L&P Beyond Dichotomy: An international collective exploring the power in caring beyond bounds. (Love & Philosophy Subscriber

Conversations across traditional divides. Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological and poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds.
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Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological & poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Deeply human, friction friendly, & daring to care. Past and future show hosts include Andrea Hiott, Mirko Prokop, Fotis Tsiroukis, Henry Kramer, and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. Regular podcast links at https://loveandphilosophy.com/ lovephilosophy.substack.com

  1. 3d ago

    Persona Fog, Passion, Estrangement, Endurance (and Carl Jung) with Patricia Martin

    By now we know that online life, with its endless content, algorithmic polarization, and pressure to present oneself publicly, is detrimental to our well-being; countless books and articles have dissected these angles. But after a decade of empirical research, Patricia Martin argues the damage goes deeper. We discuss her book Will the Future Like You?, which makes the case that the capacity to form and sustain an identity is itself being eroded by code built to keep us uncertain about who we are and cut off from our own inner authority. She calls this condition persona fog. In Jung’s model, the persona is the thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life: useful, but never meant to be load-bearing. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study with roughly 100 participants and a decade of data on online self-presentation, she describes what happens when we pour our whole sense of self into multiple online personas: fragmentation, chronic self-doubt, and estrangement from a core self. The conversation with Andrea Hiott moves through Patricia’s own “undoing” (divorce, three moves in 18 months, her mother’s sudden death, her child’s transition, and the loss of a major project), her path into Jungian psychology, and the difference between resilience and endurance. Passion, she reminds us, once meant the capacity to suffer and hold steady amid uncertainty. Along the way: Csikszentmihalyi and flow, social pain research, Winnicott’s attentive gaze, and why everyday attention to one another may be a form of love. About Patricia Martin Patricia Martin is a cultural researcher, author, and Director of the Institute for Psyche and Culture, a depth-psychology think tank based in Chicago. She is the founder and host of the podcast Jung in the World, now in its sixth season with over two million cumulative downloads. Author of four books, including RenGen, featured by the New York Times, and her latest, Will the Future Like You? (Karnac, 2026), which Kirkus recommended as an “incisive, fresh work.” For the past decade, she has led independent research on the erosion of selfhood through digital persona management, advancing her theory of persona fog. She completed postgraduate training in Jungian theory at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and holds a certification in Medical Narrative from Duke University, an MA in Irish Literature and Culture from University College Dublin, and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College. She is a Research Affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.Chapters * 00:00 Introduction: persona fog, endurance, and the art of enough * 04:00 Missing the school bus and a childhood moment of transcendence * 08:00 What the persona is, and why it was never meant to be load-bearing * 11:30 The self as product and the post-identity era * 17:00 What changed since our grandparents’ generation; the three factors of identity * 23:00 From public libraries to the early internet * 25:00 Patricia’s personal undoing and the question “Who am I?” * 29:00 Fragmentation, resilience, and endurance * 34:30 Persona, brand, and optimization; passion as endurance * 37:00 Social pain online and the neuroscience of rejection * 38:30 Movement, the body, and the micro-singularity of the self with its devices * 41:30 Who listens to Jung in the World, and a yearning for depth * 44:00 How Patricia found Jung; Jason’s story * 48:00 Jonathan’s descent story and preparing to endure the AI era * 50:30 Csikszentmihalyi, flow, and 45 minutes offline * 53:45 The transcendent function, and the Jung lecture that inspired Csikszentmihalyi * 55:00 Why high achievers can be the most fragile; chronic self-doubt * 59:45 Janet’s story: auditing her “wardrobe” of personas * 1:05:30 Love, attention, and Winnicott’s good-enough gaze * 1:08:30 Why the self still matters; persona and romantic love * 1:11:00 Listening as love, participatory sense-making, and stewarding attention * 1:16:30 The spiral: returning to where we started, but anew Links Patricia Martin Will the Future Like You? Will the Future Like You? (Karnac) Jung in the World podcast C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago The persona in Jung’s psychology (IAAP): https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/persona-2/ Robert A. Johnson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Johnson_%28psychotherapist%29 Claude Lévi-Strauss James Williams in The Guardian (2017) Vint Cerf: https://engineering.stanford.edu/about/heroes/2011-heroes/vint-cerf Naomi Eisenberger, The Neural Bases of Social Pain (PDF) Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University tribute) Donald Winnicott, Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development Participatory sense-making with Hanne De Jaegher (Love & Philosophy ep. 68) Love & Philosophy * Podcast and website: loveandphilosophy.com * Substack: lovephilosophy.substack.com * Andrea Hiott: andreahiott.net * Andrea’s book, Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness: Simon & Schuster * Support the show: Giving page Transcript Andrea (Intro): [00:00] Hey everyone. Today I’m joined by Patricia Martin, a cultural researcher who has been tracking a big shift in our society over the last three decades, and especially over the last 10 to 15 years, relative to what being online has been changing for us. She was there around the beginning of the internet, working with public libraries in America as they began to implement the web. Today she hosts Jung in the World (as in Carl Jung), a podcast that applies Jungian psychology to contemporary living, and it has reached listeners all around the world. We’ll talk about that a little today, but mostly we’re going to talk about her book, Will the Future Like You?: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention. It comes from research she’s been doing over the past decade, including a three-year ethnographic study with about 100 participants. She even created an early tool to help her analyze the data. The book also came from some [00:01] personal undoing, which we talk about: some really hard things she went through in her own life, in her relationships and her family. She woke up one morning thinking, “Who am I?” and set off to figure out what it really means to build a self in this digital age. One of the main themes this conversation revolves around is persona fog. In Jung’s model, the persona is a thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life, and it was never really meant to bear all the weight we’re now putting on it. We’re almost trying to put our bodies into this simulated interface online, and that is causing strange feelings for some of us, and for our society overall. We’ve created personas that are nothing more than a film or [00:02] a layer over us, or maybe a screen is a better way to think of it, and somehow that’s making us feel disembodied. We talk about a lot of that. It relates to some of my own work too, but it’s really interesting to get Patricia’s views on this, and on the way we end up talking about resilience and endurance: what matters, and what continues to matter in our lives. Holding steady even when the ground is moving, as she points out. I think that’s a skill we’re all trying to learn in different ways. It’s part of why we try to think beyond either/or here, and to develop a way of staying balanced and still connecting to what matters to us even as we connect with the world. This connects to flow a little, and ideas like that, which we also talk about. We even get to Winnicott at the end, [00:03] the idea of the good-enough parent or good-enough mother, the attentive gaze, and what it means to just be with “enough.” Enough is a word that comes up in a few upcoming conversations. The art of enough is something I’ll talk about with Jonny Thomson and his upcoming book. We’ve already recorded that, and I’ll be publishing it. So we’re trying to think about what it means to find balance, but also to feel excited, to feel the amazing consciousness that is our life. We talk about that here too: how to really notice each other and notice what matters, and what it means to be human. Those are the themes we’ll be exploring in these next episodes, starting with this one, thinking of the spiral of how we move through life and always return anew. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope you’re doing well out there and not experiencing any persona fog. But if you are, you’re not [00:04] alone, and we can get through this together. Missing the bus Andrea Hiott: Hi, Patricia. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. I’m so glad you’re here today. Patricia Martin: It’s my pleasure. Andrea Hiott: We’re going to talk about Will the Future Like You?, which is such a wonderful title, Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention. There’s a lot in this book I want to get into, but I also want to give people an idea of who you are. One scene that really struck me is when you were helping your teacher at school, I think in second grade, and you lost track of time. You came out of the school and realized you’d missed the bus home. The way you write about this moment, I feel like there’s a lot in it, because you sort of freeze, which reminds me a bit of things that come later, like persona fog. But the moment I want to start with is when you make the decision: “Okay, I missed the bus. I’ll just walk home.” Patricia Martin: Yes. Which took me miles out of my way, but it was what I knew. Andrea Hiott: Coming from this navigational [00:05] mind of mine, that’s interesting on so many levels. And then, having made that decision, at some point you saw the environment differently. You describe it so beautifully in the book, and I really hope

  2. Oct 4

    Love, Attention & Meaning with John Vervaeke (and Iris Murdoch)

    On Love, Attention, and the Good: Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (University of Toronto) and philosopher Darius Parvizi-Wayne (Macquarie University) talk about love as a way of paying attention, starting from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. They discuss John’s idea that getting out of the meaning crisis means “falling in love with being again,” Murdoch’s famous M and D example, what “unselfing” really means, Simone Weil, Heidegger, the Kyoto School, and pilgrimage as a way of knowing. They end with a personal conversation about mentorship, vocation and the love of wisdom. Introduced by Andrea Hiott from the Philosophers’ Way in Heidelberg. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction from the Philosophers’ Way, Heidelberg 02:30 Darius and John introduce themselves 07:00 “Falling in love with being again” 12:00 Love as volitional necessity 17:00 Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good 27:00 The M and D example 37:00 Can cognitive science explain loving attention? 43:00 Unselfing: Murdoch vs. Simone Weil 46:30 The Kyoto School: self-power and other-power 52:00 The two-worlds mythology and nihilism 1:08:00 Nishitani and absolute nothingness 1:20:30 Place, basho, and the sacred 1:23:30 Pilgrimage and theoria 1:27:30 Darius’s story 1:32:30 Mentorship, vocation, and the love of wisdom 1:38:00 Closing: dialogos and Middlemarch MENTIONED Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good · Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love · Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses and Faith and Place · Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention · Taliaferro & Evans, Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent · Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology · Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God · John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis * John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne * How preferences enslave attention (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) * What active inference still can’t do (Philosophy and the Mind Sciences) * Iris Murdoch – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Lawrence Blum) * Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent – Taliaferro & Evans TRANSCRIPT John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is a conversation between John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. They will introduce one another. Darius, who knows both of us, offered to put us in touch, but I thought that Darius and John might have an even better conversation, and wow, it’s a good one. And they talked about Iris Murdoch, who is one of my favorite philosophers. So, three amazing voices in this conversation. I just wanted to say something: so many students listen to this, but also a lot of professors and teachers, whether you’re an academic or a teacher in some other way. In a way, many people are teachers without even knowing it. Listening to this conversation, and also to some of the notes I get from you asking me to talk to John Vervaeke, I realize how important mentors are in our lives, whoever they may be for you. We all have different ones. [00:01:00] We all come from different paths, and different people speak to us at different times. But that relationship in general is so important, and I really felt that in this conversation in so many ways. There’s an old story about Honi, who sees a man planting a tree, a carob tree, and teases him: it takes, what, seventy years to bear fruit, and you’ll never eat from it. And the man shrugs and says, “I found these trees when I came into the world, so I’m planting them for my grandchildren.” Then, I think, Honi lies down and goes to sleep for seventy years, and wakes up, and there’s the man’s grandson eating from the tree. Anyway, I think there’s even more to that story than that, but it comes to mind because, for one thing, if you’re watching the video, I’m up here on the Philosophenweg, the Philosophers’ Way, in Heidelberg. I’m at the university here. And so many people walked here on this path. Hölderlin, if you [00:02:00] know the poet, was up here, and Hegel, who I talk about a lot, but also Karl Jaspers, who’s one of the reasons I came to this town. Hannah Arendt was his student, and both of them are so important. I could go on and on. Max Weber used to live nearby. Anyway, there’s a tradition in these hills of philosophers walking, and I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for this conversation between John and Darius and Iris Murdoch. So here we go. I hope you love it as much as I did. Darius: Well, I think we should just do this spontaneously, right? And then, Andrea, you can edit as you see appropriate. Well, John, this is a complete honor for me. On a public platform it’s been, what, two and a half years since we spoke for the Active Inference Insights podcast, in, I think, December ‘23. John: I think that’s right, yeah. Darius: So quite a lot’s [00:03:00] changed. Just for the audience, people should know who you are. I imagine many people know who you are, but of course you can introduce yourself. Many people will not know who I am, though. My name’s Darius Parvizi-Wayne. I’m about to enter the third year of a PhD in philosophy here at Macquarie University in Sydney. I’m obviously not Australian, if you can’t tell from my accent. I’m originally from the UK, and I’m very inspired by John’s work, as well as other people’s, of course. My PhD is on active inference, or predictive processing, and the problem of relevance, which is something John has worked on extensively for decades now. But I have a range of interests that very much align with John’s: flow and insight and intuition and skillful coping and Heidegger, and someone I hope we get to touch on quite a lot today, which is Iris Murdoch. John: Yes. Darius: [00:04:00] But John, is there anything you would want to add about yourself? John: I guess, if people don’t know me, I’m an associate professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, where I teach cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I’ve been the director, the associate director, and the assistant director of the cognitive science program, so I have a long history with that program. In psychology, I work on intelligence, rationality, wisdom, meaning in life, and mystical experiences. In cog sci, I work on, as Darius said, relevance realization, its connections to predictive processing, and its connections to what’s called 4E cognitive science. This is the idea that cognition is inherently embedded, enacted, embodied, and extended. I would perhaps add another E: it’s exapted, in an important way. And then both of those come together. I’m a [00:05:00] long-term practitioner: 35 years of Tai Chi Chuan, Yiquan, Zhan Zhuang, meditation, contemplation, Neoplatonic practice. I’m also a facilitator. I facilitate various retreats and intensives. I co-facilitate with other people. All of this work is marshaled together towards wrestling with what I call the meaning crisis, which I’ve been talking about for quite some time. I have a YouTube series on it that’s become somewhat famous, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And by meaning I don’t mean semantic meaning; that’s a metaphor for what I’m talking about, which is this sense of existential, spiritual meaning. What makes life worth living even when we bump up against failure and frustration and futility. Many people are struggling, increasingly so: issues around loneliness, ideological capture. I could go on with an entire symptomatology. [00:06:00] And more and more people have taken this up and are discussing it actively. So all of my work is basically aimed at trying to help people address and ameliorate this. Part of that is theoretical work, scientific work, understanding meaning better and all of these other processes I talked about. Part of it is practical, in the deep sense of practice: giving people an ecology of practices. Part of it is educational. I do that at the lectern, and on my online teaching platform. Right now we’re going through the Kyoto School: how can their integration of Zen and Heidegger, and through Heidegger, Neoplatonism, perhaps help us with the problems of nihilism and cynicism we face? So that’s a lot of what my work is. And I get to bump into some really excellent people, and one of them is Darius. I think of you as a friend now, and I hope you think so too. [00:07:00] We talk quite often off camera. We’re collaborating on several things. He’s much faster than I am. I’m an extremely busy person. I’m sure he’s busy too, but I’ll use that as my excuse. We talk a lot, we share a lot, and I always enjoy his company. I know we’re supposed to be talking about love today, and I think that’s actually relevant to everything I said, and I’ll say something initially provocative. I have proposed, and this requires a really deep recovery of what we mean by love, and we can talk about that, and Murdoch will play an important role in that, but I have proposed that ultimately, awakening from the meaning crisis requires us being able to fall in love with being again. You can hear Heidegger in that proposal as well. So the topic of love has been very central to me because of that particular proposal. Darius: Good. That’s excellent. [00:08:00] I think there’s a nice way of making a convergence here between someone like Heidegger and Murdoch. Just to add, of course, I feel exactly the same. I definitely see us as friends. You are in many ways also a mentor and an idol, in the least glorifying or sacrilegious way possible. And I think at the end of this chat it would be nice to talk a little bit more about the personal dimensions of this stuff. John: Happy to do that. Darius: But to go to the philosophy. One thing that Heidegger makes very clear is that we are beings that care. We are Dasein, and at the very foundation he wants to say Dasein’s constitution is temporality, but at least at the intermediary level he says it’s Sorge, it’s care.

  3. Sep 19

    Sophie Strand and Henry Kramer on Imaginal Empathy, Consciousness and Re-Enchantment

    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 Find Love & Philosophy here on Instagram 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. “When people say the arc of the universe is towards justice, I laugh so hard. I’m like, ‘Justice for who? For us? For me? For you?’ If anything, the arc of the universe is towards crabs, because things tend to co-evolve into the shape of crabs.” — Sophie, 00:35 “We are new, and we are misbehaving. I think it’s important for us to begin to really open to not even holding competing ideas, but holding the ‘I don’t know, and I may never know.’” — Sophie, 00:31 “Go outside and start imitating the heron, the oak tree, the salamander. The exercise will always fail, but the empathy muscle it strengthens is absolutely crucial.” — Sophie, 00:44 “Conspiracism is like doubling down on rationalism, weirdly enough. Someone’s in charge, someone’s doing this — rather than pivoting towards the mystery and saying, ‘Wow, things are a lot weirder and stranger, and I do not yet have a framework robust enough to explain this.’” — Sophie, 00:26 “The injunction against anthropomorphizing is secretly a way of saying, ‘Don’t realize that they’re alive and have agency and thoughts,’ so that we can keep killing them and keep using them.” — Sophie, 00:46 “Probably the best way of introducing myself is as a lover. I follow the breadcrumbs of my love, and I end up in extraordinary places making new connections.” — Sophie, 00:06 “A tree stops being a strange other that we encounter full-bodily, and instead becomes the idea of a tree that we think can contain that tree totally. It becomes a locked box that keeps us from wonder, real relationship, openness.” — Henry, 00:22 “We’re all addicts of this culture, which is to utilize, to turn into a tool, to turn into calories. So I actually love poisonous mushrooms and plants, because they interrupt utility.” — Sophie, 00:50 “We can read books, but we can’t read the emotional, physical state, the weather patterns of the beings around us.” — Sophie, 00:45 “Machines are things we create, in a completely separate genealogy from the creatures we are all kin with. So it seems very bizarre to choose the machine over the person if you’re going to decide between those two.” — Henry, 00:47 “We should actually approach the world more like a really hard sci-fi book: ‘Oh, I’m going to have to work really hard to understand this, and pay attention to the magic systems.’” — Sophie, 00:57 “We’re using consciousness to study consciousness. It’s going to slip out of our grasp every time. For me, that’s beautiful. That’s the trickster pedagogy.” — Sophie, 01:04 “The illusion of selfhood is just that: a brief, temporary fiction” (Sophie, 00:09) “I want to make myself useless to AI, illegible” (Sophie, 00:51) . Cold open and introduction Andrea’s opening intro is left out; the transcript starts with the Sophie clip that opens the episode. For Andrea’s intro, see the original audio above or on any podcast platform. Sophie: You know, when people say the arc of the universe is towards justice, I laugh so hard. I’m like, “Justice for who? For us? For me? For you?” If anything, the arc of the universe is towards crabs, because things tend to co-evolve into the shape of crabs. And we, unlike horseshoe crabs or bdelloid rotifers, don’t actually have a good track record of adapting to extinction-event collapses or to shifting climatological pressures. We are new, and we are misbehaving. I think it’s important for us to begin to really open to not even holding competing ideas, but holding the “I don’t know, and I may never know.” Henry: Hello, and welcome. I’m very pleased to introduce this episode with Sophie Strand. Sophie is a very dear friend of mine and an extraordinary, accomplished eco-feminist writer, poet, educator and world-weaver who writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her books are The Flowering Wand, on rewilding masculinity through mythopoesis; The Madonna Secret, a retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth with a more earthy, animistic bent; and The Body Is a Doorway, a memoir about her experience with chronic illness. It’s about finding an earth-based spirituality, a way of thinking about her own illness, a way of opening the body and mind to the more-than-human world. I hesitate to say healing, but something necessary in the crisis she was experiencing. I always appreciate talking to Sophie about these topics because of her urgency in getting these thoughts, stories and ideas out there — she’s written about this too. I appreciate that urgency in philosophy, because philosophy can feel disconnected from the real world. If ideas can’t be applied to our lives and can’t help us navigate those lives, if they’re not restorative in some sense of our relationship with truth or with each other, then I wonder how truly rich those ideas are. If they can’t be embodied or enacted, then what are we even talking about? What are we even doing? That’s never an issue with Sophie. With Sophie, it’s always grounded, always real, always important, always urgent. Our conversation went a number of different ways. We talked about shape-shifting and imaginal empathy, and the importance of training the muscle of imagining what it is like to be other beings. We talked about consciousness and panpsychism, and our feelings about the rise of panpsychism in academia lately. We talked a little about conspiracy theories, and how tempting it is to be literalist and dogmatic in a time of ambiguity and confusion, when the way we think the world should be isn’t the way it actually is. And we talked about language: the labels and assumptions we make about the world, and how we mistake the world for our ideas about it and our ways of describing it. The conversation ranged far and wide and could have gone, I’m sure, much further and wider. I hope you enjoy it. With that, here is the conversation between myself and Sophie Strand. The conversation. Introductions (00:06) Henry: Hey, Sophie. Welcome. It’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming on Love and Philosophy. Sophie: My two favorite things. Thank you so much. Henry: Do you want to share a little about your work generally, and how you see your project in the world? I’m sure it will relate to both love and philosophy, and to the show’s other theme, which is beyond dichotomy — Sophie: There we go. Perfect. Henry: — which always comes up in our conversations, too. Sophie: It would be very easy to introduce myself as a writer. I write books, stories, fiction and nonfiction. I always call myself genre-promiscuous. But probably the best way of introducing myself is as a lover. I follow my love, the breadcrumbs of my love, and I end up in extraordinary places making new connections. I’d say I’m a lover more than I am an expert or a writer or anything. My projects are informed by spirituality, ecology, the history of religion an

  4. Sep 12

    Systems Neuroscience & why Automaticity Matters for Cognitive Evolution

    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

  5. Aug 28

    #95 Inventing Temperature, Operational Coherence, Articles of Faith, Clarity & Care: A Discussion with Cambridge philosopher of science and history Hasok Chang

    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 multi

  6. Aug 19

    #94 Action without Attachment, Conversational Care, and the Bhagavad Gita with Keya Maitra (Audio and Shownotes)

    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. Action without Attachment, Constellating Different Dualisms, and Conversations as Care Love & Philosophy, with Andrea Hiott and Keya Maitra Open [00:00] Keya Maitra: I think we sometimes assume tension always means something negative, but tension can also mean a potency, a possibility. It’s a love story, if love means caring, deeply caring, which also means a kind of vulnerability. Loving is giving a part of yourself, an opening, a vulnerability. Of course we see Arjuna’s vulnerability. But maybe we could also speak of Krishna’s vulnerability, because Krishna doesn’t say to Arjuna, “You need to do this.” At the end he says, “Do what you think is the right thing to do.” That’s what makes it a conversation. Conversation requires a kind of vulnerability, a kind of growing together. Introduction [00:01] Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone, this is Andrea Hiott. Thank you for listening to Love and Philosophy. As you know, I promised to do these intros improvised, wherever I am, off the cuff and from the heart. So for those of you here for the first time, that’s why this might sound a little in the moment: it is. I want to speak with heart. Today I’m talking with Keya Maitra about the Bhagavad Gita, a very important text in Hinduism. We’ll tell you all about it in a bit. Some of you already know that I’m trying to think of a constellatory approach to what we’ve thought of as dualisms. Those are big words, but think of things like either/or, like mind/body. We often think through those either/or contrasts. A lot of this show is about how we can let those be: not dissolve them into each other, but see what else they constellate with, what other constellations are part of that either/or. This conversation gets into that in a very beautiful way. I think the conversation itself becomes a way of doing it. We also talk about the power of conversation, what conversation is, and how it’s a kind of portal. This relates a lot to the Gita, because the text itself is a conversation, and also to the way Keya translates and discusses it in her book. It’s funny, because I fumble a little at the start and call her book a philosophical commentary, since that’s what you usually call translations that include a section discussing each part. But as she corrects me, it’s definitely not a commentary. It’s what she calls a Philosopher’s Corner. That little fumble is actually wonderful, because it opens us into talking about what really matters: what’s so philosophical about this text, and how we can think of texts in ways that still relate to us. This text has kept going for a very long time. There’s obviously a reason. So why? And what does it mean for how we think about who we are in the world? An important phrase associated with the Gita is action without attachment. How do you act without being attached? If you’ve ever felt really attached to something, you know how much pain comes with that: wanting a certain outcome, or loving someone very much and then going through some kind of loss. What we get to here is that you’re not getting away from the feeling, the care, and the love. Instead, you can act in a way that actually feels expansive. Action without attachment isn’t about cutting yourself off. It’s about realizing that what you are is beyond what you had thought, that you’re more expansive. I’ve been going through a lot lately (I’ll tell you about it some other time), and what’s helped me, in this conversation and in reading through the Gita, is thinking about how what I see in the world and the people around me are part of something I’m also part of. When you let go of your attachment to what you think you are, you feel more of this wider, bigger, moving, amazing… some would say spiritual, you could also think of it as philosophical; think of it however comes naturally to you. This bigger movement that we are literally in, and as, and part of. What I might think of as way-making. A movement you can’t really describe, but that we’re all part of. So a lot of what we discuss is about rethinking our connection to that more powerful, but also part-of-us, ecological world or multiplicity, whatever you want to call this force, and how we can become more specific within it. We talk about how, in her translation, she kept many of the very specific names. Connecting to that expansive nature that is ours is also about being more precise and more specific in each moment. There’s always a truth in each moment, but that truth changes as we change. That’s another theme that comes up a lot on this show: how to be more specific and also more expansive. I know this is getting abstract. That’s the danger of me talking while I’m on the road about to go to the airport. But this is what comes up: this conversa

  7. Aug 8

    #93 Is there a Cure? Rethinking Freud, chemical imbalances, and the power of love via embodied participation: A conversation with neuropsychologist Mark Solms

    Mark Solms began translating Freud’s neuroscientific writings in the late 1980s, then gave twenty-nine years to revising the translation of Freud’s psychological works. In this episode, Solms joins Andrea Hiott to talk about his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — and to make a surprising case: that far from being the discredited figure many take him for, Freud built a model of the mind, from the inside, that modern neuroscience is now confirming from the outside. Together they explore multiple memory systems and the unconscious as things we repeat rather than remember; why transference is a far bigger phenomenon than its jargon suggests; the damage done by the “chemical imbalance” story of depression; the stubborn role of time in real change; and, in the end, care — the idea that psychoanalysis is ultimately a cure by love. Throughout, they return to the show’s animating theme: holding paradox, and refusing the false choice between the subjective and the objective, feeling and fact. 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 Neuro

  8. Aug 2

    Molyneux's Enduring Question with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney

    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.), M

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Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological & poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Deeply human, friction friendly, & daring to care. Past and future show hosts include Andrea Hiott, Mirko Prokop, Fotis Tsiroukis, Henry Kramer, and Darius Parvizi-Wayne. Regular podcast links at https://loveandphilosophy.com/ lovephilosophy.substack.com

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