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This is a coversation between John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne introduced by Andrea Hiott.

On Love, Attention, and the Good: Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (University of Toronto) and philosopher Darius Parvizi-Wayne (Macquarie University) talk about love as a way of paying attention, starting from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. They discuss John’s idea that getting out of the meaning crisis means “falling in love with being again,” Murdoch’s famous M and D example, what “unselfing” really means, Simone Weil, Heidegger, the Kyoto School, and pilgrimage as a way of knowing. They end with a personal conversation about mentorship, vocation and the love of wisdom.

Introduced by Andrea Hiott from the Philosophers’ Way in Heidelberg.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction from the Philosophers’ Way, Heidelberg

02:30 Darius and John introduce themselves

07:00 “Falling in love with being again”

12:00 Love as volitional necessity

17:00 Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good

27:00 The M and D example

37:00 Can cognitive science explain loving attention?

43:00 Unselfing: Murdoch vs. Simone Weil

46:30 The Kyoto School: self-power and other-power

52:00 The two-worlds mythology and nihilism

1:08:00 Nishitani and absolute nothingness

1:20:30 Place, basho, and the sacred

1:23:30 Pilgrimage and theoria

1:27:30 Darius’s story

1:32:30 Mentorship, vocation, and the love of wisdom

1:38:00 Closing: dialogos and Middlemarch

MENTIONED

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good · Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love · Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses and Faith and Place · Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention · Taliaferro & Evans, Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent · Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology · Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God · John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

• John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne
• How preferences enslave attention (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences)
• What active inference still can’t do (Philosophy and the Mind Sciences)
• Iris Murdoch – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Lawrence Blum)
• Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent – Taliaferro & Evans

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Sophie and Henry explore consciousness, mind, and the porous boundary between inner and outer experience. The conversation ranges from panpsychism and animism to imaginal empathy, ecology, myth, and why modern life makes it so hard to stay open to mystery.

Sophie brings a wide ranging perspective shaped by writing, spirituality, ecology, the history of religion, and Eros. The two ground the discussion in consciousness, reenchantment, and the question of how language and labels can flatten lived experience.

A few references:

On empathy and imagining the lifeworlds of other beings: Sophie Strand, “Supracellular” through Emergence Magazine, Stephen Harrod Buhner, Taliesin, Paul Shepard

On challenging the individual self: Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, Amitov Ghosh

On the imaginal and its relationship to reality: JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and William Blake, “Double Vision”

On panpsychism: Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error, Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

On trickster pedagogy and weirding the ordinary: Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” and Viktor Shklovsky on “defamiliarization

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.”  You can follow her work on Instagram (at) cosmogyny

Henry Kramer is a scholar, educator, and artist exploring wonder, imagination, and our relationship with the more-than-human world. Henry teaches in the Program in Religion at CUNY Hunter and is Academic Dean of the Strother School of Radical Attention, where his Radical Imagination course was featured on the New York Times’ Hard Fork. Henry is also a ritual and immersive theater designer, songwriter, storyteller, and (most recently) a bit of a puppeteer.

00:00 Andrea Sets the Stage
00:33 Meet Host Henry
02:14 Why This Episode Matters
05:41 Henry Introduces Sophie
09:43 Sophie on Being a Lover
10:31 Re Enchantment and Mind
12:15 Symbiosis and Selfhood
14:23 What Is Consciousness
18:35 Myth Archetypes and Reality
25:29 Language Labels and Weirdness
27:37 Conspiracy and Ontological Shock
34:13 Species Humility and Long Story
38:31 Crab Universe Joke
38:53 Disorientation Teaching Tactic
39:53 Nacirema Defamiliarization
42:12 Taliesin and Shapeshifting
45:44 Spiderweb Mind Ecology
46:55 Imitation Builds Empathy
48:52 Against Anthropomorphize
52:36 Utility Addiction and Mushrooms
56:28 Inner Biodiversity and Stories
01:00:47 Panpsychism Resurgence
01:04:43 Hard Problem of Consciousness
01:07:47 Trickster Ending Farewell

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Find Mac at https://macshine.github.io/publications/

Mac’s Lab: https://profiles.sydney.edu.au/mac.shine

The Brain Inspired conversation Andrea mentions.

Mac Shine on Systems Neuroscience, Automaticity, and the Cerebellum’s Role in Human Cognition. In discussion with Andrea Hiott.

University of Sydney systems neuroscientist Mac Shine in conversation about systems neuroscience and the challenge of linking single-neuron explanations with whole-brain network accounts. Shine describes his path from evolutionary biology influences and medical training to a search for simplified, cross-scale principles in brain science, noting how terminology like “representation” or “integration” can hinder communication across disciplines. They discuss his 2014 paper “Delegation to Automaticity,” inspired by observing his son learn to walk, which argues that cerebellar architecture supports the delegation of difficult skills into automatic control, freeing resources for higher-level cognition and potentially shaping human cognitive evolution alongside bipedalism. Shine contrasts basal ganglia habit findings with cerebellar predictive control, uses driving and chess to illustrate deliberate versus automatic processes, and emphasizes embodiment, learning through struggle, and collaborative, caring lab culture.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:27 Automaticity and Evolution Teaser
02:48 Why This Conversation Matters
05:02 What Is Systems Neuroscience
10:24 Mac’s Path Into Systems Thinking
18:42 Language Gaps Across Fields
26:15 Are We Assuming Cognition
33:35 Delegation to Automaticity Paper
37:19 Cerebellum as Automation Engine
46:09 Bipedalism and Coevolving Mind Body
47:29 Bipedalism And Cognition
50:05 Natural Selection Good Enough
52:37 Frozen Accidents And Delegation
55:06 Humans Adapt Not Excel
58:33 Repetition To Automaticity
01:00:19 Habit Versus Automatic
01:08:18 Driving And Chess Layers
01:16:18 Beyond Motor Cognition
01:21:57 Flow States And Expertise
01:27:26 Scientific Humility Ethos
01:29:16 Curiosity Over Credit
01:30:57 AI And The Value Of Being Wrong
01:33:07 Learning Through Struggle
01:37:59 Embodiment And Driving
01:40:56 Cerebellum Body Brain Coupling
01:48:14 Expertise Through Variation
01:53:31 Lab Curiosity And Next Questions
01:59:49 Care Love And Leadership
02:04:44 Closing Reflections

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Philosopher of science Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge) joins Andrea Hiott to trace the through-line of his work — from Inventing Temperature (2004), through Is Water H₂O? (2012), to Realism for Realistic People (2022) — and to think together about what it means to treat knowledge as something we do rather than something we merely possess.

The conversation begins with why Inventing Temperature has quietly become an inspiration for neuroscientists: it shows how a felt quality (hot and cold) can become a trustworthy number (temperature) — not by discovering a pre-given fact, but through a messy, iterative, bootstrapping process of invention. From there, Chang and Hiott move through the ideas that organize his mature philosophy: epistemic iteration, operational coherence, active/activist realism, path dependence, conceptual engineering, and a pragmatist re-reading of truth that no longer leans on correspondence to an inaccessible reality.

A recurring theme: Chang describes each of his books as costing him “an article of faith” — first foundationalism, then monism, then the ideal of pure science — and how each loss opened onto a more dynamic, practice-based, and pluralist picture of knowing. Hiott connects these moves to her own navigational approach to mind and NAEC, where cognition is understood as a body’s coherent, aim-directed action in the world rather than the storage of static representations.

Full show notes here.

Hasok Chang is the Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Trained first in physics (Caltech) and then in philosophy (Stanford), he is known for “integrated history and philosophy of science” and for what he calls complementary science — using historical and philosophical study to recover scientific questions that mainstream science has forgotten or foreclosed. His three main single-author books are Inventing Temperature (Oxford, 2004; winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award), Is Water H₂O? (Springer, 2012), and Realism for Realistic People (Cambridge, 2022). He is a founding figure of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) and the Committee for Integrated HPS.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Chang throughout.

Chang’s three books at a glance

Book Year Central question “Article of faith” Chang says he lost Inventing Temperature 2004 How did scientists learn to measure temperature reliably without already having a trustworthy thermometer to check against? Foundationalism — the idea that knowledge rests on some ultimate, secure foundation (fundamental laws, or raw experience) Is Water H₂O? 2012 Was the consensus that water is H₂O actually forced by the evidence — and should science ever settle on a single account? Monism — the idea that there is one world, one truth, and one job for science: to find it Realism for Realistic People 2022 What would scientific realism look like if we started from practice and everyday life rather than from correspondence to an ultimate reality? The ideal of pure science — knowledge first, application second (he moves openly into pragmatism)

Key terms & concepts (glossary)

The definitions below are general but we're staying faithful to Chang’s own usage.

Epistemic iteration. Chang’s name for how inquiry actually makes progress: we don’t begin from a secure foundation, but knowingly start from an imperfect position and then use the results of inquiry to correct and refine that very starting point — a self-improving loop with no bedrock underneath. In Realism for Realistic People Chang invokes Peirce’s image that inquiry “is not standing on the bedrock of fact… It is walking upon a bog, and we can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present.” The aim is not coherence as such, but the ongoing improvement of coherence. (In the conversation, Chang stresses that he first thought iteration solved only the narrow problem of validating measurement standards, then came to see it as a very general pattern of learning.)

Operational coherence. Roughly, “a harmonious fitting-together of the elements and aspects of an activity, which is conducive to the successful achievement of the aims of that activity.” It is Chang’s practice-based replacement for truth as correspondence: instead of asking whether a proposition matches reality, we ask whether an activity’s parts hang together well enough to reliably achieve its aim. Crucially, coherence is always defined relative to an aim — without a stated or assumed purpose, the word “coherence” has no meaning.

Epistemic activity. “A more-or-less coherent set of mental or physical operations that are intended to contribute to the production or improvement of knowledge in a particular way, in accordance with some discernible rules (though the rules may be unarticulated).” Examples: measuring, detecting, predicting, hypothesis-testing — but also mundane actions like lighting a match.

System of practice. A coherent, interacting set of epistemic activities carried out with a view to achieving certain overall aims. (This is the unit Chang argues can be legitimately plural: several incommensurable systems of practice can coexist productively within one discipline.)

Active knowledge / “knowing how.” Chang’s term (in Realism for Realistic People) for knowledge that resides in ability and action rather than in propositions — knowing how to do something rather than knowing that some statement is true. He argues proposition-based epistemology simply isn’t the right tool for evaluating methods, instruments, or institutions; for that we need to look at the coherence of what we do.

Active realism vs. activist realism (a terminology note). In Is Water H₂O? Chang introduced active realism: the view that realism shouldn’t be sitting back satisfied that we know a lot, but should be an attitude — even an “ideology” — committed to continually learning more and better about reality. In Realism for Realistic People he renamed it activist realism, to avoid confusion with his separate notion of active knowledge (someone might wrongly hear “active realism” as “any assured possession of active knowledge”). “Activist” better captures the ever-learning, never-shrinking commitment. (The two terms are easy to run together in conversation; Chang’s clarification here is the reference point for both.)

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Keya Maitra is the Lenney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa. Keya joins Andrea to talk about her Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. They discuss this text as a living philosophical conversation. They move from action without attachment and yoga as a redirection of attention, to why the Gita's dualism isn't the mind-body split we know from Descartes, to how holding tension (rather than dissolving it) opens an expanding circle of care. By the end, they're calling it a love story: not romance, but caring, vulnerability, and the way real conversation itself becomes a form of care.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Maitra throughout.

• How Keya came to the Gita. Growing up in a Bengali-speaking Hindu household, first encountering it in a middle-school Sanskrit class, then never in an Indian philosophy classroom—through a PhD on Hilary Putnam and philosophy of language, before finally meeting it academically while teaching Joel Kupperman's comparative philosophy course in Connecticut.
• Philosophy as "being one's whole self in writing." Keya draws on feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman to describe her journey as coming to be her whole self with philosophy, with the Gita quietly anchoring that path.
• What the Gita actually is. A 700-verse, 18-chapter conversation set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, narrated by Sanjaya, unfolding between Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna—who is revealed to be reality itself.
• Why another translation? Keya's modest but pointed goal: a Gita that works in a Western philosophy classroom. Why she keeps every name for the characters (relationality matters—Arjuna as "son of Kunti" keeps his mother present) rather than flattening them the way some translations do.
• Action without attachment. Not indifference, not Kantian action-for-action's-sake, but how you act—without being consumed by the fruits of action (karma phala) while still holding your relationships close.
• Yoga as a redirection of attention. Why Keya refuses to translate yoga as "discipline," and how Krishna's call to "be a yogi" points toward union at multiple levels—self and body, self and Krishna, self and everything.
• Beyond dichotomy. The dualism of the Gita isn't Cartesian mind-body dualism but self-body dualism—opening room for embodied cognition, embodied relationality. And Krishna's repeated call to "go beyond dualities" of good and bad, not by transcending them but by understanding them.
• Prakriti and Purusha. The Samkhya framework of nature/action and consciousness/witness, and how the Gita folds them under Krishna as "lower" and "higher" nature. Equanimity (samatvam) as groundedness that isn't experience-lessness.
• Tension as potency. Reframing tension not as a negative but as possibility—and caring itself as a kind of tension we learn to hold without dissolving the paradox.
• The Gita's difficulties, honestly. Its problematic verses on caste, B.R. Ambedkar's scathing critique, and how the same text can hold radically different readings—including those of Gandhi (who called it his "eternal mother") and of the people who killed him.
• The expanding circle of care. Why going inward, on Keya's reading, doesn't make us less socially responsible—it widens responsibility, because the "self" one turns toward is not a private inner space but something that dissolves the limits between self and world.
• A love story. Not a romance, but love as deep caring, vulnerability, and growing together—including Krishna's own vulnerability in telling Arjuna, in the end, to "do what you think is the right thing to do." And conversation itself as an act of care.
• Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018)
• Related to the Kant thread in this episode — "Comparing the Bhagavad-Gita and Kant: A Lesson in Comparative Philosophy"
• Feminist Philosophy of Mind (co-edited with Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford UP, 2022) — background for the care/feminist threads

About Keya: "Her intellectual journey bridges continents and traditions. Trained in both India and the United States, she holds two Ph.D.s—one in Philosophy of Language from the University of Hyderabad and another in Philosophy of Mind from the University of Connecticut. She has been a professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she also served as the director of the Humanities Program and Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities (2018-22). Her research and teaching facilitate critical conversations across cultural and disciplinary boundaries...."  

Mentioned: The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Keya Maitra); Barbara Stoler Miller's translation; Joel Kupperman; Daniel Kolak / Wadsworth Philosophers Series; Hilary Putnam; Naomi Scheman; the Mahabharata; Vyasa; Gandhi; B.R. Ambedkar; Thoreau and Walden; Samkhya philosophy; care ethics and non-ideal theory.

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Mark Solms began translating Freud's neuroscientific writings in the late 1980s, then gave twenty-nine years to revising the translation of Freud's psychological works. In this episode, Solms joins Andrea Hiott to talk about his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — and to make a surprising case: that far from being the discredited figure many take him for, Freud built a model of the mind, from the inside, that modern neuroscience is now confirming from the outside.

Together they explore multiple memory systems and the unconscious as things we repeat rather than remember; why transference is a far bigger phenomenon than its jargon suggests; the damage done by the "chemical imbalance" story of depression; the stubborn role of time in real change; and, in the end, care — the idea that psychoanalysis is ultimately a cure by love. Throughout, they return to the show's animating theme: holding paradox, and refusing the false choice between the subjective and the objective, feeling and fact.

(Please see here for all the papers to really look into the serotonin debate. It is nuanced and requires study and deep thought.)

Andrea & Mark also discuss dual-aspect monism, subjective and objective perspectives, multiple memory systems, unconscious processing, state-dependent memory, and transference as the enactment of non-declarative “action policies” that therapy makes visible and revisable through repeated working-through over time. Solms links these ideas to care, politics, and mortality, ending with Freud’s “cure by love,” followed by Andrea reading Seamus Heaney’s “From The Cure at Troy.”

About the guest: Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst, and world-leading pioneer of neuropsychoanalysis. He discovered the brain mechanisms of dreaming, serves as science director of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is the translator and editor of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. His previous book was The Hidden Spring (2021).

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
03:50 Freud Translator Journey
05:20 Why Call It Cure
07:00 Reframing Freud Today
11:41 Freud as Neuroscientist
19:57 Memory Systems and Unconscious
31:41 Subjective Meets Objective
39:08 Chemical Imbalance Myth
43:23 Needs Feelings and Therapy
51:03 Pills Versus Talking
52:09 Limits Of Medication
53:31 When Pills Help
54:41 What Is Transference
56:04 Infantile Amnesia
57:17 Interpreting Patterns
01:01:25 Why Therapy Takes Time
01:04:46 Cost Versus Care
01:10:59 Teddy And Polypharmacy
01:19:20 Short Termism Trap
01:23:13 Cure By Love
01:25:37 AI Therapy Limits
01:31:25 Mortality And Meaning
01:34:55 Closing Thanks
01:36:09 Heaney Poem Easter Egg

KEY THEMES

Freud was a neuroscientist first. Over 23 years he contributed to neuron theory, neuroanatomy, and clinical neurology. His 1891 work on aphasia reframed language as a psychological function — the seed of psychoanalysis. Because his neuroscientific writings were never translated into English, this side of Freud stayed invisible.

Two perspectives on one thing. Solms argues for dual-aspect monism: the subjective and objective are two views of a single reality, not rival teams. Feelings can only be empirically observed through introspection — leave them out and you lose half the causal picture.

Memory, the unconscious, and transference. Freud anticipated the modern model of multiple memory systems decades early. Unconscious memories aren't recalled as images; they're repeated as "motor policies." Transference is that repetition made visible — and naming it gives the patient the freedom to revise it ("free won't").

Against the "chemical imbalance" myth. The claim that depression is a serotonin deficiency is, for Solms, both conceptually incoherent and empirically disproven. Bad feelings are signals of unmet needs. Medication has a real but limited role — it changes your state, not who you are.

Time, care, and cure by love. Real change is slow because procedural memories are "hard to learn and hard to forget." Therapy works partly as re-parenting, drawing on the mammalian capacity for care. Cure and care share the Latin root cura — and Solms ends on Freud's phrase that psychoanalysis is "a cure by love."

NOTABLE MOMENTS

"One doesn't cure symptomatically. One cures causally." "They're not remembered, they're repeated." "It's called not free will, it's called free won't." "Computers don't give a damn." "Reality always wins."

MENTIONED & FURTHER READING

• The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — Mark Solms
• The Hidden Spring (2021) — Mark Solms
• The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (2024) — translated/edited by Solms
• Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness — Andrea Hiott
• Referenced thinkers & ideas: Sigmund Freud, Baruch Spinoza (dual-aspect monism), Hilary Putnam (functionalism), Edward Tolman (multiple memory systems), B. F. Skinner, Donald Hebb, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 4E cognition and enactivism, Philip Ball, and Freud's letter to Einstein.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Solms throughout.

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Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy

In 1688, an Irish scientist named William Molyneux sent John Locke a letter with a question in it. Suppose a man born blind has learned by touch to tell a cube from a sphere. Suppose he is given sight, and the two objects are set on a table in front of him. Could he tell, by looking alone, which is which?

Locke said no, and put the question into the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley said no more emphatically. Leibniz said yes — with a hint, and a little time. And three centuries later the question is still open, only now it's being asked in operating theatres in New Delhi, in habituation studies with ten-hour-old infants, and in the way a skateboarder looks at a handrail.

Janet Levin and Brian Glenney have been in conversation about this problem since Brian's dissertation defense in 2007, where Janet was on his committee. They still disagree (productively) about whether you need to move your body in order to see. This episode is that disagreement, twenty years on.

Janet Levin is recently retired from the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. She works on the mind-body problem, phenomenal concepts, and what she calls the philosophy of philosophy: whether thought experiments are worth anything, and whether they can absorb empirical information and still count as philosophy. Her 2008 paper introduced the distinction between temporal and epistemic immediacy that has shaped how the Molyneux question is tested ever since.

Brian Glenney teaches at Norwich University in Vermont. He wrote his dissertation on Molyneux's problem at USC in 2007 under James Van Cleve and Janet Levin, wrote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the question, and has since argued for a pluralist answer — that the question has many correct answers depending on who is being asked about, and how. He also works on skateboarding, urban space, and the sensory expertise he calls the skater's eye.

Full show notes

• 00:00 — Why a navigational approach to mind keeps running into this question
• 02:20 — Introductions: phenomenal concepts, sensory expertise, and Bernie Sanders at the skate park
• 05:20 — Janet reads Locke's own statement of the question, and his answer
• 08:00 — Why this was supposed to be the crucial experiment for empiricism vs. rationalism
• 10:30 — The 1688 letter Locke never answered, and the 1693 one he did
• 12:00 — Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, and the attempt to give empiricism experimental oomph
• 14:00 — Why Locke buried the question in a passage about perceptual learning
• 15:00 — Common sensibles: what touch and sight might share
• 17:00 — Locke's "at first sight" trick, and what it forecloses
• 19:30 — Passivity vs. activity: if you move your head, is it still perception?
• 20:40 — Leibniz's cheat code, and the birth of epistemic immediacy
• 22:20 — Janet's distinction: temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy
• 24:15 — Held (2011) and the best evidence for a "no"
• 27:30 — Andrea's caricature: two languages, or one idea?
• 29:30 — Why restored vision isn't normal vision — and the paradox that follows
• 31:00 — Vision and touch as English and Russian; Leibniz as the bilingual child
• 33:30 — Janet on phenomenal concepts and why Molyneux caught her
• 35:40 — Did you know Adam Smith had a theory of perception? He wrote it at fifteen
• 37:50 — Brian finds his own ancestor in the archive: George Glennie, Aberdeen, 1796
• 40:15 — The moon illusion, and how Janet and Brian actually met
• 41:20 — The dissertation with six chapters, and the one revision that changed everything
• 42:30 — Maybe there isn't a single correct answer
• 47:15 — Project Prakash: five subjects, three days of play, and a fast yes
• 51:30 — Janet's counter-proposal: what if you only tweak vision?
• 55:20 — Bumpy pacifiers, baby chicks, and the ten-hour-old infants who disagree
• 58:50 — The six-month-old who recognizes its own hand
• 01:01:00 — Nobody frames it as empiricism vs. rationalism anymore
• 01:03:20 — The couch potato perceiver and the sentient statue
• 01:05:50 — Could virtual reality run the experiment we can't?
• 01:07:00 — Path dependency: every subject arrives with a history
• 01:11:20 — The blind Rubik's Cube puzzler, and whether expertise transfers
• 01:15:00 — "Give me something I care about": motivation as the missing variable
• 01:19:10 — Why does perception have to be passive at all?
• 01:22:20 — Andrea: what if it isn't yes or no?
• 01:26:50 — Ned Block and the border between seeing and thinking
• 01:29:20 — The skater's eye: knowledge in the heel rather than the head
• 01:33:00 — Enactivism, affordances, and the motivation Brian adds to them
• 01:36:30 — Janet puts a lock on the back gate
• 01:39:20 — Do you still care about this? Plato's cave, Reid, and the seduction of the external world

Some words that come up

Empiricism / rationalism — The organizing quarrel of the era. Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) hold that knowledge is built up from sense experience. Rationalists (Leibniz) hold that some ideas are innate and amodal — not owned by any single sense. Molyneux's question was supposed to settle it experimentally.

Common sensibles — Properties like shape, figure, and distance that seem accessible to more than one sense. Colour isn't one; neither is roughness. The question is whether a common sensible is genuinely shared, or whether you have to learn to correlate two separate streams.

At first sight — Locke's three-word addition, and, as Brian argues, a trick: it more or less guarantees the answer is no, if perceptual learning is needed to make the correlations.

Temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy — Janet's distinction. Temporal means the first instant after the bandages come off, which is probably what Locke meant. Epistemic means the identification is made by perception rather than by inference or association — so you wait until the person actually has the wherewithal to see, and only then test. It reframes what a fair experiment even looks like.

Perceptual learning — Changes in what you can perceive that come from experience rather than reasoning. Locke's newly sighted person sees a flat, variously coloured circle before they see a sphere.

Passivity vs. activity — Locke assumed perception is passive reception, and that anything active is cognition. So: is moving your head still perceiving? Is watching an object rotate? The whole episode circles this.

The perception/cognition border — The contemporary form of the same question, now central to philosophy of mind through Ned Block's work.

Phenomenal concepts — Concepts of what it's like to have an experience: to see red, to feel something smooth. Janet's long-standing interest, and her route into Molyneux.

Affordances / enactivism — Gibson's idea that we perceive the world in terms of what it lets us do, developed by Alva Noë and others. Brian adds a motivational layer: the skater doesn't just see that the handrail is skateable, they want to skate it.

• Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; Molyneux's question added to the 1694 second edition), Book II, Ch. IX, §8. Full text at Project Gutenberg
• Molyneux's first letter to Locke, 7 July 1688 — the one Locke never answered. The second, in 1693, is the one that made it into the Essay. Molyneux had in the meantime dedicated his optics treatise Dioptrica Nova (1692) to Locke.
• Marjolein Degenaar & Gert-Jan Lokhorst, "Molyneux's Problem", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the standard scholarly overview. plato.stanford.edu/entries/molyneux-problem
• Brian Glenney, "Molyneux's Question", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Brian's own entry, and the best place to start. iep.utm.edu/molyneux
• Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux's Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge, 1977) — the classic history.
• Denis Diderot's Letter on the Blind (1749) is where the two-dimensional version of the question first appears — roughly fifty years after Locke,

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Charlie has been gathering some of the best scientists in the world to rethink what agency is together and form new connections outside the usual academic constraints

Join Andrea in NYC this week here.

Today's guest is Charlie Munford, president of the Agential Biology Institute, and he has been gathering some of the best scientists and philosophers in the world together to rethink agency. Andrea and Charlie have a personal, meandering conversation that moves from family life stories to foundational questions in biology, education, evolution, and meaning. Munford recounts growing up in Mississippi, wilderness canoe trips, Yale literature and polo, organic agriculture studies in Cuba, farming and a New Orleans wild boar sausage business, and a later personal crisis that pushed him into researching chronic disease and biological agency. He argues mainstream gene-centered biology assumes blind variation, but evidence for inherited acquired changes and directional adaptation (horizontal gene transfer, planaria pattern memory, small-RNA inheritance in worms and mammals, maternal grooming effects, genetic assimilation) suggests a missing causal layer and universal cellular learning. They discuss natural selection, Darwin and Lamarck, Barbara McClintock, a Karl Popper “active Darwinism” lecture, ABI’s testable hypotheses, and openness, creativity, and care.

00:00 Welcome and Brooklyn Invite
04:20 Meet Charlie Munford
04:35 Banana Couch Story
05:49 Kids and Creativity
08:48 Mississippi to Yale Adventures
15:17 Farming Cuba and Sausage Business
18:40 Crisis Sparks Biology Questions
21:38 Agential Biology Explained
30:04 Lamarck Darwin and Natural Selection
36:45 Evidence for Inherited Change
46:21 McClintock and Popper Teaser
47:51 Cells Sense Not Code
48:36 Genes Aren't Difference Makers
49:45 Popper Versus Selfish Gene
54:06 Agency Without Theology
55:11 Horizontal Gene Transfer
58:34 Three Testable Agency Ideas
01:00:00 Popper And Falsification
01:06:05 Episolution And Cellular Mind
01:12:58 Harmonic Resonance And Sleep
01:17:12 Attention And Surprise Learning
01:20:33 Personal Journey And Meaning
01:26:24 Love Openness And Invitation
01:30:16 Otter Story Farewell

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her approach here throughout.

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Andrea, Yogi and Marcus are forming Paradoxis. This is one of the conversations towards that, a Third Space episode of Love & Philosophy.
Philosopher Andrea Hiott sits down with artist and facilitator Marcus Neustetter and biologist-philosopher Johannes "Yogi" Jaeger for a wide-ranging conversation about working in the space between art and science. The two have collaborated for about six years as part of The ZoNE, a transdisciplinary collective they run in Vienna alongside artist Bronwyn Lace and curator Başak Şenova.

Marcus and Yogi introduce each other, then talk through how their collaboration actually works: not illustration-for-hire, but a genuine co-production where a text and a drawing "wrap themselves around each other" into something neither could have made alone. From there the conversation moves through constraints and "staying alive," productive tension, performance and vulnerability, the trickster, space and context, institutions and gatekeeping, conflict and tolerance, and finally care and love.

The episode also introduces the paradox project (referred to in the audio as "Paradoxis"), a shared piece of writing on treating paradox as a practice and performance, and the idea of building offline "circles of trust," a concept Andrea draws from her earlier conversation with Parker Palmer.

Read PARADOXIS here.

Watch the ZoNE talks here.

Link to Zone talks Andrea mentions on the Zone channel with one of her favorite philosophers. And the one with Julian Gough on Egg and Rock.

Topics covered

• How Marcus and Yogi met and why they were both looking for a "third space" between art and science
• The Perspective Studio methodology and collective co-creation
• Constraints, co-construction and "staying alive" as an organizing principle drawn from evolutionary biology
• Productive tension vs. problem-solving; adaptation over optimization
• Finite games vs. infinite play, and "serious play"
• Performance, persona, authenticity and vulnerability
• The trickster figure and the danger of putting narcissists "in charge"
• Space, context and embodiment (including a 10-second listening exercise)
• Institutions, gatekeeping, decolonizing spaces, and the "plastic mushroom in the Pompidou"
• Conflict, tolerance, "overlapping consensus" and "coherence from difference"
• Care, love, and the shadow — seeing "the person behind the persona"

People, projects and references mentioned

• Love & Philosophy — Andrea Hiott's podcast and Substack
• The ZoNE — the art/science collective (Lace, Neustetter, Jaeger, Şenova); see also the Makers page and Actions/notation log
• The emerging book Beyond the Age of Machines / Expanding Possibilities — the manifesto and chapters referenced throughout, published chapter by chapter
• Perspective Studio — the workshop/facilitation methodology
• Andrea Hiott's Holding Paradox and her Embracing Paradox guide
• Andrea talking with Parker Palmer — "circles of trust"
• James Carse — Finite and Infinite Games
• Hanzi Freinacht — "serious/existential play"
• Tyson Yunkaporta — Sand Talk (the trickster)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — "whereof we cannot speak…"
• Plato — the allegory of the cave
• Michael Schmidt-Salomon — the paradox of tolerance
• John Rawls — "overlapping consensus"
• Carl Sagan — the gas-giant "blobs" thought experiment
• Patricia Martin — Will the Future Like You?
• Declan Donnellan and Sophie Fiennes — on performance and theatre (episodes Andrea mentions are forthcoming)
• Anathi Konjwa and Micca Manganye — performers in Marcus's Johannesburg short-film anecdote
• Steven Hobbs — Marcus's longtime South African collaborator

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Why Caring Isn't Self-Sacrifice with Elissa Strauss

The episode of Love and Philosophy introduces a conversation with journalist and essayist Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, framed by the host’s view of care as an embodied, orienting force and “minds as actions.” Strauss distinguishes “caring,” social-status “not caring,” collective/kumbaya care, and “dependency care,” which she calls a “Hotel California” relationship you can’t easily exit; she argues dependency care is fraught, messy, and misunderstood when treated as pure altruism. She describes moving from fast-paced feminist journalism and a policy lens on U.S. caregiving failures (including lack of federal paid leave) to a deeper account of motherhood’s embodied realities, attention, and moments of union and estrangement with children. The discussion links care ethics (Gilligan, Noddings, Kittay) with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil on unselfing and attention, critiques binary labels that assume we are all always one thing or the other related to ideas like “trad wife,” explores caring-for versus caring-about and the “glass door” separating home from public value, and connects care to economics, interdependence, faith as “wrestling,” and intergenerational “sandwich” caregiving.

Elissa's Book When You Care
Elissa's Substack: https://elissa.substack.com/

We All Care

the Navigational Approach to Mind
Heat by H.D.

Care of Things episode mentioned here

00:00 Trad Wife Label
00:48 Embodied Parenting
01:55 Estrangement Moments
02:57 Care Philosophy Intro
05:25 Care Ethics Primer
09:35 Care Economics Value
11:55 Poem Heat Reading
17:18 Defining Care Buckets
19:19 Dependency Care Explained
22:20 Writing Career Origins
25:53 Motherhood Identity Shift
30:32 Beyond Binary Labels
33:15 Embodied Early Motherhood
33:52 Embodied Early Motherhood
36:18 Attention and Listening
39:00 Touch Versus Screens
42:27 Dependency Care Awakening
46:25 Unselfing as Parenting North Star
49:54 Estrangement and Return
52:39 Faith as Wrestling
55:45 Finding Care Ethics
01:00:21 Gilligan Noddings Validation
01:05:46 Caring For Versus About
01:08:16 Shame and the Glass Door
01:09:44 Glass Door Feminism
01:10:48 Care Work Counts
01:13:00 Tradwife Backlash
01:15:12 Money Meets Meaning
01:16:19 Care Beyond Maintenance
01:20:47 Home Everywhere Politics
01:25:05 Figure Eight Care
01:27:42 Parenting as Process
01:31:51 Love Clarity and Illusion
01:35:54 Sandwich Caregiving Crunch
01:41:08 Wired to Care Together
01:43:55 Closing and Where to Find

Care Ethics

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.