Mind & Life Europe Podcast

Jane Hirshfield, an acclaimed poet and longtime Soto Zen practitioner, explores the interplay between poetry, science, and ethics. She emphasizes how poems answer life's unanswerable questions, delving into her unique creative process and the influence of Zen teachings on her work. Jane discusses the political role of poetry in times of crisis, drawing parallels between poetry and the natural world. She also shares insights on the 'ethics of poetry,' highlighting its capacity to promote kindness and interconnection, culminating in readings that capture her profound reflections.

This trailer dives into the enactive approach to mind and experience, exploring how cognition emerges from organism-environment interactions. It emphasizes the ethical implications of viewing the mind as interconnected rather than separate, warning against extraction and control. The podcast introduces the concept of 5E cognition, which encompasses embodied, enacted, extended, embedded, and ecological perspectives. Season three promises diverse guests and an arts theme, fostering long-form discussions that deepen understanding of these crucial concepts.

What does enacting the world look like for organisms who are not thriving, but merely surviving? What happens when we don’t have access to the activities that are organism-defining? How to curate a life from the edge, when one is cast out of the relational web because of illness or disability? These are questions that Professor Shay Welch is asking herself today, and not because the questions have a theoretical draw, but because, as she shares in this candid conversation, these questions have become the throbbing centrepiece of her daily life. At the time we spoke, Shay was facing a diagnosis of an incredibly rare neurodegenerative disease (3 in one million), and a possible diagnosis of other conditions, and in one year’s time, she saw her life get turned on its head. Exploring this journey together, we discussed the epistemic injustices facing women and marginalized persons in medicine and academia, what is needed to sustain a minimal integrity of the organism when the body breaks down, the necessary conditions for participatory sense-making to happen well between two people, the deeply political nature of any epistemological framework, not least the enactive framework, and the ‘somatic dance,’ as Shay puts it, of trying to figure out how much of the world is moving you and how much of you is moving with the world when the world seems to be moving against you. Shay’s cutting wit and unflinching realism was a refreshing antidote to many of the world’s harrowing displays of sophistry, authoritarianism, and bigotry at the moment, and her observations helped to shed light on how trust in the body, and in first-person experience more broadly, is a powerful seed of resistance for these times. It was not a conversation that attempted to enact any illusion of a happy ending, but where we ended seemed a robust and generous teaching about how to begin making sense with the world, moving closer to solidarity. More about our guest here.TW: There is a mention of suicide near the end of this episode. ***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Barbara Bogatin, a mindfulness-oriented cellist, Luc Petton, a choreographer blending dance and nature, Stephen Scott Brewer, a teacher exploring language and creativity, and psychologist Letícia Renault as they dive into the world of improvisation. They explore its profound connections to ethical interactions, emotional expression, and collective creativity. The group discusses how mistakes can spark growth, the interplay of individual agency and group dynamics, and the significance of presence in artistic expression. Discover how creativity can thrive through disruption!

“Transversal operations for the creation of ways of knowing emerge from the ground up. They are singular and speculative at once, emboldened by the creativity of the everyday. The mistake is to assume that what education needs is a model. What education needs is an opening for learning, an operative interstice for seeing beyond the map.” –Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Knowledge in the Making” in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, Sep 2020.This was a conversation that felt like many different fingers pointing to the same moon — whether we call it “engaged pedagogy,” “transversality,” “enabling constraints,” “situations of encounter” or “rich learning contexts,” Prof Erin Manning and Prof Emeritus Joëlle Aden brought us into contact with their radical approaches to pedagogy, within two very different cultural, educational contexts. Rather than asking the question of how to teach and learn better, we took a few steps back to first consider the conditions that either facilitate or thwart our natural curiosity and inclination to pose “proto-philosophical questions,” as Erin Manning put it. The conversation traveled through a wide landscape of interlocking questions, beginning with the following question that undergirded the entire exchange: How might we talk about teaching and learning beyond the concepts we have about them? And then, more specifically: How do institutions frame what it means to value knowledge? Is there a margin for evaluating learners differently, valuing process over product? How can we get over the habit of simply applying theories and concepts in the classroom, and instead generate theories and concepts from experience? How can we create a context in which thinking can be its most precise and generative? Is there a way of languaging together that doesn’t suppose a pre-given meaning in encounters of learning? How do we write new narratives for an ecological-relational approach, which disrupt the currently prevailing narratives of whiteness, coloniality, and neurotypicality? How can we think with complexity as a society, rather than resisting it, and learn to engage systemically with change? To find out more about our guests: Joëlle Aden & Erin Manning. Additional references:Hélène Trocmé-Fabre, L’Arbre du savoir-apprendre. The art of learning and the knowledge tree. Editions Le manuscrit, 2022 (édition bilingue). We’ve just learned that Hélène Trocmé-Fabre has passed away and we would like to dedicate this episode to her work, which profoundly influenced the work of Joëlle Aden. Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Knowledge in the Making,” in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, Sep 2020.Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Luc Steels is a Professor Emeritus of Artificial Intelligence with a focus on enactive approaches, while Takashi Ikegami is a Professor at the University of Tokyo specializing in complex systems. They explore the intricacies of AI versus human cognition. Questions arise about participatory sense-making and the potential for enactive AI. The discussion critiques data-driven models, emphasizing the ethical dangers of AI and the human misuse of technology. They also highlight creativity's connection to humanity and reflect on experimental robotics that encourage interaction and understanding.

Amy Cohen Varela, a clinical psychologist and philosopher, Dr. Rika Preiser, an associate professor focused on sustainability, and Dr. Sanneke De Haan, a psychiatry and philosophy expert, discuss the complexities of healing. They explore the ethical implications of how we define suffering and the messiness of healing beyond conventional methods. The conversation emphasizes the importance of narratives, community, and relational dynamics in mental health. They advocate for epistemic humility and critique individualism, promoting a deeper understanding of interconnected healing and identity.

Few conversations have been as illustrative as this one of the proximity between participatory sense-making as a theory and participatory sense-making as a veritable way of moving through the world. In this episode, we hear from Allison Leigh Holt, Jonny Drury, and Dr Hanne De Jaegher about thinking divergently, and feeling oneself to be 'atopos' in a world where the neuronormative claims on the mind and body are ceaseless, fraught, and very often alienating. Addressing many of the subtleties of naming and normative categorisation, the conversation echoed concerns that are fundamental to participatory sense-making and enactive thinking, where we must navigate the tension of simultaneously being bound by language and transgressing it, of moving through it and being moved by it. It was a living testament to the great ingenuity that is born of difference, and a robust embodiment of the joyful resistance and lateral imagination that are often called upon to participate in the world from a marginalised perspective. Some references mentioned during the conversation:David Bohm’s approach to dialogueDr Hanne De Jaegher’s website, including her two excellent papers integrating autism and the enactive approach Allison Leigh Holt’s website Jonny Drury's Dialogica website, and a link to his forthcoming book, The Autism Dialogue Approach Handbook: Transforming Communication in Neurodiversity (Routledge, 2025)Article on “atopos” by Jonny Drury***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elena Cuffari, an assistant professor specializing in the enactive approach to language, Hanne De Jaegher, a philosopher known for participatory sense-making, and Ezequiel Di Paolo, a cognitive scientist bridging neuroscience and philosophy, engage in a riveting dialogue. They explore the fluid nature of identity, emphasizing how shared meanings are constructed through participatory sense-making. The trio connects these ideas to real-world applications, discussing ethical interactions, the impact of autism research, and the dynamics of communication within high-stress situations.

As an introduction to this new season of conversations, I sat down with Dr Hanne De Jaegher, who was the backbone of Semester 4 of our Core Enaction Programme. She is well known in the worlds of philosophy and cognitive science for her development - with Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo - of the theory of participatory sense-making, which grew out of the enactive approach and which takes seriously our expertise in intersubjectivity by virtue of our being human.  For those who are new to participatory sense-making, here are a few words from Hanne’s wonderful website: “Participatory sense-making is a conceptual, scientific, and experiential framework for investigating our social lives. It builds conceptual bridges between the different disciplines working on intersubjectivity. These concepts and methods are being applied to issues such as autism, therapeutic practices, learning and teaching, intimacy, development. In turn, the applications inform the further construction of the theory.” See also Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, "Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition" (2007).In this conversation, we dwell with some of the key questions that emerged from our experiment in Semester 4 of bringing participatory sense-making into conversation with the exigencies of intersubjective practices in the world today. And we consider some of the tensions that are necessary to an approach that seeks to understand interactional dynamics across differences and asymmetries, recognising the care or concern that is at the core of a person’s agency. We also reflect a bit on the experiment itself of Core Enaction, Semester 4, and the ways in which it mirrored the ongoing challenge we all encounter of neither overdetermining nor underdetermining an interactional situation. ***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.