Bio

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Andrea Hiott is a philosopher, author & educator with degrees in philosophy & neuroscience (UGA, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, currently at Universität Heidelberg). She also has an M.A. in world heritage (department of urban planning & civil engineering), has worked in transportation and development, and has been a researcher with the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig) and Northoff Lab (Ottawa). She is the host of Love & Philosophy and a founder of Making Ways. Her upcoming book is Holding Paradox: How to Hold Paradox in a World That Demands Certainty.

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“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

― Wilfrid Sellars

https://youtu.be/ZqlVhnaI3u0?si=8YkqHdMoEkjQ_FSt

General questions

Holding Paradox from Iff Books

• Given your it’s your first time on the podcast, can we start with a brief discussion on your upcoming book?

  Scientists, philosophers, and seekers have an important role to play in this transition: to hold the contrasts and bifurcations, the dualisms, rather than decide between them or prove one against the other. It is no exaggeration to say that this is a momentous task, and the world depends upon it.

  • I was deeply intrigued by this statement as it’s in deep affinity to Slavoj Žižek’s ontology of the The Parallax View.

  This book provides a new way to approach this task by telling the story of the hippocampus — also known as the brain’s 'GPS' and the seat of memory — a literal collection of neurons with names such as place cells, border cells, head direction cells, and so on. The research arc of how this came to be, how the hippocampal formation holds both memory and movement at once, shows us how to hold contradictions without resolving them and thereby discover new capacities. Herein lie new conceptual keys for moving beyond traditional dualisms — the mental and the physical, time and space — as well as a peek into the constellation of potentials waiting beyond any either-or threshold.

  • What is your philosophical interest in neuroscience and theoretical biology?
  • Would love for you to flesh out your use of paradox in the philosophy of neuroscience.
  • This excerpt also reminded me of the philosopher Rafael Holmberg’s writings on German Idealism and Neuroscience (Holmberg, 2023), which I’d love to discuss.

• As a philosopher working on paradox what’s your interest in the free energy principle and active inference?

  • I’d like to bring up unexpected perspective psychoanalysis especially (Dall’Aglio, 2024) variant of A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis: Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty.

• Do you take an enactive approach to your thinking or do you think most contemporary enactivist be it a Gallagher or Di Paolo don’t hold paradox or take contradictions seriously enough?

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating

• To lay some groundwork what is your characterisation of radical embodied cognitive science (RECogSci)? Worth outlining what you mean by embodiment because it’s one of those polymorphous terms.

  • For instance, what is a ‘cognitive map’ through RECogSci?

• Does embodiment necessitate the “real meat” of biology? I’m curious to discuss the neorationalist philosopher Peter Wolfendale who argues against “somatic chauvinism” here.

• Can you outline your reformulation of the representational mind as opposed to the classical symbol approach to representationalism?

  • Do you have a critique of the non-representationalists? Or would you rather hold this paradox or irreconcilable gap between representationalism and non-representationalism?

• This reminds me of the symbolic-imaginary-real registry in the Lacanian theory.

  We might consider ‘neural representations’ to be communicative assessments that are the best we can make in the moment we are making them.

  Neural representations are not in brains, but they are communicative interactions that help us better understand them.

• What is way-making?

• A big part of your project is moving beyond dichotomies - what does this mean to you?

• Through this RECogSci perspective where we cannot locate representations or memories as specific "hieroglyphs" inside the brain what does the future of neuroscience look like? Do we need a new language, perhaps?

• A beautiful conclusion:

  … but we can now see that to be hungry for representations is part of being human, for it means to be hungry for communicative ways of assessing the world and better understanding it.

  In the spirit of holding paradox, way-making extends the radical embodiment program whereby cognition is understood and described in terms of agent-environment dynamics but allows for it to embrace representation as a communicative measurement of those same dynamics.

• What about abstract reasoning like doing maths or logic?