What does enacting the world look like for organisms who are not thriving, but merely surviving? What happens when we don’t have access to the activities that are organism-defining? How to curate a life from the edge, when one is cast out of the relational web because of illness or disability? These are questions that Professor Shay Welch is asking herself today, and not because the questions have a theoretical draw, but because, as she shares in this candid conversation, these questions have become the throbbing centrepiece of her daily life. At the time we spoke, Shay was facing a diagnosis of an incredibly rare neurodegenerative disease (3 in one million), and a possible diagnosis of other conditions, and in one year’s time, she saw her life get turned on its head. Exploring this journey together, we discussed the epistemic injustices facing women and marginalized persons in medicine and academia, what is needed to sustain a minimal integrity of the organism when the body breaks down, the necessary conditions for participatory sense-making to happen well between two people, the deeply political nature of any epistemological framework, not least the enactive framework, and the ‘somatic dance,’ as Shay puts it, of trying to figure out how much of the world is moving you and how much of you is moving with the world when the world seems to be moving against you. Shay’s cutting wit and unflinching realism was a refreshing antidote to many of the world’s harrowing displays of sophistry, authoritarianism, and bigotry at the moment, and her observations helped to shed light on how trust in the body, and in first-person experience more broadly, is a powerful seed of resistance for these times. It was not a conversation that attempted to enact any illusion of a happy ending, but where we ended seemed a robust and generous teaching about how to begin making sense with the world, moving closer to solidarity. 

More about our guest here.

TW: There is a mention of suicide near the end of this episode.

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This conversation was a rich and potent gathering of creative minds, whose lives and work have long orbited practices of improvisation, co-creation, and participatory sense-making: cellist and mindfulness teacher Barbara Bogatin, atypical choreographer and dancer Luc Petton, pianist and teacher of teachers Dr Scott Brewer, and our wonderful co-host from Core Enaction, Semester 4, Dr Letícia Renault. From beginning to end, we dwelled with the many qualities that improvisation has in common with participatory sense-making: listening, becoming, and letting be; play, surprise, and épochè; interdependence, kinship, and attunement. The questions that emerged in the conversation turned out to be many of the same questions that concern all living beings who participate in the intricate process of making worlds together. 

• How can we cultivate the fine balance between effort and emergence, making happen and letting happen, agency and suspension? 
• Is there such a thing as a pedagogy of creativity and intuition? 
• What new grammar, syntax, and vocabulary does improvisation afford us for moving through the world? 
• How can we maintain a connection to our interiority while also expressing art publicly? How do we arrive in a zone of ‘pure communication’? 
• What might be said for the generative possibilities of breakdown and mistakes? Might we take a playful attitude toward our fallacies? Can we use them to disrupt the mechanisms of habit?
• What is the relationship between contemplative practice and creativity? 
• What do creative practices, such as dance, music-making, and language teaching, have to do with our ethical way of being in the world? Could certain improvisational attitudes — such as decentring the self or suspending judgment — help us interact across differences? How does improvisation affect our sense of intersubjectivity, and our ability to participate in a collective organism? 
• How do these practices inhabit the body? What can be said of the importance of touching and being touched, of being changed by the imprint of others? How can we activate the “full orchestra of the body” (Luc Petton)?

More about our guests: Barbara Bogatin, Dr Stephen Scott Brewer, Luc Petton, and Dr Letícia Renault. A couple examples of Luc Petton's work: 'Light Bird' teaser and 'Swan' teaser.

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“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.

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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.

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More information about Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami.

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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). 

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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 dialogue

Dr 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

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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)

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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. 

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In this second season of the podcast, we are prolonging an experiment of sorts that we conducted in the spring of 2024 in the Core Enaction Programme, our online learning curriculum. Over the course of eight sessions, we invited researcher-practitioners into an open space of dialogue to explore how their intersubjective practices might be informed and enriched by participatory sense-making, and how participatory sense-making might in turn benefit from the forms of knowing implicit in these intersubjective practices. The semester paid visit to artists and curators, therapists and teachers, neurodivergent thinkers and AI specialists, musicians and choreographers. A central thread of these encounters was the intersubjective expertise that we all possess just by virtue of being human, and how that expertise is made manifest and refined in the different intersubjective practices that we explored. The question of ethics quietly guided many of these conversations, prompting us to consider how our ways of knowing eminently relate to our ways of being and doing, and how we might use our knowing to interact with each other in more skilful ways. We ended the semester by considering what an enactive ethics might imply, both as an ethics of participation and an ethics of engaging across difference, where difference is considered in all its generativity. In many ways, it was an experiment of exploring the "living, lived logic" underlying human knowing, to borrow a phrase from Dr Hanne De Jaegher.

We decided to bring each dialogue group back for a second round of conversations, where we not only picked up some of the threads of their earlier dialogue, but ventured further into the moving horizons of their thinking. You'll hear from Dr Hanne De Jaegher, Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo, Dr Elena Cuffari, Jonny Drury, Allison Leigh Holt, Amy Cohen Varela, Dr Sanneke De Haan, Dr Rika Preiser, Dr Luc Steels, Dr Takashi Ikegami, Dr Erin Manning, Dr Joëlle Aden, Luc Petton, Barbara Bogatin, Dr Shay Welch, and Dr Karen Grøn.

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My guest today is the brilliant multidimensional thinker Michel Bitbol, a rare mind that is as well versed in medicine and physics as it is in Buddhist philosophy and micro-phenomenology.

His copious bibliography traces the evolution of his interlocking interests and his thinking about the role of phenomenology in theories of consciousness, the parallels between Buddhist dependent arising and certain Western theories of knowledge, and most relevantly for our conversation today, quantum philosophy and the common blind spots in the work of a scientist.

In this third and final segment, my conversation with Michel opens out onto questions about the role of contemplation in the life of the scientist and what we mean by contemplative science. He offers a granular description of the practice of micro-phenomenology within that tradition, and discusses the important work being done by the Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology at Mind & Life Europe. Ultimately, the conversation brings us to some of the subtle points of similarity between contemplative practice and the practice of phenomenology, bringing to bear the ethical dimension of both. We end on some of Michel’s most recent work, including his two latest books from 2023, Philosophie quantique. Le monde est-il extérieur? and Mettre fin aux controverses.

I’d encourage you to visit our YouTube page to watch the online course that he offered for the MLE Friends community, “Beyond Confines: the Philosophy track.” There you can hear him speak about “Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics” in Part I and about “Consciousness: East and West” in Part II. You can also check out an online course in which he taught, hosted by our partner Science & Wisdom Live, “Buddhism and Quantum Physics.”

Bergson, “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” essay from 1903

Mind & Life Europe’s Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology (ICP)

Paper on the validity of 1st-person descriptions by Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin (2009)

Carlo Rovelli 

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to this podcast, donating to Mind & Life Europe, and becoming an MLE Friend. We would also encourage you to visit our website for upcoming events, as well as our YouTube Channel, where you can find dozens of free talks, dialogues, symposia, and cutting-edge educational materials.

"Slate Tracker" and "Lemon and Melon" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

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