Explore every episode of the podcast L&P beyond dichotomy. An international collective exploring the power in caring beyond bounds. (Love & Philosophy sub stream)

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

Find Henry here on Instagram

Find Sophie here on Instagram

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Some references:

On empathy and imagining the lifeworlds of other beings: Sophie Strand, “Supracellular” through Emergence Magazine, Stephen Harrod Buhner, Taliesin, Paul Shepard

On challenging the individual self: Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, Amitov Ghosh

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.

full video is for yt members first, then goes live to everyone sept 20th

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’s Lab: https://profiles.sydney.edu.au/mac.shine

The Brain Inspired conversation Andrea mentions.

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

Approximate chapters of video without A’s Intro

* 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

* Arousal / neuronal “burst cascades”: Munn et al. (2023), “Neuronal connected burst cascades bridge macroscale adaptive signatures across arousal states,” Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42465-2

* 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.

Mac Shine: No, thanks for having me, Andrea.

Andrea Hiott: All right. Bye.

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 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 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.

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.

* Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018)

* 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).

* 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.

* Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018)

* Related to the Kant thread in this episode — “Comparing the Bhagavad-Gita and Kant: A Lesson in Comparative Philosophy”

* 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.

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

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

(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.

For paid subscribers to Love and Philosophy or the way-making philosophy blog of Andrea Hiott, we’re also sharing this research conversation about Inventing Temperature, operational coherence, and how some of Chang’s ideas could be helpful towards clarifying a navigational approach to mind.

The landmark challenge to the “serotonin theory”

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.

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 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.

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.

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

A few highlights from this conversation:

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.

Agential Topics YouTube is the conversation ABI has been hosting, including Andrea Hiott

Resources:

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.”

Medium.com page hosts many essays Charlie has written during 2019-2024, including one, “I Found a Loophole in Biology...Optimism“ about my personal life journey to the problem of agency.

Charlie’s Substack now hosts my most current personal essays and thoughts, including the most scientifically significant, “The Double Resonance Conjecture.“

Links & references

* 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.)

* Agential talk with Denis Noble

Agential talk with Stuart and Katherine Kaufmann and Daniel Phillips, Frantisek Baluska, and Eric Schaetzle

Agential talk with Alicia Juarrero

Agential talk with Mike Levin

Agential talk about the work of Richard Watson

Agential talk with Philip Ball

Agential talk with Yogi Jäger

Agential talk with Rupert Sheldrake

Agential talk with Terrence Deacon

Agential talk with Matt Segall

Agential talk with Karl Friston

Agential talk with Andrea Hiott

The lost Popper lecture

* 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.

Suggested “further reading”

Go deeper: the Agential Biology Institute; Charlie’s own paper, “Episolution”; Niemann’s Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life; Michael Levin on bioelectricity; Oded Rechavi on inherited RNA; Richard Watson on natural induction; Josh Bongard on living robots; and Denis Noble’s The Music of Life.

TRANSCRIPT

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.

Andrea Hiott: All right. Bye.

Charlie Munford: Bye-bye.

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.

Read PARADOXIS here.

Watch the ZoNE talks here.

Link to Zone talks Andrea mentions on the Zone channel with one of her favorite philosophers. And the one with Julian Gough on Egg and Rock.

Topics covered

* How Marcus and Yogi met and why they were both looking for a “third space” between art and science

* The Perspective Studio methodology and collective co-creation

* Constraints, co-construction and “staying alive” as an organizing principle drawn from evolutionary biology

* Productive tension vs. problem-solving; adaptation over optimization

* Finite games vs. infinite play, and “serious play”

* Performance, persona, authenticity and vulnerability

* The trickster figure and the danger of putting narcissists “in charge”

* Space, context and embodiment (including a 10-second listening exercise)

* Institutions, gatekeeping, decolonizing spaces, and the “plastic mushroom in the Pompidou”

* Conflict, tolerance, “overlapping consensus” and “coherence from difference”

* Care, love, and the shadow — seeing “the person behind the persona”

People, projects and references mentioned

* Love & Philosophy — Project, Channel, podcast, blog, etc.

* The ZoNE — the art/science collective (Lace, Neustetter, Jaeger, Şenova); see also the Makers page and Actions/notation log

* 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

* Andrea Hiott’s Holding Paradox and her Embracing Paradox guide

* Andrea talking with Parker Palmer — “circles of trust”

* James Carse — Finite and Infinite Games

* Hanzi Freinacht — “serious/existential play”

* Tyson Yunkaporta — Sand Talk (the trickster)

* Ludwig Wittgenstein — “whereof we cannot speak…”

* Plato — the allegory of the cave

* Michael Schmidt-Salomon — the paradox of tolerance

* John Rawls — “overlapping consensus”

* Carl Sagan — the gas-giant “blobs” thought experiment

* Patricia Martin — Will the Future Like You?

* Declan Donnellan and Sophie Fiennes — on performance and theatre (episodes Andrea mentions are forthcoming)

* Anathi Konjwa and Micca Manganye — performers in Marcus’s Johannesburg short-film anecdote

* Steven Hobbs — Marcus’s longtime South African collaborator

Full intro and notes here.

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

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Some Quotes that are connected to the ZoNE:

* “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.

Marcus Neustetter

Thank you. Thanks so much.

Johannes Jaeger

Thanks a lot.

Marcus Neustetter

And Andrea, what I would

Why Caring Isn't Self-Sacrifice with Elissa StraussThe 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 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.

Elissa's Book When You CareElissa's Substack: https://elissa.substack.com/

We All Care

the Navigational Approach to MindHeat by H.D.

00:00 Trad Wife Label00:48 Embodied Parenting01:55 Estrangement Moments02:57 Care Philosophy Intro05:25 Care Ethics Primer09:35 Care Economics Value11:55 Poem Heat Reading17:18 Defining Care Buckets19:19 Dependency Care Explained22:20 Writing Career Origins25:53 Motherhood Identity Shift30:32 Beyond Binary Labels33:15 Embodied Early Motherhood33:52 Embodied Early Motherhood36:18 Attention and Listening39:00 Touch Versus Screens42:27 Dependency Care Awakening46:25 Unselfing as Parenting North Star49:54 Estrangement and Return52:39 Faith as Wrestling55:45 Finding Care Ethics01:00:21 Gilligan Noddings Validation01:05:46 Caring For Versus About01:08:16 Shame and the Glass Door01:09:44 Glass Door Feminism01:10:48 Care Work Counts01:13:00 Tradwife Backlash01:15:12 Money Meets Meaning01:16:19 Care Beyond Maintenance01:20:47 Home Everywhere Politics01:25:05 Figure Eight Care01:27:42 Parenting as Process01:31:51 Love Clarity and Illusion01:35:54 Sandwich Caregiving Crunch01:41:08 Wired to Care Together01:43:55 Closing and Where to Find

Full intro and notes here.

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.

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Andrea Hiott in conversation with 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.

https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/we-are-not-our-genes-a-new-biology?r=3qslz0&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Philip Ball on How Life Works: Beyond Genes, Toward Context & Meaning

Andrea Hiott in conversation with 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 Intro00:35 Why Biology Is Shifting02:09 Cancer, Meaning, and Patterns04:37 Challenging Gene Determinism11:03 Beyond the Machine Metaphor17:52 Purpose and Teleology in Life23:58 Messiness and Higher-Level Causation31:54 Meaning Making in Cells38:10 Embodiment and the Mind-Body Link41:20 Embodied Minds42:23 Nested Bodies and Meaning43:52 Molecular Caring and Committees45:02 Physics of Collectivity47:19 Universality From Traffic to Cells51:11 Leaky Layers in Living Systems53:20 Beyond E. coli to Elephants55:49 Caring as a New Metaphor57:44 Symbiosis Parasites and Affordances01:03:23 Brains Agency and Emotions01:08:10 Mortality and Whirlpools of Meaning01:15:42 Uniqueness Open-Ended Evolution01:18:25 Love as Evolutionary Reality

Philip Ball is a British science writer based in London. Born in 1962, he trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and earned his PhD in physics from the University of Bristol. He spent more than twenty years as an editor at Nature, and now writes as a freelance author and broadcaster, contributing regularly to publications like Nature, New Scientist, Prospect, The Guardian, and Chemistry World, and presenting Science Stories on BBC Radio 4.

Ball has written more than two dozen books spanning chemistry, physics, biology, music, art, and the history and philosophy of science. His 2004 book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another won the Aventis Prize for Science Books, and Serving the Reich was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize in 2014. Other notable titles include H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, The Book of Minds, and most recently How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2023), which argues that modern biology is moving beyond the gene-as-blueprint picture toward a richer, more contextual view of life.

He has received the Institute of Physics’ Kelvin Medal (2019), the American Chemical Society’s Grady–Stack Award (2006), and the Royal Society’s Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar Medal (2022) for contributions to the history, philosophy, and social roles of science.

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.

The Conversation

Andrea Hiott: Hi, Philip. It’s so wonderful to have you on Love and Philosophy today. Thank you so much for being here.

Philip Ball: Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: We’re going to talk about this wonderful book, How Life Works — one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. To get us started, I was thinking about this idea of “it’s all in the genes” — this common thing a lot of people still say. What do you think about that sentence: “it’s all in the genes”?

Philip Ball: Yeah, we hear it again and again. I see it almost daily — “it’s in our DNA.” It’s a cultural trope we’ve got, and it worries me, frankly, because we say it quite lightly, but underlying it is a sense that what’s in our genes or our genome somehow defines us. That’s the message that, increasingly, these mail-order companies that offer to sequence your DNA like to encourage — they will tell you all kinds of things about you, including these ancestry charts, which really have very little meaning, but play into certain cultural ideas that I think are worrying. They’ll also tell you things about your personality.

I’ve just reviewed a book, actually — a very nice book by Alison Bashford about chiromancy, analyzing the hand, reading your palm. She follows this story through from ancient practices, ideas of magic and so on, through to modern analyses that get into genetics. It makes the case very nicely that this is the kind of old idea we now want to invest in our genome — that this somehow tells us deep truths about ourselves.

I wanted to challenge that. I think if you speak to pretty much any geneticist, they will say, “Well, yeah, that’s a simplification. It’s not really like that at all.” But I think the messages that have gone out, particularly from things like the Human Genome Project, really suggested otherwise and have given rise to this tendency for people to imagine we are somehow defined by our genomes.

What I wanted to do in the book was to explain why modern biology makes that idea no longer tenable, and to try to find better ways of thinking about the relationship between our genomes — what scientists call our genotype, basically the unique sequence of chemical letters in our DNA — and our actual selves, our actual traits, what they call the phenotype. That relationship is very, very complex.

It is absolutely clear that there are aspects of people’s traits that can be correlated with particular sequences in our genome. People who have particular variants of genes might tend to show statistically certain kinds of traits that other people don’t show. So there is a relationship between the genotype and the phenotype, but it’s very hard to unravel what that relationship is. In particular, it’s hard to say exactly what our genes are doing in building us.

What I’m suggesting in the book is that when we look at the way cell biology, molecular biology, and developmental biology have progressed, particularly over the last two or three decades since the completion of the Human Genome Project, we can see that any simple one-to-one or linear relationship between genotype and phenotype has become untenable. In fact, there seems to be no privileged layer within the whole hierarchy of structures in biology — from genes to molecules to cells to tissues to organs to organisms and even beyond into the ecosystem. There is no privileged layer that determines the way an organism is. We have to think about all those processes in their context, including the context of the lives we lead from even before we were born.

I try to explain how those different levels do what they do, and how there is a constant interaction and connection between them — a flow of information. When we think about how complex organisms like us work, that is the only way we can work. Our bodies, our cells, and our selves have to be responsive and adaptive to our circumstances, to our context. We couldn’t survive otherwise. What’s interesting to me is how evolution has set up these systems to enable that to happen — to enable us to be these open informational systems that can use contextual information and feed it back down even to the level of our genome, turning on or turning off certain genes in response to environmental signals. It’s a very complex process. But what it absolutely shows is that it’s not a bottom-up process. Everything isn’t being determined by our genes.

Andrea Hiott: I think this is really hard for a lot of us to really take in, because we want this mechanistic notion of how everything works, of how life works. We want to understand it as linear — that we can find the answers, that things will keep working the way they work, that we can just see what’s happening, and then that’s what’s going to always be happening. You’re introducing what’s really the case, which is a kind of messiness — even an almost assertive tension between things like opening and closing in terms of systems, or where it matters from what position we’re looking, what we’re going to see. So how is this different from that mechanistic worldview that a lot of us still really want to believe in, but also how is it not just kind of “anything goes,” if that makes sense?

Philip Ball: Yeah — brilliant questions. That really is the key point of the book: as we come to understand this complexity in biology, it becomes more and more clear that we cannot think about it in terms of machines. That’s been our tendency, right back to early modern times when science began, or probably even before. Certainly at that time, the mechanical philosophy of people like Descartes and Newton was that everything is machine-like, and we have to understand it that way.

What I’m saying in the book is that there is no machine we have ever made that works in the way we can see we work. So the machine analogy is unhelpful. It encourages us to think in terms of components that fit together rigidly and deterministically, and that is not the way we work — and it cannot be the way we work. Because any machine with the complexity we have, if it worked that way, like clockwork, with every bit having to be in place, it simply would not function. At the level of molecules and cells, it is unavoidably messy. Everything is moving about by diffusion, it’s all shaking around. You cannot guarantee that all the molecules in one cell will be in the same position as in any other of our billions and billions of cells. So you have to have some way of making things work that isn’t sensitive to those fine details. That’s what biology has found — by not using this machine approach.

That’s really the challenge, because we’ve thought about life in these mechanistic terms for so long that it feels — and I think this is what some biologists explicitly say — if we relinquish that, how else do we make sense of it? Then it just looks messy. It just looks chaotic.

But I’m suggesting in this book that we can relinquish that and still find generic principles that work and give robustness at the level of the organism. We live all these years despite all this messiness. It makes sense that evolution would do this; biology is using that messiness.

The question really is: what metaphors are better than the machine metaphor? I would suggest there are some, and they’re usually — invariably — metaphors that come from life itself. We shouldn’t be thinking about things we make. We should be thinking about how life works.

For example, it makes sense to think of the way a cell works more in cognitive terms than in machine-like terms. By that I don’t mean that cells have consciousness or awareness, although there are people who would suggest that. But I don’t think it’s necessary to invoke that. What I mean is it’s more like the way our brains work, in the sense that cells can take in and integrate many different sources of information and out of those come up with decisions — literally decisions — that are robust and reliable, and appropriate for the context.

The way I think about that in molecular terms is that molecules work not like little cogs and machine-like components but like committees. We make committees because we know what humans are like — that not everyone is going to be there, not everyone is going to be paying attention, some people will be stuck in traffic. But nevertheless, as long as you’ve got a quorum, with enough people paying attention, and you have a good discussion, you can come up with a decision that hopefully is a good decision. To my mind, that’s exactly how cells work, and exactly how the molecular systems in cells work. It’s a collective process.

Just yesterday I got an email from a very high-powered team working on how our genes are regulated, how they’re switched on and off — a fantastically encouraging email. They’ve just published a paper in Science, and the team leader said what I’d said in my book was really anticipating what they found: in order to make sense of this incredibly complex molecular process of switching a gene on and off, which involves many different components, they found they had to relinquish the old habitual ways molecular biologists think — of machine-like components — and think of something emergent. It’s a collective process where the causation, the decision being made, is happening at that higher level. It’s really happening at the committee level rather than at the level of “this molecule speaking to this one speaking to this one.” It’s encouraging to see that this way of thinking is useful for making sense of biological complexity.

Andrea Hiott: That’s so exciting. I’d love to read that paper. I think we’ve arrived at a time where maybe we can handle this a little bit — as you say somewhere in the book, or maybe as you just hinted, a lot of scientists have known this forever, but they keep using the mechanism orientation because we can’t quite handle it, but also because a lot of biology has been trying to run away from notions of contextuality, which ends up looking like meaning and teleology when we try to talk about it in metaphors.

How do you see that connection? Maybe we could talk a little bit about why biology has been so afraid of words like meaning. When I was doing my neuroscience degree, you couldn’t really talk about purpose. That was sort of, “you’re not supposed to talk about purpose, you’re supposed to just do the science, that mechanistic kind of science.” How does that fit in with what you’re saying here and where we are now in terms of the shift we’re making toward more contextual or committee-like science?

Philip Ball: It’s a very odd situation in biology that, on the one hand, many leading biologists have always acknowledged that organisms are purposeful entities — that they have goals. This is something the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr acknowledged. He’s one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. It’s something Jacques Monod, a molecular biologist — again, one of the most influential of the late 20th century — also said: we have to recognize all living things, without exception, have goals. They’re driven by goals. This is in the nature of organisms, and it’s not incidental, it is almost definitive of what organisms are. They are entities with goals. Maybe we’ll come back to that, because I think we forget how extraordinary it is that such things have arisen in the universe.

We can see this all the time. It seems unproblematic for us and for a lot of biologists to say, “Well, of course we have goals.” Often the way that’s dealt with in biology is to say, “Well, those goals are set by evolution, so our goals are to reproduce and to survive.” But if we think about the things we do — us having this conversation now — it’s not obvious that those are the drivers. Most of what we do day to day, those ultimate goals are not forefront. We have proximate goals that we set. I want to do this. I want to make a cup of coffee because I’m thirsty. Obviously it’s related to instinctive functions, but the decision itself is a proximate one.

I think it’s absolutely clear that all complex organisms work that way. If we think of other primates, cats and dogs, birds — they’re all doing this. They’re all setting themselves proximate goals. Actually, I think we can see that tendency all the way through the living world. You can even think about plants. You can do experiments where plants are clearly responding to goals in a goal-directed way. So this is absolutely central to the nature of living things.

But biologists have been very nervous about it because when you start talking about goals, that really is teleological. There’s no getting away from that. They worry that it’s going to seem like there’s something mystical going on, and that it plays into notions — and can be very easily abused, of course — by people who want to argue for things like intelligent design and some grand design behind all this. I don’t want to dismiss that idly, because there are some very profound thinkers who have argued that way. But obviously what we tend to come across is the very superficial version, in terms of creationism and intelligent design, and understandably biologists are very nervous about that.

What that has given rise to is a reactive sense that we can’t use those words, because this is what we’re invoking. I think that’s a real shame, because if we don’t use those words, we are not talking about the nature of living systems. We have lost sight of what life is.

I’m always struck by something the molecular biologist François Jacob said in 1973. Jacob was one of the people who, along with Monod, did the crucial work in understanding gene regulation. He’s a Nobel laureate. He said in 1973: “Biologists no longer study life.” What an extraordinary thing to say. But what he meant was: life is too hard to understand, too complex a phenomenon, so the decision has been made in biology to break it down — for him, into molecules, and to understand the molecules. He also said the way biologists now work is to try to understand what biological systems do from the structure of their molecules, by looking at what were considered the components.

When you do that, you have lost sight of life itself. But it’s a pragmatic approach, because we can make progress that way, and we have made enormous progress that way. That’s what I wanted to explore in my book. But I feel we are now at a stage, because of that progress, where we can start putting the bits back together and asking those bigger questions: How do all these components, these entities, work together to create entities that have goals — and not just have them as programmed goals, but goals the entity sets in the moment, in its context, in response to what’s happening to it? That’s the question I think we’re now ready to start exploring, and it’s really the central question for living things.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow. In the spirit of messiness, there are a few things I really want to talk about. The first is this kind of ambiguity or tension we’re learning how to hold. It’s almost like we’re opening to the ambiguity so we can be more precise about what we’re actually studying — which means, as in the book, you show that proteins are floppy, strange forms, and it’s not always clear-cut what a molecule is or what they are when we’re studying them. So we’re at least acknowledging this is very messy, but there’s a precision in that: now we have to really say what we’re actually assessing.

In the book you say very clearly that evolution itself isn’t... You’re not saying evolution has a purpose, because for me that’s at the modeling level — we’ve called something evolution, and then if we say that has a purpose, we’ve gone to a different place. But when we’re assessing a goal in a particular situation, that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the same goal and always work that way. There’s a kind of computational explosion in terms of what we could study and what we could know. That’s why we go to these mechanistic models and focus on very distinct things. But as we open up and let this ambiguity come in, we have to find a new kind of precision.

Philip Ball: Yes — I think I see what you mean, and I absolutely want to reiterate that point: I see no reason to suppose evolution itself has any sort of goal or purpose. Some people have argued there may be a directionality to it. I’m agnostic about that. I see no reason to invoke it. What evolution does is produce goal-directed entities. That’s the mechanism by which we get them, and the only mechanism we know of by which we get them. We might be able to eventually do something like that ourselves, but only because we’re entities of that sort to begin with. It’s important to make that clear.

The question of messiness is the one we inevitably have to deal with, because every living entity is unique in what it’s doing at any one moment, and yet we need — because this is what science does — generic ways of understanding them. Even at the level of our cells, the state of no cell is going to be exactly the same as any other cell in terms of which molecules it contains and where they are. And yet some cells do things in particular ways: our skin cells are, in some sense, recognizably skin cells and distinct from our neurons.

The same with species. No animal is identical to any other animal. If you give a set of seemingly identical animals from the same species a particular stimulus, they won’t all respond the same way. Even individual cells won’t necessarily do that — cells that look like a clonal population, given a stimulus, some will do one thing, some another. Why is that? And how does any regularity and reliability come from something that seems so capricious?

Those are the questions we’re now looking at. We’ve got to that point because we have methods for studying individual cells, finding out exactly what molecules are in them and where, so we can really see these distinctions. It means we have to recognize there are higher-level questions that cannot depend, and clearly do not depend, on those fine details. To my mind, that means we have to start thinking about where the causation is in these systems — the causation giving rise to skin cells developing in a particular place on an embryo at a particular time. There’s an element of that that is clearly genetic, but there are other things going on. In general, those things are the high-level interactions between the components of the system. Cells are speaking to each other in a developing embryo all the time, and those conversations determine what a particular cell will become — whether to become a skin cell or whatever. It’s from its context.

This is the general question we want to understand: the contextuality of living things, and how we make systems that are able to respond in a contextual way. In the same way as we respond to our context, we cannot do it by a set of absolutely rigid rules. We have to improvise, be inventive, innovate sometimes. Those characteristics have to be built into living systems at a very deep level. We don’t have theories and concepts for really understanding the nature of entities of that sort — entities that can innovate, improvise, work by rules of thumb. Again, this is why I think it’s useful to think in cognitive terms, because we don’t really understand how our brains do that either, but clearly they do. It requires a whole new set of principles, quite different from bottom-up principles.

Andrea Hiott: I love that you bring up cognition, because a lot of scientists, philosophers, a lot of people are trying to change the way we assume that word to be something in the brain, in the head, in a human — to be more about the way we make our way through the world as bodies, how we deal with what we encounter. It’s something very basic that could manifest in many ways. You’ve written about this in a very beautiful way in terms of what we could think of as minds.

To stay with the gene — that’s usually thought of as a blueprint, and what I heard you just saying is this more flexible nature, where we’re not trying to make a blueprint but to make something flexible such that, as it moves through a landscape, whatever it encounters, it can be flexible and change. You talk about promiscuity a little bit — it has many more options than just some kind of program blueprint. We could think of this at many levels. The gene itself, while very important, isn’t the only thing — you talk about proteins and RNA, and there’s so much exciting territory we haven’t focused on. It becomes more about the regulation of all that, about a body trying to deal with what it encounters. How is that being regulated in terms of that committee?

Philip Ball: Yes, the key is the contextuality. We have to have systems — from the gene-regulation machinery upwards — that can integrate many sources of information, bring them together, and somehow come up with a decision about what action to take: whether this gene should be switched on or off, whether I should run or freeze.

With that notion comes the notion of meaning, of making meaning. As you said, this is an even more contentious word in biology than purpose. To start talking about meaning — isn’t that getting into something really mystical? But I think at some fundamental level, what living systems are is makers of meaning. Here’s what I mean: the information we’re getting all the time, and the information our cells are getting, there’s so much of it. Some will be useful, some useless. We’re necessarily making judgments about the meaning, the value, of that information — and what does it imply for what I should do in this context. It’s hard to get away from anthropomorphizing.

Andrea Hiott: Our language is kind of built around that. So it’s very hard.

Philip Ball: Some of it is taken care of by evolution. Evolution has decided, for example, that it’s not useful for us to attend to information from infrared radiation in our environment. We are sensitive to the visible spectrum — by definition we don’t attend to infrared. Some animals do; they have infrared senses because that information is useful, meaningful, to their lifestyles. Bees can see ultraviolet that we can’t. So that’s fixed by evolution. We’ve learned through evolution that some things are worth attending to and some are not.

Even given that filtering, we have to do immediate filtering ourselves. Is this thing I’m hearing a warning signal I should be aware of, or background noise I can screen out? Cells are in a similar situation. So there are judgments — judgments about the meaning of contextual information — and we have to have systems able to make those judgments.

I feel there’s a continuity between that very low-level, basal meaning-making that individual cells and bacteria are doing and the kind of meaning we talk about colloquially: is this book going to be meaningful to us? They’re not different things. We have an incredibly sophisticated elaboration of that same sense of meaning. Because we have complicated lifestyles, we have to have these nuances of meaning.

What’s really interesting is that at some point between bacteria and us — no one knows exactly when and there’s no agreement — those judgments about meaning became valenced, emotionally valenced. Meaning started to make the organism feel a certain way. It’s a very plausible idea about the development of minds and emotions that this was an adaptive response. Once you have an emotional response, it focuses your attention. “This particular thing is making me feel bad — I don’t like it — so I’m going to attend to it and make it a key component of my decision.” Or “it makes me feel great.” This is a very reasonable idea for why emotionality arose at some point in connection with meaning-making.

Andrea Hiott: This is really fascinating. You mention affordances a few times. We have all these different nested scales, and also this continuity. Even the way we’re talking, we’re still talking as if there’s some sort of ladder we’re going up and down, which is actually what you’re exploding in the book. And what a lot of us are trying to think through — multiplicities or constellations — instead of this “one or the other.”

You talk about purpose being intrinsic, sometimes even about meaning being life itself. But I wonder if you ever think of it as more radical — where in an ecological-psychology kind of way, it’s literally what’s happening in contact, with bodies and bodies — and that at some point we develop a way to become attentive to that, and even know that we’re feeling, in a panpsychist or Mark Solms kind of way. Have you thought about that more immediate level? Sometimes I feel in the book you’re actually trying to almost say “this is the action of this,” but the way we use words it ends up sounding like “this has this action.”

Philip Ball: Yeah — an interesting perspective. When we think about how this relates to embodiment, I absolutely think it’s clearly in the nature of living things that they have an embodiment, that they are embodied. They are not disembodied information. There’s a big discussion now about how central that is to the notion of minds — whether they have to be embodied minds. I think it’s unambiguous for living systems that the particular embodiment they have is an aspect of the kind of mind they have. The neuroscientist Anil Seth has talked about this: the decisions we make, our mental world, is conditioned by what we think we can do as embodied creatures. We can go round behind something and take a look, so we imagine the world from that perspective. We don’t have the kind of embodiment that allows us to imagine flying. A bird does, and will have a different mental landscape because of its embodied nature. That’s absolutely central.

Another thing emotions are doing, related to what I spoke about: it’s the body telling the brain what’s going on for the body. Emotions are embodied. The fact that it’s so deeply embedded in the way we talk about them — “I felt it in my gut, I felt it in my heart” — and you kind of do.

Andrea Hiott: Which is also part of the nervous system. Even thinking of brain and body as different — or assuming that in our language — the nervous system, as you know, is big. It goes through the body.

Philip Ball: Yes. That’s why I find it useful to remind ourselves that the brain is not the computational center of the body. The brain is an organ in the body — an organ with particular functions, amazing functions — but it’s an organ, so it’s part of the body. It seems quite likely — this is what Peter Godfrey-Smith has talked about — that central nervous systems could well have arisen from different bodily necessities. Partly they were to do with sensing — we started off being able to take in information. But we also needed central nervous systems to control these big bodies that early animals began to have. Those two are separate processes that at some stage literally connected up, and you have something like a brain that is in some sense a controlling aspect of the body but is also part of the body.

It’s very hard to talk properly about it because we have these long traditions of mind/body duality. It’s really hard to get away from. But that embodied nature of organisms is absolutely central to what they’re doing, how they’re behaving, how they’re collecting information, their tactile senses, and so forth. We have a mental sense of what our body is doing, and that’s absolutely crucial for being able to conduct ourselves in the world. I’m very keen on what seems to be happening in neuroscience now — this much more embodied notion of what minds are and how they work.

Andrea Hiott: There’s a lot of generative stuff that can come from your book — for neuroscientists reading this, for example — and also this idea of body as you just raised it. Then we start to notice there are many bodies within bodies. You talk about that nestedness. We’re talking about cells, we’re talking about human bodies in this conversation, and all of these are also nested within each other, and they’re also distinctions we’re making so as to try to understand all of this ongoing process. I’m just trying to open it back up to that contextual view that I think is so important in your work — and the idea of meaning being this regulation that’s happening at so many different levels. The cells in the body are regulating, but that’s also regulating the body.

To try to link this to meaning — or even, I don’t know if you would say “mattering,” if that word’s going too far — we’ve talked about how we can be so open and almost promiscuous in terms of possibilities. But another really important part of the book is collaboration, which already sounds like a coming together, a fidelity. I wonder how you think about that tension of committees caring. I’m using the word caring; I don’t know what you think about that. We can talk about it in a minute. But communities having the same kind of meaningful system, so they’re in a concert toward something. How does that sense of collaboration or fidelity fit for you, alongside this other sense of being flexible and open?

Philip Ball: First, the notion of thinking about these molecular or cellular committees as “caring” — I think that’s a perfectly reasonable term, because there are value judgments being made. How much do I care about this particular signal? How much should I care? That’s exactly what these committees are having to think about. There may be an emotional valence attached, or not, depending on the kind of organism. But the question of collectivity is an interesting one. Here I tend to approach it — this may be a rather clinical or technical way, but it’s the one that makes sense to me — from my background as a condensed-matter physicist.

In fact, the next book is going to be about this. It frustrates me so much that the notions we have about physics are about looking at more and more fundamental forces and particles — somehow we’re going to get to the deep questions by understanding it at this reductionist level. We need that reduction; we need to truly understand what the things that make atoms are made of, what the fundamental forces are. We absolutely need that. But so much of physics has been about collectivity, and this is not recognized.

This is the area of condensed-matter physics — basically the physics of real, tangible stuff: liquids, solids, gases, lots of things interacting with one another, because that is the nature of the universe. What’s so fascinating, and we’ve known about this in some deep sense since at least the middle of the 19th century with the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, is that there are rules to this collectivity. Regularities emerge that do not depend strongly on what the individual components are. We find the same kinds of behaviors and rules in liquids evaporating to gases, gases condensing to liquids, magnetic systems where many magnetic atoms interact. The similarities are extraordinary, even in quantitative detail — you can map one onto the other, and yet they look like totally different systems. There’s a deep universality to collective behavior.

That universality is now being recognized in many other places. For the last 20 or 30 years, urban planners have thought about traffic this way. Traffic is a many-body system, and the rules are quite simple. You don’t want to crash into the person in front, so you’ll slow down — as if there’s a force of repulsion. So traffic, above a certain density, can condense into a fluid-like flow, and further into a solid — a jam. The same principles apply.

When water freezes, there’s no meaningful way of saying it froze because of that molecule. It has to nucleate somewhere, and the ice crystal grows; on another day it would start somewhere else. It’s irrelevant where it starts — it’s going to happen as soon as you get to the freezing point. There’s emergent behavior that’s predictable, rule-bound, but not coming from what this particular thing or that particular thing does.

Principles like this are operating in biology, and we’ve come to recognize that more and more. People convincingly argue we could and should understand some aspects of evolution this way — interactions between organisms, or between genes and gene variants, with a collectivity to it. I think the collectivity we see in biology — where you get the same thing happening despite all the differences in fine details — is the same kind we’ve been familiar with in the physical sciences. It’s worth bringing these disparate fields together to understand how those collective processes operate.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that’s wonderful. It makes me think of a quote you have, something like, “from E. coli to elephants, we’re all doing the same thing.” (Maybe you can correct that.) But also the very important idea of holding the paradox, because a lot of this can seem like we’re saying it’s all regulation, but you’re also very careful to say it’s not just from the collective to the gene — it’s actually we’re opening this up to see that it can also be gene to cell. It can be in all kinds of directions. So there’s that rule-based regularity, and at the same time, depending on the situation — whether it’s E. coli or an elephant — this is all going to align differently. How do we develop models to hold all of that possibility at once?

Philip Ball: Yes. From what I’ve just said, the fact that life works using these collective principles — there’s nothing particularly special about life in that regard, because that’s how the whole universe works. It’s a collective process and you get these emergent behaviors, whether it’s freezing of water or the behavior of a cell. What is unusual about living systems is that there is this interaction between the different levels. There’s this constant exchange of information so that sometimes what happens to a particular gene — a particular mutation — really does matter to the whole organism. It can send the organism off track. But most of the time it doesn’t matter. Most mutations don’t do anything. Cells don’t even recognize them. You can even knock out genes — something biologists were doing all the time in the ‘90s. They’d think, “This gene is crucial to this organism. Let’s stop it working and see what happens.” And nothing happened as far as we could tell. The organisms were fine.

So most of the time the details don’t matter. Some of the time they really do. And the same the other way: sometimes there are particular kinds of information the organism really has to attend to, and that will feed down all the way to changing which genes are switched on or off. That’s the unusual thing — living things have this leakiness between the different layers. Sometimes it’s insensitive to the details. Occasionally it really matters. That’s what makes living things so hard to understand. If they were like the freezing of water — everything emergent — we wouldn’t fully understand it, but it would be a lot simpler. They’re not, and that’s what makes them so complicated, but also so wonderful in what they can do.

As for whether they’re all doing it in the same way: it was Jacques Monod who said, “What’s true for E. coli is true for the elephant.” He meant it in a very specific way; I don’t want to take him too much out of context. But it’s become a bit of a mantra in biology that, okay, so we can understand how gene regulation works in E. coli, and we now understand gene regulation, because that’s what Monod did. We now understand: no, we cannot. The way gene regulation works in bacteria is fundamentally different — in important ways — from the way it works in us or an elephant. We can understand why it needs to be so: it’s related to the fact that we have more complex lifestyles than E. coli. We encounter different circumstances. We encounter every day circumstances we have never encountered before, that our ancestors never encountered before, and we have to figure out what to do. That doesn’t tend to happen so much to E. coli — usually they’ll just die if they encounter something different. It applies a little bit, but the more complex an organism becomes, the more open, informationally open, it needs to be — the more agency it needs in responding to its environment. And in order to get that, you need different molecular principles.

That idea of Monod’s made sense, and sometimes it’s right. We all have DNA, we all have proteins. But there are important respects in which it doesn’t work, and sometimes that has tripped biology up. We’ve assumed, for very good reasons, that we’ll start with the simplest organisms — but we cannot always assume what we find from those will apply further up. A lot of the things I’m talking about in my book are trying to address that problem of, now that we understand things don’t work in those relatively simple ways in complex organisms like us, so how do they work? That’s where all the stuff about disordered proteins and promiscuous molecular interactions comes in. Evolution has had to find different solutions because it has different problems to address.

Andrea Hiott: This is why I was trying to bring up the immediacy. I’m not an ecological psychologist, but the idea of immediacy is what I’m trying to point to here — this Gibsonian, affordance kind of thing. Nothing is generic, as your book shows — and yet we share context. So we’re trying to hold both at once. What I was thinking about when meaning and purpose come up — and I just love your book so much for orienting through that — is that it connects a lot to caring, which is something I’m thinking about all the time. I’m thinking of caring as this immediate, primordial, needful-freedom kind of thing — not the ethics and values that become the more human version of that expression.

I wonder how that sits with you — thinking of this almost primordial tension, but also this kind of collaboration or “committee-ness” as a kind of caring. Right now we have this metaphor of competition. You talk about metaphors a lot, and I wonder what it would be like, as a thought experiment, if the metaphor were caring. To give an example: I was walking my dog before our conversation, of course thinking through your ideas. There’s something I care about, which was getting back here and making sure I was in the right space to talk to you. And there’s something she cares about — very slowly sniffing the bushes. I could orient that as competitive, but it’s also a caring; we’re caring for different things. My care for her made me sit with that tension and let her do what she needed to do, because I was ready and had time. How does that sit with you, given the work you’ve been doing?

Philip Ball: It makes me think that most life — certainly, as far as I understand it, all complex life — is symbiotic. It is a collaboration between different entities. For that reason, we don’t even have a good definition of biological individuality. There’s a really interesting discussion about that. What does it mean for me? Because I have my microbiome, and I’m totally dependent on collaborations with my environment, with other living things.

It’s really good to recognize that collaboration and finding compromises between entities has always been central to what biology does. There’s a real tension because another central aspect of living things — probably since the origin of life — has been parasitism. There are exploiters, that kind of competition. But sometimes those distinctions aren’t really clear; whether something is symbiotic or parasitic isn’t always clear, and it can change. We see this even at the level of the genome — our genomes are full of DNA we’re sure ultimately came from a viral source. Viruses have invaded us, infected us, inserted their DNA into our genome. Some of that can genuinely be regarded as selfish DNA — not really genes, but selfish DNA, because it’s very good at replicating itself. If left unchecked, it would screw up our genomes really quickly, and we have a kind of viral-DNA immune system in every one of our cells to make sure that doesn’t happen.

But by introducing this DNA into our genomes, viruses have created reservoirs of stuff with affordances — a great word. This is something key to biology, even at the level of molecules. I think of our cells, our genomes, as full of affordances. Our cells are constantly making molecules — small molecules, little peptides, little bits of RNA — that have no clear function. They’re being made, I think, because they have affordances. They might find uses in particular situations. We need this stuff, but we don’t need it for particular reasons. We need it because we need affordances. That’s the way evolution happens: a protein might arise with potential uses, and cells and evolution will find a particular use for it — or several uses.

We can see that kind of collaboration, that kind of symbiosis, and an ambiguity between what’s “good” and “bad,” parasite and symbiotic, all the way down. It seems absolutely intrinsic to the way life works. There’s a flow of information, matter, DNA, and genes between organisms all the time. This is a profound shift — certainly in the way we think about how evolution works. It is not enough to think of evolution as a whole bunch of well-defined entities trying to do their own thing and competing with all the other entities trying to do theirs. It’s much more complex — a continual exchange, an ecosystem of exchange of information and matter, what makes life interconnected in fundamental ways.

Andrea Hiott: That’s wonderful. I think about that a lot — like watching parasites, or just birds. I like to watch birds, and sometimes it’s a violent thing where a bird steals the birds of another bird. Caring can sound like it doesn’t apply to that, but I actually think if you orient through caring, you understand that caring is tense. There’s something in your book where you talk about parenting. This needful freedom is what’s bringing it up — what I’m trying to bring in by mentioning parenting is that this caring is very tense. Sometimes you don’t have a compromise. It’s not that caring means you compromise. It’s a different, primordial feeling than competition, and I see that competition could be better understood through that primordial tension. In the book you write about decentralization, and identity itself being contextual. That becomes very important once we start thinking of meaning.

Philip Ball: With the question of parenting — I think that’s in The Book of Minds where I’m thinking. I think of the brain that way, because it’s a kind of reason why we have brains. Our genes can’t do it all. Even in the old picture where our genes were calling the shots — and to some extent we could imagine they are doing that more in bacteria — they can’t tell us what to do. There is no genomic lookup table for “I’m in this situation, what do I do?” Evolution can’t provide that, even if it were a good solution, which it’s not. So it gives us brains instead, or cognitive systems more generally — which are contextual, which work on rules of thumb. “This is probably the best thing to do, but we don’t really know. Let’s try it anyway.” That’s how living organisms work, and how they have to work, because we cannot be optimizing all the time.

If you have systems like that, what I said in the book is that if you’re going to make a brain, it’s got to do more than that. It’s going to end up doing things that seem to — and this is what puzzled Richard Dawkins — why do we sometimes behave in ways that are not adaptive? It’s because that has got to be the nature of our brains: they are not going to necessarily adhere to evolutionary imperatives. They might do things that are destructive, things that mean we’re not going to pass on our genes — because they have an autonomy, because they have to have that autonomy. It’s the only way they can work.

The fact that we have brains is a kind of illustration of the agential nature of what we are. We need that agency, that freedom to make choices contextually, in the hope that maybe this is the best thing to do. That’s what agents are. They’re not machines with a lookup table for what action to take. They’re responding in the moment. What you said about immediacy — it’s exactly that. Agents are things that have to make immediate decisions in the context, hoping it will be the right decision. Any parent will be familiar with that — “I don’t know what to do here, I don’t know what the best answer is, because there isn’t a best answer. This is the best I can think to do at the moment.” It’s a good metaphor, but probably more than that. Hopefully it comes from a caring background, a caring motivation. And like I said, we can extend that to the whole notion of there being a valence, an emotional response — that being part of the decision-making process. This is pretty uncontroversial now in neurobiology: emotions are a part of what we might think of as our rational decision-making process. Without emotions we don’t make as good decisions.

Andrea Hiott: I love that you brought in basically that there are many different ways to be — that openness again, that surprise. Things might not go the way you desire. That’s the price we pay for keeping the possible destinations open. There is this entropy, this unpredictability to it all, which speaks to “meaning, not mechanism,” per your book.

You wrote a really beautiful article in Nautilus about your own experience. I wonder if this has opened up ways for you to see the world differently, and if that’s helped you with some of the things you’ve had to deal with over the past few years. You write about it in that article as having helped you. How does that connect to what we’ve been talking about?

Philip Ball: As I was coming toward the end of writing this book called How Life Works, I found my own life wasn’t quite working the way it ought to, because I had cancer. I had prostate cancer of a mildly aggressive sort, so I needed to have something done about it. I had surgery, and by every means we can see, it’s done the trick. I was lucky to have been able to do that. But during that time — certainly before knowing exactly what stage it was at and what treatment I might be facing — it was absolutely a time for thinking about mortality, what that means, the time we have here, and what our real nature is.

It focused my thinking. The way it seemed to me to think about it: clearly we’re not our material nature, because that’s changing all the time. What is it that is persisting, and what is it that disappears when we no longer persist? You can think about it as a kind of pattern of information, because in a sense, that’s what’s being imprinted on these atoms. That itself is a really weird thing to think about, because it seems disembodied — but actually it requires materiality.

Thought about that way, it made me think: given that it’s patterning, given that it’s a temporary coming-together of the material universe in this sustained pattern until it is no longer sustained, that information and that patterning doesn’t just disappear with us. We leave imprints of that information that would not have existed had this particular cluster of information not come together in this temporary little whirlwind — that’s what I thought about.

Andrea Hiott: Whirlpools of meaning. It’s such a beautiful phrase.

Philip Ball: That’s what we’re doing as living things — we’re creating meaning. It helped me make sense of how something someone has done — because they were one of these whirlpools at some point in time — has imprinted something on the universe that is still there. Like Bach’s music, Beethoven’s music. Like a book. That is in some very real sense still a part of that information, still a part of what they were. I don’t think it’s just a romantic way of thinking about it. It is literally that information exists and continues to have an effect on the world, because it came from that person as a whirlpool of meaning.

This is the thing that has always astonished me — that information can persist and can continue to have meaning. Some years ago I went to a performance of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the piano pieces he composed late in his life, played by Igor Levit. That’s almost his signature piece, so it was extraordinarily good. I knew nothing about it in advance, and I was taken by surprise halfway through just to find tears streaming down my face. I was thinking, “What is this about?” It felt to me like the meaning-making that went into that music was making meaning for me. That communication is something very real. It’s an extraordinary expression of how that whirlpool of meaning that was Beethoven somehow created in the world something that persists.

I did find some solace in that, because it’s going to happen. I was lucky it didn’t happen to me at that particular time, but it’s going to happen at some point. We need to confront the fact that this is in our nature — we’re not here forever. For me at least, as someone who doesn’t have a religious belief — perhaps has a kind of spiritual outlook, but not rooted in any religion — this felt like a useful way of thinking about our presence here, how we’ve come into being, how amazing it is, that bits of the universe have come together to do these things, to have these conversations. Atoms talking to each other. How on earth does that happen? That’s really the mystery at the bottom of trying to understand biology. If we don’t recognize that, we’re not acknowledging the true depth of the mystery of living things.

Andrea Hiott: It’s beautiful. I have to say, I’ve had a similar experience with Beethoven, and I had a similar experience reading your article, to be honest. It kind of teared me up. Two things — I want to add that it was also very intellectually stimulating to think about diseases as other ways cells are being. But more to this conversation, since we’re coming to a close: that idea we were talking about, where nothing is generic, relates to a philosophy of love kind of idea — everything is unique. Nothing can be replaced, because of context. We’re creating what’s possible, and that context continues. I think that’s in your book a lot — look at how much of your book and me and all of us are talking about people who did work, who lived so long ago, and it’s oriented us. Your work, I think, will orient other people in the future.

That feels so meaningful. We’ve danced around ideas of mysticism or wonder a few times here, as if those are words we should be ashamed of. But if you look at it through this different frame, those words almost become necessary, because that is kind of what’s happening here — this contextual continuance. How can we not be awed by that? Finding a way not to feel guilty or embarrassed about that feels like part of this project too, and something I want to thank you for. Your work is helping people deal with that, because it’s hard.

Philip Ball: Thank you. That’s lovely to hear. One thing it speaks to me is that it’s a curious thing science is trying to do, because it’s trying to make generic what is actually always unique. Every moment in the universe is unique. Science is about finding patterns and regularities that help us understand generically how things happen. But there’s still going to be that tension about the uniqueness of every moment and every part of the universe.

What’s crucial in that for me is: there has been this notion — you still hear physicists in particular say this a lot — “well, yeah, but it’s all predictable because it’s only atoms interacting. So if we knew” — an idea that goes back at least to Laplace — “if we knew where every atom was and what every interaction was, we could predict all of the future.” Increasingly, people — including some physicists — are realizing that is not the nature of the way things happen. There is a kind of computational irreducibility, as it’s sometimes called, that means you cannot know, cannot predict, until it happens. You cannot predict without actually letting everything play out in all its detail. Basically, letting history happen.

What’s more, and this is crucial to understanding living things, they become a nexus of causation in what happens — there’s an open-endedness to it. When something develops, it actually creates new possibilities for what can come afterward. This is something we see in evolution: when there is some ramping up of complexity, entirely new things become possible for what life can do — things that simply weren’t present with simpler organisms and were not predictable. Even in a technical sense, were not predictable. There’s an open-endedness to the way the universe unfolds, and certainly to the way living things unfold. So the uniqueness you were talking about — it’s not just one thing after another that we can’t predict exactly; new possibilities arise. There’s something very exciting I find in that aspect of life.

Andrea Hiott: Me too. Literally nothing is replaceable, which is just a fascinating thing to meditate on. Before we go — it’s Love and Philosophy, so I have to at least say the word love. I always ask if you have any experience of love, or if that word relates at all to any of this in any way you want to share.

Philip Ball: It’s a great question. I wish I had something more profound to say about it. I guess I feel it’s one of those words that is talking about something real. It worries me that there’s a tendency in biology to talk in “as-if” language — that we can talk as if we were conscious, as if we were agents, as if we were loving entities. It’s really important to say: no, those are aspects of reality that ultimately we might want to address. Where does that come from? Recognizing a continuity of the characteristics living things have — including the ability to feel love — recognizing an evolutionary continuity in that doesn’t diminish them. On the contrary, it forces us to recognize them as real things, with evolutionary roots we can understand and explore. By doing so, we are not explaining away those characteristics. We are recognizing them as real, valuable, and worth taking seriously.

Andrea Hiott: That’s beautiful. Thank you. That was wonderful. Thank you so much for this talk and for spending some time with me today.

Philip Ball: Oh, it was a great pleasure, Andrea. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: Have a great day there.

Philip Ball: Thank you.

Links & References

Philip Ball

* Author website: philipball.co.uk

* Wikipedia: Philip Ball

* Chemistry World biography: Philip Ball at Chemistry World

Philip Ball’s Books (mentioned or relevant to this conversation)

* How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2023) — the main book discussed

* University of Chicago Press

* Author’s page

* The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens (2022)

* University of Chicago Press

* Reviews on author’s site

* Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2004) — winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books

* Author’s page

* Macmillan

* H2O: A Biography of Water (1999)

* Author’s page

* The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (2010)

Philip Ball’s Nautilus Essay

* “How Life Really Works” — Ball’s essay reflecting on writing How Life Works while being diagnosed with prostate cancer

* Read on Nautilus

Other Books Mentioned

* Alison Bashford — Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (the book on chiromancy/palmistry Philip mentions reviewing)

* University of Chicago Press

Scientists, Thinkers & Figures Mentioned

* Ernst Mayr — evolutionary biologist (Wikipedia)

* Jacques Monod — Nobel laureate, molecular biologist (Wikipedia)

* François Jacob — Nobel laureate, molecular biologist; quoted line from 1973 about biologists “no longer studying life” (Wikipedia)

* James Clerk Maxwell — 19th-century physicist (Wikipedia)

* Ludwig Boltzmann — 19th-century physicist, founder of statistical mechanics (Wikipedia)

* Anil Seth — neuroscientist, on embodied cognition and the conditioning of mental life by embodiment (anilseth.com)

* Peter Godfrey-Smith — philosopher of biology, on the origins of nervous systems (petergodfreysmith.com)

* Mark Solms — neuroscientist working on affect and consciousness (Wikipedia)

* Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, author of The Selfish Gene (Wikipedia)

* René Descartes and Isaac Newton — early-modern figures of the mechanical philosophy

* Pierre-Simon Laplace — the “Laplacian demon” idea of total predictability (Wikipedia: Laplace’s demon)

* Ludwig van Beethoven — and the Diabelli Variations

* Igor Levit — pianist whose performance of the Diabelli Variations Philip describes (Wikipedia)

* Johann Sebastian Bach — referenced alongside Beethoven as a “whirlpool of meaning”

Subjects & Concepts Referenced

* The Selfish Gene — Dawkins’s framing (Wikipedia)

* The Human Genome Project (Wikipedia)

* Genotype vs. Phenotype (Wikipedia)

* Mechanistic philosophy / mechanism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

* Embodied cognition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

* Affordances (J.J. Gibson, ecological psychology) (Wikipedia)

* Symbiogenesis / symbiosis (Wikipedia)

* Condensed-matter physics (Wikipedia)

* Computational irreducibility (Wolfram) (Wikipedia)

* Intrinsically disordered proteins (Wikipedia)

* Gene regulation (Wikipedia)

* Teleology in biology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Teleological Notions in Biology)

* Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Podcast

* Love and Philosophy with Andrea Hiott — Find more episodes

Host neurophilosopher Andrea Hiott interviews founder and investor Jenna Nicholas, author of The Enlightened Bottom Line, about integrating purpose, spirituality, and investing rather than treating them as opposites.

Nicholas describes formative experiences from ages 11–14 in a Switzerland program on values, speaking at Commonwealth Day at Westminster Abbey, being influenced by her mother and grandmother, and later studying at Stanford, moving toward social entrepreneurship, and working on socially responsible investing, including in China. She discusses impact experiences using symbolic objects to bridge divides, a “HEAL” framework (Hope, Empathy, Abundance, Legacy), stewardship and seven-generations thinking, and money as a tool that gains value in circulation. Hiott closes with a T.S. Eliot Four Quartets passage on recovering meaning over time.Please join this channel to support us -- it's a dollar a month and it really helps out! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqSipsue_pxSZN_a0g5bjfA/joinDISCLAIMERThe information provided by Love and Philosophy LLC ("we," "us," or "our") on http://www.loveandphilosophy.com (the "Site") is for general informational purposes only. All information on the Site is provided in good faith, however we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of any information on the Site. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHALL WE HAVE ANY LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE OF ANY KIND INCURRED AS A RESULT OF THE USE OF THE SITE OR RELIANCE ON ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED ON THE SITE. YOUR USE OF THE SITE AND YOUR RELIANCE ON ANY INFORMATION ON THE SITE IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.EXTERNAL LINKS DISCLAIMERThe Site may contain (or you may be sent through the Site) links to other websites or content belonging to or originating from third parties or links to websites and features in banners or other advertising. Such external links are not investigated, monitored, or checked for accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness by us.

WE DO NOT WARRANT, ENDORSE, GUARANTEE, OR ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR RELIABILITY OF ANY INFORMATION OFFERED BY THIRD-PARTY WEBSITES LINKED THROUGH THE SITE OR ANY WEBSITE OR FEATURE LINKED IN ANY BANNER OR OTHER ADVERTISING. WE WILL NOT BE A PARTY TO OR IN ANY WAY BE RESPONSIBLE FOR MONITORING ANY TRANSACTION BETWEEN YOU AND THIRD-PARTY PROVIDERS OF PRODUCTS OR SERVICES.PROFESSIONAL DISCLAIMERThe Site cannot and does not contain philosophy and science advice. The philosophy and science information is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. Accordingly, before taking any actions based upon such information, we encourage you to consult with the appropriate professionals. We do not provide any kind of philosophy and science advice. THE USE OR RELIANCE OF ANY INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THE SITE OR ANY PODCAST EPISODE IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Andrea walks through the forest and reads a poem. Her dog Hollywood joins.

Andrea Hiott in conversation with investor Jenna Nicholas. What would it mean for money to be understood as a sign of what we care about and what we want others to care about? Is it already? How do we shift the current in ways that help?

Jenna discusses her book The Enlightened Bottom Line and how spirituality, love, and purpose can inform investing and business rather than oppose them. She traces formative experiences from ages 11–14 in a Swiss “Transformation for Peace” program and speaking at Commonwealth Day in Westminster Abbey, including meeting Desmond Tutu, to the confidence instilled by her mother and grandmother, faith, and a lifelong practice of hosting “Saturdays at Jen’s” discussion groups.

After moving from London to Stanford, she was inspired by social entrepreneurs, worked on socially responsible investing in China with mentor Wayne Silby (Calvert Funds), and later organized experiences and interviews exploring profit–purpose paradoxes. She describes practices like symbolic objects to bridge divides, dreams-based decision-making in the Amazon, and a HEAL framework (Hope, Empathy, Abundance, Legacy), emphasizing pauses, stewardship, seven-generation thinking, and money as “currency” valuable when in motion.

Find Jenna’s book The Enlightened Bottom Line here.

Jenna’s website with further links.

Parker Palmer conversation with Andrea is here

Jacob Needleman conversation with Andrea is here.00:00 Welcome and Book Setup00:25 Teen Years and Abbey Speech02:25 Tutu High Five and Lasting Joy04:01 the Women Who Raised Her06:48 Holding Paradox in Community08:56 From Stanford to Impact Investing11:40 Choosing Stanford by Fate14:43 Wayne Silby and Legacy Shift17:18 Bhutan and Business of Happiness19:24 Enoughness and Inner Compass22:52 Saturdays at Jens Conversations25:14 Fierce Love in Organizations27:25 Creating Listening Spaces28:03 Building Impact Experience28:40 Coal Meets Solar Values30:13 Redefining Money Capital34:00 Heal Framework Questions35:37 Hope Empathy Abundance37:16 Playful Abundance Wand40:04 Amazon Dream Circles43:03 Death Joy Legacy46:31 Stewardship Seven Generations49:02 Reflection Questions Pauses52:40 Grandmother Loving Kindness55:37 Honoring Stories Love57:15 Podcast Substack Farewell

The Enlightened Bottom Line by Jenna Nicholas

Jenna’s Substack is here.

Jenna on LinkedIn

Baha’i Faith

Books discussed in addition to the Enlightened Bottom Line:

InnSaei: the Icelandic Art of Intuition by Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir

The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

TRANSCRIPT AND NOTES:

Currents and Currencies

A conversation on Love and Philosophy with Andrea Hiott

“There’s an amazing talk that Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 where he talked about gross national product, and that it doesn’t measure some of the most important things in our lives. It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. And so I think this real interrogation around what are we optimizing for? A theme I come back to a lot in the book is: what is enough? Having this conversation with ourselves and with our family and with our community, to not just take for granted what success means.”

— Jenna Nicholas

Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and today we’re going to be talking about money.

Money is a word that might strike you in all sorts of ways: motivating, painful, complex, exciting. The words go on and on with how we could describe this, or when we think of a certain time in our life when we had to deal with money in a certain way.

But I wonder how many of you thought of the word care when I said money. Did anyone have that idea come to mind — that money might be a way we’re caring for one another? What if it were? What if we could think of money that way, as somehow connected to what we care most about? What if we thought of it more like a currency, actually — that’s always shifting and changing, and that we shift and change through our bodies and through what our bodies care for? Which means also our minds, of course, because our minds are part of our bodies.

So what if, as we’re navigating this world, care is already something like a currency, and we begin to think of money like that? Is that too wild? Maybe it’s not too wild. I think a lot of people are starting to do things very similar to that. But of course, we have this whole long history of money and what it means in so many different cultures and so many different languages.

Today we’re going to talk about it just a little bit — really one specific area of it, which is actually the first time I think we’ve ever talked about investing and business ideas directly on the show. Jenna Nicholas is a founder and an investor, a graduate of Stanford Business School, and she’s written a book called The Enlightened Bottom Line. She’s done a lot of interviews with investors and people who are trying to consider the bottom line through an enlightened perspective.

I was already thinking about a lot of ideas relative to this paradox of money — of this seemingly invisible and yet ever-present idea, currency, flow, actual material exchange, non-material exchange, digits, paper, metal, all these different ways that we think of money. So she reached out, and I thought, “Oh, this is a good chance to start on this subject a little bit.”

For those of you who like the more practical or everyday sorts of episodes where we talk about someone’s life and their work and their practical ideas and advice, this is one of those shows. Her book is like that too. For all of you out there who are working with businesses, starting a business, part of a business, dealing with anything like that, the book itself is really trying to help you think about your business and what you’re investing in and what you’re doing with your investments through a more enlightened lens — or what I’m thinking of as care. Actually thinking about what we care about, and taking it very seriously that where we put our money is somehow about what we want to grow in terms of what we want the world to have more of, what we want to be able to share with others, and how we want to relate to others.

Jenna and I talk about money as currency here in that way a little bit. She’s really trying to think through these ideas, and she’s trying very hard every day to live through them in the work she does, even as an investor working in all these different situations. So we will talk about that through her life — about capital and conscience as not being opposites but as being somehow connected as this currency.

She brings up Parker Palmer, so I’m going to link to a conversation I had with Parker in the show notes, because I think it’s actually very interesting to listen to these together. Parker has lived his whole life toward what he really cares about, and part of that for him was healing what was a divide in him relative to what he cared about, what he wanted to do with his life, and what these other structures said he should do.

Another person I thought of a lot after talking with Jenna was Jacob Needleman. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him — he was an American philosopher, and I read him a lot when I was a teenager and even in my early 20s. I actually had a chance to have some conversations with him, and I remembered one of them after talking with Jenna, because in this conversation I say something about money being like a koan. A koan is this spiritual insight or meditation in Zen Buddhism, where you just sort of hold something contradictory in mind, or you think of something like: What is the sound of one hand clapping? The point of a koan isn’t to solve something. You don’t really answer that question. It’s more about sitting with the tension or the paradox or even the absurdity, and therefore noticing your old habits of thinking, and then you can sort of use that as a threshold to think — what I often talk about as a constellation.

This is possibly what money could be for us. Jacob was actually telling me about that, and I will also link to that conversation, because it’s very interesting. He talks about money as not being sacred in itself, but actually being something that does alert us to the sacredness and the love and the ongoing relation that we have with each other and with the world.

When we think of money as a koan, then it becomes a mediator. It’s actually something that’s there to help us expand and connect from life to life through life — not a goal or an endpoint, which is how I think a lot of people grew up thinking about money right now. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It really could be more like a currency that’s helping us flow along our path, and that we give to help others flow along their path.

Another idea that came into my mind after this conversation was this line: we had the experience but missed the meaning. That’s from T.S. Eliot. You won’t be surprised, because I talk about T.S. Eliot a lot and the Four Quartets. That really feels like what I’m trying to describe here — that the meaning is here, and we could actually think of money through and as meaning, and as part of the urge of our body caring for what it cares about. Which would be different for each of us, because we each have something different to give. We could help each other do that, because each of us would have something to gain from that, because we have so much knowledge from everyone else to gain.

So what if we think of it like that? That’s really the idea here — just to hold that question. What if we thought of care and money together?

To really change these wider systems which constrain a lot of us — all of us, I guess, in different ways — we really have to dance with this, rediscover exactly what’s going on here, and try to shift it from within. Shift the current from within. We can do that, but only together.

I hope that wherever you are in the world, you’re feeling the currency today in a good way — feeling the flow — and that you receive what you need to receive and can give what you need to give, because giving is itself a form of wealth.

I’m happy to bring you this conversation with Jenna Nicholas.

The Conversation

Andrea Hiott: Hi Jenna. It’s so wonderful to have you on Love and Philosophy. Thanks for being here today.

Jenna Nicholas: Thanks so much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Andrea: To get started, I’m thinking about maybe starting when you’re around 13 or 14. Does that sound okay?

Jenna: That sounds great.

Andrea: Is that when you did this event at Westminster Abbey? Can you just tell us where you were around that age and what happened in your life that seems to have kind of prompted you toward this book, even though you couldn’t have known it back then?

Jenna: Yes. It’s definitely a really formative time in my life. Leading up to that — from the ages of 11 to 14 — I took part in a program in Switzerland called Transformation for Peace. It was with young people from all around the world, and it was all about reflecting on our values and place in the world. It was inspired by the Bahá’í teachings, and it was very much focused on looking at themes around love and philosophy in practice — actually very much aligned with your podcast. That really kind of helped to spark within me this idea of: how do we integrate our values into our life on a daily basis?

I was invited to speak at an event at Westminster Abbey. It was Commonwealth Day, and there were leaders from all around the world. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had come from South Africa with a choir. The Queen was there, and Tony Blair was Prime Minister at the time. It was an incredible event. They had young people from different faith backgrounds share a passage from their scriptures and reflections around how that played out in their thoughts and philosophy.

I had a chance to share this line from the Bahá’í writings that has continued to be a deep inspiration to me: “A human being who is organic with the world, his or her inner being molds the environment and is deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other, and every abiding change in the life of a human is the result of these mutual interactions.”

I continue to this day to think so much about this idea of: how are we shaping the environment around us, and how are we also shaped by that?

Right before I did this sharing, I had a chance to meet Archbishop Tutu. He said to me, “Are you nervous?” And I said, “No, are you?” He gave me a high five. It was just such a beautiful, joyful interaction.

About 10 years later, I was in the process of building a coalition of foundations to shift capital from fossil fuels into new economy solutions, and I had a chance to meet him again, as he was a big proponent of that work. I told him, “Ten years ago, I met you and you gave me a high five.” And he said, “Well, I gave you a high five then, I’ll give you a high five and a hug now.” It was just so beautiful — always laughing. I think laughter in so much of this work is such an important aspect. So I always remember him.

Andrea: Such joy just coming from him. You said so many powerful things there. The quote is very powerful. A lot of people who listen to this podcast — we talk a lot about embodied cognition, and you talk about embodiment too, but also this participatory kind of sense-making that we’re always doing with the world. I really heard that in that quote from a different angle, which is beautiful.

You said you were 14, you were invited to speak, the Queen was there — as if it was so normal. How did you have this poise that you weren’t nervous at 14? Did it have something to do with the women in your life? As I was reading your book, I noticed you had some really strong women in your life. The spirituality seems connected to that. But I really want to know how you had that poise, and what brought you to that place.

Jenna: I love that question. A hundred percent — a huge amount has to do with the women that raised me. I was raised by my mother and grandmother. From a very young age, they really cultivated in me a deep confidence, but I think it came from a deep place of love. I could feel so viscerally the love that they had for me.

My mother almost passed away giving birth to me. My grandmother was there, and it was a pretty traumatic experience. I think because of the fact that we were all alive, I always had this sense of gratitude for even being here. As a result of that, there was just a lot of love.

Faith and spirituality was a really big part of my life from a young age, and I think a lot of confidence and strength came from building from a resource that was beyond just me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t nervous at all — I mean, I was being a little cheeky when I interacted with Desmond Tutu. But to this day, where the confidence comes from is when I’m able to get out of my own way, and actually be more of a channel for something bigger than myself, rather than “oh, I’m so great and that’s why I can do these things.”

Both my mother and grandmother have since passed on, and if anything, I think I feel that love and that strength maybe even more greatly since they’ve passed on.

Andrea: Wow, that’s amazing. The joy that I was thinking of with Desmond Tutu — that’s kind of an example of it too. Being so aware that this life is miraculous and amazing all the time. We get kind of numb to it, almost because we can’t handle it — because if you really think about how precious and amazing every moment is, it’s quite overwhelming. It sounds like your mom and your grandmother were aware of that.

You also talk about holding the contradiction, which is another theme of the show. Is that what you were just talking about? Of not getting in your own way? When you’re holding the contradiction — and the way you express it in the book — there is a kind of conversational happening with the world that feels like that kind of love you are expressing. Does that make any sense at all?

Jenna: A hundred percent it makes so much sense, and I think that it’s in community where so much of that love and resourcing comes from. Certainly a big part of the motivation for me in writing the book was less as a sort of “this is the set of answers,” but more: how are we holding these questions in community together?

The book is based on a series of interviews with various investors and business leaders and other thought leaders about how they have cultivated these concepts of bridging this paradox — of finding meaning within money, and the balance of profits and purpose, and how these pieces come together. The extent to which we’re able to hold that in community, and to hold it with love and grace and gentleness, and know that these are complex topics where there can often be a lot of emotional baggage and context that we’re bringing to some of these conversations — the more that we can hold it with care, the more opportunity there is.

Andrea: I want to get into what your book is really doing and how you got into this. It’s about investing and business and doing this with purpose and meaning. But you’re also challenging something that a lot of us just kind of assume — and maybe don’t even know that we assume — which is that spirituality goes on one side of life, and it’s the opposite of what we think of as material concerns, which is where we lump everything like money and financial gain.

What you’re saying in the book is that true power is what we’ve been talking about: holding that, embracing that as a kind of seeming contradiction that, when you explore it, becomes not really contradictory so much as like a resonant tension. I want you to tell us how you got from that place at Westminster Abbey into even thinking about investing and money. Then maybe we can start to understand how you’ve come to develop it in this different way.

Jenna: I was brought up in London, and then I came to the U.S. to do my undergrad at Stanford. Growing up, I actually thought I might go into human rights law — I was very motivated by social justice work. So the last thing I thought I would be doing, to your point, was working in business or investing.

But coming to Stanford — I remember in my first year taking a class and hearing from these social entrepreneurs. I remember calling my mom and saying, “I want to be a social entrepreneur.” And she said, “What is that?” I was like, “I don’t know, but that’s what I want to do.”

I was so motivated and inspired by hearing from these incredible people who had really bridged building sustainable, revenue-producing models with having deep social and environmental impact across a broad range of areas — within healthcare and climate and education. It really captivated me. This could be a career and a pathway to follow.

It became really organic from there. I had a chance to meet some incredible investors that were doing work in China, and began to collaborate with them on some projects. I ended up moving to China to teach a class on socially responsible investing. We would lead delegations for U.S. and European investors to China and Chinese investors to Europe, all with a focus on socially responsible investing.

I kept seeing models — and this is over the last 15 years, so the industry has really developed over these years. Previously there really was this sense of: we have one pool of capital that we’re just focusing on maximizing wealth, and another pool of capital that’s for philanthropy. What’s been really exciting to see is more and more of these innovative mechanisms bringing those elements together, and really seeing this as something that can exist across our whole portfolio and whole life.

I think a lot about this line from Parker Palmer where he talks about being “divided no more.” It really is that sense of: how do we achieve that with our lives and our work, with our lives and our capital? This really is something that’s possible.

Andrea: Why did you want to go to Stanford? It seems like it’s played a very big role in your life — you’ve met so many amazing people there. It’s like a scaffolding to the book in a way; you bring in a lot of stories and very interesting, very successful people who are doing this more impact-based, purpose-based work. But why Stanford? Where did that come from?

Jenna: It’s actually a pretty fun story. I was curious to go to university in the U.S., partly because of the approach to education — just the breadth of exploration. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to study, and I liked the ability to engage with multiple different subjects. In the UK, you choose the one subject and that’s all that you do for your time at university.

I was actually choosing between Stanford and Yale, and it was the night before I had to make a decision. I was parking my car in London and I started to talk to this man about whether or not I could park there. I said, “I know this is really strange” — he had an American accent — “but I have to make this decision. What do you think I should do?” He was a professor at Stanford.

It’s just one of these things — this through line of the power of the universe. Things come up and you’re presented with people and opportunities that are beyond what we can fully understand. Once I had that conversation, I was like, “Okay, I think that’s what I’m meant to do.”

Andrea: That’s wonderful, because as you were answering the last question, I was actually thinking you seem like someone who’s followed the yellow brick road, so to speak. I just talked to Sophie Fiennes, and she told me that her brother Ralph is always talking about “follow the yellow brick road.” When you were talking, I was thinking, oh, that’s what it is — this kind of “when you are holding the contradiction, things are sort of in this conversation, and it’s naturally leading somewhere.” It’s very interesting that you listened to yourself and talked to that person. Imagine if you hadn’t.

Jenna: Exactly. I think it connects so much to your work — it’s following love too, right? Love in the biggest sense of the word. That deep love and calling within, and how that’s manifested in the people and the situations that we have the opportunity to encounter. Not to take that for granted — what a blessing it is that these signs come into our lives, and that we can so easily be so busy and preoccupied with what we think we’re meant to be doing that we don’t even see that these people in the street are maybe there to teach us something. How we continue to stay open to that is something that is an ongoing practice for me.

Andrea: Absolutely. The noticing and trusting — trusting that that conversation will continue. It makes me think about Wayne Silby, who seems like an important person, because as you were talking I was thinking: we get so distracted about the bottom line. That’s part of your book. We have to make money, we have to do this, we have to become someone. This can seem really different from what we’re talking about with following love — which I guess is the yellow brick road, actually. Wayne seems to have had a moment where he realized that. Maybe you want to introduce him.

Jenna: Sure — this is something I come back to a lot. Wayne Silby started a fund called the Calvert Funds in the late 1970s. At the time, it was just a successful financial firm. He went to a Buddhist retreat, and at the retreat, they had them reflect on: what would it say on your tombstone? His reflection was, “It would say: the man that made 2% more than the next man.” And his reflection was, “This isn’t really the legacy that I want to leave.”

So he went back to his colleagues and said, “We need to make this socially responsible.” It’s now a $45 billion firm. It’s been really a pioneer in this area of socially responsible investing — and that really came from this moment and this reflection on what really is the legacy that he’s trying to leave.

He wrote the foreword of the book and has been a deep inspiration and mentor. I had a chance to work with him within China and DC and various projects. He still serves on a board, and is a deep friend. What is this ability to take these catalytic moments and then transform them into the organizations that we build and how we live our lives as a result? That continues to inspire me.

Andrea: Is that how you ended up in China working — was that connected?

Jenna: It’s a big part of it. I did my thesis while I was at Stanford on socially responsible investing in China, and through that got to know Wayne. We first met and just had the most beautiful conversation — kind of like our conversation today — about the universe and love and the meaning of life. We were like, “We have to do something together.” So we started just working on some projects, and one thing led to another. We’ve now been collaborating for about 15 years. Quite a privilege.

Andrea: I’m thinking also about the 14-year-old girl who I’m seeing as a very strong — I really like her. I’m thinking about her many years later. You also seem to have been creating things and projects. Didn’t you go to Bhutan? Can you tell me a little bit about that side of what was going on with your creative conversation with the world?

Jenna: I love the way you phrased that — “creative conversation with the world.” That’s definitely what it feels like. Yes, I went back to Stanford for business school, and while I was there, I had a chance with some of my classmates to organize a trip to Bhutan. We called it “the business of happiness.”

In Bhutan, rather than focusing on gross national product, they focus on gross national happiness. It’s pretty amazing in terms of what that looks like. That was a big part of what we wanted to investigate as part of this trip: how does that play out in reality?

One of the things I was really struck by was that they have what they call spiritual consultants. Their role is to help support the implementation of these principles around gross national happiness within all levels of society — within healthcare organizations, the school system, and so on. To see the experiment with the implementation of some of these ideas — and of course there’s a lot of challenges in that implementation — being able to really look at what’s working, how they’re implementing it, what lessons learned could be applicable in other parts of the world, was a big part of the conversation.

It made me really look at so many of the challenges that we have around thinking about metrics. There’s an amazing talk that Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 where he talked about gross national product, and that it doesn’t measure some of the most important things in our lives. It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.

Andrea: There’s a documentary I’ll try to find a link to, because I think a lot of people don’t know that experiment is happening. From your point of view, has all this travel — you’ve been a lot of places, lived a lot of places — changed how you think about what the bottom line actually is, or what that means?

Jenna: Totally. And how we think about what success means, and how we should be living our lives. Spending time in India — people often reflect on this — sometimes it’s people that have the least financial resources but have the biggest sense of happiness and fulfillment and contentment. So often in the Western world there can be this sense of “if only I have more and more money, then I will be more and more happy” — and of course we see that that so often isn’t the case.

I think this real interrogation around “what are we optimizing for?” — and a theme I come back to a lot in the book is what is enough — having this conversation with ourselves and with our family and with our community, to not just take for granted what success means. It can and should be, I think, a real conversation and exploration.

Andrea: I like the enoughness part. But I even mean more in your own embodied understanding that there are so many different ways that everything can be done. Is it helpful in a way that helps you not get stuck? How many companies have you created?

Jenna: About four.

Andrea: So you’re a very high-powered person, you’re creating things. I’m just wondering if knowing that there are many different ways to do things is helpful for you, so that you don’t get sucked into trying to play the game the way it’s being played by those around you.

Jenna: For sure. Coming back to one’s body and that lived sense — there’s an amazing book called InnSæi, which means “intuition” in Icelandic, and it literally means “inner sea.” It’s “to sea” like the ocean, and also “to see” — to perceive. The author Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir is a dear friend, and I think a lot about: how are we creating the spaces to tune into our innsæi? That can certainly be through walking in nature, through prayer, through meditation. I love swimming — anything that reconnects us back to our center and to our body, to be able to really tune into that.

I also do think that so much of that is through inquiry with other people too. I have a dear friend, and we do regular spiritual inquiry — where we’re really trying to interrogate in a loving and graceful way, and with deep care, the different contours of our lives, such that we’re able to not just take things at face value.

Part of, I think, the gift of being exposed to so many different ways of being and showing up in the world — and this came through in so many of the interviews that I did for the book — is that we can think there’s only one way of doing things and it’s the way that we’ve always done things. Continuing to interrogate that is certainly a goal that I have.

Andrea: Have you always had these kinds of conversations with people you can trust, where you can explore meaning and purpose and this spiritual side of yourself and life?

Jenna: It’s actually pretty funny. You started with talking about age 13 or 14 — actually about age 12, I started, at my home in London, what we called “Saturdays at Jen’s.” They were just these discussion groups. We would often bring in speakers around different themes, and it would be about love and justice. It was very philosophy-based. We would have quotations from different philosophers and poets, and from different faith backgrounds as well. That’s really continued to this day. I still host those discussion groups in my home and in different cities around the world where I’ve lived.

Being in deep conversation around some of the biggest topics at a deeper level is something that I really cherish — particularly having people that are coming from different backgrounds and contexts, where we can in a really loving way push our thinking around some of these areas. It’s been a huge source of strength and inspiration to me over the years.

Andrea: I think it’s so important — something so many of us could start trying to do earlier on in our lives, that we don’t actually realize is so important. Because you’re building those habits. You’re creating a way to have trusted conversations that helps you in all these other areas.

These are not easy things. I don’t want it to sound like, “Oh, you just become enlightened and you just choose love.” In the moment, in everyday life, we get stressed, we get worried. There’s a lot of actual tension that I’m trying to bring out. It sounds like you’ve had ways to deal with that.

I’m thinking of this saying that you say in the book: “Let your heart burn with love for everyone you meet.” The “burn” part — caring is a kind of tension, sometimes extremely transformative and flowing and ecstatic. I just wonder if that makes sense to you, if you think of care and love in business and investing in this way at all — not as just sentimental, but sort of this active feeling.

Jenna: A hundred percent. People use language like “fierce love.” The line you’re referring to is from the Bahá’í writings: “Let your heart burn with loving kindness for all who may cross your path.” I think about that almost every day. It’s so easy to interact with people not from that place — we’re busy and moving on with our lives. But what does it really mean? And what would the world look like if we were to actually let our hearts burn with loving kindness for all who may cross our path?

One of the examples I share in the book of how people have embedded concepts like this into organizations: there’s a company called Devoted Health. They’ve been very successful in the healthcare space, and they credit a lot of their success to a simple exercise. Before they engage with any of the patients they interact with, they’re encouraged to close their eyes and imagine that the person they’re about to interact with is a beloved family member.

It’s such a simple exercise, but it’s kind of incredible to think and imagine: what would it look like if in all organizations, that was the way that we were to engage with people? From this place of: “If you are part of my family, how differently am I going to engage with you as a result?” And what is the strength of that love that will emanate from that?

How we can come back to that — it’s not always easy, to your point. It is a constant reminder. In the same way that we might go to the gym to work out physically, I think there’s a muscle that can develop around the cultivation of some of these principles. Seeing the impact that can have, both on our own wellbeing, the wellbeing of the organizations we’re part of, and the broader community, is a huge opportunity.

Andrea: Have you found you can create conversational spaces — and I mean that not just with words, but with bodies and environments — that help people, so there’s less of that tension? I’m thinking, for example, of the one example in the book about the coal and the solar panels. One of the practices that you tell us about in the book — and that you’ve also asked people to do a lot — is for them to bring a symbolic object. Maybe you want to tell about that, and about how you can create spaces where we can listen, but we can also recognize that we already have a shared conversation going.

Jenna: A hundred percent. About 10 years ago, I co-founded an organization called Impact Experience. It was really based on a lot of what we’re talking about here — how disconnected we can become from ourselves and from each other. The real motivation was: how do we create spaces to build bridges between investors, entrepreneurs, artists? We’ve now had about 6,000 people that have gone through these experiences. We start each of our gatherings — it’s typically about 30 people at a time — with everybody sharing a symbol, an object that has significance to them.

The experience you’re referencing was in southern West Virginia, a community where we’ve done a lot of work over the years. It’s a community with incredibly high rates of diabetes, obesity, drug offense rates, and many laid-off coal miners. In the group, we had a former coal miner come and bring a piece of coal as their object, and share about the role of family and values.

In the group, we also had somebody who’d spent her life fighting for environmental causes. She brought a solar panel. On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different — a coal miner and a solar executive. And yet underneath the symbols they were sharing, the values there and what really motivated them, and their care and love for their family and for their community, were actually much more similar than we would’ve thought on the surface.

What we found is that through the process of them connecting and being able to see each other beyond those professional roles — but really who they were as full human beings — the collaborations they were able to have as a result were that much greater than if they had just seen those differences.

How we create those opportunities in our daily lives for us to truly see one another and to see beyond the labels is certainly a big part of the inspiration behind my work. But I think it’s something that we can all do in our different respective roles.

Andrea: So after you’ve created all these different companies, how do you see money? What do you really think of as money? It still seems like something separate from all this we’re talking about. But how do you see money after having worked in it and with it, and with so many very successful people, investors, and companies — being one yourself? What is money?

Jenna: A few elements. One is thinking about money and capital — the different types of capital. So often we think about capital and we just think about financial capital. But thinking about social capital and human capital and spiritual capital as part of the fullness of this picture.

We talk about currency — but there’s current embedded within that. Money has value when it’s in motion. So often we can get stuck in more stagnant environments. One of my mentors, Lynn Twist — who’s also referenced in the book — wrote an amazing book called The Soul of Money. She talks a lot about this idea that money is a form of medicine, and that money gets its true value when it is in circulation, when it has this currency and flow.

So much of it is what we subscribe to it. Often in many of the discussion groups that we have, we engage around our money stories — and sometimes that can be pretty traumatic for people. It can be a taboo topic to engage around in many contexts. How we lower the barriers to entry for being able to have some of these conversations, and to explore what role money plays for us, and it being a tool rather than an end in and of itself.

Andrea: That word “value” has such weight in economics, in a really scholarly way of thinking about it. But of course in philosophy it has a different way of thinking about it. I want to get a little bit messy for a second. Can we think of money as the currency, the flow toward what we care about? But I also mean that sometimes we don’t know what we’ve chosen to care about. We are just in a kind of system that tells us to care about a certain kind of fame or a certain kind of success or a certain kind of product. We’re not really thinking about it. We’re not in these kinds of groups like you are, where you’re conversationally noticing your care.

Care is the orientation toward your urge, your desire. Maybe I want to buy a bunch of stuff to make myself look better so other people like me — but I’m not really thinking of it like that. Of course that gets nested into much bigger things when we think about tech companies or whatever. I just wonder what you think about that — that money has a kind of currency of the orientation of our care. But when we notice it, and we notice what we’re actually putting our energy into, we shift the current.

Jenna: I couldn’t agree more. There’s so much in the process of even realizing how we may be unintentionally oriented toward certain ways of thinking about or engaging with money, or how we’re thinking about the intersection of care and money.

Part of the opportunity — there’s a framework that I present in the book called the HEAL framework, which stands for Hope, Empathy, Abundance, and Legacy. These are based on the interviews I did for the book. So much of that is, actually through the process of reflecting on some of these themes — around the intersection of value and care and currency and money — having some of these tools and questions to navigate the complexity of these intersections.

I don’t think these elements are simple. For generations we’ve been trying to engage around the nuances here, and I don’t think we’re going to solve it today. But Parker Palmer talks a lot about the power of holding the questions. I think that’s part of the hope and goal with this engagement — less “how do we get all the answers now,” but rather, what is the practice of holding those questions?

Andrea: Hope, empathy, abundance, legacy. We can talk about those in different ways, but I wonder — when you were doing all these interviews and these were the themes that you ended up finding, did any of them feel surprising that it surfaced so much? Was there anything surprising in this process of writing the book? Which one was harder for you to hold?

Jenna: I think each of them in their own ways felt like stretch elements and had their own elements of surprise. With hope — there’s a concept in the Bahá’í writings around the forces of disintegration and integration in the world. So much of what we see on a daily basis are these forces of disintegration. With the media and everything we’re seeing, it’s all of the terrible things going on in the world. This active cultivation of hope — Brené Brown talks about microdosing hope — is something where, coming back to the muscles that we’re building up, how do we continue to reorient around that?

I generally like to think of myself as a hopeful person, but also realizing that it’s something we can’t just take for granted, that we have to keep front and center.

With empathy, the examples like Devoted Health — what does it look like to really imagine people as part of our family? That can be complex. We can sometimes have complex relationships with our family. With each of them, it’s how do we continue to hold them as a kind of north star for us to continue to strive toward, and also have grace and care and love for ourselves in the process of trying to cultivate some of these ideas.

Andrea: So nothing was really super surprising. You felt like most of it kind of fit with what you’ve already been thinking about.

Jenna: Some of the things that surprised me was — to your point earlier about joy and play — how people went about trying to cultivate some of these ideas. Within abundance, there’s an example that came through in one of the interviews with Scott Shickler, who runs a company called Seven Mindsets. It’s been a very successful company in the education technology space. When I was asking him about how he cultivates a sense of abundance, he shared this example of how he has a wand on his desk. When he finds himself in more of a scarce way of thinking, he literally waves the wand, and it helps him to cultivate more of a sense of abundance.

I’ve known Scott for many years and worked on different projects, and I never knew that before. What I really appreciated, and what consistently surprised me in some of these conversations, was being able to see more of the fullness of people. There’s a line that just kept coming up in so many of the conversations: “I don’t really feel like I can talk about this, but...” — and then people would share these incredible stories.

It was both surprising and inspiring to me how, for many people, they had these really inspiring and meaningful experiences and motivations. The opportunity to be able to elevate some of those stories and create more of a space for that is something that was exciting for me.

Andrea: That’s exactly what I was hoping you would talk about. There are these moments where this wonderful strangeness kind of comes in — these moments of vulnerability where we’re talking about power and money, and then something like using the wand to dispel the bad feelings or the self-sabotage. It’s playful, and it can be playful. It speaks to that contradiction: if you’re doing something spiritual or “woo” — these words we’ve taken on for good reason — a lot of people are motivated to try to find those strange ways of getting out of your comfort zone, feeling more optimism, believing in the world.

Sometimes it’s these strange moments that help us get out of our habits. It’s a little like what I was asking you about — if changing place so much helps you. In the book, you write about going to the Amazon, for example. I imagine you had to get out of your normal habits there. To me it’s a similar feeling. Do you know what I’m saying?

Jenna: Definitely. A hundred percent. Engaging with other ways of being and doing — I had a chance to write a Substack piece recently around one specific event in the Amazon. This trip was organized by the Pachamama Alliance — I mentioned Lynne Twist earlier; she started this organization about 30 years ago, and they’ve been leading these trips to the Amazon in collaboration with the Achuar and Sápara communities.

They have a practice there as a local community: every morning at 5 a.m., they come together in their local community and they sit in a circle and they share the dreams that they had the night before. They make decisions on what they’re going to do that day based on the dreams that they had the night before. We had a chance to participate in one of these activities.

It was an incredible experience on many levels. To your point about just being exposed to other ways of being and doing — when I look at my calendar in typical days, it’s back-to-back meetings. Even if I wanted to create space for thinking about what my dreams were and how I might live my day based on that, there’s no space for it. This idea of what we can take for granted — how we live our lives, what success means, and even the role of money...

This particular community that we were engaged with has only actually had physical currency over the last 15 years or so. So the whole way of interacting with one another is different. We were there exploring around different investment opportunities. Even thinking about what investment looks like in a context where there’s been such a different way of being and doing... I couldn’t agree more around the importance of being exposed to other environments as an inspiration for thinking about things from a different angle.

Andrea: I also find some of your faith adds a bit of this element of — I can’t figure out what the word is I’m trying to say — kind of thinking strange, or kind of waking up. These moments of, I’m thinking of like a Zen koan. There’s one quote in the book where you say that death is a messenger of joy. Is that right?

Jenna: Yes, exactly.

Andrea: Those things don’t seem to go together at all, is what I’m trying to say. In a similar way that often we think investing doesn’t go with spirituality, or a lot of these seeming opposites — which are kind of ways of opening us into different ways of being in a surprising way, like waving the wand around.

Let’s think about the death thing. That actually is a part of your book, and it seems to be a very important word for a lot of reasons for you. You already shared that you’ve lost your mom and your grandmother, and that seems important in this book, even if you don’t really talk about it directly. And also the tombstone with Wayne — that’s a big thing, right? That changed his life when he thought, “What should I write on my tombstone?” The idea of legacy, which is the L in HEAL.

I want to get into that just a little bit. What does that all mean for you, also to go back to the very beginning — your mom and your grandmother being appreciative of life. What does that bring up for you, in the sense of the way we can think of our legacy in this bigger way than just our own life?

Jenna: It’s something I think about a lot. Another example I bring up in the book on this point: there’s a professor in the UK, Peter Hawkins, and he has a coffin in his office. Before you get to see him, you see his coffin. His point is we should really spend each day reflecting on the fact that we’re going to die one day, and that being an important thing for us to reflect on.

Certainly this passage from the Bahá’í writings — “I have made death a messenger of joy” — is something I reflect on a lot. In the passing of my grandmother and mother, at the beginning it was: how does this make sense? It has been really over time that a fuller sense of what that really means has come to me.

So much of it is around an escape from sometimes the limitations of this physical reality, and how we are embracing the fullness of our spiritual reality in addition to our material reality. That’s, in many ways, part of this intersection of money and meaning — being able to hold all of these parts of our reality as part of the broader contours of our life and work. It gives this sense of importance to the decisions that we’re making.

I think about this a lot in running an investment firm — Phoenix Capital — and we’re investing into companies that are trying to be at the forefront of innovations in climate and healthcare and other sectors. What does it mean to leave a trace, and what is the trace that you are trying to leave?

Sometimes we can think, “Oh, we’ll get to that later on.” But we don’t know how long we have in this world. There’s another line in the Bahá’í writings that says, “Strive that your actions day by day may be beautiful prayers.” I love that imagery — that our actions and the ways that we engage with one another can in and of itself be a beautiful prayer, or work as a form of worship. Truly, whatever it is that we’re doing, doing it with love and care is part of a way of us expressing the fullness of who we are.

Andrea: You talk about stewardship sometimes in the book too. That’s a word that does recur. What I’m trying to get at too is — we have this sense of self, which can feel very narrow, in which we can get very caught up in the ego side of things, or even like you were saying about your calendar, just staying busy and following the next thing that’s going to ding on the calendar. That feels different than what you’re really saying about leaving a trace, because that makes me think of how we’re all opening paths for each other all the time. Our life is a path that we’re opening for others, from others. Does that ring true with any of your experiences — with your mom and your grandmother, or with your faith, with your business? Are you ever able to get out of your own individual definition of self and feel that a bit?

Jenna: Totally. I try to all the time. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes people would refer to that as a “flow state.”

To your point about stewardship, I think a lot about — and talk about a bit in the book — the indigenous concept of seven generations thinking. How are we thinking about the impact of our decisions now, and seven generations to come? And the legacy that we’re inheriting from seven generations in the past, and how does that impact how we think about decisions as a result?

I think about that a lot in the investing work I engage in: what are the repercussions of these decisions, hopefully for generations to come, and what impact might that create?

A lot of what my mother and grandmother cultivated within me was a sense of really trying to see the full picture. There’s a line from Martin Luther King where he said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, but take the first step.” There’s something about: how are we just taking each step? Sometimes that can be really challenging, even just taking that first step. But there’s power in what can unfold when we just take each step, and trust that things are unfolding as they’re meant to.

Andrea: I want to hear you tell what you want other people to really know about this book. The message feels very important right now. You do talk about AI a bit too, and that’s part of it — but also just that we can remember that where we’re putting our energy, our money, our currency, can be meaningful and can have purpose, and can be about stewardship and about love. I really feel that in the stories of the people. If there’s anything that comes up that you want to share with everyone, please feel free to do that.

Jenna: I love that — and that was certainly the intention. One thing: in the book, at the end of each chapter, I have a series of reflection questions. The real hope and intention there is to provide spaces for people to think about how this shows up in their lives and work. So many of these conversations of how we think about money and meaning and purpose and profits is going to be different for each of us. It being a lifelong journey of continuing to ask some of these questions, and what’s resonating, and to engage with it, to this point we’ve been talking about — from a place of playfulness and joy and exploration — and to often do so in community, where it’s something that we don’t have to be alone in a process of trying to figure all of this out. How to enjoy the journey along the way.

Andrea: That conversational aspect — you really fill in that part. There are a lot of intense stories and ideas, and then the reflection questions give you a moment to really process it at the end of each chapter. I imagine that’s been very helpful in more business situations too, where you’re sharing this message. People can do that in their own teams and businesses.

It makes me think of resilience, coherence, integrity — those are names of the chapters. Did you build that in on purpose? You’re building resilience, you’re building coherence, and there’s an integrity to that. Was that on purpose, and has it been good in practice too?

Jenna: Very much so. This idea of: how do we be gentle with ourselves in the process? These are all hard things to do, and we’re going to fall short sometimes.

One of the things that really struck me recently — there was a foundation with about a billion dollars in assets, and they mentioned that before they made an investment, when they went through their investment committee process, they actually read an excerpt from the book. I was like, what an amazing use of the book — so inspiring to hear that.

Part of what I reflect on in the book is the power of pauses, and through creating pauses we create the spaciousness to be able to tune into a lot of what we are talking about here. The idea that maybe reading an excerpt of the book can help to spark some of these conversations within organizations, or as people are trying to make difficult decisions — it can then become a living laboratory for the deepening around some of these themes.

Andrea: I feel like the pause is a very important thing you bring in. But before we go, I have to bring up this other thing, which I think is very important — something I talk about a lot here — these seemingly small moments that can actually be enough meaning for a lifetime.

To go back to your grandmother — she was a shop owner in London, and basically she took the time in a busy day to listen to someone who was at a very desperate moment in their life, and it made all the difference. Your grandmother kind of told you this — that even if she didn’t do anything else in her life that she did, there’s meaning in that. That’s the trace, the continuity. I really think about that all the time — that we try to be these big people doing these big things, but those moments are what really matter, and actually what feels fulfilling. There’s a reason your grandmother told you that. Maybe you want to tell that story, or just what that brings up for you relative to these ideas we’ve been talking about.

Jenna: I love that story, and it is one I come back to a lot. It does seem to be resonating with people. It is something of: how do we think about what those elements are on a daily basis, and that we never really know the impact of how we’re engaging with people?

To this earlier passage: “Let your heart burn with loving kindness for all who may cross your path.” That’s really how my grandmother interacted with everyone — but certainly on that day, interacted with this woman. It clearly, given the circumstances and everything that was going on in her life, was something that had such a deep impact in terms of keeping her alive.

It would’ve been so easy for my grandmother to have just focused on continuing to serve other customers and be in the busyness of life. But actually being able to be in tune enough to be able to see that this woman was struggling and needed that time and space — this element of how we continue to stay open, and to then also realize that we are enough, that yes, there’s more that we can do, but not to become so attached to the doing of more that we lose sight of our inherent nobility.

Andrea: At one point, one of your friends wrote something similar to you on a card — like, “Just remember, you’ve already done enough.” Everything else is kind of extra, because you’ve given a lot of meaning to the world. But I think that also holds that tension of — your grandmother was working in a busy store, and it was not easy for her to take a moment with this person. So it’s not that these things are easy. It’s not a complacency. You talk about it not being transactional — it’s more communicative instead of transactional. Making that choice actually has these very big repercussions for resilience and integrity, and this elasticity that you talk about. You’re building your power to understand what the enough is for you.

The last thing before we go: if there’s anything you want to share relative to an experience of love or care that helped you write this book, or that just comes up today in connection to any of these themes we’ve been talking about.

Jenna: That is definitely one that I come back to a lot, with my grandmother. More broadly — I mentioned they’ve both passed on, but I dedicated the book to my mother and grandmother, and I could feel them guiding me throughout the process as I was writing and pulling the pieces together.

Another aspect: part of the inspiration for me in writing the book was that there are so many people that have so many incredible stories, and I was thinking that many of these people are getting on in life, and will these stories be told before they pass on? Actually, a few of the people I interviewed for the book have since passed on. My hope with the book — and hopefully it’s playing out — is of honoring the legacy of those people and their stories.

A couple to mention: Bob Chapman, who just passed away just a few weeks ago — incredible leader. And Lisa Hall, who passed away last year, also an amazing leader in this area of socially responsible investing. I can feel their love — both in my relationship to them, but also love for the world and love for the advancement of these ideas. That’s certainly been a catalyst for the writing and also for much of the work I engage in.

Andrea: That’s the other word that’s actually surprising me right now, but comes up the most powerfully: this conversational quality, this conversation. The pause is important, and the message of what you’re giving in the book is very important. But also just that conversational thing that we started with — and that you started with when you were 14 — of having these conversations and taking them seriously, documenting them. It’s a real sign of respect, I think. A lot of your conversations — did you record them? Are they available?

Jenna: Yes, I’ve released many of them in podcast form. I have a podcast and a Substack, which is very much trying to engage around some of the broader conversations. I could only have small tidbits from them in the book itself, but I try to hold the fullness of some of these stories through some of these other platforms.

Andrea: We’ll be sure to link to all of it. Is there anything else you want to make sure we say before we go?

Jenna: No — just thank you so much for this opportunity, and thank you so much for all that you’re bringing into the world. These are such important conversations, so I really appreciate it.

Andrea: Thank you too. It means a lot, what you’re doing. I want a lot of people to know more about it, think more about it. So thanks for coming on today, and I wish you all the best. Have a great day.

Jenna: You too.

Closing Reflection: T.S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages

I said I’d read this poem, which I found — the part of Four Quartets called “The Dry Salvages.” Here is the passage in context (though remember, this is from a much longer, fuller poem, so go check it out):

It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence — Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy, Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. The moments of happiness — not the sense of well-being, Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination — We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness. I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations — not forgetting Something that is probably quite ineffable...

What Eliot is sort of pushing back against here is this idea that the past is just some sequence, and we move beyond it, or a development. Actually, it’s still part of us — or at least that’s how I’m thinking of it. We are memory. We’re carrying it with us. It’s changing. It’s becoming. And the meaning comes back to us later, and it’s restored as experience in a different form. And this is constantly going.

So even now and later, before, past, present — these are all actually sort of right now in our bodies. We don’t want to lament the lost time so much as make the shift right now. Recovery through return, I guess, is sort of what I’m thinking of — and what I’m imagining is how we might shift what we think of as money toward currency and care. Which is a kind of weird stretch with this poem, but just this idea that the experience and the meaning can be together.

Jenna Nicholas is the author of The Enlightened Bottom Line. Andrea Hiott is the author of Thinking Small, Holding Paradox, and How to Be Alive (coming 2027).

What are your Way-Markers?

…noticing is what shifts the path.

clips from discussion with A.A. Kostas

Full interview and post at:

https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/what-are-your-way-markers-noticing?r=3qslz0&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

and full video now at

https://youtu.be/HXoUsG89yyk?si=WnmZzwbBKahSEmHX

These days, finding a place where curiosity meets understanding and where you can come without being judged while still learning and growing can feel like a revelation. "Love and Philosophy," guided by Andrea Hiott and other hosts offers just such a haven.

As a philosopher, educator, and advocate for open-hearted discourse, Andrea invites listeners into a world where the mind and body coalesce into a dynamic exploration of what it means to be alive.Andrea brings a wealth of knowledge from her multifaceted background. Not only is she a trained philosopher and professor, but she also strides joyfully through life as a poet and neuroscience enthusiast, particularly captivated by the hippocampus—a seahorse-shaped bastion of memory and movement within the brain.

Andrea’s work over the past decade has focused on developing an approach to the philosophy of mind that's navigational, proposing that minds are not just contained within our brains but are the actions that bodies make to find their way in life. Minds are ecological, embodied, and action-oriented phenomena that extend far beyond simple neural activity. So many researchers and thinkers have spent their careers opening this way of considering mind to us, and this podcast hopes to bring some of those to you via the lens of everyday life. No matter who you are, you can find a way in here.Some might find Andrea’s perspective initially unconventional, yet it aligns with the growing trends within cognitive sciences and with research into navigation in neuroscience circles. This philosophy embraces embodied cognition and participatory sense-making—ideas that breathe life into traditional, static notions of the mind. Engaging with these concepts allows participants of "Love and Philosophy" to explore how everyday actions and experiences contribute to the intricate tapestry of thought and consciousness.Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy is about the exploration and celebration of diverse interests. Whether your passions lie in art, music, theater, analytic philosophy, or brain science, the team and this show provides a welcoming platform.

Encouraging a bit of 'friction-friendly' dialogue, the podcast recognizes that some topics might challenge preconceived notions, while others might feel like a refreshing connection to your innermost convictions. This dynamic interchange is what keeps our understanding of the world both personal and profound.The only rule is that we care. And that is part of life. We all care about something. So, what is it you care about? That is a key to understanding what you have to share and give. And we invite you do to that here, too.

This journey is about approaching each episode with a genuine interest in learning and understanding. By distancing ourselves from the distractions that often demand our attention, listeners are invited to cultivate an open heart and mind. "Love and Philosophy" thrives on the exchange of ideas and the mutual growth that comes from listening and engaging with others.We look forward to welcoming you to this unique experience of love, philosophy, and discovery. With each episode, we hope to guide, challenge, and learn from guests and from you as the audience, collectively navigating the vast landscape of understanding and expression. Come, listen, learn, and find your path and meaning amidst the chaos.

Wishing you a journey filled with love and philosophical insight.

What are your Way-Markers?

…noticing is what shifts the path.

👇 scroll down for links to the books Kostas discusses

“...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...

You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you yearn towards the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....

From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.” ― Stephen Graham

Andrea Hiott has a conversation with A.A. Kostas, a Singapore-based lawyer and writer behind the Substack Waymarkers, blending poetry, fiction, and essays. They discuss how moving through different places shaped his writing and his interest in avoiding simplistic binaries through discernment—first identifying what kind of decision is in front of you—using hiking metaphors of many paths versus a narrow ridge, or the ridge versus ‘anything goes’.

Kostas cites Into the Wild as a cautionary waymarker about seeking truth without rejecting human connection, and describes a Cradle Mountain hike where his wife had to find her own route.

They explore how technology reinforces binary thinking, why poetry and music hold meanings beneath prose, and the value of humility from engaging Western and Eastern traditions (including Merton and Suzuki). Mentioning various waymakers from C.S. Lewis to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace to The Gentle Art of Tramping and the Cloud of Unknowing, Andrea and Alex explore what it means to be a writer, why noticing what we are moving through is key, the potentials of care and uncomfortable attention, the importance of embodied presence, and Alex’s experience of fatherhood as immediate responsibility and obligation where love grows and churns the soil.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro02:21 Becoming a Writer03:51 Growing Up Everywhere05:15 What Is Way Markers07:12 Pilgrimage and Substack10:29 Into the Wild Lessons14:29 Beyond Binary Thinking18:49 Cradle Mountain Metaphor22:36 Discernment and Ridge Lines25:20 Tech Shapes Our Minds27:00 Why Braid Genres31:04 Music and Poetry Under Language34:12 Law as Applied Philosophy37:41 Zen Meets Catholic Mysticism43:00 Humility and Unknowing46:48 Craving Oneness Safely48:19 Mystical Moments Explained50:20 Flow State With Meaning51:00 Desire Points to God52:25 You Cant Conjure Awe56:14 Care In Writing58:36 Audience Capture Trap59:27 Pamphlets Off The Internet01:02:40 Love Is Uncomfortable01:17:58 Fellow Travelers And Faith01:24:28 Humor Holds Paradox01:28:34 Fatherhood And Obligation01:32:18 Closing Reflections

Sign up for Waymarkers

Books:

The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham:

full pdf available here from Project Guttenberg

—

The Cloud of Unknowing by a mystic of the 14th century:

full electronic scan of the book available here

—

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig:

full book on Internet Archive or as pdf

—

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

link to a pdf version here

—

Alex also mentions this review of the book

Room for Good Things to Run Wild by Josh Nadeau, in which he discusses dealing with alcoholism.

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack

When we design AI, we are designing ways of being human. Clips from the latest episode with punk drummer and philosopher B Scot Rousse. Listen anywhere you find podcasts: www.loveandphilosophy.com

B. Scot Rousse (“B”)'s substack, "Without Why," focuses on what it means to be alive in an age of intelligent machines. He is philosopher in residence at Topos Institute and visiting scholar in Philosophy at Berkeley. He also drums in 3 punk bands.

Andrea Hiott has a conversation with philosopher B. Scot Rousse (“B”). B is an Oakland-based, Berkeley-affiliated Heidegger and phenomenology scholar focused on AI’s effects on our capacities to care. He is also a Topos Institute affiliate and a punk drummer.

Andrea and B discuss Heidegger’s care as living in “meaningful differences,” embodied affordances, moods, and existential orientation. They explore how AI risks compulsive optimization and an overly narrow picture of the role of language in human life. B argues that technologies design ways of being human, urges users and designers to ask “for the sake of what,” articulates punk’s embodied, communal, joyful “controlled chaos” as an antidote to technological nihilism, and celebrates love and care in their visceral, pluralistic, and risky uncontrollability.

Along the way, B traces a path from growing up Hare Krishna in Florida, to an encounter with a philosophy teacher who encouraged his transfer to UC Berkeley where he came under the mentorship of Hubert Dreyfus, whose teaching and critiques of symbolic AI shaped B’s work.

B also shares about his work with philosopher-entrepreneur Fernando Flores (thanks to an introduction by Dreyfus), who applies philosophy to organizational “networks of conversations” that coordinate commitments and care for customer concerns, drawing on his experience in Chilean political history and ontological reinterpretation of entrepreneurship. In all of these experiences, B focuses on an abiding and urgent question: How do we protect our capacity to care in an age of optimization? How can you create, in your life, your version of the worldly joy and shared meaning of being in a punk band?

B’s substack is Without Why. He currently drums in the bands Realistic, Vexxyl, and Wildfire.

Subscribe to B’s YouTube channel here. Support the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project here.

00:00 Welcome and Care Question00:36 Meet B Scot Rousse04:31 Highlights and Themes07:08 B Introduces Himself08:14 From Krishna Roots to Philosophy10:27 Teacher to Berkeley and Dreyfus12:01 Ambassadors of Possibility13:16 Dreyfus Mentorship Years14:52 Fernando Flores and Careful Organizations18:40 Heideggerian Care Meets AI23:56 Care and Agency in Analytic Ethics30:04 Mattering and Affordances33:13 Dreyfus on Technology and Optimization38:00 Language as Commitments Not Info39:02 Language as Commitment40:54 Why LLMs Aren’t Human Language43:18 Training, Deployment, Disembodiment45:22 Languaging vs Symbol Systems49:44 Care and Ontological Design52:41 Compulsive Chatbot Loops55:30 Disorientation and No Recipes01:02:10 Kierkegaard and Commitment01:11:35 Practicing Conversation with AI01:14:38 Punk as Embodied Community01:17:46 Punk As Belonging01:18:50 Drummer Life And Community01:19:14 Mood Joy And Chaos01:21:10 Entropy And AI Randomness01:23:19 Choosing The Wild Path01:27:01 Teaching At The Edge01:33:01 Meaning Is Out There45:45 Care As Human Intelligence01:36:24 Many Loves Music Refuge01:43:19 Nihilism And Reviving Care01:45:21 Closing Links And Thanks

Read more of B’s Substack Posts here:

CLIPS:

Full show without intro:

Technology, Nihilism, and Giving a Damn: Part I, Part II, Part III

* Why Not Brain Rot: AI and Contemporary Nihilism

* The Manifold Varieties of Mattering: Heidegger on Dasein

* Why Care Matters for AI: New Conceptual Foundations for AI Alignment

Past episodes of Love and Philosophy

Andrea’s ‘ramblings’ in Waymaking on Harry Frankfurt and more, as inspired from this conversation: Magic Circles Never Close

You can now preorder Andrea’s next book:

Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness

Preorder now to explore landscapes of the mind ❣️ Available to preorder worldwide soon, still mostly in Europe and UK for now.

“Hiott asks us to become the contrasts and bifurcations without dismissing them, a provocative and important philosophical contribution via cognitive neuroscience. This is a real tour de force.”

—by Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher, author of more than seven books, and computer scientist

“When John O’Keefe and I wrote our book in the 1970s, we knew we were putting forward something radical, that the hippocampus creates cognitive maps for navigating space. At first this seemed to many to be at odds with memory research but over the years, we’ve started to see this apparent conflict resolve. This book shows us how the field of hippocampal research may be positioning us for a shift in how we understand the mind itself.”

—by Lynn Nadel, neuroscientist and co-author of The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map

“A genuinely original contribution to philosophy via cognitive neuroscience. Hiott demonstrates that holding contradictions open is not intellectual weakness but scientific enlightenment. This is an enriching and essential read (that uses all my favourite words). Hiott’s framework offers something rare—a way to honour both the mathematical precision of computational neuroscience and the irreducible reality of lived experience. Her concept of ‘way-making’ is a universal and philosophical notion that speaks to the existential imperatives of active inference: namely, how organisms minimize surprise by navigating spaces both physical and conceptual. Hippocampal research provides compelling evidence that memory and navigation do not call for reconciliation—they disclose existential processes operating across scales we are only starting to fathom.”

—by Karl Friston, neuroscientist and initiator of the Free Energy Principle

Thanks for listening.

❣️ and audio only from feed..

“You can be pluralistic and still be doing good science. You can be disciplined and scientific without thinking there’s a single objective truth you have to be aiming for. Being pluralistic is very, very different from the idea that anything goes. It is simply a recognition of multiplicity.”

"Human beings…all individually change over time. We do things differently as individuals, and differently from context to context — let alone different people doing the same thing in different conditions."

“You can be pluralistic and still be doing good science. You can be disciplined and scientific without thinking there’s a single objective truth you have to be aiming for. Being pluralistic is very, very different from the idea that anything goes. It is simply a recognition of multiplicity.”

Find Marek and Craig’s book The Great Psychology Delusion here.

This is an academic psychology-focused episode with lecturer Marek McGann, whose work spans enactive cognitive science, embodiment, politics, feminist philosophy, and Science and Technology Studies. Andrea and Marek discuss his co-authored book The Great Psychology Delusion with Craig Speelman. McGann explains why “delusion” fits psychology’s persistence in treating long-critiqued assumptions as valid, especially the aggregation delusion: averaging group data and applying it to individuals despite human non-interchangeability and change over time, linked to the ergodic assumption and ergodic theorem conditions rarely met in human behavior. They discuss how averaging can create misleading “laws” (e.g., power law of learning), the research–practice gap in clinical work, psychology’s history and method-driven identity, and the need for disciplined, pluralistic, scale-aware science that better integrates perspectives and practitioner expertise.00:00 Show Intro And Intro Marek01:23 Book Thesis And Stakes02:24 Aggregation Delusion Explained03:54 Research Practice Gap04:49 More Detailed Book Summary07:47 Averaging Artifacts And Ergodicity09:29 Careful Critique Not Anti Psychology11:06 Warm Reorientation Sendoff11:51 Conversation Begins15:17 Why Call It Delusion20:11 How Psychology Became Method Led31:08 Aggregation Delusion Deep Dive33:35 Ergodic Fallacy in Humans35:21 Scale Slippage and Delusion37:59 Research Practice Gap Explained41:01 Clinician Code Switching42:46 Many Scales of Mind43:57 MRI Averaging Pitfalls48:32 Method Silos and Identities52:43 Care, Careers, and Canalization55:27 GPS Model for Pluralism01:00:33 Pluralism Not Relativism01:02:58 Why Marek Cares01:06:06 Psychology’s Moment of Change01:06:56 Closing Thanks and Wrap

Marek McGann has been a lecturer in the Department of Psychology since 2005. His principal research is theoretical work on the enactive approach to cognitive science, which examines the mind more as something we do rather than something we have. This is also related to ecological approaches to psychology, which explore how behaviour and mental life can be examined by looking at what your head is in, rather than what is in your head. He also has a related interest in critical considerations of theory and scientific practice in psychology more broadly.

Marek co-convenes the ENSO Seminars, a series of online seminars with researchers from enactive and ecological cognitive science. If you want to go deeper into enactive cognitive science, this is a good place to start.

The paper Andrea mentions: Facing Life

Support the show

Please rate and review with love.YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads

“Human beings are basically the least ergodic things in the known universe. We all individually change over time. We do things differently as individuals, and differently from context to context — let alone different people doing the same thing in different conditions.”

“We do one thing, think we’re doing something else, and don’t have the capacity to reflect and realize the sliding between scales. Assuming that research with samples and averages has given you insight into individuals and their individual behaviors — that’s a delusional thing.”

“You can be pluralistic and still be doing good science. You can be disciplined and scientific without thinking there’s a single objective truth you have to be aiming for. Being pluralistic is very, very different from the idea that anything goes. It is simply a recognition of multiplicity.”

— Marek McGann

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT BELOW

FOR FULL TRANSCRIPT, SEE LOVEANDPHILOSOPHY.COM

Andrea Hiott: Hi Marek. Thanks for being on Love and Philosophy.

Marek McGann: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

Andrea: I met you in Austria about six months ago. I realized we had a lot in common, and then you mentioned a new book — which is now out. I’m constantly thinking about research methods in cognitive neuroscience, so I’m really glad to find it. It’s called The Great Psychology Delusion. Do you want to introduce it?

Marek: Sure. This is work I’ve been doing with my colleague Craig Speelman at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. The book brings together different strands around theory and practice in psychological research. Our first publication together, back around 2013, looked at the use of averages and the mean in psychological research — the limitations, the underlying assumptions. Nothing terribly new to most psychologists, and yet despite that, everyone still continues on as though everything’s fine, when we think it really isn’t. This book is an attempt to bring those threads together: the often-implicit assumptions about human beings that underlie psychological research, and the implications for how we understand, interpret, and apply the findings. We try to elucidate the underlying issues in a clear, and sometimes polemical, way.

Andrea: The word “delusion” is really strong. Why did you choose it?

Marek: It is perhaps a little hyperbolic, but it articulates something we both find particularly frustrating in the dialogue around these issues. We open with the Oxford dictionary definition: “an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or rational argument.” For so many of the points we address — the problematic use of averages, the weak and undisciplined way theoretical work is done — these have decades of criticism behind them. And yet mainstream psychological research just plows on as though all is well. We really want to call that out. The community, or a large chunk of it, seems to blindly follow established practice without a clear enough understanding of why those practices exist or what they actually produce. We have to see and name it as a delusion to crack open the shell of mainstream misconceptions.

Andrea: It seems like you’re trying to make us realize how general and disparate all of this is, so that we can be more specific. Does that make sense?

Marek: That’s a very nice, succinct way of putting it. Yes, absolutely.

Andrea: Psychology is probably one of the most popular subjects people study or want to be part of. And yet you’re showing that the fundamental ways we do it academically are deeply flawed. How do you see that contradiction?

Marek: There are a number of forces in play. One thing that underpins the whole book is that we draw on roughly forty years of work in the history and philosophy of science — work that makes it very clear that science is a deeply human endeavor. Once you apply that lens to psychology, you can trace how many of its threads are actually quite separate and never properly drawn together. Where they are combined, it’s often for political or pragmatic ends rather than genuine scientific coherence. From the late 1980s onward, there’s an analysis of psychology as a discipline defined not by the phenomena it studies, but by the set of methods it uses. To become a psychologist is to learn certain research methods, and the phenomena almost get pushed aside. We have a tendency to force our phenomena into certain ways of asking questions, rather than adapting our methods to suit the phenomena.

Andrea: I see the same pattern so often: what we care about most, we try to get rigorous about — and we end up going to the methods. Do you see a connection between science defending its methods to remain credible, and losing track of what it actually cares about?

Marek: Yes, that’s exactly the logic we’re looking at. As a discipline, we’ve decided that certain ways of constructing phenomena are the only valid ones, and everything else gets relegated to the messy outside — the domain of practitioners, not hardcore science. The general assumption is that when physicists bring things into the lab, it’s to stabilize an otherwise dynamic phenomenon. Psychology applied the same logic, except we didn’t bring something in from the real world — we created it. Our notions of reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving are largely drawn from philosophical analyses of how people should think, not from systematic observation of what people actually do.

Andrea: Could you walk through the aggregation delusion specifically — the individual-versus-group confusion?

Marek: This was the foundational issue where Craig’s and my work began. It’s the assumption that human beings are sufficiently interchangeable — that you can gather a large group, produce data, average across it, and “boil off the noise,” ever-approximating a truer measurement of some psychological variable. But to do that, you have to assume we’re all essentially doing the same thing. This is sometimes called the ergodic assumption: that the average of the group is sufficiently similar to the average of the individual, so that studying the group gives you insight into individuals. That’s fine for hydrogen atoms. But human beings are basically the least ergodic things in the known universe. We each change over time. We do things differently from context to context, let alone different people doing the same thing in different conditions.

The notion that aggregating scores approximates a true score — which underlies almost all tests of mean difference, which are fundamental to the vast majority of laboratory psychological work — is an untenable assumption that goes almost entirely unquestioned. It misrepresents phenomena at two different scales: the behavior of a sample, and the behavior of an individual. Psychologists will say they’re interested in understanding the mind, which occurs one per person. But in a large amount of our research, we don’t look at individuals at all. We only look at samples and their averages. Not being able to see that mismatch is the delusion.

Andrea: And yet you also say we do get a lot from group-level study. What would it look like to open that up and become more specific?

Marek: A lot is being covered by individual professional sensitivity, particularly in clinical psychology and counseling. There’s what’s called the research-practice gap, and it means different things to different people. For researchers, the gap is that practitioners aren’t implementing findings as prescribed. For clinicians, the gap is that the research simply doesn’t fit their needs — because research uses carefully selected, clean samples that individual cases almost never resemble.

Insofar as a practitioner takes research insights and applies them effectively, the sensitivity and responsiveness of that clinician to their individual client is doing a huge amount of the heavy lifting. There’s a lovely observation from Sanneke de Haan in Enactive Psychiatry: psychiatrists tend to code-switch between conferences and clinical settings. In conferences, they talk about the brain constantly. In the hospital, they speak in the language of clients — experience, behavior, concrete realities. The clinicians often aren’t aware of that switch. If we can just recognize that these movements are happening, we can reflect on them and orient ourselves more effectively. The issue is not that one scale is wrong and one is right, but that you should know when you’re moving between them and what changes when you do.

Andrea: When you bring up pluralism, doesn’t it also happen at other scales — in our lives, in the way we can return to a motivating force that isn’t hurting us?

Marek: Yes. We get channelized — canalized, as it’s sometimes described neurologically. I’ve become this type of researcher. I’ve adopted this set of methods. I can build a career with it. If I step outside, I weaken my position. There’s nothing pulling me back. But I think it’s all ultimately motivated by care. Most psychologists got into this because some aspect of human experience was close to home, often personal.

An example I love: the GPS system is an engineering achievement, but it depends on satellites launched using Newtonian physics, carrying atomic clocks that only work because of quantum mechanics, using Einsteinian relativistic mathematics to identify coordinates on a round globe, represented on a flat-earth map for a human navigating a street. All of those perspectives are mutually exclusive descriptions of the universe — you can’t be Einsteinian and Newtonian simultaneously, or Newtonian and quantum. And yet the GPS system works brilliantly. It is all of those things at once, embedded in a collection of human practices that makes it all make sense without worrying about the mismatches. That kind of pluralism can be immensely productive. The messiness of psychology isn’t the problem. It’s the way we conflate mess with reductionism — insisting a concept developed at one scale must mean the same thing at another. What we need is to get comfortable in the tension of pluralism, and to build in deliberate, little habits of silo-breaking: go listen to the qualitative people for a while, go listen to the cognitive people. Help each other hold the tension.

Andrea: And it’s not “anything goes” either — which is maybe why it’s so tense. Is there anything you want to add?

Marek: No, I fully endorse that. The fear for so many scientists is that the value of science lies in there being a single objective truth we can aspire to. But scientists are actually very capable of holding multiple truths in mind at once and being fine with it. You can be pluralistic and still be doing good science. You can be disciplined and scientific without thinking there’s a single objective truth you’re aiming for. Being pluralistic is very different from relativism. It is simply a recognition of multiplicity.

Andrea: Why do you care about this, Marek?

Marek: My undergraduate degree is in psychology. I’ve always had a philosophical bent, and my early postgraduate work was in philosophical psychology. I then expanded into cognitive science, did a master’s, and a doctorate at the University of Sussex with a group of enactive thinkers. Throughout all of that, I was teaching a module on critical issues in psychology, which suited my philosophical leaning and gradually became a significant part of my work. Those two strands — philosophy and cognitive science on one side, conceptual and historical issues in psychological science on the other — coalesced over the past decade and a half into papers with Craig, and ultimately this book.

Andrea: You really do care about psychology as a discipline.

Marek: I really do. For a lot of psychologists, I’m not a psychologist — I don’t do enough empirical work for their tastes, I get dismissed as a philosopher. But I consider myself a psychologist. I’m paid by a department of psychology. And psychology is going through an unusual period of vigor around these discussions. There is a real possibility for transformation and for an increasingly successful psychological science, if we can just work through some of these supposedly philosophical questions.

Andrea: Well, you’ve been holding that tension — and that’s a real service. Thanks for the book, and thanks for being here.

Marek: Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you.

Overview

This is an impromptu bonus episode previewing the NYC premiere of Sophie Fiennes’s documentary film Acting (come join us for it), which follows the celebrated theatre company Cheek by Jowl through their production of Macbeth. Andrea is speaking with Sophie about this in NYC on April 11th.

Andrea introduces the ideas of director Declan Donnellan, whose book The Actor in the Space (2024) helps us get some insight into the film.

Subjects: the philosophy of performance to spatial cognition, presence, and what it means to be truly alive on stage, or anywhere.

More on Acting here. Buy tickets for this special event here.

Perhaps this is a good moment to revisit the lessons of Macbeth.

The Film: ACTING

Directed by Sophie Fiennes, Acting is a documentary that goes inside Cheek by Jowl’s work preparing for a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It captures actors working in real time — grappling with space, presence, and the paradox of playing a scripted role with full spontaneity.

Screened at The Quad Cinema, West 13th Street, New York City.

• Sophie Fiennes — filmmaker and director →Acting

• The Quad Cinema, NYC → Venue

Some ideas from the sketch given

1. Performance is part of being human

Donnellan argues that performance is not artifice but the operating system of human life. We begin performing as infants — mirroring our mothers, learning language through imitation and play. Performance is how we come to know ourselves and others.

Human beings are actors. It is hardwired into our DNA... Performance is not merely a habit that humans keep repeating across millennia, languages and cultures. It is more fundamental than that. Performance is what it is to be human. It is the operating system for life. — Declan Donnellan

2. The paradox: hardwired but still hard

If performance is natural, why is acting so difficult? Because the moment you become self-conscious about performing, the naturalness evaporates. The task of the actor (and the acting teacher) is to recover the spontaneous, relational aliveness that we have as children — but now deliberately, on demand, within a scripted structure.

In real life, most people can make a good stab at improvising their allotted role of father, mother, nurse, lover... but give them a script and their performance rapidly dies. There is a series of black marks on white paper, a dead thing, and we need somehow to bring it to life. — Declan Donnellan

3. Space, not feeling, is the actor’s material

Donnellan’s central shift: instead of asking ‘what does this character feel?’ or ‘what does this character want?’, ask ‘what space does this character inhabit, and what are they trying to avoid within it?’ The more dangerous and dynamic the space, the more alive the actor becomes.

There is no acting — only reacting to the space. — Declan Donnellan

The flower metaphor: a child picks a flower and takes it home, but it wilts. The flower’s life was not in itself but in its invisible context — the soil, the water, the light. Strip away the space and the life goes too. The same is true of a character on stage.

4. The Purloined Letter — attention as method

Donnellan uses Poe’s story as a metaphor: the police tear apart a room looking for a letter that is pinned in plain sight on the wall. Actors (and people in life) often become so desperate to create an effect that they fail to notice what is already present in the shared space between them.

• Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) → Read free

5. Working with the audience’s cognition

Sophie Fiennes extends this spatial thinking to filmmaking. She describes her goal as leaving enough space in the work for the audience to encounter themselves — not just the subject. The viewer’s own cognition becomes part of the material.

You are working with the cognition of the audience. For them to have enough space in it to encounter themselves in the work, in what they see — as much as what the subject is. — Sophie Fiennes

6. Creative risk and ‘the addiction’

Fiennes describes her filmmaking practice as a kind of addictive risk-taking — the willingness to shoot without knowing exactly how it will work, trusting that the edit will reveal the form. This requires acting as if you have nothing to lose, even when you do.

You need to tell yourself it doesn’t matter... We have to act as if we’re free, even though we know we’re not. — Sophie Fiennes

7. Against meaning-seeking

Both Fiennes and Donnellan resist the demand that art ‘mean’ something. Donnellan: Shakespeare doesn’t mean anything — he shares life with us. Meaning-seeking leads to anxiety and abstraction; the living thing resists reduction to a code.

If you start looking for meaning, you’re going to get terror, frightened, and depressed... The play’s alive. It doesn’t have meaning. Shakespeare doesn’t mean anything. He shares life with us. — Declan Donnellan (paraphrased in episode)

8. Kinetic editing vs. spatial filmmaking

Fiennes reflects on a shift in contemporary cinema toward impact cutting and kinetic editing — driven partly by lighter cameras that move more freely — at the cost of the spacious, contemplative filmmaking she values. Bigger, heavier cameras created a different relationship to space.

Philosophical & Theoretical Connections

4E Cognition

The host connects Donnellan’s spatial approach to 4E cognition — the view in cognitive science and philosophy that mind is Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended rather than confined to the brain. Acting as reacting in space maps directly onto some embodied accounts of perception and action that have often been discussed here.

• 4E Cognition — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy → SEP entry

Martin Buber — I and Thou

The host invokes Buber’s concept of the I–Thou relation: genuine encounter in which the self is not prior to the relation but is constituted by it. Being truly present to another person — as an actor must be present to their scene partner — is what Buber calls an I–Thou moment, as opposed to the distanced I–It relation.

• Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923) → Wikipedia overview

Heidegger — Being-in-the-World

The episode also touches on Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world (Dasein): we do not exist as isolated subjects who then encounter a world, but are always already embedded in a world of meaning and relation. This resonates with Donnellan’s insistence that the character does not exist in a vacuum — it only lives through its situatedness in space.

• Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World — Stanford Encyclopedia → SEP entry

Macbeth: An Overview

The author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely considered the greatest writer in the English language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he spent most of his career in London, where he was a founding shareholder of the Globe Theatre and a leading member of the King’s Men acting company. He wrote approximately 37 plays and 154 sonnets across comedies, histories, and tragedies. Macbeth is one of his four great tragedies, alongside Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.

• Shakespeare — Folger Shakespeare Library → folger.edu

• Globe Theatre, London → shakespearesglobe.com

When was Macbeth written?

Macbeth was written around 1606, during the reign of King James I of England (also James VI of Scotland). It is one of Shakespeare’s shorter tragedies and was almost certainly written to flatter the new king: James was Scottish, obsessed with witchcraft (he had written a book on the subject called Daemonologie), and claimed descent from the historical Banquo. The play draws on Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) as its primary historical source, though Shakespeare altered the facts freely.

• Holinshed’s Chronicles — British Library overview → bl.uk

The plot

The Scottish general Macbeth encounters three witches on a heath who prophesy that he will become Thane of Cawdor and then King of Scotland. The first prophecy is immediately fulfilled. Macbeth writes to his wife, and together — with Lady Macbeth as the driving force — they murder the visiting King Duncan in his sleep at their castle. Macbeth takes the throne.

But guilt and paranoia consume him. Afraid of another prophecy — that his friend Banquo’s descendants will be kings — he has Banquo murdered too. Banquo’s ghost appears at a banquet, visible only to Macbeth, who begins to unravel publicly. Lady Macbeth, meanwhile, is destroyed by her own guilt: she sleepwalks, compulsively trying to wash imaginary blood from her hands (’Out, damned spot’), and eventually dies, likely by suicide.

Macbeth revisits the witches, who offer new prophecies that seem to promise his safety. He becomes a tyrant, ordering the massacre of his rival Macduff’s entire household. But the prophecies are riddling: ‘no man of woman born’ can harm Macbeth — until Macduff reveals he was born by caesarean section. And the witches’ warning that Macbeth is safe ‘until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’ is fulfilled when Malcolm’s army camouflages itself with branches cut from the forest. Macduff kills Macbeth. Malcolm is crowned King of Scotland.

The themes

Macbeth is a concentrated study in the psychology of ambition and what happens when a person crosses an irreversible moral threshold. Key themes include:

Ambition and its corrupting force. Macbeth is not a naturally evil man — he is a celebrated soldier, admired and loyal. His tragedy is that he allows ambition (stoked by the witches and Lady Macbeth) to override his conscience. Shakespeare shows with precision how each transgression makes the next one easier and more necessary.

The gap between action and consequence. Macbeth’s famous soliloquy ‘If it were done, when ‘tis done...’ (Act I, scene vii) captures his desire for a crime that could be sealed off from its consequences — if only the act could be contained in time. The play is relentless in showing that it cannot be.

Guilt, imagination, and reality. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are destroyed not by punishment from outside but by their own imaginations. Macbeth sees a dagger before the murder and Banquo’s ghost afterward. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking is a physical enactment of a mind that cannot rest. The play suggests that the moral imagination is inescapable.

Appearance vs. reality / equivocation. The witches’ prophecies are all technically true but systematically misleading. Lady Macbeth instructs Macbeth to ‘look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.’ The entire play is threaded with the terror of things not being what they seem — which is part of what makes it so uncanny to perform and watch.

Love and power. Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most complex female characters. She invokes spirits to ‘unsex’ her — to strip away the feminine qualities she associates with weakness — so she can carry out the murder. The play raises uncomfortable questions about the gendering of ambition and violence, and about what happens when those roles are swapped or shared.

Fate vs. free will. Do the witches cause Macbeth’s downfall, or do they merely reveal a future he chooses? The play never quite resolves this, leaving open whether Macbeth is a victim of supernatural forces or of his own freely chosen desires.

Why it matters for this film and conversation

Macbeth is an extreme case of everything Donnellan’s method addresses. Macbeth cannot — must not — see himself as a murderer; he is a man of conscience trying to survive inside an action that has destroyed his conscience. The rehearsal scene captured in the film and this transcript makes exactly this point: the actor cannot play ‘I am a murderer’ — he has to find the space of a man in total internal conflict who cannot afford to name what he is doing, even to himself.

The play is also about performance in the deepest sense: Macbeth performs normality (the gracious host, the grieving king) while concealing atrocity. Lady Macbeth performs strength while collapsing inwardly. And the witches perform prophecy that is really a mirror for Macbeth’s own desires. The whole play is about the gap between the performed self and the interior one — which is precisely what Donnellan’s work deepens and opens.

The scenes in the transcript

The clips heard in the episode come from Act II of Macbeth, the night of Duncan’s murder, and Act I scene vii (Macbeth’s soliloquy before the deed).

‘It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st goodnight’ — Lady Macbeth, Act II scene ii. She is waiting alone while Macbeth kills Duncan. The ‘fatal bellman’ is a reference to the town crier who rang a bell outside condemned prisoners’ cells on the night before their execution.

‘He is about it. The doors are open and the surfeited grooms do mock their charge with snores. I have drugged their possets...’ — Lady Macbeth, Act II scene ii. She has drugged the guards. The word ‘possets’ means hot spiced drinks — a nightcap. Her clinical efficiency here is chilling.

‘Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it’ — Lady Macbeth, Act II scene ii. This is the hairline crack in Lady Macbeth’s resolve — the one moment she admits a limit to what she can do. It is crucial dramatically: she is not a monster, and that makes her arc more terrible.

‘If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly’ — Macbeth, Act I scene vii. This is Macbeth’s soliloquy immediately before the murder, weighing whether to proceed. The repetition of ‘done’ is one of the most analysed passages in all of Shakespeare — the desperate wish that an act could be both accomplished and over, closed off from time.

• Macbeth — full text (Folger Shakespeare Library) → Read online

• Macbeth — No Fear Shakespeare (modern English alongside original) → sparknotes.com

• Macbeth — Wikipedia → Wikipedia

Transcript

Opening — Macbeth rehearsal fragments

[Rehearsal clips from the film Acting — Cheek by Jowl’s Macbeth]

It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman which gives the stern’st goodnight.

He is about it. The doors are open and the surfeited grooms do mock their charge with snores. I have drugged their possets, that death and nature do contend about them whether they live or die.

Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.

My husband... had done the deed.

Sophie Fiennes on space

Sophie Fiennes: We’re always in a space. We don’t exist outside of space. So that’s why it’s such a huge component to our understanding of, and to how we are in, the world.

On creative risk

Sophie Fiennes: It was like really taking a risk — taking a risk with how to shoot it, to trust that you will learn in the edit. You just have enough knowledge that it could work, that this might happen.

Sophie Fiennes: And he said, ‘Sophie, the problem with you is that you are an addict.’ And I thought, do you know what — you’re right. I’m addicted to the kind of creative risk. Because of the discovery of it.

Sophie Fiennes: I completely dissolve. I disappear. It’s a kind of weird thing. It’s like you forget yourself totally, because everything is what you are seeing.

Sophie Fiennes: It’s really important that you always feel you have nothing to lose. You need to tell yourself it doesn’t matter. We have to act as if we’re free, even though we know we’re not. It gives you that sense of not holding back.

On kinetic editing vs. spatial filmmaking

Sophie Fiennes: It’s lost slightly now, by the forces of kinetic editing and the pressure to turn things around quickly. You get more of this kind of kinetic, fast filmmaking that works on impact cutting. It’s less about space. When cameras were bigger and heavier, they just didn’t move in the same way. There’s a kind of archaeology and anthropology of filmmaking that’s related to the cameras.

On working in the dark

Sophie Fiennes: You are like someone in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. It’s dangerous insofar as you are going to risk — you start in the dark, really. But you get caught into the threads of possibilities and you get woven into it gradually.

On the audience’s cognition

Sophie Fiennes: I think about the audience so much. I want them to have the experience of their own cognition happening. That’s the beauty of what I try to say to students I work with: you are working with the cognition of the audience. That’s the other end of the scale of care. For them to have enough space in it to encounter themselves in the work — in what they see, as much as what the subject is.

On meaning

Sophie Fiennes / Declan Donnellan [paraphrased]: Worrying about meaning is not really useful after a while. Otherwise you start to get into really crappy things like ‘what’s the meaning of life?’ — and there isn’t one. If you start looking for meaning, you’re going to get terrified and depressed, because it doesn’t work like that. The play’s alive. It doesn’t have meaning. Shakespeare doesn’t mean anything — he shares life with us. What does your child mean? Does your child have meaning? Not really. Does that mean your child is meaningless? No. The child doesn’t exist in a world of meaning or non-meaning. It’s a living thing. And that’s what a great work of art is.

Andrea’s introduction — bonus episode

The quotes Andrea reads are from here.

Andrea: Hey everyone, it’s Andrea. This is a little special bonus because I’ll be talking with Sophie Fiennes tomorrow night after I get to watch her wonderful film Acting. I hope you’ll all come and join us.

Andrea: I’ve always loved Sophie Fiennes’s work. She made one film called Artificial Things which I honestly think may be the most beautiful short film I’ve ever seen — or definitely top five, for a lot of reasons. I find her work very moving and have for a long time, so it’s a real honor.

Andrea: For those of you who love theatre, this is just gold. And for those who don’t know anything about theatre, it’s still wonderful.

Andrea: The film is about a theatre company called Cheek by Jowl, in London. And about Declan Donnellan, who’s written some really amazing books: The Actor and the Target and The Actor in the Space. As someone who’s always talking about space, these books mean a lot to me and I am still learning.

On performance as human nature

Andrea: Think about performance in your own daily life. Think about something you did today — making tea, catching someone’s eye on the subway, telling a story you’ve told before but telling it slightly differently because you’re talking to someone who hasn’t heard it. These things aren’t performance in a pejorative way, as if you’re being false. There is a way we’re acting and performing even as a way of being more honest than we can be. Language itself and speaking can be a kind of performance.

Andrea: There’s something about being alive and expressing and relating to people that already has something of acting in it. And sometimes you are your most authentic in that space. That’s a holding-paradox kind of idea, I think.

On Declan Donnellan

Andrea: He’s one of the most celebrated theatre directors in the world. Ralph Fiennes worked with him — I think that was his very first job. A lot of actors have worked with him and really seem to appreciate and respect him more than just about anyone. Jeremy Strong has famously said that his book is his most favourite thing as an actor.

Andrea: Donnellan and his partner Nick Ormerod who is really a co-director and author in many ways founded Cheek by Jowl in 1981. They’ve worked in over 400 or 500 cities. They’ve won all sorts of awards — the Golden Lion at Venice, the Stanislavsky Prize in Moscow. I think they both trained to be a barrister — a lawyer — but ended up in theatre. Quite an interesting person.

Andrea: His first book, The Actor and the Target, came out in 2002 and went viral partly because Jeremy Strong swears by it. It’s been published in about 15 languages. His second book, The Actor in the Space, came out in 2024 and that’s the one this film grows out of, which also itself partly grew through some wonderful conversations on Not True But Useful with Lucy Dawkins.

Key quotes from The Actor in the Space

Declan Donnellan (quoted by Andrea): Human beings are actors. It is hardwired into our DNA — from toddlers playing make-believe to old-age pensioners sharing jokes in the pub. We need to perform. It’s an essential part of being human. Acting starts early. We use it to develop our relationship with our mothers. We watch her and wonder, mirror her smiling, repeat the sounds she makes. We learn things by performing for her, and she performs for us. Does that mean we are lying to each other? Of course not. Performance is woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s as natural and important to us as breathing. Performance is not merely a habit that humans keep repeating across millennia, languages and cultures. It is more fundamental than that. Performance is what it is to be human. It is the operating system for life.

Declan Donnellan (quoted by Andrea): In real life, most people can make a good stab at improvising their allotted role of father, mother, nurse, lover, and so forth. But give them a script and their performance rapidly dies. This is the basic problem we face in a rehearsal room. There is a series of black marks on white paper — a dead thing — and we need somehow to bring it to life.

Declan Donnellan (quoted by Andrea): When scientists search for life on other planets, they don’t look for living organisms themselves. Instead, they search for the conditions that life needs — in our universe: water, oxygen, carbon. They find life not by searching for life itself, but by looking for a space that could support life. All life depends on context — ultimately on the space around it.

Declan Donnellan (quoted by Andrea): Actors sometimes plunge past this first crucial step and instead valiantly throw themselves into acting — meaning each word sincerely, desperately, deeply, indicating the slightest nuance and pouring energy into the performance. They can exhaust themselves — and indeed the audience — and yet it still feels dead. The issue is rarely that they have failed to discover the right feelings. The problem is simpler: the actor hasn’t done the imaginative work to create a new and different space for the character. No effort can be alive if it happens in a vacuum. It’s not just that the character is dead. The character hasn’t even started to exist.

Declan Donnellan: There is no acting — only reacting to the space.

On ‘acting’ vs. ‘action’

Andrea: At some point you’re acting — but that’s action. You’re immediate, in your body, acting. And that’s why the word ‘acting’ is so beautiful. Which is also the name of this movie that Sophie Fiennes made with Cheek by Jowl. And just to relate it to philosophy for a second: I was thinking about Buber — I and Thou — this genuine relation that precedes and constitutes the action itself and the self. Where ‘I’ is coming into being and having this encounter with ‘thou’. And that is itself that reacting in space, as space, to space. That’s being plugged in.

Andrea: If you’re in New York City, come say hi — starting at 6:45 at The Quad on West 13th Street. I’ll put notes and links in the show notes. Hope you’re acting with your full presence and plugged in today, wherever you are. Alright, bye.

Macbeth rehearsal — Donnellan and actor

Actor: I’m a murderer. It’s difficult.

Donnellan: It is. But the difficulty is Macbeth’s, not yours.

Actor: I mean — I imagine very few people who murder people actually see themselves as being murderers.

Donnellan: Exactly. He’s up there. He needs to get away from people. He doesn’t want to confront more people.

Actor: But they’re not people — they’re another aspect of you. Like some people talk to mirrors. Or the person you talk to in the shower.

Donnellan: The audience you see — they’re an enormity. They’re in the space. They’re changing. They’re going through the thresholds and they present a huge predicament. The predicament is: they think you are mad and that you are deceiving yourself. They become the thing to convince. That’s really important. Convincing them is not a side issue.

If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly. — Macbeth, Act I scene vii

About Sophie Fiennes

Sophie Fiennes is a British filmmaker known for essay films that inhabit art, philosophy, and performance from the inside. Her work is immersive and rigorously composed — she doesn’t observe from a distance but rather co-creates a space with her subjects that is caring and unique. Andrea describes her work as having been among her favorite documentaries.

Acting: Come see this film in NYC this week: https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/acting/

Artificial Things (2014) — a dance film with Stopgap Dance Company, described in this episode as potentially ‘one of the more beautiful films’ the host has ever seen

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) — essay film with philosopher Slavoj Žižek

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) — documents the creation of a new piece by German industrial artist Anselm Kiefer

Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2017) — Fiennes spent more than a decade with the titular icon

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (2022) — a collaboration with her brother Ralph Fiennes, translating to the screen his stage production and performance of T. S. Eliot’s poem

Cheek by Jowl

Cheek by Jowl is one of the world’s most acclaimed itinerant theatre companies, founded in London in 1981 by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod. Over four decades they have toured to more than 500 cities, performing in multiple languages and winning major international prizes including the Golden Lion at Venice and the Stanislavsky Prize in Moscow.

Le Figaro described Donnellan as ‘Irish in origin, English in education, European in culture and universal in thought.’

• Cheek by Jowl official site → cheeky by jowl.com

• Nick Ormerod — co-founder and set designer → Company profile

Notable alumni include Ralph Fiennes (his first professional role), Martin, and many others.

Declan Donnellan

Declan Donnellan trained as a barrister before turning to theatre. As artistic director of Cheek by Jowl he has been one of the most influential directors of the past forty years. He is known for a rehearsal approach centered on space, reaction, and aliveness rather than psychological intention or emotional technique.

• Declan Donnellan — Wikipedia → Wikipedia

Source of the Quotes Andrea reads

The Actor and the Target (2002)

Donnellan’s first book, translated into over 15 languages. Focuses on what blocks actors and how to unblock them — the ‘target’ being the living object of attention that the actor responds to. Jeremy Strong (Succession) has publicly credited it as one of the most important books in his life, which brought it to wider attention.

The Actor in the Space (2024)

Donnellan’s second book, published in 2024, is the direct companion to the film Acting. It extends his thinking from the target to the space — arguing that aliveness in performance depends entirely on the actor’s relationship to the space they inhabit, not on internal effort or emotional intensity.

The central insight: you cannot find life by looking for life. Just as astrobiologists search for the conditions that support life (water, oxygen, carbon) rather than life itself, an actor must create the conditions — the space — in which a character can begin to exist.

In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play, “instinct”, we explain nothing; if we call it “mind” or “will” we say too much. However we may regard it, the very fact that play has a meaning implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself.”

— Johan Huizinga Homo Ludens

Full post and podcast at:

Can serious play be a portal to wisdom?

Holding Paradox Through Play and Embodied Practice: This is an episode about puzzles and care. Andrea has a conversation with puzzle maker Jason Robillard (StumpCraft) about how puzzles cultivate new ways of being and seeing, holding paradox by repeatedly joining opposites only to realize they were never quite opposites but mirror-like pieces of a coherent whole. Robillard describes his wooden, laser-cut puzzles built from Canadian fine art, with uniquely drawn organic pieces, symbolic elements, sensory “shock,” and sometimes multiple valid placements that challenge assumptions of a single solution. He connects puzzling to embodied experience, attention, OODA loops, cognitive biases, and navigating complexity through “alternating base camps” and Goldilocks destabilization, relating this to career upheavals and identity change. The conversation emphasizes care as community glue and highlights values embedded in his work—curiosity, creativity, integrity, and generosity—plus a resonance with David Whyte’s poem “Start Close In.”

In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” Johan Huizinga

00:00 Paradox Through Play02:36 Podcast Intro Puzzles Theme07:54 Meet Jasen And His Work09:20 Puzzles Holding Paradox11:38 Designing Artful Wooden Puzzles14:47 Embodied Senses And Touch16:58 Career Shift Into Puzzles23:24 Serious Play And Homo Ludens25:50 Moving Childhood And Safety31:57 Base Camps And Destabilization34:30 Polarity Recipes Beyond Flatland38:47 Designing Paradox Puzzles39:48 Many Solutions Mindset42:54 Puzzles as Conversation47:53 Liminal Times Need Puzzles56:00 Sensemaking and OODA Loops01:00:22 Home Gifts and Community01:03:17 Four Values in Design01:11:29 Start Closer In Practice01:13:39 Care Belonging and Vulnerability01:18:52 Where to Find Jasen01:19:57 Closing Poem Reading

StumpCraft Amazing Instagram Photos and Videos of Games

Jasen’s writings: Releasing the Muse

Jasen on LinkedIn

OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act)

Homo Ludens by J. Huizinga

“StumpCraft is a jigsaw puzzle workshop based out of Calgary, Alberta. They design and locally craft laser-cut, heirloom-quality puzzles showcasing the best of Canadian fine art. StumpCraft started making puzzles in 2017 and has been steadily growing ever since.

They view puzzles as:

* a vehicle for widespread art appreciation;

* meditative downtime from a distraction-heavy culture;

* brain exercise; and

* most of all fun!

Art for StumpCraft puzzles is selected in collaboration with local artists across Canada, as well as estates, museums and art galleries with a deliberate focus on Canadian fine art. Puzzles are then designed and crafted to enhance patrons’ puzzling experience through the use of premium puzzle materials, printing technology and a carefully considered proportion of contextual whimsy pieces.

Care for the pieces - focus on the whole.Challenge chaos with creativity, generosity, wonder and integrity.Find your piece of the puzzle.

About Jasen, the Founder

Jasen Robillard was always a closet creative: piano lessons from age 5, art projects galore through high school and eventually an interest in digital photography through early fatherhood. He long denied the creative muses, focusing instead on a “secure” engineering career until it dried up in 2017. As is often the case, necessity proved to be the mother of invention…When his professional hours began to dwindle in 2016, Jasen started designing and prototyping his whimsical puzzles which were inspired by other wooden laser-cut puzzles he had enjoyed years earlier. He noted a lack of wooden puzzle availability in Canada, as well as a severe lack of deliberate focus on Canadian fine art. After a year of playful prototyping and a clear end to his engineering-focused career, Jasen decided to launch StumpCraft formally in 2017.Since the formal launch, StumpCraft has experienced growth and praise as more and more fans share their love of puzzles with friends and family members. StumpCraft observed a noted jump in market exposure in 2019 via market attendance outside Calgary, namely very warm receptions at Circle Craft in Vancouver and Signature’s Butterdome Christmas Market in Edmonton. Despite our inability to attend more shows in 2020 and 2021 due to covid-related restrictions, the puzzle craze expanded our community of fans even more. StumpCraft was also the recipient of the 2021 Made in Alberta Award in Games & Leisure, exposing us to an ever more rapidly expanding fanbase. Jasen personally uses his craft as a way of learning more about Canadian fine art, history and the subject matters underlying the themes of the puzzles he designs. He is also passionately committed to using StumpCraft as a catalyst for generosity. Ultimately as an artist and puzzle designer, his aim is to expose puzzle fans to more Canadian art, to provide great moments of engaging contemplative low-tech activity, and to provide a vehicle for social connection between friends and family.

FEATURED ARTIST COLLABORATIONS

StumpCraft works with artists to bring their works to life. Some of the artists we have worked with in the past have included: Kari Lehr, Reilly Fitzgerald, Lori Anne McKague, Pam Weber, Sharon Lynn Williams, Julie deBoer, William Flett, Steve Driscoll, Sam Millard, Mandy Budan, Amy Shackleton, Janet K. MacKay, Steve R. Coffey, Kim Smith, Tom Thomson, Travis Anderson, Roland Gissing, Serge Dube, Monique Munoz, Melissa McKinnon, and plenty more.”

“We make the future in the present, when we show up. Don't surrender it to those who would destroy it.” Rebecca Solnit

Three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee (Oxford Research Group) Scilla Elworthy reflects on 70 years of work with conflict and war, beginning at age 12 after seeing tanks in Budapest, then being sent to help concentration camp survivors. For her, the lesson of a lifetime, the one she feels is urgent right now, centers on “the vital importance of the heart for all we’re trying to address and change in today’s world.” It might seem too intimate or uncomfortable (at least for some of us) to talk about love and the heart so openly, but if we can sit with that difficulty, we may find power opening beyond the threshold.

TRANSCRIPT

Scilla Elworthy on Love and Philosophy

[00:00:00] Why do we, humans who have so much knowledge now and so much information and, and we know so much, why do we go on killing each other? And what’s wrong with the people out there, uh, in the parliaments and governments to keep this absurd way of trying to solve disputes down to who’s got more guns? Yeah, I think so.

I think it action was very important for me. I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear to see, I couldn’t bear to laser about and read books and be a student just when. People were suffering so much. Um, and it was, it was their suffering in their being their heart. That hit my heart. So it, although I didn’t really wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but that’s what stirred me.

I couldn’t really do anything else. I couldn’t get a job as a [00:01:00] secretary or. Well, I was a student, but I couldn’t do the normal things while all this was going on. it’s, um, listening with the heart so that it becomes a process of one heart, hearing another heart, and I can do that, but my heart will tell me what this group of people need.

Really need, and it might be food, but it might be, it might be a hug. It might be to be cuddled. It might be to know that their father was going to come back or whatever it is, and the heart will give me that information or give me the right question to ask them. ‘cause my inner critic was, was a massive thug for a long time.

You know, I, I didn’t do this well enough. I’m not clever enough. I didn’t take enough risks. All that that goes on in, in our heads. And that was really the tip off, I think, to get more into my heart because my heart doesn’t do that. Neither does he owns the [00:02:00] heart has, if we listen to it, it has. Profound.

Good sense, practical, good sense. It will say that. Not bad, just go into your heart and say, could you hold, could you handle this for me, please, my heart? ‘cause it hurts. And gradually it took. Decades, but I realized that what people really responded to and how we got, got the job done, so to speak, of connecting and building things together and all that was if I took off my persona and my achievements and all that and just confessed to, oh, you know, I’m feeling, I’ve got a bad feeling at the moment and I, I need to just.

Digest it for a minute before we open this conversation to your mind. You know it in a single flash of a second, you may be offered an opportunity which may lead to saving someone’s life or whatever it is. You know, [00:03:00] it, it’s it, the heart justice, such a guide. It’s astonishing. The power is the responsibility and the.

I think the, the, the key is the moment to be present in the moment where you become aware that you have the power to contribute something.

Andrea Hiott: Hey everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is a podcast which is trying to remind us that care is in our very cells. Love is radical, and it’s what really all of us are doing here and are trying to help one another.

Do. It’s about philosophy, but not just something that we study. It is about academic philosophy. Quite often we have academic philosophers and neuroscientists on the show, but it’s also about how we live and philosophy as a practice, as our living.

And today is one of those episodes. It’s with a woman who has been nominated for

The Nobel Peace Prize three times a woman named Scilla [00:04:00] Elworthy.

Mostly for her work with the Oxford Research Group, where she was, for example, negotiating nuclear weapons with policy makers and basically trying to bring more peace into the world, more care into the world.

And this conversation is. A sort of demonstration, I think, of what she brings and the philosophy of the heart. She’s been doing this a long time. She’s 82 years old as you’ll hear. She founded Peace Direct in 2002. She received the Nano Peace Prize in 2003, the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2020. Another Peace Prize, the GOI Peace Award in 2023.

And the list goes on. She also founded The Business Plan for Peace, and she’s an author and she’s written a lot of wonderful texts and books such as The Mighty Heart, how to Transform Conflict, and the Mighty Heart in Action. I’ll put links to all her work in the show notes, but. I wanna keep this intro just a little bit shorter because what it’s really about is said so well in the conversation itself, [00:05:00] and I think it speaks past a lot of the noise that many of us are hearing right now.

The kind of noise that makes us wanna turn off all our devices. Kyla Scanlon just wrote a wonderful piece about how we’re sort of being manipulated by our very desperation, the creation of desperation, and then sort of things getting sold to us to help us control that desperation. But it’s a very vicious, ridiculous loop. It’s connected to competition and. We could reframe through care and that’s what I have been talking about a lot and I hope we can do, and I think so many people are already doing, Silla is definitely showing us how to listen to the heart as a philosophical text in a way, or a philosophical bodily friend that we all have within us, and that is not weak. I hope we can all remember that what we give our time and energy to is making whatever we’re giving our time and energy to stronger. So what do we wanna give our attention to? That’s really the question. [00:06:00] Who and where and what does not make us feel desperate and helps us help others not feel desperate.

Those are the real powerful forces right now. Let’s find them. Let’s help each other, make them, let’s be them. I think this, today’s guest has been doing that for 70 years, as you’ll hear, and as she says, it hasn’t been easy. It’s not that she’s done it perfectly or always had the answers, but at 82, she knows that the heart is strong.

And I think we can listen to that and we can learn from her. And I just wanted to share this with you today. With that in that spirit and about how literally sometimes the most powerful person and the most powerful presence in the room is one that’s listening. So thank you for listening to this, and I hope wherever you are today, you fill some heart and you fill your heart, and you ask your heart for help, and your heart responds.

Okay. Bye. Hello, Scilla So nice to have you on Love and Philosophy. Thank you so much for honoring us today and coming on the show.

Scilla Elworthy: It’s a great pleasure.

Andrea Hiott: there’s so many things about you [00:07:00] and your work that are very moving for me, but I thought I’d give you a chance first, just what would you like for people to know who might just be hearing your name for the first time off to start?

Scilla Elworthy: Oh, I would like to transmit a message, um, to the people who watch your show about the importance of the heart today for everybody and for the world. Um, after working with conflict and war for 70 years, um, I started when I was about 12 and I really feel that, um. The, um, the importance of the heart today is grossly underestimated and the more one works with the heart, the more you feel the power of it.

So I’d love to come to that, but I’m happy to, um, respond to any questions you have about, uh, how I got here [00:08:00] and what, what I feel is important today.

Andrea Hiott: Well, let’s think about that young girl. So were you about 12, 13, early teens when you saw the tanks rolling in to Budapest? Is that the moment that you sort of

Scilla Elworthy: Yeah.

You’ve done your homework.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you.

Scilla Elworthy: Um, yes, I was, um, brought up on a very, um, safe farm north of, uh, London. Um, my folks were farmers and I. Um, was at a school where they opened our eyes to what was going on in the world. And, uh, that started me watching TV and listening to the radio. And I saw the, um, the.

Uh, uprisings that were going on, uh, all over the, um, eastern part of Europe. And, um, I wanted to go and, and do something and help. Um, and [00:09:00] so I’ve always been, um, moved by, um, killing, suffering and. Um, I had a mother who had been, uh, uh, very active in the First World War looking after wounded soldiers and, ‘cause my father was in the first World War fighting and she, um, was a great traveler, but she would do anything to, uh, see what she, how she could help with the debris of war and the, and the casualties.

And she was driving. Uh, wounded soldiers from an airport outside Edinburgh where she lived, um, to the hospital to get them, um, attention and so. And she took me traveling very early on. Uh, she took me to Kenya in Africa when I was eight or nine. And, uh, so I got a, [00:10:00] a habit of travel from her. And, uh, she was also very inquiring, very interested in other people, and I’m infinitely grateful to her for making me unafraid of, um, opening a conversation with anybody.

Andrea Hiott: So when you, when she saw you reacting this way to the tanks rolling in, I, I, I think you wanted to go, go there. Did you start packing your suitcase or something? You seemed to have been,

Scilla Elworthy: I did

Andrea Hiott: action oriented.

Scilla Elworthy: Well, I watched a TV program when my parents were out and I was so shocked by what was happening that I went upstairs and started packing my suitcase and my mom came in and said, what are you doing?

And I said, I’m going to a Budapest in Hungary. And uh, she said, what for? And I said, there’s something so horrible going that on there. I have to go now. I think I was 12. And she said, don’t be so

silly.

And, uh, [00:11:00] and I burst into tears. And so then we opened a conversation, which was one of many that we had about, um, the fact that she had got herself involved in the casualties of the first World War.

And I now wanted to do my bit and insisted that I had the right to do that. And, uh, eventually she got it and well, she, she was quick to pick it up and she sent me off to work in a holiday home for concentration camp survivors. Um, uh, not very far from where we lived. And I sat on the grass in the peeling potatoes and listening to their stories of what had happened to them in the Second World War.

Um, the concentration camps, the, uh, appalling suffering, and there was something so. Honest and natural in the way that they, they weren’t humongous at all. They [00:12:00] were just telling me what happened. And I was so moved that I started to keep a diary about it and write about it and got more and more interested in, into the debris of war and the terrible tragedies that war brings about.

And often the people who have started the wars. Have no idea of what they do to people’s lives. Um, and whether they are people in destroyed villages who have to flee for their lives or whether they are the children and relatives of soldiers who get killed. And, and it just, the whole thing seemed to me to be so absurd.

Why do we, humans who have so much knowledge now and so much information and, and we know so much, why do we go on killing each other? Um, and what’s wrong with the [00:13:00] people up there, uh, in the parliaments and governments to keep this absurd way of trying to solve disputes down to. Who’s got more guns?

Andrea Hiott: I wonder how you, at that age and also through your life, were able to hold that. one, one thing I love reading your work and listening to you is it’s so bodily and you’re, you’re really. Present and you’re really feeling it with your body. But I think this can be very hard for people too, or, I wonder if it was hard for you when you were young to notice this violence and this pain, when you were writing or you were already processing it somehow, as Living body, not just it, it just seems very immediate in the way that you noticed it. But I often hear it presented as a kind of abstract problem.

Scilla Elworthy: no, it wasn’t abstract at all. It was in my heart straight away. My [00:14:00] heart hurt, um, and I couldn’t avoid the information that I know. As a teenager knew was available and somehow the, the more I could find out about it, the more able I felt to do something about it.

So I went aged, I dunno, 17 or 18 to Algiers where there was a war going on in Algeria. And then from there progressed down through Africa, through the Congo, which was at war at the time. Um, and all the way down to South Africa, which as you know, is a very violent country. And, um, and I stayed there for quite a long time, um, working with, mainly with starvation because, um, although South Africa is a very rich country, the, at the time when I went [00:15:00] there, um, in my early twenties.

There was starvation right through the so-called homelands where black people lived and not much was being done about it. So I couldn’t help but get involved with a, um, a nutrition co company, which distributed very basic high nutrition food stuffs to people. Um, in conflict areas that who really needed it, and that felt very real and practical.

And you saw that, you know, you helped people save their own lives. Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott: So you were acting I know you probably didn’t think about it like this at the time, but was that your way of dealing with that pain or that

Scilla Elworthy: Hmm.

Andrea Hiott: Because even as a young kid, you immediately went to pack your suitcase and then, you know, you’re so active in such, it’s, there’s so much action immediately.

Do you think that was the way you [00:16:00] were able to handle being able to handle that, that difficulty?

Scilla Elworthy: Yeah, I think so. I think it action was very important for me. I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear to see, I couldn’t bear to laze about and read books and be a student just, um. When people were suffering so much. Um, and it was, it was their suffering in their being their heart.

That hit my heart. Um, so it, although I didn’t really wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but that’s what stirred me. Um, I couldn’t really do anything else. I couldn’t get a job as a secretary or. You know, be a stu, be a, well, I was a student, but I, I couldn’t do the normal things while all this was going on.

Um, and in some cases going on, not very far away. So I, I wanted to roll [00:17:00] up my sleeves and say, you know, let’s do something. And that’s where in South Africa, I started various organizations to help distribute food stuffs to starving people, but also to get education going for young black children. And um, which was very little, little attended to, um.

And it’s much better now. Much, much better now.

Andrea Hiott: So much has changed since the apartheid. It’s good to remember that things have changed. I also seem to remember it was during this time you started to notice how powerful women are in the community.

Scilla Elworthy: They were, they were, and using minimal, minimal tools or supplies, they didn’t have mobile phones. Of course, in those days, they had no really no communications at all, except verbal.

Um, and song, song was very important, um, but also to help them [00:18:00] find ways to help themselves, so set up systems whereby they could access, for example, milk powder. Because many of them, through starvation or whatever, their milk had run out and they had small children and they were desperate. So milk powder was terribly important.

It wasn’t very tasty or nice, but it was better than nothing. And so we shipped huge quantities of milk powder out to the so-called. Um, reservations where the poorest of the poor were sent away to staff, and, um, and that was, that felt good. Um, and to, to go and see how, um, helpful it was for them. Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott: Taking care of the women in that way? Sort of, you saw it reverberate, I guess, if the women were [00:19:00] stronger or,

Scilla Elworthy: yeah. The women were, were aching to take part and. F almost elbowing their way into, um, organizations, um, trying to be part of white organ, white run organizations who were often very un unfriendly to them.

Um, they were trying to get the kids educated that was high on their agenda because they knew that being educated and and literate was the way to. Uh, free themselves and free their families from starvation.

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. In, in all this action oriented, you’re acting so much, but I feel like you were also listening.

Do you remember when you started cultivating that sort of power of actually. You know, listening this, I,

Scilla Elworthy: I think that’s become really central to my life and my work and I, any young people, uh, wanting to start and [00:20:00] do that kind of work, I encourage them to spend a lot of time really listening. ‘cause most of the time you’re a very good listener, but most people aren’t they thinking what they’re going to say or how to make a clever remark or tell their story or whatever it is.

But the more we can actually. Listen to what’s really going on for somebody who’s in trouble, particularly somebody who’s, um, suffering in some way and really, really tune into what it is they need, then we can be far more help, far more quickly, um, than just getting carried away with the emotions or the story, but to get listen in such a way that you get below the narrative and into.

What is really needed? ‘cause it might be food, it might be water, but it might be safety, you know? Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott: [00:21:00] And it sounds like this kind of listening isn’t only listening to words. Is it a, is it a, it’s not just, have you noticed there’s different sorts of language that you. That you listen to?

Scilla Elworthy: Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s, um, listening with the heart so that it becomes a process of one heart, hearing another heart. And that’s when you learn what it is you can do that’s most useful. If you’re just living, listening with your head, you’re making plans, you’re writing budgets, you’re doing all that, which is great and it needs doing, but when you tune in to somebody in trouble with your heart.

Really listen to them. They will open up, uh, um, a treasure chest really of what it is they really need. Um, and it may be that they want to bury their grandmother. Uh, properly, or, and they might not tell you that straight away, [00:22:00] but, um, if, if, if they know that you are attuned to them, not just with your mind, but with the rest of you, they will reveal to you much more quickly what Disney really need.

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. What do you think of as the heart for some people listening? This, there’s so many different people coming from different walks of life, and so heart is gonna meet so many things to so many people, coaches, philosophers. So how do you think of heart? I’ll tell you how I’m imagining when I hear you say it.

Mm-hmm. I’m imagining kind of your whole body open from, from this most vulnerable place. Um. In a way, but I’m also imagining that as a kind of strength, like a kind of, almost like a, you know, that sort of protects you in a way at the same time that it’s the most vulnerable opening. That’s kind of the image that comes to mind when I hear you say it, but maybe you can help us understand that word.

Scilla Elworthy: You, you push it really beautifully, Andrea. That’s very much the same way as [00:23:00] I see it. Um, but it took me. Yeah, I, I’m sad in a way. I mean, my heart was obviously going out to people in trouble, but now, um, and over the last say 20 years, I’ve, um, used my heart. If it’s not pretentious to be a sounding board for action, my brain will say, oh, you know, go and raise some money, or.

And I can do that, but my heart will tell me what this group of people or children really need, really need. Um, and it might be food, but it might be. It might be a hug, it might be to be cuddled. It might be, um, to know that their father was gonna come back or whatever it is, and the heart will give me that information or give me the right question to ask them, [00:24:00] you know, are you worried about your dad?

Um, yeah, I’m, I don’t think he’s gonna come back, you know? Then you know, more, more, more detail about what’s really necessary.

Andrea Hiott: That’s very powerful because I was thinking of you when you’re a little kid and it sounds like you’re very much, Seeing yourself in what’s around you, if that makes sense. Not, not demarcating so much in terms of I’m separate from what’s around me.

I’m not saying you’re thinking that way, but you know, you’re, that immediate action and needing to take place feels very much as if what you see happening is part of you. Mm-hmm. and that can be very overwhelming and difficult, right. When you feel all of that so much, and I can imagine that some people would’ve gone, would’ve tried to, you know, there’s these things of, put it, create a tower of books around yourself or create some kind of shells around yourself.

not go directly even deeper into the [00:25:00] action. also what comes up when you were talking is, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been feeling lately, the more you can just be present, you, you are in a communication with ever with whatever’s around you without even you don’t have a choice, if that makes sense.

it’s

Scilla Elworthy: certainly mysterious. It’s certainly mysterious, but. The thing that I’ve learned is that, um, we need, those of us who choose to do this kind of work, need to nourish ourselves.

It can run out of juice and then you do bad work. You do stupid things, so. I’ve found, and it might be different for different people, but for me, being in nature is vital. I need to touch and be in trees and walk on the grass and, but also having a garden is an absolute, um, it, it, it’s like medicine. Um, uh, it doesn’t matter [00:26:00] how big it is, it can be a little tiny plot, but growing something.

For yourself and for other people is utter nourishment because you are getting your fingers dirty. You’ve got your hands in the earth, you’re planting the seeds and you forget everything else. Then you forget everything. And so, um, it sounds a bit, sort of from. Uh, privilege, but a little, tiny plot of land or, uh, um, even a window box outside your window, um, to put things in, to plant things in that will grow and surprise you and you can eat them or love them or whatever.

And that is, even if it’s on small scale. But growing a garden with other people who are underprivileged is, um, often a, [00:27:00] a soul restorer for them. It restores their soul because they can be useful, they can plant things that will grow and feed, feed other people. Um, and they, uh, they sort of expand when they can.

When they can do something with the earth, um, and the Earth responds of course.

Andrea Hiott: that’s exactly what I was trying to get at with that communicative thing. You know, communic, there’s some that, that’s a perfect example of it, of participating in this together, you know, with the people around you too.

I wonder when you, when you noticed that, or when you realized that kind of, was that early on too, that you. How did you take care of yourself? I’m still kind of thinking about this young woman who’s in these situations, and how did you find to, did, did you find that early on to go out into nature and restore yourself or

Scilla Elworthy: one way or another?

Yeah, but I don’t think I learned it tangibly. I don’t think I [00:28:00] thought, ooh, you know, I’ve been traveling for three days. I better get out and, and get my feet in a stream or something.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but I, I just gradually learned that if I didn’t. Um, if I didn’t get out and feet on the ground, um, I would be more heady and less useful.

Um, I, I, I’m, um, um, workaholic often, and I have spent many years in my thirties and forties. I, I’d done laptop, literally all typewriter as it was then, just trying to get through. Files of paperwork and starving myself. And it took me until my forties and fifties that, and having children helped, um, because they would say, oh, we’ve gotta get out, mom.

You know, and, um, and they would lead away. [00:29:00] And so. It became almost, um, a part just daily part of life to spend at least some time with vegetables and digging and that kind of thing.

Andrea Hiott: It’s so wonderful. It’s also that bodily presence that I feel in your work too, of really, being bodily engaged with whatever’s around you.

But also there’s another part of your work was, which is this. Know thyself, self-inspection kind of in a way that right now we hear we’re not supposed to do. I mean, from, from tech people at least. There’s been some interviews recently where they say, don’t inspect, don’t self-inspect, just act. And I don’t hear you saying that either.

So I’m wondering how that arose for you too. because I feel like for you, that’s also this heart and this body, it’s not. In the head either, but I, I wonder from your point of view, how that fits with what we’re talking about.

Scilla Elworthy: Well, it was in the head a lot. I mean, I had the privilege of having, being able to [00:30:00] have a, an intensive course of, um, what you might call, um, well therapy with, with a knowledgeable older woman and.

Uh, and, and I read a lot of psychology and, uh, and I was deeply curious, but then, um, I realized that, um, it, a lot of it was staying in my head and driving my head, and I didn’t, I didn’t realize it categorically for a while, probably until my fifties. I think menopause was very helpful in that, that I.

Really got more into my body. And, um, so, um, being able to translate what’s, um, troublesome out there into what can my small [00:31:00] gifts be able to contribute to that situation or that person. And, um, um. It was, your questions are very good ‘cause they’re helping me really think about, um, what, what grew this passion for understanding the connection between my brain and my heart and my body.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, because you feel very rooted and present in your body now with the heart. Mm-hmm. But I’m thinking, you know, I’m half your age, so like how, how do we get there and how do we focus and, and, and grow into that? but also I’m thinking about the work you’ve done, which is very significant and has a lot to do with you.

You have to introspect, but you’re also having to be present with people who are maybe not introspecting, maybe very difficult, wanting very different things. And you know, you talk about his bullying sometimes I think in a way, or, or this violence, right? This kind of regression, I guess [00:32:00] I’ll bring that word in, that can be very hard to face right with the heart, this vulnerability and this listening.

and I wanna bring that up a little bit. Also, the idea of the inner critic, which you’ve talked about, and I don’t know if those are connected, but that, that way that we criticize ourselves or we see others criticized. And how that can become a kind of false power or bully. Uh, I don’t know if I’m, if that’s making sense or what that brings up for you

Scilla Elworthy: because my inner critic was.

Was a massive thug for a long time. Um, you know, I, I didn’t do this well enough. I’m not clever enough. I didn’t take enough risks, you know, all that that goes on in, in our heads. Um, and that was really the tip off, I think, to get more into my heart, because my heart doesn’t do that neither does yours or anybody.

Heart doesn’t. The heart has, if we listen to it, it has profound good sense, [00:33:00] practical, good sense. It will say, you know, that not bad. Um, and um, so the heart is just incredibly good at information when we need it. Um, now I’m not answering your question, which was, um, how do we. Well, how do we deal with self-criticism for one thing?

Um, I think self-criticism is not a bad thing. If we listen to it with a kindly ear, you know, not, um, I’ll beat myself up again, which a lot of us do. Um, sometimes we try and hide it, but we do beat ourselves up and that’s very so dis disenabling that it’s, it needs to be dropped. It needs to be dropped.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you for saying that. I think that’s gonna be a relief for some people just to hear that you don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to even criticize yourself for criticizing yourself.

Scilla Elworthy: Just let it [00:34:00] go when it comes up. Oh, I didn’t, oh my God, I forgot that. Or I didn’t tell that person that, or I hurt them.

Just go into your heart and say, could you hold, could you handle this for me, please, my heart. ‘cause it hurts. And um. That gives me shivers actually, just even to say that,

Andrea Hiott: that gave me too

Scilla Elworthy: Yeah, because the heart will say, no problem, just leave it with me and, and off you go. Um, and the heart can digest, it can digest shed legs of it and, and leave relieve us of self.

Mutilation and self-harming in whatever way we do it because we just do an injustice to what our good, healthy, heartfelt [00:35:00] motives are.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it’s more like the garden or that communication of that natural communication, that there’s something nourishing in what you said and generous, which is like a garden, when you care for it.

I guess I wanna see how that, because this feels to me very related to even this very high level sort of work, trying to help, you know, negotiate about nuclear weapons or whatever, all these big topics that could seem far away from that. it, it feels, I wonder about your journey, or if this was connected in you finding a way to connect with your heart and listen, and also that being a way you could be present with other people in these other situations.

Was that happening at the same time or?

Scilla Elworthy: Well, it was also, um, daring. Do, do you know that expression daring?

Andrea Hiott: Do Yeah. Throw yourself in kind of,

Scilla Elworthy: yeah. I, I, I thought, um, and partly because I was brought up with, um, people in my family who’d been in the army and so on, I thought, well, I can do that. You know, I can talk to [00:36:00] generals and they’re not such big deal.

Um, and, um. I always had this sort of chutzpah, you know, chu? Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah.

Scilla Elworthy: And um, I thought, well, I’ll have a go, you know, I’ll, I’ll ring up that, um, kernel or admiral or whoever it is and, and nearly, I mean, it’s hard to get through to them sometimes ‘cause they always have armies of people protecting them.

But if you have a good reason and a good question you can normally get through, but, um. Once, um, once I witnessed what happened, when I took, for example, I took a delegation of British Army, Navy, and, uh, air Force, very senior people and some of the bureaucrats who supported them and supplied them with their ships and stuff.[00:37:00]

Um, and I. I always treated these men with great respect. I didn’t despise them because I knew they were many, doing many honorable things, uh, honorable work. And I took them to meet their opposite numbers in China. And uh, at first it was a row of Chinese, one side of the table, very stiff. And me and my admiral from generals on this side and.

We needed to break the ice. We needed to show that we were humans because the Chinese were very nervous. ‘cause if you put a foot wrong as a senior person, uh, or any person in, in China, and you didn’t do what was expected of you, you gave a wrong response. You, you really had a hard time. And so my job was to really try to, um, to, um.

I was gonna say moist in [00:38:00] the atmosphere to soften it to um. To say yes, we have some very serious things to discover and dis and discuss, but meanwhile, it would be just lovely if each of you would talk about one of your children or the child that you are very fond of for a minute or two. And if you have a photograph on you, great.

You know, show it. And we and our delegation did the same and that just changed everything. Um, and keeping it short, the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes out of a three hour meeting, but the conversation over coffee was completely different. Did you really have a, how is your blind grandchild now? Or, um, you know, how does your wife feel about you doing this work or whatever it was?

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that’s just beautiful. I love that. It’s such a shift of perspective. And actually it was something I was going to ask you about is, like [00:39:00] how you, how you don’t condemn people in your head or in your heart. If you’ve come into a room with someone who’s very dangerous or who you know has hurt a lot of people, you know, according to whatever story you’ve been told, but you just showed me actually, it’s kind of.

somehow shifting out of that current situation, right? Almost what you did is a little bit, like you said, something about surprise earlier or you like surprise and there’s some kind of element of, of doing what you wouldn’t expect one to do or something. Does that make sense? Kind of. Yeah.

Scilla Elworthy: Absolutely. Breaking the mold, um, as much as you can, doing something unexpected, natural human. Um, and, um. Uh, let’s see. It’s, it’s like, um, like sending a little message on a, on a dart or an arrow over into the other. Consciousness, which is quite, maybe quite protected, and, [00:40:00] and people on their best behavior and worried about making a mistake and, and sending a little message.

I’m, I’m human too. And or talking about a mistake you made, um, or even. In one instance, I had stumbled on the stairs coming up, um, to the meeting room. Um, and, uh, and before I said my name or anything, um. In my self introduction, I said, well, I’m the person who nearly fell down your stairs and it was my fault.

It’s not your stairs fault, or something like that. And, um, and it was sort of, um, it was allowing people to be a little, um, foolish or whatever. Um, and, and it, it all helps to get there. Humanness into the room.

Andrea Hiott: That reminds me again of what I was [00:41:00] seeing earlier when you were talking about the heart, because you’re opening the vulnerability in a way.

If you’re talking about something like a mistake you made or your children, there’s a sense of opening the vulnerability, but actually doing that is such a strong thing to do that you be, you are stronger and you appear stronger. So it’s a very interesting way of, of both of those being there.

Scilla Elworthy: Well, it’s about, um, allowing, uh, the humanness to come into what would otherwise be a very stiff and best behavior type of type of meeting. Um, and there’s something else. Um, yeah, what, what I encourage people to do at mealtimes, um, was to, to tell their neighbor something about their children or their, Uh, uh, ne nephews and nieces or schoolchildren that they knew. Um, and that opened up lovely conversations between them and somebody from a completely different culture.

Andrea Hiott: You know what’s so beautiful about that too is [00:42:00] that not only do you see other people as having families and with these histories and, you know, tangled up gardens, so to speak, but you also remember yourself that way.

Scilla Elworthy: Hmm. ‘cause

Andrea Hiott: I, I think that’s very important, right? Sometimes we go into these situations and we don’t, we try to leave all that behind and we’re a different presence then.

Scilla Elworthy: That’s quite right. We’re, we’re our, um, uh, CV or our, you know, our achievements and so on, which often get in the way of, uh, an actual connection.

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. Is this what you mean by power with, because. You talk about power with, which I think is really interesting. It’s not just the power to do something or the power over something, but this kind of, which is often the way we frame power. But I see or hear in your work that, that there’s something about power.

is this community gardening or something?

Scilla Elworthy: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s, um, it was my way of getting over, [00:43:00] um, my, um, childhood and many of us have this and, and, and in my teenage, um, trying desperately to build myself up to be important and. Knowledgeable and effective and all those things. And I, I really was a nightmare I think, doing that.

Um, because, um, it, it was all producing a picture, which wasn’t necessarily true at all. Um, and it was my image of myself. And I was very fond of it. Um, and it was about how I dressed and how I looked and all this. Um, and um, gradually, oh, it took decades, but I realized that what people really responded to and how we got, got the job done, so to speak, of connecting and building things together and all [00:44:00] that was, if I.

If I became more naked, if I took off my persona and my achievements and, um, all that and just confessed to, oh, you know, I’m feeling, uh, I’ve, I’ve got, um, a bad feeling at the moment and I, I need to just digest it for a minute before we open this conversation. Do you mind? And, and, and, and do that or say, um, uh, I’m, I’m.

Feeling bad this morning because I forgot to phone X and it could, we possibly interrupt the proceedings where I just make a quick phone call and it’s annoying for people, but you know, if it’s really important you, you can, you can make the space for it.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much for saying that. I think this is what we really need to hear right now and what isn’t happening or what we’ve, we don’t think of that as powerful.

[00:45:00] When you are, when you experience that in the moment you feel the room change and there’s real power, if you can almost just be present with what the case is and state it.

Scilla Elworthy: That’s it. What, what’s the immediate, um, and. The immediate mean might mean you’re desperate to go to the toilet.

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. Which makes a big difference about your stress and frustration.

Scilla Elworthy: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: But I think it’s very hard to do because of all that stuff you just said, because we build up this, um. Way we wanna be seen by others. And often when you’re gonna say the thing in the moment, it’s not gonna really fit to that story. You know?

Scilla Elworthy: Exactly. You’re destroying your carefully built image and, uh, and, and, you know, giggling a bit like a child.

Andrea Hiott: Because there’s a kind of ecstasy in it or a kind of, um, I think it has something to do with that surprise element or that I was trying to bring [00:46:00] up and this, this not necessarily working from a blueprint, you know?

Scilla Elworthy: That’s right. And, and, um, being a bit badly behaved or, um, you know, not following the rules.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, letting yourself, I mean, of course you wanna fill into what is the real case, not just do that to be kind of crazy, but, you know, feeling into that it’s a powerful place, I guess, is, is the pain.

Scilla Elworthy: It has to be in the mo you, you’ve nailed it because it’s not, you can’t come in with something, oh, I’m going to do that to shock them.

No. Um, it has to be in the actual moment, um, or. You know, taking a, a, a, a fellow female guest aside in a frightfully important meeting and saying, have you got your tam packs? You know,

Andrea Hiott: these kind of things. You know, they, they, they, they make a difference. I think we get sort of prompted to do that.

We, we have this feeling, oh, I should say this because it’s so real and often we don’t [00:47:00] listen to it. We let it pass. But if you can start to learn to listen to those moments of, of Yeah. I don’t know what it is. Prompting from a real place, it’s amazing what they can lead to. uh, that makes me think of all the women that you talked about in your examples too, because, the women who you talk about is courageous. they’re also coming from places where they have to be in the moment and not just taking things, down.

Have you, have you found that as a source of real change, I guess in the world too? Is. Not just, yeah, I don’t know what it is exactly except I’m, I’m trying to think of what enables people to act in the moment with courage, even when their life is maybe at stake. Is it connected to this heart in the way to bring it back to that Oh

Scilla Elworthy: yeah, it is because your heart knows what the moment needs and it’s, I, it is taken me all my life to get there, but.

If I don’t know what is needed in a room [00:48:00] or a, a meeting with somebody, I have to just breathe three or four times quietly into my heart, and my heart will say that, you know, talk about that or ask for what that person needs in terms of that. And it’s, it’s, it’s. Um, it always reveals something more real than any sort of polite conversation would reveal.

Andrea Hiott: That’s that real power and energy, that real change comes from, which you speak of a lot in your work. I guess before. Yeah.

Scilla Elworthy: You know a lot about it, or you wouldn’t be interested. You wouldn’t have arranged our conversation today. In this way and ask me these questions because you, you already know all this, which is lovely.

Andrea Hiott: I’ve felt it and I want others to feel it. I think it’s similar to how I feel that in you too. You know, you, you’re, [00:49:00] you really want to give this and mm-hmm.

Scilla Elworthy: And

Andrea Hiott: I really want people to realize the real power in this, and it’s a different kind of way of living. I think

Scilla Elworthy: it is. Um, because it’s very momentary.

You know it in a single flash of a second, you may be offered an opportunity which may lead to saving someone’s life or, um, their marriage or whatever it is. You know, it, it, it’s the heart. Justice is such a guide, it’s astonishing. And just, just to take that fraction of a second, ah, you know. I mean, what Princeton prompted me just now to turn the conversation back to you.

I wasn’t doing it to be polite. My heart took me there and said, you know, this is a really interesting woman. Talk to her, not just as an interviewer, but talk to her as the really, uh, profound woman [00:50:00] she is. And, and it was a joy.

Andrea Hiott: Well, thank you.

Scilla Elworthy: Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott: I really appreciate you and your work, and I think you just kind of demonstrated it, which is, is is really very beautiful that you, you did that because just thinking of that little girl that we started with, there was a kind of responsibility to it.

And I think that’s what I feel in this is that this power with, and this sharing and this, in a good way, right? Uh, the power is the responsibility, if that makes sense.

Scilla Elworthy: Mm. Yes. The power is the responsibility and the, I think the, the, the key is the moment to be present in the moment where you, where you get, uh, become aware that you have the power to contribute something.

Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And you definitely have, and I wanna say thank you. And I also, before we go, wanna offer if there’s any experience of love or any. Anything at all that you wanna [00:51:00] share, uh, before we, before we end for now? Um,

Scilla Elworthy: an experience of love.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I always ask at the end because it’s love and philosophy, so you don’t have to say anything, but I always wanna give people a chance if anything comes, if anything arises.

Uh,

Scilla Elworthy: I spent the weekend with my nephew and his wife, who are both gardeners and both holding down very big jobs in, in, um, institutes as well. And we went, um, into their garden and they, they were just telling me what was growing there and the connection that there was between the four of us just touching the leaves or smelling the, the, the.

The, um, vegetables or whatever was growing was so, um, deeply connecting and it, um, it, it was a source of nourishment. Um, [00:52:00] it doesn’t really answer your question, but it was just, it moved me a lot that it was, um, it couldn’t have been pre-thought or prearranged. It was just there.

Andrea Hiott: That’s actually really beautiful.

It reminded me of when we were just going back and forth in our emails, I said something about is love of the skeleton or the scaffolding? And you were like, no, love, love is the, is the change. Right? It changes what we perceive, which changes what we do. And I love that you did that because it made it alive again.

I was trying to make it into some structure.

Scilla Elworthy: Hmm.

Andrea Hiott: And you put it into the life. And I think that example you just gave really says that, that love, that kind of love that you just express change is what’s possible, right? That the perception of that garden or that plant, and also you know what it’s doing.

So thank you for that.

Scilla Elworthy: Well, thank you, Andrea. It’s, uh, been a terrific conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’d, I’d really like to learn a bit more about what you do.

Because you’re asking to [00:53:00] me, you’re asking all the pertinent questions of today now. and unless we wake up ourselves and everybody we can touch now, I fear for the future.

Andrea Hiott: Me too. And that’s why I was so connected to your message because it. It’s such a strong message that I, I can’t imagine we need anything more right now.

I really want us to come into that caring and that body and that power of that not as a, it’s soft, but it’s so powerful it’s a whole different way of being in the world. Right. I don’t want people to miss it.

Scilla Elworthy: Good, good, good. Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot.

Andrea Hiott: I really appreciate it.

Scilla Elworthy: Okay.

Andrea Hiott: Bye.

One quick thing before I go. I want to say thank you to all of you for listening, but also one of you in particular who’s been a listener for a long time, first on YouTube and now like many people just wanting to kind of have audio experiences because the internet has gotten so crazy. And for that same reason, I don’t [00:54:00] wanna say your name out loud, but I received an email from you at some point over the past few months, but I cannot find it because my, our inboxes.

I’ve just gotten completely insane and I’m not really sure what happened, but I, I can’t find the email. I know you sent it and please send it again. I’m very sorry that I couldn’t respond. I’ve just gotten, it’s just email has just gotten outta hand and even the, uh, inbox got full, which I didn’t even know could happen, and I, I just don’t know anyone else.

Also, if I’ve missed your emails. That’s because I’m a little overwhelmed at the moment by correspondence and work, but I’m trying my best and it really means a lot to me. All of it. Always. Please know that. Also, I wanna tell you about an event that I’ll be doing in New York City on April 11th with Sophie Fines, who is a wonderful filmmaker.

Always been one of my favorite. And if you’re in New York City, come. Watch her wonderful new movie and say hi. I’ll be talking with her about her movie and I’m really looking forward to [00:55:00] that. I’ll put some information in the show notes about that. So would love to see you there. And also I wanna thank Mark, mark McCartney of what is a good life because he is the one who introduced me to Silla.

He put us in contact thinking we would’ve a nice discussion, and he was right. So. Lots of gratitude to Mark and check out his work if you get a chance. All right. Bye everyone.

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of the mind, mental states, and consciousness, and their relationship to the physical world — its main variants include dualism (mind and body are distinct substances), physicalism/materialism (mental states are ultimately physical), functionalism (mental states are defined by their functional roles), eliminativism (folk mental concepts are radically mistaken), and phenomenology (emphasizing the first-person structure of conscious experience, which is what we talk about most on this show). Is philosophy of mind something you want to know more about? If so, you could start here.

Facing reality with clear eyes but without desperation.

Three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Scilla Elworthy reflects on 70 years of work with conflict and war, beginning at age 12 after seeing tanks in Budapest and being sent to help concentration camp survivors. She describes how others’ suffering “hit” her heart and led her to action in Algeria, the Congo, and South Africa, where she worked on starvation relief, shipped milk powder, and supported education, noting the central role of women in community resilience. Elworthy emphasizes “listening with the heart” to discern what people truly need beyond narratives, and explains how turning to the heart helps release harsh self-criticism. She also shares practical self-nourishment through nature and gardening, and recounts using humanizing, vulnerable moments—like discussing children—to soften high-stakes meetings, including military dialogues in China, as a way to build connection and “power with” others.

"Triple nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with Oxford Research Group to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics from 1983-2003. Founded Peace Direct in 2002, awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003, the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2020, the GOI Peace Award in 2023. Founded The Business Plan for Peace  based on her latest books - The Business Plan for Peace: Building a World Without War (2017), The Mighty Heart: how to transform conflict (2020), and The Mighty Heart in Action (2022)."

Find all Scilla's work here.

Kyla Scanlon's post mentioned here

00:00 Why We Still Kill00:55 Action Over Apathy01:07 Heart As Guide01:39 Inner Critic Quieted03:23 Podcast Introduction07:03 Meet Scilla Elworthy08:17 Tanks In Budapest11:32 Early War Witnessing14:33 Africa Conflict Journeys17:47 Women Leading Change19:52 Listening With Heart22:29 Defining The Heart25:31 Nature As Nourishment29:35 Self Inspection To Embodiment32:41 Taming The Inner Critic34:04 Heart Led Self Compassion35:54 Daring Diplomacy With Generals36:49 Breaking The Ice With Humanness42:48 Power With Vulnerability47:24 Courage In The Moment51:07 Love In The Garden53:03 Closing Thanks And Future Fears53:55 Listener Note And NYC Event

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Love & Philosophy begins from the premise that care is not a feeling we add to life, but the orientation that makes life possible, and philosophy is not only something we study, but something we live.

Here is the book.A little video noting the death of 20th-century philosopher Jürgen Habermas at age 96. It offers a brief tribute by recommending his short, dense book The Future of Human Nature as a good entry point for new readers. Andrea explains that the book wrestles with difficult, paradoxical questions about the good life, what kinds of beings humans are and will become, what we owe one another, and how much control we should have over the future through the engineering and enhancement of life—questions that can also be considered in relation to AI. It highlights Habermas’s focus on when a “gift” of life becomes a decision made for someone, and his emphasis on receiving others as unknown, irreducible “otherness,” while acknowledging that his arguments face criticism and inviting possible group discussion.00:00 Habermas Remembered00:06 Best Intro Book00:31 Big Questions Inside00:51 Engineering Life01:05 Gift Or Design01:23 Receiving The Other01:58 Tech And Consciousness02:25 Tribute And FarewellObituary of Jürgen Habermas

“There are two questions. One is: how do you change your mind? And a prior one, increasingly, is: how can you get yourself into a position where you are willing to change your mind? What do you have to give up, and what do you gain?”

“What does it mean to stumble into your life’s work? Do you think most of us stumble into our life’s work, or do we choose it? And what does that have to do with the connection between the way our bodies are moving through the world — all our experiences, everything everyone said to us, all the books we’ve read?”

“It’s easy to let the days go by without really thinking about things. When you asked me to do this, I found myself genuinely engaged, really interested, wanting to go back and think more. It made me realize that the questions I was interested in throughout my career are still interesting — and I’d like to think about them more.”

“Something can be staring you in the face, but you can purposely focus your attention straight ahead and not look. People are doing that more and more these days.”

Welcome to a new season of Love and Philosophy. We’re so glad you are here.

This episode is with philosopher Janet Levin.

Andrea Hiott hosts philosopher Janet Levin, newly retired after 40 years at the University of Southern California and the department’s first tenure-track woman hire, to discuss a life in analytic philosophy and debates about mind and consciousness. Levin recounts stumbling into philosophy at the University of Chicago with Ted Cohen and later studying at MIT amid figures like Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and advisor Ned Block, and writing the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on functionalism. They contrast dualism and physicalism, explain metaphysics as inquiry into what exists and what is possible, and examine thought experiments such as Descartes’ arguments, Jackson’s knowledge argument, and Chalmers’ zombie case. Levin holds that our feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body, primarily the brain and central nervous system. The conversation closes on teaching, women in philosophy, and how openness, identity, and social forces affect willingness to change one’s mind and pursue truth.

The Road Taken APA Talk 2020 Pacific Division Dewey Lecture: Listen here

Janet Levin

Time Stamps:00:00 Big Questions on Mind Change01:47 Consciousness and Zombies02:11 Welcome and Season Setup03:22 Meet Janet Levin07:31 Stumbling Into Philosophy08:25 Why Minds Change Slowly11:10 Synthetic Hippocampus and Extended Mind12:57 Chicago Origins With Ted Cohen18:02 MIT Era and Cognitive Revolution22:01 From Behaviorism to Functionalism26:17 Defining Physicalism and Supervenience29:23 What Is the Mind Really34:46 Cognitive Phenomenology Debate37:31 What Metaphysics Studies40:02 Classic Metaphysics Puzzles43:15 Free Will and Determinism46:34 Descartes and the Self51:41 Conceivability and Zombie Arguments58:40 Dualism’s Causation Problem01:11:40 Type B Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts01:22:46 Water Lightning Mind01:24:15 Identity Theory Pushback01:27:51 Physicalism Explained Broadly01:30:05 Phenomenal Concepts Introspection01:32:17 Introspection As Skill01:34:44 Defending Armchair Philosophy01:37:22 Armchair Near Window01:39:10 How Minds Change01:43:55 Bias Identity And Windows01:45:35 Women In Philosophy Shifts01:50:28 Grad Training Mentorship01:54:43 Teaching Confidence Bloomers01:57:42 Love Retirement Future Questions02:02:12 Host Outro Waymaking

Here is the cartoon Janet mentions:

Giving Page

Longer Show Notes and PDF of APA talk

Janet Levin

Janet is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, where she was a longtime faculty member in the School of Philosophy. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from MIT and her B.A. from the University of Chicago.

Much of her work engages with one of the hardest problems in philosophy: how to account for the subjective, felt quality of conscious experience within a broadly physicalist framework. She has also written the entry on functionalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the view that what makes something a mental state depends not on its physical makeup, but on the functional role it plays in a larger system. Levin holds that our feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body, primarily the brain and central nervous system.

In her 2022 book The Metaphysics of Mind, published by Cambridge University Press, Levin surveys the major contemporary theories of mind — including dualism, type-identity theory, role functionalism, Russellian monism, and eliminativism — assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each rather than advocating for a single view.

Her other published work spans topics including phenomenal concepts, the epistemic gap between physical and mental descriptions, modal intuitions, the Molyneux problem, and the methodology of armchair philosophy.A few of the themes discussed:

—the importance of thought experiments

—what matters in life as it progresses and how our questions still matter all the way through the shifts and changes

—how to understand why our experience of thinking feels so different from what we have traditionally called ‘physical’

—what it means to change our minds and how that happens

—the importance of mentorship and helping students early to feel free to experiment and find their voice without pressureLevin shows us that thought experiments, offer a paradoxical blend of what Andrea calls rigorous ambiguity. They challenge us to consider possibilities beyond empirical testing, thus enriching our understanding of concepts that are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, which Levin mentions here, like consciousness and free will. In classic cases, such as Chalmers' "zombie" scenario or Jackson's thought on "Mary the color scientist" these experiments push the boundaries of what we consider knowable.While some critics argue that these mind games lack practical utility, Levin defends them as vital exercises in critical thinking. She and Andrea discuss how they nurture a form of intellectual navigation that helps us understand and engage with the world in more nuanced ways.This conversation is pretty heavy in the philosophy, but it is also about what matters in a life and by the end, it comes to a place of real care, encapsulating an exploration of life's work through the lens of philosophy. Hiott starts with such questions: Do we stumble into our life's work, or is it a conscious choice? How do our experiences shape who we become, and how might our philosophical endeavors reflect and influence our life paths?Levin's career journey and the talk here is living document and testament to the confluence of personal experience and philosophical inquiry. Starting from an accidental enrollment in a philosophy class to becoming the first woman hired on a tenure track in USC’s philosophy department, Levin embodies how personal and professional growth can be intertwined with intellectual curiosity and philosophical commitment. (Andrea also ‘accidentally’ got into philosophy after thinking she would get a degree in marine biology and then go to law school, though how that was going to be possible is its own thought experiment.)All this relates to (and comes down to, in the end) questions about the ability to change one's mind, a process entwined with one's identity and experiential learning.

Levin emphasizes the importance of creating environments conducive to intellectual openness, allowing for mind change that moves us closer to truth—if indeed truth is discernible.The conversation transitions into the significance of holding contradictions, or "holding the paradox," a skill crucial to philosophical thought and a necessary condition for progress. This echoes in broader societal shifts, such as evolving attitudes towards same-sex marriage and the way women have come into philosophy, demonstrating how openness to new perspectives can redefine normative thought.Towards the end of the dialogue, Levin touches on the aspect of mentorship and teaching, pivotal in shaping future philosophers and thinkers. Teaching, she notes, is not merely about imparting knowledge but involves learning from students and creating a mutual path of discovery. Levin's reflection on philosophical inquiry post-retirement underscores philosophy's enduring value, both as a tool for intellectual engagement and personal growth.Some of the heavier stuff in the middle includes debates on dualism versus physicalism and the nature of consciousness. In the end, what we understand is that thinking about our lives and how we come to know and change them matters. When we do philosophy, both individually and collectively, we partake in a timeless enterprise that not only seeks to solve intellectual puzzles but also to illuminate the pathways of human existence. Wherever we are and in whatever way feels right for us, the philosophical approach to thought experiments and life itself remains a journey worth embarking upon.

Join us in building a care collective!

TRANSCRIPT:

Metaphysics of Minds: Janet Levin and a Career in Philosophy

Janet Levin: So there are two questions. One is: how do you change your mind? And a prior one, these days it seems, is: how can you get yourself into a position where you are willing to change your mind? What goes into that? What do you have to give up, and what do you gain?

You need to have all that stuff going on in order for there to be conscious experience. So my view is that if that’s true, then whatever is supposed to be going on to have conscious experience can be explained by appeal to what’s going on in the brain, in the endocrine system, and maybe what’s going on in the world.

All of that stuff — physical — needs to be taken into account. But no matter how much information of that sort you have, no matter how closely these events may be correlated with these feelings — these feelings of what it’s like to be in pain, to be perceiving red, to be thinking that Paris is beautiful — that is not going to emerge from your knowledge of all the stuff that’s going on. It’s still going to seem separate. And this is where the phenomenal concept strategy comes in.

How do you get yourself to change your mind if it seems like you need to? And how does identity play into it? And how can forces that are there — and increasingly powerful — get in the way of real knowledge and changing your mind for the better? I mean, getting closer to the truth. People have said that the truth doesn’t matter. I think it does, but then you have to say more clearly why.

Couldn’t you imagine what Chalmers calls a zombie — a creature that is just like a human being, maybe just like you, neurophysiologically, but doesn’t have any conscious experience, that there’s nothing that it’s like to be that creature? Can you imagine that?

Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and I’m so glad you’re here.

What does it mean to stumble into your life’s work? Do you think most of us stumble into our life’s work, or do we choose it? And what does that have to do with the connection between the way our bodies are moving through the world — all our experiences, everything everyone said to us, all the books we’ve read, where we are in the world? What does all that have to do with who we meet, who we become, and who we — perhaps after we retire — look back and think we were and what we’ve done?

Those are questions that I think are hiding in a lot of philosophy, even though they’re rarely examined or put exactly like that, because they’re questions that are human and that we’re all wondering about and trying to figure out as we go through this life. I just wanted to start with them, because they’re worth keeping in mind as we listen to this conversation, which will get quite analytical and deep into philosophy. We can remember that a lot of that was towards trying to figure out some of these bigger questions that matter on a very deep level.

Today my guest is Janet Levin. She has just retired from a 40-year career at the University of Southern California, which is one of the great schools of philosophy — and of neuroscience, actually. Janet was the first woman hired into the philosophy department there for a tenure-track position. That was just 40 years ago, and that was her.

There’s a lot of work going on at USC now relative to the body — like Damasio, who is at USC and working with the endocrine system. Janet is someone with a deep conviction that the world is physical. And I think those words — physical and mental — are starting not to mean the same thing they used to. I think we’re all starting to understand them a bit differently.

Because of that, even though Janet is definitely a physicalist and a materialist coming out of the analytic tradition, she now describes herself more as holding that feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body — primarily the brain and central nervous system. She’s coming from a really great analytic tradition that we haven’t spoken of a great deal on this podcast. We’ve had a few analytic philosophers on, but we haven’t really talked about the analytic tradition directly. So I wanted to start this season getting a little analytic — but also getting a little personal, talking about Janet’s life and philosophy, because those things — analytic philosophy in the US, at least, and her life story — are in a way intertwined.

So we’re going to talk about consciousness, physicalism, the zombie experiment, the nature of mind — we’ll walk through some of those thought experiments. And what’s wonderful is that we end up in a really human place, a place of care, and relative to what really matters. Also a little bit relative to those questions I started with. Listening back, I found it really touching, and I’m very thankful that we somehow got to that place.

I also think her life is one worth celebrating. I wanted to start with a kind of celebration of life, of her persistence and curiosity — and also what I like to think of as her ambiguous precision. I mean that as a compliment, and I said it to her too. She’s very good at what I think of as holding the paradox — holding a lot of things at once and not sticking herself in a box, even though she has certainly called herself a physicalist and all of that. She’s also very open and is really trying to figure things out. That is the best kind of philosopher. She opens paths and worlds for people.

She’s been part of a time in history that I just want to note: she trained at the University of Chicago, and then she was at MIT in the mid-1970s — a pretty electric time. There was a man named Jerry Fodor there who came up with something called the Language of Thought — LOT — and was developing a representational theory of mind. Very interesting stuff. Even though I hold a different view of representation, his work has genuinely informed my thinking. He was a really wonderful writer and philosopher, and Janet was there when he was creating all of this.

She was also there when Ned Block was starting his career. If you haven’t heard of him, most people know him because of his distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness. He was actually her PhD supervisor — she was probably one of his first PhD students. She went on to write the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on functionalism, which relates a great deal to all these people. Ned in particular, because he came up with the China Brain thought experiment, which distinguishes between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.

Functionalism, briefly, is the theory that mental states are defined by their functional roles — their causal relationships to sensory inputs, other mental states, and behavior — rather than by the physical substrate. That might sound confusing, but we’re going to talk about all of that here.

Janet has come to her positions over time. She describes it the way Wittgenstein does, actually — he talks about it like light dawning gradually over the whole. She stumbled into philosophy through an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago, taught by a very charismatic professor named Ted Cohen, who was smoking his Lucky Strikes, telling stories of Harvard graduate school — it was that time. She really loved it. She took another course, and another, and it kept going.

I think quite a lot of us in philosophy have an experience like that, where we stumble upon philosophy and just can’t leave it. There’s a wonderful talk that Janet gave to the American Philosophical Association where she goes through many of these stories, which I will try to include as a PDF for those who want to read more — it’s a really beautiful and honest reflection on philosophy and on her life.

One question I asked her before we recorded was: how do you think minds actually change? We do get to that toward the end. It’s not really through knockdown arguments — it’s really through something slower, something seeping in, getting some different information, starting to understand things differently. It’s much more like the turn of a kaleidoscope, I think. She doesn’t describe it exactly like that, but I see it in the way she talks about it — this quiet turn that is also really stark, dramatic, clear.

We look at what really matters, and it tends to be the ideas and the change itself — finding new ways to sense and think, and having a community that’s partly helping you do that, or at least doing it alongside you. Thinking about your body, your life, the world outside — the world that is you, this extraordinary experience. I think we get into that feeling by the end, and it’s a very human place, and I like that a lot.

Relationships matter, I think — that’s what I want to say after having listened to our conversation. The paths we open for one another really matter. Teachers, you really matter. But students, you really matter too. You open paths for the people around you and for the people who are teaching you. The best thing about being a teacher is that you learn. Sometimes it’s more than content that matters. Sometimes all these theories in the end have taught us something that we didn’t actually think we were even talking about when we were making those theories.

It’s a bit of a strange thing for a philosopher to say, but I’ll leave it like that, because I think there’s a lot opening up right now in philosophy. We’re starting to see the past in a new light, and I think it’s really beautiful. I’m very grateful to Janet for being part of that time — especially in American philosophy, those years of creating analytic philosophy and teaching us how to think critically and how to notice the world around us. I’m also very thankful to her for spending some time with me. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Welcome to the next season of Love and Philosophy. We’ll be posting a conversation at least on the 17th of every month — some months there will be two or three, but at least one every month. I’m writing as much as I can about these ideas on all the other outlets. If you want to hear more about the philosophy side of it all, thank you for being here. Good luck out there. I know some of you are working on your PhDs, and it’s coming time to turn them in for some people, so I just want to say: good job. You can do it. You’re almost there. All right. Be well, everybody.

Janet Levin: That is interesting. You know about this researcher at USC who has made something like a synthetic hippocampus?

Andrea Hiott: Oh!

Janet Levin: Yes. I think his name is Berger. I’ll check. Wow.

Andrea Hiott: Cool.

Janet Levin: And he found a way — for people who can’t lay down long-term memories, so that they just vanish, like in Memento or “The Lost Mariner” — he found a way to transfer them into some kind of device. This was a while ago, so I’m probably giving you imperfect information.

Andrea Hiott: Even so, that’s super interesting. I think I’m remembering something related, but I’ll definitely look that up again. I love the hippocampus — I should know everything about it.

Janet Levin: Can you remember it all?

Andrea Hiott: Ha, exactly — I use my hippocampus to remember my hippocampus.

Janet Levin: I suppose an iPhone can serve as one too.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. At the end of your book you talk a bit about the extended mind.

Janet Levin: Yes.

Andrea Hiott: That’s interesting — maybe we’ll get to that. But maybe we should start at the beginning. Hi, Janet! I’m just thrilled to meet you, as you know. Welcome to Love and Philosophy.

Janet Levin: Thank you very much. I’m very grateful that you’ve taken so much time with my work and raised some really interesting questions that I definitely need to think about more.

Andrea Hiott: I’m so glad to hear that. Where should we start — should we start in Chicago?

Janet Levin: Yes, I think so. There’s not a whole lot that went on before then. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. They had a very heavy-duty core curriculum requirement in Western civilization. Some of it was a little outdated, but I happened into a three-quarter sequence in the humanities. One quarter — my very first quarter in college — was Ted Cohen’s class on philosophy. Modern philosophy, actually, though we were supposed to start with Plato.

Andrea Hiott: What we call modern philosophy — so, Descartes onward?

Janet Levin: Yes. We were actually supposed to begin with a history of philosophy starting from Plato, but we started in on Descartes, did a little of Hume, and were supposed to do Kant too — but we did about five minutes on Kant.

Andrea Hiott: Had you wanted to take that class, or was it by accident?

Janet Levin: Completely by accident. I really didn’t know anything about philosophy before I arrived. I often think that core curriculum requirements aren’t so great, but if you didn’t have them, nobody would end up majoring in philosophy — very few people encounter it otherwise.

Andrea Hiott: Absolutely. That’s exactly what happened to me. I thought I was going to law school, took a philosophy class through the core curriculum, and it changed everything.

Janet Levin: Really? Was your family okay with that?

Andrea Hiott: No, of course not — I was going to be a lawyer and I became a philosopher. Eventually they were okay with it. Was your family okay with it?

Janet Levin: Yes. They were — as long as you’re happy. I don’t think they expected too much either way, but they were happy to go with it.

Andrea Hiott: That’s good. So you took this class — what happened?

Janet Levin: I really loved it, though I wasn’t quite sure whether I liked the subject itself or the experience of the class. You focused on various passages and wrote short 500-word responses to questions — that was fun because it got me to be more precise and really look carefully at the texts. But there was also a lot of camaraderie. I remember the names of about half the students in that class, which is shocking — that hasn’t even happened in most of the classes I’ve taught. It was really extraordinary.

Ted Cohen in those days was just — I don’t know if you know him; he died a few years ago — he focused on aesthetics, but he’s probably best known for a book he wrote about jokes.

Andrea Hiott: Oh! I didn’t know that.

Janet Levin: He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was very charismatic — he would smoke his Lucky Strike (you could smoke in class in those days) and sort of go into a reverie, talking about what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard, which he was, and all the things going on there. So I couldn’t quite determine whether it was philosophy itself that I liked so much, or this experience of being in a class where people were really engaged and the teacher was so charismatic.

Andrea Hiott: This is one of those classes everyone took — isn’t this the one your husband took too, and later your son?

Janet Levin: My son — yes.

Andrea Hiott: So it had a reputation.

Janet Levin: A mixed one. I went on into philosophy. That was the only philosophy class my husband ever took, and my son double-majored in philosophy and history but ended up going into history. So there you have it.

Andrea Hiott: So it did something to you specifically.

Janet Levin: That’s right. And I mean — there was one person who knitted the whole time but asked these really pointed questions. People went on to do various things; I’ve lost touch with most of them. But it was very interesting that I remembered it all — people really talked to one another, really engaged. And so I ended up taking other classes with less charismatic professors and still ended up liking it. I went on to graduate school and ended up at MIT. That wasn’t my first choice, but I’m glad I was there, because a lot of interesting things were going on.

Andrea Hiott: When was this exactly?

Janet Levin: I graduated from college in ‘72 and went the following fall.

Andrea Hiott: A lot of people would say philosophy was basically being created at that time at MIT and Harvard. You ended up at MIT, though you’d applied to Harvard first?

Janet Levin: Yes. But I got to know people there for various reasons — basically, they needed TAs at Harvard and MIT didn’t have enough spaces. So I was the first to go down there, and I was a teaching assistant for Quine’s logic class.

Andrea Hiott: Quine at Harvard — and you were also in the middle of the moment when philosophy of mind was joining forces with linguistics, in a sense. Jerry Fodor was there, Ned Block —

Janet Levin: Yes, and Chomsky, of course.

Andrea Hiott: Chomsky too! Goodness.

Janet Levin: And Morris Halle. It was really a group. At that time, philosophy had its own debate about its place — it was in the humanities section, and there was the worry, actually the threat, that philosophy would just be absorbed into the humanities and lose its autonomy. There were people who had joint appointments in philosophy and linguistics, and all sorts of twists and turns that I can’t fully remember.

Andrea Hiott: Do you think that merger with linguistics had a big influence on the philosophy that was happening — with Jerry Fodor, for example?

Janet Levin: Not directly. Fodor was interested in linguistics and psychology for a long time on his own terms. Descartes was a great 17th-century polymath — his mathematical contributions, Cartesian coordinates, are probably better known in some quarters than Cartesian dualism. Now there are a few people who know science very well and also do philosophy of science. But what seems easier and more relevant now is to be someone who does serious philosophy and serious linguistics and/or serious psychology altogether — making real contributions in all those fields. Fodor really was an example of that. His psychology, most of the time, did inform his philosophy and vice versa. It was very good to see.

Andrea Hiott: You were in his classes and around him, but why did you end up with Ned Block as your supervisor? That’s a more general functionalism rather than the specific representationalism Fodor was working on.

Janet Levin: That’s an interesting question. At that time I was more interested in getting the general hang of an alternative to behaviorism and to physicalism of the type-identity sort. I wanted to see what was going on. I was probably one of Ned’s first dissertation students — maybe the first, I can’t quite remember.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, you were one of his first PhDs?

Janet Levin: Yes. So he was learning, I suppose, how to be a dissertation advisor. He has supervised so many since — he really is a superstar. But I wasn’t quite ready either to be swept up in Fodor’s ongoing research program or to take a step in opposition to it. I felt I really wanted to master the more general questions first. I’m glad I did. I’ve read a lot of Fodor in between, talked to him — he’s wonderful. But I think I made the right decision.

I didn’t feel ready either to be swept into a research program or to stand in opposition to it. I was gradually becoming much more convinced that yes, there really are interesting processes going on in the mind — let’s see how you can give a general characterization of them that’s not too behaviorist and isn’t a JJC Smart-style identity theory. It was really good for me to read the burgeoning literature on that. Fodor did a lot of it, and he and Ned wrote some important papers together against behaviorism. So, in favor of something better.

Andrea Hiott: It’s funny — you said you were kind of a secret behaviorist at some point. Do I remember that correctly?

Janet Levin: Yes. It’s one of those embarrassing things I remember, though I try to shut it down.

Andrea Hiott: I don’t think it’s embarrassing — when you’re thinking about behaviorism in a scientific sense, or even Edward Tolman’s version, it’s not embarrassing at all.

Janet Levin: Well, nobody was a behaviorist, and at some point I wasn’t either. But I was attracted to the idea that you can explain a lot by talking about what people are disposed to do under certain environmental circumstances — and that you could get a lot farther with that than people had thought. Functionalism, at least philosophical functionalism, is like behaviorism in that mental states are defined in terms of what people will do if they have various combinations of states given certain environmental stimulation. So it’s a more realistic, less objectionable version of behaviorism, and it is compatible enough with physicalism, even though it’s not strictly speaking a physicalist view. It seemed a lot more promising and really worth pursuing. A lot of people are functionalists now.

Andrea Hiott: Indeed. For those who don’t quite understand what we’re talking about with all these terms — you mentioned that you always just thought physicalism was normal, or obvious, or something like that. And then of course when you have to justify it philosophically, that’s a whole other thing. For those who don’t really understand what physicalism means, how would you describe it?

Janet Levin: A fairly common and sufficiently broad way to put it: a physicalist holds that everything in the world — objects, properties, relations — is physical, or is nothing over and above the physical.

Now, what is it to be physical? Maybe this is begging the question somewhat, but many believe that being physical includes being one of the items theorized about in the physical sciences, including physics, chemistry, biology, and maybe psychology, or at least certain parts of it. And “nothing over and above” means that whatever else there is supervenes on the physical: no difference without a physical difference. If two things are allegedly distinct but there’s no physical difference between them, then they’re not really two — they’re one.

Was that understandable?

Andrea Hiott: Absolutely — wonderful. I’d just say, for context, that people often understand this in contrast to the “mental.” What are we really trying to understand when we try to understand the mind? Is it this experience we have that we call thinking? How would you describe what we’re trying to figure out?

Janet Levin: It seems that people are interested in the nature of mental states. That includes thinking — what goes on when we think; what goes on when we feel, that is, when we have bodily sensations like pain, nausea, itching; joy, ecstasy, love; and what goes on when we have perceptual experiences — when we look out into the world and see colors and shapes and other people. What goes on when we are in moods? All these things are supposed to involve or be located in the mind.

What goes on when we’re doing or undergoing all these things? How is it that our thoughts can be about items in the world? That’s the question about representationalism: how can what goes on in the mind reach out, connect with items in the world? Or can it? Maybe it can’t.

Andrea Hiott: And how do we know that it does?

Janet Levin: Exactly. And can you represent the world and have thoughts without language? That’s a really interesting question too. In any real-life situation, you’re doing a lot of things at once — you’re thinking, perceiving, your perceptions are sometimes distracted by your thoughts so you don’t notice certain things. If you’re sitting down, you’re feeling the seat beneath you. If you have a sore leg, you notice when you move around. All these things are going on when you’re just awake and paying attention.

Are all these cases to be characterized in the same way? Are there important differences between thoughts and sensations and perceptions?

It seems that thoughts are mental states that are, in most cases, about something — either in the world or in your own body. Whereas sensations and perceptions have, if you will, this qualitative character. This “what it’s like” — as Thomas Nagel put it, a phrase that has really become the term of choice to describe this. Some people think thoughts are essentially representational — you could have thoughts without there being any particular qualitative character. There might not be anything special that can be characterized as what it’s like to think that Paris is beautiful or that it’s sunny outside, beyond perhaps picturing those things.

So there’s a proposed separation: thoughts are necessarily representational, whereas sensations and perceptions necessarily have something it’s like to undergo them. But these days the lines of separation have been vanishing. Many people think that perceptions and even bodily sensations are also representational — that perceptions represent, truly or falsely, what’s out there in the world; that bodily sensations represent what’s going on in the body; that moods can represent certain general states of the world.

On the other hand, there’s an increasing number of people engaged in what they call cognitive phenomenology — who propose that thoughts not only have a general kind of content one can be aware of, but that each different type of thought has a special what-it’s-like character. So that what it’s like to think that world peace would be good is phenomenologically importantly different from what it’s like to think that universal charity is good — let alone more mundane thoughts like “I have to go to the grocery store after class” or “I hope my parking meter hasn’t run out.”

There’s a whole book by Angela Mendelovici about this, and many people hold this view. So it’s interesting that what seemed like a sharp line between what you can say about thoughts and what you can say about sensations seems to be, at best, ragged.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, absolutely. That’s happening in a lot of different fields — this simultaneous clarifying and blurring. But it’s interesting because I think a lot of the work that started in the seventies, which seemed so oppositional, helped us get to the point where we can handle that weird clarified blurriness. You wrote a book called Metaphysics of Mind — a short but very well-written overview of these theories as they’ve been developing. You talk about dualism, type identity theory, functionalism, eliminativism, illusionism — there are many we could cover. But maybe we could pick a few that show us what that oppositional nature was, and what we’re becoming more — or productively less — certain about. We should probably also talk about the word “metaphysics,” since your book is called Metaphysics of Mind. What do you really mean by that?

Janet Levin: Well, the term “metaphysical” is used in new age circles to mean something spiritual — and maybe that could be one kind of metaphysics. But metaphysical questions are usually taken to be questions about what there is: what is there in the world? Are there basically just mental entities? Are there physical entities? What are properties? What are the natures of things?

To determine the nature of something, you need a theory not just of what there actually is and what things actually do, and not just of what you can predict inductively from observation. Metaphysical questions mostly involve what’s possible — things that might not be scientifically possible. Is it metaphysically possible for a person to jump over the moon? Not only will it never happen, but science says it can’t. But is it possible in some other sense? Is it in the nature of human beings not to be able to do that?

Maybe better examples: what are the basic properties in the world? What about time — does the present, past, and future all exist at once? Is there a kind of spotlight present, so that only what exists now exists, and then you move on? Or is it more like a block universe, in which you move from one temporal period to another, but it all still exists?

Or think about a statue of Goliath, made of clay. Is the statue the same thing as the clay? They might come into existence together, but if you crush the statue, you still have the clay — just not the statue. Does that mean they’re not the same thing? What would have happened under counterfactual conditions? What gives you justification for saying one thing rather than another?

Then there are questions about the self — is the self just a bundle of changing states about what’s going on in your mind and body at a particular time, strung together? Or is there a substantial self we can access through introspection across time?

And then free will and determinism: are those compatible? Science isn’t going to tell you. Determinism means that, given some initial conditions — say, the Big Bang — and fixing the laws of nature, everything from that point on is determined. Is it possible to have free will even though there is no way to get out of that sequence? If I’m sitting here and decide to raise my hand, do I do it of my own free will, even though the laws of nature would have it that I raise my hand? Is it still possible that I could have done otherwise?

There are a lot of people working on that question. Those are the sorts of metaphysical questions.

Andrea Hiott: Wonderful — everything we’re interested in, really. You actually defend armchair philosophy in your work. And you also defend science. That holding-the-paradox quality that I love. But why have we had these competing theories — dualism, monism — about the mind? Why has it mattered?

Janet Levin: Well, I think it’s natural for at least some people to ask: what is it to be me? This is actually how Descartes starts in the First Meditation. He’s been doubting various things and wonders what he really is. He thinks he can arrive at a clear and distinct conception of what it is to be him.

Which is something I think we all feel at some point. And part of what Descartes asks is: what could I lack and still be me? What could I lack and still have thoughts? He works through it: if I lost an arm or a leg and still was living, would I still be me? He says yes. What if I were dreaming, and the world around me and even my body were completely different from how I think they are in waking life? He says yes, I’d still be me — because I’d still have my thoughts and at least my memories of perceptions.

And then — the big cannon — what if there were an evil genius who devoted all its powers to deceiving me, making me think there’s a world out there in all aspects, when nothing is really the way it seems? Not even mathematics or geometry, because the evil demon could interfere with each step from premise to conclusion. Even so, Descartes concludes, he can still exist — because it would still be him that the evil genius was deceiving. And what’s required for existence is just the capacity to think: to have thoughts, perceptions, doubts, certainty, mental states.

So what we need to exist, Descartes says, is a mind — an immaterial substance with the capacity to think in this broad sense. And by shaving away everything else — body, environment — he arrives at this foundation: we can have a clear and distinct conception of mind without body, and of body without mind, with no conceptual connection between them.

Andrea Hiott: And so that started to feel like something separate from the physical — what we’ve called “mental.” But then the question comes: maybe it’s just a kind of physical thing, like C-fibers firing. Could you talk about how that bifurcation felt like it needed to be resolved?

Janet Levin: Absolutely. So this is where things get picked up by Kripke, Chalmers, Jackson, and Thomas Nagel — the zombie argument, the knowledge argument, “what it’s like.”

They all use Descartes, because Descartes says: I can have an idea of my mind as something capable of thinking and perceiving, and I also have a conception of my body as this physical thing that takes up space and is capable of moving. I think very carefully about each of these, and I find nothing in one that connects it to the other. I have a clear and distinct conception of both — a complete enough thought of each — and can conceive of one existing without the other. Because of that, and because God is good and wouldn’t deceive us about these things, Descartes concludes that mind and body are genuinely distinct.

That lays the foundation for the argument that if you can conceive of two things as existing apart — in the right way — then they are distinct. That’s what resurfaces in the zombie argument, Jackson’s knowledge argument, Kripke’s argument from conceivability.

Andrea Hiott: Frank Jackson is the Mary one, for those who know the knowledge argument.

Janet Levin: Yes. By the way, he’s changed his view — in 1994 he became a representationalist, thinking that once we recognize these states represent the world, we can be physicalists.

Andrea Hiott: Oh — I knew that, but I thought you might mean he’d changed again. But that’s what I want to come to: the physicalist response. That’s really your work. We haven’t really brought that out yet in contrast to this dualistic picture. Could you say something about what a physicalist says here?

Janet Levin: Yes. What a physicalist says about Cartesian dualism — substance dualism, which holds that there are two distinct kinds of things in the world, minds and bodies — is, first, that there are obvious problems. How exactly are minds and bodies connected? What happens when something occurs in your body and produces a thought, or a pain? You stub your toe — on Descartes’s view, that’s a physical event, and it produces a mental state in an immaterial mind. How does that work? How do you get causation between the physical and the mental?

Descartes is actually quite good on the neurophysiology — until you get to the point where what’s going on in the body is supposed to produce something in the mind. Then it’s like that famous cartoon of mathematicians at a blackboard: the equation ends with “and then a miracle occurs.”

Andrea Hiott: Yes — and I think we all feel that, right? The physical seems so different from our experience of it. It’s very hard to understand how those things could be the same thing, even though we see how connected they are all the time. We go for a run and we’re in a different mental state — it’s very hard not to separate them, because it’s almost as if we’re having a conversation with our own self. And just as when I have a conversation with you, I feel like you’re different from me — there’s something in me that feels different from me too, and it doesn’t reduce easily to either side. This has been so hard to put into words.

Janet Levin: Yes. Sometimes when I would start an introductory philosophy of mind class, I’d ask students whether they thought the study of the brain is the only thing that can tell us about the mind. Many students, especially science majors, said: yes, of course. They thought that anything going on in the mind would, at least someday, be explained by looking at the brain.

Andrea Hiott: So they were already physicalists in a sense.

Janet Levin: In a naive version, maybe. Then I would give them some basic Descartes — can’t you imagine things going on in the mind without a physical correlate? And you get these thought experiments. Couldn’t you be perceiving something that doesn’t exist? But the real clincher that really grabs students is the zombie argument Chalmers puts forward.

Couldn’t you have all the information about a creature’s brain states, all the effects of the world on those brain states, all the effects of those brain states on bodily movement — and yet that creature has no conscious experience? The lights are on, or maybe they’re not, and nobody’s home. Couldn’t you imagine what Chalmers calls a zombie — a creature neurophysiologically just like you, but with nothing it’s like to be that creature?

Some people say no. But a lot of people say yes — even if I look very carefully at everything going on in their brain and body and the world around them, I can conceive of all that being there with no consciousness, no “what it’s like” in Nagel’s words.

Once you get people thinking that way, it’s very hard to get them back down the ladder to physicalism.

Andrea Hiott: I think it also resonates with our own experience of, say, driving while not really aware of what we’re doing — there’s a contrast there that makes the zombie idea feel almost familiar. But how do you counter that as a physicalist?

Janet Levin: There are a number of different ways, going back to critics of Descartes in the 17th century.

One is something Gassendi said: you think you’re conceiving of your mind without your body — that you have a clear and distinct idea of each and that they’re not connected. But maybe you don’t have such a clear idea of your mind. Maybe the mind is just a collection of very ethereal physical entities that are too small to recognize, and you’re wrong to think you have a complete enough thought of the mind and the body. A lot of people say this today too: you really aren’t conceiving of a mind without a body. Or, in the zombie case, you really don’t have the mental capacity to think about all the physical stuff at once — and if you did, you’d recognize that of course the creature is conscious. That’s not a very compelling argument, but some people try to make it.

Another critic of Descartes in the 17th century offered obvious counterexamples to the conceivability-to-distinctness inference. He pointed out that you can conceive of an isosceles triangle without conceiving of the Pythagorean theorem, but any isosceles triangle obeys it. Descartes’s response: you don’t have a complete enough idea of the triangle and the theorem. If you did, you’d see the connection. So the question becomes: what counts as a complete enough idea?

And then of course there’s the problem of causation — this view seems hard to reconcile with the conservation of energy. How can mental states cause physical events if they’re genuinely immaterial? We all believe that if you stub your toe, you feel pain, and that pain causes you to say “ouch” or reach for aspirin. How does that work without a physical substrate?

Andrea Hiott: Okay. What about the phenomenal concept strategy? I’m thinking about type-B physicalism — could you talk about that, and about how something like red or pain can’t be fully grasped through conceptual analysis beforehand, even though it’s happening as one physical thing?

Janet Levin: Yes. People say: I’m having a feeling, a sensation — I’m perceiving red, or I’m having an afterimage of yellow-orange, as JJC Smart used to say. So imagine you’re sitting somewhere with a brain scan running, and you can see on a screen what’s going on in your brain. You are seeing what’s going on, and you are feeling what you’re feeling, aware of your experience.

So, I’m seeing red. There are various things going on in my visual cortex — cone stimulation, and various processes that explain color perception. And yet there doesn’t seem to be any connection. If all that stuff had produced a sensation of green instead, you wouldn’t be able to tell just from feeling your experience and looking at the brain data that the sensation had to be what it was. You can explain this intuition very graphically: there’s no way to spell out what’s involved in feeling red or feeling pain that lets you derive it from the physical description, even a very detailed one.

But you can also say: okay, I can’t find a conceptual connection — but why do I need one in order for these concepts to be picking out the very same thing?

My view, and the view of many so-called type-B materialists, is this: a type-A materialist says that if we thought more carefully about what’s going on in our bodies, or about what’s going on when we feel pain, we’d see the connection. Think about pain: there’s this aversive quality to it, we want to be out of it, it gives rise to desires, we can compare it to other experiences. There really is a lot of information in our idea of what it’s like to be in pain that we’re glossing over. And if you go more general — take it up a step to the psychological significance of what’s going on in the brain, how certain beliefs and desires produce certain behaviors — you might see the connection after all.

That’s what Dennett says, and a number of others. I used to think that too: that if you get enough functional information, you’ll be able to see that they’re connected.

But I’ve changed my mind. I now think it’s unlikely there will be a conceptual connection between your experience of what’s going on in the mind and what’s going on in the brain, even at higher levels of generalization. But there is something special about this phenomenon of conceptual separation, and it’s this: mind-body identities are a special case. You get your idea of what’s going on in your mind through introspection. You are aware of a certain kind of event going on in you — you can pick it out, point to it, recognize it when it recurs. There’s no connection between your conception of what’s going on in your brain and the concept that picks out — that demonstrates, points to — what’s going on in your mind. But so what? Introspection is a special, subjective way of pointing to what’s going on in you. And given that there really isn’t anything to your conception of these mental states beyond picking them out, demonstrating them, and recognizing them again — there’s nothing that has to be conceptually connected, because it’s just a pointer. Introspection is the only way of getting substantive information about something that you access by pointing in this way.

Andrea Hiott: Is it just the same as what we do in a science experiment — noticing as much as we can about what we’ve set up, even though we can’t notice everything, and there are many different scales we could look at it on? When we do that with our own bodies it seems somehow different. But is it the same kind of thing — we’re also just noticing as much as we can, and we could look at different scales or with different technologies?

Janet Levin: So you’re saying that in lots of scientific experiments, you find out more by looking more deeply at the relevant domain — and that you have no problem saying, for example, “lightning is a stream of photons,” even though the common-sense concept of lightning seems so different. Or: water, the stuff that fills our lakes and streams, turns out to be H₂O. We have no problem saying, “Oh, okay, water — that’s H₂O, nothing but H₂O.”

Andrea Hiott: And we’re doing something similar with our own thinking — we’re trying to understand it better. I don’t think it takes away the mystery of what’s in the bucket, whatever it is. It’s still kind of amazing. I think our own experience is very similar. It’s pretty wild, and I understand why we want to think of it as something categorically different. But even if you think about what we’re looking at in the world, you can have that same awe about it.

Janet Levin: Yes. But there’s been pushback. Many people — including early identity theorists — said, look, saying that having an afterimage of orange is just having a certain brain process is the same kind of claim scientists make all the time: lightning is just a stream of photons, water is just H₂O. But Kripke, Chalmers, and Jackson push back and say: the reason we can make those claims about water and H₂O is that when we talk about water, we’re talking about the stuff that comes out of faucets, fills lakes and streams. What makes it seem possible that water couldn’t be H₂O is that we associate “water” with that stuff. There could be stuff coming out of our faucets that isn’t H₂O — gin, say, or something with the same functional role but different chemical composition. But that doesn’t mean water, that stuff in our lakes and streams, isn’t H₂O, given that experiments have shown it is H₂O.

Andrea Hiott: We’ve been going an hour and a half, so I won’t try to push back on all of that, because we could open up millions of threads. But just to bring it to a general level for people: we were thinking about mind as something not obviously knowable as physical things, and you think everything is physical. In the most general terms — would it just be that you think if we had enough sensory skill and technology, we could understand anything through the body, through the brain, through the central nervous system? That these aren’t separate realms that can’t make contact, but rather something continuous?

Janet Levin: Briefly: the idea is that all thoughts, perceptions, and bodily sensations are nothing but physical states. By physical, I include not just what’s going on in the brain but what’s going on in the rest of the body as well. Various people, including Antonio Damasio — whose neuroscience institute is now at USC — think it’s important for conscious experience that certain events occur in the endocrine system, of all things. I don’t know if that’s true, but there are a lot of things going on in the body that are required for consciousness besides certain brain states: certain regions associated with emotion have to be involved, and so on.

So you need to have all that stuff going on for there to be conscious experience. My view is that if that’s true, then whatever is supposed to be going on to have conscious experience can be explained by appeal to what’s going on in the brain, the endocrine system, and maybe what’s going on in the world.

All of that physical stuff needs to be taken into account. But no matter how much information of that sort you have, no matter how closely these events may be correlated with these feelings — the feelings of what it’s like to be in pain, to be perceiving red, to be thinking that Paris is beautiful — that is not going to emerge from your knowledge of all the stuff that’s going on. It’s still going to seem separate. And this is where the phenomenal concept strategy comes in.

The idea — called a “strategy” in a somewhat disparaging way, but I think it’s on the right track — is that there’s a special case where you don’t have to be able to see that all this physical information that determines your conscious experiences is conceptually connected to your experiences, to your knowledge of what it’s like. The reason is that you get a special set of concepts, a special way of picking out items in your brain, through introspection. You are a subject; you have experiences. Because you can focus your mind from the inside on these states, you can get a whole range of information about what’s going on in you, what it feels like to do things.

I don’t want to say it’s a special sense, because there isn’t some brain area that underlies introspection — but you can point to various things, and once you point to a bunch, you can compare and contrast them in terms of what it’s like to have them. Your own mental states are the only things you can pick out this way. You use your phenomenal concepts — the way of thinking about yourself, about what’s going on inside — that comes from introspection.

Andrea Hiott: Would you be willing to think of that as a skill that we develop?

Janet Levin: That’s really interesting. I think you can get better and better at identifying different things going on in you through practice. Think about what happens in a wine-tasting class: wines that seemed basically the same start to differentiate — this one is a little sour, this one sweet, this one gives a certain tingle. You can learn to notice differences and similarities you didn’t expect. There are people specifically trained in taste and smell distinctions for quality control, or people very attuned to differences in shade of color. So yes, there are ways in which you can get better and better at identifying how things seem to you — sensations, appearances, and so on.

Andrea Hiott: That’s wonderful. And it connects to the arguments you make in defense of armchair philosophy against the view that we should just do experimental philosophy and abandon thought experiments. If we take this noticing seriously — as a kind of physical skill, even — then critical thinking is doing something more powerful than we sometimes give it credit for. Is that part of what you mean in defending the armchair?

Janet Levin: What I think armchair philosophy can do is take certain counterexamples seriously — can knowledge be something other than justified true belief? The trolley problem? What I’m really arguing is that it’s an impoverished view of philosophy to say that philosophers have nothing to offer beyond what scientists give us. The cover of Chalmers’s book — well, the Churchland book actually, The Limits of Philosophy — shows someone in an armchair with their back against a wall. I think the author stops too soon. There are things philosophers can work out about possibility that are genuinely interesting, and sometimes thought experiments not only satisfy the itch of wondering what’s possible and what must be, but can also get people to reexamine empirical evidence, to notice distinctions they’d missed. So it can affect empirical research too.

The book I’ve been working on — through many incarnations — I’m tentatively calling The Armchair Near the Window.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, beautiful — I love that title.

Janet Levin: Rather than with its back against the wall.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I think there’s something to that. Can we try to bring it toward a close? Would you be willing to do the Mollie question another time, since we’ve already been at it nearly two hours?

Janet Levin: Sure. And if you want to do the whole thing over — I know there were deeper questions we didn’t get into — I’m happy to do that.

Andrea Hiott: I love this conversation as it is. I do have more things I want to talk to you about, and I think some part of the audience will too. So let’s just tie up a few threads, and then we can do a more focused follow-up in the spring — for the nerds. What do you think?

Janet Levin: Sounds good. Just one thing about the window: the idea being that if you pay attention to what’s going on in the sciences, what you take to be possibilities you might reconsider. And that gets into the question you began to ask about but we didn’t really get to: how do you change your mind? What does it take to effect a slight change, or a wholesale change?

A lot of what’s going on in thought experiments is that you are — or are not — willing to include certain cases in the category you’re thinking about: knowledge, free will, moral action, autonomy. Information about what’s going on in the world and in the sciences, and even information about how other people think, can have a direct impact or just somehow seep in and change your inclination to categorize things in certain ways.

I think that’s what happened with same-sex marriage. People were against it, and then they realized that people they know and love — who are in same-sex relationships — want to get married the way heterosexual people do, want to have families. Why think there’s something wrong with that? And so their category of what counts as a legitimate marriage expands. Something can be staring you in the face, but you can purposely focus your attention straight ahead and not look. People are doing that more and more these days.

So there are two questions. One is: how do you change your mind? And a prior one, increasingly, is: how can you get yourself into a position where you’re willing to change your mind? What do you have to give up and what do you gain?

Andrea Hiott: I think you have to be very strong. And that’s one reason I’d argue for critical thinking and for philosophy of the armchair-near-a-window variety — because it does teach you how to hold tensions, how to hold things that might not be resolvable. That openness gives you more windows, and lets you go outside them. Which can be very hard for people.

Janet Levin: Yes. And group identity really plays a big role. If you even look elsewhere, you’re seen as betraying your group — and that seems to be more and more the case.

Andrea Hiott: That’s a good point. There’s a lot of pressure not to look out the window. But just before we go — you were in this exciting moment in philosophy, and you were one of the first women in your position. Things have changed, I hope. I was also thinking of your friend Tamara Horowitz — I just want to mention her because I know she was at MIT with you, and also at Chicago?

Janet Levin: Yes, we were at Chicago together and continued to know each other after — she got a job at the University of Pittsburgh and became chair of the department. My mother lived in Pittsburgh, so whenever I visited, I’d visit her too.

Andrea Hiott: Pittsburgh is a major school for US philosophy, and she was the first female chair there. I just want to mention that — I want people to know that you were there and she was there, and it feels important to acknowledge. Is there anything you’d like to share about that, anything you feel should be part of the record?

Janet Levin: She was a very close friend, and she died of a brain tumor, much too young — before she was fifty. I just thought she was doing interesting things and would go on to do a lot more philosophically. But it wasn’t about philosophy — I just lost a friend who had become part of our family. My mother would visit her a lot in the hospital. When I gave that lecture, I wanted to acknowledge her, because she could have given one too, if she’d lived.

But in terms of changes more broadly: there are more women in philosophy now. They used to be steered — not formally assigned, but encouraged — toward so-called softer subjects: ethics, moral philosophy, value theory. But now there are lots of women in all fields, including core metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of science. And two: the so-called soft subjects like ethics and moral philosophy have become very technical — sometimes to their detriment, when technical results substitute for genuine philosophical interest. But also, fringe areas like work on women, gender, and race — which were once dismissed as too specific to have general philosophical consequences — are being taken much more seriously. Not only do they open up questions about intrinsic differences, the binary nature of gender, racial psychology, and so on; they make you reconsider more general questions about how things could be and how we characterize how they are.

And something else that’s changed, which I think is good for everyone: when I came to MIT, there really weren’t courses — just a pro-seminar you had to take. There was no instruction in teaching; I was thrown into an undergraduate class by myself. You had to pass general exams but could choose very narrow topics. Now, at USC and I think at other places, students have a fairly structured set of requirements at every stage. People are looking at your work and making suggestions. Students are assigned mentors for the first couple of years, then advisors for preliminary exams and dissertation. There are dissertation seminars, practice job talks. Students are not just assigned as TAs but given real teaching seminars where they learn how to teach.

Andrea Hiott: That is a very important difference — one I think we take for granted.

Janet Levin: And there are independent programs — philosophers teaching somewhere but getting together with funding to run mentoring seminars for women at certain stages. Louise Antony does a lot of this work, along with Jennifer Saul and Sally Haslanger — they get women in early positions, just hired as assistant professors, to share their work and help each other. They get feedback not just about their work but about what to expect at each stage, what the pitfalls are, what kinds of subtle dismissal they’re going to encounter. That’s really valuable.

And there are seminars for graduate students too. At USC, we always allow graduate students to ask questions first, before faculty, at colloquia. People are taught informally: you might be afraid to ask a question, but lots of people do — some questions don’t land, but some are wonderful, and those are the ones that get remembered. Here’s how to go about it. You don’t have to be aggressive; you don’t have to be first. You can still formulate something and be confident it will be interesting enough to engage with.

The idea that you’re innately good at this, or a complete failure, just isn’t right. You have to wait sometimes for confidence to build, and for what someone is good at to come out.

And the best way to think about it — what we are starting to do at USC — is to remember that you spent days and days choosing this entering class, this group of good students. So what you have to do is figure out how to get them to fulfill the potential you yourself noticed and chose them for. Think of it that way, and you’ll be more patient — and you’ll allow late bloomers to bloom. And they often do.

Andrea Hiott: That is wonderful. That makes all the difference. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken to — famous or not, whatever that means — who say it was some teacher who noticed them and did exactly what you just described.

Janet Levin: And if it’s policy, then that’s even better.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. Just before we go — I always ask about love and care. Is there anything you want to say about those words relative to everything we’ve discussed, or just your career in general?

Janet Levin: One thing I want to thank you for, Andrea: I’m retired now, for the last couple of years, and it’s been somewhat hard to adjust to. I’ve had various health issues — nothing life-threatening, but still — and it’s easy to let the days go by without really thinking about things. When you asked me to do this, I found myself genuinely engaged, really interested, wanting to go back and think more about the questions you raised — especially the ones toward the end about how people change their minds, and how people can wall themselves off from even giving themselves the chance to think.

This made me feel much more energized about getting back to work. It made me realize that the questions I was interested in throughout my career are still interesting — and I’d like to think about them more. Maybe not so confident about the products, but very confident that these questions themselves are worth it.

How do you get people to change their minds? How do you get yourself to change your mind if it seems like you need to? How does identity play into it? How can forces that are increasingly powerful get in the way of real knowledge and changing your mind for the better — getting closer to the truth? People have said that truth doesn’t matter. I think it does, but you have to say more clearly why. Those are things I’d like to think about more. And there’s AI too, which we haven’t gotten to —

Andrea Hiott: We’ll leave that for another time. But I do love that question in the way you’ve been discussing it.

Janet Levin: And as I said in passing — I’ve been thinking more about what it would take to get me to change my own mind. And I think that’s a good first step.

Andrea Hiott: That is a really good first step. I really appreciate you and love this conversation. Thank you so much for spending this time with me, and for your career and your work. Thank you.

Janet Levin: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Andrea Hiott: Is there anything else you want to say, or are we good?

Janet Levin: I think we’re good — but I’d be happy to come back and talk about the Molyneux question.

Andrea Hiott: Okay, great. And maybe also how you change your mind.

Janet Levin: Yes. I’ll try to make up my mind about that.

Andrea Hiott: I’ll try to get you to change your mind about whether to talk about changing your mind.

Janet Levin: Ha — that’d be fun too.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much, Janet.

Janet Levin: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Andrea Hiott: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening all the way to the end.

Since you made it here, I’ll just offer a brief note on how this relates to way-making, or navigability — which is what I write about more broadly.

What I want to say is that I think what we understand as thinking is a form of communication with ourselves. When we think of it as communicative — drawing on Habermas and other traditions alongside phenomenology — then a lot of this makes more sense. This is something I write about in my thesis: we are often confusing the self with that communication. We can be social; we can learn how the world is from other perspectives through communication with ourselves, but with others too. Self and mind, in the way I’m presenting it, are communicative processes. That’s why it feels so mystical or mental — why we think it must be another kind of thing.

But in the same way that smell, or sight, or metabolism, or conversation — the fact that we’re communicating right now, whoever you are and wherever you are in the world — is both miraculous and, at the same time, just what happens. So there’s the paradox. It is bigger than a body, this communication. And I think it makes sense that we’ve thought of it in mystical terms — because it is, in a way, mystical. Both and either/or.

There’s more writing about that coming on the Substack, if you’re interested. It would be wonderful if you joined or, if you want to support us, you can visit the giving page — the link is in the show notes. Or come to the Substack. Whatever you wish.

I’m just glad you’re here. Thanks for listening. I’d love to know what you thought. My inbox is a little overwhelming at the moment, but please do write — I love hearing from you. Hope you have a good day, wherever you are. Bye, everyone.

Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy: Way Making, Care, and a New SeasonAndrea Hiott introduces Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy and reflects on how a late-2023 research project became a podcast shaped by the guiding question of “way making”: how we find our way and how our way makes us. Drawing from philosophy, neuroscience, urban planning, ecology, biology, and navigability heuristics, she reframes life’s most crucial action as care, challenging fixed separations like ontology, epistemology, and axiology and emphasizing “constellation” or kaleidoscopic thinking over either/or dichotomies. She previews more rigorous work addressing questions about consciousness, representation, agency, self, mind, and technology through the lens of care, and mentions an upcoming book, Holding Paradox. A new season begins tomorrow March 17 with philosopher Janet Levine, releasing monthly episodes on the 17th, with show notes summarizing key ideas from the past two years.

Here is a link to the free Love & Philosophy Field Guide which comes to your email. If you already subscribed, just use the same email and it will come to you, or (if you are on a computer) find the pdf below.

00:00 Welcome and Project Update00:27 Waymaking as Core Question01:03 Care as Life’s Foundation03:48 Beyond Either Or Thinking04:49 Books and Rigorous Philosophy Ahead06:38 New Season Schedule and Thanks07:15 Support the Work07:43 The Hard Parts and Staying in Care08:31 Show Notes Summary and Closing Good Wishes

Field Notes at https://making-ways.kit.com/01025445f6

Support the show

Please rate and review with love.YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

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Here is the book if you would like to read it.

NEW: There’s a book called AI Everywhere with the amazing SheWritesAI community (and Andrea as co-author) which will be published on Women’s Day, May 8th, in the US. If you’re in the UK, you can also preorder Andrea’s book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness now. It will be available for preorder in the US and elsewhere this summer.

Hi everyone.

This week we are posting an archive episode of Love and Philosophy featuring Perry Zurn, provost and associate professor of philosophy at American University and coauthor (with twin Dani Bassett) of Curious Minds. Andrea also previews our upcoming season launch with USC philosopher Janet Levin.

In the conversation, Perry Zurn links curiosity to desire and love, arguing love can guide curiosity away from appropriative or objectifying inquiry. Perry reframes curiosity not as an individual desire to fill information gaps but as a social practice and a “capacity to connect,” drawing on network science, complexity, and ecological aesthetics through the idea of “edge work.” Andrea and Perry discuss diverse styles of curiosity (busy body, hunter, dancer), curiosity’s role in shifting knowledge networks and methods, interdisciplinary resistance, and how breaking “edges” and “cracks” can be both destructive and creative, relating curiosity to hope and to more-than-human ecologies. They also describe the book’s beautiful artwork by Poonam Mistry and the dedication to children who ask whether things must be this way.00:00 Archive Season Preview00:56 Why Curiosity Matters03:19 Support And Welcome03:53 Love And Curiosity06:28 Origins Of Curious Minds08:51 Curiosity As Practice11:24 Edge Work Explained15:18 Pioneering And Ethics17:39 Complexity And The Brain21:27 Styles Of Curiosity26:08 Curiosity Across Divides30:12 Walking As Knowing32:31 Methods As Paths36:34 Why New Paths Threaten39:38 Dead Ends And Branching40:33 Connectional Curiosity42:48 More Than Human Curiosity47:29 Cracks Hope And Destruction51:35 Daring To Disturb53:47 Art And Dedication56:45 Closing Reflections

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Curious Minds: Buy the book

Welcome to an exploration of curiosity from the L&P archive. The show has been going since the end of 2023, so more than two years now! This episode was one of the first public L&P conversations, shared by Andrea in conversation with provost philosopher Perry Zurn. Below we’ll give a brief summary of their discussion on ‘curiosity as a practice’ which comes form the book Perry wrote called Curious Minds (MIT), exploring the multifaceted nature of curiosity and its ties to philosophy, society, and ecological systems.Before the archive episode begins in the audio, you’ll hear Andrea Hiott guide listeners into the dialogue, highlighting an upcoming new episode for the Spring 2026 season of Love and Philosophy which will be with the distinguished USC philosopher Janet Levin, who was there at MIT when Jerry Fodor was developing his LoT and who was a Teaching Assistant for Quine before going on to become the first tenured woman philosopher at the University of Southern California. Andrea reflects on her excitement about exploring profound conversations that shift our understanding of concepts such as the metaphysics of mind.

Here’s a summary of the archived conversation:

Perry Zurn, an associate professor of Philosophy at American University, alongside her twin, the physicist Dani Bassett, co-authored "Curious Minds," a book from MIT Press that interweaves threads of curiosity with interpersonal, ecological, and philosophical landscapes. Perry introduces the concept of edge-work, describing curiosity as a practice that brings forth connections between disparate nodes in both knowledge and society. Through curiosity, paths are created by walking and reaching towards that which is not yet known.Perry challenges traditional views by redefining curiosity. Instead of seeing it solely as an acquisitional or individual endeavor, curiosity is repositioned as a social and relational practice, what Perry describes well here as a networked drive for building connections. This nuanced definition shifts the perception of curiosity from a simple desire to know into a transformative practice of living, learning, and interacting with the world.Drawing parallels with both dancing and walking, the conversation touches on various styles of curiosity, illustrating how curiosity manifests as a busy body, a hunter, or a dancer (in the book, there is a whole ‘bestiary’ of potential curiosity styles). These styles reflect diverse approaches to curiosity, supporting the idea that curiosity can be a playful, creative, and dynamic practice that embraces the ever-changing topographies of knowledge. Per usual, Andrea tries to imagine how these landscapes overlap and what sorts of ‘shapes’ we might imagine of how they connect, or don’t.In the spirit of way-making and navigability, both the literal and metaphorical notion of walking is explored via the geographical and conceptual journey, suggesting ways human beings traverse paths of knowledge, ideas, and existence. Through different walks, individuals carry implicit methodologies in their mental frameworks that influence how they approach and inquire about the world.At some point, the discussion ventures into ecological and non-human realms, exploring the living nature of curiosity among other beings. By expanding curiosity to include more-than-human participants, Perry advocates for recognizing curiosity as an evolutionary and ecological process intertwined with the living world, encouraging a symbiotic relationship with other beings and nature. Andrea imagines humans as growing from that other living curiosity and as a way for that other life to be curious about and explore itself.The notion of cracks as entry points for light and transformation emerges as a powerful symbol of creativity and hope, as it does in the book Curious Minds. In the presence of cracks, ideas and connections are broken and reconstructed, reflecting the paradoxical nature of destruction and creation within curiosity. This thought challenges binary divisions and embraces complexity, envisioning curiosity as a force that disturbs and simultaneously reconstructs the universe.In their conversational journey, Andrea Hiott and Perry Zurn invite us to reconsider curiosity as not merely an individual pursuit but as a connective, ecological flow. By perceiving curiosity as a joint practice with an inherent capacity for connection, there arises an opportunity to foster relationships that honor diversity and participatory interdependence. Through love, philosophy, and curiosity, new pathways are paved, inviting us to rethink how we engage with the world around us.

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If you are interested in embodied and enactive cognition, we also recommend the ENSO Seminar Series: https://www.ensoseminars.com/presentations/past

Another take on Darwinism & the Dynamics of Change (From the Archive)

Richard Watson works at the Institute for Life Sciences in the Department of Computer Science (Agents, Interaction and Complexity group) at the University of Southampton. Agential Biology Institute (CSO). Richard is a scientist, academic lecturer, and author with expertise links evolutionary biology and computer science with a desire for personal and societal well-being.

We’re replaying older episodes till Spring, at which time we will be back with new episodes.

This is a replay of an earlier conversation with Richard Watson (which was already an unpublished conversation we’d had earlier, so there’s lots of nesting here). Initially focusing on Universal Darwinism and its limitations, the discussion evolves into a broader examination of alternative mechanisms like learning and mutual transformative change. Andrea Hiott and Richard delve into nuanced definitions of individuality and agency, challenging the reductionist view in favor of a more integrative approach. They explore the intersection of science and subjectivity, positing that love, characterized as ‘deeply vulnerable mutual knowing,’ plays a critical role in understanding relationships and evolutionary processes. This conversation highlights the dynamic interplay of biological systems and the potential for a more compassionate and creative understanding of life’s complexity.00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview00:27 Andrea’s Reflections and Richard Watson’s Work00:56 Defining Individual and Body01:14 Evolutionary Units and Mutual Transformative Change01:41 Academic Ideas on Evolution and Cognition03:27 Richard Watson’s Background and Research05:22 Natural Selection and Adaptation12:02 Learning Processes vs. Natural Selection21:08 Cooperation and Competition in Biology28:53 Individuality and Agency in Living Systems39:20 Bioelectricity and Gene Expression40:51 The Bidirectional Relationship of Cells and Genes41:34 The Limits of Natural Selection42:55 Love as a Scientific Concept47:06 Evolutionary Algorithms and Their Shortcomings50:00 The Evolution of Cooperation and Individuality54:09 The Role of Love in Evolution59:25 The Dance of Relationships and Resonance01:07:33 The Creative Process of Evolution01:18:01 The Balance of Love and Fear

Richard Watson

What’s Love Got To Do with It

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First conversation:

Another conversation with Richard and Andrea:

This week we’re revisiting a conversation with philosopher C Thi Nguyen, who has a new book out called The Score. This conversation was one of the first episodes we ever published, back when we started all this in 2023.

The discussion delves into the philosophical aspects of games, how they shape our agency, and the profound impact they have on our cognition and perception of reality. Thi explores the intersection of love, trust, and philosophical inquiry, highlighting the intricate ways games influence our societal interactions and personal experiences. The episode also touches on how games can be a lens for understanding broader human behaviors and the nature of agency itself. Join us as we navigate these complex ideas and reflect on the role of games in our lives.00:00 Introduction to Love and Philosophy00:54 Navigational Mind and Upcoming Conversations01:36 Revisiting the Conversation with C Thi Nguyen01:49 Games and Sculpted Agency03:03 Trust and Agency in Games07:39 Philosophy, Writing, and Personal Journey21:16 Games as Art and Medium of Agency30:57 Art, Porn, and Sentimental Art36:08 The Role of Games and Art in Emotional Release36:29 Aesthetic Approaches and Viewer Attitudes37:10 Games as Tools for Different Experiences38:02 Personal Reflections on Sports and Dance39:46 Agency and Game Design41:10 The Power and Danger of Games45:06 Virtual Reality and Games46:58 The Concept of Play vs. Games56:08 Games and Trust59:09 The Impact of Games on Perception and Behavior01:04:04 Final Thoughts and Reflections01:05:17 Support and Farewell

Here is the original version:

the voluntary suspension of habitual responses into awareness.

AI, Suffering, Remedy and Love as the voluntary suspension of habitual responses into awareness: This episode is with philosopher and cognitive scientist Thomas Metzinger, a Professor Emeritus at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and a member of the German National Academy Leopoldina. He has worked mainly in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and applied ethics, particularly focusing on neurotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

The conversation explores a wide range of topics including the critical intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, meditation, and artificial intelligence. Metzinger shares his skepticism about separating deep philosophical inquiries from meditation and certain sorts of experience relative to psychedelics, while discussing the impact of AI on human cognition, the concept of suffering in both humans and machines, and the responsibility of philosophers in an age of epistemic crisis. The discussion underscores the need for a balanced and multifaceted approach to understanding consciousness and suggests that new paradigms may emerge from current technological and philosophical shifts. This episode aims to foster an expansive and hopeful outlook as we move into the new year.00:00 Introduction to Fundamental Issues and Meditation00:44 Epistemic Crisis and AI Concerns01:15 Buddhism and Suffering02:09 Philosophical Insights on Suffering and Awareness04:47 Welcome to Love and Philosophy05:43 Introducing Thomas Metzinger07:43 Thomas Metzinger’s Contributions to Philosophy and AI09:53 Exploring Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE)13:49 Narrative and Pure Awareness22:09 Philosophical and Scientific Exploration of Consciousness29:30 Thomas Metzinger’s Personal Journey in Philosophy56:11 Criticism and Meditation56:55 Epistemic Authority and Consciousness59:27 Embodiment in AI and Philosophy01:01:52 Challenges in Academia01:05:31 AI, Critical Thinking, and Future Concerns01:15:29 The Nature of Suffering01:22:50 Compassion and Love01:44:12 Closing Thoughts and Reflections01:44:30 A Poetic Farewell

Thomas Metzinger

The phenomenology of ‘pure’ consciousness

Link to Elephant and the Blind full book

New book Bewusstseinkultur

MPE discussion mentioned in Intro

MPE project

Philosophy Babble conversations

Beyond Nondual

Thomas Metzinger (1958 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) was Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz until 2019. He is past president of the German Cognitive Science Society (2005-2007) and of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2009-2011). As of 2011, he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the Barbara Wengeler Foundation (2019-2024), and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2008 to 2009 he served as a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study; from 2014 to 2019 he was a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College; from 2019 to 2021 he was awarded a Senior-Forschungsprofessur by the Ministry of Science, Education and Culture. From 2018 to 2020 Metzinger worked as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. In 2021 he was awarded the Pufendorf-Medal, in 2022 he was elected into the German National Academy of Science.

In the English language, he has edited two collections on consciousness (“Conscious Experience”, Imprint Academic, 1995; “Neural Correlates of Consciousness”, MIT Press, 2000) and published one major scientific monograph (“Being No One – The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”, MIT Press, 2003). In 2009, he published a popular book, which addresses a wider audience and discusses the ethical, cultural and social consequences of consciousness research (“The Ego Tunnel – The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”). Important recent Open Access collections are Open MIND at http://www.open-mind.net (2015, with Jennifer Windt), Philosophy and Predictive Processing at http://predictive-mind.net (2017, with Wanja Wiese), and Radical Disruptions of Self-Consciousness (2020, with Raphaël Millière). In 2024, he published a major OA-monograph with the MIT Press titled The Elephant and the Blind (see also top of page).

Just Now

by W.S. Merwin

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me

that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for

not patient not even waiting no more hidden

than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days

and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone

it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

Esther Lightcap Meek is Professor of Philosophy emerita at Geneva College, in Western Pennsylvania. She is the author of numerous books, such as Longing to Know and Loving to Know. Loving to Know is the subject of this episode. Esther shows us knowing is an act of love and she has dedicated her career to making philosophy accessible and transformative for people in all walks of life.Trained at Temple University in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, Meek discovered the work of scientist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi and her work is helping a whole lot more of us discover it now. Her work centers on epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—and she has developed what she calls "covenant epistemology," which places love at the heart of knowing.

This episode (#79) explores the intricate relationships between knowledge, information, reality, and love with guest Esther Lightcap Meek. Building on the ideas of Michael Polanyi, Esther and Andrea delve into the concept of ‘subsidiary focal integration’ and its implications for how we understand reality. The conversation addresses the limitations of viewing knowledge merely as information, the importance of bodily cognition, and how love and communion with the real are fundamental to genuine knowing. It shows how philosophy can be understood as therapeutic, a dynamic process that connects us deeply with ourselves, each other, and the world.

Here is the book Loving to Know.

And the most recent, Mother’s Smile.

And the Polanyi book Knowing and Being.

These are research conversations.

To skip research ramble in the audio go to 26:33.

Or just watch this video:

00:00 Introduction to the Concept of Reality and Information

01:46 The Role of Subsidiary and Focal Integration

03:36 Exploring Covenant Epistemology

04:54 Understanding Bodily Cognition

06:44 Introducing Esther Lightcap Meek

08:50 The Journey of a Philosopher

10:46 The Importance of Subsidiary Focal Integration

13:02 Practical Applications and Everyday Philosophy

16:40 The Role of Philosophy in Real Life

26:31 A Conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek

49:34 Integrative Knowledge and Liberation

50:25 Epistemological Therapy and Embodied Cognition

52:37 The Role of Subsidiary Focal Integration

54:58 Daisy of Dichotomies and Modernity

57:54 The Interpersonal Nature of Knowledge

01:11:20 Covenant Epistemology in Education

01:18:35 AI, Tools, and the Real

01:29:14 The Role of Love in Knowing 

A professional philosopher, author and speaker, Esther Meek offers her own distinctive, down-to-earth, approach to the philosophical matters that ground and permeate our lives: humanness, meaning, reality, knowing. The book Andrea and Esther discuss here is Loving to Know.

Link here to Esther’s work and books: https://www.estherlightcapmeek.com

for those of you interested in the way-making approach and how this fits with other episodes (otherwise, skip ahead)

Way-making resonance relative to past conversations and project: Knowledge is inherently unformalizable. Information is formalizable, a communicative way into knowing. Information tries to formalize knowledge (and rightly so); information is a way we represent so as to communicate and (at best) expand what can be known, though taking information (and its representations) as formalized knowledge (taking the focal as all) leads towards atrophy and away from intimacy with what the real. The real is dynamic focal interrelation with the tacit or subsidiary, what we hold and what holds us, without beginning or end. Intimacy with the real is knowing in which direction the sun will rise, feeling the grass under bare feet, listening to others, feeling the from-to and beyond of all that manifests.

Introduction

 Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today’s guest is Esther Lightcap. Meek, what a beautiful name. And she is a philosopher who believes that knowing is an act of love. She is the professor of philosophy emerita at Geneva College, which is in western Pennsylvania, and she’s written all sorts of books and she’s really dedicated her career to making philosophy accessible.

And transformative for people in all walks of life, from academia to wherever any person might be in the world. She was trained at Temple University. And, uh, we talk about that a bit here and how she found the work of scientist turned philosopher, uh, Michael Polyani, which opened her philosophical path. And now she’s opening many of our paths by introducing us to Polanyi. And it’s an exciting discovery for me. And I hope so for you too. There is a research ramble coming up, for those of you who are interested in the way making approach and And in connecting all the dots between all these different podcasts because this is basically like one big research piece. putting a lot of different ideas together in different ways and showing my inspirations, showing our inspirations.

It’s probably gonna evolve to a podcast that’s a little bit different next year, but that’s what it’s been this year. here’s kind of the last research ramble of the year. For those of you who’ve been following along and are, are following the philosophy, those of you who just wanna hear Esther, just skip right ahead.

It’s no problem at all. I’m really glad you’re here and it’s really beautiful to hear Esther talk about her work that starts in about 20 minutes from now. Just go ahead, for the rest of you, here’s the research ramble. Thanks for being here, everybody, and happy holidays.

Transcript of Research Ramble

Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today’s conversation is likely going to be the last we publish this year. I hope it’s been a good 2025 for you. I can’t believe it’s already over. Even so, there’s still so much to do, but I really want to get this episode to you before the year’s end, as a gift for the holiday. Today’s conversation explores information and knowing, what the difference is between those, and their relation with control and communion or what today’s guest calls ‘covenant epistemology’. This conversation also touches on some things I’m trying to get at in all these conversations and in all the other work I’m doing relative to what is really meant by ‘holding paradox’ or ‘bodily movement as already being cognitive, but not cognitive in the way you think’.

This exploration is coming at those ideas in a different way, which I hope will be helpful, through the ideas of philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, who is the guest today. Because her work is building on the work of Michael Polanyi, this episode is a lot about Polanyi too. Meeting both these minds was a treat this year, as I had not yet read Polanyi or Meek and was recently introduced to them by Hanne de Jaeger and Karen Wong. So thanks to both of them for recommending this work to me a few months back. It was also a bit of a conincidence to find that much of Esther’s work is inspired by the work of Parker Palmer, who I talked to earlier in the year. Hopefully you’ve listened to that one. Anyway, the basic idea that I’m trying to express is: We know through our bodies before we know through what we think of as our mind, as our thinking. What we call cognition is actually ongoing bodily action of making way through all we encounter, and that means mind and thinking are deeply connected to this from-to-beyond (to put it in the terms of Esther and Polanyi) process of bodily encountering.

All this stuff we call mind, which is the awareness of ourselves and our experience that we call ‘thinking’ and ‘memory’ or that which we notice as others and call their mind—the part we often identify with completely—is the tip edge of a process that connects us with more than we can tell, with our bodily knowing, with the source of anything we’ve called cognition till now, which is how we make our way through the world in all the many layers and spaces of experience, both those we are aware of and remember and think about and those we don’t. The part we call our thinking is the tip edge layering of the knowing (and loving, and being loved) that we are actually embedded within, extending, and an extension of—all this deep and endless communion and action of which and with which we are the conversational path.

And which is not only our bodies, but also everything the body is encountering, co-creating and being created by and with. Polanyi’s work, which I’m just discovering, is really helpful towards getting a grip on some of this from a non-cognitive science perspective, because he talks about this process through something that he, and then Esther Lightcap Meek, who is extending his work in a really beautiful way that we will talk about, describes it as subsidiary focal integration. Meek is coming to it through Christian studies. Outside of these studies, you may heard this most often discussed via tacit knowledge. That is the knowledge we have and know we have but cannot put into focal or information/representational terms. Meek discusses this via Indeterminate Future Manifestations (IFMs).

All this taken together as process also is giving of the rhythm of some of what I am trying to express via this dialectic of coming to know through and as our bodily movements. It’s like we’re always bringing some of this subsidiary or tacit-ness into our focal awareness, which also changes what is subsidiary or what’s holding us or what is all that we sense and know but that we have not put into representational format. And yet it is what is this dynamic ongoing encountering, and then also that which changes what can become focal and lead to tacit shifts so on and so forth. So we’re sort of co-creating all the possibilities for cognition, including emotion.

‘Love is the ability of the ongoing and unending to relate to itself.’

As I understand it though, again, and this would be controversial depending from where you are defining terms, when I talk about cognition, I’m talking about something that is held by love, love being the ability of the ongoing and unending to relate to itself, and through these layers of communication.

So there’s already way too much to unpack in there, to really do it justice, I need to read Polanyi more. I need to talk to Esther more and all that will come, I just want to try to introduce a little bit here now, and I’m only gonna focus on the book Loving To Know by Esther. That’s the one I read before I talked to her, and that’s the one that we will discuss here. But she’s also written quite a lot of other books like Longing to Know or The Mother’s Smile is her most recent. but this one is about loving to know we can think about what I just said through, through that title, even that knowing, the way we’re often taught when we go to school is about learning things like two plus two equals four, or it’s about information processing. We hear that a lot and it makes us think of our minds as computers processing information, but all of that is actually the communicative representational-influenced surface, literally, of a deeper knowing connecting us with what is endless.

It’s the tip edge of this ongoing action embodied ecological action or bodily and ecological, and this whole thinking/discursive part of our relationship with ourselves that we often take for granted as ourselves is really just the tip of the iceberg. Esther doesn’t actually put it like that, but this is what I’m drawing from it. She puts it in terms of covenant epistemology. And that orients a definition of knowledge as apprehension, bodily apprehension. So rather than the tip of the iceberg, this information comprehension part is being what we think of as knowledge, it’s this apprehending. So you can hopefully see how that connects relative to the bodily encountering.

As Esther says, knowing your timetables is great, but information, not knowledge. It’s the surface. It’s a surface of a much deeper bodily knowing Esther talks about it is as ‘wearing’, you know, you wear what you learn, you learn stuff so you can wear it. I understand what she means by that, but I almost think that it’s not even that you’re just wearing it, it’s really becoming sort of part of your way of encountering. But she gets to that idea, too. Wearing is the way we begin it.

So I think we basically mean the same thing there. So if we understand loving as this bodily being in the world. In the way that, for example, Parker and I discussed, then we can also understand Esther’s thesis here, which is that instead of knowing so we can love, we are actually already loving and loved and it is only through that, that we come to have knowing of anything at all.

Love is already holding you if you have knowledge of yourself—in other words, if you are aware that you exist. We are connected somewhere to generative relation, to what I mean by love (the ability of the ongoing and unending to relate to itself); that’s the only way we ever can know. That’s the only way we ever can develop something like thinking or mind or the movement of thinking that we identify with as if it’s everything. This is not cognition the way we think it is, but rather as the being alive itself, without sweetness or sentiment, and with it.

Esther talks about when she was a kid that she worried she could never know anything outside of her head that, she was aware of her thoughts, but how did she know there was anything else or anything real? And as she talks about here, it wasn’t something she felt she could talk about in her community. She’d become aware of this sort of the tip of the iceberg as I’m expressing it here, of what we call mind, and she didn’t know how to connect that to the real.

And like so many of us, it was isolating her. It felt like she was trapped there, as if that’s everything, how does she know there’s a real world? How does she connect to it? It’s like you’re stuck in this little box or something. And then eventually she found different scholars to help, one of them, a primary one, being Polanyi, Michael Polanyi, and something that he said changed things for her, something he wrote, something about the way he articulated the focal-subsidiary integration (as she puts it) was what she needed; it sort of popped her out of that, and it helped her understand that even to get to that place of awareness of self and knowing that you’ve been being held or known by something bigger, so to speak. I’m kind of adding my words here, of course, but it’s how I am coming into what she talks about it as from-to and beyond, which also comes from Polanyi, or her reading of it.

So, for you to even be able to be asking these questions, there’s already something you know, some knowing, that’s deeper than this tip edge thinking that you’re experiencing. And this starts to get at this whole holding paradox idea and it’s portal resonance. It’s quite hard to put into words, which is why I’ve had these 79 conversations about it from different points of view and perspectives, it’s a process of coming to know. More of yourself as yourself, and also becoming aware of what you think of as self and body, as even beyond what you might be delineating it as.

So Esther Lightcap Meek expresses this in her book by showing us that knowing is this transformative encounter and it is this long before it realizes itself, long before the ‘you’ of thinking realizes it, so now we get to this idea that philosophy is something like epistemological therapy in a way. It’s a verb of healing or of opening or noticing those portals and those places where we are already connected and with focus we can begin ‘to wear’ or align into differently as we make way.

And this is helping us with this feeling of being trapped in our heads or identifying with our thoughts. We’re not our thoughts, but we often assume that we are. And how do we become aware of that? How does that not become an illness? Or if it isn’t, if it has become somehow, uh destructive. How do we notice it and, and heal it?

That’s part of this, and it’s where the idea of dichotomy comes into her work and connects also to what we often talk about here because we often have this thinking self and we see it as in contrast or, you know, blocked off from everything else. The mind versus the body. Or us versus them, or even me versus myself in some sort of strange way knowledge can become sort of formalized.

We think it’s formalized or codified and made into something that’s absolute and unchanging and blocked off in this little box. But actually in the way I’ve been trying to discuss knowledge is this ongoing changing in dynamism, just like our bodies, just like everything we encounter that’s not formalisable in any absolute or static sense, even if we represent it as information (this is my addition here). It doesn’t mean that our knowing is not, consistent and regular and real and findable in all of that—it is— but you can’t just formalize it into something that will always hold in some representational form (which is part of the idea in this hippocampal paper).

Philosophy is a verb and knowledge is not formal but it is consistent and real. Information is formalizable information is the representational, communicative language and all this other stuff, images, and so on that we create. It’s very important, but it’s really only the tip edge of what we’re thinking of as knowledge. That’s the paradox to hold even as it cannot be held by any one position.

And it’s also where Meek challenges this modern tradition that treats knowledge as objective facts. So it’s not that there isn’t something objective. Of course there is, but there’s not this sharp division between knowing that as, as the subject and what is known, it’s, it is still an ongoing creation.

And that’s this connection between the bodily movement. And our knowing, of that bodily movement and this kind of layering as expressed in this practice, and how it can be therapeutic to realize that and feel back into ourselves, which is always possible. But until we realize it and have ways to help one another do it, we don’t do it.

No doubt, this can be hard. We wanna feel back into that connection we have with all that we encounter and with our emotions and with the love that is us and that is holding us, and it’s not sentimental, but is literally just how we come into this world, and how this world is continuing It’s because our bodies have this loving relationship to themselves, which by the way isn’t always easy and pretty and nice, but, because the world has that possibility within it, we can know that we are here and that opens a whole lot of other possibility.

So that’s the research ramble, or what comes to mind right now as I want to introduce the philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, who is, as I said, the author of Loving To Know, which is the book we talk about here, but also longing to know and. A little Manual for Knowing and The Mother’s Smile and many others, which, uh, she and I will hopefully talk about more in the future.

And again, it’s a lot about Michael Ponlanyi’s work. Polanyi was a Hungarian British scientist and then philosopher, mostly working in the early 19 hundreds, passed away probably before most of us were born. Or, or maybe in the seventies. He, I think 1976, he passed away. So his work is about threading his focal subsidiary integration or what you might have heard as tacit knowledge.

And what does he mean and what does, how does that relate to all this? All this? Well, the quick answer is that it has a lot to do with what we talk about when we talk about participatory sense-making or ecological psychology, or perspectival realism, all these other things that we bring up here because it’s about bodily relation at different levels and knowing as this ongoing, immediate action.

Which is oriented in many different ways, and which, depending on from where you assess it is going to look different, even as it’s one continuous process, or not one continuous process, but even as it’s continuous process. Polanyi discusses this as a process of knowing, Where we can understand it as a relation of what’s focal, which is sort of what our awareness is focused on.

Maybe think of it as like the spotlight, if you can leave behind the way that’s used in neuroscience for a minute. What’s in the spotlight, and then all that’s being experienced. That’s not in that. Area of focus, but that actually makes that point of focus possible, so to speak. And so it’s like you’re walking through the city and your body’s aware of and encountering so much more than your actual thinking mind is aware of—how you always know more than you can tell.

It’s again, that tip of the iceberg sort of thing, and we can also understand this when we look at how we come to do things like ride bikes or play a sport or do some sort of craft, and there would be all kind of psychology and neuroscience relative to that. Which I know a lot of you are thinking of now, but just let me just stick here with Esther’s view and, and Polanyi first we might have to focus on what the body’s encountering, like when we’re learning to read or ride a bike. But then we indwell that, or we wear that, as Esther might say, or it just becomes part of our body’s way of aligning with our encounter, as I might say. And we don’t have to focus on it anymore, and yet it’s holding whatever we’re focusing on, if that makes sense and it’s, and there’s a constant interchange between all of this, between what we’re focusing on and that subsidiary process. But if we focus too hard on the details. If we sort of try to break it up and make it into a dichotomy, then we do something that’s actually representational and that can be positive for a while.

That’s where the information comes from. But if we mistake that representation with the actual process, then we’re more prone to have something destructive or, or even something that’s hurting us, an illness. So this is that unhealthy state that is assumed in this dichotomous stance, which Esther talks about, she talks about a daisy of dichotomies and how we, we kind of get away from the center by, by creating these oppositional ideas and then sort of believing in them.

So we think loving and knowing, for example, are, are not connected or mind and body are not connected, but in fact they’re co-creating one another and believing that they’re separate, does something, Painful frankly, to, uh, our experience. because you’re loved and that love is what your body is doing but to live in the focal is to disconnect from that base of ongoing care, or to try to do so.So, she is saying that instead of knowing to love, we’re loving so that we can know. So, so maybe you can feel the kind of rigidity of the current age in a way. And how we do take these representational separations, this information, as if it’s everything or even our thinking is everything divorced from our body, and there’s a rigidity in that that maybe needs some therapy in the way that Esther is offering here. Part of that is treating information a little bit differently, and knowledge not not as something that’s information that’s collected and controlled, but rather something that’s dynamic and bodily and our way of becoming aware of the real, being able to handle more of the real together, and that’s a connection rather than a disconnection. So information is not knowledge, even if it can be a way to help us know.

There is the real and it’s that sort of knowing that her work is trying to open us back into, at least as I feel it, because that is the knowing that is us and is connecting us to what is real and, and the reason we are real. It’s this most human act of embodied subsidiary-focal integration— it is genuine knowing, as she presents it, human knowing of and as the real.

So, if we think about cognition in this subsidiary focal dynamic, then it’s not a voice in our heads. It’s not processing information. It’s an embodied ecological layered fractal of from-to in many directions, a layering relational action that we’re just beginning to understand. And that is much, much deeper than our actual thinking right now. than what we’re aware of, than what we can be aware of but not of what we know.

We’re already in touch with reality. We’re always in touch with it. The very fact that we can think about it means there’s something there that we already know. The question is whether we can trust this and whether we can find our way back into being what Meek calls lovers of the real, whether we can care for ourselves, is how I would put it, can you care for yourself for your own self, your body, and all that you don’t yet know about yourself? Can we see one another that way? Can we help each other find the energy and the time and the chance to remember this and feel into this in our individual lives, but also the way we exist socially and, and otherwise?

Finding Polanyi in this, what feels to me like dialectical layering of focal and subsidiary is what gave Esther a way to understand that she’d always been in contact with the real, with reality that is beyond thinking. She wasn’t stuck in her head. And she talks about that a bit here. She writes about it a lot. So the problem wasn’t insufficient proof, but it was that she was mis describing her own reality, because that’s what we’re taught to do.

She says some really profound things about that, about the way modernity teaches us to misdescribe our own reality, and this is part of being. In communion with the real or loving to know because we’re born in it and of it we are love. Otherwise, we couldn’t know we are here.

It’s that iceberg that could only rise above the water due to the fact that it’s in the water and is the water.

One term that Esther uses is indeterminate future manifestations. And basically this is this idea that you already feel something in the future that you don’t yet know. You can’t put words on, it’s not information yet, but somehow you sense it. And this is actually knowing, a glimpse at the depth of the reservoir of dynamism. This focal subsidiary integration is showing us that happens, it’s also what helps us understand that we’re already grounded in reality or something bigger than what we understand with our thinking mind, especially than the information that we have.

This also reminded me of something that Lisa Maroski and I talked about in one of the previous episodes because she said something to me about how You can’t question if you don’t already know.

I found that echoing a lot in this Polanyi and in Esther’s work, this sort of seeming contradiction that for us to know how to question anything, we must already know some part of it and be in relation with it, this indeterminate future manifestion that Esther discusses whereby we sense what we have not yet put into reprsentations (as I see it). Maybe that sounds confusing, but that’s that holding paradox that sort of forces us to break open these old categories and just sit with this feeling, even if it’s, we can’t quite understand it. Seeing information as different from knowledge, but also a way into knowledge that we could use to deepen communion and stewardship. And it’s a little bit disruptive and even frustrating, but it’s part of realizing that we’re not closed systems or boxes and that what is us is in constant shift in dynamics, but it’s also always connected. There’s no other, there’s no outsider, insider, beginning or into all of this. And care is the way we come into more of this movement as knowing we know it.

It’s that iceberg that could only rise above the water due to the fact that it’s in the water and IS the water.

As Esther says here, you can think of the difference in life and performance that we see in a story like, Seabiscuit. I don’t know if you remember that story about the horse that was treated terribly. And then this one caretaker saw the horse differently and the horse of course, sort of blossomed. Esther brings that story up a little bit here because just to show the difference between trying to control something, trying to make life become something, and caring for it, and being in a covenant relationship with it in communion and the potentials that open. Once we shift that orientation, the way the intru, the way the caretaker of the horse shifted, the relation between human and horse.

Another, image she brings up a lot is those Magic Eye moments where you look at something (these stereograms) and you can’t, and you suddenly see a pattern pop out. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those, basically the idea is that, you know, we’re always close to revelation if we just dare to shift our orientation a bit, and if we allow ourselves to fill into the care that is holding us, which is really scary to do, I know that. But it is. It is possible. Just let it be possible. It’s the hardest thing thing sometimes, but it’s also a real place and it’s flow and grace and all those words we use to try to talk about it.

This resonates with this podcast with way making withholding paradox because it’s referring to this philosophical skill or, or action of being able to, of holding seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once. And in so doing, not trying to resolve them, but instead feeling into the expansion that’s, that is there, and that is connecting us to what feels like it’s beyond us. So we’re learning a way to hold what seems in irreconcilable, we’re doing that by connecting with something like care or love that’s holding us. And that’s not sentimental or easy, but that is there. It really is there. So you can think of this via all kinds of dichotomies, absence, presence, control, covenant isolation, membership, and of course mindbody.

But basically what Esther and Polanyi are doing is opening this conversational path. With you and yourself, with you and them, with you and me, with you and others, so that we can move beyond what we’ve maybe, tried to codify or make a little bit too rigid by taking representational, communicative symbols or ideas as the actual kind of continuous process.

That means that knowing is less about information, as Meek shows, and more about transformation, it’s less about comprehension and more about ongoing apprehension. So that rhymes with a lot of what we’ve talked about here and. you know, knowledge is knowing philosophy as a verb, active relational process, participatory, and this epistemological therapy that Meek offers is hoping to kind of, you know, dispel some of the presumptions that might keep us from that communion.

So you’re already in touch with reality. That might be the main idea here. You’re already beyond the self you identify with as you’re thinking. And bodies are already cognitive way before they can think or imagine there’s a mind to them. Don’t worry if that sounds kind of wild. And don’t worry if it sounds completely obvious. Either way, it’s good.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek, she is just a joy as you’ll hear. There’s also just a lot of good cheer and laughter.

A few little notes. I should say that there, we were of course doing this in a video call and sometimes we were communicating with our bodies like she’s nodding and stuff, and you might not be able to tell that in the audio. Sometimes there’s like an affirmation that isn’t auditory, but I think now that I’ve said that, you’ll notice. Yeah, also there was some internet trouble and there might be a few little moments where there are some cuts, but hopefully it’ll just flow right along.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening this year. Thanks for whatever way you might’ve supported this, even if it’s just by having a good thought about it. I really appreciate it. It’s not easy to make time and do all this or to listen to all this hahah, but um, it’s really worth it and thanks for giving me a chance to do it, and I just send you a lot of love and whatever you might need today,   I hope you, you get it, you feel it, and that you give it, which is even better.

Michael Polanyi and Subsidiary-Focal Integration

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath who transitioned from chemistry to philosophy and developed an influential account of how human knowledge actually works in practice. Central to his epistemology is the distinction between focal and subsidiary knowledge, which appears prominently in his major works Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Tacit Dimension (1966).

Polanyi argued that when we know something, our attention operates on two levels simultaneously. Focal knowledge is what we are directly aware of—the object of our explicit attention. Subsidiary knowledge consists of the things we are aware from but not aware of—the background particulars, bodily sensations, skills, and contextual elements that enable us to grasp the focal object but remain on the periphery of consciousness.

His famous example involves hammering a nail: we focus on driving the nail, while our awareness of the hammer’s handle, the pressure in our palm, and the coordination of our movements remains subsidiary. These subsidiary elements function as clues that shape our focal awareness without themselves becoming the object of attention. If we shift our focus to the subsidiary particulars themselves—analyzing exactly how we’re gripping the hammer—the integrated skill often breaks down.

This framework led Polanyi to his broader concept of tacit knowledge—”we know more than we can tell.” Much of human expertise, from scientific discovery to riding a bicycle, depends on subsidiary awareness that resists full articulation. This challenged the prevailing assumption that all genuine knowledge must be explicit, formalized, and impersonal, and had profound implications for understanding science, skill acquisition, and the transmission of knowledge across generations.

Here are some quotes from his work:

“The act of tacit knowing thus implies the claim that its result is an aspect of reality which, as such, may yet reveal its truth in an inexhaustible range of unknown and perhaps still unthinkable ways.”

“To claim that we can know the unexpected may appear self-contradictory. It would indeed be selfcontradictory if knowing included a capacity to specify completely what we know. But if all knowledge is fundamentally tacit, as it is if it rests on our subsidiary awareness of particulars in terms of a comprehensive entity, then our knowledge may include far more than we can tell. The true meaning of the heliocentric system was discovered only by Newton, but it was anticipated 140 years earlier by Copernicus. We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell if we believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can establish contact. This I do. I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.'“

“…the relation of a set of particulars to a comprehensive entity. The essential feature throughout is the fact that particulars can be noticed in two different ways. We can be aware of them uncomprehendingly, i.e., in themselves, or understandingly, in their participation fo a comprehensive entity. In the first case we focus our attention on the isolated particulars; in the second, our attention is directed beyond them to the entity to which they contribute. In the first case therefore we may say that we are aware of the particulars focal!J; in the second, that we notice them subsidiarity in terms of their participation in a whole.”

“It accredits man’s capacity to acquire knowledge even though he cannot specify the grounds of his knowing, and it accepts the fact that his knowing is exercised within an accidentally given framework that is largely unspecifiable. These two acceptances are correlated within the effort of integration which achieves knowing. For this effort subsidiarily relies, on the one hand, on stimuli coming from outside, from all parts of our body and from tools or instruments assimilated to our body, and on the other hand, on a wide range of linguistic pointers which bring to bear our pre-conceptions-based on past experiences-on the interpretation of our subject matter. The structure of knowing, revealed by the limits of specifiability, thus fuses our subsidiary awareness of the particulars belonging to our subject matter with the cultural background of our knowing. I To this extent knowing is an indwelling: that is, a utilization I of a framework for unfolding our understanding in accordance __ with the indications and standards imposed by the framework. But any particular indwelling is a particular form of mental existence. If an act of knowing affects our choice between alternative frameworks, or modifies the framework in which we dwell, it involves a change in our way of being. But since such existential choices are included in an act of knowing, they can be exercised competently, with universal intent. Nor do similar existential changes, undergone passively, impair the rationality of our personal judgment. They merely affect our calling. For while they , modify our opportunities for seeking the truth, they still leave us free to reach our own conclusions within the limits granted by these opportunities. All thought is incarnate; it lives by the body l- and by the favour of society. But it is not thought unless it strives for truth, a striving which leaves it free to act on its own responsibility, with universal intent. We have found that our subsidiary awareness of the particulars of a comprehensive entity is fused, in our knowing of the entity, with our subsidiary awareness of our own bodily and cultural being…”

Michael Polanyi - Knowing and Being_ Essays by Michael Polanyi (1959–1968) (1969, University of Chicago Press)

Audio only on YT

Something we came upon while researching this last week:

Happy holidays and lots of love to all. Release the bird.

Maybe memory is a way we communicate with ourselves and the world at various layers, our ‘bridging experience’ of time and space.

In this episode, Andrea Hiott and Lynn Nadel continue their ongoing talks about memory. This time they explore the intricate workings of the hippocampus, focusing on its role in bridging spatial and temporal gaps. They delve into how memory, navigation, and cognitive maps are interconnected, challenging traditional views and opening up discussions on the dynamic nature of memory.

Lynn shares insights from his paper on memory and action at a distance, discusses how past research has evolved, touching upon philosophical perspectives from Kant and modern neuroscience findings. The conversation also moves into broader implications, including how understanding the hippocampus might extend to a wider view on cognitive functions and societal interactions.

There’s an in-depth ‘research ramble’ from Andrea at the beginning for those interested in the wider themes of this whole project, but you can also skip that and go to the main conversation at 43:43 if you wish.

This is a bonus episode. Our next episode for the holidays is on Michael Polanyi with Esther Lightcap Meek, focusing on her book Loving to Know, so keep a look out for that one soon, too.

The main paper discussed here is The Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance

Lynn Nadel is an American psychologist who is the emeritas Regents’ Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Nadel specializes in memory, and has investigated the role of the hippocampus in memory formation. Together with John O’Keefe, he coauthored the influential 1978 book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map.00:00 Introduction to Hippocampal Function02:07 The Role of Memory and Space11:38 Philosophical Insights on Space and Time15:50 Quantum Entanglement and Memory28:48 Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map43:43 Encouragement and Introduction to Lynn Nadel44:30 Discussing the Paper: The Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance44:55 Linking Time and Space: The Role of the Hippocampus47:21 Memory and Cognitive Maps49:59 The Evolution of Cognitive Map Theory51:34 Intertwining Memory and Navigation01:04:30 Philosophical Perspectives on Space and Time01:09:37 Innate Structures and Evolutionary Adaptations01:16:08 Plant Cognition and Tropisms01:16:59 The Importance of Memory01:17:39 Cognitive Maps in Animals01:17:57 Symposium and Research Updates01:19:08 Locomotion and Cognitive Needs01:20:54 Internal Models and Memory01:23:27 Temporal Contiguity vs. Contingency01:29:26 Dynamics of Memory01:35:11 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans01:36:34 Hippocampus and Social Interactions

*This full post with all its quotes, especially the list from Lynn’s writings at the end, is too long for email, so please click and read on the website or App if you would like to see the full text*

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Paper: The Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance

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Introduction (A cleaned up version of Andrea’s improv audio Intro)

How does the brain allow us to transcend the here and now? What is the relation between space and memory? How are all these connected? Perhaps memory is a word we use to describe our awareness of the habits that bind us with the action we encounter—not just storage, but a mechanism that liberates us from being bound to the immediate present, both through remembering the past and imagining the future through that same habituation with different degrees of awareness and conversation with ourselves. In other words, as Andrea puts it in the intro, maybe memory is the communication we are having with ourselves by way of our relation with the world as we encounter it.

“Perhaps memory is our communication with ourselves, and we experience it as thinking and action at different times and towards different goals.” (A.H.)

This connects to constellation cognition and the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, because we experience ourselves and others as “constellations rather than either/or formulations”.

As Gregory Bateson said, it takes two to know one—which means everything is always a communication of at least three different positions simultaneously, whether that’s past, present, future, or body, brain, world. Andrea: ‘these are the triads of stability we experience in the layers of our constellatory connection.’

Imagine two particles that have interacted, becoming so deeply connected that measuring one instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart they travel across the universe. This phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, defies our everyday intuition about how objects should behave when separated by vast distances. Einstein famously called it “spooky action at a distance” because it seemed to suggest that information or influence could somehow leap across space faster than light should allow. When we measure a property like spin on one entangled particle, its partner immediately “knows” and takes on a corresponding state, even if it’s on the other side of the galaxy. This does not happen due to signals traveling between them; rather, particles are somehow sharing a quantum state so fundamentally that they can’t be described independently, as if distance itself is somehow not there or meaningless from some other position (obviously still mysterious to us and our ways of measuring all this).

Just as quantum entanglement creates mysterious connections between particles across space, memory—powered in large part by the hippocampus—might be imagined as an activity of connection across space & time that allows you to move between past and future and here and now. Your brain performs its own kind of action at a distance: you navigate to a coffee shop you can’t currently see, you avoid a danger you experienced weeks ago, you plan for events months away.

Without your hippocampus, you’d be trapped in what neuroscientist Lynn (quoting Corkin’s book on the famous patient H.M.) calls the “permanent present tense”—unable to bridge the gaps between where you are and where you want to be, between what happened then and what’s happening now and able to imagine something else happening.

Entanglement defies spatial separation while memory (or the action of remembering or imagining, which aren’t all that different for the brain) gives us the power to also defy spatiotemporal separation. Lynn says we do this by “stitching together spatiotemporally disparate entities and events.” Andrea sees it all as a much more immediate alignment, and much of this text is taken from her audio and writings.

Quantum entanglement is also unmediated, or ‘ecological’ in the way that term is used in some of the Gibsonian literature; it requires no intermediaries, and yet our experience of memory is itself (to us) the constant mediator of this seeming spectrum of spacetime. Both these ideas (entanglement and remembering/imagining) challenge our intuitive sense that things only affect each other when they’re geographically close or tangible.

Kantian foundations

To understand why this matters, we can step back into philosophy for a moment and talk about one of Lynn’s favorite philosophers, Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant argued that space and time are not things existing independently “out there,” but rather are a priori forms of intuition—mental structures that our minds impose on raw experience before we can perceive anything at all (which Andrea argues is ecological or immediate bodily cognition rather than any sort of imposing).

Lynn Nadel explicitly invokes this in his work, writing that through hippocampal processes, “our subjective sense of both space and time are interwoven constructions of the mind, much as the philosopher Immanuel Kant postulated.”

Nadel and O’Keefe were already conceptualizing the hippocampus as a system for bridging spatiotemporal gaps, thinking of it as an innate Kantian absolute spatial framework not derived from experience, a flexible constellation-like system (in A’s terms) allowing navigation from any place to any other place, and a mechanism solving the identification problem by providing context for re-identification across different situations.

Today we can assess grid cells in the entorhinal cortex that “code a spatial structure that is generated internally within the brain and use it to scaffold the external environment, much in the same manner that Kant had anticipated.” Another way of thinking about this is to say that the hippocampus actively constructs space and time so as to organize all this ongoing experience.

getting more Hegelian

Quantum entanglement shows us that spatial separation isn’t absolute—particles can be fundamentally connected across distance in ways that defy classical locality. Kant argued our experience of space and time are mental constructions, not direct perceptions of reality as it is “in itself.” The hippocampus, as Nadel demonstrates, is the biological mechanism that stitches together spatiotemporally disparate experiences, creating our subjective sense of coherent space and time—it mediates “action at a distance” by bridging gaps. And Hegel, properly understood if you think Andrea’s way is proper (😅), showed that contradictions aren’t dead ends but generative, with truth emerging through dynamic interplay that we categorize but that is not absolutely categorizable.

All of these thinkers including Andrea and Lynn are grappling with the same fundamental mystery: how do we connect what is separated—whether particles across space, memories across time, or perspectives across minds? The answer seems to be: through structures that aren’t “out there” in objective reality, but rather emerge from relational, dynamic processes—whether quantum entanglement, hippocampal navigation, or constellation thinking.

the 1978 Book

In 1978, Lynn Nadel and John O’Keefe published “The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map,” (which Andrea and Lynn have talked through often). Back then, they were already thinking about these issues towards the way we’re discussing them today whereby memory and navigation are ways of considering the same process. And this forms the foundation from which a lot can now grow, even if it asymmetrically.

As Lynn points out in the talk, the very first sentence of their introduction explicitly frames memory as central to their theory.

This book is concerned with three topics which, at first glance, do not appear to be related: (1) a part of the brain known as the hippocampus; (2) the psychological representation of space; (3) context-dependent memory. We shall argue that the hippocampus is the core of a neural memory system providing an objective spatial framework within which the items and events of an organism’s experience are located and interrelated.

They were already thinking of memory as a system for connecting disparate experiences across space and time.

action at a distance

Action at a distance refers to objects affecting each other across space or time without any apparent connection. Einstein famously called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”

But humans and animals perform their own version of action at a distance constantly. We navigate to goals we can’t see. We make decisions based on events from hours, days, or years ago. We plan for futures that don’t yet exist.

The hippocampus, Nadel argues, is the brain system that makes this possible. It does so through what we can assess as interconnected mechanisms:

1. Creating cognitive maps that represent extended spatial contexts—linking places you’ve never experienced together into a coherent model

2. Building neural trajectories that connect events across time, even when those events are separated by significant gaps

(Andrea then understands these as way-making and allows that when we are discussing memory or when we are discussing navigation, we are still able to do the following, which she calls Navigability:

3. Use these maps and trajectories to simulate possible futures)

Without a hippocampus, we’re stuck with what’s immediate, which is not as great as it might sound because we have no trajectory to which to compare it. As Andrea says, we ‘lose our connection to the tacit’ and this might be the real clue to what the hippocampal formation has to show us about relation.

superstitious brains

Animals with hippocampal damage become locked to (or trapped in) temporal contiguity alone and are highly superstitious—they can only connect events that happen immediately together, missing the deeper patterns of contingency that govern how the world actually works. They become context-blind, unable to use the when and where of experience to distinguish what truly matters.

In a 1980 study, researchers Devenport and Holloway found that rats with hippocampal lesions become, in effect, highly superstitious. These rats could only connect events that happened in close temporal proximity—if A was followed immediately by B, they assumed A caused B. Further research found links to this and delusional thinking.

Understanding the world requires more than temporal contiguity. It requires contingency—the ability to track whether events reliably go together across many instances, separated by time and space. Does A really cause B, or do they just sometimes happen to occur together? These sorts of layers and real time alignements are hard for us to explain without reverting to linear causality, but the hippocampus is doing something more like entanglement, and at more than just one layer or scale.

more specific to this discussion

Lynn and Andrea recorded this Action at a Distance conversation some months ago, which was approximately 50 years after Nadel and John O’Keefe first proposed their cognitive map theory, they explore these ideas and their implications for how we understand consciousness, memory, and our place in time and space. In it, they discuss how memory and spatial navigation aren’t separate functions but are deeply intertwined in ways often presented on this podcast and in the waymaking approach in general—two sides of the same coin, and explore how the hippocampus accomplishes this extraordinary feat by constructing cognitive maps (according to Nadel) representing extended spatial contexts, creating neural trajectories linking parts of events across time, and using these maps and trajectories to simulate possible futures.

Much of the core insight—that the hippocampus ‘stitches together’ spatiotemporally disparate experiences into a coherent framework—can be found in the early work from the beginning. Andrea has tried to show in her academic work that this ‘stitching together’ is representational (a form of external communication about what is already continuous).

What emerges is the recognition that memory and navigation are threaded together (or even ‘two dynamic paths to the same dynamic lake’), that space and time are not separate scaffolds but interwoven constructions of the mind, mediated by this remarkable neural architecture.

beyond space and time

Nadel does not seem to think of emotion as cognitive, which is something perhaps to be furthered explored by the two of them, as they seem to have different ideas of what emotion and cognition mean.

When asked about emotion, love, or compassion, Lynn is refreshingly direct: “I have no insights into it. I... I struggle.”

The hippocampus, he suggests, is a “purely cognitive, purely knowledge-based system” that can influence emotional and social domains but isn’t fundamental to them. It makes contextual contributions—knowing when restaurant voice versus home voice is appropriate—but doesn’t explain emotion itself.

Yet there’s something profound in the conversation that goes beyond these mechanics. When asked if there’s any connection between his work and care or love, Nadel initially demurs. But then Andrea suggests: if we think of the hippocampus as a way we communicate with ourselves, constantly updating our knowledge to stay true to reality rather than clinging to outdated models, then it could be about “extending the circle of care.” She is getting at the idea that emotion is another way we make, and also cognitive, and this has a lot to do with what and how we navigate.

“Your memories, you are your memories, your memories are in constant dialogue with the real world, basically with everything you’re putting in, whatever you’re watching on YouTube, the people that are around you, those are shifting the algorithm, so to speak, all the time.”

Both the 1978 book and the 2021 paper are open access, so we encourage you to read them if you wish to dive deeper. Here are some further quotes from both below.

quotes from the 1978 book:

On bridging gaps and action at a distance: “The place system permits an animal to locate itself in a familiar environment without reference to any specific sensory input, to go from one place to another independent of particular inputs (cues) or outputs (responses), and to link together conceptually parts of an environment which have never been experienced at the same time.”

On the hippocampus as the stitching mechanism: “We shall call the system which generates this absolute space a cognitive map and will identify it with the hippocampus... This system underlies the notion of absolute, unitary space, which is a non-centred stationary framework through which the organism and its egocentric spaces move.”

On the Kantian absolute space: “In contrast to this view, we think that the concept of absolute space is primary and that its elaboration does not depend upon prior notions of relative space... There exists at least one neural system which provides the basis for an integrated model of the environment. This system underlies the notion of absolute, unitary space.”

On constellation-like flexibility: “Each new item which is located on a map is automatically related to every other place and item already on the map. A change in a feature of the landscape occasions only a single alteration in a map, yet it changes every route statement in which that feature occurs.”

On the non-object-dependent nature of places: “The constituents of space are places... Places and space are not, in our view, defined in terms of objects or the relations between objects. The absolute space defined by Kant exists in the absence of objects... This freedom from reference to any specific object or set of objects is one of the most important properties of maps.”

On connecting experiences across time: “Since each representation of a stimulus is encoded in terms of its spatial relations to other stimuli, an identical stimulus occurring in different parts of the same environment, or in totally different environments, will have distinct, and differentiable, representations in each case. This, of course, is the way in which a spatio-temporal framework solves, by its very structure, the problem of re-identification so central to our philosophical discussion.”

And on the innate spatial framework: “We have organized this chapter around the dichotomy between absolute and relative space in the hope of showing how the choice of either of these as prior crucially influences the ability of any theory to cope with space perception... It seems reasonable to conclude, first, that there is a clear need for the concept of unitary space. Further, it appears that this framework cannot be acquired through experience; it must be available soon after birth, for the processes of localization, identification and the coherent organization of experience depend on it.”

Quotes from the paper they discuss here:

The 2021 Paper: “The Hippocampal Formation and Action at a Distance,”

In this paper, Nadel deepens these insights while moving toward a more integrated view. He writes:

“The question of why our conceptions of space and time are intertwined with memory in the hippocampal formation is at the forefront of much current theorizing about this brain system. In this article I argue that animals bridge spatial and temporal gaps through the creation of internal models that allow them to act on the basis of things that exist in a distant place and/or existed at a different time. The hippocampal formation plays a critical role in these processes by stitching together spatiotemporally disparate entities and events. It does this by 1) constructing cognitive maps that represent extended spatial contexts, incorporating and linking aspects of an environment that may never have been experienced together; 2) creating neural trajectories that link the parts of an event, whether they occur in close temporal proximity or not, enabling the construction of event representations even when elements of that event were experienced at quite different times; and 3) using these maps and trajectories to simulate possible futures. As a function of these hippocampally driven processes, our subjective sense of both space and time are interwoven constructions of the mind, much as the philosopher Immanuel Kant postulated.”

He continues: “Mediated action at a distance is central to much of what psychologists care about, given that behavior is frequently motivated by things that are at a spatial and/or temporal remove from the here and now. I will argue that mediating action at a distance is so important that a brain system, centered on the hippocampal formation, is largely devoted to carrying it out.”

And crucially: “Without a hippocampal formation, I will argue, organisms are largely incapable of escaping the here and now—a state of being captured in the title of Suzanne Corkin’s book about the famous amnesic patient H.M.: ‘Permanent Present Tense.’”

Nadel reflects on the journey we’ve already been discussing, writing:

“Nearly 45 years ago we proposed the ‘cognitive map’ theory of hippocampal function. Spurred by the discovery by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky of place cells in the hippocampus, this theory spelled out the ways in which this brain structure, and its neighbors, allowed organisms to move about and explore space and to store in memory specific experiences that played out over time. Much has been discovered about the hippocampus and its neural confederates since then, most of which is consistent with the broad outlines of cognitive map theory. But one enigma remains: Why is it that the same neural system is so intimately involved in aspects of space and time and memory?”

quotes Andrea reads in intro from Lynn and John’s book (1978):

1. On “Action at a Distance” and bridging gaps (parallel to Nadel paper):

“The place system permits an animal to locate itself in a familiar environment without reference to any specific sensory input, to go from one place to another independent of particular inputs (cues) or outputs (responses), and to link together conceptually parts of an environment which have never been experienced at the same time.”

2. On the Hippocampus as stitching mechanism:

“We shall call the system which generates this absolute space a cognitive map and will identify it with the hippocampus... This system underlies the notion of absolute, unitary space, which is a non-centred stationary framework through which the organism and its egocentric spaces move.”

3. On Kantian absolute space:

“In contrast to this view, we think that the concept of absolute space is primary and that its elaboration does not depend upon prior notions of relative space... There exists at least one neural system which provides the basis for an integrated model of the environment. This system underlies the notion of absolute, unitary space.”

4. multiple representations/Constellation-like flexibility:

“Each new item which is located on a map is automatically related to every other place and item already on the map. A change in a feature of the landscape occasions only a single alteration in a map, yet it changes every route statement in which that feature occurs.”

5. non-object-dependent nature of places:

“The constituents of space are places... Places and space are not, in our view, defined in terms of objects or the relations between objects. The absolute space defined by Kant exists in the absence of objects... This freedom from reference to any specific object or set of objects is one of the most important properties of maps.”

6. On Connecting Experiences Across Time (memory function):

“Since each representation of a stimulus is encoded in terms of its spatial relations to other stimuli, an identical stimulus occurring in different parts of the same environment, or in totally different environments, will have distinct, and differentiable, representations in each case. This, of course, is the way in which a spatio-temporal framework solves, by its very structure, the problem of re-identification so central to our philosophical discussion.”

7. On the Innate Spatial Framework (Kantian a priori):

“We have organized this chapter around the dichotomy between absolute and relative space in the hope of showing how the choice of either of these as prior crucially influences the ability of any theory to cope with space perception... It seems reasonable to conclude, first, that there is a clear need for the concept of unitary space. Further, it appears that this framework cannot be acquired through experience; it must be available soon after birth, for the processes of localization, identification and the coherent organization of experience depend on it.”

More quotes discussed from the Action at a Distance paper:

“The question of why our conceptions of space and time are intertwined with memory in the hippocampal formation is at the forefront of much current theorizing about this brain system. In this article I argue that animals bridge spatial and temporal gaps through the creation of internal models that allow them to act on the basis of things that exist in a distant place and/or existed at a different time. The hippocampal formation plays a critical role in these processes by stitching together spatiotemporally disparate entities and events. It does this by 1) constructing cognitive maps that represent extended spatial contexts, incorporating and linking aspects of an environment that may never have been experienced together; 2) creating neural trajectories that link the parts of an event, whether they occur in close temporal proximity or not, enabling the construction of event representations even when elements of that event were experienced at quite different times; and 3) using these maps and trajectories to simulate possible futures. As a function of these hippocampally driven processes, our subjective sense of both space and time are interwoven constructions of the mind, much as the philosopher Immanuel Kant postulated.”

“Mediated action at a distance is central to much of what psychologists care about, given that behavior is frequently motivated by things that are at a spatial and/or temporal remove from the here and now. I will argue that mediating action at a distance is so important that a brain system, centered on the hippocampal formation, is largely devoted to carrying it out.”

“Without a hippocampal formation, I will argue, organisms are largely incapable of escaping the here and now—a state of being captured quite well in the title of Suzanne Corkin’s book about the famous amnesic patient H.M.: “Permanent Present Tense.””

clouds in Boulder, 2025, Andrea Hiott

be well out there.

Mostly unscripted. From the heart. Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological and poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Philosophy as a verb.

Hey everybody.

This podcast is about seemingly impossible combinations and this one is the doozy of love and power. It’s about the politics of care. Or love in politics. Can you hold those words at once? Can we? We might be surprised by ourselves.

Jamie Bristow has spent the last fifteen years bringing mindfulness and contemplative practices into the British Parliament, the UN, and halls of power around the world. And now he’s decided love is the only answer. But what happens when you bring the language of love into spaces where we typically speak only of power via politics?

This episode of Love and Philosophy, hosted by philosopher Andrea Hiott, delves into the intersection of love and power in political and personal realms. Guest Jamie Bristow, with his extensive experience working with people in the British Parliament and the UN, explores how mindfulness, consciousness, and inner transformation can reshape politics and society.

Through discussing concepts like Eros, resilience, and ontological metamodernism, the conversation examines how personal and societal change can be navigated, holding love and power together to create meaningful transformation. The episode also touches on Jamie’s journey from a corporate advertising executive to a ‘legitimizing agent’ for contemplative practices in politics, highlighting the role of faith, trust, and the evolving nature of consciousness. More in depth on those themes in the post below.

Jamie is a policy advisor working at the intersection of inner & outer transformation, resilience and sustainability.

Find Jamie and his work here

00:00 The Sacred Nature of Power02:05 Introduction to Love and Philosophy02:25 Exploring Love and Power in Politics03:14 Jamie Bristow’s Journey08:41 Mindfulness in Parliament18:38 The Intersection of Inner and Outer Worlds31:51 The Role of Love and Power in Society43:45 Exploring the Concept of Eros44:23 The Broader Implications of Eros46:33 Love as a Cosmic Force47:43 Resilience and the Role of Love52:51 Trust and Faith in Personal Growth55:43 The Politics of Love01:14:06 Navigating Modernity and Postmodernity01:19:18 The Middle Way and Superposition01:27:50 Closing Reflections on Love and Philosophy

The System Within: addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability and systems transformationMindfulness in Westminster: Reflections from UK PoliticiansReconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside OutThe Conscious Food Systems Alliance (UNDP) Power & Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change by Adam KahanePolitical Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice - Martha Nussbaum

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legitimizing agents

Jamie calls himself a “legitimizing agent” — someone who takes what’s considered fringe, woo-woo, or even what seems like ‘career suicide’ and makes it speakable in mainstream contexts.

A decade ago, some governmental members who took mindfulness courses did so under strict confidentiality. “Just don’t tell anybody,” they’d say. Now some of them are talking about it on the front pages of major newspapers and the idea of mindfulness and meditation is almost commonplace.

Part of this may be about the meditation techniques and stress reduction but the motivation discussed here is also deeper and gets at something bodily and crucial beyond discipline.

Jamie talks about it as “the missing inner dimension” and it does hold a powerful punch to ask if we want to be treated as our politicians treat one another, though as usual here, the host also wants to explore how we might talk about this beyond inner/outer while still respecting both. The answer comes down to a life’s sustainability and transformation, and the social scaffolds that add up to our collective means of civilization.

living paradox

There’s a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that structures this conversations in many ways, which Jamie brings up and Andrea recounts in the intro:

“Power without love is reckless and abusive. And love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. And justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

We’re so familiar with how power degenerates and how it becomes manipulative, oppressive, or corrupt. But (as Jamie discusses here) we’re less familiar with how love can degenerate, or how we might sculpt and twist its energies into forms that cannot be maintained.

Love can lead us into real power but our desire to feel it can also be confused with the desire for ‘being liked’, which can lead to us being too passive or people-pleasing, avoiding difficult boundaries and necessary confrontation; sometimes the drive for unity without differentiation can actually limit our capacity to show up fully in the world.

Towards how we might live in this dance, Jamie talks about learning in mindfulness training to be “strong in back and soft in front at the same time” — to have rigor, discernment, and clarity while also being compassionate and receptive. It’s rare, he admits, and it’s powerful.

corporate exec, dharma bum, political insider

What is an insider really? Does anyone ever feel like one?

Jamie’s own journey embodies this tension between power and love, between wanting it and having it and being seen as having it. He was running a global advertising account, responsible for a billion-dollar brand, when something shifted. He describes it as moving from what Harvard professor Robert Kegan calls “the socialized mind” to “the self-authored mind”, a shift from running the company code absorbed from society’s values to taking his own direction.

He became something of a “dharma bum” then in Barcelona, meditating with no income and no plan. It was a move that required faith—as Andrea brings up towards the end in an interesting insight, faith in himself and in possibility itself.

That path eventually led him to work in climate communications, where he became disillusioned with what he calls “the information deficit hypothesis” which is the idea that if we just give people the right statistics, they’ll change.

He realized his own inner transformation had made the same facts land differently. This is when he started asking: Why aren’t we thinking about the inner dimension of the climate crisis? He asked this because he realized this ‘inner’ world is what had changed for him. The first step beyond the assumed inner/outer dichotomy (that we are trapped in our heads, for example) is often in realizing that there is something powerful that comes through awareness of the world oneself.

eros as world-creator

As the conversation heats into new grounds, Jamie talks about Eros and says he forgets that people still associate that work with sexual desires. Eros is not just sexual, though that is a manifestation, but it is a fundamental creative force in everything.

Drawing on the soul-making dharma tradition he practices, Jamie describes Eros as the impulse to move toward something, to become intimate with it, to penetrate or be penetrated by mystery and beauty.

“It’s a world creator,” he said. “It’s a fundamental generative force in human nature and perhaps in the cosmos.”

But there’s another kind of love, one without an object, more like an ongoing “background radiation” of beneficence. In his deepest moments, Jamie senses a divine ground of being that has no separate subject and object. The boundary between his love and cosmic love becomes indistinct. This is another sort of power that is the kind that transforms us.

stack of possibilities

As the conversation progresses, Jamie ends up coining the term “ontological meta-modernism.”

He’s not talking about the middle way as a lukewarm compromise between extremes. Instead, he describes a kind of “superposition” (if one is borrowing from quantum physics) where multiple perspectives exist in a stack, all influencing how we show up, with different ones becoming more relevant in different situations.

“Maybe I’m 60% panpsychist, but I’m still at least 10% scientific materialist,” he explained. “And I really like Christian mysticism. They’re all in a stack, in superposition with each other.”

This tolerance for ambiguity, this ability to hold complexity without collapsing into a single answer is at the heart of both love and real power (the kind that is infused with unadulterated care). It’s not about choosing between modern confidence in objective truth and postmodern paralysis in total relativism. It’s about something that moves through both, holding the paradox.

what politics could be

So what would a politics of love look like? Maybe like it was already in love. Both eros and beyond.

Whatever it may be, Jamie suggests it can’t be grounded in specific theological claims, but it must invite discourse about what truly matters and about meaning, care, connection, and what constitutes a wholesome life. This is a way of bringing what’s sacred into public conversation without requiring everyone to share the same faith tradition or beliefs.

Systems alone aren’t enough. As Gandhi supposedly said, “We want our systems to be so good that we don’t have to be.” That fiction is evaporating. We need the conversation about who we want to be as people, not just what rules we’ll follow.

learning what we need to learn

At one point, Jamie mentions that he and his partner Rosie Bell wrote about pathways through climate collapse that aren’t just binary, that are not just “we’ll barely make it” or “total catastrophe” options. One pathway they sketch is darker but also somehow hopeful, as it states that we might see the suffering, the systems failure, to learn what we need to learn.

A Zen Master was asked when people learn. His answer: “When they have to.”

Maybe we don’t have to yet. Maybe that’s changing. Or maybe we can do this by feeling into all the suffering that already exists without having to create ever more of it, even if we don’t yet feel it as ‘our own’.

gifts of philosophy

At the end of Andrea and Jamie’s conversation, Andrea asks Jamie about love and philosophy. His answer surprises her becasue he brings up his dad, who had not yet been mentioned. He thanks his father, who raised him by being a philosopher (so to speak), introducing him to thought experiments as a kid. “How do you know you’re not a brain in a jar? How do you know any of this is real?”

Elsewhere Jamie had previously talked about his spiritual journey in somewhat negative contrast to his philosophical upbringing. But in this moment, he recognized it as an enormous gift: being held in love while being taught to question everything, to be a lover of learning.

That feels like the place to start and so to come back to here. Whether as a parent, a friend, a colleague, or a citizen representing other citizens (which is what politicians are in a democracy) to hold space for someone to become a philosopher, a questioner, an explorer of what’s possible. To do that with love. In power. And with power. In love.

Strong and soft at once. Holding the paradox without collapsing it.

It’s messy. It’s vulnerable. It’s urgent. And maybe it’s exactly what this moment between worlds is asking of us. Which brings us to one bit of gratitude we want to give, and that is to Manda Scott who has is a master connector of people, ideas and hearts (and is the one who put Jamie and Andrea in touch a while back). If you haven’t heard her Accidental Gods podcast, check it out!

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Love and Philosophy would love to hear from you if you have practices or are part of communities who are trying to find ways to hold paradox, which means to move beyond binaries without thinking one side has to win over the other, & to do this with care. This post is towards all this. What do you think?

Can we shift mindsets through shifts in language?

Both together and from within?

Episode #77 is hosted by philosopher Andrea Hiott and explores the concept of embracing paradox with Lisa Maroski, author of ‘Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language.’ Lisa’s book looks into how our language separates concepts, leading to binary thinking, and how questioning and reexamining these linguistic habits can foster a deeper understanding of interconnectedness.

Using the metaphor of the Mobius Strip (which you may remember from the episode with Parker Palmer) Lisa and Andrea discuss the importance of holding multiple truths simultaneously and the potential for transforming our worldview. They touch on various topics, including the influence of language on culture, the need for a new way of thinking to address global challenges, and the role of love and trust in fostering connection. The conversation encourages listeners to see beyond binary choices and embrace a more integrated, kaleidoscopic approach to understanding and caring for the world.

Find out more about Lisa’s book at:www.lisamaroski.com

00:00 Introduction to Paradoxical Thinking02:54 Welcome to Love and Philosophy03:23 Exploring Language and Cognitive Boundaries04:08 Introducing Lisa and Her Book05:21 The Mobius Strip Metaphor06:03 The Complexity of Language and Culture26:20 Dynamic Processes and Biological Insights28:48 The Existential Motivation for Change32:15 Exploring New Ways of Being33:54 Interconnectedness and Environmental Awareness38:35 The Power of Questions48:40 Learning from Different Perspectives51:45 Language and Collective Change58:27 Embracing Paradox and Wholeness01:00:40 Final Thoughts and Recommendations

L.E. (Lisa) Maroski didn’t intend to become an editor, it just so happened that she was good at helping people say what they really wanted to say, not what they wrote. After years of doing that for others, she turned her trade on herself, publishing a novel, The One That Is Both, in 2006 and Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language in 2024. Both books derive from a deep desire for language to be able to “do more.” A third book that continues this theme is in development. Having studied philosophy and psychology but working in medical editing and writing, she considers herself a generalist, one who likes to make connections between ideas. An avid dancer, she balances mind with motion, lofty thoughts with high kicks. You might find her dancing tango somewhere…

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summary of this week’s themes

rethinking language and perception

Language serves as more than a basic tool for communication; it also shapes our experiences and perceptions and arises like a path that we have been walking through our lives. Maroski illustrates the constraints of “either/or” thinking that language often reinforces (a narrowing of the path or of possible paths) urging us to consider a “both either/or and both/and ” approach instead. This perspective is explained here through the metaphor of a Mobius strip—a surface with seemingly opposite sides that are actually one continuous form. By recognizing this interconnectedness, we can start to perceive the world less in terms of rigid binaries and more in fluid, harmonious unities.

cultural matters

Maroski prompts us to consider how cultural paradigms shape our languages. English, a noun-heavy language, often leads to seeing the world as a collection of static entities rather than dynamic processes. In contrast, some cultures perceive life’s continuous changes, and language reflects this worldview through more verb-like structures. All tenses are important but what if we notice how we use them (and how that use shapes our potentials) differently? To evolve our language effectively, a shift in cultural mindset is needed. It’s about more than just inventing new vocabulary; it involves a broader change in our perception of interconnectedness and interdependence. Understanding we use nouns to understand that everything is a verb.

action paradox

Embracing paradox invites us to inhabit a space where we hold multiple truths simultaneously. This means recognizing the distinctions while also perceiving the unifying connections between them. Maroski emphasizes that language can evolve organically through awareness, questioning, and dialogue. By questioning our language and its underlying assumptions, we open ourselves to new ways of being and interacting with the world (and even with ourselves!).

languages are part of living systems

Language is not static but rather part of a living system that evolves alongside life. Maroski argues for a conscious engagement with language to catalyze change. Rather than forcing language to shift through prescriptive changes, real transformation emerges from collective exploration and dialogue. We can appreciate the multiplicity of perspectives that different cultures bring, embracing this constellation of potentials to enrich our collective narrative.

Lisa Maroski’s exploration of language through the lens of paradox offers a way to shift perspective and take note of the power we have just in the ways we speak. And the ways we are aware of our speaking.

By questioning the “either/or” dichotomy and adopting a “both either/or and both/and” mentality, we can tap into the boundless potential of language as a tool for deeper connection and understanding. This shift enhances our communication and enables us to navigate a complex world with more openness, curiosity, and care.

“The way our language separates these concepts as opposed to holding them together like a yin yang, has us pursuing things in like a wrong-headed way. Like trying to pick one side of a unity and argue that that side’s right, and then somebody else picks the other side of the unity and argues that that’s right. We get stuck in these arguments of either or….”

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and educator, trained in neuroscience. Her pamphlet Embracing Paradox is available here and here.

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Episode #76 is about exploring love through maintenance and the disruptive, delightful, mundane, difficulty of the everyday.

Jérôme Denis is Director of the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation at Mines Paris-PSL. David Pontille is Director of Research at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. Their book is The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance. They work in Science and Technology Studies.

Welcome to Love and Philosophy, where we explore philosophical, scientific, and technological spaces beyond either/or bounds. This episode is a conversation about care, maintenance, and our relationship with the material world. Philosopher Andrea Hiott introduces this discussion about the often-overlooked topic of maintenance and its philosophical, scientific, and emotional significance. She gives listeners an intro to the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and highlights the contributions of influential figures like Bruno Latour, so listeners have some background for the rich discussion as the guests discuss their book ‘The Care of Things,’ which emerged from their unexpected findings while investigating the Paris Metro signage system. They explore how maintenance and care reveal the fragility, multisensory engagement, and relationality of objects and how even mundane tasks hold deep significance. The three underline the interconnectedness of people and objects, challenging the notion of autonomous entities and underscoring the often hidden yet crucial work of maintenance.

As the book tells us from the beginning: People don’t just live among objects, they take care of them. From coffee machines to cathedrals, satellites to washing machines, smartphones to bridges, nothing survives without ongoing care. But we rarely give this care the recognition it deserves.

The discussion extends to the personal experiences of the authors, their approach to teaching, and the emotional resonance of caring for things, ultimately advocating for a greater appreciation of everyday maintenance and its broader implications in contemporary society.

The Care of Things began, as many important projects often do, by accident. Jérôme Denis and David Pontille didn’t set out to study maintenance. They were investigating something they thought they understood, the signage system of the Paris Metro that guide millions of travelers daily. They wanted to understand “the power of writing, its capacity to concretely organize our ways of living together.” But near the end of a two-year investigation, someone casually asked: “Have you talked to the maintenance workers?”

And it turned out to be a question that changed everything.

“The signs, which we thought we knew in every detail were literally transformed before our eyes.” What they had seen as solid, immutable, standardized objects revealed themselves as fragile, constantly transforming entities held in place by invisible labor. The maintenance workers were experts at what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called “plugging into the flux of matter”, but this wasn’t abstract philosophy. It was concrete, embodied, everyday work. Not so romantic, and yet important as any form of love.

What emerged from this encounter is a book that asks us to fundamentally rethink how we live with objects, with each other, and with the world. It’s a topic that fits well with Science and Technology Studies (STS), an interdisciplinary field that examines how science and technology are inseparable from social, political, and economic life.

Rather than treating scientific facts as objective truths discovered in isolation, STS scholars investigate how knowledge is actually produced through networks of humans, institutions, materials, and practices.

One of the field’s most influential figures was Bruno Latour (1947-2022), a French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist whose groundbreaking books and his work with others (Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, John Law, etc.) towards Action Network Theory (ANT) helped establish STS as a field. His books have grown increasingly more influential over the years, including Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), and We Have Never Been Modern (1991).

Latour challenges readers and students to stop separating humans from nonhumans, arguing that objects are not passive things but active participants in social networks. ANT traces how associations between people and things create the stable patterns we call society.

A key idea here is one you will recognize from many of our other conversations, though this one comes from an STS angle, and that is that idea that everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships.

In his famous essay “Where Are the Missing Masses?” Latour made a provocative argument towards that idea: when sociologists tried to understand social bonds, they consistently came up short and felt that something was missing. That something was the relation of and with the material artifacts that surround us—from doorknobs to seat belts, for these are not mere tools but moral agents that shape our behavior, delegate responsibilities, and hold society together in some very literal ways we have the luxury not to notice most days. But all those everyday ongoing relations are attended to by someone, and that’s where maintenance comes into play.

In contrast to this reality of maintenance, we often think about repair, which is dramatic, heroic, event-based. Something breaks and someone fixes it; order is restored.

We notice repair. It’ the plot line for all our blockbuster movies, whereby someone saves the day.

Maintenance is something else, more like the daily pulsation of care that prevents breakdown before it happens.

It’s repetitive, ongoing, mostly unnoticed. “When there is an emergency and things have to be repaired, we notice,” but real love and real life are matters of everyday ongoing maintenance.

As David explains, maintenance’s drama is to “make everything go on as if nothing had happened.” But to whom does nothing happen? As soon as you follow maintenance workers, you discover that so much is happening, too much to hold, so much that it takes someone’s constant vigilance, bodily engagement, multisensory expertise, decisions about intervention, negotiations with materials. This ‘nothing’ is actually quite an achievement and a sort of ongoing societal work that becomes invisible precisely because it succeeds.

Still, the book doesn’t romanticize maintenance.

Care can be exhausting, overwhelming, even harmful. Maintenance workers can be injured by the tools and materials they use. Some French Ford Mustang owners (discussed in the book and in this conversation) sometimes become so overwhelmed by the constant vigilance required that they sell their cars. You can care so much for something that you destroy it—or yourself.

As David says clearly: “We are not ‘for’ maintenance.” They’re not arguing that we should maintain everything forever. Rather, they’re asking us to notice maintenance, to recognize the work it requires, to understand the interdependencies it reveals. Sometimes the right decision is to let things go, to stop maintaining. But that should be a conscious choice, not a default driven by the illusion of autonomy.

The late-night comedian John Oliver captured this perfectly in a 2015 episode about infrastructure.

His team created a movie trailer about bridge maintenance—famous actors adjusting screws, checking for leaks, tightening bolts, all set to suspenseful music. It’s absurd and hilarious precisely because it reveals the truth: maintenance is profoundly important yet spectacularly undramatic. We would rather watch a bridge explode and be heroically rebuilt than watch it be quietly, carefully, lovingly maintained. To get a feel of it, watch John Oliver and his skit about Infrastructure.

Jérôme and David’s work moves deeper or farther than repair and than what we’ve already said above regarding ANT and Latour. That work mainly focused on how objects resist, how they push back, how they stabilize. This book shows us the fragility, transformation, and ongoing work required to maintain the appearance of stability is actually where the potency is at. Even Latour gradually turned his attention away from mundane maintenance, focusing instead on innovation and the negative effects of material entities on our world.

Artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, one of the main threads in the book, brought it back. Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1939) is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service-oriented artwork and the attention it gives to maintenance. She has been the Artist in Residence (unpaid) of the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977.

What maintenance workers revealed to Jérôme and David was something more subtle and profound: maintenance doesn’t just respond to fragility—it produces the very solidity we take for granted. The immutable becomes so through care. The stable becomes so through attention.

Fragility as Foundational Strength

The book argues that fragility (rather than only robustness or autonomy, which are not the opposite) is the foundation of our relationships with objects and each other, and Andrea reads this as a kind of strength and dynamic power that we rarely notice as such and try to hide.

Drawing on feminist care ethics, particularly the work of Annemarie Mol and María Puig de la Bellacasa, they show that the logic of care takes as its starting point our physical embodiment and the fragility of life.

Care is fundamentally about interdependencies, not independence.

It acknowledges that all things—including ourselves—require ongoing support to persist. Vulnerability and the need for care are not weaknesses, and those who receive care (whether people or things) are not passive. Rather, care is an active, dynamic relationship that creates the conditions for life to continue.

Multi-sensory and Embodied: two themes of L&P and CofT

When Jérôme and David followed maintenance workers through the Paris Metro, they discovered a form of expertise that engages all the senses. These workers don’t just look at signs; they touch surfaces to feel degradation, they listen for sounds that indicate problems, they smell for chemical changes, they notice vibrations and patterns invisible to untrained observers.

This same idea comes through the stories of classic Mustang owners in Europe. These aren’t wealthy collectors that keep these cars in museums; they’re everyday folks who have saved for years to own these cars. And they drive them daily. In so doing, they’re plugged into their cars bodily: feeling vibrations through the seat, hearing sounds through the steering wheel, noticing the slightest change in engine rhythm.

They live in what Jérôme calls a “disquieting attention” whereby they are constantly attuned to fragility, worried but also deeply connected. When they need to replace a part, they consult the entire community: “If I change this, is it still a classic Mustang?” Their care is what keeps the car authentic, even as (or especially as) everything transforms in the daily grind of life. And by studying their care for their cars, some new understanding emerges.

This leads towards what cultural theorist Yves Citton discusses as a sort of meta-attentional engagement, of paying attention to how we pay attention, thinking of this as an ecology.

This reassignment of attention—from innovation and crisis to the everyday, is one way into understanding a profound political and ethical shift. At what cost does a thing remain the same? At what human cost? At what environmental cost? A bridge, a nuclear plant, even the Mona Lisa— none of these last on their own. They require people to maintain them.

Jérôme and David draw explicitly on feminist theories of care to argue that maintenance is skilled, demanding, valuable work that our economic and social systems systematically undervalue. Just as feminist theorists revealed how domestic labor is rendered invisible and unpaid, just as they showed how the myth of the autonomous individual obscures our fundamental interdependence, this book reveals how the myth of autonomous technology obscures the human labor required to sustain it.

We tend to think AI is going to solve everything, but who is going to care for those systems and technologies? And what good are they if we lose the care of the everyday?

When you look at architectural magazines, you never see maintenance workers. When you see advertisements for infrastructure, you see sleek objects rather than the people who clean them, repair them, monitor them. This erasure says a lot about whose work counts, whose expertise matters, who deserves recognition and compensation.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Making Maintenance Visible

Running through the book, and literally appearing on the cover of the French edition, is the work of the artist mentioned earlier, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939), a pioneering American artist who in 1969 wrote her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition: ‘CARE.’”

Ukeles’s manifesto emerged from a personal and political crisis. As a young artist and new mother, she found herself overwhelmed by housework and childcare, with little time for what she thought of as her “real” art. A male professor at Pratt had even told her that becoming a mother meant she could no longer pursue an art career. Her response was to realize and then designate her maintenance work as art itself.

“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.”(Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969).

In 1973, in an iconic set of photographs, Ukeles scrubbed the steps and floors of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum during opening hours, wielding her mop like a paintbrush. In 1977, she became the first (and still only as far as we can tell) artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, an unsalaried position she has now held for nearly five decades. Her masterwork Touch Sanitation (1979-80) (what a title!) involved shaking hands with all 8,500 New York City sanitation workers, telling each one: “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”

Ukeles revealed that the opposition between “development” (innovation, creation, the making of new things) and “maintenance” (preservation, repetition, the sustaining of existing things) is gendered, classed, and profoundly political. Maintenance is not inferior to creation but it is the condition of all creation, all life, a lot like love.

Carelessness as Comfort

One of the most provocative arguments in the book concerns what Jérôme calls the “configuration of carelessness as comfort.” In the conversation, he describes a moment of realization: “I knew that, but I really realized how much in 50 years, and even less, a whole kind of model of consumption had been installed by a certain kind of capitalism, where hyper-consumption has replaced everything.”

He traces how expertise in caring for things was once ubiquitous, how not too long ago ”we were all experts” and how that has been systematically dismantled. Modern comfort was designed with carelessness built in. As one podcaster’s father told her when asked why he never taught her to maintain things: “We wanted you to enjoy life.” The implication being that caring for things is a burden to be escaped rather than a relationship to be cultivated.

David shares how this research reconnected him to his grandparents and family life in a new way, and helped him reimagine what it meant that everything must last: “When you are a small kid and you are always on your knees and never on your feet... they’d say ‘think of your pants!’” For a long time he dismissed this as “a generational thing.” But working on maintenance made him realize: “It’s really connected to climate change and everything today.”

Maybe it sounds like nostalgia for a pre-modern past but it is actually a recognition that the ability to notice fragility, to care for things, and to make them last are skills and sensibilities that have been deliberately eroded. And their erosion has consequences not just for objects but for how we relate to each other, to our environments, to life itself.

By the end of this conversation (and book), we see how this has really changed everyday lives in everyday ways, and how powerful this is, as real care.

David describes how this work has transformed his approach to supervising PhD students. Instead of just “trying to explain how to do a good PhD,” he now takes time to “understand who they are, what they try to do with this topic, how the topic relates to their own experience.” Some of his former students have become close friends because of this deeper attention to care.

“It’s like two people going on the same road for a time.”

Jérôme talks about teaching engineers and future leaders who will make decisions about infrastructure, technology, society. His goal is to “debunk the idea of autonomy in technology” and help them see that “each time you say that a technology is autonomous, you are leaving a lot of people aside.” He points to AI and the invisible labor of annotators. He challenges them to ask: Who is this supposed autonomy really serving?

Both describe how they can no longer navigate the city the same way and how people often have that same reaction after reading the book. Jérôme talks about the graffiti removal workers who “really love Paris” and care for its stone facades with what can only be called an act of love. David talks about seeing every object as a network, a flow, a web of interdependencies rather than a stable, autonomous thing.

The book’s “very modest but also very ambitious aim,” Jérôme says, is “for each reader to end it and not look at the world exactly the same way.” This is what he calls a “percept” which is not just a concept to understand but a new way of perceiving, a transformation of sensibility.

So what does all this have to do with love? A lot, if we understand love as a form of attention, a way of being in relationship, a practice of care that acknowledges fragility and interdependence or even what is holding us, whether we like it or notice it or not.

Love recognizes that autonomy is a myth and that we are all, always, held by networks of care that mostly go unnoticed precisely because they work.

Steven Jackson says: “If we could love our artifacts and the things we are living with, maybe a lot of things would change in the world.” Jérôme acknowledges it’s “a bit romantic” but insists it’s important. The graffiti removal workers love Paris. The Mustang owners love their cars. The Metro maintenance workers love their signs—or at least they care for them with a fidelity and attention that looks a lot like love.

This kind of love is not sentimental. It’s sensory, embodied, sometimes exhausting. It involves touching rust and smelling chemicals and feeling vibrations and being careful. It requires noticing what others miss. It means accepting that nothing lasts without work, that autonomy is always an illusion sustained by someone else’s labor.

As Jérôme says beautifully at the end of the conversation: maintenance workers “taught us to pay attention to the attention of others.” This meta-attentional practice (noticing how others notice, caring about how others care) is fundamentally an ethical and political stance. It means repopulating our picture of the world with all the people whose work makes our lives possible.

Reimagining care through our relationships with objects might help us reimagine care in other ways, care for each other, care for life itself, care for our ecosystems, care for our own embodied existence. Not because objects and people are the same, but because both are fragile, both require ongoing attention, both exist in ecologies of interdependence that our culture systematically obscures.

This is not about rejecting innovation or development. It’s about balance, about recognition, about making visible the work that goes unnoticed. It’s about understanding that the daily pulsation of maintenance is not background noise but the heartbeat of life itself.

As Jérôme and David conclude: the future doesn’t lie in making things unbreakable or autonomous, but in learning to care for fragility—in objects, in each other, in ourselves.

Jérôme Denis is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at Mines Paris-PSL, one of France’s elite engineering schools. His research focuses on two interconnected domains: data work and maintenance practices. Through extensive ethnographic investigations in companies, public administrations, and urban environments, Denis explores how both data and infrastructure require constant care to function.

David Pontille is Director of Research at CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research) and a senior researcher at the same Center. His research sits at the intersection of science and technology studies, anthropology of writing, and ethnography of work. His work spans writing practices in professional settings, the evaluation technologies of scientific research, and the politics of maintenance in technological infrastructures. He is a founding member of the Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances.

The collaboration between Jérome and David began in the late 1990s as young PhD students on the same team, a model of slow, patient, collaborative scholarship that, fittingly, embodies the very ethic of maintenance it describes.

Read the book. Available in all major outlets.

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice

(French cover of book image is from this blog post which we recommend reading.)

Episode #75: A conversation about neural synchrony, how we might model the “third brain” that arises in interaction, and why misalignment matters: with biologist Nicolás Hinrichs, hosted by philosopher Andrea Hiott.

We seem to know when we’re in synch, especially when we’re together in person (it’s a little harder via Zoom). Maybe you’re in deep conversation with someone, and you feel the shared flow. You’re finishing each other’s sentences, moving through ideas together like dancers who’ve practiced the same routine. This is that feeling that there is a ‘third entity’ as Beck Todd puts it in another Love & Philosophy conversation (via a term that came from dancer Steve Paxton) where it’s not you and not them but something happening as both.

This might sound magical and it can feel a bit magical, too, which is why we don’t quite know how to talk about it or how to model it in ways that can be rigorous. Other guests on the show have been finding ways through perceptual crossing experiments (for example) or through developing new ways of doing experiments like PRISMA. This week’s guest, Nicolas Hinrichs, is trying to develop mathematical and experimental models that might be able to help us better express and visualize what is happening via the data we record in neural activity.

But even without all those EEGs, fMRIs, and fNIRS, as a living experiment, it’s pretty natural and easy to observe this in yourself, if you take seriously that we are co-creating reality together as we communicate. In everyday moments, we can notice how a conversation or interaction with someone (even through a book or television show or podcast) can create a different sort of thought cloud around us for a time, and how this shapes our ways of thinking through the day. This is powerful stuff, the ways we shift one another potentials.

All that seems to imply being in synch. But what if the most interesting (and perhaps most important) moments in human connection aren’t only about being perfectly in sync? What if all that wonder and magic is also about the places we ‘misalign’ so that it’s about the dance and the ways we react to those misalignments together that creates the wider dynamic?

That’s one of the provocative ideas of this week’s Love & Philosophy conversation with the Chilean-German neuroscientist and biologist Nicholas Hinrichs.

Nico specializes in something called hyperscanning, which is a technique that might sound like science fiction but is increasingly revealing profound truths about how we connect. The basic idea is that instead of studying one brain at a time (the traditional approach), researchers record the brain activity of two people simultaneously while they interact.

Imagine two people wearing electrode caps (like shower caps covered in sensors) or lying in adjacent brain scanners while, talking, playing games, or working together. Scientists can then watch in real-time as patterns of brain activity ripple through both brains (or the parts of the brain they are watching), sometimes aligning, sometimes diverging, always in motion.

By doing this, they are finding that during social interactions, certain brain regions synchronize between people. Our nervous systems (Andrea and past guests would say ‘our entire bodies’) really coordinate together. We change each other’s movement, pace, and patterns by being in conversation, and that doesn’t only mean being in conversation with words.

Still, most study and model synchronization, looking for and finding these moments of synchrony and treating them as a standard of good communication.

Hinrichs thinks this is too simple, and that we need other ways to visualize the dance that is happening between bodies and their brains. As he puts it:

“If you think of interaction, it’s not just that you move in the same beat and then that constitutes your relevant marker... I think of it more as a choreography. And so there you also have other layers on top of the beat... and maybe sometimes that loosens or tightens and definitely shifts.”

In other words, real human interaction isn’t like two metronomes clicking in perfect unison. It’s more like a dance and in any dance, there are moments of coming together and pulling apart, of leading and following.

Under the traditional view, when two people’s brains fall out of sync during conversation, that’s called ‘noise’ which is something to be filtered out of the data, a sign that communication has broken down. Scientists usually do not put this into the final results and it can be overwhelming to the experiment to have too much of it. But how might we create tools that use the noise?

Hinrichs argues that misunderstandings, tensions, and ruptures aren’t noise at all. They’re ‘signals’ too, to put it in experimental terms; they’re meaningful.

Some of the most transformative moments in relationships happen precisely when we’re not aligned. When you realize your friend has been processing your conversation completely differently than you have, that opens a portal for a new understanding between you.

These moments of misalignment, what Nico mentions in the conversation as “phase transitions”, might actually be where the deepest understanding happens. They’re not failures of connection; they’re part of the process of connecting. This is hard to hold, but also where the potential is.

One of the most beautiful ideas in the conversation is what Heinrichs calls “the third brain”, an idea which threads with previous L&P conversations to express this emergent process that exists between two or more people in interaction (or maybe even between you and yourself at times).

Hinrichs is developing what he calls “geometric hyperscanning” to try to capture and visualize this third entity. Instead of just taking snapshots that show “aligned” or “not aligned,” he’s looking for ways to map the actual choreography, the dynamic, shifting patterns of how two or more brains move through interaction together. He and Andrea discuss ways of modelling this as “constellatory cognition” (or what Andrea discusses as kaleidoscopic), suggesting that maybe we can think less about linear alignment and more about multiple dimensions of connection happening simultaneously.

You might be synchronized with someone in one way while completely out of sync in another. You might be talking about the future while they’re thinking about the past. You might be sharing the same space while experiencing it entirely differently.

And all of that is okay. In fact, it might be essential. Which brings us to one of the central themes of the podcast: holding paradox. This does not mean solving one side into the other side but exploring the spaces holding them.

As Andrea puts it in her introduction, this is about “trying to hold what feels irreconcilable”, refusing to collapse complex realities into simple either/or categories. Connection isn’t either synchrony or misalignment. It’s both, all at once, in constantly shifting configurations. The dimensions of this are still beyond what we have been able to visualize, which is why conversations and attempts like this are so important.

Hinrichs sees this as more than just a philosophical stance. For him, it’s “a kind of care”, a way of attending to the full complexity of human experience without trying to reduce it to something simpler and more manageable. As he explains:

“If we do not steer ourselves in holding that paradox meaningfully, then we will tend to gravitate towards what I call unnamed centers of attraction... that can fill your own discourse of considerations, you know, or the considerations of your own praxis if you leave that unchecked.”

In other words, if we don’t actively work to hold complexity, we’ll unconsciously drift toward oversimplified explanations that might serve other agendas that we do not even know we are serving, be those personal, commercial, political, or communal.

Care is what really matters at the end of the day. Specifically, Hinrichs wants to understand human connection better so we can help people who are struggling with mental health, with relationships, with feeling isolated or misunderstood.

That’s why he and another guest from a previous show Mark James are working on something called “neuroprotective rituals”, which are ways of using interpersonal synchrony to help people cope with stress, chronic inflammation, and the neurobiological effects of things like social inequality. The idea is that if we understand how our nervous systems coordinate and regulate each other during interaction, we might be able to design practices that actively support mental health.

And it’s why the complexity matters. As Hinrichs notes, current mental health intervention often relies on what’s called “clinician’s intuition”, which is valuable but also, he argues, “not enough.” We need to understand what’s actually happening at multiple levels when two people interact, especially in therapeutic contexts, and how it is unique for everyone. Not easy, but worthy of trying to find new ways to create experiments and model data that consider this.

One thing that is striking in this conversation is how Hinrichs’s approach to science mirrors the quality of human connection he’s studying.

He grew up with a cellist mother and a theoretical physicist father, so art and hard science, discipline and expansion, were held together. He also grew up with multiple cultures and languages and learned early that both/and perspectives matter, that you need to “juggle.” His work now sits at the intersection of biology, phenomenology, philosophy, and mathematics, holding the space of many a lens.

When asked how hyperscanning might help us care for each other better, his answer was beautiful and concise:

“I think what geometric hyperscanning can offer us is to name the moments that matter in human connection, and by doing so, we can make them tractable for care.”

To name the moments that matter. Not to control them, not to perfect them, but to see them clearly enough that we can tend to them. Maybe true connection isn’t only about synchrony. Maybe it’s about something more complex, more dynamic, more human— the ability to move through alignment and misalignment together, to hold the paradox, to stay in the dance even when (or especially when) we’re out of step. Noticing this and working together on the dance might open new sensual potentials, including of the cognitive sort.

Check out the full podcast episode on Love and Philosophy, and watch for Nicholas Hinrichs’s presentation at the upcoming Active Inference Symposium. The preprint of his geometric hyper scanning paper is also available for those interested in the technical details.

Invitation to share: What moments of misalignment have taught you something important about connection?

Papers and references:

Active Inference Institute and Symposium

Geometric Hyperscanning of Affect under Active Inference

On a Geometry of Interbrain Networks

Nico’s homepage

Watch on YouTube

The Art of Asynchrony

Both Hinrichs and Hiott will be giving papers at this year’s Active Inference Institute Symposium.

Another episode mentioned in this podcast is A Map is its Own Territory:

For those more interested in the machine learning and maths side of this, we recommend listening to Hinrich’s on Rahul Sam’s podcast or check him out on Substack here.

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.

Also see this conversation: Complexity Fatigue & The Third Entity with Rebecca Todd, Shay Welch and Penijean Gracefire

This bonus episode features a conversation with Tim Logan and Andrea Hiott from Tim’s wonderful podcast Future Learning Design (check it out here). In this lively conversation, Tim and Andrea discuss advancements and challenges in education and look towards new conceptions of what education might mean. They explore themes such as the limitations of traditional education frameworks, the emerging insights from 4E cognitive science, and the importance of embodied, relational and ecological approaches to cognition. They also discuss the disorienting yet exciting potential of understanding education as a living, dynamic process. Through it all, the conversation emphasizes the importance of love, attention, and awareness in reshaping educational paradigms.

Tim Logan is an educator, a member of Good Impact Labs and co-leader of the International Baccalaureate’s ‘Festival of Hope’. He’s highly experienced as an educational leader, management consultant, coach and researcher, has held leadership positions all around the world and excels at bringing people together and sparking new paths forward.

Check out Tim Logan’s work with Good Impact Labs and connect with him on LinkedIn. You can find the original of this episode here.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Overview01:49 Starting the Podcast Episode02:43 Exploring Cognitive Science05:16 The Role of Education08:52 Challenges in Education Systems13:19 The Future of Learning and Technology22:38 Navigating Educational Metrics30:54 Exploring the Teacher-Student Dynamic32:13 Implicit vs Explicit Learning35:33 The Importance of Context in Education36:32 The Third Entity in Education40:56 Sensing and Cognition48:49 The Relational Process of Educating53:47 Concluding Thoughts on Education and Love

Tim is the host/producer of the Future Learning Design podcast.

Tim on LinkedIn

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Please rate and review with love.YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Tim Logan is an education leader, connector and facilitator. Tim moves projects from innovative learning design to effectively executing ideas on the ground, swiftly. Bringing his extensive learnings and insights from a global career in youth work, teaching, school leadership and consultancy, Tim has worked with prominent clients around the world to develop new and innovative approaches to learning, well-being and youth engagement. He has most recently worked with International Baccalaureate, Nordic Bildung and Nora Bateson’s team at International Bateson Institute.

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice

#74 with Tim Adalin and Andrea Hiott

This is an intense conversation about the invisible patterns that shape how we communicate. What we often discuss in this project as ‘holding paradox’ might also be expressed as ‘sharing paradox’, creating or noticing a shared vocabulary beyond the one we assume, easing into what allows us to hold different positions without being opponents.

It’s about noticing the subtle codes that make us feel like insiders or outsiders in any given conversation or situation and noticing those together so we feel (and are) less alone.

One thing about Love & Philosophy is that it brings together thought collectives (people who share ideas that guide their work and life) that do not always feel comfortable in one another’s regularities. Scientists might find some of these conversations too esoteric; artists might find some of them too rational. It’s a grand experiment, which is why your voice matters. We need everyone to help us understand how to better communicate across these thought collectives, and to do this together with care.

This idea of the thought collective comes from a philosopher named Ludwig Fleck. In coining that term, he meant it mostly in terms of groups of scientists and how science progresses, but lately those ideas are helpful for understanding how philosophical circles and groups that share certain patterns of thought have become so important in so much of the world in ways that are more explicit and fractal than we’ve been able to notice before.

Through podcasts and new sorts of social media and group chats and so on, there are now groups of people bonded in deep thinking about ideas in ways that are having major consequences. People gather and come to share not just ideas, but entire frameworks for making sense of the world. These collectives are often virtual, but they are also embodied, habitual, and atmospheric.

Whatever way we are coming together, are we doing it in a way that is caring and healthy? Are we able to hold and share the space at the places where these feel dissonant? Because that is where we will find our fullest shared potential; that is where we are rich together in our multiplicity and where we overlap portals in the shared adjacent possible.

Erich Fromm: once wrote that: Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

This conversation with Tim Adalin, founder of Voicecraft, explores these dynamics. It may even be some sort of practice (or praxis) in this sharing of paradox, or of being present to the comfort and discomforts of entering or listening to conversations beyond what feels normal. Though every conversation on L&P seems to feel a bit like that for someone.

Tim is trained in philosophy and dedicated to understanding what it means to cultivate voice—not just as speech or expression, but as our fundamental capacity to participate in the world, to affirm our presence, to create meaning together.

Right now, as we’re all navigating an explosion of new thought collectives forming through podcasts, YouTube channels, online communities, and social media platforms, his work feels so relevant because he comes at it with such an earnest desire to really understand the world and the people he is speaking with.

Holding and Sharing Space

One of the frames through which you can enter this conversation is to dance between the ideas of ‘holding’ and ‘sharing’ and how this might relate to the ways you feel when you are in conversation in your own life in different ways, whether in personal, professional or public contexts. Do you feel like you are holding the space or the space is being held, or are you sharing it? There is no one sort of feeling that is right. Sometimes we hold and sometimes we are held and sometimes we share. But there is something powerful in realizing the different qualities of this.

Holding space implies a kind of container where someone creates and maintains boundaries, manages energy, keeps things from falling apart. It’s essential work, certainly. But who gets to do that holding? What are the limits of the holder? And what happens when the structure itself needs help?

Sharing space, Tim suggests, involves a different kind of risk. It means genuinely welcoming the participation that might unmake and remake the grounds we’re standing on. It requires “skin in the game”—a willingness to be transformed by the encounter rather than simply managing it. This isn’t about abandoning structure or leadership, but about recognizing that the most generative relationships emerge when we’re willing to transgress our own boundaries, to enter unmapped territory together, but to also be clear about what we stand for and what is meaningful from our trajectory.

Authenticity

Andrea and Tim also wrestle with one of the central tensions of our moment and one we hear lots of people dealing with who comment on this show, and that’s how to show up authentically in an age of personal branding, algorithmic attention, and increasingly sophisticated mimicry. What if making money was easy and awesome and oriented towards what is meaningful rather than what gets attention ‘no matter what’?

This ends up being a question about what we’re actually building when we engage in public communication. Are we cultivating genuine relationships and understanding with the places we put our support, attention and money? Or are we just performing a version of authenticity calculated to generate the right kind of attention because we were told that is what makes the most money, which ends up putting us in some sort of numbing loop?

With recent advances in LLMs (large language models) and all the ways we can now create text and videos that have been built from all that has been created before them, we seem to be desperate for authenticity, even as its gotten harder to spot.

And yet, perhaps this very confusion contains the seeds of a breakthrough. Maybe the uncanny accuracy of large language models is actually teaching us something crucial: we are not our language (as Andrea Hiott says here). We are not our representations. We are not even our language-based thoughts. The fact that an AI can flawlessly reproduce our linguistic patterns without being ‘us’ reveals the gap between expression and presence, between what we say and the living source from which we speak. This feels like an urgent understanding.

Thought Collectives and Cookies

This is where Fleck’s concept of thought collectives becomes particularly useful. We’re not just exchanging information when we communicate; we’re actually participating in shared patterns of attention, value, and meaning-making. Those have been ‘allowed’ but could also be blocked or unallowed if we notice them or develop ways to notice them collectively. These patterns are like cookies in a web browser, quietly shaping what we notice and how we respond, creating pathways that become more entrenched with each repetition.

Which cookies are we allowing? Which thought collectives are we feeding with our attention, our energy, our participation that we may not have chosen or even know we are participating in? And those we have chosen, are they built on what is generative or are they built on taking other ‘opponents’ down? Because meaning is in the generative.

Tim’s project is exists as space that shares this question by creating spaces where people can develop the capacity to recognize these patterns and engage with them more consciously. To be present and talk and explore and notice what arises and how it got there. Not by escaping into some imagined neutral space, but by developing what we might call “craft”—the skillful, embodied practice of attending to the quality of our relating together as we are doing it. (Another Voicecraft conversation with Tim, Andrea and two other Voicecraft participants also delves into this here if you are interested.)

This isn’t about achieving some perfect clarity or consistency. We all wear different masks in different contexts, and that’s not inherently inauthentic. The question is whether there’s an integrity running through these different presentations, a “permeating self” that’s energizing and orienting our various roles and expressions.

Can we play with the masks we wear while staying attuned to what’s underneath?

There’s a kind of presence, after all, that is fundamentally unable to fall into mimicry and manipulation. This ‘inner technology’ of being ourselves isn’t something we need to invent; it’s more like a capacity we need to remember and cultivate and allow for ourselves in spaces of care.

Maybe that is what Tim means here as “an inherent gift of humanity”, that is, our ability to meet each other in genuine second-person encounters like this, to sense the difference between performance and presence, to recognize when someone is actually there with us versus when they’re going through the motions, and to let people be as rational or far out as they need to be to realize where they are here and now.

That’s also what comes through here when Andrea and Tim discuss participating in what Tim describes as “long periods of silence with others in the gestating and the creative opening”. These are moments when the usual social scripts fall away and something more fundamental can emerge (though one has to be careful not to overdo it).

It’s not too comfortable. It’s not about feeling at ease, at least not at first. It’s about developing the capacity to stay present when the ground becomes uncertain, to trust that meaning can arise from the space between everyone rather than from any single person’s predetermined plan.

“Why am I doing anything at all?” Tim asks at one point. “I cannot not be in relationship with love and the cultivation of its momentary forms in the world.”

Love is what is shared, and it often takes discomfort to notice and feel it.

This isn’t love as sentiment or feeling, but love as a fundamental orientation or what philosopher Forrest Landry calls “that which enables choice.” It’s about creating conditions where genuine possibility can emerge, where people can actually become rather than just perform who they’re supposed to be. And critically, it requires what Tim and Andrea talk about through “loving transformation”, which is the capacity to both hold and let go, to provide structure while remaining open to being remade by what emerges. That’s often what Andrea calls holding paradox, but maybe sharing paradox is an even better way to consider it.

Listen to the full conversation here or on your podcast app to hear Tim and Andrea explore these themes in much greater depth, including discussions of masks and maps, the challenges of building authentic communities in an age of personal branding, the surprising lessons of large language models, and what it means to speak from integrity in a world that often rewards the opposite.

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.

This Bonus episode of ‘Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy,’ hosted by Andrea Hiott, features a deep dive with Lynn Nadel into the complexities of representation in the brain. The discussion explores how thoughts and memories are formed and represented, beginning with a child’s understanding and extending to advanced theories in neuroscience. Central themes include population coding, the relational nature of brain functions, and the embodied cognition approach. They also touch on historical perspectives from key figures like Tolman and Eichenbaum, the idea of cognitive maps in the hippocampus, and the role of pre-wiring and experience in shaping brain functions. The episode highlights ongoing debates and innovations in understanding cognitive processes and how the brain models reality.

Slides are here

00:00 Introduction to Thought and Representation01:48 Exploring the Concept of Representation04:07 The Hippocampus Memory and Cognitive Mapping08:50 The Mind-Body Problem and Cognitive Neuroscience29:30 Topographic Maps and Brain Representation32:21 Understanding the Somatic Brain32:50 Face Systems and Brain Localization33:26 Sensory and Motor Systems34:21 Mapping the Brain and Body Connection35:01 Historical Insights: Penfield and Milner35:50 Topographic Maps and Computational Advantages38:11 Hippocampus and Non-Topographical Maps39:44 Representation and Meaning in the Brain48:20 Associative Learning and Memory01:00:31 Concluding Thoughts and Future Discussions

Lynn is in Trondheim during this discussion attending the Kavli Prize week. This is the third conversation with Andrea and Lynn.

Exploring the Cognitive Neuroscience of Representation: Past, Present, and Future#representation #lynnnadel #neuroscience #hippocampus #representationdebate

In this conversation (three of five forthcoming) Andrea & Lynn discuss how we have thoughts and memories and what this means a la representation.First talkSecond talk

Hippocampus as a Cognitive MapLinks to Lynn’s paperRep paper from Andrea

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Episode 73

“Like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”

—Thomas Merton

Sometimes we feel torn between seemingly opposite truths. Between needing solitude and craving community. Between wanting to fix everything and learning when to say “enough”. Between the darkness of our times and an inexplicable hope that persists.

One person who has helped so many of us live with these feelings and experiences is the educator and writer Parker J. Palmer, who is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal.

At 86, Palmer has spent decades exploring how we can hold life’s contradictions without being torn apart by them. In a recent conversation for Love and Philosophy with Andrea Hiott, he shared insights that we hope will come like a balm for you, too.

Dr. Parker Palmer is an American writer, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, social change and spirituality. He is the Founder of The Centre for Courage and Renewal and the author of 10 popular books, including: A Hidden Wholeness, The Courage to Teach, an Undivided Life, and On the Brink of Everything.

Survival Skills

Palmer calls paradox a “survival concept”, an idea that feels especially helpful right now. We live in a culture obsessed with resolving tensions, picking sides, finding the one right answer. But what if the secret to thriving isn’t choosing between opposites, but learning to hold them together? What if that opens another sort of sensuality?

Consider this paradox Palmer quotes in this episode, a favorite idea of his from the physicist Niels Bohr:

“The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie. The opposite of one profound truth may be another profound truth.”

Parker says we could even take breathing as a simple example of this. You need both inhaling and exhaling. If you decided to be “just a breathing out kind of person,” you’d die. Yet we apply this either/or thinking to so much of life: Are you an introvert or extrovert? Do you need community or solitude? Should you be vulnerable or strong?

Parker explains that both are part of us, and embracing these parts of us is challenging but transformative. Both individually and in community.

Becoming the Darkness

Palmer speaks from hard-won experience. He’s survived three major episodes of clinical depression, experiences he describes with startling clarity: “In the depths of depression, you’ve become the dark. So there’s no difference between you and the darkness.”

But even in that place where, as he puts it, “you either endure or you don’t,” something paradoxical happened. Deep in the thickets of his inner darkness, he glimpsed what he calls “the soul”—like a wild animal that “is able to survive on hardly any resources at all.”

During one of these dark periods, or just as he was beginning to come out of it enough to function again, while walking through harrowed farmland in Kentucky, a poem came to him that captures the mystery of knowing when enough is enough. He recites this poem from memory in the episode. Here are a few glimpses from it:

The plow has savaged this sweet field...

I have plowed my life this way, Turned over a whole history looking for the roots of what went wrong...

Enough. The job is done. Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be seed bed for the growing that’s to come.

That single word—”enough”—was a gentle nudge towards recovery and it can be cathartic to hear it now. Not because it instantly cured his depression, not because it instantly changes anything for us, but because it offers an image of possibility, that we can stop this harrowing and trust that something might grow from this tilled ground.

the Paradox of True Community

Here’s another paradox that comes out in this conversation: Palmer quotes theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wisdom about community:

“Let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community, and let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone.”

When this paradox falls apart, Palmer observes, “solitude devolves into loneliness, isolation and community devolves into the crowd.” Looking around America today, he sees “a lot of lonely people who have joined together in crowds that become mobs.”

Real community requires people who know how to be alone with themselves. Real solitude requires people who understand their need for connection. It can take a minute for this to really sink in. Actually, we’re still trying to really grasp it.

Love That Doesn’t Try to Solve Anything

Perhaps the most moving part of the conversation was Palmer’s description of the friend who helped him during depression—not through advice or analysis, but through presence. This friend came every afternoon, sat with Palmer in silence, and massaged his feet. Rarely speaking, except occasionally to say “I can feel your struggle today” or “I feel you getting a little stronger.”

“He was there every day,” Palmer recalls, “having found the one place in my body where I could feel a connection with another human being.”

This friend understood what poet Rilke called love: “that two solitudes border, protect and salute one another.” He didn’t try to fix Palmer or offer solutions. He simply showed up, day after day, creating space for Palmer to exist exactly as he was.

the Edge Where Everything Becomes Visible

Palmer titled one of his books (from 2019) “On the Brink of Everything,” inspired by his friend Courtney Martin and her three-year-old daughter Maya who was discovering the world with fresh eyes. At 80, he realized he too was “on the brink of everything” and going forward to that brink, he wanted to be committed to what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” This is such a powerful way to imagine our lives as we all move forward.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

Maybe that’s where wisdom lives—not only in the safety of certainty, but also on the edge where contradictions meet, where we can see what’s invisible from the comfortable center but where we care for each other and realize we are more than just our individual lives after all.

Letting Be

What if instead of demanding that people choose sides, we learned to hold paradox? What if instead of trying to fix each other’s struggles, we practiced presence? What if instead of fearing our brokenness, we understood that “wholeness has nothing to do with perfection” but with “embracing our brokenness as part of who we are”?

Palmer spent decades learning and sharing and teaching about the idea that you can’t separate soul from role—that trying to leave your true self at home while you go perform in the world ultimately breaks you. The alternative isn’t easy: it requires what he calls “rejoining soul and role,” bringing your full identity and integrity into every part of your life. That sounds hard, but the quality of life lived is worth it. And letting others do this for themselves in their own ways means is the real spirit of listening.

This isn’t a quick fix or a simple formula. It’s more like learning to breathe—finding the rhythm between solitude and community, vulnerability and strength, accepting what is and working for what could be.

As Palmer puts it: “The desire to feel at home in who we are and whose we are—the two great questions—runs very deep. Just keep your eye on it.”

The full conversation with Parker Palmer is available on the Love and Philosophy podcast on all your favorite platforms. Palmer is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal and author of ten books, including “A Hidden Wholeness,” “The Courage to Teach,” and “On the Brink of Everything.”

Parker Palmer is a beloved educator, writer, and activist who helps people find courage and meaning in their work and lives. He writes about universal human struggles, finding your calling, dealing with depression, staying true to yourself in a world that pulls you in different directions, and creating communities where people can be authentic and trust one another.

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice

Some of the key themes in his work are as follows:

Vocation and purpose: helping people discover work that aligns with their deepest values

Inner life: making it okay to talk about the soul, meaning & identity in secular spaces

Courage over fear: practical wisdom about living with integrity despite obstacles

Education as transformation: not just information transfer, but helping people become more fully human

Parker draws from Quaker traditions but speaks to people of all faiths and none. He’s academic (former professor) but writes in plain, beautiful language, combining personal vulnerability with social activism in ways that help others find meaning and connection again.

Follow Parker on Substack at parkerjpalmer.substack.com.

• Amazon page with all 10 of his books is HERE.

• IndieBound page with all 10 of his books is HERE.

• Founder page at the Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE.

• Project with Carrie Newcomer, The Growing Edge is HERE.

• Facebook Author Page is HERE.

• His wonderful On Being columns are collected HERE.

N. Katherine Hayles: I think it's a misunderstanding of that book to say that it is urging us to embrace the posthuman. When I came upon the title, How We Became Posthuman, I meant it with a healthy dose of irony. So it was as if we had all already become post-human, which of course is a gross simplification of the actual situation.

So let's just make one thing clear at the very outset, and that is from my point of view, human is a historical construct that has always been in the process of change, transformation, and contestation…

…the hope is to be able to articulate a vision that is not naive, that is well aware of the scientific specificities involved in all of these big ideas, but nevertheless also strives to see the big picture, which is, relational.

It's ecological. It's about our place, not only on the planet, but on a visionary scale on the cosmos. What it is that we have to contribute, what it is that we have to fear, what it is that we are risking, what it is that we have the potential to be and to do. And those are ideas that need a lot of circumstantial specificity to really carry heft.

…We're at a new, point in human history and I think it has enormous potentials, but just like symbiosis includes parasitism, symbiosis always includes risks and there are risks to anytime you become so entangled with a symbiant, you can't live without it.

…it's so important to recognize that consciousness is not the whole of cognition and that there are many forms of cognition, which do not have and will never have consciousness, but nevertheless carry on cognitive activities. understand our relation to the rest of the planet, but also understand our relation to these new forms of synthetic intelligence.

…that would be part of what humans can carry forward from their heritage into the future: Care. Care for the planet, care for ourselves, care for our other beings in enhanced, increased sense. So, you know, you could almost look at human history as the ability to enlarge the circles of care.

Summary of Podcast: A poetic conversation at the intersection of literature, science, and technology with Katherine Hayles, a distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hayles discusses her ideas from her books 'How We Became Posthuman' and 'Bacteria to AI,' focusing on the need to rethink cognition and decouple it from consciousness. She describes the concept of non-conscious cognition and emphasizes the importance of understanding the integrated cognitive framework, which includes biological organisms, synthetic intelligences, and their symbiotic relationships with humans. The discussion extends to planetary ecology, the risks and potentials of advancing AI, and the overarching need for humanity’s care for the planet and each other.

00:00 What I really meant by posthumanism00:27 The Concept of Human Transformation00:54 Scientific and Ecological Perspectives01:38 The Role of Machines and Symbiosis02:31 Understanding Synthetic Intelligence02:52 Widening the Circle of Care03:40 Introduction by Andrea Hiott04:01 Catherine Hales' Academic Background04:19 Books by Catherine Hales08:30 The Importance of Fiction in Science09:55 Consciousness vs. Cognition17:42 The Integrated Cognitive Framework18:37 Non-Conscious Cognition33:01 Meaning Making in Organisms35:28 Understanding Different Umwelts38:42 Understanding AI's Conceptual Umwelt40:13 Embodiment and Ontology in AI45:51 Symbiosis: From Biology to AI58:08 The Role of Narrative in Science and Literature01:10:06 Planetary Cognition and Future Challenges01:18:48 The Importance of Accurate Information and Education

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Please rate and review with love.YouTube, Facebook, Instagram

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.

…You've gotta let them lead the dance, and you've gotta learn how to get in step, get in sync with the rhythm of their moves, if not, then to me, you're violating a fundamental ethical principle of hermeneutic justice, patience and generosity.

Give the writer his or her say. Learn to dance with them.

Learn how to get in step. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing. Give them their say. Open yourself up to them.

…this was a central concern and (Martin Luther) King said, look, I'm not talking about erotic love, I'm talking about Agape love. So part of it is getting worked out: What do we mean by love?

…let's talk this through. We call it dialogue, listening, asking questions prior to rendering final judgments, being open to the possibility of changing oneself

…That process is crucial to having a stable, viable community.

…we call it democracy

Esteemed philosopher Lucius Outlaw Jr is professor emeritus of Vanderbilt University. In this conversation with philosopher Andrea Hiott , he shares his remarkable journey from growing up in segregated Mississippi to becoming a respected philosophy professor, closely acquainted with influential figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Eric Fromm. The discussion weaves through topics like double consciousness, agape love, the philosophy of Hegel, and the transformational power of language.

Outlaw also reflects on how shared experiences, dialogue, and love can create a more inclusive, understanding world, even in the hardest of times.

"…love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.."

Loving Your Enemies," from this sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church November 17, 1957 by Martin Luther King, Jr.

00:00 Introduction to Hermeneutic Justice01:30 Welcome to Love and Philosophy01:39 Lucius Outlaw's Journey02:04 Exploring Double Consciousness03:43 Phenomenology and Du Bois07:49 Challenges in Recording the Episode10:38 Lucius Outlaw's Early Life in Mississippi36:01 Academic Struggles and Determination37:03 Intellectual Growth and Honors Program37:16 Gender Dynamics and Respect for Women38:24 Choosing Fisk and Academic Rigor40:45 Dartmouth Experience and Scholarship Offer42:38 Return to Fisk and Black Power Movement48:33 Student Government and SNCC Chapter52:14 Graduate School and Intellectual Influences01:02:01 Hegel, Marcuse, and Dialectical Thinking01:07:07 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual01:12:00 Reclaiming Negative Terms01:14:17 The Struggle of Identity and Language01:16:29 Navigating Predominantly White Institutions01:19:33 Rehabilitating A Controversial Notion01:23:52 The Role of Dialogue in Understanding01:25:23 The Legacy of Reverend James Morris Lawson, Jr.01:40:50 The Power of Nonviolence and Love01:47:30 Final Reflections and Continuing the Legacy

Lucius Outlaw, the philosopherLucius at Vanderbilt University

W.E.B. Du Bois

James Morris Lawson Jr.

Lucius with Angela DavisGive

Lucius is the W. Alton Jones Chair, Emeritus Profeessor at Vanderbilt. His research areas are: "racial matters in socio-political life, in the United States in particular, and in legacies and practices of European and Euro-American Philosophy; Social and Political Philosophy; Africana Philosophy (African; African American, for example, Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, among others); American Philosophy.SpecializationsAfrican, African American, Continental, History of Philosophy, Social and Political"

Representative Publications"On Cornel West on W.E.B. Du Bois" Cornel West: a Critical Reader, George Yancy, ed. (Blackwell 2001).

“Multiculturalism,' Citizenship, Education, and American Liberal Democracy," Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, Cynthia Willett, ed. (Blackwell 1998).

On Race and Philosophy (Routledge 1996).

"On W.E.B. Du Bois's 'The Conservation of Races'," Overcoming Racism and Sexism, Linda Bell and David Blumenfeld, ed. (Roman & Littlefield 1995).

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This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.

Michael Garfield is a futurist polymath who has worked everywhere from the KU Natural History Museum to the Sante Fe Institute to Mozilla to the Long Now. He’s currently with the AI Capabilities and Alignment Consensus Project. Oh, and he also has twenty years experience as an artist and musician. This conversation is a bit of a song exploder, looking into one of Michael’s songs (the Big Machine) through the mesh of his more academic interests.

Lyrics below.

Listen to the Big Machine (warning: it’s a bit trippy and you may find yourself humming it for the rest of the day).

Summary: A Song Exploding Episode

Andrea & Michael delve into the themes behind Michael's song 'Big Machine,' tackling how love, family, mysticism, science and technology intersect in this wild world. Michael shares his nuanced understanding of information, attention, and what it means to explore learning and teaching both within and beyond the traditional academic and scientific bounds.

A deep, multifaceted conversation with kaleidoscopic minds.

Michael Garfield is known for creating the Complexity podcast at the Santa Fe Institute, Future Fossils, and Humans on the Loop. Andrea & Michael traverse terrains of threes, paleontology, ontology, music, complexity science, and the great Fractal Rubik's Cube that may be Michael’s balm for the challenges of our times.

Check out Michael's latest essay for Aeon.

Listen to the Big Machine:

Complexity and SFI

Michael's Substack and Foraging Video

00:00 Introduction to Michael Garfield

01:37 Exploring Michael's Multifaceted Talents

02:48 Unpacking the Song 'Big Machine'

05:19 Michael's Journey and Inspirations

06:06 The Evolution of Michael's Musical Path

10:46 Complexity Science and Personal Growth

23:24 Challenges in Academia and Complexity

54:34 The Role of Psychedelics and Language

58:14 The Importance of Communication and Curation

01:00:18 The Evolution of Social Media and Podcasts

01:02:08 The Importance of Internal Culture in Organizations

01:05:59 Navigating Modern Uncertainty and Strategic Thinking

01:07:21 The Role of Games in Understanding Complexity

01:09:33 The Intersection of AI, Podcasting, and Education

01:10:24 The Concept of Future Fossils and Precognition

01:13:06 The Philosophy of Finite and Infinite Games

01:17:17 The Age of Entanglement and Emergent Engineering

01:24:55 The Practice of Noticing and Consciousness

01:41:39 Love, Synchronicity, and the Future of Work

Read Michael’s Substack post.

And here is a short talk Michael gave this summer.

Lyrics

Lyrics to the Big Machine

🎙How long can you go without looking at your phone?

How long does it take before your concentration breaks?

How sure can you be that your mind is really free?

How much would you stake that your reality's not fake?

Where do your desires arise in fields of wireless privatized

and pirated attention? In enclosed incomprehension?

How much is your agency and how much is the will of other

entities entirely?

Or is that even how to see this sea?

Doom scrolling (Like subscribe)

You're trolling (Find your tribe)

Everybody wants to be seen

By the Big Machine

Fan polling (Leave reviews)

Rage swollen (Count your views)

Everyone's volition is squeezed

by the Big Machine

Everybody wants to be pleased

by the Big Machine

How much would you spend to stay in touch with your own friends?

How relieved are you the algorithm offers the convenience

Of staying in a bubble of your spoon-fed preferences?

How much of your self is really what your heart intends?

And where do you define the line you draw between your mind

and the global operations of unconscious just-in-time

Logistics markets states and great unfolding fated intertwined

Machinic processes; you're hospiced in a matrix planet wide

Doom scrolling (Like subscribe)

You're trolling (Find your tribe)

Everybody wants to be seen

by the Big Machine

Fan polling (Leave reviews)

Rage swollen (Count your views)

Everyone's volition is squeezed

by the Big Machine

Everybody wants to be pleased

by the Big Machine

Everybody's choices are screened

by the Big Machine

Ask yourself just who you are feeding

When you play to rhe Big Machine

Now if you aspire to be free

From the Big Machine

Just how long can you go without looking at your phone?🎙

QBD for Episode #70

In a week full of new paths, the L&P project takes another intriguing turn, looking at complexity through the lens of a song called The Big Machine that Michael recently wrote, a sort of anthem for our times.

Michael embodies the intersection of art, mysticism, and hard science. This conversation explores a song and in so doing unpacks the complex systems of his journey through music, creativity, and the questions that drive him to persist.

The Big Machine serves as the linchpin for this exploration, unraveling themes of connection, complexity, and ultimately opening into the space of love.

Michael’s song (and this conversation) stretch across dimensions of self and society, pushing us to turn the fractals inside out and find the interwoven fabric of planetary existence that continues to hold us.

Through his journey, Michael has taught many to think beyond traditional academic boundaries. His discussion with Andrea wanders through those metaphoric landscapes of finite and infinite games, systems of organization, and the ever-changing tides of knowledge as pushed in technology.

Michael’s been staking out new paths, helping others find theirs, and communicating the complexity of it all in whatever ways he can for decades. His passion for complexity science stems from a deep-seated desire to understand the evolution of intelligence, consciousness, and all that goes into understanding dinosaurs. Michael’s main medium may be conversation, but he has opened up communities and connected dots in what could only be described as fractal Rubik’s Cubes. Enter if you dare.

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.

Oh! Did you see this guest post from Yogi (Johannes Jaeger)?

It’s definitely worth a read. Click below.

Also, in the spirit of discussing attention, here’s a post on attention from Way-making:

Also, in case you’ve never heard of Jenny Lewis, here’s a link.

This is a conversation about the philosophy of bioregionalism with Félix de Rosen, a landscape architect and gardener. In this episode, Felix shares his fascinating journey from studying political science at Harvard to his passion for the natural world and Bioregionalism.

Andrea & Félix explore the philosophy of organizing human societies around naturally defined areas, discussing complex systems and the importance of finding community. This conversation is an exploration of the intersections of ecology, culture, and personal growth through Felix's experiences and insights on creating sustainable and meaningful connections with the land and one other.

00:00 Introduction to Bioregionalism

00:43 Félix de Rosen's Background and Journey

01:30 Complex Systems and Community

02:53 Felix's Personal Reflections

05:21 The Importance of Place and People

21:34 Discovering Landscape Architecture

26:37 Understanding Bioregionalism

30:11 Exploring Systems Thinking and Worldview

31:38 The Intersection of Gardens and Worldviews

36:06 Frustrations and Realizations in Landscape Architecture

39:45 The Importance of Systems Thinking

42:54 Bioregionalism and Community Building

48:01 Bridging Political Divides through Bio Regionalism

52:25 International Bioregional Projects

54:37 The Role of Love and Connection to Earth

01:00:30 Agency Deficit Disorder and Hope for the Future

01:01:28 Conclusion and Ways to Connect

Links:

A Garden’s Purpose

The BioFi Project

Polycultura: Planetary Design and Communication

A talk from Felix at the Harvard commencement

The Bioregional Learning Center inspired by Donella Meadows

This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice.

Philosopher of cognitive science Hanne De Jaegher discusses the profound relationship between loving and knowing as intertwined processes.

The first in what we hope to be many conversations about this inspirational work. With Andrea, Hanne explores the idea that thinking and feeling emerge from the same fundamental act of sense-making, which is rooted in our basic, biological existence.

De Jaegher shares her personal experiences and how they led to her academic journey studying cognitive science, and then to her work developing the scholarship behind ‘participatory sense-making’. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing both oneness and difference in relationships and the conversation discusses the critical role of noticing and relational awareness. Through various explorations, De Jaegher illustrates how love is an ongoing relational activity that ‘shares a core with knowing’ and that can foster a deeper understanding of ourselves and others.

00:00 The Nature of Love and Sense Making01:18 Exploring Cognitive Science and Social Cognition02:58 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest03:52 Hanne's Academic Journey and Dissertation05:37 The Philosophy of Love and Knowing09:38 Personal Reflections on Love and Language11:48 The Interconnection of Loving, Knowing, and Being22:26 The Role of Noticing in Relationships25:36 Philosophical Insights on Ontology and Epistemology30:03 The Dynamics of Relationships and Sense Making34:42 The Importance of Holding Tension in Understanding40:53 The Impact of Loving and Knowing on Personal Growth47:17 Exploring Abstract Patterns and Sensory Experiences48:25 Understanding Social Cognition and Autism56:10 Bridging Cognitive Science and Sociology58:14 Motivations and Challenges in Academic Life01:01:15 The Role of Love in Research and Life01:06:27 Navigating Academic and Personal Challenges01:18:27 Holding Space and Embracing Multiplicity01:24:47 Concluding Thoughts on Love and Understanding

Francisco Varela

Loving and Knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology

Paradoxical Practices (2025) with Elena Cuffari and Rika Preiser

Participatory Sense-Making with Ezequiel Di Paolo

Sense Making (Maturana & Varela)

Living Ways of Sense Making by Evan Thompson

Andy Clark

Hanne’s website and publication list

Linguistic Bodies with Hanne, Ezequiel and Elena

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This conversation between Andrea and Hanne ventures into the complexities and shared processes of living, knowing, and loving—especially through the lens of neurodivergence and relational understanding.

Here’s the QBD Summary of some of the key ideas:

Love Beyond Scarcity

One of the central themes of the dialogue is the notion that love isn't constrained by scarcity. In a society often driven by competition and finite resources, recognizing that love can be abundant and renewable is transformative. Hanne highlights that love is not diminished the more it is shared but rather expands, growing richer with interaction and engagement.

Shared Core of Loving and Knowing

Andrea and Hanne explore how loving and knowing share an inseparable core. This relationship is more than just a philosophical consideration; it’s an ontological process. Loving is a form of relating, a dynamic interplay that is both a way of being and a method of acquiring understanding. It’s a process inherently tied to our identity and existence as humans.

Neurodivergence: A Different Rhythm

The conversation also unveils Hanne's journey through academia, where she observed a disconnect between lived experiences of autistic individuals and the external, theoretical frameworks used to describe them. This observation sparked her quest to bridge cognitive sciences and social sciences, leading to the development of participatory sense making—a theory that places relational and rhythmic understanding at its core. It's a call to recognize and honor the diverse rhythms of life, particularly those experienced by neurodivergent individuals.

Finding Your People

A poignant part of Hanne's narrative is her mother’s reassurance that she would eventually find “her people”—those who understood and resonated with her unique perspective. This speaks to the universal human longing to find communities where one feels understood and accepted. It's an affirmation that finding one's people is not just about belonging but also about authentic self-realization.

Holding Space & Creating New Systems

The conversation also touches on the tension between the academic world's external representations and the internal, subjective experiences of individuals. They advocate for a shift in systems thinking, suggesting that academia and society at large can benefit from embracing multiplicity over binary, either/or constructs. This new framework would allow for more inclusive and dynamic interactions, fostering environments where different ways of knowing and being are celebrated.

Confronting Vulnerability & Embracing Precarity

Navigating uncertainty and embracing vulnerability become crucial themes as Andrea and Hanne discuss personal and professional transitions. They reflect on how societal and academic structures often prioritize external validations over deeper, more meaningful engagements. Yet, it's these vulnerable spaces—where safety isn't always guaranteed—that can lead to profound growth and understanding.

Recent and Related Podcasts:

❣️These articles and podcasts in all forms are informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice❣️