Moving Beyond Binaries in Learning, Loving, and Living - A Conversation with Andrea Hiott

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Your thinking is just like the tip edge of your cognition. Your cognition is how you're moving through the world. It's how you're interacting with everyone. It's the gestures. It's the way you're treating yourself, because we are also multiplicities within ourselves. So if you start to really understand cognition in that way, you're literally changing what's possible for you in the world.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast after a much-needed summer break. I hope you've also managed to enjoy a bit of relaxing time with loved ones, and if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, your transition back into the academic year is going well. If you're not a regular listener to the podcast, my name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. I've been so looking forward to sharing this conversation as it's an area that I'm particularly passionate about. I feel really strongly that the way that we think and talk about learning, teaching, and education is still so rooted in the dominant language language of things like training, mechanistic metaphors of the brain as a computer, coming from behaviorism and cognitivism. And there is still a widespread lack of awareness of the emerging insights of cognitive science, often called 4E cognitive science, referring to embodied, embedded, extended, and inactive cognition. This is the idea that our understanding, thinking, and learning in the world happen in our relationships with each other, with our environments, the tools we use, and our bodies. And not just as abstract representations in our brains. And there's no one better to be talking about this with than Andrea Hyatt, who I met recently, who runs an amazing channel called Love and Philosophy, which I really recommend checking out. As she says, for her, all of her life has been motivated towards the same goal of finding ways for us to move beyond either-or mindsets and to explore our multiplicity. Andrea is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and writer, and is currently a researcher at numerous universities. She's also the author of various books, including Thinking Small, and her new book coming out in 2026, Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness. Andrea and I dived right into the conversation. I had told her that I mentioned 4E cognitive science to people who are actively working to bring cognitive science into schools and who had never heard of it. So I started by asking Andrea if 4E cognitive science was still a fringe area that few people were aware of.

I think it's becoming less so, but I mean, cognitive science itself is a little bit of a niche world. And what you call cognitive science is also a big question, even for people who call themselves cognitive scientists. Okay. Because it can encompass so much. I mean, you can be doing robotics or you can be doing more psychological, psychology-based kind of things. You could be doing computer programming. Right. You know, all of that informs cognitive science. So it's a wide field. And I think even when I did my degree, 2018, '19 in neuroscience, 4E cognition was definitely fringe then. And it's much less so now, but I remember I wanted to talk about these things and it was not easy. Of course, I was in a more analytic department in Berlin, but there were no, you know, embodied cognition departments necessarily even available around there. So it's changed a lot in the past 5 years, I would say, but I'm not surprised that he hasn't heard of it because Once you hear of it, you see it everywhere. But if you haven't, he's probably heard of embodied cognition. You know, it's, it's just the 4E kind of way of talking about it.

No, fair enough. Yeah. But I mean, that's one of the other things I really like about cognitive science as a frame is that it is, as I understand it, inherently interdisciplinary rather than, I think the way a lot of educators see cognitive science is as cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience maybe, but it's like, it's its cogs and its brains as machines and its cognitive architecture and memory and cognitive load theory and all of these things, which are really, they're really commonly understood now in education, which is fascinating to me because that then colonizes the conversation about what learning is and what education needs to be doing very much around all of these narratives of recall, retrieval, just memory, basically short-term, long-term memory, as though that's the thing we are doing in education. And that's the thing that I get so, I can feel myself now, I get so annoyed by that.

Yeah.

Because it feels so, it feels such an impoverished version of, it's like, as Indi Johar says, it's like teaching humans to be bad robots. Mm-hmm. It's so impoverished and superficial. It's like the depth of what education could and should be Yeah.

It's like, yeah, I wonder, is that because we, you know, this has been sort of an age of neuroscience and that we've become so fascinated with the brain and that somehow the, the idea of the brain as a computer has been the dominating metaphor.

Right.

And so it's a lot, I think a lot of what you're saying is almost like an assumed orientation that no one's thought about too much in the excitement of realizing we can study the brain in certain ways, having better tools for it. And this unfortunate metaphor, or I mean, it's been very helpful, the computer metaphor, but it's thinking that our brain is a computer and thinking that thinking itself and all cognition is, is in that is, is I think assumed in a weird way across, you know, most areas of society. So a lot of that feels like assumed for me. You have to notice that you're even assuming all of that, that cognition is in the brain, that cognition works like a computer and so on. Because it's just, it's been built up through what neuroscience is in a way. And memory, I mean, memory is almost the beginning of neuroscience. If you look at McGill University and a lot of the famous people of neuroscience like Donald Hebb and Penfield and everyone, they were really trying to understand what we call memory now. And that's when all those categories of memory started to become built up. And, you know, just kind of taking a word from William James, memory, and saying, we're gonna look for it. And now we can look for it in the brain, so it must be in the brain. A lot of that was just assumed and in good spirit because it was exciting. We were trying to understand memory and thought are so connected. So it feels like we're trying to really get at the heart of what are we, who are we? And these famous cases where people lose their memory and then we try to figure out what happened because it's as if they've lost who they are. So that was the beginning of neuroscience and all of that became understood as, you know, what you just described as the cogs and looking for this in the head, even these ideas of memory and what memory is, they're not very, I mean, they're very helpful, but it's not like there's actually such a thing as declarative memory and associative memory and semantic memory, you know, separated in our body, but how to understand all of that, because we developed it looking for those things and we started calling what the patterns that we recognize those things. So I think the hard part is understanding that we're assuming that mentality that you said, and not just rejecting it because a lot of good stuff has come from that cognitive approach. I mean, right? Right. I don't think it's— is it bad that in your— in education, people are thinking about that? Would you say?

It's a really good reminder to me, you know, to not fall into the binary trap of valorizing one side of it and criticizing the other side because I agree with you. I think a lot of really good stuff has come from that and it's still really relevant and important. My issue with it, I think, is that that's been seen as the whole of what it means to be a learning, growing human.

Yeah.

Like, it's like this, that has overtaken the full story of who am I in the world? How do I show up in this space? How do I learn to do things better, to be better, to, you know, to learn about the world? That's really important. But the broader picture of who am I and how am I showing up and what is going on in this space together as we learn gets at the best secondarily treated, right? It's like, it's, that's the afterthought of the reason why we're here is to lay down strong memories of propositional knowledge. That's, and procedural knowing skills, you know, it's a really instrumental view of why kids go to school, like why schools exist. And I think it's clearly it has real value. But it's so far from the full story that that's why I struggle with it. And I think that the rebalancing, the counter-narrative, I feel passionate that that's part of my role is to bring back in, bring back the body in, bring back the context in, bring back all these other things which have just been kind of ignored by teachers because they, as you say, enamored by neuroscience or whatever, we have kind of assumed that that thing is the whole thing that we're doing of the project of education. Yeah.

I think about that quote or that poem, T.S. Eliot, you know, coming back to where you started and knowing it for the first time, because you kept saying, bring it back and that we've forgotten it, but I'm not sure we ever knew it because the way that we've gotten to, like, a lot of what you, you just described with the propositional knowledge and stuff and what education is doing is a kind of attention or awareness of our, what we're doing together. You know, you can look at that in whatever subject you want to look at it as. It's a kind of way of like sharing what we've been doing together in ways that can help us orient towards futures. But we didn't think of it like that. We thought of it in the way you described it. So it's about learning facts that are important that then get you to the next step on the ladder. Maybe like we kind of had to structure it that way in order to take it seriously and make it what it was. Do you know what I mean? It's like That was kind of the first step of the awareness of what I just said that, that you and I are talking about now, but I'm not sure we could have started there. We almost had to, okay, we need, we created these systems for how, how is the society, how am I going to have a good life? How's my kid going to have like a good life? And we've created these systems, these educational systems out of that. And it's like a ladder. We've thought of it as like you first, you do this. It's, there's a step-by-step process and that fits very well with that. Older mentality that we're talking about, where you have categories, you have facts, you have things you learn that never change. We almost couldn't have started in flux and dynamism. It would've been too stressful. We needed to believe all of that stuff, right? To create those systems. And we created those systems and they've done a lot of good. But through that creation, we've now come maybe, hopefully to a place where we can understand, oh, okay, actually all of these things that we've been doing are right and good and true for a time. But it's this process itself that we've been trying to become aware of, you know, it's this process of how we intersubjectively communicate and how we co-create our world, which is what we're doing with education, with colleges, with the jobs, with all of that, right? It's that action, that process, that co-creation that we're only now, I think, just barely getting to understand as the actual reality of all of that. Not that we get a degree and do da da da da da, which I mean, you've talked about this, I think, some on your podcast. That's a, it's an amazing, like, we're realizing how amazing we are as part of life. Yeah. And we're also, it's also really scary and hard. That's that whole relational view. I mean, that's a, it's hard to realize that there are not particular definite categories and things and facts that will always, always, always be exactly like they are, that you can just learn, you know?

Yeah.

I think that's a scary, hard thing to realize. I don't know. If that relates to you.

So there's a, yeah, there's a kind of a disorientation in the acknowledgement of constant flux.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's a kind of a convenience in stasis, right? There's a convenient fiction of imagining that things stay the same in order to orient ourselves somehow as we move through the world.

Right.

But the thing that struck me as you were saying there was like, that I've learned a lot with you, from you, on your channel and in other ways. Throughout that whole history you've just described, there were always voices saying, hold on a minute, we're missing something. Hold on a minute, you know, and there's like a, there's an attractiveness to the control and the power of being able to leverage the scientific method and all of these abstractions to do stuff in the world. Like, that's really addictive and powerful, right? And all the time, you know, from your conversation with Evan, Husserl or Heidegger or Alfred North Whitehead or all these people, even just in the European tradition, in the, you know, as the things were emerging in terms of science, there were also voices constantly saying, maybe we're substituting the method for the being, or, you know, the, what is it? Surreptitious substitution that Evan talks about, the blind spot. It's like maybe We're missing something and we're mistaking the whole for the parts. And that's kind of what I'm saying about education. It feels like that's the thing we've mistaken. It's not that there's no value in the propositional, and I, I completely agree with you. I think it allows us to extend our cognition in a way, right? Like when we, when we can externalize stuff, ideas into tokens that we can share and point to and like into algebra or into a map or into a, you know, concept that we can say, hey, look at this, or I can teach someone else about it. I can show them that thing, right? Even though it's not a thing, but it kind of pretends to be a thing for a minute while I'm talking about it because it helps a young person orient themselves in the world or something.

Yeah, it's always been there. Yeah.

That's all great, but we've missed, but we've mistaken that as life.

Yeah. I mean, it's funny that I'm sort of defending, I'm not even, because the whole point of, you know, what I'm doing is this participatory sensemaking and this understanding the process, but it's also holding all these things together, which is a really, really hard thing to do. And, um, also, of course, what I'm talking about in terms of education is a very specific kind of education. I'm talking about the kind of education I had in my very specific way where you go to school and you learn in certain— there's many other— I mean, education is not about only the school, as you've talked about. And, but I guess what I'm trying to hold here is that what happens, and maybe cognitive science and elsewhere, the reason these— what seem like actually the most true thing, that life is a process, that we are participatory together, that the cognition is not only in the head, it's in the body, it's in our interaction with one another— those things, if you think about them, seem— you know them, you know, it's your experience. It can almost seem trivial if you let yourself reimagine what this word cognition means, because, you know, that word, people often just put it in the head. But if you start to think of cognition as the ways we make through the world, or how we interact with our encounter every day. If you think of it like that, then all of this stuff seems very normal. Yes, it's our whole body, it's our sensory body, it's different according to what kind of being you are. You're the teacher and the student, or that's an interaction that's changing, that is the education. It's not just this like stuff in books that are facts. All of that can seem, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's good. But I guess what I'm saying is it often feels like all those, if you, if you introduce it in a certain way, which I've seen it introduced, It's as if it's against all this that's already been done. And that's not only in the way we teach kids. It's like, I see it in science, you know, you have this whole world that many people depend upon that's built on what can seem like 4E cognition or embodied, ecological, and active or processual or transformative. There's all kinds of different ways, relational. It can seem as if you're saying, oh, you've gotten it wrong the whole time. And everyone's been trying to tell you, and you've built this whole system and wasted all this money and done all this research, and you've even built your experiments in the wrong way. And I don't think that's helpful or true, and I don't even think that's what people in this discipline are trying to say. But because you get sucked into the system, you start taking on those patterns, and that's just exactly what we don't want to do.

Yes.

You know, we don't want to mirror the very patterns we're trying to discuss here. So that's why I bring this up, because it's good to have some tension and some dissonance about it because as important as it is for me, I mean, participatory sensemaking, and I, I feel like this can really help us. It's one of my philosopher and friend Hannah Dyer talks about it is constantly determining what matters, you know, that is what we're doing in education, but that is a process that takes so much care and so much community and so much patience. And if we just are putting that against everything that already was, I just see that we've somehow gotten back into the, the system of it. Do you see what I mean? So what we're trying to do here is even get out of that way of talking about it. It's very hard, right?

I completely see what you mean because that, again, that's something I've really appreciated about your work is that you are calling out the paradoxes where we have to acknowledge that that is a patterning. That we don't wanna just keep falling back into the either/or. Because, so I'm very, I totally hear you and I really agree and not to disagree, but I'm saying that I think there's something about what is valued. That's the thing that's coming up for me. It's like the thing that we, you talk about dissonance, right? Like I hear this a lot from young people and from teachers and there's like this felt dissonance in formal schooling. That shows up in all sorts of ways, right? In, in school refusal or mental health issue or all sorts of ways that the felt dissonance is between like all the things you just said about, I am participating, I'm in relation, I'm doing all these things. I am an embodied organism making my way through the world, finding out what matters in every moment. I'm doing all these things and yet I'm being, I'm sitting in this space being told to ignore a lot of that data and only value the, they're like the things that are being put up on the pedestal of the things that matter, which are the more abstracted, the more decontextualized, the more conceptual, not always, but often. And so I think there's something around challenging that there is just more going on. And how can we bring that again, bring that back in, like, you know, in the sense that maybe it's not a remembering that we've forgotten, but, but it is definitely something we feel, but are not given, always given permission to bring into the space.

It's life. It's, it's what we care about. It's the, it's the reason for doing all, all of this work. And yet it's also like we have to soften a little bit and sort of, you know, let the knots untangle just a little bit. I mean, and because it is heartbreaking actually that we judge each other by something like an SAT score. You know, we all have these numerical things that are basically just about memorizing certain facts. A lot of, some of it's critical thinking, but it's a kind of critical thinking, like that's divorced from your actual embodied ongoing interaction, you know? And it's actually, it's heartbreaking when I think, I don't know about you, but when I think about my own life and how alienating and strange it feels to be in that system and how I think most people feel that way, even when you're really good at it, like even when you do really well, because there's no end, you have to just like, you know, I was told, oh, you're so smart when you're a young kid. And then you feel so pressured. Like, what does that mean? I have to keep doing that or something. I'm supposed to be some kind of— and it never really makes sense with all the tests and everything because, because they're all not seeing what we're talking about here. It's, it's not taking context into consideration. It's not understanding that every time you take a test, you're gonna be in a different space. It's not even understanding that all of those little facts that we're learning aren't really a sign of what we are going to be able to best give in the world. And it's also not understanding that best giving in the world isn't about an individual, like, cut off from that world. It's about you have a unique position and place in this world, and we're all in it together. And like, it's that whole re-understanding of what a self is, that we are inter-beings. None of that is in SAT scores, for example, or something. And that's heartbreaking, you know? And so, yeah.

It is. It is really heartbreaking. And that, to me, that the meta-communication of the system, and this is where I, the meta-communication is that's what matters. The SAT score is what matters and all the things you've just said, yeah, they can exist, but they're not the real thing that matters. And that's the, that's the alienation for me. And that's the thing that I, you know, again, I can feel it right now. Like I get passionate about that point because I feel, yes, it's not a binary that we've just got it all wrong, but there is something that we've just, we've allowed the map to be ultimately valued over the territory or all of those ways of thinking about it that Evan was talking about. Yeah.

But why have we done that, Tim? What do you think? Because I was thinking about this, right? Like, why do we have all those kinds of tests and metrics and what has that been about? Because we're at a really crazy moment of transformation right now. And do we really know what we've been doing and what we want? Because this happened and we all did it and we were responsible for it. This is what we've created. Yeah, we've created a metric system whereby we decide how worthy individuals are in certain ways based on weird numbers and things, right? Like, this is what we've done. And like, we can leave aside all the good stuff in that, but it's where we are right now. And, but we're also at a moment where we're having to really confront that due to what everyone talks about as AI, the, you know, LLMs and all this that suddenly is showing us maybe all those facts aren't what we thought. And maybe knowing them in this old memory way of just knowing them as facts, not living them. Taking them as the word or the map or whatever is the territory. That seems— okay, first of all, we have technology that can do that for us now. So what does that mean? Who are we? So why did we do that in the first place? And I guess like that question is, is hard. And that's why I'm trying to bring it up that I think we did it to become capable of knowing where we are, to develop our attention.

Completely agree.

Yeah. And, and the fact that we can now begin to understand ourselves as inner beings. So it's a, we're at a really beautiful like tip, like we're on this wave And if we can understand, oh, like, oh, that's what we were doing. Oh my God. Like, think of what we can now do together. But we had— that has to be a space that's shared and safe. And there's care involved because if it's just like, if we go into this school system, I know you know it well, where basically you just have to make your career on some ideas and theories and so on. So you need, you're fighting the other. That's a, feels like a very dead, difficult, sad, lonely space, you know, for everyone. But it's so easy to just go into that and to make this what I'm saying into a theory, which I then need to like prove to everyone else. So how do I, how do we sit together right here and like, look at this? Like, what do you think? Why have we done this? Why have we, you know, why have we created these kind of metrics?

I love that. But the, just quickly, the reason I think part of the reason why we continue that, and I have this conversation all the time with different people as parents or as teachers or whatever, is that the ladder is still there. Like people still want their children to be successful on the ladder. So the ladder still exists, right? So it's like, while at the same time, Many of us are looking at the ladder saying, this is radically insufficient and alienating and all these things, but it's still there.

Yeah.

And it's a kind of the—

we're still doing it.

Like, we're still doing it. It's still the steps to success. So part, part of it is in, I think, this long now of the Great Turning, or, you know, Joanna Macy, or whatever you want to call it. It's like, it's a long process of acknowledging. But I loved, I totally loved the way you just said that because I think that The big piece of why, I mean, I, I'm not nowhere near smart enough to be able to articulate it, but there's something around, for example, it makes me think of Daniel Schmachtenberger and the way he talks about technology.

Mm-hmm.

And then this is probably like Heidegger and other things, but somehow we used the affordances of the technology that was available to us at the time to do stuff in the world, right? To try and figure, figure, problem solve, figure stuff out, be in the world together. And like he talks about coordination technologies. And, you know, artificial technologies like, so a spear and the human coordination was what allowed humans to be able to kill the woolly mammoth to survive and to stop threats, to get food, et cetera, et cetera. So it wasn't one or the other, it was the ability to do the coordination technology and the physical technology. And somehow those two things have been like interacting. And I, in a way, I, so language, maths, All of those things I see as somehow, or there's one way of viewing them as technologies that we have used to afford further exploring of the world, right? And some people will like die on that hill of mathematics as the ground of being or whatever, like Ruliad guy, whatever his name is. You know, it's mathematics is like the ground of being almost.

Wolfram, sorry.

Wolfram, right, there you go. And, and so it's like, in a way, that's just, that's just another technology that, that humans have invented to talk about or explore the world in different ways. And in a way, I see education as a coordination technology that we have used to bring groups of people together to distribute, participate in knowing the world, sharing these technologies amongst each other. There's, you know, multiple ways that we've used different coordination technologies to continue life in some way, continue exploring, continuing figuring out what matters. And so somehow been this emergent story of just trying to figure out how we can enact our will in the world or, or, you know, minimize free energy or, you know, maybe like it's, it's like however you describe the thing that we're doing. And that's why I love your work. I think part of what we're doing is just waymaking together. And using the affordances of the landscape that we find ourselves in. And you can only do that from the point you are, you know, when you find yourself born into the late 20th century, early 21st century, you are given a bunch of affordances that are existing there. And then suddenly, like when AI comes and it brings this whole nother layer of affordances into the space that is just blowing, you know, it's blowing people's minds. It's scaring the hell out of other people. It's like, And we're trying to navigate using suddenly this new piece of technology, new to many, which brings new affordances and then makes us question other technologies. And like I'm saying all this aware of the fact that technology as a frame is one way of talking about it. Yeah. There's something very emergent and complex about the ecology of the thing that's brought us to now in that way, right?

Yes. And I think part of that awareness or attention or appreciation for rumination, which sounds like very weird that we could develop that right now when we're— we have attention economy and all of this, but I think that's allow— giving us a way to hold a very difficult understanding that there's not either/or and there's not— there's always many possible paths. First of all, the landscape itself is not flat. It's multidimensional. It's kaleidoscopic even. The landscape itself is changing with every sensory change. Of view. And that's a really strange way to think, right? We have to think in constellations instead of in lines. How do we do that? Some of all of this we've been talking about and all of the stuff that we've gotten stuck in and rutted in and that's become rigid now and that's constraining us in bad ways, you know, or that we're appreciating as constraints sort of instead of interacting with. But a lot of that has been ways that we can start to get to know that constellation, that start to understand how we're changing the kaleidoscope all the time. Start to understand how you and I have had really different paths. And even though we're meeting in a space here together, and this is the landscape where we're both overlapping in a lot of ways, and as we turn our kaleidoscope, but there's so many— there's so much richness and stuff there that of your path that I'm trying to sense, you know. That's what we're doing in this conversation. And that interaction, if we really— are we at a space now where we can start to notice the beauty of that and how that isn't always good and easy and clear and so on, but Starting with that again, now that we've kind of mapped the territory in such so many ways, that there's so much power in there now that maybe we can begin to understand and hold a little bit better. So waymaking sounds like it's, oh, it's so easy or something. You're just moving through a landscape and there's affordances and affordances, you know, like everyone has different ones. Everyone's on a different path. Yes. Okay. But actually what I'm really saying is pretty radical because you have to start with a scaffolding that's not binary, and you have to distinguish the representation from the relation. So the way that we're using language, or the way that we're using whatever, isn't the relation itself. So I think it's— what it really comes down to is being really present with where you are, how you got there, how you are, the people and the places that you've been, and how that's always going. You didn't leave them behind. The constellation is ongoing. It's all of this, everything all at once, right? And even in terms of education in a really traditional way. When we think of ourselves as kids being educated, we tend to think now we're adults, you know, but we are— but we're still kids too. And what does it mean to always be the kid and to be the teacher and to be like— to be our soul who takes on different roles as we turn the kaleidoscope, in awareness that we're taking on roles, you know? What is that? Like, the kid— the kids teach us too. And Yeah, not even kids, but adult, adult students. I mean, yeah, you know, there's that old thing where you learn what you teach. It's so true. So how do we— like, that's the space I'm thinking attention and all the stuff allows us to sort of start to explore, that we are the teacher and the student and the landscape and the material we're teaching. You know, we're all of those things, and it's not a crazy messy blur, and it's not anything goes, and it's not there's no truth and nothing is right and wrong. That's not it at all. It's that in every moment we're gonna express and experience those things differently. They're, they're there, they're real, they're traceable, they're legitimate, but they're changing all the time. And how we express them, how we communicate them, where you and I are gonna connect, we are gonna have to dance a little. And, and you know, it's, it's constantly going with ourselves too.

Mm-hmm.

You know, with our own, absolutely. Own selves.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the thing that also comes up for me when you're saying that is something about implicit and explicit. Because there's a lot going on implicitly in all of the things you've just described. And I think, again, that's one of the other little traps that we get locked into in education is that there is, again, a valuing of the explicit.

Absolutely.

Because it's the thing you can talk about. It's the thing you can write on the exam paper, or it's the thing that you can show that you can do.

Exactly. And that's an either-or thing too, because I hear what I hear you saying, what I've heard in your other podcast, maybe even with Nora Bateson, is that it's the implications and the It's all the stuff we can't put into those external representations, those right yes/no answers, or even right now that you and I can't like actually say. That's all that's actually the orienting. Yeah, of all of this, you know. And that's part of that cultivation of being able to sit in presence and not judge each other, but also to be rigorous and to believe in, you know, what we believe in. We're not just like being passive as if everything goes. Yeah, to notice that, what you're saying. So it's not the implicit or explicit, it's what those are generating as all that's implied and can't actually be pointed to as implicit or explicit.

Yeah. But there's also something maybe about trust that that is all going on though.

Mm-hmm.

Like, because I think there's sometimes in order to acknowledge it or notice it, it has to come up into attention or awareness and—

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say at the beginning.

But it feels like a lot, a lot of stuff is going on, not in that zone, right? We're— and so there's something about trusting. I don't know whether that's the right word, but like being okay with all of that happening without necessarily being in our conscious awareness.

That's where the care comes in and creating spaces where we can actually explore this stuff together. And that's the kind of education that I think has— what we're maybe talking about orienting towards, the kind of relational interaction where you're coming together towards understanding something, and it's going to be a process that you're going to do together, and you're going to bring in all the ways, other paths that people have been on that have understood this in a certain way, but you're looking at as a constellation. So there's going to be a lot of different ways to get there, and the only way you can even have any of this is if, if the space is safe enough and if everyone agrees that this exploration can take place, which means you don't necessarily have the expert who's going to give you the answers and then you're going to get a good grade on the test.

Yeah.

It's a different, you know, way of thinking about what that is.

Yeah.

I think it relates more to like homeschooling or to having some kind of, I mean, traditionally the way those things go, because when you are homeschooled, you have a one-on-one interaction with someone who cares about you. Or when you do something like a cognitive apprenticeship, in a— I don't mean that in a strict way, but just when you're like working with someone who cares about you, who's been through a lot of experience, who's going to share that experience with you and also learn from you in that— what is it like— that zone of proximal development, the Vygotsky, that, that area where nobody really quite has the answer, but you're bringing stuff together. So that feels like a good way to orient education.

Totally. It really reminds me of, I had a conversation with Helen Street about, she calls it contextual wellbeing rather than care. But I really like that idea that, you know, often the idea of wellbeing has been situated in the individuals, but actually she's, you know, talking about what the context, how well is the context or, you know, how flourishing or how enabling of thriving is the context that we're situated in. And in a way, that's what you're talking about. In the ideal situation, if you've got someone a family doing homeschooling, you would ideally hope that that's happening in a holding of care, right? In a context that is rich with love and care in order to do the things you've just been talking about.

I like that a lot. And also the context, just understanding context, how important it is, is part of this, right? That is a kind of care in the way I mean it. And understanding we're not just calculating or memorizing, we're elucidating for one another. And yeah, that kind of opening of space feels important, difficult. But let me just say this too, in all these talks I have, we mentioned 4E cognition, participatory sensemaking, and processual. And really what that is, is a way of noticing that there's a third entity or kind of another thing, right? Like you and I right now interacting, we are autonomous beings who have paths and that are very important and haven't gone away. And that matter, but also within us we've created a third thing here, which is— that is what we're doing all the time with one another in education. And somehow recognizing that that's the process of education, it's not two separated brains, you know, computational machines in heads coming together to like give each other some information or some data, or maybe it's warm data, I don't know. But you know, it's, it's this, this third entity is where it's exciting and where education really is. And we don't know actually what's possible until we engage in that. And that opens up further possibilities for further worlds and landscapes that we can explore. That feels really motivating to me in, in ways that we need.

100%. No, I totally agree. And it makes me think like, are we creating third entities in all directions as well? Because we, you know, you and I are creating a third entity between us, but we're also creating third entities in a way with the context we're in. That you're in.

Yeah.

So there's something multi-dimensional going on there.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah, because the third bothers me a bit because the third, people tend to rest there. And actually, in this book I wrote, which is a like poly philosophy, it's a hippocampus-inspired book, Holding Paradox, that comes out next year, I actually talk about that space of the third. It's a really important idea and we use it all the time. I mean, I studied Hegel in my first degree and it's the synthesis, right? You can find this trend in every, like, all kind of religions and philosophies and psychologies where you have the third and it helps. Because you can step to that space and then see that you've been in a binary. And it's so important, but we don't stop in the third, you know. The third's not even really there. It's a portal into exactly what you just expressed, which is also what's so hard to hold, is that constellation that we are multiplicities, that we are inter-beings, that there are truths and paths that are traced, but that there's a lot of them. It's not just one line. So thank you for saying that because that's a really important point. Yeah.

No, no. And that's the disorientation in a way that we kind of brought in at the beginning, right? It's like so hard.

So hard.

Maybe.

And even a little bit dangerous, you know? It's hard. I mean, I think we should pause on that a minute because people talk about, oh, just adopt a relational view and just think about it as all relations in all ways and there's no boundaries and everything's fluid. And that is incredibly disturbing. And I don't think we actually pause enough to realize how disturbing that is. I see it., you know, with people who are really trying to understand it, who we, we assume everyone's been on our path, but if you haven't had this like kind of very gentle lifetime, you know, years and years of leading into what that means and you just suddenly encounter it, it can be very scary and dangerous. So I think that's something we also sometimes forget.

But I, I love that because I mean, it came up in my conversation with Indi Johar and it also, it was like one of the first things I wanted to ask Nora Bateson when I met her in person. Oh wow. I remember like we met in Switzerland and I was like, I'm so glad to hear that you This like niggling issue of like boundaries are important because they make people feel safe, right? And yes, they limit and they do violence and all these things, but they also make people feel safe. And there's like, there's a really tricky holding of this thing. I completely agree with you. 'Cause I think if you say, oh no, just step, I mean, it's like, as we, before we started recording, it's like, just shift your ontology. Just like step into this relational space.

It seems so easy once you've seen it. I mean, it's not easy actually, but it's not. Yeah, but it seems obvious. I had a conversation with Jessica Bowman, who's an engineer, who's— a lot of people are starting to try to do philosophy, right, in whatever field they're in as a way of life, or as there's all these ways to think about it, but just thinking critically, right? And she also talks about how she was kind of happy in her little engineering world, and then she discovered relational philosophy, and it— yes, it opens up a whole new universe, and it's almost like for these times we're gonna— we're being forced to deal with it at this. But at the same time, how disturbing it was, you know. And just like, I think that's part of why there's a lot of resistance too, and all from all, all points. So I'm really glad that's an important part of what you say. And I do remember you bringing that up with Indy, I think. Yeah.

Can I just— because I'm really curious about this point about sensing and like how we sense into that landscape that we're talking about. So we're, you know, we've talking a lot about all of that, but it feels like a lot that's come up a lot for me in the conversations you've had. Like Mike Levin, for example, this idea, and, and with Eric recently about like Schutzgabel, the tree and the, you know, like the, I use the word, but like the affordances of the body of that thing, thing, like the thing that's not a thing, but like, yeah, you know, the affordances enable a certain type of sensing. And as Mike said in your conversation with him, like if we had, it's just such a visceral example. If we had tongues that faced inwards, maybe we'd be better at sensing our own inner organs and movement inside our bodies, our interoception, right? Like just what an image.

Yeah, exactly.

But also just makes the point so strongly to me that our ability to sense into the landscape, to navigate all these like third entities that you are talking about are really contingent on our sensual apparatus that we have, right? And in a way, that's part of what 4E cognitive science is doing, right? It's like, bring the body back in, in activism, etc. Our cognition is happening through our limbs, through our bodies, through our, you know, gut biomes and all these different aspects. Do you feel like, do we have an ability to shift that, augment that without changing our own bodies? Or like, there's something for me about, I don't know quite what the question is, but like, how if we're talking about sensing into a, a more multi, multiplicitous constellations, universe, et cetera, multiverse, it feels like we need different sensing apparatus to help us with that. And can we get better at those things? And Nora talks about sensitizing, like, I don't know, it just feels like there's something there for me about like an ability or a different kind of tool or apparatus or something.

Yes. I think this brings out a lot of the points we've been talking about because We are sensitizing ourselves into another existence of literally, you know, whatever scale you want to look at it, as individuals, but as communities, as countries, as ecologies. There's a level in which you could understand that's what, that's what we're doing with this waymaking. This, as we encounter and as we adjust, we're creating new calibrations with the world, which is a sensing. I think what's so important about understanding this thing that we began with where cognition is not a computer in your brain, but rather your brain is part of your body. You actually have a central and peripheral nervous system that extends in through your body. You have neurons all over your body that if you understand literally that your body is a sensing being and that that is cognitive, that's very hard, right? Because we've separated it all in the same way we've been talking about. But if you just take, start to feel into that, that your whole body is what you thought of as cognitive, as the brain and computer in your head, but actually know you're this incredible cognitive being. Like, all that stuff you thought was a computer in your head is your body, and it's your interaction with all that you encounter. Everything you read, everything you watch, every conversation you have, every walk you take, all of that actually is contributing and giving you the material of how you are going to continue your thinking But your thinking is just like the tip edge of your cognition. Your cognition is how you're moving through the world. It's how you're interacting with everyone. It's the gestures. It's the way you're treating yourself because we are also multiplicities within ourself. So if you start to really understand cognition in that way, it's not that, I mean, of course our bodies are changing and we have all this technology and we could go, you know, into crazy ideas about that like Mike does. And it's all very interesting and I explore a lot of it, but I think just on a basic level, if you think of your attention as something that's changing, you're literally changing what's possible for you in the world when you begin to be able to hold that sensory body as your cognition. I mean, this word cognition, but as the way that you're making through the world and as something very unique to you that you can share with others because we're all in a different space and time. And that cognitive process or that bodily process, that living that sensing is so unique and shared at the same time. And if you realize that interface is what's so meaningful and you start to become aware of it and not judge yourself and accept it, wow, you know, yes. I mean, we start to change into different sensory beings and not as this old self that we thought was stuck in our head, but as a participating being in the world that can— I can look at other beings like trees and understand them as part of me, even feel into them without it being kind of mystical or crazy, just literally you can start to understand that you're respirating with each other and giving each other the ability to be. I mean, probably the tree more us than us the tree, but you know, we're here, we can take care of the tree. So, and that actually isn't mystical and crazy. It becomes incredibly motivating. And a walk through your neighborhood can be a very different thing. So can a conversation with anyone. So can like just the way you interact at the shop. I find that incredibly exciting. And like to think of what kind of beings we would be in that space is very exciting. To think of the way we would do science. Yeah, even the way we would structure technology, the way we would do education becomes very exciting for me. And there's people trying to do it. Um, you know, right now a lot of our scientific experiments, as I know you know, are set up where you have this linear observer. There's the observer, there's a subject. You know, we talk about it in a lot of the conversations on Love and Philosophy, but that everything's separate. But there are people who are trying to create new ways of, you know, how do we have a participatory kind experiment where you and I might do an experiment together instead of— and the scientists might like be there or watch or record it, but that is the experiment. There's a thing called PRISMA that's built on the Feldenkrais thing but goes in a totally different direction from that, where they actually try to do that. You know, they, they create experiments that actually the experimenters co-create as they do them, and then you have data, but it's not data that's been dictated in that linear way. Or there's perceptual crossing experiments, there's hyperscanning. Like, we're starting to understand ways that we can understand ourselves as beings beyond what we've decided is the computer in our head. And I find in education and technology and science and just everyday conversation, that's, that's the thing that I think I would answer your question with as what's possible in terms of creating new capabilities or new bodies. You know, they're already there. It's more becoming aware that, that they are.

No, absolutely. I know. And it makes me think it's almost like you can, some of it you can see in the language. There's a, I was doing some work with Ray Ison. And you, they've got this great paper, him and some other authors called The Praxis of Co, like co-hyphen, in the sense that like you can almost see it in the language that words like co-creating, right, which you just used, are just coming up more and more. Like there was, I would say, X number of years ago, 10 years, 20 years ago, people weren't using the word co-creating as anywhere near as much as they are now. And there's something, there's something that you can notice in the way that we use language, I think. That indicates us sensing into that thing that you've just described. Absolutely.

I think that's a really good point. Yeah. Even a lot of the people on your show or the people I talk to, they're using those kind of terms and that kind of way of, of speaking, which, which is why it's sometimes uncomfortable for people or slightly disorienting, or it's a new set of language.

Some people will dismiss it as jargon, but there's some, some really interesting responses to the way this stuff gets talked about.

Mm-hmm.

Which I, yeah, which I find fascinating. But also just maybe to end, one of the things that I keep with me all the time, so as I I said to you off air, I do some work with Nora Bateson and this, like, it's kind of a motivating question to me, to your point about what does it mean to educate if all of those things were true? The, the question that I sit with all the time is what does it mean to educate if information is alive, if communication is an ecology, if cognition is everywhere, and if the individual island self is a myth? So like, to me, that's like, that is the motivating question is like, what does education mean if we take all those things to be more true than we've given credence in the last, you know, 200 years, maybe ever.

It almost isn't. Yeah. It almost isn't a noun anymore. Right. It's almost like, as you were saying that, I was thinking education sounds, or maybe it's just, it's this somehow living process of—

Right. Exactly. Exactly. And that's, I actually used to educate rather than education because I agree. I think there's like the mis— what is it? The misplaced concreteness of, of a thing.

Yeah.

It's like, it is a process.

Mm-hmm.

Like I think educating is a process. It'll be a relational process. It always has been, whatever we're teaching in whatever space you're in. But again, back to some of the things we've talked about, I think it's partly about allowing the value to be given to the things which are implicit, or, you know, all the things we've said, rather than just the things that are concrete and the things, the thing things that we can manipulate.

Or just noticing the value. You not don't necessarily have to allow. And also I mean, who are we to allow? I think that comes up too. And I guess since you like— and this to educate, as if that still implies there's one locked-in kind of brain or body that's going to give, that's going to educate another, whether it's—

that's— and that's—

yeah, I'm sure you've explored that before, but it just came to mind. It's— that's also—

yeah, no, I, I— that's part of the learning issue. So, and Kurt Bister calls it learnification, like people gravitated towards the word learning in order to circumvent exactly the thing you've just described. It's like, it's all about learning.

Hmm. But now that's become symbol-oriented, hasn't it?

Well, a little bit, but there's, but there's something interesting to me. Like I haven't, you know, it will be a lifelong inquiry, but there is something in the educational relationship or the educational act I've played with. And it's like, there's something in that relating, which is not just about two people learning. Together. It is about that, but it's also something— there is a relationship that is saying, I have something, like Hjörtvíslr talks about, like, I have something I want to show you, or I have something about the world I'd like you to notice.

Oh, I love that. That joy in that.

Right, exactly. And there is something—

You just can't wait to share it with someone, isn't that?

Right. So there's something powerful, I think, in that idea that it's not a power imbalance. I'm not meaning it in that sense, of like the master and the student. It's not like I'm here and you'll be here one day. It's something about I'm passionate about the world, I'm passionate about this thing, and I want to show you. And, you know, I've maybe done a bit more thinking about this thing or some exploring of this thing than you have, and that's given me a richer understanding, richer kind of appreciation and wonder for this thing, and I'd love to show you. That feels— that feels like an important relationality in the mix of all the things we've just Yeah, because—

and that only makes sense and works if we've kind of stepped back enough to understand that we all have unique paths within this kaleidoscopic constellation, nested, multi-being place. And all of those paths are necessarily going to offer the being that's been on them something different to give, which doesn't mean we need to compete, like, right? But, but does mean we can still be very, very motivated to find ways of doing that, right? So that we don't lose the motivation. But because often it would come, oh, I know this and I want to tell you because I've had this incredible life.

Exactly.

And it's like, okay, yeah, all of us have, right? So how do we, all of us, no matter who we are, how educated we are, I absolutely believe it. And I, I'm sure you've seen it too, have something to give that others can't give. I've just seen it. It's, you know, yeah.

Yeah, totally. And that was your point about learning from the young people as well, you know, or the, the older, kids, you know, as you said earlier, it's like the person doing the educating can be anybody because as you say, they've had this rich experience and they want to share it. It doesn't mean that you have to be, it's not a position as such or a role as such.

It's like a state. We're in educating or something like, let's do some educating. I don't even know what the word is, but you almost get into kind of like a little, little spirit together, right?

Yeah.

But it does, I think it's easy to forget that it doesn't have to be degrees and all this. I mean, sometimes it's very hard for me to hear, cause I know my channel, it's like very heady. All these scientists and philosophers and technology and all these words as you were talking about. And if someone just comes to that without, maybe they didn't go to college and they know a completely different kind of knowledge, I don't want it to seem like that's a better knowledge. You know, I still struggle with how to hold all that because once you've gone through these paths, you tend to group in people who've also been on those paths. So how do we really like connect those different parts of the constellation? That feels important too. And I know you're doing it with your podcast.

No, no, I agree. And it's, it's a trap for everyone, I think. But, and I think, I think you do it really well by bringing love back in. And I'd like, you know, if we can explore that separately.

Yeah.

In a future group conversation, maybe I would, because I do think you bring people, you ground your conversations in the kind of relational with the idea of love as the frame. So I, mm.

Because loving is knowing as, yeah.

Right.

Hannah Díaz has wrote about it. I, I really think that's kind of like a way of knowing that we all share, even no matter, you know, what, what you love or who you love or You know, there's— that is a knowing, right? That is something relative to the education that we've been talking about, that we have to give, I guess, and receive.

Amazing.

We talk about that another day.

Thank you. Oh, this is amazing. No, I so appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you, and thanks for all the work you're doing.

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