Mind & Life Europe Podcast

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) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 1903Mind & 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). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.