We are Intertwined Creatures - A Conversation with Prof. Tony Chemero

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We have to make a choice one way or the other on how to kind of do our science, live our lives, educate our children. And what I think is that taking us to be inextricably intertwined with one another and the world is a better way to do those things.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast this week. My name's Tim Logan, and this podcast channel is produced by Good Impact Labs. If you think about which verbs dominate formal education, you'll probably come up with a list of something like learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, knowing, and maybe behaving. Now think about what images come to mind when you consider those verbs, or do a Google search and see what you get. I'm willing to bet that the most common images coming up are of individual heads, maybe with a visible brain or cogs even, doing the thinking, the reasoning, the learning, and the cognition. And to emphasize the point further, when we want to highlight that it's more than one thinker or reasoner doing the work, we have to put clarifying adjectives or nouns in front, like group cognition, collective learning, or collaborative problem solving. But the fact is, we are actually already intertwined creatures in our entanglement with each other and the world as we think, learn, and reason. We do this all the time with and through each other, with the objects we interact with, and the places we are in. My guest this week, Professor Tony Comero, has been a major proponent of radical embodied cognition for his whole career as a professor of philosophy and psychology. His latest book, brilliantly titled Intertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Other, is an amazing articulation of just how interconnected we are as creatures and learners in the world. Tony is a distinguished research professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Cincinnati. And a primary member for both the Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception and the Strange Tools Research Lab. As well as many academic articles, he's the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science in 2009, Phenomenology with Stefan Kaufer in 2015, and his latest book Intertwined Creatures published this year. You can find lots more links to Tony's work in the show notes.

Well, thank you, Tony. Really happy to meet and Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, I read a couple of years ago and was just so interested. And so I've been kind of tracking your work a little bit since then, and you've just released this new book, Intertwined Creatures. Though I, I hear you're already onto the next big project, so that's super exciting. Maybe we'll touch on it, but no, just, I'm really happy to be able to have the conversation. And as I said to you before we started recording, I'm really passionate about bringing more of these ideas to educators in schools and universities, informal education, because I just think it's still really under-understood in terms of what the implications are for this science in the way that we engage with young people, the way that learning happens, et cetera. So, no, thank you very much for taking the time. Firstly, great to meet you.

Yeah, thank you. It's good to meet you.

So, I mean, just to kind of set some of this, this has come up a few times before on the podcast, but you, you do touch on it in the book and this very persistent idea that the dominant metaphor of the mind is computer. And I was actually reading Howard Gardner is a bit of a celebrity in my world, and I was rereading his book about the history of the cognitive sciences. And he says right at the beginning, and bearing in mind it was written in 1985, I think, but he says at the beginning of that, the best model for the human mind is the computer. And I actually don't know how much Howard shifted in his views over the years. Maybe you know, but I mean, I read that book.

That's what kind of led me into doing cognitive science was that book.

Oh, okay.

Oh, really?

Also, um, I went to Tufts University because it was inexpensive for my parents compared to other places. And, uh, I just kind of lucked into having Daniel Dennett as a professor. And so he talked all the time about how if you want to be a philosopher, you shouldn't just study philosophy. You need to study something else. And he's the one who introduced me to the idea of cognitive science, of which he was a contributor, but also kind of a skeptical contributor.

Okay. But I mean, by definition, it's again, also not well understood. I think it's an interdisciplinary science, right? So you are talking philosophy, but also anthropology, and then, you know, cognitive psychology and other disciplines coming into feeding into the same thing.

I wish we talked more about anthropology. I have a student, Ilir Isufi, who is writing his dissertation about how cognitive science went wrong when it kind of excluded anthropology from a lot of its conversations.

Oh, interesting. Oh, I'd be very curious as an anthropologist myself. I'd be super interested in that actually. But yeah, perhaps you could just say a bit about why, 'cause you talk about this idea of mental gymnastics a lot, right? This idea that we represent, it gets obviously it gets quite technical quite quickly, but I like the idea of mental gymnastics.

I say, well, that is stolen from Mrs. Joy, my 5th grade teacher. And oh, brilliant. She would either call it mental math or mental gymnastics where the idea is she would kind of give you a number and an operation and then another number, then an operation. You ignored all the order of operations stuff, which we didn't know yet then. And you have to kind of keep mentally track of it until she said, okay, what's the answer?

Nice.

So the idea that, and it, this fits really naturally with cognitive science, of course, but the idea is that all of our thinking, including all of our kind of interaction with the near environment and with one another. Is a matter of internal computations about the other and about the situation that we're in. So I thought of this as a potentially clever way to talk about the kind of standard cognitivist understanding where according to which LeBron James is constantly doing mental calculations in order to shoot basketballs. And I think that seems crazy to me.

So yeah, but exactly. But I mean, it's that, that somehow the really dominant as a, I mean, I don't know whether you would agree, but it's potentially not that brains don't compute to an extent, or you could use that verb, but the fact that the most effective model of the human brain is the computer as a noun is just a, you know, a massive misrepresentation of what's actually going on, right?

Yeah. I mean, and if you think about it, and this Andy Clark is the one who said this most clearly, as is often the case, Andy says it the most clearly, that you know, that's literal. Your brain is literally a kind of computer. It just happens to be made of meat. So his, he has a book where he talks at length, like the whole time, the way I talked about mental gymnastics, he talked about meat machines. So it's not just a metaphor. It's not just a model. It's intended, at least initially in the discipline, to be literal.

Sure. But then what, what are the implications of that? If you then, if you stick with that as a frame and don't get into the, the embodied or the radical embodied, what are some of the dead ends you think people end up down?

Well, the most famous one is called the frame problem, which is from the 1960s. And, and the idea— McCarthy and Hayes— the idea is that how do you build a robot that actually does anything in the environment? Because in order to decide what to do, you have to attend to the relevant things. Most of the thinking that we do most of the time is about what's happening right in front of us. But for a robot that's a, with a computer brain where the reasoning is just logic, there are literally infinitely many things you could be thinking about in any situation. And the frame problem is how do we get a machine to attend to the relevant things without checking all of the things and deciding that these are the relevant ones. And that's still a problem. So far unsolved.

Yeah. Interesting. Although I'm very interested in John Vovecky and his work on, 'cause he, I mean, he talks about relevance realization as a very, as a really key, maybe that's just a placeholder name for something we don't understand. I'm not sure how he articulates exactly what it is, but the fact that we are able to kind of hone in on the relevant information in any given situation rather than, as you say, this computationally explosive thing that we do all the calculations to figure out what's relevant. Clearly we don't do that. Somehow we know. And so I don't know whether he, he or you would say, you know what it is.

You know, relevance is just, is the key problem for, with the idea that your mind is software running on your brain computer. It's just 'cause computers, nothing is more or less relevant to my laptop. Right. So that's the problem. And you know, The issue is how do you make it so that relevance appears in computation? And one way that people have tried to solve it is basically saying, well, your mind is just a whole bunch of little computers that don't interact very broadly. They're modules. And each module can't think about everything. It can only think about a very specific focused thing.

Yeah.

So that's been an attempt to make sense of it with, I'm not sure much success, but since the 1980s, people have talked about modularity. Again, the idea that your mind is a bunch of little pro— computer programs, not a unified program, as a way to be like, okay, so here's the module that makes sense of projectiles coming at me. Here's the module that recognizes food here. And they're not— they can't do anything else.

Yeah.

So each individual module, of which there are many tens of thousands according to the theory, is extremely limited. And can only think about things kind of in its bailiwick. It can't kind of wander off and start thinking about, well, if I move my head, the color of the walls doesn't change, even though the apparent color of the walls changes.

Yeah. Interesting. So it's, I mean, highly fragmented, but what is it for you that brought you into the kind of the feeling that that whole kind of direction of research and thinking was on the wrong track somehow?

So, uh, I'm being autobiographical. Um, my advisor was Dan Dennett as an undergrad, and he said, you should go to Indiana to study with Doug Hofstadter for your PhD. I ended up not studying with Doug Hofstadter. He was away for my first more than a year on campus, but the other people at Indiana University were, you know, kind of all attending to the things we do with our body in order to make our thinking easier. So it was, you know, it was kind of forced upon me in grad school. I mean, I guess I could have hung out with, with people who are doing computational cognitive science, but it seemed kind of, I don't know, boring. And my personality is such that, you know, I want to say something controversial. So I got very interested in this idea of, look, your brain is not a computer. Your body does most of the work. And there are some things you can do with your brain that seem like computing, but in general, that's the wrong approach.

Okay. And, and was it controversial at the time? I mean, did you get yourself into some sticky situations?

Yeah, I think it still is. I mean, you know, the idea that in the popular culture, but also in, in like the scientific literature, that large language models are literally intelligent is, again, it's sometimes taken to be the kind of nail in the coffin of the idea that embodiment matters.

Yeah.

So I think it is still controversial. And I, I think that some of the people who are more still in the kind of traditional cognitive science hope that this is the thing that will make me go away once and for all.

And you seem to think that it's not. It's actually perhaps with your new book coming, that perhaps the thing that's going to help us realize that bodies are actually fundamental.

I think that's right. And you know, as I said in, at the end of the book that we're supposed to talk about now, giving a damn is so central to being one of us, to having a mind, and computers just don't. Large language models don't. There's a, well, he didn't make up the word, but Harry Frankfurt, a philosopher, has a very skinny book called On Bullshit.

Oh yeah.

And so, you know, the idea is like when you tell the truth, you are like trying to make what you say align with what's true. And when you lie, you're trying to make what you say not align with what's true. But when you bullshit, you just don't care about what's true. And I feel like large language models, modern AI is only capable of bullshitting.

And potentially some politicians, but I didn't, I didn't say that on a recording.

Yes. Politicians. Yes, absolutely. I'm, you know, the thing about it is that large language models are good for certain purposes, but you've gotta fact check them just like you do politicians.

Yeah, absolutely. So then bringing it to your latest book, Intertwined Creatures. How would you explain the journey from radical embodied cognitive science to this idea of not just being a body, but being an intertwined body? What, how did that come about?

A couple things. One is as an undergraduate, I, we actually be, I was at a very logic-based philosophy department, so we had a secret reading group about phenomenology. So I was reading Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who both think that, you know, minds are necessarily multiple. Back then, but I never thought there could be any scientific evidence for it. And then when I moved to University of Cincinnati and started working with people on social coordination dynamics, I started realizing that, you know, this kind of interacting groups of people has a similar integrity and a similar dynamic to individual biological cognizers. So why do we think, and again, this is the literature, why do we think that the real thinking is an individual?, and when two individuals get together, either they are not really a joint mind or they're a joint mind only if they are sharing some kind of computational process. I mean, it seems to me that, you know, when you look at people, two people carrying a sofa, right, it just doesn't seem like the right way to make sense of that. I can't carry a sofa down the stairs myself, and neither can you, but we can do it together. And when we do that together, I am responding to subtle movements that you make, shifting of load, you know, direction of push and so on in a way that is kind of more intimate, I feel like, than when I sit and try to do mathematics mentally like Mrs. Joy taught me.

Yeah. Interesting. And so we, we're not open or we're much less open to consider that that's, that you couldn't call that thinking if it's, relational between two people.

That's right. That's right. The idea of a group mind, hardly anybody believes in group minds anymore because they're, because of cognitive psychology and the idea that your mind is a computer. Group minds start to seem derivative or nonsensical to a lot of mainstream cognitive scientists and philosophers.

Okay. Yeah. And so how do you begin to make the case then that actually that is a plausible way of thinking? I mean, because I think that is, that to me, that feels like how we experience it when we're, if we're open to it, whether we would allow it to have those names and give it those terms or not, but somehow there's a felt sense that that is what's going on when you're really in a flow of thinking or talking with someone else. Right.

Right. But one of the things is I feel like people who, who believe that, no, it's I'm just me and you're just you have never had good sex.

Love it.

Because they're, you know, there's a thing that's both of you that is doing all of the work in situations like that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I feel like it's very natural to think about, but it's hard to accept if you believe that you're your mind is your brain, which is a kind of computer.

Yeah. And I mean, this is something that I said to you in my correspondence that I was, I am really interested in. It's partly also to do with this obsession with the bounded self, right? Which isn't just about your mind or your cognition. It's also just about your sovereignty of who you are somehow. Like this myth, some people would say of this man is an island idea that Actually, you are just this separated, bounded self moving through the world alone. And I don't know, it's a, it's a story, but it's not one that fills me with lots of joy or hope.

Right. It's a, I mean, you know, if you think that there's a kind of layer of representations between you and everything else, there's a kind of alienation that you feel that you should feel. You don't, to the way, you know, other people are essentially invisible to you as thinkers, as minds. From that point of view. The way you described it reminded me of a place that I think it's in the Principles of Psychology where William James talks about, well, so what is a self? Well, it's kind of me and my family and my clothes and my stuff. Now, that's not a way that cognitive scientists naturally talk, though. You know, they think, okay, so there's self as this little nugget, and then there's a mind that surrounds that. Then there's a person that surrounds that, and a person may have kind of social and legal things connected to it. But the mind and self do not.

Yeah. Yeah. And somehow this idea also of the movement of the self, I shared with you a piece by Nora Bateson, but she quotes Carl Rogers in that about the person is a fluid process, not a fixed static entity. And so there's that, there is a school or many schools of thought that have kind of maybe undercurrents in different disciplines that have been more open to framing the self as something that moves and shifts or is relational or porous, right?

I mean, if you— not just the self, I mean, there's a big movement in philosophy now, especially European philosophy, but to think about process ontology, right? So everything is a process, not an object. And I have for my entire life managed to not have to talk about that because the original writings on it are very difficult, like, you know, Bergson and others. And so I have so far not written about the process ontology, but I think that's the, what, what we have to have, right?

Yeah.

We have to understand ourselves as fluid processes that are going on and are not kind of walled off from everything else.

Yeah, sure. But I, I would also say though, the interesting thing I found about your intertwined creatures idea is that you don't actually need to go to the level of ontology to have a felt sense again of the thing that you're talking about, because that's my worry about some of those arguments is like, we're going to essentially be arguing forever because no one has any proof as such about the ontology. So everyone's just going to talk around their particular favored ontology and you just get into this very strange space of, you know, the world keeps moving, everything keeps happening, you know, politics keeps happening, you know, all the injustices, et cetera, et cetera, while we're all talking about ontologies. So there is a worry I have around that of And sorry, just more positively, that's really what I resonated with this idea of being an intertwined creature because we are moving through the world together with others and we are building stuff, we're making stuff with, or destroying things or, you know, doing politics, making culture, et cetera. That's just a, that feels very resonant just as a kind of quite visceral way of describing something that's similar, but doesn't have to go to this level of ontology. Right.

I mean, and you know, you asked me how I kind of present this and I veered us in another direction and I apologize for that.

No, no, it's good.

But so the idea in the book is I don't try to convince you philosophically about the intertwined self. I say, look, it's coherent philosophically. It has a historical pedigree that's quite strong and it's a possible way to understand how we work. And then I try to present bunch of empirical evidence that, that suggests actually this is the way that humans work, what kind of creatures we are necessarily connected with the world and with others and with technology.

Yeah. I mean, ab— again, unarguable, right? But, and the stories, the strong dominant stories seem to persist, right? About these bounded selves or this, this kind of black box computational. It's, it's so interesting to me how sticky that story is. I don't know whether you have thoughts on why.

I mean, well, there are many things. One, and this is a point that David Foster Wallace makes somewhere, that all of the evidence makes it obvious that you are the center of the universe, right? All of your experience make it so that there's you and there's everything else and you're separate. And, you know, we have to get over that.

Yeah.

So that's one reason it's attractive. But also if you think about the computational metaphor or potentially literal idea is that, you know, the processor on my computer interacts with a very thin stream of information, right? And if you want to kind of compare that, like, you know, your central processor of your mind interacts with limited and arguably vague visual, auditory, olfactory, et cetera, data., and your job as to have experiences, you have to construct, you have to put all those things together inside of you, right? So there's a kind of folk understanding and like, look, my life happens to me. I must be a separate thing. And then there's the way cognitive scientists and neuroscientists talk. And the problem, you know, that cognitive psychology is supposed to solve is there's not enough information in the environment to make judgments. Therefore, we must have operations where we mentally add information. In inside of us. And cognitive psychology is aimed at talking about what those additions of information are like. But again, this is all thinly connected to the world and tightly bound on the inside. And I think that philosophically, scientifically, we can think otherwise. Also, the last part of the book, I say for, you know, there's the philosophy, then there's a bunch of cognitive science. And then there are what I take to be the consequences of that. And I think the consequences that I discuss to be an argument in favor of the view of mind. And the reason I think that is that every philosopher of science will tell you, or scientist or mathematician, that you prefer theories based on aesthetic judgments, right? So this theory is simpler, more elegant, more intuitive. These are like aesthetic ideas. And my sense is that we should also have moral and political ideas. That help us determine which theory we want to believe is true. And I hope at the end of the book, the consequences that I draw out for what I take to be a kind of kinder, more connected world are part of an argument for the position.

Interesting. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I was obviously, some people wouldn't, but that resonates a lot with me. And I think the reason I'm interested in it is because I think There's an interesting trap, isn't there, that you wait for the science to prove the thing that you've always, you know, that somehow you felt was right all the way along. And until the science says it, that is a trap. But at the same time, it is, I think, really important that the 4 ecognitive sciences are, seem to be, feel to be becoming more robust in making the case because there is a moral and political dimension to it. I think that for me, it's about a connectedness or a separation in you know, in the inverse from the world that allows us to morally and politically position ourselves in relation to issues like climate change, for example. You know, it, it allows us to distance ourselves and say, oh, it's not really anything to do with me, or it's apart from me and my bounded self and my computation about the world. If you are tightly coupled and intricately webbed in relationally with everyone else and everything else in the world, that has major moral implications about what, for me, what learning means, how learning happens in that world, but also what some of the moral and political consequences of that might be. So I absolutely agree. And I think that's directly, hopefully directly informs then educational decisions we might make about how we set that up. Right.

I mean, you know, you don't want to have like hippie kumbaya stories, right? But you want them to be grounded in something real. And You know, the thing I said that all philosophers of science agree on, which is that we don't have enough data to know what theory to believe. So we have to use other means to decide. And I feel like that's true across the sciences that, you know, we don't have enough data to say definitively that the self is intertwined or that it's walled off from the environment. So we have to make a choice one way or the other and how to kind of do our science, live our lives, educate our children.

Yeah.

And what I think is that taking us to be inextricably intertwined with one another in the world is a better way to do those things.

It, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I also think a lot about this, and this is very present in education, is that then the argument becomes ideological because it's, I think this is a better way of doing those things. And then it becomes, okay, well, I don't, and now we are polarized. And again, that's why some people will look to the science to be the somehow the arbitrator or the mediator for the strongly held ideological positions. So it's quite interesting to hear you reflect on the science in that way.

Yeah, I mean, 'cause the science can't force you into believing one thing or the other. So yeah, there's some, I prefer not to think of it as ideology, but it is ideology, right? And I have always been attracted to views like this you know, since undergraduate, because I feel like we treat one another more kindly when we realize that the other isn't separate from the self and the world isn't separate from the self. So we kind of have a kinder view. And, you know, it's not about maximizing me. It's about interacting with in a kind of fluid and useful way with all of the things around me, including the other people.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wasn't planning on asking you this, but if you don't mind, you mentioned Tufts and are you aware of Michael Levin's work?

Of course. Yes. So weirdly, I learned only recently that Michael Levin and I were in the same classroom for a whole semester.

Oh, cool.

We were both in a philosophy of mind course by Daniel Dennett.

Ah, fantastic.

And you know, I found out on social media when he like repeated a joke and said Daniel Dennett 1990. I'm like, oh, I was there for that.

I was in the room. Oh, brilliant. Oh, that's so good.

The thing that I love about his work is that it suggests— doesn't even suggest, it demonstrates— that you are already a group, right? So the idea of you as a biological individual is not supported by biology. So again, the kind of philosophical tradition is that the individual is the center, and you have like, there's the mind in the world and there's the self and the other, and that mind that's separate from the world and that self that's separate from the other doesn't make sense in an era where we now know that at least numerically speaking, we are all majority non-human because of our, our microflora.

Exactly. I know. I mean, I just, I find it also just so inspiring and interesting for that reason. And also the fact that I, I enjoyed, I heard him say that he hasn't yet found a binary that he can't break. Because basically he's like, he's saying it's all, you know, essentially it's all a continuum, right? It's all kind of this nested continuum of whatever it is you're looking at. But particularly I'm interested in even the idea of cognition, right? Basal cognition that he talks about. I mean, the fact that, I mean, he's, some of his experiments are wild, like showing that a sorting algorithm has some level of kind of ability to take alternative means to reach its goal. So some level of cognition, this is just a sorting algorithm.

Right. And it's just among your gene, it's among your cells, it's in you. Like the, every cell is intelligent in a way, right?

So this, like this stacked level of, and so this idea that, that somehow you as this particularly exceptional human bounded thing is the only thing that can have, you know, have cognition, cognitive capacity. And, and I mean, it's just, it feels like that is an incredibly weak position to hold now.

Right.

I mean, just the tradition that privileges the individual thinker, and it turns out that there's nothing very special about that. It's kind of groups all the way up and down.

Exactly. And isn't that, I mean, that to me is not, it doesn't undermine the specialness, the exceptionalness of being human. I mean, being human's amazing, right? But at the same time, it's also even more amazing because it's part of this incredible nested continuum of, as you say, groups all the way up and down. I mean, it's amazing. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's, for one, you know, it's a super exciting scientific idea. Just the fact that scientific evidence could point in a direction that's so out of line with our common sense and the way we learn to speak and the way we, what we learn in school.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just exciting that science can kind of like nudge us out of that. This thing that we've known for centuries now.

Absolutely. And for me, that's what's so interesting and the complicity of education in that, because it continues to perpetuate in all sorts of disciplines. Actually, I did a podcast a while ago about economics and, you know, just some of the myths or the outdated ideas that are still being perpetuated through the teaching of, say, economics or in this case biology. Or tends to be more of a higher education subject when you get into anthropology and cognitive sciences. But it is still, there is a real complicity. I think the formal education perpetuates some, they're kind of the orthodoxies which are becoming increasingly questioned by the science.

And it's not there. You don't need that much knowledge of science to understand that you had your first experience inside another person. And for early years of your life, when you kind of became a human.

Exactly. I love that.

You were always with a caregiver or you were sleeping, right? So all of your experiences are experienced with others from a young age. And formal education has to try to make, tries to make us into something else, right? And, you know, there are advantages to being that something else. It's nice to be able to kind of sit and think about something without simultaneously wondering what mommy would think. Right. So there's a kind of achievement that we can get from formal education, but it does depend upon, and maybe does some damage to, depending on who you ask, this kind of natively intertwined thing that we are up until we go to, you know, kindergarten.

Yeah, well, exactly. But that's so, so interesting though, isn't it? Because the, again, the narratives are that we, it's okay to accept that we are intertwined, but we essentially mature and grow out of that as we become the, our full self.

That's right.

That's quite an interestingly dominant idea, I think. And I remember talking to Tyson Yunkaporta on the podcast, who's Aboriginal Australian, and he, I mean, similar kinds of topic coming up in relation to the communal collective dimension to yourself, to who you are. And then, but then this uniqueness of you as an individual, I think somehow it's like there's a lot of protection rightly in a way of like, you know, my experiences are different to Tony's, right? We are having different experiences of life. We have different stories. We've got different accumulations of self and relationships. And there's something about not wanting to give up on that as the same time that we accept that we are deeply intertwined and deeply in relation.

And going back to the kind of Mike Levin point, right? The idea that every cell has a different experience from its neighbors, but nonetheless, they work together to make an organ or another part of an organism. So yeah, I mean, I think that even if you start with a kind of like, you know, no one else is sitting where my eyeballs are, therefore I'm a kind of individual, you know, then think about your retinal cells. Are they individuals too? Is, you know, is your, is your visual system an individual? And the answer in most cases seems to be no. The question is, where does Where does the individual bottom out?

Yeah.

Where do we find an, you know, a kind of an indubitable individual.

And it's a, it's a where we decide to draw the boundary somehow, right? I mean, it's like a Markov blanket, but I have no idea what a Markov blanket is. 'Cause I don't understand the maths enough.

Well, the Markov blanket is just a boundary beyond which nothing makes a difference.

Right.

So, okay. So, you know, if you're looking at the state of some creature, how far away from the middle of it do you have to go before, you know, eliminating external parts doesn't change its behavior or dynamics? So there's a Markov blanket around it. And in fact, according to the, the free energy principle and, and Carl Friston and his colleagues, having a Markov blanket is basically being by definition a thing. Yeah. All and only things have Markov blankets. And I mean, it's an interesting and useful idea, but it seems like it overplays that separateness, right? That kind of lack of stickiness. We are like, we stick to things. That's kind of how we go through the world. We stick to one another. We stick to things around us that— so, so you lose the stickiness.

Yeah.

Blankets. You lose the real world from Markov blankets. You just have a world that's represented.

I definitely lose the real world when I try and understand the maths and all of, like, all of Carl Friston's stuff. I love it. It hurts my head, but I just, I very much enjoy trying.

And you know, this is a good scientific theory. I don't think it's true, this kind of free energy principle and active inference and all of these things that are bound up with Markov blankets. So I'm not, can't be critical of it as a scientific theory. It's rigorous. It's, there's not much evidence for it, but it's rigorous and there are lots of simulations surrounding it. But, you know, you step outside of the natural sciences and at least American and British philosophy departments, the intuition that, you know, separation individualism is the base case dissipates. So you said you'd studied anthropology and in anthropology, you know, the— if I said, well, there's just me, the biological thing that has all the thinking in the world only happens to me. That sounds crazy to an anthropologist. It just anywhere out in the humanities or social sciences, individualism is thought of being as something that we've overcome, but not in cognitive science and not in philosophy.

Yeah. Interesting. But the legacy of that, I think, in the institutions is, is still incredibly powerful, I think. And I, I feel in formal education as it's been exported around the world, often violently through colonialism with this nugget of individualism somehow built into the DNA of it. I mean, you know, some people would disagree with that, but I think it is somehow in the, the scripts. I was in India recently and I actually, it was quite interesting to me that they, when they're talking about schools, they use the English term batches about you were in batch, meaning like grade levels or whatever. And I found that quite interesting just again, because it was kind of pushing back against this idea. I mean, for me, there's a slightly industrial aspect to it, but it's just a nice pushback against this idea of me being this sacred individual and just me.

I mean, I feel like, you know, the colonial project, which unfortunately is not dead, was to make people who were not Europeans and Christians think of themselves as Europeans and Christians do. And, you know, so many bad things come of that. I recently listened to a podcast about Fela Kuti, and, you know, his whole thing was a fight against colonialism and about kind of the British education system that he grew up in. And again, I think what the colonialists were doing was trying to make the world safe for individualist capitalist processes.

Yeah.

Under the name of, you know, religious saving of people.

Yeah, right, exactly. Absolutely. And I've had previous podcasts where we talk about, for example, the, the awful residential schools in what is now Canada, just how actively that was done, that separation. So I think, I mean, it, it's not a world away from this idea of being intertwined creatures and, and trying to create opportunities for particularly people who have been often violently severed from that intertwinedness to remember what it feels like to be an intertwined creature, right? I mean, that doesn't feel only like a scientific endeavor. It feels like a deeply kind of, I mean, you could say spiritual, but definitely kind of experiential thing of just, you know, where are those spaces where we can really feel that relationality again so that we can somehow remember Yeah, I mean, I think, and I'm equally guilty of this as everyone, we don't dance enough.

Dancing with another person breaks down those boundaries.

Yeah.

I learned this from Habiba Berhana, who, if you haven't met her, she's an amazing scholar, but she's the one who told me that about Ubuntu and what basically Ubuntu means is I'm a person because you're a person, right? And I think there's something really deep about that, that the kind of colonial project was out to eradicate.

Absolutely. And I think that feels like part of what we're talking about, that kind of broader global way that that has shown up throughout history, but also persisted despite these kind of things like the colonial project. And hopefully a humble recognition that we're beginning in, for example, in mainstream science to, or maybe you wouldn't call it mainstream yet, radical science, let's say, use your radical word, begin to come to some kind of adjacent insights that some people have known, like that have never forgotten, right? And it's not to romanticize, but it's just to say, it feels to me like we really deeply need to remember that intertwinedness.

You know, the, the word radical I think is, is a really valuable word because one, it kind of points to new ideas, but also like it means etymologically, it means at root.

Yeah, right.

And so the idea that is we are at root embodied and we are at root with others and we build a bunch of stuff on top of that, which some, for some of us, some of the time makes us forget that at root we are with one another and with the environment.

Yeah. Interesting. Was that an intentional use of the word when you first wrote the, the 2009 book?

It was. And, and, you know, Andy Clark again is the one who came up with the phrase radical embodied cognition. As a view that he thought went too far.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

And my view is like, well, first, the word radical doesn't mean only what you think it means. It also means this at root part bit. But also what he says was goes too far is probably true, given the scientific data that we have, the philosophical ideas that we can bring to bear on that data. There's good reason to think that that view that Andy Clark set up as just too much, going too far, is in fact probably correct. And so Andy is an old friend. Um, I've known Andy for a long time, and for him, it's important to him to kind of have people who are saying crazier things than he says, right? So he wants to, you know, he writes about his cat all the time, like, kind of like humanize his kind of, you know, techno-optimist self. But it's important to him to have someone of it, like, these people go too far, and I'm happy to I would do that for Andy.

Interesting. Doing a good service for Andy Clark. I love it. But would you say, just maybe to finish, would you say that in the 17 years since you wrote that book, the experimental science has become more robust in providing evidence, in inverted commas, for that to make it less of an out-there position?

I mean, I think, yeah, there's more reason to believe it. And there's, there are research labs all over the world now that kind of start with the assumption that what we're studying is groups. And the technology enables us to study the dynamics of groups in a way that makes them look a lot like the dynamics of individual action.

Okay. Interesting. And that's, you think that's, there's a robustness to that evidence base.

Yeah. And you know, the people who worked with me at University of Cincinnati, Michael Richardson, who's no longer here, Paul LaSilva, Tayron Davis, Michael Reilly, Kevin Jockley, they all are kind of pushing this envelope. Noting that mathematically speaking, you know, data science speaking, there's no reason to kind of not think a pair of people is the same sort of thing as one person.

Okay. No, interesting. And you do, I mean, I noticed in the Intertwined Creatures book, you do talk briefly about group cognition at some point. Don't go into further detail about it, but I did notice you mentioned that.

I do. And, and part of the reason I didn't write about it is that one of my PhD students, Zach Peck, is writing his dissertation about, okay, about cyborgs, but cyborgs, not in Andy Clark's sense, but in Donna Haraway's sense, where every living thing is partly biological, partly technological, and made maybe of multi-species. I mean, Zack is very interested in what that means about the possibility of group cognition. And I pointed at Zack's work and decided not to write a lot about it because, you know, it's his work.

Yeah, sure. No, interesting. Oh no, that's great. I mean, yeah, you've given me lots of people to follow up on and dig into it more, but no, thank you, Tony. It's, I mean, yeah, super interesting. And I know with the new book, I don't know, do you want to just briefly say something about what you're currently working on? Sure.

I'm working on a short book about the centrality of embodiment. It's kind of old news from my point of view.

Yeah.

But what I'm trying to do is put it in the sort of package that people from any discipline can pick up and kind of follow through. And as part of it, I include a lot of stuff about works of art as kind of exemplifications of the points that I'm making, like the difference between being alive and being dead. Like, you know, there's a bunch of artwork that kind of points at that and makes that distinction stark. So there are interludes between all the kind of philosophical and cognitive science chapters about things that hopefully will be easier for everyone to grab onto.

Nice. Okay. Interesting. And with a specifically AI connection as well, or?

Well, yeah, the, the idea is what I'm doing the whole time is rebutting these kind of intuitive arguments that large language models show that we don't need bodies or others because they don't have bodies or others. So I'm kind of constantly battling that idea. And there are other, you know, another thing that people have brought up is, All the things we can do now and do well, including in my own lab, in virtual environments, seem to kind of point us toward the idea that the real body, real world aren't essential. So I'm kind of constantly rebutting those points.

Hmm. Interesting.

But the positive story is about the kind of necessity of embodiment of creatures like us.

Fantastic. And when's that coming out? Do you have a date for it or not yet? Just whenever it's finished.

Whenever it's finished, I'm about halfway through writing. Okay. And being finished is usually a couple of years before being in print.

That's also true. Yeah. Right. So, uh, thank you, Tony. No, I'd look forward to reading it when it comes out and thank you for everything you've been doing for a long time on this, like such an important subject and no, it's a real honor to meet you and get to talk to you about it.

Yeah. Thank you. This has been great. And you know, the, the kind of visibility you're giving to embodied cognitive science and for educators, I think is really valuable. So thank you for Amazing.

Thank you so much.

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