Consciousness and Cognition with Cognitive Scientist Fred Cummins

TRANSCRIPT PART TWO:

Bonus Feeling of Being Alive with Fred

Fred Cummins: [00:00:00] There we

Andrea Hiott: go.

Fred Cummins: Okay.

Andrea Hiott: Hello Fred. I'm alive. You're alive. We're both alive. That's reason for celebration. We were before we

Fred Cummins: pushed the button as well.

Andrea Hiott: What? We were before, yeah. We were before the button, the button was pressed to record and we are now still alive. That's good.

Fred Cummins: But now, now we're being recorded.

Andrea Hiott: Now we're being

Fred Cummins: recorded. So this is leaving a trace. Conversations don't often leave demonstrable traces.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, well, this one's leaving all kinds of traces, and what kind of spaces, over what kinds of times and spaces, we don't know, but Can you hold up your hand again? You have a dot on your hand.

Fred Cummins: Two of them.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, can you tell me about that? It always intrigues me. It makes me I see that, I can fill it in my own palm, you know?

Fred Cummins: You can.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. I feel it in my palm.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, well, you're in the Christian sphere. You know about stigmata.

Andrea Hiott: I know. Yes, of course. I grew up with, uh, [00:01:00] quite a, shall we say, education in all of that, so maybe that's why I feel it, you know.

I used to have these dreams when I was a little kid about hiding with, like, Jesus when he was trying to get away.

Fred Cummins: Um, you may know I've been troubling the way we talk about vision and seeing.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. I know. I've been trying to watch some of those.

Fred Cummins: And I think about this an awful lot. And I'm aware of a great deal of lacunae of, of, of things that our discourse about the visual manifestation or the manifestation of the light omits.

Um, so I experiment with these, I see with my hands. I see perfectly well with my hands, now nobody can make sense of that. So those are eyes, [00:02:00] are you

Andrea Hiott: saying? Those are points of seeing?

Fred Cummins: see like this, right?

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Oh, the little brain is back. Hello, Mr. Brain. The brain with the googly eyes on it. Most people think of

Fred Cummins: themselves.

And this is not my image of myself. Um, but in India, when people go to a temple, they go to, not to see the God, but to be seen by the God. They are, they have an elaborated discourse in which the reciprocity. of your encounter with the visual manifestation is clear. Now we like to say, I see, as if I had something inside me.

Andrea Hiott: Uh,

Fred Cummins: but there's a hell of a lot here that I see, but that is not inside me. I assure you, I just knew this and there's the sky and there's the clouds, you know,

So they have a word, Darshan, which I find is lacking from our vocabulary. It has to do with this recognition or being seen. The other aspect, [00:03:00] we have interest, intromissive theories of vision.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Fred Cummins: As if something was going in. And we know about extromissive theories of vision. And those of us in the 4E world sort of think there's something wrong with both of those.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Fred Cummins: So when I was going to India, I was going to study temples, visit temples, add it to Indian spirituality, and um, Was this related

Andrea Hiott: to the joint speech that you, when you went, or was this before?

Fred Cummins: Well,

Andrea Hiott: that

Fred Cummins: led me to this kind of thing. Let's say, I going to find, but I'm going over to India. I'm going, um, I was all planned for a big six week temple tour and I was going to a specific temple, which I didn't get to, uh, to abandon ship after, um, 48 hours in India and fly home in an emergency.

Um, but on my second day, there was one temple I'd been looking at in Bangalore, and it was very mysterious to me. Uh, there was all kinds of gods on the outside. It was in the [00:04:00] middle of a city street. It's filthy. There's big piles of rubbish outside from the way from the worship, which generates amounts of worship.

And there was a heavy traffic going in and I don't know who the gods are and I'm not going to go in there as a tourist. Um, but I really, really wanted to see what was inside and I was sitting there at the end of my second day. I was looking in Google Earth at the photos of the inside of the temple and I really wanted to go into the temple, but I didn't know how to go into the temple.

In the evening, I draw eyes on here. Blue, red rays coming out. The only luxury I had taken with me to India was my markers. I drew my eyes on the hand. I went over to the worshipers like this and they almost carried me into the temple.

Andrea Hiott: What?

Fred Cummins: They came out, fed me, drummed for me, were hugging me. We went inside.

I was completely within here. We were worshiping and crying together and they were astonished that I saw them the way that I saw them. Um, the only word I could use for it was [00:05:00] Darshan. I see you as you see me, if you like. And they said, you don't see us that we're poor and so on. And it was. Mind breaking, boggling.

I went over there for temple experience. This was a goddess worshiping cult, which is very much, um, of my sympathies. A tantric cult. There was still sacrifice there. It was not inside the Brahminical order. I was right not to go in as a tourist.

Andrea Hiott: Okay.

Fred Cummins: But I was right. To do this. My intuitions were correct.

So these tattoos, tiny little ones, but they're enormously effective for me in thinking imaginatively thinking with my hands and getting how I see and I'm seen and how I hang in the world.

Andrea Hiott: That's very strong.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, well, we all have strong imagination.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, because it's, we often use seeing and vision. We think of, I mean, there's this kind of eye.

This focus on the eyes, um, in terms of like, [00:06:00] because we, it can seem like that's our main source of sensory data because we forget the whole body's doing the seeing, I guess, but it gets confusing when we talk about seeing and vision. I think you're entangling that a little bit in your videos, but I haven't watched them all yet, but.

Fred Cummins: I am. And

Andrea Hiott: that's interesting to think about it like that. And you have this reminder in the middle of your hands, in your palms, which are such a, yeah.

Fred Cummins: There's a confusion between these two.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, exactly.

Fred Cummins: We actually have two eyeballs, which don't make sense of our integrated seeing as a whole. I know the neuroscientists try to bind together the two streams and so on.

But there's a confusion here because this, uh, the capital letter I, that is the assertion of oneself as an independent entity, is just as much a problem as the consideration that one is a detached observer of the world. They're confused. There's lots of issues that hang around our symbolism and our language that are not well represented in print.

It's no, it's no, accident, [00:07:00] those two words are confused, and that they sound the same.

Andrea Hiott: No, that's true. And that, yeah, that, yeah, the vision means so much in so many different, um, what do we say, disciplines, languages, walks of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, vision quests, and all of these kind of things where you don't have to be able to have two eyes, but, Yeah, you know my friend I have a good friend and she has a son who's probably half my age, you know, and He's you know At the age where he's thinking about philosophy and stuff a lot and he's been really into a lot of these people who say everything Is a hallucination

Fred Cummins: Yeah,

Andrea Hiott: it's a no sir, but it's there's you know, it gets picked up all over the place Yeah, with other people too.

Yeah,

Fred Cummins: the word controlled hallucination is sometimes used.

Andrea Hiott: Controlled hallucination. I think that's more what Anil Seth says, [00:08:00] right? But it gets taken as that reality is a hallucination. I think if you probably Googled that on YouTube there'd be 5, 000 videos. I haven't done that, but in any case, he's a young teenager going into whatever, and you know, it's um, it bothered me, but I don't know why it bothered me so much that at that age where he's, you know, an adult going into manhood, you know, going to study in school and all the stuff that he was thinking of everything in life as a hallucination or something.

And maybe it's just, you know, I mean, when I was that age, I was probably reading all kinds of crazy existential stuff that was not that far away from that. Um, but why does it bother me so much? And also having studied neuroscience and like you've said, you know, there's something to it. It's not that we're hallucinating.

I think that's what bothers me. There's a nuance there that is incredibly important.

Fred Cummins: That's missing. You're dead. Right. And I teach now. I say in public, Annalseth should not be doing this. [00:09:00] We should not be exposing people who are not prepared for it to this kind of language. It's entirely misleading and it could be profoundly unsettling for someone at the wrong moment.

It also suggests that That is such a thing as a very good for irritable perception, which you are not having that you're not, you're not real in some sense, you are perfectly real. Discussion of cups of cups and tables can come afterwards and dreams and ambitions. Um, there's nothing at all wrong with your reality of your life, your articulation of it, your engagement with it, your description of it.

Those are the. Good look, that's, uh, that's what we call poetry and living, but, um, to go around simply saying without any caution your experience is unreal is a profoundly stupid thing to do.

Andrea Hiott: And I think, yeah, it does get taken as if there is no reality, you're not real, nothing, it's easy to go into nothing matters, [00:10:00] it's all.

It's all just hallucination anyway, and I don't think Adnil don't have all the study from neuroscience and you're not, it's, it's, it's, I understand why that gets attention, because it's, it's like a matrix, right? I think you even say that in one of your videos about time and space or something about, I understand why that gets our attention, because hallucination There's even something good about thinking of that.

Our own perspec perception and perspective is not completely like, not whole. We need others to complete that perception, but it is our body and it is real and there is a real world and like debating all of these things can become, I don't know, it just seems dangerous at this moment in time. .

Fred Cummins: I, I think it's a very bad message.

I, I think it's, I, I, I sense a certain glibness and superior. Superiority in the, in the, in the messages, if the scientists understood the world better than the person that they're talking to, [00:11:00] um, I don't set the interestingly as a Buddhist Thomas Metzinger talks the same language. He's also a Buddhist.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Fred Cummins: A lot of these people who've got over the idea. We've got over a Christian delusion of a, of an autonomous self-controlled individual who've encountered a way of thinking in which the self is not a stable entity, are all too happy to go out like smarmy ass tech pros and, and get a, get a rise outta people by telling them the wonderful thing that they've realized.

Good for you. And Seth, uh, took you a lot of study in a lot, and it didn't knock you for a wobbler. You were prepared for it. There are things you can find out that will knock you for a wobbler, um, and there are those same things if encountered under different conditions, set and setting, would be illuminating and helpful.

Oh

Andrea Hiott: yeah, that's a good way to say it. It is enlightening and I do, I do see the connection to Buddhism. I don't know if you've studied like Buddhism, probably you have, but I have definitely done a lot of that sitting and going into meditation and finding the non self. Yeah, definitely. [00:12:00] thinking about that, reading it.

Tantra too, you know, there's, in all the traditions there is something like this, but you're right, there's a discipline and there's time and there's usually kind of teachers and helpers and it's kind of, when you're just confronted with it as if it's science, I mean, as science, that science has found out that, Everything is a hallucination, which again, I don't think either of them is saying that, but it, it comes off that way, or that's kind of the soundbite that easily gets attention, then you're right.

It could be incredibly. dangerous and destructive in the same way that actually meditation can be for some people, right? If you experience that moment of non self and you're not kind of prepared for it or in the right moment or with certain drug, drugs that are used these days for the same thing and like, you know, you need a certain kind of gentle care preparation for it.

Fred Cummins: I had a cognitive science student who is a very experienced meditator and very deep in the Buddhist world and she did a thesis on the adverse [00:13:00] effects of meditation, which are very, very rarely talked about.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, there's quite a lot of it. I've, I've seen that research. It's, it can be. And

Fred Cummins: there's no, there's no one a right way to meditate that the whole data is completely misunderstood.

Um, but these days I find myself pushing back. against any idea that there's a western thought and eastern thought that the traditions have something and then and then there's science.

Andrea Hiott: Science

Fred Cummins: at its worst is another bloody religion. Um, science Said that again?

Andrea Hiott: Science at its worst is a religion? Is that what you said?

Is

Fred Cummins: another religion, yeah. That's a strong statement. Yeah. Um, well At its

Andrea Hiott: worst, that's an important point too, but It might not even, it might be more like pseudoscience, right? At its worst.

Fred Cummins: No, pseudoscience, hang on. That's part of the vocabulary here. Yeah,

Andrea Hiott: well, I mean, I just, that's hard for me to think of science as a religion.

Science

Fred Cummins: is a bunch of differentiated means of [00:14:00] acquiring competence in specific domains. We're never tempted to say science is. You know, we can't talk about science Bad science is better, right?

Andrea Hiott: Bad science, not pseudoscience.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, or misunderstood science. Mm

Andrea Hiott: hmm.

Fred Cummins: Those people who have done the best neuroscience are profoundly humbled.

Epistemically humbled, but their work is turned into a travesty of self description, narcissistic projection, and the illusion is awakened that these neuroscientists know what's going on. To inquire into things deeply, especially when it comes to the brain, is to be ever more ignorant, and that's good. I don't mean ignorance in a bad sense.

Andrea Hiott: No, I agree with you and I do, I mean, this is about beyond dichotomy. A lot of the things I try to deal with this, these things really mean a [00:15:00] lot to me and I, that's why I push on the words a bit because I know different people see it in different ways and depending on your, where you're coming from, what you think of as science and religion, I mean, a lot of people could just get turned off just hearing, but, but hearing a statement like that.

There's some, there's something about the, the deeper you go into trying to learn something, the more you realize you don't learn what's right. I like

Fred Cummins: beads, cutlery, grocery beads. What's that?

Andrea Hiott: What are those? Those look familiar.

Fred Cummins: There's a rosary beads and a crucifix and shiva and way over the brain to keep superstition away.

Okay. We don't like superstition around here. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: So you're, you're getting rid of the superstition. That's good. Yeah.

Fred Cummins: Yeah. I have a, I'm Pope, so I can do that.

Andrea Hiott: Do you think of yourself as, um, spiritual, religious, like scientific? I mean, do you ever, do you just not name yourself any kind of agi like?

Fred Cummins: I definitely don't, don't name myself, but, but when this kind of talk comes up, I tend to open my eyes wide and say, I am wildly religious, entirely psychotic, and very happy in that way.[00:16:00]

Um, I don't label myself as an ism or an ist, I engage

Andrea Hiott: in

Fred Cummins: practices that, um, make it quite clear that our discourse around experience and consciousness are miserable, um, and alerts me to the fact that there's so many rumors, mainly from the interaction among the various Dharmic schools, that, uh, you can't ignore that we have potential.

The potential for human experience is vast, whether the word human is correct there is difficult word because all words come from somewhere and we're in the humanist sphere here. You can't get rid of that word without causing anxiety. But if you define it or class, you know, what category boundaries around it, you'll get in trouble.

Um, Yeah, I'm an ecstatic. And, um, if you've never swallowed the cosmos whole, you [00:17:00] haven't lived, as William Blake would have said.

Andrea Hiott: I love William Blake so much. Uh, and that, that also gets to this whole getting past kind of dichotomous thinking or.

Fred Cummins: And, and the hallucination question.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Fred Cummins: Is particularly troubling because it suggests there's a correct way to perceive the world.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it does both at the same time. It suggests there's a correct way and suggests you don't actually have access. Correctly and you don't

Fred Cummins: have it. Recognizing that the cosmos, the manifestation is far bigger than you could ever comprehend. And yet you're in it. And yet you're in it. You're allowed to partake in this.

But you're not allowed to dictate its form and you're not swallowing it whole and you won't exhaust it with representation.

Andrea Hiott: Well, what's so wonderful about all of these things that we're talking about? Because I mean, we're talking about these [00:18:00] almost like they're trouble, but of course you're also saying you're, you're wildly ecstatic.

And I've also, I mean, this, this is like the motivation for a lot of beautiful art and connection and life, all these things we're talking about. And there's a reason for that. And there's something to all of this because actually we. We don't see and perceive everything that is there because we can't handle it, but there are different states or different connections you can make or different ways of learning or just different conversations.

I mean, there's all kinds of ways you start to get a glimpse of what you do. what more there is, but to do that and not discount what is, um, and to hold the space, right, where everything is a little bit, you can never, nothing is ever static and nothing is ever exactly as you perceive it, and yet your perception is very much real and worthy and there, and there's a real world.

It's hard to talk about both.

Fred Cummins: Everything you've said would come as would be so pedestrian and [00:19:00] obvious to anyone with the slightest artistic or poetic sensibility, it's only people who get trapped by a particular kind of positivist academic explaining discourse that begin to have doubts about that. No person in their rational mind and their well being, if they're doing well, Would even begin to suggest that there's a correct way to perceive the world.

Andrea Hiott: I'm not sure either of those are A lot of people fight about that and political situations, you know, that's that's what the fight is about.

Fred Cummins: Well We're fighting.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah,

Fred Cummins: and we have opinions,

Andrea Hiott: but people think they see the world the right way and there's one way to see it That's right. I mean, I don't

Fred Cummins: talk that way.

Andrea Hiott: They might not really believe that but they'll definitely make a lot of, uh, they'll fight about it. So. But they're not

Fred Cummins: talking about the kind of things that cognitive science and a much narrower framework are talking about.

Andrea Hiott: No, no, no. Do they see the

Fred Cummins: world or perceive? But it's connected. Well, [00:20:00] unfortunately, yeah, they're connected and I don't know how to deal with that.

Disentangle

Andrea Hiott: it all. Yeah. Also in science, when you come at it with the science hat or, when you're, when you're doing science, you are engaging in a particular activity that to be, to achieve its aim, we can talk about whether those aims are right or whatever, but you, you do have a process, the method, and you do need to test things over and over and you do need a lot of, you know, and that does lend itself in a.

a bit to bracketing some of the experiences that can't easily fit into that, I guess, you would say. It doesn't mean you don't still believe in them, but

Fred Cummins: I'm going to pull you up on that. Now I've done a bit of science and some of the science. Yeah, you're a cognitive scientist. Self advertising. Um, but some of the science I've done has been very much what you suggested and it has been in the interest of stabilizing observations, observing correctly, Observing in a way that can inform [00:21:00] discussion and required, like I stared for six months at blinks.

I just did nothing but annotate blinks for six months. Some of the science I've done has been done by being ignorant and going out in the world and drowning in it. I'm studying the world to learn from the world. Not to dictate it, or to master it, or to conquer it, but to be open to it. So I'm doing science when I'm walking along the beach whistling a tune.

I'm doing science when I'm out of my brain ecstatic in my temple. I am doing science because I'm inquiring into things in the most general way. Some of what that rigor, but people have this idea of science as if it was A single skill or a single art or as if randomized controlled trials or experiments even were the hallmark of science.

They're not! Experiments are a madness of science. Randomized controlled trials are a particular way of going in agriculture and perhaps medicine. Um, science is looking into [00:22:00] things. It's got to be much bigger than all that. I'm afraid it's our inquiry, but we don't, you know, we, There's no scientific method, and it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, the epistemic virtue of not interfering with your data, making sure everything's completely controlled and the spreadsheets are in order.

That's useful for some kinds of work. Yep. It's not the only virtue.

Andrea Hiott: No, but these are, these are different ways. So do you think of your work as phenomenological kind of science or qualitative or quantitative? I know you wouldn't want to use any of these labels for people who aren't. in the aesthetic, in the way that you are, and we try to bridge all of these things.

Like, how did you get to this kind of spot? Because what you just described, what does work when you have, it depends what, where you've set your parameters and what landscape you're kind of trying to assess, right? But if you're doing something like trying to understand a particular kind of brain disorder, [00:23:00] um, via some particular kind of, uh, chemical or something like that, that's a different process too.

So maybe we could like kind of. Maybe you could help me understand how you got to where you got and if you don't, if you, if you think none of these, like there's no difference between third person, first person, science, phenomenology, I don't know, all these words, qualitative, quantitative, how do you see all that?

Fred Cummins: I'm very reluctant to cast any autobiographical shadow over this discussion, mainly because my autobiography is irrelevant and I just had a particular set of experiences and so I don't, I'm

not in a position to tell anyone else how to address a question. Um, but talking together is a good way of unpacking some things. You spoke of a first person and a third person perspective. Right now, we're in the vocative. We're always in the vocative. All life is lived in the vocative. Both first and third [00:24:00] person accounts are optical metaphors that are slightly stretched too far and ignore other people.

Ham, this relationality in our being. Um, I don't like the, uh, well, I mean, phenomenology has been very important. I learned from whistle and, you know, I learned from all these guys, and, and, and loads more be, be besides. I don't like reading them though, and. One reason I've backed out a little bit, and this is nobody else's problem but mine, is I have reached the limits when it comes to describing experience.

As if experience and consciousness or living in the now could be equated. Have you met The Blind Spot, the book The Blind Spot?

Andrea Hiott: Uh, can you say more? Isn't there a couple of books called The Blind Spot? [00:25:00]

Fred Cummins: This?

Andrea Hiott: Oh, no. No, I haven't. I haven't. Yeah, that's the one I've seen of the, yeah.

Fred Cummins: Evan Thompson with two physicists.

What they do is they correctly position theoretical physics with its claim as the queen of some kind of sciences and with a particular kind of grasp on reality. And they pointed to what they call the blind spot, which is the nature, which is experience, which is the grounding for all investigation, including that of physicists.

Now that's a very good way to approach this question. It doesn't assume that you can simply leave It doesn't disrespect physics, but it says, if you like, physics provides us with one view of non negotiable conditions of being, and that leaves everything still to play for, because it hasn't touched experience.

The physicalism is, can become a religion. [00:26:00] Um, so I love this book, I'm reacting to it in my videos as well, I think it's a really good way, good way to do it because what it does is, you know, the sciences are balkanized, they split, fractured, and developed all these separate disciplines, became involved with technology, stupidly became involved with technology, so that now you can call yourself a science if all you're doing is Engineering, frankly, um, if you're just making doodads or making bombs, you're still a scientist.

Um, science fractured like this, so it's not, it's not any kind of an arena of truth, but by getting each of, each of those domains has competence in the domain. under certain assumptions, that certain terms are just taken for granted, and that certain methods are treated as valid. So each domain has, is sociologically constructed, historically constructed, and limited.

By eliminating all of those, leaving just theoretical physics and embodied cognitive science, we have a wonderful [00:27:00] confrontation. Which I think we can all explore. I think Evan Thompson has done us a solid. He's come out with another banger of a book, but I don't know if anyone's going to listen to it. I'm really, really, really pleased with it.

Oh, he's

Andrea Hiott: wonderful. holding the paradox in exactly the way, I mean, I think about why I'm not a Buddhist or, but, you know, also when I think of mind and life and a lot in that book, closer to Varel and, and, and thinking about phenomenology and thinking about how do we do science from the first person in a way that you kind of described, I mean, um, there's still kind of these distinctions, but I think that the, the thing is, they're, they're never real, the distinctions, but They have, I don't know that I agree with you that we've now, first of all, I don't know that I agree that I would say engineers aren't doing science.

Some of them definitely are and it, it does, there's no one person that fits as just an engineer. It all depends on what you're doing. But also when we look back to where philosophy and science began, all the stuff was very mixed up. Um, So we do make [00:28:00] distinctions in order to kind of understand these things, but I'm not sure there ever are actually really these fine line distinctions.

But what seems to me that's happened is we've gotten confused about those distinctions and those models and those, um, Third person things and these words that we're talking about is as if that's the truth, um, rather than that there isn't actually ever a way to really distill anything that's dynamic in the process.

We seem to have lost that somehow.

Fred Cummins: And, and if you look at the work of actual scientists doing actual scientific work, it doesn't fit any of what we're talking about because it's messy and it combines qualitative and quantitative and it draws on everything in its can and it's got Absolutely, and their own backgrounds often.

Yeah. And it's got politics in there and it's got funding in there and it's got education in there. It's all real scientists do this messy business. My cognitive sciences is a joke, but my, my brother's a soil scientist. Oh, soil S O I

Andrea Hiott: L.

Fred Cummins: Yeah. Soil. Now there you've got, [00:29:00] you've got chemistry and physics and agriculture, archeology and cultural studies and climate you've got such a convergent finger in all those pies.

That's what science is really like. It's a bunch of tools that we use in the domain to get some competence in.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I agree. So, are you pushing back a little on that, because you, you often, you, you, you have a lot of experience in cognitive science. You've done a lot of things. You've come up with the kind of new ideas in cognitive science, but you also talk about it as if it's kind of not worthy of being called what it is.

So, is it because, uh, Like when you're talking about the technology and engineering, do you mean more like, okay, you can think about computation as the brain and then you can kind of study that and that somehow is like too abstracted in some way that, that bothers you or what is it? Like where? Oh,

Fred Cummins: no, no, no, no, no, no.

I mean, if you go back to the 19th century when science suddenly started producing, um, [00:30:00] Results for the consumer and for industry and started contributing to the industrialization process. Um, as it goes on today with every new Apple release. Um, but scientists are busy developing bombs and scientists are busy.

Um, science doesn't distinguish between technological. development, ethical progress, um, boons and curses for mankind. Science is not a kind of an oracle that can make those distinctions. But you're

Andrea Hiott: saying that's what annoys you that, that, because like, I think of the, the, the, all the examples from the second world war where scientists were sort of supposedly sort of co opted to help one side or the other try to win the war.

Um, and, and also now you have consultants, right? Scientists are like consultants for companies and that's gotten very blurry with all the things. So is that, is that what you mean? That kind of. Is

Fred Cummins: it a moral, ethical,

Andrea Hiott: value based kind of thing, bother, [00:31:00] concern?

Fred Cummins: Um, well, in my university, for example, there's a kind of an ideology which informs all public pronouncements.

Um, and the Irish government rose, rose in as well. It sees a particular virtuous sphere of activity, which it calls STEM. Which means science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Now, there's not a single human value in there. I consider that morally bankrupt. And I teach in my university that STEM is morally bankrupt.

That if you do this without connection to human values, you are just as capable of producing an atomic bomb as a vaccine. And STEM is bankrupt. But that's, I live in a world that's totally informed by STEM. I mean, what are you going to do? You can at least Yes,

Andrea Hiott: I mean Your job is sort of informed by that.

So it's, it's weird because when you say that I push, just yesterday, I can't even, I, there was, I was talking to some women about STEM, you know, there's these, [00:32:00] these always you hear about how women don't go into STEM and, um, someone was kind of pushing back on that.

Fred Cummins: 50 percent of women went into STEM or STEM was 50 percent women.

Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: That would be better. Is that what you said?

Fred Cummins: No, that's not what I'm saying.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, no, I didn't hear what you said. I was trying to hear what you said, but it is confusing because those like, there's a reason why those sort of scientists are respected. I'm not saying it's a good reason or a bad reason or anything, but there's, the world has become this kind of STEM world in terms of what, on all these different levels, in terms of the people we respect and kind of hold up as icons in a, in a way.

And then also in terms of what we spend our money on or in terms of who we think is going to solve the climate problem or, you know, if you

Fred Cummins: look at what Einstein wrote, Einstein was not a STEM researcher. Einstein was very clear where ethics [00:33:00] and human values lay.

Andrea Hiott: But people think he's a STEM researcher today.

So that's the confusion.

Fred Cummins: Yeah. No, the thing is, STEM is an ideology that, that, um, drives the economy. It's of great economic value and that generates an enormous, um, political power. Um, it's no accident that the first departments to get culled. Um, when the economic policy is not going too well are those which just deal in human values.

I'm not going to sing the songs of every researcher in every squirrely little humanist department. Some of them are, I'm sure they're looking into crazy shit. So are some of the scientists. You see what I mean? The, the, the blind spot complains about the absence of human experience in the, um, results delivered by physics.

It's forgotten

Andrea Hiott: that it came from

Fred Cummins: human experience.

Andrea Hiott: So that's the blind spot, what you just described in a way about. It's

Fred Cummins: kind of pervasive. [00:34:00]

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And it's funny too, because when you hear stories of Einstein or when people are talking about him, it's almost always for those. human or values or something that he said that resonates with you like as if in the same way

Fred Cummins: And when he gets into the weeds with Bergson, you see he was only, he wasn't even very good at it.

Like Bergson was better than him at it.

Andrea Hiott: Mm hmm. The time space stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, just when you hear him quoted and stuff, it's often spiritual or inspiring quotes from him. It's not, it's not only that, that he did, Give us a kind of language for understanding the world differently through mathematics, which he did too.

Fred Cummins: He hangs up on posters in girls rooms, for God's sake, with his tongue out.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, no, that's what I mean. It's a, it's a very much not a, it's a very lived alive. artful connection that people have with him, even if it's just an assumption or something like that. [00:35:00] But I think it does become kind of the poster for why you might want your kids to go into STEM, you know, because it's respected and that's where the future is.

And it's,

Fred Cummins: it's very interesting to me that the Einstein Bergson debate, which raged for more than 10 years, um, forms a very central part of the argument in the blind spot. And it's always been, it's been central for me as well, and I'm speaking about it a little bit in my videos now as well.

Andrea Hiott: I don't think

Fred Cummins: the page is dead, precisely because the Duret is mixed up with the idea of lived experiences, mixed up with this crazy idea.

I mean, who came up with this? Of the present.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, right. Well, that makes me think of what you Uexkuell too, and the continuous and the discreet and these kinds of confusions. It's a similar, I think, isn't it just hard to understand? Isn't that again? Yeah. A way in which we want it to be one way or the other, rather than holding the space for it to be assessed as one way or the other, rather than ever be one way or the [00:36:00] other?

Fred Cummins: I don't know what we want, but I do know that the manner in which we talk is All mixed up with the ideas we have about, among other things, time and space.

Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah.

Fred Cummins: And, um, those ideas don't belong only to physicists. They belong to embodied beings. Physicists have no notion of now there's no now in physics whatsoever, and space and time have a particular characteristic.

And relativity theory. Don't ask me about quantum theory, I know nothing about it. Mm. Or an embodied being spent time and space are. qualities, they're different and they're centered in the body and in the presentism. And there's no way we can, there's no easy way to solve this, but it is possible to recognize how, um,

two hasty assumptions that we know what the temporalities and [00:37:00] spatialities are that we're talking about. Um, if we don't, if we're not aware of the difficulties in talking about time and space. that concern us, then we tend just to flatten the world into a representation again, because in a representation of the world, you don't have these problems.

That's a snapshot or a picture or a diagram.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, but we think the representation is the process. Like, we don't make the distinction. Searching for math

Fred Cummins: all the time. That's our specialty. That's what we do best.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, yeah. And that's what we, I really like that Thompson wrote it with physicists, for example, instead of, So that, that already helps to get into that interstitial processual place of, we're not ever going to just say it's one way or the other.

This is us trying to figure it out.

Fred Cummins: And it had been Evan Thompson. They did a good job. They, first of all, they, they have respective competences and the competent person wrote each chapter. So, they, they will actually [00:38:00] enumerate all the current, um, um, Interpretations of the dual slit experiment and the relationship between relativity and quantum physics, for example.

And I couldn't be arsed doing that because for me, that's a problem physicists have, but he's got physicists and he writes the phenomenological and cognition chapters, which is very good.

Andrea Hiott: That's wonderful. It reminds me of what you were saying too, about the embodied. There's something connected in all this with what we were talking about with the hallucination in OA2 and this time and space, um, that it's, I think there's a quote you, I've heard you say a few times about when there's no body, there's no time.

Is that von Oxskill too, maybe? I don't know. But,

Fred Cummins: Oh, I think I say time arises in the interaction of the living. That's, that's my, my point.

Andrea Hiott: So again, it's in

Fred Cummins: the interaction of the living. Yeah. I think. And that doesn't have a single scale.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. So.

Fred Cummins: It's not integrable.

Andrea Hiott: In my, when I was writing my master about [00:39:00] the hippocampus and space and time in that way, I did really deep dives into all the things with Einstein and Bergson, for example, but also, you know, like all the mini, there's a lot of debates about space and time over, over the years.

And it began to seem to me, and there's, I can't remember the man's name right now, which I need to look back. But there was one scholar who just. had kind of suggested this and then I sort of went with it, but that those are all confusions in the same way that what you were talking about with representation, that the lived ness of the process of space and time wouldn't even be necessarily need to be called space and time, but If you're gonna need that third space, that system three, I might call it, that representational space, which is very important because it's how we share things, connect, communicate, and so on, then you have to assess it from a certain point of view that needs to be called something like space or something like time.

Um, but it's so hard to, to think about that and not, okay, it must be [00:40:00] absolute or it must be relative or it must be discrete or it must be continuous, you know, what, depending on what you're trying to figure out, it might be, Better to think of it in all those ways.

Fred Cummins: Recall the way that the fabric of world history was altered when you pushed the record button?

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Fred Cummins: There's now a trace of this conversation which otherwise was ephemeral. It's pretty much the same conversation and it's still having effects, but some of them are, are part of that for, of the representational, they, they're capturable. That doesn't mean Yeah, that's an important I would say it's not, it wasn't ephemeral though.

Andrea Hiott: It just would have been less, it would have been between you and I, because we're already using representations to talk, so we would have both had traces of this in our own life, and it would, it would change, but now it's kind of putting it out there in a different way, but yes, I see your point, it's right, now it's represented in a third system space that, It is different.

And that changes space and time in a weird way.

Fred Cummins: It doesn't actually, you just click the button and there's a recording which maybe you'll look at it, maybe someone will look at it, maybe they won't look at it. The [00:41:00] world carries on in its orbit and nothing giant happens when you click that button. But the way that we talk about this conversation is, um, some part of it are, um, in some sense represented.

Are you know inscribed inscribed and those inscriptions can be read. I think I'm coming around to the idea that we we leave traces. We inscribe in a very general sense, possibly even in the sense in which genes and proteins and so on and talk about, um, and that the eminence of the past and the present, um, has to be a function of those traces of all kinds.

I don't mean just physical traces.

Andrea Hiott: Well, I think of them as ways. We, there are ways we make, not only ways that are ours that we take.

Fred Cummins: These guys made a wonderful point that the topic of memory belongs to the duree and [00:42:00] not to the representations. And that for me is wonderful, because I've never known how to come with the topic of memory, because memory is caught up in your own idea of who you are, what your autobiography is, what kind of film reel you think you have going in your head and God knows what, a totally insufficient way of describing the manner in which the past is imminent in the present.

Um, so consigning it to the duree means now if someone asked me about memory, I'll just say, well, what's your philosophy of time? What are we talking about?

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I mean, you can't. Take The weird thing with memory, I mean, I've written about this a lot and studied a lot too, is that it's even just like, there's all kinds of memory that is studied and there's all, all those words are inadequate at the same time and, but it's not dissimilar from the way we try to understand the way we try to communicate in a representational space about something like space and time memory.

It's just that we've tagged the representations to it usually so that either there's [00:43:00] some. In our human way, there's, there's memory that isn't tagged to representations, but we've tagged it to images, we've tagged it to words, so it feels to us like this very different experience when we're thinking of something like episodic memory for humans, that it, it feels special, but the process itself is not that much different from all the other development that the body goes through.

It's just that because we have this incredibly pronounced representational space, and by that I mean the shared space of something like language and something like visuals in all the many different ways that that comes, then we are also constantly kind of taking that back in and it becomes part of our own patterning.

So when we turn our attention to our own patterns, it feels very special because we feel like we're doing something like what we do at night when we dream. And we are, but, um, it's not much different from what we do to be able to walk across the street and, um, you know, remember where, how to get to the refrigerator and move our bodies in certain ways and stuff like that.

It's [00:44:00] just, now we have these tags of images and words to it. And yeah, that's not the memory. That's not the time. That's not the space, but that's how we communicate about it.

Fred Cummins: In our language, we're forced to construct simpler pictures because only, only fairly simple pictures can be communicated. Um, you're familiar, I presume, with the Extended Mind paper, Thomas Clark.

And you remember Otto and Anna. And the way, it was a very good example to use because the Extended Mind thesis was suggesting to people that your mind can leak out of the head. In my experience, that's terribly troubling for people with a psychological training and not so for those who don't because they're not so sure about the mind thing anyway.

And you remember Otto and Anna and the way the memory worked with the notebook and all this memory. Well, as it happened yesterday, I was going to the Museum of Modern Art myself. In New York? No, not in New York, in Dublin. I was like,

Andrea Hiott: wow, that was a quick trip.

Fred Cummins: And I was driving up the motorway on my way there, and I realized, Oh, this is Otto and Anna.

I wonder [00:45:00] how I'd know where to get to the Museum of Modern Art. And I realized I didn't have a goddamn clue. I was confident that I could get there, but I couldn't actually remember the way. I just knew I'd get there. Um, but it was troubling me all the way up. So on my way, I stopped off at my brother's. I was going to meet my brother there.

I thought he wouldn't have left. So I went in. Because he would know the way and he had already gone up to the museum. So I met his wife who gave me directions that just made my head spin. And so all I did was get back in the car and carry on confidently. And I got there no trouble as I knew I would. Um, but it turns out that as much like I'm Anna in this story, but it's not that much too simple a story about Anna there.

Andrea Hiott: Exactly. That's a bit of what I was trying to say. There's these. Nestedness like you have a whole lot of memory before you ever have language or image tagged to it and you don't most of the body's memory doesn't I I think of it as ecological memory or you know, there's all kind of and I don't mean that in the way most people say ecological but I [00:46:00] mean memory is not Most of it is not tagged to language or image in this kind of auto sense where auto I mean he was writing in his notebook kind of how to get places or people can think of it as Signs that show you kind of I mean I'm thinking of the Museum of Modern Art where you need to go the 53rd Street in New York or whatever like that's a kind of memory.

That's at a particular nested scale of this representational way that, or when you write it in your notebook, and the point of that paper that's most important is that if you don't have that certain, you know, you're actually debilitating, uh, what we think of as mind or mental stuff for certain people, and so it's very important that there's kind of access to that.

There's a whole lot of other stuff in that paper, but for me, that feels important, but you know, your body has that without, you know, your body remembers. We all know that.

Fred Cummins: You're a Hegel scholar. You know that there's no one way to talk of memory or imminence or past or history. Or anything,

Andrea Hiott: yeah.

Fred Cummins: And we can do so in, we have to, in order [00:47:00] to.

talk sense at all. We have to constrain this discourse somehow. So, um, memory, I'm particularly uncomfortable with memory precisely because it's so caught up in these questions of time and imminence. Um, and so I can't discuss memory in the abstract. I can, you know, episodic memory, it is useful. Yes, yes. In cognitive science, we're, we're always tasked with these two things.

On the one hand, People are drawn to cognitive science because they want to know about themselves and how they work and what it is to be alive and what's experienced. But then the discussion inevitably comes down to, how do we do this? How do we achieve the daily goals? How do we meet our plans? How do we not fall down?

Are we in cognitive decline or ascent? Are we cognitively failing or succeeding? And so cognitive science becomes behavioral science. And there's every reason for behavioral science, as long as you don't confuse it with the spiritual end of things. That is the, what is the existential end of things, the being alive bit.[00:48:00]

Um, but talk of cognition just gets derailed quickly into this. But I wasn't

Andrea Hiott: being abstract at all. I was being very like, I mean, there's semantic and episodic memory. Um, that's just titles we've given to certain things, but they're real. You can study them and that's not abstract. And I don't think it's abstract that we were born into the world.

And we remember, I mean, that the body aligns with what it's. moving through and that that's also a kind of memory. I mean, it's also a studied kind of memory. So like riding a bike or, you know, all these different, like, that doesn't feel abstract to me. So I'm not sure, like, what do you mean by I can't, you can't talk about memory in the abstract?

Fred Cummins: Because the, there's vastly more. of the past imminent to me now. Indeed the entire past is imminent. And talk of memory is already an apportioning of some parts of that to my own personal narrative, my own beliefs about what I did or did not do in the [00:49:00] past, why, how. Um. It's, uh, it just gets captured by the psychological autobiography, that's all.

Andrea Hiott: But we share patterns, and within, we each have our own psychological biography, or not only psychological, our own development in all these different ways. I'm trying very hard, in mine, I

Fred Cummins: don't know, I don't have a psychological, I'm trying very hard. To treat psychology as soul science, as nothing other than an interpretive modality, and not as any kind of science.

Most people do have fairly fixed stories of who they are and where they're going, and as that happens, let's say you're getting older, for example, you don't want to be living a life in which, ah shit, I peaked in my twenties, what's the point of even being alive now? Um, I'm a little older than you. I'm 62 yesterday.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, happy birthday. Never [00:50:00]

Fred Cummins: felt so alive. That's wonderful. Never felt less worried about death. I was much more worried about death when I was 20 than I am at 62, I assure you. That's fascinating.

Andrea Hiott: And that's connected to letting go of those narratives that, by the way, I don't think any, there's a difference between those narratives of a certain age or number being some kind of a marker for some kind of a, Whatever in life versus kind of you have from the moment you were born till now had a particular Development and that is your development even if you don't whatever you remember don't remember whatever stories you put on it but it's beautiful that you don't worry about death like um, I mean, I don't either I, but I did too.

I remember when I turned 25, uh, I felt like my life was, I had just, like, I couldn't believe I was 25. Like I just wasted my life or something. It's strange how experience [00:51:00] changes

Fred Cummins: that. You see, I mentioned the term integration. So there's two basic mathematical terms, differentiation and integration.

Differentiation is creative, Um, and things arise through differentiation. This is a bit Buddhist, I suppose, in this approach. When we tell stories, we integrate to sum over things as if there was a part. Whereas I'm always new, my becoming is always new, and to tell a story of personal achievement, did you get where you wanted to go in life and blah, blah, blah, blah, is to integrate over a tiny little thing.

Whereas I'm, you know, I'm talking to Andrea today. I'm so much bigger and better than I was yesterday because I've talked to Andrea, you know, it's not knitted into a big personal discussion, autobiography, except you get a footnote on page 47 in June. You know, But it's perfectly true. I, I, the use of [00:52:00] personal pronouns is tricky.

The Buddhists are not very fond of being too fond of this guy. And I'm, I'm, I'm trying to be with them a little bit, I suppose. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it is. It's, um, again, that we, we can, we need to use language in these representations to meet, but we don't, I mean, if we were together, we could just sit in the room and communicate, but especially through a medium like this, uh, it's, It helps us to, to communicate, but to, to use that in a beautiful way and almost like a song or a dance to let it, you know, kind of change the space or change, help us change the space together is beautiful, but to confuse that with the actual process of the body and, and so on, it's, it's kind of at the root of a lot of that fear probably that I felt when I was 25 or that you felt because you, you know, something in you knows that you're not confined to that and yet.

You also feel like you need to live up to it, or understand [00:53:00] it, or own it, or, I don't know, it's that linearity, too, that, and that either or stuff that bothers me so much, um, that's You

Fred Cummins: see, physics gives us a straight line of time, which is A. An idealization, a construct, time is not of that nature. I mean, physicists have to work so bloody hard to even find out what direction time goes in, and all they could come up with is things fall apart.

I like to think that the trace we're leaving now with this conversation is contributing to time, in that someone might encounter it and be moved by it, and that would have an effect. Now we didn't, the pre record bit, was ephemeral in the fact that in the way that you and I may be changed by it was not going to change anyone else.

But by making the recording where we're inscribing or leaving a trace, that could potentially affect someone. And that doesn't work with a linear notion of time, you know?

Andrea Hiott: No, it doesn't. And I agree with you also, however, I think even if we hadn't recorded it, I'm glad we did, [00:54:00] do record these, we just come on and talk and that's wonderful.

But, you know, you, you might say something and I'm sure it's happened that you say something to me that shifts a little bit the way I. Am in the way I communicate and I go to the grocery store and somehow that's kind of, you know Change something that I say that then someone else picks up on and it changes them So I don't think we ever get out of that but it's just that it's beautiful that we can have moments where we give like give it to time and space and people, because they'll all be coming from different places.

The now for them and however, whatever they hear from this will be based on all their development. So it's just like a release or a surrender. And it's also kind of a, without, without not still being responsible for what we say, you know.

Do you think of teaching like that?

Fred Cummins: Um, you're a teacher. Yeah, yeah. I'm a teacher. But I, I just want to say [00:55:00] for

Andrea Hiott: people who haven't seen your videos, like you're really good at explaining things. So if you want to know something like what is ecological psychology, or if you want to think about cognitive science ideas, then have a look at Fred's videos because he's good.

Fred Cummins: I can also confuse people very easily be precisely because I consider the questions from such a rather so many angles. so many angles. Yes. Without, without answers. Um, and I favor epistemic humility over explanation. Um, my teaching has changed. I improvise now I talk and I have at least two whole modules that are just, let's talk about some stuff.

And I'll say, you know, you, you read this and you read that or look up that or something like that. Do your Googling or whatever, but we're just going to talk about it in class. And for me, that's been liberating. I think the pandemic helped me recognize that as well. How so? [00:56:00]

Andrea Hiott: Because you had a different format?

Fred Cummins: Because the personal interaction was, was gone. And I realized we didn't know the first thing about what we were talking about when we started talking about the intimate chat in the classroom was face to face, which it most definitely isn't. And we failed to notice that the Zoom chat is face to face. To my horror, above your head, there's a little face there that people would apportion to me.

I assure you, I have no knowledge of that face, as you have no knowledge of your face now, unless you look in the little window above you, above me.

Andrea Hiott: On your screen, you mean,

Fred Cummins: yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah, it's, but it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about how there is a responsibility because you're introducing people to new ideas and that process comes with a kind of pace and responsibility that can be dangerous if it's done the wrong way as we were talking about at the beginning.

So

Fred Cummins: difficult. I had one student in the last semester who was. Taking my introduction to cognitive science course for undergraduates. So it's an [00:57:00] elective and students from all over the university can take it and she was loving it, but she was also taking a course in, uh, cognitive neuroscience and a course in mindfulness training as well.

Nothing. She met across those three courses and lined up. I'm there about the metaphoric role of the computer in the historical development. And over the, in the neuroscience class, they're saying your brain's a computer. That's what we know. I'm there. I'm trying to speak carefully. Um, and in a modulated fashion about what we can learn from traditions, uh, that we are ignorant of that are quite culturally remote.

And she's over there in this full on capitalist mindfulness thing, which is just training you to shut up and be a good employee using Buddhism as an excuse. Um, the tensions of being a student in the present world is not just if you come to my class, but they become very obvious if you come to my class.

Andrea Hiott: I think it can be so overwhelming. I do remember feeling like that too [00:58:00] when I was in my early student years, but that there's so much information and you do start to feel like you need to kind of latch on to some, some, I don't know, some kind of grounding or I think it's what we, we look to what we might call spirituality or religion or even sometimes Different philosophies or literature are, like, for that kind of release from, uh, needing everything to fit in a particular way, while at the same time being part of some kind of, some kind of community that we feel like we can trust, because I think it's so confusing, it's confusing for me, to be honest, to figure out Because a lot of times in these different realms that you just described, I'm in them too, and I know you are too, right, when you're doing mindfulness, or you're talking to, um, computer scientists, or you're dealing with technology, or you're studying philosophy, everyone's got a different language, and they're coming at it a different way, and [00:59:00] you can figure out your way in to where you're talking about the same thing, maybe using different words than you would in another one, but it can also just get kind of overwhelming to where, It can seem like there is nothing that you're really talking about or something.

Do you know what I mean?

Fred Cummins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm, I've got very picky about talking and writing. Um, my preferred mode of publication now is me talking to a camera uninterrupted. I think you're ahead of

Andrea Hiott: your time in that way. I think it's going to become more. I've heard people now do papers like that, like spoken papers, because it's somehow

Fred Cummins: Yeah, um,

Andrea Hiott: Or even a PhD that's spoken.

That's actually like a thing you can do in some universities now. Yep. That's

Fred Cummins: good. I always think whenever I think society's gone mad and everyone's gone mad, and I realize everyone else actually has the same problem, I should say. Yeah, that's the funny

Andrea Hiott: thing. We're all If

Fred Cummins: I'm, if I'm uneasy about something, lots of people are uneasy about [01:00:00] that something, but they don't necessarily know what to do with that unease.

Well,

Andrea Hiott: I think you're opening spaces for people to understand that it's okay to feel it. And you don't need to have the answers. But at the same time, you know, you are a teacher, and you are taking responsibility for what you put out. I mean, none of us can do it all perfectly and stuff, but I think that's why maybe you say You do present a lot of different perspectives because you're so aware of, of exactly the, the kind of, the tipping point we're in right now, which is one of having access to so many different perspectives, but still not sure how to understand how to like release our own I and the I I that you were holding up.

Use the I when we need to, but also surrender and release that I and understand it's. multi scale, multi variable, but it's meaningful, it's cohesive, it's coherent, all that at the same time.

Fred Cummins: Such epistemological [01:01:00] puzzles, existential puzzles. I can think my way into them. I don't know what other people are going through though.

I don't know what my students are going through and I don't know what's good for my students. I don't know what I should be teaching them. I no longer believe that if they're blessed with this paper, this paper, and this paper, they'll be better off. Um, some of them these days don't come to class. A lot of them don't come to class.

Students are becoming much more independent and making up their own mind. They've developed a healthy distrust of the institutions themselves. They encounter a world in which housing and jobs are no longer simply straightforward parts of the human world, but are so obviously part of the Um, political social apparatus of power.

Um, we have an enormous crisis here, um, both with migrancy, which is only going to get, I mean, that's a drop in the ocean and housing. Um, and I was not aware of that when I was the age of my students are now. So I respect their choices and they choose to engage with. And so I [01:02:00] just kind of say, well, you could look, you know, you can make Come talk to me.

Andrea Hiott: I think the answer is in a some kind of conversation and sharing and something like the fact that we can do this now more easily on these kinds of spaces. I had, I tried to see that as a positive movement towards a different kind of towards what we used to do with papers, writing papers, but that has now become like, that is just kind of, at least for now, it's, uh, It's not doing that in the same way.

Of course we still share information. Papers are important in that, but when you talk to scientists and a lot of people who are in that, where you have to publish and it has to be in this sort of thing, there's something a little bit, it's not doing what we are talking about here. But maybe just conversation and videos are.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, I mean, there's no accident. This is the second podcast I'm doing today. Um, papers, I lost faith in scientific publication over the space of a couple of years. And I, I [01:03:00] moved from one journal, which was very central as journal of phonetics, normal journal, good linguistics journal to an outsider journal, but still an Elsevier journal language sciences, which took wild ideas, but it was still in the publishing.

And after three years there, I had to say, I'm sorry, I'm not, I can't do this anymore. I don't, that's not a good way of doing things. If you call science, this peer review and professional publication thing, then I want no part of it. I'm certainly not going to adjudicate other people's battles on there, but people also tell themselves stories.

And which may or may not match reality. So everyone's told that there's a publish or perish thing and you have to get citations and so on. Um, just for my part, no one's ever asked me once about my citations. Okay, I did the promotion thing up to a certain level. I'm never doing that again. So I don't have to sell myself.

If I had to sell myself, citations or something like that would be what I would talking about, but not having to do that. I don't experience that. And then with that, I realized I'm free to say, no, I'm not a [01:04:00] peer reviewer for a random shite about things I'm not. qualified to talk about. Like I got asked to review a paper where some Chinese people had a beef with Saussure because they just discovered Saussure and he was very European, wasn't he?

And I'm like, let them have it out. Who am I to adjudicate a fight between Saussure and China?

Andrea Hiott: But you, you have a certain kind of, like, a humble clarity or being, being comfortable with who you are, which I don't mean, yeah, there's, that, that's all stuff that probably took you time to learn and, and become and, and a lot of, and you did, you did have a lot of success and, you know, so, you know,

Fred Cummins: it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a great boon.

That's true.

Andrea Hiott: But I do think you're right in a way that, like, well, I mean, it just makes me think a lot of the younger people I know or I encounter mostly are, they're really, really interested in education, and they're getting that education through podcasts, through videos, through books, [01:05:00] uh, not necessarily through university.

Well, mean, you

Fred Cummins: mean they're finding stuff that attracts them. You see, education is sometimes a, a means. What they think of as an education. Particularly social order places that stamp upon the person. That's why we had Well developed school curricula, and you had to learn these poems and not those poems and you had to chant your tables society and imprints On its young people with education.

I've, I've a grave problem with that because you got to understand the social order is also, you know, what's, what's this society? What is this social order? In, in, in my work on joint speech, myself and Luchana Longo, we uncovered that just by empirically looking at where this joint speech goes on, there was so much to see and there's a.

a whole world of ritual and protest and, and, uh, group affiliations, but there's primary education. And then when we did that, [01:06:00] we, we, we stopped looking at it from a sociological point of view and just asked, where's the chanting, right? And it's in the math, math tables. And everyone learns the math tables by chanting.

And I did, and you did, and it's all over the world do, if they're in our kind of school system. And we broadened it to other kinds of school systems. And we found Quranic chanting in the madrasas. And we realized that in both cases, the sacred values of the ambient society were being instilled in the children through repetition in neither case with any attention given to whether they understood or were capable of interpreting what they were doing.

They merely had to make the right sounds. That's true for Quranic chanting and maths tables. And with that, I felt we had found something, but not something that's within an education that fits easy in the view of education.

Andrea Hiott: What? Can you help me understand what that tells us about education? Is it, are you saying there's a communal connection that's at the root of [01:07:00] it or something?

Or there's a It's very

Fred Cummins: hard to step outside your own cultural bubble to think from the other side.

Andrea Hiott: I

Fred Cummins: can't do it any more than anyone else can, but by virtue of recognizing that primary education is the kind of social, Construct that actually does travel outside into worlds. I don't know. I'll still find something called primary education and lo and behold, I'll find different sacred values being imprinted in the chanting and they're very, very interesting.

Quranic chanting is really interesting and gorgeous. I know why it's a sacred value. It is a sacred value. And I understand, I like, I love it, I love mathematics, and I love Quranic chanting, and I'm not, um, inside the Islamic sphere such that I would aspire to chant it myself, but when you're taught to chant it, you're taught to make the sounds, you're not taught to understand the words or the meaning.

That's a biblical approach.

Andrea Hiott: What is it you love about it, Fred? Is [01:08:00] it the communal aspect? Is it the, what it does to your body, the experience of it? Do you I

Fred Cummins: put it on in my temple and I ascend to heaven. That's what I love about it.

Andrea Hiott: What does that mean? I've no gone through it. Does it change your physical state?

Cause numbers too, you also said you love numbers, so I'm trying to connect. Where's the, is it the patterning that then becomes sort of trans, transcripting? leads to a different state of whatever, being, knowledge. If you are

Fred Cummins: capable of being moved by Um, you must have gone to some sublime choral music in your time, the elevation that you get in the sublimest of Gregorian chant or Hildegard from Bingen or one of these wonderful choral chants, is the closest thing I could suggest to being swept up by the speech, by Quranic recitation.

It's a matter of letting yourself surrender. Surrender is essential in Islam. It's a central term and there's no getting to heaven without surrender. It's a very [01:09:00] important term, but these are not insights that you can share. Um, but that's the way joint speech works. Shows you things that are outside your cultural bubble and allows you to see that, well, that mathematics is a sacred value around here, for example.

I've often wondered why everyone insists, no, everyone hates maths. We insist that they learn maths. Everyone says I'm no good at maths. Everyone's scared of maths. And then they go out and they just do calculation. Nobody knows any fucking mathematics. I've only discovered mathematics in the last couple of years.

And it's great, let me tell you. Oh my God, it's nothing like what I learned in school. nothing like it at all.

Andrea Hiott: I agree. I, I love math. I love, I don't know what it is I love about math though, except that it's, there is a similar, that's why I asked you because when I, I like reading about mathematicians and I like understanding the way that the things fit together.

It's not that I love sitting down doing math equations [01:10:00] because that's a bit harder for me, but I love looking at how it fits together and how it. Connects to, uh, how we connect through it, which for me is something similar to that surrender you're talking about, but it's a presence. It's not just a kind of giving up surrender or a, like, I'm going to drink till I'm numb, you know, surrender.

There's not that that is even really a surrender, but I really think there's some kind of quality in which you, your attention is, uh, Either, I don't know, you're not aware of yourself in the way we were talking about with the I, but you're aware. It gives you a state of awareness that isn't bound by previous.

Fred Cummins: This I seems to only exist when you say it, and it exists as soon as you say it, and it exists as long as you say it. And even Descartes said that in the second meditation. He said, Je suis, J'existe, as long as I have this [01:11:00] thought, as long as I say it, basically. And then he goes and cooks an egg, and there's no eye left.

Except the German. But that's

Andrea Hiott: the confusion, right? The eye and the self, or the eye and the lived. the ongoing sort of form that is Descartes or that it is us. Those aren't the same thing.

Fred Cummins: Your particularity, and we use the word existence or becoming, is the being and becoming are always mixed up since Plato.

So your existence, whether you think of it as a being or a becoming, is not the same thing as what you do with the creative production of I. And you do it for protection, you do it because you have to become a person among people, you have to have a position, you have to have an opinion, you have to represent yourself.

Andrea Hiott: There's all kinds

Fred Cummins: of reasons we use this goddamn thing, but essentializing it and believing that that, that lives inside you is, is, is.

Andrea Hiott: Do you see it as connected also to how we start to realize or be present [01:12:00] in this way that something, so like when you're a little child, you have this. Non I ness, I mean, you don't need the I, you can't even speak the I, and it gets imposed on you very quickly because your parents tell you your name and all that, but, but you're in that kind of, you're in that space of like, what people sometimes say they experience in drugs, where everything is kind of, ah, one, and you, you know, you're like looking at the flower and it's incredible, and like, eh, you're a part of it all, and then you've got to go through the I, Hopefully, right?

You, you learn you're an I. You struggle with trying to understand that I and accept it and feeling judged. You hopefully find some practices and some other people who help you release yourself from that and realize what you've just been saying, that the I is only there when you use it, but you're still there and you're coherent and you're real and you're part of something bigger.

But somehow there's a, that process, it's like you can't do that when you're just a little kid, right? So. Do you see that as connected? You

Fred Cummins: don't need to, but, but that's largely what [01:13:00] neurosis is. There's a healthy side, just like there's a healthy side to psychosis, there's a healthy side to neurosis. We wear pants and we don't feel terribly, terribly constricted because we're told by the social order to wear, but there's no God given reason to wear pants.

But if I'm going out there in the street, I'll probably wear pants. And I don't feel that as being neurotic. But if I can't, if I worry that the dishes are not in the right place and I can't sleep because the dishes might not be in the right place, then I've become neurotic. And so we live in a constant state of tension.

The other side that I'm doing a right brain left brain thing in case you can't tell. So that's your left brain. The right brain is your imaginative, artistic, your psychosis, your capacity to fly, to imagine, to fly, to lose yourself, to, to be transported. Um, and that done in a healthy fashion is the best you can possibly be.[01:14:00]

Divine madness occupies a whole dialogue in Plato there, various kinds of divine madness, and they're well discussed. And we have this capacity, we, there's no way of knowing who gets into, who's living the best life, who's actually getting to the best they could be, you don't see it, it doesn't leave a trace, it's not in the record, there's no point in despairing about the world, Ukraine, Gaza, climate change, because you actually have no overview of it.

Like, I don't know, the world will never notice if you have a peak experience. Hegel's apotheosis at his desk when history comes to an end is my favorite example of this. We're all Hegel!

Andrea Hiott: Well, I would have much to say about Hegel because of that linearity is what annoys me about him, but he also did come up with this language that gets out of the linearity, so.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, no, he's circular.

Andrea Hiott: Well, it, it, yes, of course, but then there, there is this beautiful, almost innocent thing, [01:15:00] which is also dangerous and destructive of being in the moment in time and taking it so seriously that we can then start thinking about the end of history and so forth.

It's always the end of history and the beginning, and there's no ending and beginning. He shows that with his, he illustrates that, I guess, with the writing and with this, well, this constant becoming, um, but it's often taken in kind of the other way, that, that That there's some kind of right progression and right development and that, that we're on it and you know, all of that, but that would be a whole other, a whole other thing.

To come back here. Yeah. Well, there's

Fred Cummins: other discussions you can only have in person. If you're here in person, I've got tons of material here to talk about time and history and Duret and so on, but you have to be actually present here to actually use them.

Andrea Hiott: Okay. You mean like books and stuff?

Fred Cummins: No. Um, I, I, I have a temple inside.

You have a

Andrea Hiott: temple in your house?

Fred Cummins: Yep. I'm gonna go for a little walk.

Andrea Hiott: [01:16:00] Okay.

Fred Cummins: But believe you me, this is better done when you're here.

Andrea Hiott: Cool. I believe you, but at least like now all the listeners will also be able to have a little.

Fred Cummins: So we'll start with,

Andrea Hiott: Oh,

Fred Cummins: there's history. Wow. So there's, there's the whole history.

There's my life. There's the year 2000, there's the year 2024. There's William James, John Dewey, Kant, Descartes, Kepler. So I can see where the ideas stack up and how they got here. And that goes back to 1600 and on top it's rescales. There's 1600 and there it goes back to Jesus and Plato.

Andrea Hiott: And now I

Fred Cummins: can think about straight lines and I can think about what's further down there.

And I've got various points marked. I can point all the way to the dinosaurs from here. I know the dinosaurs are 63 kilometers out in the Irish Sea from here. And then, there's, oh sorry, I want you to meet my lamp.

Andrea Hiott: There's a lamp?

Fred Cummins: Hello there. You see [01:17:00] this lamp? Yeah, I see it. It's

Andrea Hiott: broken.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, it's terrible.

Terrible state. Um, one day it was sitting here before it broke its neck, and I took a photograph of it, and then I made a print of that. I do prints by rubbing them, transferring and rubbing them into being, and I stuck its picture up behind it, and then I took a photograph of that, and I took off the old print, and I put the new one on, which had two prints, and now we have an endlessly receding print.

Series of, so

Andrea Hiott: you can

Fred Cummins: literally looking at this lamp through time in an actual,

Andrea Hiott: can you, I couldn't see the whole thing. It was, I only saw the top part of the painting. Oh, yeah, there. Oh, yeah. Anyway, that's, that's actually very fractal.

Fred Cummins: It is very fractal and there's one, two, three, four, five lamps there and this lamp here and they go back through time, literally through time and I was sitting here, looking at that, reading a book [01:18:00] and there was text came up right beside this, so I could look from the book up to this.

The book I was reading was by a French man called Henri Bergson.

Andrea Hiott: Ah, well of course. And

Fred Cummins: what it said, what the text said as I was looking at this, as reality creates itself unforeseeable anew, its image reflects behind it into the indefinite past. Now that seems kind of relevant. It does. So, yeah, I have a lot more here.

There's a big ass table. So much art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see? And this is all Wow,

Andrea Hiott: that's cool. So much art. These

Fred Cummins: are all thinking tools. So, we'll come out of here, because you have to come over for a visit sometime.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, yeah, I will.

Fred Cummins: And I'll talk about Hegel. Okay. I have Hegel in there. Have you ever had

Andrea Hiott: an art show, Fred?

Fred Cummins: Yeah, a few.

Andrea Hiott: I thought so. Now I'm remembering the art, but um, there was something, that was, that was a beautiful journey. You're back.

Fred Cummins: That's how I think.

Andrea Hiott: It's funny, [01:19:00] you, I would, if I were you, I'd have a bunch of those paintings behind me. That's so, well, that's not true. I don't show off my stuff either, but those are pretty cool, so.

Um, I mean, on your, on your videos, they

Fred Cummins: all need explanation, not explanation, but that's true. They need to, they're, they're vehicles for co, co thinking.

Andrea Hiott: Well, I want to, I mean, I already kept you a half an hour more than we said. And so I know let's, let's get off, I don't have

Fred Cummins: any time limit on this. I know you're fine.

Time and space. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Um, but this shamanic tantric. Um, ecstasy. I think we've said ecstasy a few times and ecstatic. And I, when I was in my teens, I was really interested in, in that probably more coming from like Rumi and, but I definitely got into the Sufi idea of, of this and then so on and so forth. And even more like.

Uh, the Buddhist Tantra and this is static state. I don't know. Um, [01:20:00] it strikes me a little bit that it can also be dangerous in the same way that the, it can be dangerous to hear that everything's a hallucination if you don't have,

Fred Cummins: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And terrible things happen, but you've heard of it. We have heard now from the results of other traditions and there's wonderful scholarship going on.

Tantric scholarship. There's a guy called Alexis Sanderson is doing a most amazing work recreating the theories of consciousness from a thousand years ago in Kashmir. There's a real scholarship going on. And I recently fell into a. Tibetan deep rabbit hole, looking at the bond, the world of bond, which is often regarded as shamanistic, pre Buddhist.

Tibetan religion turns out that's a gross simplification,

Andrea Hiott: but

Fred Cummins: I found things in there that immediately resonated with me. Now, if there was nothing there, like I, I appreciate these come from different cultures, [01:21:00] but having looked into a lot of things, you can't oversee common themes, which speak of something which is immediately available to you wherever you are.

Um, there's a wonderful book by a guy called Gregory Shaw recently, which will piss any historians off because it's called Hellenic

Andrea Hiott: Tantra. The

Fred Cummins: Hellenes being the Greeks and Tantra being beyond. But what he's doing is he's actually a student of Iamblichian Theurgy, which are the these techniques for getting into the state, elevating the state through ritual and Reaching various forms of hypnosis approaches to God from the late classical world.

And we have descriptions of similar states achieved through using the vocabulary of tantra from the tantrics and the metaphors are congruent. It's all light and energies and there's [01:22:00] similar kinds of words coming up and you just can't oversee. The fact that, oh, no, hang on. Now, I'm not advocating a perennialism, but there's so much that comes through that you begin to realize, oh, holy cow, am I ignorant, and we can learn.

So I'm kind of really annoyed when people talk about East versus West now, because I'm Um, I, I, I, I deny those.

Andrea Hiott: Because you see the connections and the patterns and the, but you do in the same way maybe that we use the I. Sometimes there's a way we, you know, these, these, the, the, the, the, the movement and the process itself is never either or and one or the other, but there's a way we sometimes do.

There's a reason why we set things, against one another, uh, in that representational space until we can handle understanding that they're not set against each other. And in fact, on every side of everything, there could be many, many nested sort of such [01:23:00] ongoing experiences or dialectics or tantric movements or whatever we want to, however we want to describe it.

But just like, I do need to go soon, but before I, something is really bothering, like, I wonder about your, Perspective on this is I don't know about your personal life, but my personal life We've talked about when we were younger. We've talked about we've both obviously explored a lot of different things towards Whatever, like feeling this ecstasy, or finding knowledge, or whatever way we want to say, but, um, Do you, do you, do you, like, uh, I guess I worry, like, um, I don't think we're saying that none of these things are important, like, I guess I want to zoom out a little bit and think, Like, all that's really important in both of our lives, and all these paths that we found Towards finding some kind of peace, like, we both seem to be kind of okay, I, Not that every moment is, we're still humans doing our thing, but at least we can say, uh, death isn't too [01:24:00] scary anymore.

Whereas when I was 25, I thought, yeah. And you, you obviously said the same. So I guess what I want to open up, open it up to is like meaning. And that it's not just that all this stuff is meaningful and we just, I don't, I don't want this conversation to sound to someone like nothing matters and like none of these things, there's no cognitive science and no words mean anything and stuff like that because it's really the opposite.

That's kind of what we're saying, but I wonder if you can articulate it better.

Fred Cummins: Absolutely, but that, um, we, we need to distinguish between inquiry and The products of the inquiry and their subsequent fate as they get integrated into popular discourse, get perverted, get misunderstood and feed into a collective imagination that frankly doesn't have a great deal of nuance.

Um,

I'm in heaven and I only got there by doing cognitive science. But that doesn't mean if you do cognitive science, you're going to go [01:25:00] to heaven. It means, yeah, that's inquiry. It did this kind of persistent inquiry into the nature of things, your own minds, understanding what the hell am I doing here? What is this?

What is it to be alive without necessarily you needing an answer, but to be able to ask and always ask and always ask better. And the answer will change every day. That's the thing. There's no goal. There's no end state.

Andrea Hiott: You know, and things still hurt and there's still challenges and you just keep persisting though and, and it's kind of these patterns start to feel more comfortable or more, you, you can access the joy and the life in, in what's around you more like in that childlike state but with that kind of surrender and presence while still holding the responsibility connecting.

Yeah, I don't know. It's possible, right? It's, it's not about not taking it seriously. It's about taking it seriously till [01:26:00] you understand seriousness differently.

Fred Cummins: Yes, and you, you learn so much by asking how other people have pursued the inquiry, what motivated them, why did they do things. So, I find a lot now, When I'm teaching neuroscience, I don't tell them, you must read this paper or this textbook.

I say, oh, you found the work of, let's say rames or something like that. Find out who this person is. Find out what motivates their inquiry. Why are they drawn to think of things in this way? Inevitably, you find out far more about a particular cognitive of neuroscientific program if you understand the neuroscientist behind it.

Mm-Hmm. . I only know a few neuroscientists. Well personally or know enough. About their personal motivation to understand their work. But it's always been incredibly illuminating, whereas investigation into neuroscience done in the Google mode just produces walls of cognitivist bullshit.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And that also helps [01:27:00] us to understand that the way, like the problems, the challenges, the work we're doing as scientists, as philosophers, whoever we might become is very important, but we keep in mind also that we're coming at it with a particular development and from a particular place and in a particular way, and others are coming at it in different ways.

And that's. Beautiful, that's a portal, but we don't need to like, uh, stringently say there's only our way. It's much more about finding ways to connect with each other towards kind of a better shared knowledge, whatever, if we're dealing with science, then it would be towards whatever the goal is, which might be helping people who suffer from schizophrenia or something, whatever it is.

But it doesn't have to be only like one way, even if we parameterize our own research in a certain way.

Fred Cummins: There's a kind of a constructive ambiguity I try to convey to students, which is to live with the tension. That you idealize highfalutin ideas and our inquiry into the natural world leaves us with inestimable [01:28:00] puzzles and climate change in Gaza.

And you're going to live in this zone, indeterminate zone, your whole life. Get comfortable in it. Learn to seek in the indeterminate zone. I don't like. you know, people coming in with explanations. If I want an explanation, if I want to, if I buy something from Ikea, I want an explanation to how to assemble this because then it'll be assembled and I'll be done.

Whereas this kind of inquiry, I don't want to be done. I'm never going to be done.

Andrea Hiott: There's no done. Cause as soon as you know,

Fred Cummins: as soon as

Andrea Hiott: you've soaked, you know, as we address the problems, the problems change and the ways we address them, change them. And that's beautiful. That's not to be too, that can feel overwhelming, but when you sort of accept it, it's funny how, and Whether it's science, philosophy, religion, whatever label we give it, a lot of it does come down to holding that space, that tension, as you said, that paradox, that finding some way to be in that space and open it up and realize.

is not just two things kind of in opposition, but it's, that's life, that becoming, [01:29:00] that constant kind of change that's at the same time, um, does have very real resonances and patterns and things that, that matter, but yeah. Anyway, that's been part of this conversation for me, so thanks for having it.

I'm sure we'll, I hope we have many more. I have to go now. I want

Fred Cummins: to, Andrea, I really like this.

Andrea Hiott: Me too. It's fun. I think

Fred Cummins: there's other places we could go. I don't know. I don't know. You, you have such, such a broad range of interest and you think so well that it's great for me.

Andrea Hiott: For me too, you are the same, to you. It's nice to be able to talk to someone who knows, who, who's interested in art and neuroscience and spirituality and, it's great. So I really appreciate that. And, um, yeah, so I send you some gratitude and I will hit the button again soon, unless there's anything you want to add before. No, I'm,

Fred Cummins: I'm around 20th of July and then away for a month, more or less.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, you're going on a really exciting trip, right? Aren't you Kathmandu.

Fred Cummins: We're going back to the country. Wow. Tell me a little bit

Andrea Hiott: about that before we go. [01:30:00]

Fred Cummins: The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies runs a summer school over there. They know their shit. They've got people in there and we'll be doing lectures, doing workshops, going to puja, visiting temples, visiting families.

We have to

Andrea Hiott: talk after that for sure. I want to hear all about that.

Fred Cummins: Yeah, as a goddess worshipper, it's going to be a delight.

Andrea Hiott: Okay, well, let's talk after that, or if not before, but Yeah. Okay, I'm hitting the button now.

Fred Cummins: Possibly before, anyway. Yeah, maybe before

Andrea Hiott: and after. Pre and post.

Fred Cummins: And just ping, send me stuff.

Great talking to you.

Andrea Hiott: Okay, good talking to you too.