L&P: the Love and Philosophy sub stream for science, philosophy, tech, poetry, nav mind and more

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. lovephilosophy.substack.com

  1. 3d ago

    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

  2. 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

  3. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. Jul 17

    Meaning-Making and the Hidden Layers of Biological Agency with Charlie Munford & the Agential Biology Institute

    Charlie has been gathering some of the best scientists in the world to rethink what agency is together and form new connections outside the usual academic constraints. 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

  7. Jul 7

    Collaboration Across Art, Philosophy and the Sciences: Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger & Marcus Neustetter on The ZoNE

    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, whic

  8. Jun 30

    Wrestling is part of it: Motherhood, Dependency and Rethinking Care

    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe

    Wrestling is part of it: Motherhood, Dependency and Rethinking Care
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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. lovephilosophy.substack.com

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