research & ramblings towards the navigational approach to mind. exploring philosophical, scientific, technological & poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. deeply human, friction friendly, divergent, & not afraid to care.
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Mac Shine on Systems Neuroscience, Automaticity, and the Cerebellum’s Role in Human Cognition. In discussion with Andrea Hiott.
University 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 Intro 00:27 Automaticity and Evolution Teaser 02:48 Why This Conversation Matters 05:02 What Is Systems Neuroscience 10:24 Mac’s Path Into Systems Thinking 18:42 Language Gaps Across Fields 26:15 Are We Assuming Cognition 33:35 Delegation to Automaticity Paper 37:19 Cerebellum as Automation Engine 46:09 Bipedalism and Coevolving Mind Body 47:29 Bipedalism And Cognition 50:05 Natural Selection Good Enough 52:37 Frozen Accidents And Delegation 55:06 Humans Adapt Not Excel 58:33 Repetition To Automaticity 01:00:19 Habit Versus Automatic 01:08:18 Driving And Chess Layers 01:16:18 Beyond Motor Cognition 01:21:57 Flow States And Expertise 01:27:26 Scientific Humility Ethos 01:29:16 Curiosity Over Credit 01:30:57 AI And The Value Of Being Wrong 01:33:07 Learning Through Struggle 01:37:59 Embodiment And Driving 01:40:56 Cerebellum Body Brain Coupling 01:48:14 Expertise Through Variation 01:53:31 Lab Curiosity And Next Questions 01:59:49 Care Love And Leadership 02:04:44 Closing Reflections
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 navigational approach to mind and NAEC, where cognition is understood as a body’s coherent, aim-directed action in the world rather than the storage of static representations.
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 (Oxford, 2004; winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award), (Springer, 2012), and (Cambridge, 2022). He is a founding figure of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) and the Committee for Integrated HPS.
#94 Action without Attachment, Conversational Care, and the Bhagavad Gita with philosopher and professor Keya Maitra
Keya Maitra is the Lenney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa. Keya joins Andrea to talk about her 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, to 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.
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 hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, 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 Maitra throughout.
How Keya came to the Gita. Growing up in a Bengali-speaking Hindu household, first encountering it 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.
#93 Is there a Cure? Reconsidering Freud, chemical imbalances, transference, functionalism & embodied science with Mark Solms
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.
Andrea & Mark also 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 (2021).
#92 Molyneux's Problem and Questioning the Perception/Cognition Border with philosophers Janet Levin and Brian Glenney
Molyneux's Question with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney
Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy
In 1688, an Irish scientist named William Molyneux sent John Locke a letter with a question in it. Suppose a man born blind has learned by touch to tell a cube from a sphere. Suppose he is given sight, and the two objects are set on a table in front of him. Could he tell, by looking alone, which is which?
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 — with a hint, and a little time. And three centuries later the question is still open, only now it's being asked in operating theatres in New Delhi, in habituation studies with ten-hour-old infants, and in the way a skateboarder looks at a handrail.
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 whether you need to move your body in order to see. This episode is that disagreement, twenty years on.
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 epistemic immediacy that has shaped how the Molyneux question is tested ever since.
Brian Glenney teaches 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.
#91 Rethinking Biological Agency & What Really Matters in Life with Charlie Munford and the Agential Biology Institute
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
Today's guest is Charlie Munford, president of the Agential Biology Institute, and he has been gathering some of the best scientists and philosophers in the world together to rethink agency. Andrea 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 Invite 04:20 Meet Charlie Munford 04:35 Banana Couch Story 05:49 Kids and Creativity 08:48 Mississippi to Yale Adventures 15:17 Farming Cuba and Sausage Business 18:40 Crisis Sparks Biology Questions 21:38 Agential Biology Explained 30:04 Lamarck Darwin and Natural Selection 36:45 Evidence for Inherited Change 46:21 McClintock and Popper Teaser 47:51 Cells Sense Not Code 48:36 Genes Aren't Difference Makers 49:45 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
#90 Paradox as Praxis: Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger & Marcus Neustetter on Collaborations Between Art and Science, & The ZoNE
Andrea, Yogi and Marcus are forming Paradoxis. This is one of the conversations towards that, a Third Space episode of Love & Philosophy. Philosopher 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 Andrea draws from her earlier conversation with Parker Palmer.
Why Caring Isn't Self-Sacrifice with Elissa Strauss
The episode of Love and Philosophy introduces a conversation with journalist and essayist Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, framed by the host’s view of care as an embodied, orienting force and “minds as actions.” Strauss distinguishes “caring,” social-status “not caring,” collective/kumbaya care, and “dependency care,” which she calls a “Hotel California” relationship you can’t easily exit; she argues dependency care is fraught, messy, and misunderstood when treated as pure altruism. She describes moving from fast-paced feminist journalism and a policy lens on U.S. caregiving failures (including lack of federal paid leave) to a deeper account of motherhood’s embodied realities, attention, and moments of union and estrangement with children. The discussion links care ethics (Gilligan, Noddings, Kittay) with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil on unselfing and attention, critiques binary labels that assume we are all always one thing or the other related to ideas like “trad wife,” explores caring-for versus caring-about and the “glass door” separating home from public value, and connects care to economics, interdependence, faith as “wrestling,” and intergenerational “sandwich” caregiving.
Isabella Granic on Liminal Learning, Neither Nor, and Education for Flourishing
Andrea Hiott introduces a guest podcast from Life Itself, Jacob Kishere interviews developmental psychologist Isabella Granic about “education for flourishing” ahead of the Human Transformation in a Time of Metacrisis conference at Harvard. Granic describes shifting from studying anxiety and depression as psychopathology to seeing them as adaptive responses, and focuses on prevention by designing social contexts that support resilience and thriving. She frames learning as liberation from inherited narratives and introduces the “neither nor” framework, developed with philosopher Bryan Kam, which teaches oscillation between conceptual and experiential ways of knowing. Granic explains Liminal Learning, a year-long program for 18–25-year-olds beginning with a wilderness “quest,” followed by a digital hub, practices like appreciative inquiry, and collaborative “heists” to build small real-world projects, moving participants from worry to wonder to world-building. Find info here and below to participate.
00:00 Embodied Learning Basics 02:16 Podcast Intro and Who Its For 06:18 Life Itself Guest Setup 07:03 Flourishing and Mental Health 12:40 Education as Liberation 16:42 Neither Nor Framework 21:50 Skills for Metacrisis Times 28:39 Wilderness Quest and Stirrings 32:34 Heists and World Building 37:47 Games and Digital Hub 46:52 Tech Shadows and Evidence 57:44 Conference Questions and Wrap
Liminal Learning is in ther final week of welcoming participants for the upcoming UK Quest.
Life itself () Jacob Kishere or and the
#88 How Life Works Beyond Genes: the New Biology of Meaning with scientist and author Philip Ball
Beyond Genes, Toward Meaning & Care, But Rigorously
Andrea Hiott hosts British science writer Philip Ball (former Nature editor; trained chemist and physicist) to discuss his book How Life Works and why the popular idea “it’s all in the genes” is untenable. Ball argues biology is shifting beyond mechanistic, bottom-up “blueprint” metaphors toward a view of organisms as open, adaptive informational systems with complex genotype–phenotype relations, constant interaction across levels (genes to ecosystems), and robust behavior emerging from “committee-like” molecular collectives. They discuss why biology has avoided purpose, teleology, and meaning, yet living systems make contextual value judgments and goal-directed decisions, with continuity from cells to human minds and emotions, emphasizing embodiment and symbiosis. Ball links these themes to his prostate cancer diagnosis while finishing the book, reflecting on mortality, persistence of patterns and information through art and writing, and the open-endedness of life and evolution, ending with love as a real evolved capacity.
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:35 Why Biology Is Shifting
02:09 Cancer, Meaning, and Patterns
04:37 Challenging Gene Determinism
11:03 Beyond the Machine Metaphor
17:52 Purpose and Teleology in Life
23:58 Messiness and Higher-Level Causation
31:54 Meaning Making in Cells
38:10 Embodiment and the Mind-Body Link
41:20 Embodied Minds
42:23 Nested Bodies and Meaning
43:52 Molecular Caring and Committees
45:02 Physics of Collectivity
47:19 Universality From Traffic to Cells
Inventing Temperature
Is Water H₂O?
Realism for Realistic People
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 hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, 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.
Chang’s three books at a glance
Book Year Central question “Article of faith” Chang says he lost Inventing Temperature 2004 How did scientists learn to measure temperature reliably without already having a trustworthy thermometer to check against? Foundationalism — the idea that knowledge rests on some ultimate, secure foundation (fundamental laws, or raw experience) Is Water H₂O? 2012 Was the consensus that water is H₂O actually forced by the evidence — and should science ever settle on a single account? Monism — the idea that there is one world, one truth, and one job for science: to find it Realism for Realistic People 2022 What would scientific realism look like if we started from practice and everyday life rather than from correspondence to an ultimate reality? The ideal of pure science — knowledge first, application second (he moves openly into pragmatism)
Key terms & concepts (glossary)
The definitions below are general but we're 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. Crucially, coherence is always defined relative to an aim — without a stated or assumed purpose, the word “coherence” has no meaning.
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 (in Realism for Realistic People) for knowledge that resides in ability and action rather than in propositions — 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). 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 — even an “ideology” — 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’s clarification here is the reference point for both.)
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.
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro 03:50 Freud Translator Journey 05:20 Why Call It Cure 07:00 Reframing Freud Today 11:41 Freud as Neuroscientist 19:57 Memory Systems and Unconscious 31:41 Subjective Meets Objective 39:08 Chemical Imbalance Myth 43:23 Needs Feelings and Therapy 51:03 Pills Versus Talking 52:09 Limits Of Medication 53:31 When Pills Help 54:41 What Is Transference 56:04 Infantile Amnesia 57:17 Interpreting Patterns 01:01:25 Why Therapy Takes Time 01:04:46 Cost Versus Care 01:10:59 Teddy And Polypharmacy 01:19:20 Short Termism Trap 01:23:13 Cure By Love 01:25:37 AI Therapy Limits 01:31:25 Mortality And Meaning 01:34:55 Closing Thanks 01:36:09 Heaney Poem Easter Egg
KEY THEMES
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
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.
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 hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, 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 Solms throughout.
00:00 — Why a navigational approach to mind keeps running into this question
02:20 — Introductions: phenomenal concepts, sensory expertise, and Bernie Sanders 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 Glennie, 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.
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,
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 hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, 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 approach here throughout.
The emerging book Beyond the Age of Machines / Expanding Possibilities — the manifesto and chapters referenced throughout, published chapter by chapter
Perspective Studio — the workshop/facilitation methodology
00:00 Trad Wife Label 00:48 Embodied Parenting 01:55 Estrangement Moments 02:57 Care Philosophy Intro 05:25 Care Ethics Primer 09:35 Care Economics Value 11:55 Poem Heat Reading 17:18 Defining Care Buckets 19:19 Dependency Care Explained 22:20 Writing Career Origins 25:53 Motherhood Identity Shift 30:32 Beyond Binary Labels 33:15 Embodied Early Motherhood 33:52 Embodied Early Motherhood 36:18 Attention and Listening 39:00 Touch Versus Screens 42:27 Dependency Care Awakening 46:25 Unselfing as Parenting North Star 49:54 Estrangement and Return 52:39 Faith as Wrestling 55:45 Finding Care Ethics 01:00:21 Gilligan Noddings Validation 01:05:46 Caring For Versus About 01:08:16 Shame and the Glass Door 01:09:44 Glass Door Feminism 01:10:48 Care Work Counts 01:13:00 Tradwife Backlash 01:15:12 Money Meets Meaning 01:16:19 Care Beyond Maintenance 01:20:47 Home Everywhere Politics 01:25:05 Figure Eight Care 01:27:42 Parenting as Process 01:31:51 Love Clarity and Illusion 01:35:54 Sandwich Caregiving Crunch 01:41:08 Wired to Care Together 01:43:55 Closing and Where to Find
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 hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, 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,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.
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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 hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, 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,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.
TRANSCRIPT
Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and I’m glad you’re here. Today is a really special conversation, which I had quite some months ago, back in February, with a writer who is one of my favorites, Philip Ball. He is a British science writer. He used to be the editor at Nature for over 20 years. He’s trained as both a chemist and a physicist, and he’s written a lot of really good books. Critical Mass was a prize-winning book, and there’s also H2O, The Music Instinct, and the one we’re talking about here, How Life Works.
Let me tell you a little bit about this book. It comes at a moment when I think biology is really shifting. It’s a shift that’s been going on for a while, but it’s at an important moment now where this mechanistic gene-first story we’ve been telling — the one that says you are your genes, you are your DNA, the selfish gene, that whole idea — is really changing a lot. The idea of the body as a machine assembled from the bottom up, that story is coming apart.
But it’s interesting because we don’t want to just flip to the opposite, to reject all that came before. That’s what this book is doing that’s so interesting, and also this conversation. I think you’ll hear it. We’re trying to hold a certain tension because even though that story is coming apart, it’s not that everything is wrong about it. The hope is not to flip into the opposite, but rather to hold the tension and to really open up a new space about how we actually think about what life is and what we are.
We have more ways to communicate and more ways to study this that can help us get more rigorous even as we also open up. So that’s what we’re trying to do in this conversation. It gets a little bit messy — that’s a word I’m always using, but in a good way — because we’re trying to talk about a lot of very hard things here, and we’re also trying to talk about them in a way that isn’t the usual way.
You’ll hear that Philip is very articulate about this. He’s even better in the book, so I really highly recommend it. He’s also written some very beautiful essays, and one of them, which is in Nautilus, is about how at the end of writing this book he got diagnosed with cancer. We get to that by the end of this conversation because he’s come through well. He had surgery. All is good. It’s all gone. But there was a time when it was very tense for him, and he was writing this book about life, so can you imagine? He was really having these questions pressed on him directly as he had been thinking about life and trying to understand what it was.
There’s something very moving about that. What he came to through this was that we are made of this material that’s changing all the time, but what persists are these patterns that come through us, or are in the world with us, or that we create and give to the world that then go on without us. It’s not that they’re floating around in the air. It’s that I can read this book again that he wrote, and there’s an imprint to the book that changes me, and that will continue even in 100 years when people read the book. It’s the same with music. It’s the same with everything we create and do. But it’s also the same with conversations that you just have with one another, because we change each other as we do that, and those patterns continue on in further conversations that those people have.
So we end up in a place a little bit like that, and it’s very interesting that that can come from a very scientific conversation and a very scientific book. One thing about Philip is he’s really good at holding that. In the book, he talks about meaning, which is not a word you see often in a very scholarly biological book, but he does it with real rigor and grace, and I think that is such a gift at this moment. I’m very happy to bring you this conversation and to share his work with you. I’m really grateful that he spent some time with me. Thanks for being here. I hope this conversation gives you something that helps you carry on these patterns that connect in some way that’s meaningful for you today.
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