“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.

In this second season of the podcast, we are prolonging an experiment of sorts that we conducted in the spring of 2024 in the Core Enaction Programme, our online learning curriculum. Over the course of eight sessions, we invited researcher-practitioners into an open space of dialogue to explore how their intersubjective practices might be informed and enriched by participatory sense-making, and how participatory sense-making might in turn benefit from the forms of knowing implicit in these intersubjective practices. The semester paid visit to artists and curators, therapists and teachers, neurodivergent thinkers and AI specialists, musicians and choreographers. A central thread of these encounters was the intersubjective expertise that we all possess just by virtue of being human, and how that expertise is made manifest and refined in the different intersubjective practices that we explored. The question of ethics quietly guided many of these conversations, prompting us to consider how our ways of knowing eminently relate to our ways of being and doing, and how we might use our knowing to interact with each other in more skilful ways. We ended the semester by considering what an enactive ethics might imply, both as an ethics of participation and an ethics of engaging across difference, where difference is considered in all its generativity. In many ways, it was an experiment of exploring the "living, lived logic" underlying human knowing, to borrow a phrase from Dr Hanne De Jaegher.We decided to bring each dialogue group back for a second round of conversations, where we not only picked up some of the threads of their earlier dialogue, but ventured further into the moving horizons of their thinking. You'll hear from Dr Hanne De Jaegher, Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo, Dr Elena Cuffari, Jonny Drury, Allison Leigh Holt, Amy Cohen Varela, Dr Sanneke De Haan, Dr Rika Preiser, Dr Luc Steels, Dr Takashi Ikegami, Dr Erin Manning, Dr Joëlle Aden, Luc Petton, Barbara Bogatin, Dr Shay Welch, and Dr Karen Grøn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is the brilliant multidimensional thinker Michel Bitbol, a rare mind that is as well versed in medicine and physics as it is in Buddhist philosophy and micro-phenomenology.His copious bibliography traces the evolution of his interlocking interests and his thinking about the role of phenomenology in theories of consciousness, the parallels between Buddhist dependent arising and certain Western theories of knowledge, and most relevantly for our conversation today, quantum philosophy and the common blind spots in the work of a scientist.In this third and final segment, my conversation with Michel opens out onto questions about the role of contemplation in the life of the scientist and what we mean by contemplative science. He offers a granular description of the practice of micro-phenomenology within that tradition, and discusses the important work being done by the Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology at Mind & Life Europe. Ultimately, the conversation brings us to some of the subtle points of similarity between contemplative practice and the practice of phenomenology, bringing to bear the ethical dimension of both. We end on some of Michel’s most recent work, including his two latest books from 2023, Philosophie quantique. Le monde est-il extérieur? and Mettre fin aux controverses.I’d encourage you to visit our YouTube page to watch the online course that he offered for the MLE Friends community, “Beyond Confines: the Philosophy track.” There you can hear him speak about “Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics” in Part I and about “Consciousness: East and West” in Part II. You can also check out an online course in which he taught, hosted by our partner Science & Wisdom Live, “Buddhism and Quantum Physics.”Bergson, “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” essay from 1903Mind & Life Europe’s Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology (ICP)Paper on the validity of 1st-person descriptions by Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin (2009)Carlo Rovelli If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to this podcast, donating to Mind & Life Europe, and becoming an MLE Friend. We would also encourage you to visit our website for upcoming events, as well as our YouTube Channel, where you can find dozens of free talks, dialogues, symposia, and cutting-edge educational materials."Slate Tracker" and "Lemon and Melon" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michel Bitbol, a versatile thinker in medicine, physics, and Buddhist philosophy, delves into quantum philosophy and immersive epistemologies. Topics include phenomenology, first-person and third-person perspectives, participatory realism in quantum mechanics, and contrasting worldviews between Western and Buddhist philosophies.

The podcast features Michel Bitbol, a multidimensional thinker, discussing the synergy of medicine, physics, Buddhist philosophy, and consciousness theories. He delves into existential questions, the evolution of his interests, quantum philosophy, and common blind spots in scientific work. The conversation challenges fixed self-perception and explores diverse disciplines to unravel the complexities of self-awareness.