『Mind & Life Europe Podcast』のカバーアート

Mind & Life Europe Podcast

Mind & Life Europe Podcast

著者： Mind & Life Europe
無料で聴く

A podcast by Mind & Life Europe, emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of our co-founder, the Chilean neurobiologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, these conversations are one more way of exploring what has been the lodestar for our work at Mind & Life Europe: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.”


Mind & Life Europe is a home for unconventional interdisciplinary encounters, where researchers and practitioners enrich one another in their understanding of mind and life, through the rigour of scientific inquiry, the openness of philosophical investigation, the edginess of artistic exploration, and the depth of contemplative wisdom traditions. We believe that holding an open-hearted and interdisciplinary space of dialogue is in itself a radical, ethical mode of being-in-the-world, which generates new pathways of research and collective sense-making with transformative potential.

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

Mind & Life Europe スピリチュアリティ 科学
エピソード
  • A Symphony Without a Conductor: Agency, Emergence, and the Transdisciplinary Legacy of Autopoiesis

    A Symphony Without a Conductor: Agency, Emergence, and the Transdisciplinary Legacy of Autopoiesis
    2026/10/22

    Bruce Clarke and Martin Rosenberg met back in 1989 in a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. More than 35 years later, they came together again as panelists at the 2026 Barcelona Power & Care Conference, co-hosted by Mind & Life Europe and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Both came from literature departments in an era in which high theory was a defining feature of literary studies, and eventually, both found themselves stretching out well beyond the confines of their original dissertation topics: Bruno, as one of the world’s preeminent historians of systems thinking, second-order cybernetics, and the Gaia hypothesis; and Martin, as a scholar of emergence, jazz improvisation, neuroplasticity, metaphor, hypermedia, and even the game of chess. Both are colourful examples of the many risks and rewards of interdisciplinary praxis, and of the necessity to lay down a path in walking.


    One would be hard pressed to summarise such an eclectic and far-reaching conversation. Interspersed with many a story, our conversation took us through the finer points of agency and autopoiesis, metaphor and meaning, systems theory and jazz improvisation, jagged ontologies and cognitive multiplicities, boundaries and permeability, epistemic humility and surrender. Both bring a high degree of precision to their thinking, supremely attentive to how words and concepts, meaning and cognition, are constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and co-constructed. Above all, they are excellent tour guides to the history of the enactive approach as well as its ethical potential, helping to tease out alternatives to the models of top-down control, sovereignty, and competition. Whether through jazz improvisation or the study of certain intellectual movements, they both have essential insights to offer on how to not let cooperation become co-optation, as William Irwin Thompson put it.


    Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus at Texas Tech University and a Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His writings explore critical ecologies of narrative, systems theory, posthumanism, and Gaia theory. His most recent books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). Previous monographs include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). More here: brunoclarke.net.


    An independent scholar since 2002, Martin E. Rosenberg (U. Michigan 1990) wrote his dissertation on the cultural work across the arts of the scientific concept of “self-organization” or “emergence.” His article “Portals in Duchamp and Pynchon” (1994) was probably the first to explore the aesthetic and political implications of The Embodied Mind (1991). Having addressed the cognitive and scientific epistemological implications of the game of chess, he similarly addresses emergent cognitive behaviors visible in jazz improvisation, and, more generally, how environment and culture affect cognition. He has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French and Hungarian. Originally trained at the Berklee College of Music with 40 compositions to his credit, he performed until recently in the Pittsburgh area. More here: http://independent.academia.edu/martinerosenberg.


    ***


    If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community. Thank you for your support!


    All of our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    2 時間 9 分
  • Constellating Care in a Precarious World

    Constellating Care in a Precarious World
    2026/09/17
    Speaking with Andrea Hiott was very much akin to moving through a dynamic constellation of ideas and watching that constellation shapeshift in real time. Hers is an intellect that dwells in paradox, that embraces movement, and that does not shy away from friction. Almost immediately, one is struck by her unbounded curiosity and refreshing humility, as well as the astonishing breadth of her thinking. She is one of those thinkers who pushes us to hear familiar words anew, and reengage with descriptions of our world in a generative, non-reductive way. As you’ll hear in the beginning of the conversation, her work stretches across phenomenology, neuroscience, 4E cognitive science, urban planning, care ethics, and more, and she has elaborated a constellatory approach to thinking and being, which we explore, and at times enact, throughout our conversation. An important concept in Andrea’s work is what she calls way-making, which, in many respects, is a kindred approach to the enactive style of thinking. One of the central concerns in the way-making modality is how we can be specific and rigorous in our sense-making, while also keeping the horizon open and emergent. We need both: science that is rigorous about its protocol, agents who are clear about their positions and responsibility, and a space that is beyond representation and assessments, as well as a self-understanding that is inseparable from the environment.Way-making has a great deal to do with how we use our attention and what affordances that attention allows in our environments, and therefore with what matters to us and how we care. For her, caring is inseparable from movement. As she says, “the body mattering is caring towards,” and “the mattering is the body coming into being.” In this context, real power comes not from the sort of representational clout we witness in the world everyday, but from the very precariousness that generates our conditions for sentience. So, she asks throughout the conversation, what does it mean to live in a world that attacks this precariousness? How can we persist in a world in which multiple forms of ‘caring towards’ are in vehement competition with each other? How can we generate regularities and affordances that encourage and amplify caring? The conversation ends on a hopeful note, and not because we don’t acknowledge the many perversions of power in our world today, but because, as Andrea says, we are forever bound to each other, through our mattering and caring, and moments of disorientation are in fact opportunities for new forms of communication and agency. ***Andrea Hiott is a philosopher, author, and educator whose work moves across neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and embodied cognition. She has been working towards the navigational approach to cognition since 2017. She holds advanced degrees in philosophy and neuroscience from the University of Georgia, Humboldt Universität Berlin, and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and is currently a graduate researcher in the philosophy faculty (Phenomenology and Psychiatry) at Universität Heidelberg. Her thesis presents the navigational approach. She is a part-time professor at various schools and universities, serves on the board for three foundations, and has worked as a ghostwriter for over a decade. Andrea is also a ‘philosopher founder’ of Making Ways and the Love & Philosophy project. Making Ways is a multimedia care collective and international community dedicated to philosophical inquiry across the usual bounds between disciplines, institutions, and ways of living.Link to Andrea's paper we discuss in the episode: "Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating." ***If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community. Thank you for your support!All of our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1 時間 42 分
  • Season 4 Trailer: Empowering through Caring

    Season 4 Trailer: Empowering through Caring
    2026/09/17

    Welcome back, dear listeners. In Season 4 of The Enactive Fold, we are "Empowering through Caring." You can learn more about our 2026-2027 programming theme on our website.


    If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community. Thank you for your support!


    This trailer was produced by Jonny Drury, and our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    5 分
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません