beautiful. Anyway
Andrea Hiott
It is. We could just do that for, you know, a while, but-
Marcus Neustetter
Exactly. But I think that’s, that’that for me very often is the, acknowledging the room, acknowledging the space, physical and mental or the communing.
The sense that we’re together, is, yeah, kind of as I’ve mentioned before, kind of my practice, my being, my... Is all always related to context and my question of why am I here, and what is my role, and how do I fit in? And the moment you do that, you look around you, and then you start making sense of what’s around.
And that’s why a lot of the work that we also do when we go into different environments, for example, the studio, is we respond to the local materials, to the stories, to the physicalities of the people. You know, the bodies and the space, and that these... We are bodies. You know, we... Embodied experiences are just important to us one form or another.
Whether it’s performance or not, it doesn’t matter, we’re still there. And, the inspiration I personally get from the corner behind you there, that kind of nice angle, and the lines that create the architecture under the blurry background of Yogi’s screen, and the drawing that’s behind me.
You know, we’ve just... Just that alone, if we just all ducked away out of our screens and we just saw that as our backdrop and these were the things that we’re speaking to each other, it already says so much. What more do you want to say? And so it’s the acknowledgement of that, and then we invade it as people, and we come in with our noise, and our ideas, and our own positions, and our arguments.
Or our silence, and our quietness, and our breath, and our... I could hear my heartbeat funnily enough while we were being quiet in my ear because it’s so silent over here, and your spaces were so quiet. And you just become more conscious of that which matters., and so if you really, acknowledge that And working in complex cons-, contexts, in places where survival, in extreme conditions, et cetera, it amplifies that, and you really have to watch where you step literally., when you’re in a more safe environment, you occasionally need to be reminded about how safe it is, and that the comfort zone that you’re in has stunted your ability to relate to the context because you’re not reminded that you’re in a place.
You’re just reminded that you’re in your head, and you lose this relationship to what could influence you physically, in this space. So I... Yeah, that’s just one, response to your thing around space, and context, and upbringing, and connections.
Johannes Jaeger
As a scientist, I mean, you see why I had problems connecting to Marcus in the beginning.
But, I got used to this kind of stuff. And it’s actually an interesting exercise for, from a scientific point of view as well, because Marcus asked us to not look at the pictures behind, us, but to listen. And we’re such visual animals, right? So we’re... As a philosopher, I’m interested in how do we get to know the world, and we are so dependent, not just on words and concepts, but on visual metaphors.
These meta- visual metaphors are based on our own history on, sharp edges, on triangle- our geometry is based on triangles. I think it was Carl Sagan who made us imagine these blobs that float around a gas, giant, and their intelligence. They would develop a completely different geometry because they never see a sharp line in their lives.
They wouldn’t have maybe the concept of a line. And so even if we try to interpret sounds or smells or, I mean, if we try to describe them immediately, we need to fall back on visual metaphors. We’re such strongly visual animals. And so, these are the kind of, phenomenological exercises that I always hated as a student as well, when people say, “Okay, just sit in the woods and be the tree.”
And so, there is this tension again between anthropomorphizing, nature and actually, you know, Being with the problem or the situation that you’re in, and we have taken ourselves so much out. So this is the other thing that we’re doing, where Marcus, the first thing he gets when, he does when we do a workshop, he gets us out of our heads, right?
And you may actually find that really annoying. We did this with 30 philosophers last summer, and it was really funny to watch all their, faces when Marcus came in the room and said, “Now we have to go play.” And so half of them were excited, and the other ones clearly not in the beginning. And so it’s so hard because they’re philosophers.
They’re the worst. Their philosophy has trapped itself since, Wittgenstein follows us around everywhere., since Wittgenstein’s time in the domain of language. So we wanna reconnect out of that cage, and we can only do that by going beyond whereof we cannot speak, thereof we shall be silent. Yes, if we are scientists and philosophers, because what we cannot express in words and rigorously in concepts is not our subject.
But then we can go and play with Marcus and perform things and experience things in a different way. And doing this in a non-- I mean, immediately people will go, that are scientists or philosophers, “This is completely flaky,” right? And this is such a big warning flag because this is, we’re still animals, and we still experience the world through a lot of, different channels than our visual and conceptual channels.
And what we could call hyper-modernity, this complete detachment from reality that we have in tech cycles, circles and other people that think, they can program the world in one way or other are a symptom of being, trapped like that. So, can we introduce a practice that is not, that is grounded, right?
Literally grounded, and, at the same time gets us out of our heads is something that I find extremely fascinating. So this is one of the other really gratifying, ways, of working with artists, is you have to perform sometimes in ways that you don’t like to. And as we said before, this allows you to discover new avenues of experience that you would not have gone down otherwise.
Andrea Hiott
I think that relates also to the noticing of the context and space and that you’re in many at once. I really love that you just linked that Coming into your body to the visual kind of, the overemphasis that we naturally have on the visual. I hadn’t really thought of it like that’s very uncomfortable, and I know exactly what you mean. I mean, this podcast sometimes is a perfect example of making philosophers and scientists uncomfortable because of things like what Marcus just did, you know, or talking about the heart or whatever. I’ve come to see that as a practice for myself, too.
It’s not always easy for me, frankly, in both directions. But I like that link that the two of you made together there of when we do something, when we it’s almost like you kind of you have to kind of give in to doing something a way you’re not used to doing it, you know?
Marcus Neustetter
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Hiott
Which then shifts what you’re gonna understand as the space you’re in.
I find that is connected to that attention and that noticing that we were talking about earlier, too. And also, I think to the, what you bring up a lot, Yogi, and, Marcus, what you’ve done a lot of work trying to help or resolve, not resolve, smooth into buttery, more buttery air, is the urgency of the times and the troubles, the very real problems and pathologies, that we’re faced with now that we were talking about a bit about, you know, how we’ve put narcissism, into some kind of power box we’re, we are very confused about what success is.
We think it’s metrics, and we think we all want them, and then we get there, and we’re, like, neurotic and have no way to relate to our bodies. And there’s all kinds of confusions going on now relative to this, I think both of you kind of end up grounding those in something like what we were just talking about, this relational aspect that kind of takes first coming into the body in a different way and what the senses are in a different way.
So I don’t know. I’m just thinking about the relationality of it, what relationship is on a different scale than we’ve been talking about, and the activism, the action orientation of it. You know, you’re active, both of you, in ways that people with your titles, aren’t always. How do you feel about that, I guess? I
Johannes Jaeger
Mean, if you do something that is stuck in your head, stuck in the ivory tower right now, then you’re doing something wrong. This is not a time to do that. You have to get out there, and you can’t do that alone. You have to engage, with other people, and if you’re engaged with other people, you have a practice, because you have to act together with them.
That is very simple, and if we don’t take that serious and we, if we dismiss it as woo and we’re just gonna go on in academia or in art as we’ve done before, it’s not working. Because this time, it, that where this very heady way of dealing with the world, was successful is coming to an end because we have manipulated, the complex world we live in so many ways that the unintended consequences are accumulating faster than the corrective measures, that we can put in there.
The other thing that getting out of your head will do is slow you down. So I teach high school students nowadays, and I tell them, “You can’t use PowerPoint slides just for one simple reason. If you have to write on the board, it slows you down, and people can actually follow you, and they interact with you.
The process is a completely different one.” And you have to actually prepare more to be engaged and present in that process. And the students are completely focused on the content at the age of 12 to 15 years already. So what have we done, right? I mean, we... It’s sort of the point of teaching is to engage in a process between teacher and student that gets, insight across, that transforms both in the best case.
And this is, not new, and it’s not our work to say that. There’s plenty of people and literature out there that says that. But again, literature, so you have to go and read it. No, you just go and do it, right? I mean, so this, it’s stuff that we just have to, do in a playful... So we can’t do it alone, and we can only do it in a playful way because we’re not experts in everything.
So we cannot... If we do it in a too serious way, by the way, then it’s also not, interesting anymore. So instead of becoming expert in whatever we’re doing, we’re sometimes just playing, being aware that we’re just playing, and not sort of arrogating that we know everything about what we’re doing. But it always gets you in, into interesting, and sometimes tight spots, but that’s also, interesting.
So that you have to then grow to the-- you have to stand up to the challenge and grow. So this is the, even in Plato’s, allegory of the cave that we’ve used as a very early subject of our art, the important part is the one where the philosopher gets out of the cave, right? This journey is important because when the philosopher gets back into the cave and tries to explain to the other people that what they’re seeing is just shadows, they don’t have the experience, and that is actually in the original allegory, but it’s never told to people that they can’t relate to that.
They’re not to blame because they’re, they haven’t, simply haven’t had the experience. And again, that’s an active experience, so that’s something we have to have these sort of experiences that allow us to reframe how we see the world. This you can’t do by reading a book or just thinking, you know, sitting in a corner and thinking
Marcus Neustetter
I guess that’s part of the artistic process being revealed is that what you’re doing is you are sharing the experience of the making, and by doing that, making the work more accessible, which goes against all concepts of what art, how art should be revered. Don’t tell people how it’s done.
It’s like a magic show. Once you know the trick, it’s not interesting anymore. And it’s not true. It’s actually very interesting once you know the trick. But I think the idea that we, The, you know, that we hold onto the process in such a way or that we, that we, hide it means that there’s little progress.
So the moment you do something and you actually share what you’re doing, you’re, you are opening up your own process to the most amazing things. And I would say that majority of my work is collaborative. I love my studio practice alone, but the majority is doing it with others because if I do it with others, I have...
Not only have I got an immediate mirror because I’m constantly looking over my shoulder thinking what’s going on, or a philosopher who’s commenting, but I have a, I have a need to be open enough to receive and give, and to receive and give, and to receive and give. And that just, poof, it just breeds new, most amazing new ideas that then just feed me that I don’t have enough capacity to deal with afterwards, which is the other frustrating part.
But, so if one takes that into, a societal structure and you think, again, places in need for survival that rely on their neighbors, that need to pull together to make something work, that have to, kind of break the system in order to make it work for them, you know, it could be very it could be infrastructural stuff, you know.
How do you get to the water if the tap has been turned off? You know, you have to dig up and then hack the thing and then put two pipes and then suddenly you’re building your own contraption around cleansing water that you wouldn’t naturally get from the state or whatever. And you, and you come up with the most amazing things, and then that thing gets marketed on a market somewhere and it’s sold internationally for millions, and suddenly there’s an industry that comes out of a need.
You know, and the, and this is just many, there’s so many stories like this that come up in industry, but, and we celebrate those there. What we don’t celebrate is how we got to those processes. You know, we forget that it comes out of complexity, it comes out of survival. And, I mean, hello, we’re living in a context where we’re around the corner from a lot of, a lot more than we’re, than we can imagine, in terms of questions around survival.
And yet, we have so much difficult, such a difficult time revealing our processes for them to change because we are so guarded. And so the doing part is, I think, a shift in that lifestyle to say, “Let me reveal how I’m doing it so that you and I can learn together,” as opposed to just protecting myself from that which could shatter my little world, you know?
Yeah.
Johannes Jaeger
If we take the process as a transformative journey as well, then, you have to give people enough framing. So if, you know, if you’re not into art and you go into a contemporary art museum and, that... This is a real, example. There’s a plastic mushroom in the Pompidou and I came back from Paris and told Marcus, “You know what?
There’s a plastic mushroom in the Pompidou. What the... What is the plastic mushroom doing in the Pompidou?” And he said, “This is an artist whose work I know, and this is the process behind the whole thing,” and I could actually understand it. But the museum doesn’t do that. There’s just a little plaque.
It has the name of a famous contemporary art artist with a plastic mushroom. And this is not a useful way to engage the public, in our, opinion, because I mean, if you assume that the average public is as dumb about art as I am, because it doesn’t,... It’s true that art is about the engagement of the public with the art, whatever you make out of the plastic mushroom.
But what do I make out of a plastic mushroom, you know? I mean, not many useful things in that very moment. So I... Can we not help, this sort of process along? And this is exactly one of the things we are probably finding in the zone between art and science is sort of new framings that make the art, tangible, make it have an impact, and at the same time also the other way around.
Why do we learn so much about, all the problems that we have from science, but we don’t act on it, right? That’s not a problem of science. That’s a problem of reframing how we deal with the insights that science gives us.
Marcus Neustetter
So I’d argue that mushroom is super important for many other reasons, whether you understand it or not.
But it’s, like so many works within a system, let it be. It can exist, and it’ll feed that group and that knowledge system, and they will inform each other, and, that should evolve. I’m perfectly fine with that, just like the international art market, just like the scientific research that’s happening in various corners of the world.
Let that happen, but let it not be the only thing., you know, that shouldn’t... It shouldn’t get..., that mushroom in the Pompidou shouldn’t be given the status, the money, the recognition that it gets just because it’s a plastic mushroom. It should be put next to something or acknowledged for the other thing that gives it life.
So what are the thousands of millions of community projects that have been in our existence that have changed lives through the arts, where you can actually say that should also be put onto a pedestal and celebrated for what it is? Or where an incredible collaboration between an artist and scientist, I’m not talking about ours, now others, making incredible strides in innovation.
Why is that not standing on a pedestal? And I think, again, the ecosystems that exist can continue to exist. They serve a certain network. They generate a lot of money for people. They feed people. They build something. But the problem is that we are focusing, at the moment, all of our attention on that, and I’m really interested at the underbelly, the alternative stuff coming and the real mushrooms popping up next to the plastic mushroom saying, “Hello, we’re also here.
What does that mean?”, you know, you can’t see the one without the other. And so, I’m more and more interested in how do we present ourselves in these institutions, because up until now, we have not been too concerned about invading the institution. We’ve just said we’re the zone between these spaces.
You know, we are the, we are the, we are the space where we want to explore. But sometimes you need to kind of place the fungi into the storerooms of the museum for it to spore, and then let’s see what happens., which most paper conservationists have chased me out of museums for that reason.
But the, idea behind it As we take the next steps in creating these trust relationships, in these shared studio spaces, we need to also manifest these spaces in the institutions, in the Pompidous of the world, where people can come to a space that is usually considered a certain kind of space, coming back to context and space, and break out that the walls and open it up for make it more permeable, not only in the physical sense of it, but actually in how we approach it.
And again, it’s a reference I can’t help, being in an urban transforming Johannesburg for thirty years. The amazing relationship people have with buildings and walking past a museum and saying, “I thought it was a prison.” Or, kind of not having, access to spaces because they are squatted illegally, and then once you realize the ecosystem that exists inside there for a matter of survival, it’s been about a very ingenious way of redesigning architecture that was imposed as a colonial instrument, and then has become appropriated, but in such an incredible way that you realize that we as humans do need to sometimes burrow ourselves into the very things that have conquered us in order to kind of eat it up from the inside like termites, you know, reappropriate it and transform it.
Maybe it has to collapse. I mean, coming to this idea of teaching, Yogi mentioned earlier, I mean, I was at a... Giving a lecture series in a university in Port Elizabeth in South Africa, in Gqeberha, and, the, students in front of me turned around and said, “You’re lucky you’re an artist and you’re coming to us creatively and you want to talk openly because if you’re a professor, we must tell you must stop professing because you’re coming from the wrong place.”
As in, you know. And once you acknowledge that and you recognize that and you... Obviously, this is a very complex, space, you know, the decolo- decolonizing the institutions, trying to figure out what it means. But it’s amazing it’s happening. The students are doing it. The, you know, people in the institutions are asking these critical questions.
I would say the museums are also doing it. Curators are thinking of alternative shows and et cetera. So it is happening. I would just love to see these trust relationships of process being much more integrated into these, spaces. So I’m hoping that through our, and just Yogi’s nodding, but I think we’ve always had this.
We’re working outside the silos between these two spaces, but actually sometimes we have to slip into the silos, rub shoulders with the wrong people to get them agitated, and see what happens when they come into a circle or into a studio and what, yeah, what that could give., just a nice provocation.
Andrea Hiott
Yeah, maybe not always only between the silos, but there’s a whole space holding them. There’s a whole surrounding context that you are too, and that already includes the silos even though you don’t have to smoosh them into each other. I mean, that’s part of that idea too. And what I hear in both of you is this communal, that kind of communal space, exploration, which doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or end, but is always a zone.
I mean, there’s only so much, like, your sensory kind of cone or whatever. Like, your sensory kind of way of being is gonna be the zone together., it doesn’t necessarily have to be between, does it? Or I guess I’m also thinking about, like, in the essay on love and philosophy, you talk about, when you’re talking about the zone and about different These projects, there’s, like, this idea of doing that we’ve been talking about a lot, which is kind of... Like, I think we’re sort of demonstrating the vulnerability becoming power actually in a way here in this conversation. But within all of that, there’s also, like, the having and the being, which none of these are separate, but that feels part of this urgency too of, and this, like, communal thing that you are doing.
I mean, even with the art itself and the mushroom and the museum and the space, these are multiplicities too. I really like the idea that they can be what they are, but we should also have a way to go into different nested multiplicities of them. You know? Yogi should have a way to... And I guess he does, it’s Marcus, of saying, “What the hell is this mushroom doing in the museum?”
Like, explain it. -
Marcus Neustetter
Oh.
Andrea Hiott
Yeah. So,
Marcus Neustetter
Yeah He says it without... He does it, he says it directly to the museum. I’ve experienced this. So it’s not always the same thing.
Andrea Hiott
I believe it. But I like that. I mean, that’s... I think that it’s part of the tension too of, saying things as they are and figuring out how you can do that without alienating those who’ve made them.
Or take, or taking responsibility for them as they are. Mm. I think that’s a hard thing to do.
Marcus Neustetter
That’s
Johannes Jaeger
Extremely-
Marcus Neustetter
But it’s the gatekeepers that- Yeah. Yeah... That it’s the very people that are, that need X amount of papers that they have to publish, that need X amount of, large ticket item names, that in order to protect their positions.
And that’s where it gets complex. Because at the end of the day, the system has been built to protect those that are already in it. And, you know, you will naturally step on someone’s toes, and somebody will have to be defensive, otherwise they’re giving over their wealth and their accumulation of whatever they’ve got in terms of power.
And we will always in society have that. How do we go about convincing those people, and I don’t have to even look at the politics of what’s happening today, but, you know, to give up any of their power is almost impossible. So what do we do? Do we, generate new power next to it that builds itself up that they have no claim to in order to create a society and a community that finds an alternative value system where the powers are shared and differently, accessed differently?
Maybe that’s a utopia, but either way, that’s always what I come up against, is still the gatekeepers that need to protect their own environment by offering that which they know is accepted as a status symbol. Papers in... I mean, Yogi, you can talk about that in the scientific and philosophical space.
You know, the academics that have to prove themselves over and over again through the amount of papers they produce
Johannes Jaeger
I was for a second thinking, are we, beneath, you know? We’re under the radar. We’re undermining the systems. We’re not between the systems. But that’s... I think the systems are undermining themselves, so we’re not doing that.
So, I think the systems are undermining them because of their closed nature, and their inflexible nature, and the, and things changing really fast in the world of today. What I find a much more useful framing is to... I agree with Mark, is it’s not useful to go against, the oligarchs in a oligarchy frontally, right?
That’s just gonna get you in trouble, but without you getting anywhere. But, there are ways around this, so,... And one of them is simply, to rediscover that we can refuse, to participate, and that’s a form of peaceful, sabotage of the system. Because a lot of these systems, do, assume that you play by the rules of the finite, very finite games that they’re playing, right?
So actually stepping outside those games is hard to do in practice, and, much harder than people imagine. But it’s a very effective form if more and more people do it, I think. Also, I’m really hopeful about the new generations doing, the young generations doing that more and more, after at least two generations of complacent people, we have to say.
Complacency was very, strong in, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And now we’re in a situation where things have to come out. And so then you can quote Milton Friedman and say, you know, when the crisis comes, you have to be ready with the right kind of ideas. But you also have to be ready with the kind, right kind of community and practice.
So what we’re building now is much more than just ideas. It’s practices that we want to... People... We want to see people play, and that’s important. They have to play in their own way, right? I mean, so we’re not coming out with the Perspective Studio TM., this is our brochure. Read it and you’ll, be this new person.
But we are, encouraging people to play seriously in their own way, because nobody can predict what’s gonna happen next, and so we have to be ready with this diversity. Again, that’s extremely important. And these diversities of approaches are gonna contradict each other. So this means embracing the friction again, and again.
So this is something... That doesn’t mean that if over there is a community growing that’s against all my deepest convictions, that I have to just go and embrace them. I can say, “No, these people are bad people.”, I can use worse words for that, but I won’t here in the podcast. And so on and so forth.
But we have to acknowledge they’re there, and we have to acknowledge, and this is the practice that we’re trying to implement in the Perspective Studio, that we may have to collaborate with them if we want to have collective action work at scale And so then we have to think, “How can I do that without selling my soul?
How can I actually keep my convictions and still work with people who I found literally intolerable in some aspects, but maybe not in this specific aspect?” A very specific example here is climate change. We have large majorities of people being worried about climate change in every poll, that’s ever been done in every country on Earth the last 10 years.
And yet people keep on voting for politicians that do not act or deliberately act against, useful measures in that sense. And what’s happening here is that we have a disunified, group of people. They don’t see how they can work together, and they don’t see the usefulness of working together.
So this is something where these sort of methods of getting out of your heads, don’t discuss every... You don’t have to agree on everything You can even be angry with each other, a lot of the time. But do something useful right now. And, do something useful together if you can agree on that. It’s called, John Rawls called this, overlapping consensus.
You find these patterns of overlapping consensus. And then you can take the evolutionary, metaphor again and say, “This is exactly how populations evolve.” You know? They all do, the individuals in the population do different things and sometimes they, compete with each other and they do opposing things and yet the population can evolve in very coherent ways out of that incoherence.
So, we call it, coherence from difference., which is something that is often, preached but, we don’t see it, actually happen. So that we learn how to be in conflict with each other again, in the sense that we can actually have the conflict. I, it was very helpful for me. I lived in Spain for seven years and the funny thing about Spanish culture is it’s extremely rude.
If you move there, it’s amazingly rude. And if, you know, you’re a bit put off in the beginning if you come especially from a very sort of, repressed country culture like Switzerland. But then you realize that, you know, if somebody just cut you off, they shouted you, just so you don’t think you were, had the right of way.
But the thing is the steam is out. So there’s actually statistically, I believe, I looked that up at some point but I’m not so sure anymore., there is less road rage in Spain than anywhere else because people shout at each other. But then, so imagine you do this, in US or, you know, then you get shot.
Or you do it in Switzerland and then you realize the person you shouted at is your work colleague. It would take you about three months to get over the embarrassment of that, right? So this is a sort of a valve of... I don’t like advocate everybody becoming Spanish in this particular way.
But it’s an example of where maybe we have to learn how to have these conflicts openly again. And, cherish integrity over, good manners., because what’s gonna come for humanity is gonna be rough. And we’re not always gonna be at our best, and that’s bringing us back to the original topic.
How can we have- these circles of trust if we believe that even being vulnerable is this good way of being vulnerable. It’s being open to others. It’s being, you know, letting your ego go. How many, Vipassana retreats can you do? And that’s not being vulnerable. That’s actually being strong.
That’s, like, a, an easy practice compared to actually accepting when you are vulnerable in the sense of being not like what you want to be. You are not your best self. And you’re not a machine, so that’s gonna happen over and over and over again, and we have to walk a fine line between just accepting, “Oh, yeah, I am just a bad person, and that I’m gonna I’m gonna be a bad person.
I embrace that.” That’s not what I’m saying. But sort of embracing that’s gonna happen, and yet being able to move forward and also embracing it in other people, that they’re not always gonna be at their best, right? I mean, I think it’s a very fine line, and it can only be explored. We can talk about it until the cows come home, or we can go and try and do something together.
But the practical way of doing it, something together is just so much more useful in this, and
Andrea Hiott
Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s this trickster kind of energy again, too, of being able to dance- Yes... Or be in, understand the multiplicity of everything. I wanna push it a little bit because you said, “I can say people are bad,” but I...
Can you? Because no person is one person, and so you can say what they did is bad, and I know that’s a kind of that can seem like a cop-out, but actually it’s very hard to say that clearly and from a place of, r-really meaning it and not just trying to take down this person. Because we don’t know who the person is.
I mean, the person is many different persons, and the way we treat them is gonna bring out more of one of those persons. I don’t know. I’m trying to think, you know, of it even more multiple in the sense of, we want co-presence, but we’re also creating the co-presence. We want respect, mutual respect, even with the things we don’t understand.
I love your example of Spain because I think this is a good example of how often we misunderstand each other because we’re all coming from different paths and we’ve all had different regularities, but we seem to, we are in the same real space, and we just assume everyone else sees it the same way and that if they’re reacting a way we would react, they mean what we would mean making that reaction.
Mm-hmm. And that’s rarely the case, especially, Mm... When you’re trying to do what we’re trying to do here which is, you know, be in that space of tension which means you’re usually in a space that you’re not used to. You said you felt like you’re underneath, and I know what you mean by that. But I think we’re all kind of underneath because we are this. So what we’re, what we’re being together is changing all that we’re encountering with. So there is a kind of subliminal or sublating or something happening there.
Does that sound fair to you, or do you think I’m being too sweet to say we’re all, we have to think of the multiplicities in one another? What do you think?
Johannes Jaeger
When I’m at my best, then I would have said it like you did. But, you know, I’m not. So I said, “These are bad people,” but they’re not.
They’re actually just behaving in a way that I don’t like. I do see that in my good moments.
Andrea Hiott
But sometimes you need to say they’re bad people to yourself maybe in the way Marcus is saying. I mean, there are...
Johannes Jaeger
Yeah. Marcus
Marcus Neustetter
Well, that there is, there’s something else there though that, everyone’s has got some thread that you can pull and go, “Ah, that’s where that comes from.”
You know, we all have something that someone else doesn’t like. And yes, we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt and pull that thread and say, “Oh, that person went through this in their life. You know, they can behave that way for once. I can forgive them, or, I can understand it. I might not forgive them, I can understand it.”
You know? So we can justify it, but it shouldn’t be, and this is a kind of coexistence, it shouldn’t be an imposed thing onto you that they justify their behavior based on their background by damaging yours, or by impeding. And that’s a very difficult thing. I know culturally we spoke about people shouting each other because that’s just part of their culture.
That’s one thing. I’m saying it’s very quick, the step is very quick to say, “Well, I’m allowed to because of...”, you know, it’s a kind of justification of, to other things. And the, and coming back to our conversation on space and context and understanding where you are and how you’re performing, that yes, if you go to Spain and that’s what happens to you, well, you’re in that territory.
That’s what’s gonna happen, and you have to, you know, you’ll find your way. But if that same person comes into Vienna and does that, I can understand the Viennese not liking that person. Of course, it’s a completely different culture. You cannot then justifiably say, “Well, I’m Spanish, so you gotta deal with that.”
Well, there’s a, it’s a tricky moment because then, you could start justifying all kinds of ill doings to others. And so I think there is, and this is what we have to learn as humans again and again and again, that we need to read our context in a little bit more careful a way, and understand empathy for others in that context in a different way.
It’s the same as a white South African walking into a township saying, “Let’s make public art together.” Huh, interesting concept. But how do you do that? You go and you find your language for doing it, and that you can... I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a clear rule to this, but, I’d be very careful to say that just acknowledging people’s multiplicity, justifies their actions.
Andrea Hiott
This is an important point Yeah. No I need to, I need to say something because, I really think that’s great that you said that because I don’t that, I mean, I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but that’s a kind of, you just kind of framed it in a either/or, like it’s good or bad, and I’m trying to kind of pop that open.
Mm-hmm. Like, let’s not even talk about good or bad. Let’s talk about here we are together co-creating this space, and how do we best understand it? You’re annoying me, and I’m, I don’t like it that you’re screaming at me about this. I’m not used to that. It’s not gonna work You know, I mean, that’s not good or bad.
That’s a kind of in the moment expression. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? No, that makes sense. So I’m even- I mean-... I’m trying to constellate it even more.
Marcus Neustetter
That’s, that makes complete sense. If we had an openness to talk like that to each other, which usually happens in the studio, funnily enough.
You know, if in the studio you can say to each other, “ You know, what you’re saying there, I understand what you’re saying it, but I don’t like it.” You know? That’s okay. I have no issue with that. Quite the contrary. You’re right. That’s the space in between Just don’t, in my opinion, when you’re in that safe space, don’t justify your behavior to me based on, that you have a sort of right to be a certain way because of your background.
And that’s what happens so quickly. You know, and that’s what happens when you’ve got hierarchies in a room. You know, when one person- Mm... Is the teacher, the other one’s the student, suddenly there’s a particular relationship between them. When we start coming, and then maybe that’s again this ego conversation, when we bring that stuff that just, that gives us the right to behave in a certain way with us, that’s a wrong start.
And all I’m saying is at the, in that space of being context and people-specific and sensitive to the environment, I genuinely agree we need to express ourselves about dissatisfaction, but not in an, in a way that, imposes your ill feelings for someone else because of what they stand for in your baggage that you bring.
That’s a different way. It’s forgetting that person’s also human and has a relationship with you or with the space.
Andrea Hiott
And also from what we said at the beginning about tension being life, you know? Mm. That’s why we’re alive- Yeah... Is the tension. So I think It’s what we do with it If... Yeah, if we start in that-... If we recognize that together, then we can have these discussions that you just said. Yeah. So it’s really like that’s what I meant about when, Yogi was talking about evolution or the what I was talking about the orientation that we’re sort of, we’re orienting as we’re coming together into a space.
Mm-hmm. And if we have this understanding that it’s tense, we’re not gonna get away from it, but, like, how do we help each other hold that and how do we flow maybe together? Because that happens, Mm... As that kind of needful freedom or that generative stuff. So yeah, I mean, I’m agreeing with you, but I’m also saying I’m agreeing also that it really matters where we’ve come together and how we’ve noticed the space we’re Yeah As already gonna be, you know, there’s gonna be tension. It... That’s what we are.
Johannes Jaeger
I mean, you may have And it’s so exciting
Marcus Neustetter
Because the same trick that covered-
Johannes Jaeger
Yeah. You may have to draw some lines, but you... It’s better to draw them around, actions or, character traits than around people, right?
So that’s one thing. And so there’s no contradiction there and you probably like this because it busts another dichotomy. There’s, this philosopher, we wrote, about this in the essay, for the Love and Philosophy blog., Michael, Schmidt-Salomon, a German philosopher, says the paradox of tolerance is really just, the distinction between two lines and that is people you dislike but you have to tolerate, and then people you cannot tolerate because they’re in some way, bigoted against you or against other people because they’re these kind of people.
They... This is just... These are unacceptable, intolerable, views in a society, and these exist. I mean, we, it, we can’t just be nice with everybody. There are just people you can’t work with. But I think it’s quite a small percentage if we find out... If... You know, most people are still at some point-, actually united in some of the aims and the worries that they have about the world, and if we focus on that, and then we can find this overlapping consensus.
But we can only do that, and that’s the other thing of, the other way of busting the dichotomy is to actually act on it, right? That’s what we just said. There’s so many ways. And funnily enough, the example of Vienna for the Spanish person is a really bad, is neither good nor bad that Marcus brought up before.
Because obviously Viennese are the second most grumpy people on earth after the Spanish. And so it’s like completely normal. It’s okay to be Spanish, just a bit less loud., you just mumble your insults instead of shouting them. But the cultures, maybe that’s the shared- Yes... Ups and downs that- We apologize
Marcus Neustetter
To all Aust- all, we apologize to all Viennese and Spanish people listening to us right now.
Johannes Jaeger
I think it’s a Stereotyping... Stereotyping but not too much., and again, we don’t wanna stereotype people. Yeah. But let’s say these cultures have tendencies like that. And, Yeah... Overcoming it is not to quibble now for the next 15 minutes whether those things are black and white categories, but, to say, “Okay, so how can the Viennese and the Spanish do something useful together,” right?
I mean, that’s the, that’s the idea.
Marcus Neustetter
And Andrea, what excites me about what you were saying and immediately, kind of my brain’s always very practically focused on how that rolls itself out in a room, for example, or in a situation. And one of the tricks that one often does in kind of holding, collaborative conversations where these things come up, you know, where I just don’t like what you do.
You know, how do you deal with that? You know, is to find the thing that’s not in the room, to reflect on. And it’s, you know, the absence of something that you can then share your frustration with, or frustration, but your tension with., so kind of that third element if you’re having a two-way conversation.
And it’s not about a common enemy. It’s very careful not to make the other thing an enemy, but make the other thing the focus. And very quickly, in this, in the strategy of kind of facilitation, you find that the thing that irritated you about that other person, or thing that you vehemently disagreed with and you want to scream and shout about, becomes secondary because we’re focusing on something that we have in common.
And in the long way around, and this comes back to the workshop with the philosophers that we did, Yogi. In a long way around, by the end of the five days of working with people like that, where there’s always something else to reflect on, always something else to reflect on, finding more common threads, these people all end up getting along really well and actually enjoy what you’re doing as an artist and actually participate, and feel that there’s a gain to be had because we constantly played this game of, reorientating and reshifting that aggression or that anger or that frustration or that opposition or that tension that was in the room.
And it’s constructive because it’s focusing it on making something, on creating something, on that other thing in the room that needs to be developed. And again, very often the space feeds you that. So you’re next to a forest, you go into the forest. Wow, we’re out of context. Now, if we talk to each other in this way, it changes things because we’re dealing with a larger world and not this little world of our little conference, but the natural environment.
And taking people out of this finite and small world, of their constraints that make them feel or engage with certain situations in a way that they need to, express themselves in that way and show them that they’re part of a bigger picture is, for me, also the strategy for The relationship with the gatekeepers that sit in these different institutions is to say, yeah, so institutions, as you said, the silo sits there, but it sits within an environment.
You still need to engage with it. You still have to breathe in and out. And you walk every day from your home where you brush your teeth and kiss your children in the morning to your office where you then go into your little academic silo, and there’s 1,001 interactions there that you should be focusing on rather than on the one that’s you’re doing in the office.
And the moment you shift that perspective, all of that ugh that’s in there that wants to challenge you goes, “Ah, yes, there’s that other life.” And the moment we acknowledge the other life, something opens. So there’s beauty in harnessing that, whatever that is that’s needed to express how dissatisfied we are with each other.
Andrea Hiott
I love the spatial switch of attention. I found myself at a workshop this weekend sort of saying to someone who was expressing an issue, like a coupling kind of issue, you know, “Well, have you thought about just, like, putting your attention on the space that’s around you, in these moments?”
And I went in a little bit further, but I realized that had come from, Declan Donnellan’s idea, who was a playwright who I’d talked to Sophie about, Sophie Fines in New York recently, because he has this thing. He’s doing Shakespeare plays, and he talks about the pressure that’s outside the room that’s actually creating the room that you’re in.
That’s a beautiful, switch of thought, right? That... And you see that in Shakespeare so much. You don’t... The stuff offstage is actually what’s creating the pressure that’s onstage. And in our lives it’s often like that, and in our conversations. It’s this pressure that’s around us that’s creating the way we’re acting in that conversation, but we don’t even notice it or switch our attention to it.
And there’s something almost, I don’t know what, like, alchemical in switching, the attention and noticing that and noticing how the pressures of other spaces are affecting the ones we’re in. And I think that also speaks to this idea that there are divisions. There are different rooms, and yet it is still the shared space at the same time.
Also just in that theater metaphor when you were talking- Yeah... I was thinking of the wings, you know, and needing space to rest too. And in all this action and activity and process, we also, we wanna understand there’s different roles and spaces at different places in the environment.
Johannes Jaeger
I’m philosophically I’m sort of skeptical about huge generalizations. But one thing that really characterizes this modern age is a focus, away from the framing, right, from the context. I mean, the whole nature of the reductionist, scientific method is, and it’s necessary, the analytic- it’s the analytical method, is to take something apart and then look at the parts and how they interact because otherwise you can’t.
You literally can’t explain, how it works in the first place, and you can’t come up with a scientific explanation. So again, just like performance, being a reductionist to a certain degree is not a bad thing. But then forgetting, throwing out the context of in which these parts work, and then forgetting about that is the bad thing.
And then when that becomes your worldview instead of just the method to do, to make progress in science, then it’s a really bad thing. And I think this has invaded so much of our thinking, and what it’s done is made the framing, invisible. And then we don’t see that instead of always rushing towards a solution, trying to find the most optimized path to a solution of a problem that we’ve clearly formulated, what we need to do right now is reformulate the problems.
Or the same if you’re in a situation that’s not a problem, like the current situation of humanity is not a problem, it’s a situation. It is something that we have to deal with, but there’s no solution to it. So, we have to deal with the situation, with interpersonal situations not as if we’re optimizing, problem-solving, but, sometimes in reframing, what we see as problems and working around them, and that’s much more common than, actually finding a solution to a well-defined problem, which is something that basically only happens in philosophy and science, I think.
And We do this naturally, but then we get educated away from it very early on and this is exactly what you can only do through practice. You can read so many books about having to focus on the context, but you can’t do it, necessarily. It’s learning how to ride a bike, you can read a lot of books about that.
You can’t ride a bike. You have to practice it. And so because it’s not a computational analytical activity, we value it less., we find it less rigorous, to, sometimes, you know, last century the positivists called it metaphysics and wanted to throw it out completely as a bad thing. But, the framing of how we see the world is everywhere, right?
Because we’re limited beings in a large world, and acknowledging this and then seeing those frames again and much more, focusing much more away, again, that’s a, it’s an active practice. It’s not something that you do in your head necessarily, is to completely work around not solving the problems that you have, but, you evolve.
So they, you become a different, sort of individual and you have different kind of problems in the future., but you don’t solve-- I mean, living is having problems more than solving problems really, and always having new problems actually. And I think you, were in an earlier conversation asking me about the struggle.
That’s what we perceive as a struggle, and we perceive it as uncomfortable. We want to be somehow in a controlled environment very often, to feel comfortable. And I think being human is not that. It’s learning that this is not a struggle, but this is life This is, you know, you always create new problems.
And in fact, science is, the point of science is to create new problems. If you solve all the problems in your field and then you publish a paper, it’s not gonna get cited by anyone because nobody’s gonna be in that field anymore. So if you have created 10 new interesting problems in your field, you’re gonna get lots of citations, and people know that intuitively.
But we’re never told that it’s like this. And we are when we you know, express or discuss explicitly how this works, then we are discussing as if science was solving, you know, problems and then putting them away., I mean, so this is again Caers’s, infinite versus, infinite play versus finite life.
Finite, game. Life is a finite game, but the, to be a part of this process of understanding the world and to be a part of evolution is an infinite play, so you’re part of that. And then you also become much more comfortable, and this whole psychopathology of trying to live forever and, you know, preserving the individual forever and being afraid of dying that we have, as a sort of a pandemic in the tech, you know, intellectual people that should know better, should grow out of that.
Then, you understand where that comes from. It comes from that having focus away completely from the whole context that we live in, that we have to experience. We can’t just think about it. We have to actually live it. And that’s a practice. Yeah? And if people then think that’s woo because it’s practical and it’s not expressible in words, that’s just how you learn how to ride a bike, you know?
Nobody can tell you how to ride a bike. You need to learn it yourself.
Andrea Hiott
Mm-hmm.
Johannes Jaeger
So there’s nothing not, that’s not rigorous about that. It’s just a different kind of thing. And that’s what being caught in the cage of language means, right? So we have to, we have to speak about these things we cannot speak about.
Wittgenstein was right about philosophy, but he was wrong about life. And he knew that because the late-- he contradicts himself, of course, at the later stages of his life
Marcus Neustetter
And I wanna point out that I think, often these,... Holding these spaces or processes that deal with the doing or the action and the, and the practicing, creates incredible agency, just generally, in society now.
You know, so given the, my background’s also a lot in the digital art space and, you know, all the electronic artists, from the ‘90s kind of going, “Okay, now let’s find a new way of net art,” and this and that, going into the virtual space, and we now are very deep in that space with AI and everything.
It’s all very exciting. But how many people have shifted back into a space of making physically is really interesting for me, of that same community. Is this recognition that there is, a need to show that you can make, not just with code, but actually with your hands, to yourself in order to reflect on something.
Now, there’s many things we can talk about here, but the one thing that really interests me is how many people are turning to each other to say, “Hold me and show me., let me experience that. What... How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I reintegrate myself into a life off the screen? How do I play with it?”
We go to farmers to help us plant things. We go to, crafters to help us, show us how to draw again. You know, whatever it is. Cooking becoming this thing that why do people cook now? It’s just because they want to feel like they’re achieving something, that they complete in one, you know, in one session and have made something that gives them success and happiness, off the screen.
And I think these are wonderful things. And what’s... A new economy is evolving for me that I find so interesting., like, an economy of agencies to help people do that, to kind of shift that attention into a way that, there is... I don’t know. Always, there are always these parallel worlds that emerge when something, shifts.
And I, and coming back to what we are doing, I’m saying all three of us, not just the Perspective Studio, but it’s drawing attention to these spaces, to these encounters, these ways of doing things. And I really think that this is a, not just something to make us feel good and find a tribe and connect with each other and feel vulnerable together, but it’s, but it’s about a form of shaping, as Yogi said, a language of doing, which is very different to a language of speaking and contemplating.
It’s maybe something that, one day will be in a dictionary of a different sort.
Johannes Jaeger
And in a way orthogonal to the, from, you know, having and being, -
Marcus Neustetter
Yes...
Johannes Jaeger
Yeah, which is another problem, but it’s sort of a you know, it’s aligned, but it’s sort of orthogonal to that.
So, that’s interesting, yes.
Andrea Hiott
I really feel this too. I really see this happening more and more, I mean, with our collaborations over the past year or whatever, and but also around me, people really moving towards very different ways of thinking about what economy is, what, success is, what we can do together, even what we are as people in the way we’ve been talking about here.
And that’s why I feel it’s really important to kind of, you know, stay with this, right? To commit, because we’ve talked a lot about moving around in different spaces and so on, but before we go, I wanna get to the... There’s a commitment to this too, right? There’s a commitment and a kind of, intimacy that’s Maybe not as easy as it might sound here, even though we’ve been talking about how difficult it is, that, you know, you’re still yourself having to deal with yourself.
And we all have things that are hard, these darker things in our life that are hard for us to look at, which we did talk about, and trying to put light on that. And I think what I was hearing in both of you just then is that we can, once we can understand that as part of the tension, we can help each other feel comfortable enough to look at that space.
And that’s part of what these new groups are. A lot of our hangups about money and success really come back to not being able to look at the dark stuff, So I was kind of seeing that connection, and also the skillfulness, that we’re practicing. And it’s not woo, it’s actually a development of skills that are different than the ones that have gotten us to where we are right now in the wider picture.
And that, what’s more important or more scientific really than trying to do that kind of experimentation. So I just wanna bring that up at the end, and I also wanna get to this, these words which, like care. I’ve been talking about caring, and that’s one of those words that people immediately kind of shut off when they hear in certain contexts because they think it’s so soft and sweet.
And love is another word. But it’s tied up with what I’m was just saying about the commitment and the intimacy and the darkness, and I’d like to hear what you think about all this I’m saying, but also kinda to get to those harder words of care and love., I know you talked about tough love on this podcast before, Yogi, and people really like that.
I think we’ve gotten into that a bit, but I mean, I wanna go even deeper. You know, even... I’m thinking of how this actually feels in your real everyday interactions with yourself even. But go wherever you want with it, but I just wanna bring up those words.
Johannes Jaeger
I’ll give, Marcus the last word, but for me, this is, sort of a, you cannot go back.
So the question of commitment is very simple because if you, once you see these frames shifting, and they shift for you, this is, like this philosopher in Plato’s cave. You’ve gone up, I mean, not into the abstract world like in Plato’s cave, in the cave allegory, but in, into a different space, right?
That’s the most important thing that we can still take out of that 2,500-year-old example. And Say, you cannot go back into the cave and pretend that you’ve never seen the light. And of course, this is also an, an allegory for all kinds of conversion examples that are of a spiritual or religious manner.
But it is this sort of experiential. You don’t have to be a religious person to have such sort of experiences. This is simply transformative learning, and this is what at the core transformative learning means, that you see the world literally with different eyes because you’re this sort of organism, and we have a scientific theory, and that closes the loop to what I said at the very beginning, that it’s constantly changing its organization, and otherwise you wouldn’t be alive.
So it’s absolutely part of your identity, paradoxically almost, that you constantly change that way, and that you change as much as the environment you’re in the adaptation process., otherwise we wouldn’t have any evolution in the first place. And so for me, this sort of... If you actually embrace this, if you are unafraid, it takes a lot of courage to embrace this fully, then you can sort of flourish in a very old style, Aristotelian way a lot more because you are developing not just more but also in different directions than if you wouldn’t do this.
So it’s sort of like cultivating a garden. You cultivate yourself. And again, a lot of this kind of stuff, if you hear me talk, it’s these words are used in circles that are very performative that way, right? So these kind of self-improvement seminars you can take and things like that have completely, perverted this sort of, essential human task and made a joke out of it, and a very sad joke.
And I think, we have to rediscover what it really means. You don’t have to turn religious or become a Vipassana meditator or whatever, but you just have to pay attention like Marcus says. And for me, this is a work of love and then to come back, we have to mention love, I know., is, as I said, expressed in the essay, the other essay that we wrote for your blog.
Love is, it’s labor of love. So basically, doing this and appreciating this in other people, that’s what love is. That’s, sort of, trying to see the person behind the persona, right? And still accepting them after, you’ve seen all the ugly parts, the shadow.
Then you can start going on your journey and develop together. But not before that
Marcus Neustetter
Hmm
Johannes Jaeger
Marcus
Marcus Neustetter
Yeah., you said, giving me the last word. That’s exactly what it’s not about. So I don’t want the last word because I would never want to assume that there is a last word in this kind of process because the, yeah, because it goes beyond the words.
Anyway, the care part is really interesting for me because the relationship of empathy, I often use that as... And vulnerability, and care are so intertwined for me that- The anecdote of, receiving some-- Oh, sorry. The experience of receiving something I can-- I would like to share as a kind of a, an anecdote.
We’re working on a short film, and I’m in Johannesburg with, Anathi Konjwa and, Mika Manganya, two performers that we-- that Bronwyn, our partner-- my partner often works with, and has done a lot of work with us as well. And they, -- And I come to them with an idea, and I say, “Here are some objects, and I-- maybe can we just together in a studio space just think about what these objects mean to you and rearrange them in a way and kind of create this landscape out of them?”
And all I’m trying to do is have a conversation with people that come from a very different background, who I hold very dear. They’re very wonderful people., they’re gentle in the way that they engage with the world, but they’ve been through really tough times. And I just wanted to open the con-- non-verbal conversation through these objects.
They’re a bunch of rusted objects I’ve collected over the years, just things. And I’d filmed these objects, and I’d put my camera up to do a stop-frame animation while I was moving them around. And Mika picks up this piece of metal and takes the other one and starts tapping the one against the other and starts playing, percussing, and making the most amazing soundscape of percussive performance.
Anathi, who’s got an incredible voice, looks at the situation, hears him, and starts picking up these objects and singing to them. And next thing, I’m standing there completely disempowered. I’m a visual artist. I’ve got no voice to speak of, and my sense of r-rhythm is so-so. And here I am completely flooded with tears of this incredibly immersive experience that they’ve given me as a gift, as an answer to a question, to a provocation I gave them, where they went as far-- I mean, this went on for quite a long time, and we went into kind of a-- or they went into this incredible trance-like space, in their music, which I found out afterwards had no particular meaning.
You know, it had no particular thing other than a response to these objects. And we spoke about it afterwards, what these objects meant, et cetera. And we then used the sound in one of the films that we made, as the zone and in our project. But that care that I got in that moment for that emotional state I was in, you cannot put, anything to that.
The fact that someone went deep into themselves, brought out whatever history, memory, feeling, emotion, et cetera, and their craft that they do, and give it back to me, whether I understand it or not. And we completely gelled in this world that I... Yeah, it was one of those moments.
So coming to this space of love and care, I think it’s how we go about with that which we don’t understand. They didn’t know what I really wanted. I didn’t understand the world that they’re in, and they were able to transform it in their own way into something that’s meaningful to them, and gave it back to me, and offered it back to me.
And that offering, that holding of this something, this gesture, was just completely moving. And, it’s nice to remember this now in relation to this conversation, because so much of what we’re dealing with at the moment are these crises, and these tensions, and this that. But we forget that everyone takes this stuff on and still molds something beautiful out of it, whether it’s in the form of a text, food, whatever it might be.
A smile, or not, or a tear. It doesn’t matter, but it gets molded into something. And I think the best thing we can do is care for that transaction and that which comes out of it. And that’s what I feel is, I guess, the currency of what we’re doing., and of this, of the state that we’re in, where it becomes intimate because we’re willing to share something in a language that we don’t necessarily understand, and therefore tap into something very deep inside us that we can’t articulate.
And when you’re in a room with people that from different disciplines, you cannot but try find that other language to connect because, yeah, a lot of words that the philosophers say, I interpret completely differently. I hear the sound, but I might not understand the same words. And similarly, Anathi and Mika saw these objects that I thought would be amazing installation, and did something to them that I could never imagine otherwise.
And yeah. Anyway, I think that’s the love and care in this transaction. And I think what happened today in this podcast, I’ve like to share. I mean, I’ll... Ah, okay, no. I’ll do this ‘cause of my stupid background. But anyway, I’ll share it later. That this, the drawing that you see behind me is manifest into a new drawing, and notes that I can look back at and just remember the feeling of this conversation and the essence of what it meant.
And I feel that in itself, is a, is I guess the space that we’re occupying. I don’t know if that answered your question, but I just had to share that. It was
Andrea Hiott
Important. Oh, thank you so much. That’s really wonderful. Beautiful. For different reasons. One, that it shows what we’ve been talking about in the sense that these are the same objects, but they saw them and felt them in completely different ways, and that sharing of it with you opened you, it opened you, right, out of your- Yeah Habitual ways. And it’s funny you mentioned the drawing behind you, because I was sitting here thinking as you were telling the story about... So we all talked recently. I was driving. I pulled over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we had this, like, no video kind of Zoom audio conversation together about some things.
And, you know, it was just one of those moments where we were just kind of, I don’t know, letting the conversation happen. And it had been a long day for me and a long weekend, not in a bad way. But I got home later that night. Not home. I got to my next place, stopped later that night, and, there was an email, you know, from both of you saying it was a great conversation.
And there was this drawing, which is behind you now, Marcus, that kind of popped up on the screen. And I was kind of exhausted, you know, and it’d been this long day of driving and a lot of things. But something about seeing that you had been drawing that while we were talking, and that you then shared it with us, and not really getting it in the way that you just spoke about, your friends.
But it just did something to me, and it was a kind of emotional... I even told you that. Like, it was this, I had this kind of emotional reaction to it, and I don’t know what that is, but it did, show me that there’s so much going on in us when we’re conversing and when we’re relating that we don’t get that is getting us, becoming us, and that we can’t maybe put into words or we don’t need to fully understand.
But, so yeah, those are the moments of care that we are just being ourselves and taking the risk to talk and to share and things like that. They seem so small, but I think maybe they’re changing, much more than we think. Yeah. Much more than we can even put into words. So I just wanna thank both of you for being here, and if there’s anything else you wanna share about your work, whatever, before we go, now is the time to do so.
But I’m sure we’ll have more conversations in the future, but anything that comes up before we go that we didn’t cover or anything about any of these topics?
Marcus Neustetter
I think it, I think it, I think it just should be an acknowledgement of this wonderful conversation and the fact that I cannot wait to have you and whichever listeners are keen to join us in a studio together and explore these ideas in person, because I think that takes it to a whole ‘nother level.
Johannes Jaeger
Yeah, there’s not much I can add to that., just thank you so much for engaging with us over the last few months and now, in this conversation. And I hope this is to be continued very much. Yeah. Transforming us all.
Andrea Hiott
Yeah, me too. It’ll be fun to share all this with other people and do some things in person, together.
Yeah. And also for the two of you to continue on in your projects, as well, and I’m happy to be part of this. And yeah, till next time then, everybody. And thank you.
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