#1274 Julian Kiverstein: 4E Cognition, Phenomenology, Culture, and Science

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Julian Kiverstin. He's senior researcher at the Lemon Tree Center for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Philosophy at the University. OF Amsterdam and today we're going to talk about topics like embodied cognition, phenomenology, neuro phenomenology, the free energy principle, and other related topics. So Dr. Kierstein, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to everyone.

00:34 Julian Kiverstein: Thank you so much for the invite and looking forward to our discussion.

00:39 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, I mean, in regards to embodied cognition, actually it's a topic that I've already talked about on the show several times, phenomenology, not so much, but uh I would like to ask you, um, I mean, what is embodied cognition and how do you link it or how do you think it's possible to link it to the phenomenology?

01:07 Julian Kiverstein: OK, great. So uh we'll just start with embodied cognition since that's uh, that's quite complex on its own as a topic. So there are many different theories of embodiment that, that are, um, you can find in philosophy and cognitive science and. And I think er a useful distinction here is the debate between what I'm gonna call conservative positions that are broadly in line with the the the traditional conventional understanding of cognition within cognitive psychology. So they start from an understanding of cognition as basically information processing where er information processing involves operations of some kind over mental representations. And then the idea of this uh more conservative approach is that some of the representations that are used in cognition have what is sometimes called a bodily format, so it might be that the representations are. Connected to action in some ways, so they're action oriented representations or it could be that they have a somatosensory format, so they involve touch, for example. So you can see how if you have forms of cognition that involve these kinds of representations, then we can say that the cognition is embodied. But they're also more radical theorists who see themselves as offering an alternative framework for understanding cognition and for doing a science of cognition. Where instead of starting from the idea that cognition can be explained in terms of subpersonal information processing mechanisms, they will start instead at the scale of the whole body in its environment. And so these theories tend to think of cognition. As depending on the body in a constitutive sense, not just in a causal sense, that some of the representations that are used by the brain in doing cognitive tasks are ones that represent the body. But in the sense that cognition is something that involves the whole body in its dynamic interaction with the environment. So on this more radical approaches, then cognition is understood as embodied in the sense that it has to be. Explained at the scale of the whole body. Uh, SO that is the habits of the body, the skills of the body, the ways that the body engages with the environment. So these kind of approaches are thinking about cognition at the scale of a whole agent environment system where on the side of the agent, you find habits and skills for engaging with the environment and on the side of the environment, you find er relevant possibilities for action or affordances. And so this is, this is a conception where. Organism and environment or age and environment are co-determining, codependent, in some sense and that to understand and explain cognition. Our ways of knowing the environment, we have to start from embodied skills and habits. So that's the uh the embodied cognition side of the question. Should we pause there and say something more about that, or I can turn to phenomenology when you're ready.

04:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I was just going to ask, when it comes to embodied cognition and the different positions that people can hold when it comes to it and it's relation to more, let's say, uh, I think we could call them actually mainstream approaches in cognitive science and cognitive psychology. Um, WHAT, what, I mean, where do you stand exactly? Do you fall more on a more moderate embodied cognition position or on a more radical embodied cognition position, and you think we should, uh, consider the entire body, uh, as when it comes to understanding, uh, cognition and, uh. The, the body as being constitutive, as you put it, when it comes to how cognition works and also uh relating to the environment more broadly or, or where do you fall exactly.

05:53 Julian Kiverstein: So I fall in the radical camp and and that's because. Well, when I first discovered philosophy in back in the 1990s as an undergraduate. The the book The Embodied Mind had just been published and that had a huge influence on my thinking at that time as an undergraduate and still does. And, and that book puts forward an idea of embodiment that is inspired by phenomenology, which leads us to your next question. So the idea of that book was to try to have a cognitive science that would accommodate and have room for understanding. Uh, FIRST person subjective lived experiences of the world. And, and a central aspect of our lived experience is that it, it, it's embodied. It takes place from an embodied point of view. It's through our body that we perceive and act in the world. So our body is our, is our point of view on the world. It is our. Our er our subjective perspective on the world as it were. And And, and so what was proposed in that book, The Embodied Mind by um uh Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Roche was that we should think of cognition as enacted. So inaction here is a technical term that refers to the engagement of the whole body with the world and, and how. Um, WE are constantly doing what is called sense making on the basis of which we, um, we bring forth a meaningful environment of action possibilities. Um, SO. Yeah Uh, this is very complicated, I, I know already, but the idea is that to try to make room for lived experience, we have to have this more, Um, encompassing view of, of what cognition is, where we recognize how cognition is embodied, how it's situated in the world. And so there's a kind of constraint here which is to to do justice, to to live the experience, to make room for lived experience. And Varela Thompson and Ross argued that that that that that was something that was difficult to do as long as you stayed within the the more conservative traditional understanding of cognition as information processing cos within that framework then you get this the the the hard problem of well how is it that out of this information processing. And out of these functional processes, out of behavior. You get Uh, lived experience, first person subjective experience. And so they were putting forward a different kind of perspective. Different framework for understanding what cognition is that they thought would allow us to then make sense of what would otherwise be very difficult to to understand our lived experiences. That's why I ended up in the radical camp because I, I, I agree with them that it should be a constraint on cognitive science that it makes room for first person lived experience. Sorry, go ahead.

09:18 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so when it comes to the 4E cog cognition approach, uh, uh, you agree with uh. Of course we're going to get later into the fourth E, which is extended cognition, but at least with the three first E's of cognition being embodied embedded and enacted or inactive, you agree with them, right?

09:48 Julian Kiverstein: Yes, I'm in, I'm, I belong to the 4E cognition movement and so we can think of there being. There are different generations within cognitive science of of thinking, um, so the first generation of cognitive science was. Uh, ARISE in the arose in the 1950s as a response to behaviorism where there were these ideas of computation, information processing that were beginning to emerge. Then we had a second generation of um more biologically inspired models of cognition that started to think in terms of connectionism and distributed processing that tried to take the the organization of the brain as our inspiration for understanding cognition. And that kind of continues today in machine learning and, you know, generative AI. These are all models that are kind of based on those. Uh PARALLEL distributive processing connectionist ideas. But in the 90s there was also like a third generation that started to emerge of people who thought that we need to study cognition in a real world context, so ecological settings first of all, which led to a more situated approach. And within situated cognition, you can find researchers that were inspirational for the idea of extended and embedded cognition. And then there were also thinkers who thought that er the really difficult problem in evolution was sensory motor coordination, perception and action. And so it's really from the constraints that arise from the body. That is uh able to solve this problem of sensory motor coordination, that we should start when we're trying to understand how cognition works and then. The, the higher cognitive functions really are built up from these more basic sensory motor, perception and action functions. And so that led to like a situated robotics and embodied cognition, um, as a kind of third approach and in philosophy that, Uh, those different approaches were unified by Sean Gallagher under this heading of 4E cognition, so embodied, embedded, extended, enacted. And I think another important E is the ecological psychology. I know you've had some discussions with ecological psychologists on your podcast before. So I would think that that's another important E here. Um, BUT that, that relates in interesting ways to the, to the other four E's that were already part of the conversation. And we can discuss more what exactly the relationship is between the different Es as we go on. But yeah, I'm very much part of this 3rd generation of cognitive scientists who think. That uh we that the four E's are really should be the, the foundational assumptions that we work from in understanding what cognition is.

12:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, we will certainly come back to at least some of the other reasons and, particularly ecological psychology or the 5th E or of ecological cognition later on. But going back to the question regarding phenomenology, so How does phenomenology come into the picture, particularly, uh, in the domain of philosophy, and how do you look then at the relationship between embodied cognition and phenomenology?

13:34 Julian Kiverstein: Great. Yeah. So phenomenology, first of all we should um see as um a movement within philosophy that. AROSE at the turn of the 20th century. Um, WAS initiated by the German philosopher Edmund Hussa. And he was concerned with classical philosophical questions like what is reality, what is truth, how to understand knowledge, how to understand meaning, logic, mathematics. So he was really working with foundational questions in philosophy and he developed a method for addressing those questions. Um, WHICH involved. Um, A bracketing of the, the natural attitude that we ordinarily operate with, where the natural attitude is, you know, what we normally take for granted in our thinking as scientists, for instance, but also in our everyday lives when we, you know, we take for granted the existence of, uh, material worlds, uh, that we engage with and Hussa didn't deny. The natural attitude, he didn't, he wasn't a skeptic about it. But he thought that um. That there are philosophical questions that arise that we need to address about how is it possible for us to er think about, experience a meaningful world. And, and that we could start to address those questions by adopting this method of bracketing or suspending the natural attitude. Um So What the phenomenologist is, is led back to then having performed this. Um, THIS method of bracketing the natural attitude is the world that we ordinarily live in, the life world, and our ways of experiencing that. So phenomenology is concerned with how the world appears to us, how it's given to us in our everyday experiences, and then gives us a method for, for describing lived experience. So why is that important for cognitive science? You might think that. That that uh our everyday experiences don't really give us a window on how the mind works because the mind is in its workings is something that is not consciously accessible to us. You know, so in in standard cognitive science we think of. Most of cognition as as having the form of unconscious computation that, you know, that goes on behind the scenes without us really knowing anything about it. So how could it possibly be then that phenomenology provides any constraints on our science of cognition if most of what happens in cognition is not accessible to consciousness. And um the phenomenologist's response to that or people who are engaging with phenomenology within cognitive science is that we should think of cognitive science and phenomenology as really having different methods, different questions and different concerns. And those concerns overlap when it comes to the philosophical assumptions that er cognitive science operates with. So if we go back to the, the generations of cognitive science that I described, the 3 generations, each of them operates with certain kind of conceptual philosophical picture of the mind and how the mind relates to the world. So, in both of the 1st 2 generations of cognitive science, the idea was really that. Um, THAT the mind. Is able to get knowledge of the world via some kind of er internal representation or internal model of the world. And that representational model. The debate between the 1st and 2nd generation cognitive scientists was about how to think about the nature of those representations. So in first generation cognitive science, the representations were understood along the lines of language or or pictures. And so that was the kind of view of representations, they were either imagistic. Or they were propositional and then you had debates about whether the imagistic ones were also propositional. I think about the debate between er Stephen Coslin for instance and Xenon Poliian. And then later on, you had the connectionists who said that the representations were not language like, they were very sub um conceptual or they were. Non-conceptual, preconceptual, um, more like the sorts of representations that we use in, Um, in classification, in pattern recognition. So they were statistical in nature, concerned with patterns of some sort. And the 3rd generation argued, well, maybe we don't need representations at all to understand the mind-world relation. We should instead start from the ecological idea of direct perception, for instance, where. Perception and action systems are able to pick up information that specifies affordances, or we'll start from the idea of inaction and sense making that that self and world are. A rising together somehow. And, and, and that happens in the sensory motor interaction of the self with the world. So you get a kind of non-representational approaches that begin to emerge. And, and those not, so what I'm trying to bring out here are the. Underlying philosophical theories and assumptions that are in play in cognitive science all the time when we're offering models, theories, explanations in cognitive science. And how phenomenology becomes relevant for interrogating and questioning those philosophical assumptions. So the idea of phenomenology as a constraint on explanation in cognitive science is that we should think of phenomenology as describing what it is that we want to understand and make intelligible in scientific terms. And what it's describing is, is our everyday lived experience that we start from actually as scientists. Um, SO we're always involved with the world in some way, even as scientists we're involved with the world. Just it's the world in the context of the laboratory of the scientists. It's a, it's a scientific life world that the scientist engages with. So the Um, so the phenomenologist says, well, let's start from lived experience and how that's analyzed and described carefully in phenomenology, and we can take that as the, the explananum, the thing that needs to be explained by our, um, our scientific work in cognitive science. Um, SO it's true that, you know, introspection doesn't give us access to the workings of the mind, but phenomenology is not introspection. It offers a different kind of method for describing and analyzing lived experience. Um, AND so the argument is that we should then start from that, what we learn from phenomenology about. Our embodiment about our situatedness in the world and take that to be. A description and analysis of what it is that needs to be explained in cognitive science, and so in that sense phenomenology becomes this constraint on explanation in cognitive science. Does that make sense? Yeah, that was very nonsense, sorry, but hopefully Aaron, you managed to follow everything and we can just slow down and go back over anything that that uh was not clear for your listeners.

22:09 Ricardo Lopes: Yes. Uh, I, I mean, I was just wondering, uh, what, what do you make then of uh approaches in more, let's say traditional cognitive science, traditional psychology. Where people might even, of course, we're talking about representational computational approaches here, but when they, for example, uh, assume, uh, uh, assume or study whether Certain aspects of our psychology might be, and I, and I know that this is a disputed kind of concept, and I mean I've already discussed it with psychologists on the show, but that certain aspects of our psychology. Uh, MIGHT be innate or might have a biological or an evolutionary basis to it and so that they would be at least to a certain extent influenced by genetics. I mean, is that something that um a framework that includes embodied cognition or even more broadly for e-cognition. And phenomenology would go against, or do they complement that sort of approach? I mean, how, how do you look at that potential relationship there?

23:49 Julian Kiverstein: Mhm. Very good, yeah, so. I think all embodied theories of cognition try to aim for biologically realistic theories of cognition, so they go beyond actually what was what developed in the 2nd generation of cognitive science where uh we started from roughly the architecture of the brain. In connectionist neural networks and then try to model cognition on the roughly the architecture of the brain. They go beyond that in that they think that um that even in those neural network models, there's, there's a lot of details of the substrate that are abstracted away from and treated as merely to do with the implementation. And so that you can then start to model computationally the brain processes, whereas, Uh, in the 3rd generation, the idea was, no, we should start from thinking about early organisms who were able to adapt to their environments by coordinating their sensory motor behaviors with the affordances of those environments. So, maybe we should start from the organization of biological systems in thinking about. How cognition works, and this is er sometimes called the life mind or life cognition continuity principle that the organizational properties of living systems can be thought of as a a guide to er the organizational properties of cognitive systems or systems that have minds. You know, so we're starting from the idea of self-organization in thinking about. Uh, HOW cognition could work or what it is to have a mind. Um, THE idea that living systems are adaptive, they're also autopoetic, which means that they produce their own organization in their engagement with their surroundings. And we're gonna start from adaptivity and er biological autonomy, which is a kind of autopoiesis in in thinking about er how cognitive systems are organized. And, so the link there with uh with biology is through thinking about what, what are the organizational properties that living systems have. Um, AND how do those then relate to the organizational properties of cognitive systems. And the idea in. This 3rd generation of cognitive sciences that we can think of there being a kind of continuity that takes us from, The organizational properties of life, so single-celled organisms, plants. Multicellular organisms, they already have some of the key ingredients that are required for, uh for cognizing, where those ingredients are things like being self-producing, self-maintaining, um, being adaptive. Yeah. Um, SO what, how would we then think about the innateness, uh, empiricism debates, the nativism, empiricism debate, um, against this backdrop. Um, WELL, I think in a way, no, both are true, nativism and empiricism and most people in biology think that now as well. So they're either or there I think we should challenge. And how are they both true? Well, because it, it's important to think about the development of er of organisms, how, how do they. You know, processes like morphogenesis, so how does the organism become, come to have the kind of body that it has. And those processes of development and morphogenesis are, are processes that. You know, where there are constraints that come from uh evolution and natural selection that, um but we also need to think about how those constraints enter into the, the development of a self-organizing system. And Uh, so that's a complicated answer, but I hope you roughly see where what I'm gesturing at in, in developmental biology, in evolutionary biology for thinking about this. So Suzanne Oyama's idea of developmental systems theory has been a, a big influence on people and inaction. Uh, WHO, who tend to think about. Um, NO, there isn't genes that code for traits. Instead we need to think about. Development in, in, um. Well, we need to think about the contribution of genes. Uh, IN a bigger developmental system. And that means looking at the history of that system over time. Yeah.

28:56 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, THE, the development of that system over time, but, uh, the development of, uh, individual, uh, organisms,

29:06 Julian Kiverstein: organisms, exactly, organism, organism centered approach to, to biology rather than starting from the, the genes, we would start from the, the organism and thinking about evolution and thinking about life. It's the form of the whole organism in its environment that that we we start from. And the organism is a kind of agent. Yeah, so, and that's why this notion of bio biological autonomy comes up that. That there's a um a goal directedness to the behavior of organisms where. The goals are not something that we just ascribe to the organism as observers of it, but that they're rather something that, um, the organism sets for itself because of uh this drive to survive, to maintain itself in in its engagement with the environment. So the organism is the source of its own purposes, goals and norms, and that's why it makes sense to think of organisms as agents. So

30:19 Ricardo Lopes: right, so, uh, but I mean er I I am

30:22 Julian Kiverstein: maybe we wanna go back to phenomenology eventually because there's a story about where phenomenology comes into that as well that we could get into. But, uh, you know, you, you steer the conversation in the way that you, you want it.

30:35 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, I will come back to phenomenology in a second. Let me just ask you at least one, perhaps two questions regarding all of what you said there. So when it comes to, when you talked about constraints and constraints and how they operate, um, And influence self-organization of the organism during development. I mean, are those constraints because I know that, I mean looking at development and even evolution from the point of view of the organism and not from A gene's eye view or a gene centric perspective, I mean those are two different approaches and so the way we need to think about things here is very different, but I mean when it comes to those constraints on self-organization, uh, are they in any way. Of course, I guess that no one at this point in time would say that they are genetically determined, but are they, do you think that they are in any way, uh, genetically influenced? I mean that that there's um. Those constraints, is there any information in the genes that influence those constraints, or that at least to some extent impose those constraints on self-organization or not.

32:19 Julian Kiverstein: Well, we, we would challenge the idea that that the genes are encoding information. And that's, um They Information is a difference that makes a difference according to to Bateson, and that's how he he defines information. And, and so. It, it can't be that the, that the genes are just these vehicles that carry information if you understand information in that sense of a difference that makes a difference. You need instead to look at how the genes are, are taken up within a larger system and the, the way that they impact on the developmental process and that requires looking. Uh The, the Contribution of genes over time and and thinking about. Them in the context of a larger complex system which in the end is going to be an organism in an environment, so exactly what, you know, think about epigenetics, how the genes contribute to development is influenced in all kinds of ways by the environment that the organism is developing in. And, and you can make similar arguments about saying, The contribution of genes within larger networks and how there's all kinds of Um Uh I want to to say that just like in the brain, there are not, uh there's not a 1 to 1 relationship between function and structure. Similarly, in genetic networks, there's not a 1 to 1 relationship between the, the traits and the gene, but exactly how the gene ends up contributing to development, we have to think about in this way that allows for pluri potentiality, redundancy. Um, SO you're, you're looking at a system where there's a lot of feedback relations in play, and, uh, it's a dynamical system, um, and the, the way that the genes contribute to development we need to think of as part of this dynamical complex process. So that's the picture that I, I would argue for in thinking about how, what contributions genes are making here. And it's a kind of dynamical developmental systems perspective and. And then going back to constraints, you know. I think that the thing I want to emphasize there is that the the constraints are biochemical constraints often. And when we think about how, um, constraint, the constraints that come from the body are shaping cognition and the mind, the, the constraints are often biochemical, which means that when we try to give computational models of cognition, we're often abstracting away from the details of the substrate which are very important details for understanding how cognition works if we have this more, Ecological biological approach to cognition, we can't really abstract away from all of those biochemical details. In order to give a kind of substrate independent medium independent description of, well we can of course, but the thing is that that's an abstraction or idealization that we're doing there and there's a lot of important details that are getting left out. The Masvita Chilamuta is very good about this in her book The Brain Abstracted. I don't know if you've had her on your, uh, podcast yet. Yeah,

36:08 Ricardo Lopes: yes, I've had her on the show two years ago if I remember correctly. OK,

36:13 Julian Kiverstein: yeah, great, yeah, yeah. So I think the arguments that she makes about, uh, how explanation works in. Neuroscience that it often involves abstraction and idealization, these are really important arguments um, in relation to embodiment, because what they highlight is that there's a lot of important detail in this, the way the substrate is organized, that we need to take into account in order to understand cognition and some of that detail of course is genetic. Um, BUT I just think we shouldn't understand genes as like codes because that is part of the same. Way of thinking about um biology. This kind of information processing metaphor, computational metaphor that. Uh, THAT was part of the 1st and 2nd generation of cognitive science, but I think 4E cognition is offering something else, something different from that. That in many ways fits with other things that are happening in biology and. So it fits well with Michael Levin's work, it fits with uh this recent book by Philip Ball about you know things that have happened in biology in recent years. And It fits with like the Evo Devo stuff and. You know, so there's a lot of things in biology that are taking place that are very much convergent with the developments in 4E cognition as well.

37:42 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, that recent book by Dr. Philip Ball is also very interesting. I actually interviewed him on the show about it as well. So if people are interested in watching that interview, so, um,

37:57 Julian Kiverstein: but I didn't see that one. I'll go back and find that.

38:01 Ricardo Lopes: So, um, going then uh back to phenomenology or at least trying to bring phenomenology into the picture here because now we're talking about, uh, biology, about development, developmental biology constraints, and then how that plays out at the level of cognition. So, uh, how does phenomenology, um, Uh, I mean, how do you bring phenomenology back into the picture here? I mean, what does it add to the picture and how can it inform how we explore, uh, questions regarding biology development and cognition?

38:48 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah So I think that a useful way to answer that question is to go back to Evan Thompson's second book, Mind and Life. Which was written after the Embodied Mind and published in 2007. Um, AND in that book he argues for what he calls the deep continuity of life and mind. Uh, SO, so far what we've been exploring is the idea that there's a continuity between the organizational properties of living systems and, and cognitive systems, and, and we've talked about that in terms of, uh, self-organization, autopoiesis, adaptivity, these kinds of concepts, biological autonomy. So the idea that Thompson explores in that book is that. Uh, ALSO in living systems we can see the beginning of what he describes as a kind of inner mental life. In that er any living system. And this idea goes back to Spinoza as well. Has this drive to survive, it has a concern for its own continuation. And that kind of drive for its own continuation. Hans Jonas, the philosopher, bioethicist, talks about in terms of need for freedom. Gives the organism, a kind of inward point of view on the world, relative to which it can then do what, That is called sense making by people that work in inaction. And sense making is the beginnings of cognition. Um, SO what. Is argued for with this deep continuity of life and mind, is that, there was already the beginnings of the anticipation of, The kinds of structures of lived experience which are described in phenomenology in the earliest of life forms. Because of the cannaus, because of this concern for the continuation of the organism. Um, THE care, the concern for its own existence, that's already there in the beginnings of life. And so we can then argue on that basis. That there's something about the organizational properties of living systems that will also help us to understand lived experience and the structures of lived experience and how, As subjects we're able to constitute a meaningful world in our engagement with our surroundings. So that phenomenological idea of constitution. Which is a way of thinking about the intentionality, uh the. The directedness of the mind at the world, that kind of. Uh, INTENTIONAL structure, you can already trace back to, to the earliest of life forms, so that that gives us a kind of deep continuity of, of life and the phenomenological mind.

42:04 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, I want to ask you about a specific kind of, um, subjective experience that we have that has to do with pain and how an embodied approach and in this particular case, uh, an embodied predict predictive processing approach can help us understand it. So uh tell us about uh predictive processing. And how then it can combine with embodied cognition to understand the experience of pain.

42:45 Julian Kiverstein: OK, now. So there's uh there's a lot in that question that we need to to go through really to to see how it it relates to the things we've been talking about so far. And I think that what I want to start from is with the phenomenology of pain. And, and the subjectivity of pain. So from the conversation that we've been having so far, I hope that your listeners can see that for me it's a fundamental requirement on the, the adequacy of any scientific theory or model that it accommodates and does justice to the, the phenomenology, the richness of lived experience. Mhm. Um, SO that's the kind of starting point for me that, that the datum that needs to be explained is the subjectivity of pain. And so what I mean by that is that. There, there isn't really a difference between um it appearing to someone that they're in pain and they're being in pain. The appearance is the reality. So it doesn't make sense so I'll say to somebody who reports that they're in pain, that they're not in pain. And it's not something that you could be mistaken about if you're, if you feel pain, then you then that that feeling is your reality, that's the reality of your lived experience of that moment. So I start from that subjectivity of pain as the thing that we need to understand. Then you might think, well, Pain has this mysterious subjective quality to it, um. And you know it's unpleasant. It, it hurts. And, and so, How can it be that as scientists, we can start to. Um, EXPLAIN, make intelligible. The quality of pain, the unpleasantness of it. Uh, THE sensory quality that it has. And that of course is the hard problem of consciousness, which I'm sure you've had many people on your podcast talking about before. Yes, um. Now, I think that pain is much more complex than just the unpleasantness, the hurting. So in the psychology and neuroscience of pain, we now make a distinction between the sensory discriminatory component of pain, the effective motivational component. And the cognitive evaluative component of pain. And so pain is this very complex construct that involves all of these different dimensions, and it's also modulated in all kinds of ways by. Uh, YOUR social support, so if you have a loved one next to you and you're in pain, then that can reduce your pain. It's modulated by your expectations, so you have the nocebo effect where expecting pain can make it worse. Are the placebo effect where expecting pain can actually down modulate the pain and make it feel better. So we see that cognition that sorry, pain is cognitively very complex, it has all of these different dimensions to it. And phenomenologically I think it's also very interesting in that pain is this sensing of the body, so that's part of pain. You feel pain within the boundaries of your body. But pain also influences your attitude towards the world. So if you're in pain, then there are now things that you can't do because of the pain. Um, WELL, not always, so people that are athletes can just. Be in pain but er it doesn't interfere with their performance, they're able to not give any attention to it and just push through. But often, you know, pain is something that stops us in our tracks, it's um it interrupts or disrupts our fluid engagement with the world. Mhm Um, SO the phenomenology of it is that we have to make sense of how pain can be this local sensing of the body. So it can be something that it has this inner character to it, we feel it from the inside, we feel it in our body, but it also has this outer directedness to it that it changes our attitude towards the world and how we engage with the world. So that's the phenomenological side of it that I think is the datum that we need to make sense of. And then I think, well, predictive processing is helpful here because it gives us a framework for understanding how it is that. Um, THESE two dimensions of pain can come together, the sensing of the body from the inside and the outer directed attitude towards the world component of it. Um, HOW it does that, we need to get into more information about what predictive processing is exactly, so maybe I just pause there and let you respond before we go into the predictive processing side of it.

48:01 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, um, I mean, but actually, I, I think we can just get into that aspect of it, about predictive processing. So what does that entail exactly?

48:14 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah, so the key idea of predictive processing is that um instead of thinking of organisms as passively receiving and taking in sensory impressions from the world, this kind of empiricist picture. We think of um perception, let's start from perception, pain is a kind of perception. Um, WE think of perception as a more active process of anticipation. So, er, the incoming information from the world, sensory information. Is being met by your, um, your predictions, top down, where those predictions are coming from. Things that we talked about earlier and uh the hardwired um. Expectations that we have and that come from natural selection. But also from learning, um, so predictions are, you know, we can learn for instance that fire is gonna burn us if we come into contact with us with it. And so there's a prediction there that if you're approaching fire, then there's a possibility of tissue damage. And So these kinds of predictions are meeting up with sensory information and then the percept is the result of combining those predictions with the the incoming sensory information to make inferences, inferences about what is likely to be happening in the body and in the world. And that sounds like a very computational information processing kind of model of how perception works and so how does that square with the things that we've been talking about at the beginning of our conversation from 4E cognition. That's one of the big discussions. Is there an incompatibility between. The predictive processing theory. And um, And 4 ideas, I think there isn't, um, but we need to. Refine some of the ways in which predictive processing is sometimes interpreted and presented, in order to see that there is a a compatibility here, that goes back to the thing that I said before about how whenever we do science, we're operating with certain philosophical assumptions. And I think you can certainly read predictive processing in a way that it's in line with. Second generation cognitive science in operating with a basically connectionist neural network way of thinking, where there's representations, it's just they're not, They're not um linguistic or imagistic, they're, they're more uh like pattern recognition, statistical representations. Um, SO in order to get from a 2nd generation understanding of predictive processing to a 4E understanding. I think it's necessary to to give a different interpretation of what the anticipating brain is doing. Uh, WHERE we think of the anticipating brain as working together with other bodily processes, this is what makes it embodied. So the, the brain is working as part of the autonomic nervous system in reciprocal interaction with the immune system and with the neuroendocrine system. Um, AND pain is the result of this kind of conversation between these different systems, which takes place across the whole neural axis. So pain is a process that doesn't just unfold in the brain. Pain isn't in the brain, pain is in the whole body. Because it involves all these complex interactions between all of these systems, and pain is also a way of making sense of the world, it's a kind of sense making. So pain is then gonna influence the goals that you pursue, it's gonna influence the meaning that you give to the environment. So we propose to understand predictive processing. As an ecological inactive process, as as something that can be integrated with ideas from ecological psychology um and from inactive cognitive science. And no, there's, there's some people that say no you can't do that, and you've had some of them on your podcast. I think no, there's an incompatibility here between these approaches. Um, SO Ezekiel Di Paolo published a paper called Forking Paths or something like that where he tries to argue that, uh, predictive processing and inactive ideas are just on different paths in cognitive science and they can't really be brought together, but I think that's a mistake and that they can actually be married in interesting ways and so that's what I've been trying to do with my colleagues.

53:20 Ricardo Lopes: And in what ways? I mean, I know that probably you haven't yet arrived at your final goal there, but in what ways do you think that can be done?

53:34 Julian Kiverstein: So I think that we need to now go a little bit into some of the technical details to see how it could work. Um, BUT the fundamental idea in predictive processing is prediction error minimization, where prediction error can mathematically under certain assumptions be mapped onto free energy and, um, so yeah,

53:59 Ricardo Lopes: I, I've, I've just to say that I had Doctor Carl Friesston on the show as well and we talked about those aspects.

54:07 Julian Kiverstein: Uh, THAT'S great. So we don't need to go into too much of the technical details fortunately cos Professor Friston has done that with you already, which is, uh, which is helpful for me because the technical details are very complicated, but yes. But, so what we try to do is understand free energy as to do with the, the dynamics, uh, within the agent environment system, so instead of just thinking of it. As there's this. A sensory epithelia that separates the organism from the environment, which is the Markov blanket. And the Markov blanket is made up of these sensory and active states, and those act as a kind of boundary separating the organism from the environment. We think of the Markov blanket as actually dynamically coupling the organism with the environment. So then free energy becomes a measure of the dynamics within this larger agent environment system. And the minimization of free energy is then about. Acting so as to improve grip on the environment, so as to move towards or away from affordances that are gonna allow you to adapt to a dynamically changing environment. So free energy increases when something surprising happens in your engagement with the world. And that surprise is not always a bad thing, sometimes it's something that we can learn from and and can help us to uh to grow, to better adapt to the environment um. But the, the key thing is that the free energy, the surprise that free energy is tracking. Is something to do with the dynamics of the Asian environment systems, and not just something that is, uh, detected and minimized by internal processes in the brain, but, uh, a whole bodily process of coupling with the environment, so that's the 4E way of interpreting. Um, THE predict the free energy minimization, predictive processing framework. I went quite quickly over that, but hopefully it gives the the rough picture of how it works and. So technically if we want to go into the mathematics of it, part of the free energy principle is the KL divergence, which is the difference between your, Um, your inferred posterior and the actual posterior in the environment. So we think of the KL divergence as as a measure of the agent environment coupling. And rather than think of it as something that is to do with the internal model, um, and it's mismatch with the environment because there are prediction errors. We think of the the chao divergence as a way of modeling the agent environment dynamics.

57:07 Ricardo Lopes: So I mean with all of that in mind when it comes to approaching the free energy principle from a more ecological and active perspective, if I understood that correctly, I mean, do you think that we can understand the feeling of being alive scientifically? I mean, and of course, uh, I think we also have to add to that the phenomenology that we've already been been exploring here, but I mean, how can we do that? How can we understand this feeling of being alive from a scientific perspective?

57:55 Julian Kiverstein: Mm, mhm. So there's a difficult question here about where sentience arises in in uh. The chain of life and how far back can we go and still find sentience, so are plants sentient. Are a single-celled organisms sentient. And given the the life mind continuity idea that I outlined for you. You can argue for a kind of biopsychist picture as it's been called that Ernst Hackel, uh, was a proponent of in the 19th century that we can trace sentience back to the beginnings of life. There's a kind of basic minimal subjectivity or sentience that is a part of being alive and that relates, you might say, to the karnatas, to the drive to survive. Yeah. And um no that's something that's been challenged by a number of thinkers. Peter Godfrey Smith in his work on, on consciousness and the evolution of consciousness and has argued for a more gradualist picture that. Uh, THAT it's not the case that life, um, immediate that sentience emerges with the dawn of life, but then it gradually develops out of processes that are to do with the sensory motor complexity of the organism. Um, AND I would tend to agree with, um, Godfrey Smith that we need a kind of gradualist picture. And Evan Thompson also argues for this in a paper on biopsychism that he published. Um, THAT There isn't really a good argument from. Uh, THE Differential responsiveness that you see in the behavior of simple organisms like E. COLI that are able to do chemotaxis where they are drawn towards food sources and move away from acids that could be potentially dangerous to them. So that kind of avoidance behavior I think is not enough for pain if we go back to the pain example again. And so we can ask, well, where did pain first arise in um nervous system, er sorry, in organisms. And I think it first arose with organisms that had a nervous system. Um, AND so when did you first get nervous systems, when there was the right, well, when you had organisms that could start to move and how to coordinate their sensing with their moving. So the beginnings of of sentience, I've argued in a recent chapter. Um, ARE sensory motor, uh, coordination. As soon as you have organisms that do sensory motor coordination, then you have organisms that need to be able to, to have arousal, and they need to have valence, the ability to feel the difference between, you know, what is good, what is bad for the organism's self-maintenance. So I think we can make an argument that with sensory motor agency. You get the beginning of um of sentience. In that you get this valence and you get arousal. Um, BUT before there were any nervous systems. Then I think you, you have sense making for sure, so you have cognition that I don't think you have sentience yet. Can we explain the feeling of being alive? Yes, we can, um, but it needs to be a gradualist explanation, I think. And, so one that sees. There being intermediate cases maybe where it isn't straightforwardly obvious whether there's valence and arousal or not. Um, IN between sorts of cases like Godfrey Smith has argued for and probably. On different er branches of the tree of life, you see different forms of sentience as well, in that different life forms inhabit different environments and are sensitive to those environments in different ways. So again, Godfrey Smith has er. Has written beautifully about this in the Metazoa book and before that in the, the other Minds book about the cephalopods, um,

1:02:30 Ricardo Lopes: But then I mean, I mean if we need to have sensory motor agents and for that we need to have a, if I understood it correctly, a nervous system, then I mean that would exclude plants from sentience necessarily.

1:02:54 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah, so I, I'm happy to say that, um, or I'm willing to concede and not everyone wants to agree with this that. That plants are not sentient, um. So I'm not a panpsychist. Nor am I a biopsychist, so panpsychists say that. Uh, THAT the universe contains, well, it is conscious in some sense, and, and that can be developed in different ways. There are different versions of panpsychism. Um, AND then the biopsychist says, no, the, the universe matter is not, uh, conscious. But er it takes a certain kind of organization to be to be sentient and that's the organization of living systems. And then the gradualist position is that. Uh, BIOPSYCHISTS are wrong. Not all living systems are sentient. Rather sentience is something that. Um, EMERGED at a certain level of complexity, um, where that the, the kind of complexity that's required is to have a. A nervous system. And I think that nervous, well, there's the biology of where did nervous systems first evolve. Um, AND there are theories like, um, Fred Kaiser here in the Netherlands. Who argue that nervous systems are for sensory motor coordination, so the first nervous systems, Evolved for the purpose of coordinating sensing and moving, so think about jellyfish as an example of this where, You've got a multicellular organism that has these, the cells that are distributed across its body and it has to solve the problem of how to coordinate. The activity in those cells so as to move through its environment smoothly. Uh, SO solving that problem of sensory motor coordination I think is where where we first got sentience from.

1:05:04 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, uh, that's about the feeling of being alive. Uh, DO you think that we can use the, or the free energy principle, uh, as we've explored it earlier through a more ecological and active, uh, perspective, uh, can, uh, that it can help us understand the self. I mean, what, what is the self exactly?

1:05:35 Julian Kiverstein: Uh, WELL, the self is not one thing, so, uh, like, like with, with pain, it's, it's a complex construct again, um. Um, NO, so we might think that pain is, is very simple and you're gonna find it in the, in simple organisms that do approach a void, and so there's not any complexity to it, but actually that's not the case even in, in simple organisms that. Have nervous systems and can feel pain, it still has a complexity to it. Uh, AND that complexity evolved and became more complex in different life forms as I've been describing, but it's the same for the self. So I, I think that the self arguably begins with, uh, subjectivity. And so the, the first. Uh, GLIMMERS of sentience. Uh, ARE accompanied by a sense of selfhood, and, and the notion of the self there is what Susan Hurley called a, a dynamic singularity. You know, um, that. Is anchored in the body, so it's a kind of bodily self. Um, SO pain is an experience of the bodily self in, in a way that, um, I, I started to unpack earlier on in that it's, it's an, uh, it's sensed in the body first of all, um, but it, it's also an experience that then shapes your perception and action. So how you engage with the world. So, so pain is kind of centered in the body. Uh, AND is the experience of a bodily self, and it's through the pain experience that then you experience the world. That's what makes it an experience that has this intentional structure of connecting the body to the world. The body and world are arising together. That's the phenomenology of it. But on the body side of things, there is the, the self as the subject of that experience, so. Subjectivity or selfhood. I think go together in the sense that there's er a a kind of selfhood that's to do with ah this is happening to me. I have a sense of ownership for this experience. I have a sense of agency for it in that the actions I initi I initiate because I'm having this experience are my actions. So there's a kind of mindness. An ipsaity to use the phenomenological term. That originates in the body. Uh, THAT is a part of the structure of every experience, so selfhood begins with this, with the embodiment of our experiences, the, the body is the self or subjects, that's uh. Maleonte, Maurice Malloponte, the phenomenologist's way of putting it, that the body is our medium of experience and by which he means that the, the body is both a subject and an object, it's the. It's er it's an embodied self that is the subject of our experiences. So how would we then begin to explain that notion of selfhood? Well, in the predictive processing theory, they model the self using processes of multi-sensory integration. So the, the layers of processing within predictive processing that are bringing together into a coherent model. The different streams of sensory information that can be from the external senses, but also from inception from what's happening inside of the body. This process of integrating those different. Um, SENSORY streams. Gives rise to a bodily self that has a point of view on the world. And in predictive processing that's thought of very much as a self model inside of the brain that the brain is constructing. Um, BUT I, I would like to, to offer a more ecological and active interpretation of that where. OK. The, you know, the process of the multi-sensory integration is something that doesn't just happen in the brain, it, it involves the whole body in its uh dynamic interactions with the world.

1:10:06 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, AND, OK, and, uh, how would, would that play out then? I mean, what would that ecological and active, uh, approach to the self entail, and I mean, in what ways would it differ from our more traditional approaches to the self?

1:10:28 Julian Kiverstein: This is where I think the the free energy principle is important to have in view because um. It starts from the the idea of um that living systems to exist. HAVE to act according to this imperative of minimizing free energy. So it goes back to the the Schrodinger idea in what is life that that living systems are systems that are are able to to make use of thermodynamics to continue to exist. And, so they're able to make use of the, the energy around them, um, their own metabolic resources, so as to, to continue to exist over time. And uh in so, so living systems are resisting this tendency towards disorder by making use of thermodynamic energy to. To survive. Um, AND the free energy principle gives you a way of unpacking that mathematically. That idea of um self-maintenance, the maintaining of the organization of the organism. Uh, SO I would first of all see free energy, uh, the free energy principle as something that's working at the level of the whole organism as a living system. Um, AND that's not necessarily how Kyl interprets it, so this is my own Karl Friston, this is my own kind of perspective on it, but we've published work together about nested Markov blankets that that fits with this organism. Uh Centered way of thinking about life. And, uh, so I think that there's not an um an incompatibility there actually in the way that I would read Free Energy principle and and Karl Fristen's work. I think his work can be read and interpreted in lots of different ways and, and the ecological inactive reading is one way of doing it. So then thinking about the self, that the self is an organism, um. So, um, well, that I, I, I, that kind of contradicts what I said earlier about the gradualism, so I need to take that back a little bit. Yeah, so I, I think, um, in understanding the, the free energized free free energy minimizing processes that. Uh, THAT are generating selfhood and subjectivity, we need to start from the whole organism in its environment, that's the ecological inactive part of it. And the organism is this self-producing adaptive. Uh, Um, COMPLEX system, um, so, you know, starting from that whole complex adaptive system and its environment, I think we can get an explanation of, of selfish. Tony Chimiro has this new book called Intertwined Creatures. Tony Chimiro is one of the radical embodied cognitive scientists that I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion. And in that book he's he's concerned with self and other and and uh understanding self and other using the tools of embodied radical embodied cognitive science and dynamical systems theory, ecological psychology. And I think the talk the story he tells there is is about the dynamics within the agent environment system that he he's interested in synergistic dynamics. And there's a there's a bridge there that I think we can build. Tony would disagree with this, so that's er something that we can maybe talk about, but I think there's a bridge that we can build from. The dynamical self-organizing ideas that he's describing in that book intertwined creatures and. And the free energy principle ideas.

1:14:26 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So I would like to ask you now, um, and I just have two more topics that I would like to cover today, um. I mean, because uh you approach things from a 4E cognition perspective, I, I mean actually we can expand it to a 5E cognition perspective because you also have the ecological cognition aspect with, I, I mean, what are then the boundaries of the mind? I mean, does it have uh specific boundaries

1:15:03 Julian Kiverstein: or. So it's thinking about the boundary of the mind, um, so in the free energy principle, the, the boundary is mapped onto. A Markov blankets, so there's er sensory and active states that, Are separating the body from the rest of the environment, so they act as a kind of interface between the the body and the world in the standard kind of formulations of the. Free energy principle, but in our ecological inactive reading of it, we tend to think of the sensory and active states. Um, THAT, uh, as coupling the agent and environment, so we start from this idea of, um, sensory motor loops, and that are dynamically. Uh, UNFOLDING in ways that are, are closed by the things that we're engaging with in the world. So these are, are loops that we, we close through our interaction with the world. Um, AND if you think of the, the, the self as what Susan Hurley called this dynamic singularity that anchors these different sensory motor feedback loops in the body. Then the boundary that separates the self from the world becomes more fluid and negotiable. Um, IT'S not this fixed boundary. And I know that we're gonna get on to talking about enculturation later, but I think this is a place where we, we see the, the way that the boundary between the agent and the environment is fluid and negotiable. And I can talk more about how that's the case, but now the picture that I think we should move towards here is one where there's not this kind of. Biological boundary, a membrane. And that is somehow. Enforcing a separation of the agent from its environment. Uh, Instead, we should think in terms, uh, and Susan Hurley brilliantly in her 1998 book Consciousness in Action, also a very. Influential book for me. And she already highlighted that. That that boundary er between the the organism and the environment is not separating the organism from the environment, instead. There's there's this constant reciprocal feedback that goes on from the environment back to the agent and from the agent back out into the world. So you have a complex system where because of the continuous reciprocal influence of the agent on the environment and vice versa. We should start from thinking of this in terms of a single system. And so the boundary is always fluid and and can be penetrated, can be negotiated by the, the things that we're engaging with in the environment. So to put that in less metaphysical terms, think about the relationship between humans and their technologies and tools and artifacts and how the, the kind of expertise and skills that we have to go back to starting from thinking about habits and skills are ones that incorporate. The tools and technologies become incorporated in our habits and skills in all kinds of ways. You know, so mobile phones, so if you have them in your pocket and you're having a conversation with me right now, then that's gonna change the character of the conversation because you're gonna be sensing your mobile phone and whether it's going off in your pocket or not. Um, AND that will affect, you know, to, to what extent you're able to, you know, to be present and to listen to what I'm saying to you, um. So the boundary between you and and your environment. I think is is one that Because of the way that we make use of tools and technologies now as human beings is one that uh is not fixed and uh it's more plastic and and undergoing change all the time.

1:19:30 Ricardo Lopes: So finally, let's get then, and you've already alluded to it just a few minutes ago, let's get into the topic of culture and culturation. From this perspective of ecological and active cognition, how do you approach culture and enculturation?

1:19:56 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah, so, um, again, it's a, it's an interesting question. All of your questions have been super interesting, um. Um, SO. I'm going to approach it via thinking about the extended mind, which we already touched on, so. The key idea in in that famous paper by Andy Clark and Dave Chalmers on the extended mind was, you know, where does the the mind end and the world begins, so that's about this boundary between mind and world. Mhm. And uh I already suggested that that boundary is fluid and negotiable, so it's not fixed over time. So when it comes to thinking about culture. Uh, AS something that is part of the world, we can ask, well, where, where does the, the mind as something biological. And culture on the side of the world, where do these two things meet up? And I want to say that instead of thinking in terms of a dichotomy of biology and culture, we should instead think that that that the kind of animals that we are. Uh, AS human beings, so this is a question, what makes us human? We are cultural animals, we are, we are shaped profoundly by our social, cultural environments in development, so that goes back to our earlier discussion of development, you know, we see. The difference that social adversity, for instance, can make to developmental processes and so whether somebody develops chronic pain, for instance, can be profoundly influenced by the social adversity that they encounter can make it more likely that a pain experience can become chronic pain that persists for a long time. Um, SO how does that happen? Well, through the influence of stressors, for instance, on, On um on the body. Um, BUT you asked me about enculturation, so if we think of biology and culture as, as influencing each other dynamically. Then instead of thinking of of culture as something like er along the lines of a memetic model, where there's er something that gets transmitted to us in the environment through social learning processes or cultural learning processes and then. The, the, uh the meme is the, the vehicle that carries this kind of cultural knowledge that then gets internalized by the brain. Um, WE would rather think of the, the. Ecology that we inhabit as human beings as already structured and shaped by social cultural practices. So our form of life as human beings is a is a social cultural form of life from the outset. And then in development. Uh, ECOLOGICAL psychologists talk about the process of the education of attention and intention by others in our social environment, in our social group. And those others are educating us as to what information we can pay attention to in developing our perception action systems, what affordances are going to show up for us as as ones that we can then perceive and pick up information about. That process of developing these perception action skills so the education of attention and intention is happening in our uh encounters with other people. So this leads to a view of um. Of inculturation where in the extended mind literature, so in people like Richard Minari for instance or Mark Rowlands. They emphasize strongly how our plastic brains are, are shaped in all kinds of ways by cultural practices, by mathematical practices, by writing practices, by reading. This changes the brain in profound ways, and they think of this in terms of a kind of process of cognitive integration, they describe it where, Certain brain processes get reused for cultural purposes. Um, AND so that involves a kind of process of taking something from the culture like literacy. And then kind of Having it installed on neural hardware that then gets reshaped by those cultural practices. But I want to defend a, a, a third wave view of the extended mind that I've developed with Michael Kirchoff, that instead of thinking of, Um, inculturation in terms of this process of internalizing cultural forms of knowledge in the hardware of the brain. We instead think of humans as, as locuses of or loci, locuses is not a word, loci of coordination, you know, where all of the different cultural practices that organize the things we do are centered on the body as this dynamic singularity, but the body, uh, is part of this, these, uh, this cultural ecology of practices. Um, WHERE the body internal, well, it doesn't internalize it, it develops certain skills, but those skills cannot be, you know. In terms of the dynamic engagement of the agent and the environment, we can't say that the skills are once and for all the internalization of the cultural practices, so now the practices can be thrown away. But instead we should think in terms of the, this agent in a cognitive ecology, which is a, a, a position that you find in Ed Hutchins's work on distributed cognition, for instance.

1:26:06 Ricardo Lopes: Right, uh, so yeah, I, I was actually going to ask you, uh, uh, because, uh, it's good that you mentioned distributed cognition right there at the end. I mean, when it comes to a culture. I mean, do you think we should always approach it as a distributed form of cognition, because I mean culture, at least as far as I understand it and even through your own framework, I think this would also apply is not something that exists in the minds of. Individuals but is distributed across a collective, correct, or or is that or is that or is that not the right way of looking at it.

1:26:57 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah, so that's why I was, I was talking about a cognitive ecology that that the, the cultural forms of knowledge are indeed distributed across the. The collective that inhabit that particular ecology, um. So it's a, a form of cultural knowledge is a form of collective intelligence in that you know it's distributed over multiple agents that contribute in different ways to the the maintaining of that cultural form of knowledge. Um, SO in the, the famous Hutchins navy ship. Example where he went onto a US Navy ship and did an ethnography of the, the problem solving behaviors of the. Uh, OF the, the people that were sailing the ship navigating, uh, through the seas, um, he was, was describing there how the problem solving was distributed across the, the whole group across the team. And, so it's a kind of collective intelligence that he's describing and. And I think what goes for that example of er of the navy ship would apply more generally as well to cultural forms of knowledge that they're they're distributed forms of knowledge that are scaffolded in many ways by the. The tools and technologies that we make use of. Uh, SO cognitive ethnographers talk about these tasks, space-time configurations as where cognition happens um. And we need to go into the wild and observe those kind of tasks, space-time configurations to understand how cognition works so. So I think that that's still a very important uh line of research within 4E cognition, this cognitive ethnography. Where we actually observe and describe, this is a link with phenomenology again, how, how is it that problem solving and cognition works in the wild.

1:29:08 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, BUT then, uh, does the ecological and active framework that you, um, I mean, I mean, uh, that, that basically you've been, uh, building up through your work, uh, can it also apply to understanding A collective intelligence and cognition that is not, that does not operate strictly within individuals but is distributed across individuals.

1:29:47 Julian Kiverstein: I think that uh you know, so far a lot of the work that's been done on. Ecological psychology has been focusing on dyadic interactions between. Individuals or on small groups. You know, so Studying cognition within larger, studying collective intelligence and looking at how intelligence works within larger groups and organizations and institutions. Um, I think that's something that's beginning to happen. Or has been happening for a while in in distributed cognition, in cognitive ethnography. And And so getting a kind of conversation going between ecological psychology and the methods that are used there and and this distributed cognition and ethnographic research I think is valuable. And and some of those conversations are beginning to happen and I think that's exciting. The other thing that I would look at is the concept of affordances, so. Um, WE haven't really talked much about how affordances are used in the work that we do, but we tend to, uh, try to have an understanding of affordance that can connect people that work in ecological psychology that are more concerned with social psychology, so and looking at social interactions between people. And perception and action, people who are looking at kind of skilled behavior. So we try to develop a concept of affordance which uh can be useful for both of those communities within ecological psychology. Um, um, SO we start from thinking of affordances in relation to social cultural practices. Um, AND that's, that's the link to the kind of collective intelligence that comes from cultural forms of knowledge in that that. That kind of knowing is there in the members of practices who have been trained to develop certain skills and expertise so that they can take part in a practice to think about craftspeople as an example of this, um. And, and so affordances we then think kind of. Are something that grow out of and develop out of these social cultural practices. At least for animals that are social and cultural forms of life, um, that goes for many animals, uh, not just humans. But the environments that social, cultural forms of life inhabit. Have affordances that come from the ways in which the environment has been modified. And given structure, I think about niche construction by the, the social cultural ways of life of those animals. So there are certain affordances that kind of grow and develop out of social cultural practices. And those affordances we think are also important for understanding collective intelligence and And more social cultural forms of intelligence.

1:32:57 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, no, no, that, that is really very fascinating, and as we were talking, I Uh, I, I can't, uh, avoid seeing the many different connections that there, that can be made across several different disciplines. I mean, I, I can even think about anthropologists and psychologists that I've interviewed and, uh, biologists as well and how there's a line here that could run all the way from uh Uh, but, uh, even evolutionary biology, developmental biology, uh, and then cognitive science, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and, and, uh, cultural anthropology, and even within anthropology, a more human behavioral, uh, science kind of framework, and then adding, and then adding ecological psychology to it and Uh, concepts like affordances and then when it comes to the extended evolutionary synthesis, the work of people like John Od linksmi and niche construction and all of that, and then, uh, I mean several different approaches within, um, cultural psychology, social psychology, and even, uh, cultural evolutionary theory. Um, THERE are several different approaches that people have to understand, to understanding culture and all of that, because I, I, I mean, of course it's not that all of exactly everything from all of those disciplines perhaps. Uh, WOULD fit together and, uh, and it was a, a complete picture, but uh, but uh I, I, I definitely see, uh, lines that can run through all of them in a, in, in a more multidisciplinary kind of approach and framework.

1:35:05 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah, so I think the way I would see the thread there that you're that you're uh that you're pulling on is that all of these different fields that you just mentioned are in the end concerned with the question of what it is to be human. And, and I think that that we get an answer to that question also from, um, from the ecological and active cognitive scientists that converges in many ways with all of those different fields that you just pointed to in, in thinking that we are in cultured beings and the the culture and and sociality are, are fundamental to the kind of existence that we lead as human beings and, and that's also a central theme in phenomenology, so. I find it fascinating that that the phenomenological understanding of what it is to be human is one that is converging in so many ways with um with what science is telling us as well. So we have a and and this convergence, I think, you know, points to the. The possibility of Having a scientific naturalistic understanding of the sorts of things that phenomenologists were saying about what it is to be human, um. And In the end, I want to be a naturalist in how I think about the mind and and life. Um, AND, you know, so this kind of convergence, I think helps us to, to see how one could have a phenomenological. Perspective and at the same time hold on to a naturalistic metaphysics.

1:36:45 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, no, definitely, and I think that we can, uh, it would be possible even for us to go to take a step further when it comes to even the epistemology of science because science is also a sociocultural institution that is embedded within a particular socio-cultural context and Uh, I mean, even many of the ideas that people produce in science, I mean, um, we do not need to look at them as just, uh, abstract things, but as things that come about or arise from a particular socio-cultural environment where then for understanding how it operates. We could again apply the sort of framework we've been talking here about today uh with all the different lines that I just mentioned that could run through many other disciplines.

1:37:55 Julian Kiverstein: Yeah, Yeah, that's very interesting that. That actually And that Practice of doing science itself is one that can be understood using these um ecological inactive ideas, so you get a kind of naturalized epistemology from uh ecological inactive cognitive science as well, yeah, fascinating, yeah. Yeah. One thing that we didn't get to which I maybe I want to just bring up briefly before we close, is the idea of neuropheenomenology and. So the central idea there was that there's this reciprocal constraint between phenomenology and and science. Um, AND I think you've just illustrated the, the bidirectionality there nicely that, um, that phenomenology gives us this constraint in the sense that it, it gives us a way of. Describing and analyzing what needs to be explained about the mind and what it is to be human by science. But, um But at the same time, science is a constraint on phenomenology in that science can lead to all kinds of discoveries. Um, Mellop Ponte's examples were neurological patients, but uh we can think about, uh, other kinds of altered states of consciousness, for instance, that will lead us to refine our phenomenological descriptions. And I think that constraint can also be applied to scientific knowledge and thinking about how scientific knowledge is produced that we can. We can think that if you have a phenomenological perspective, then you're gonna see science as something that is a practice that happens in the life world and the kinds of knowledge that we can produce and generate by doing science. ARE um Uh, ways of knowing the world that come from the kinds of environments that we construct as scientists and the practices that we have as scientists. So, um, so this kind of. Um, DIALOGUE as it were between phenomenology and science can lead to, to an understanding of scientific knowledge and science as well as a kind of practice, a cultural practice that we engage in. Um, AND that isn't necessarily a constructionist picture, we can still have a kind of objectivity to scientific knowledge within that. It's just that we need to think of um of objectivity in a more human centered way, not as a view from a view from nowhere but in relation to to human practices where science is another kind of human practice.

1:40:33 Ricardo Lopes: Right, right, no, no, that is really fascinating. So, er, Doctor Kiversin, er, just before we go, er, would you like to tell the audience where they can find your work on the internet?

1:40:48 Julian Kiverstein: Sure, yeah, so, um. You can find most of my work on research gate on academia, um. And we tend to try to publish open access, or most of the publications that we've been discussing are open access app uh publications that you can easily get hold of, um. You can find the details of the Lemon Tree Center that Ricardo I mentioned I'm part of. We have a website called the Lemon Tree Center Point NL, which we're based in the Netherlands, um, so go visit our website if you want to know more about the work that we're doing in between. Uh, PHILOSOPHY and psychiatry, which is not something that we really got to discuss today, but it's a whole another area of the things that I'm involved in. And yeah, thanks so much Ricardo for a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed it.

1:41:45 Ricardo Lopes: No, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, and I agree that it was a very fascinating conversation. Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Mulleran, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingberrd, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forst Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognun, Machael Jonathan Labran, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punter DaRosmani, Charlotte Blis Nico Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel Pancortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, and Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Jr. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Gelbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Janaertner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank, Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlo Montenegro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.