Mind & Life Europe Podcast

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

With few conversations did I feel the stakes to be so high, so thorny and complex. For this conversation on “Computing Differently,” I sat down with Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami, two of the world’s preeminent researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and robotics — but researchers who come at the question of AI from a decidedly divergent perspective, that of the enactive approach and participatory sense-making. The conversation was one of not just defining the current stakes of AI research, but of considering the outer reaches of each guest’s thinking about AI and defining some of the intractable questions in the field today. How close does the apparent sense-making of a robot come to human sense-making? What defines participatory sense-making as a distinctly human activity? Can there be such a thing as an “enactive AI”? If so, what insights might it afford us about human cognition, and about AI itself? How are we to apply appropriate caution when discussing the current frontiers of AI research? Where should its priorities be? How can we grapple with the very real dangers of AI already at hand, such as the hypernormativity of predictive systems which propagate harmful biases and drive information pollution? As Luc Steels points out, it is not so much the AI systems that we ought to fear, but the human uses and misuses of them, and the exponential looping effect that takes hold between human and machine. From our discussion of the basics of robotics and large language models emerged some of the most limpid definitions of participatory sense-making I’ve heard yet, and both speakers took great care in clarifying some of the basic terms of the discussion, which have too often been obscured by the popular media. Whether or not you feel you have a stake in the ongoing AI conversation, this conversation sheds light on so many of the fundamental questions of what it means to be a creative, enactive, and participatory being in the world today — in short, what it means to be human.***More information about Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami.***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community!

In no other conversation this season has the relationship between ontology and ethics felt more pressing and more pregnant. How we define a person, how we classify their suffering and needs, radically determines the different interventions we might choose, either opening up a space for healing or, inversely, creating further harm. This conversation about healing drew together three researcher-practitioners of different horizons - Amy Cohen Varela, Dr Rika Preiser, and Dr Sanneke De Haan - to reflect on the ways in which practices of healing imply so much more than normative claims toward ‘getting better,’ and are so much messier than the cognitivist, medical, and colonial modes of epistemology would imply. Spaces of healing are alive with the tension of breakdowns and transgressions, overdetermination and underdetermination, safety and risk, and require a unique form of epistemic humility from those involved. Participatory sense-making provided a powerful frame for this conversation, wherein suffering could be understood anew—as a mismatch between one’s sense-making and that of one’s environment, rather than an intrinsic burden of the individual.A couple references mentioned in the conversation:Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture by Dr Sanneke De Haan: “The Person in Psychiatry: An Ecohumanist, Enactive Approach”On ontological intimacy and various types of transgression, see: Kym Maclaren, “Intimacy as Transgression and the Problem of Freedom,” in Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology Vol. 1 No. 1 (2018). ***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community!

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

This episode features three remarkably engaged and engaging thinkers and collaborators. Dr Elena Cuffari, Dr Hanne De Jaegher, and Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo co-authored the magnum opus, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language in 2018, which was a much-needed extension of the enactive approach into the realm of language and intersubjectivity. We heard the three of them in dialogue during the final session of our Core Enaction, Semester 4, where we focused on the ethical core of participatory sense-making, with care or non-indifference at its centre. Here, we revisit some of those themes, but with an eye to how we might practise participatory sense-making, how it has more personally influenced each of these thinkers, and what traction it might have for concrete challenges in the world today. We importantly unpack some of the subtleties of participatory sense-making as it was originally laid out, in both its conceptual and experiential aspects. In the broadest sense, the conversation brought us back to some fundamental questions about the ethical drive behind the activity of theorising, and the ongoing circulation of knowledge and practice, of the ontological and the ethical. Further references:Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher, "Enactive ethics: Difference becoming participation" (2022)Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language (2018)***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community!

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