Constellation Thinking
Right now, there’s a sleight of hand unconsciously underway that’s eroding meaning without us noticing. It takes all sorts of forms.
One way it happens is that someone violates an unspoken norm that matters deeply to us. Life continues anyway. In spite of ourselves, and often under the radar of conscious thought, there’s a kind of attrition. How can the world just keep going after this was done? After this was said?
And yet it does, and so we think, though often not explicitly: “Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all” or “maybe it meant something different” or “maybe I’ve been wrong to be so nice” or “maybe this is just how the world works.”
Weirdly, this can be exciting.
Such transgression and subversion, especially when unthought, shows us how much more is possible. All we assumed begins to crack. People get swept up talking about it, and that widespread attention makes it seem like it’s okay, even as it hurts and undermines us. We know it’s not okay. We say it’s not okay. And yet, somehow it still seems to be taken as if it is okay.
Recently, this has been confusing and diffusing what matters most, our power to care.
One way to realize this differently is through holding paradox, turning our eyes from the cracks to the light flooding through those fissures. If there were too many cracks, we would fall into that light and no longer know it (just as we’d no longer know the sun if we fell into it). But cracks can also bring light for new focus, warmth to find and feel so as to build better foundations.
Many of the painful statements and actions that are part of ‘the trick of continuance’ discussed below only happen when a person is 100% sure they are right, or at least when they want to be 100% right, and think saying it enough will make it so.
In contrast to such surety, the idea of ‘holding paradox’ can seem passive, peaceful, wishy-washy.
It’s not.
Holding paradox is the portal into constellation thinking, a way of seeing reality in all its fractal, multi-layered, thrilling, messiness. It’s feeling and being the light without dissolving into it. This is the challenge of our times.
Balancing the light with the fractures of our landscape keeps us from going numb. We feel here, now, alive. In this world. In these challenges.
The excitement or jolt that comes when norms are transgressed is the excitement of realizing that there can always be another turn of the kaleidoscope.
It can be easy to confuse that feeling with what happened to cause it.
Sometimes cracks show us this love exists. Other times, they’re just cracks. To confuse a harmful statement or action (which might make a crack) with the feeling that ‘another angle is possible’ (the light) has become easier in a world too focused on temporary hits, where stimulus and response are harder to distinguish from their resources.
Untangling this and getting clear on its nuance holds real power & opportunity.
It’s also where love lives.
Constellation Thinking
Many of us have been developing a framework for understanding how we create meaning while holding and dancing through multiple perspectives simultaneously. A couple years back, I started discussing it as kaleidoscopic cognition. More recently, I’ve been using terms like constellation thinking or kaleidoscopic thinking, trying to find ways to make clear exactly what I am talking about, which has not been easy, though I continue to try.
Luckily, as it turns out, others have stumbled upon this same metaphor towards something similar…
(full post at: Constellation Thinking on Waymaking
TRANSCRIPT: Looking at the night sky with your back to the earth, Andrea Hiott, Diary October 17
Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, it's Andrea. Today is October 17th. This is my diary for today. I've been thinking about the night sky. I've been looking at the night sky thinking of the night sky. And when I was a kid, I used to go lay in the middle of our yard or garden or whatever you wanna call it, like grassy area around our house and look at the stars at night because one of my teachers, Dr.
Lynch, wherever you are in fifth grade, told me to go lay in the grass and look at the stars and imagine. Imagine them. imagine myself on a round object, which was the earth, and then imagine all of them as round and then try to imagine this constellation of this little me on this giant earth, which was then just a little.in this night sky with all these other stars.
So maybe tonight, go look at the sky if you can, if you can find somewhere to see the stars or one day. [00:01:00] Turn your eyes to the stars. And you won't just see random, random points of light probably. You might start to see patterns, uh, that's, you know, constellations like the Big Dipper or Cassia, Pia or Orian or you know, you can make up your own.
We all naturally start to connect the stars, like drawing lines between them. Creating means. Of understanding what we're looking at, meaning creating meaning I guess from this relationship of all these beautiful points of light, which are remarkably not connected actually in any sort of way like that, even though they do make patterns for us.
But they're actually separated by vast distances, at least for us, light years, empty space. Some of them maybe aren't even burning anymore. We just still see them. So they're separated by vast distances, light years of empty space, but we see them as holes, as figures, as stories across the cosmos. I [00:02:00] mean, think of how many people. Over all of human life or life in general for people have looked up at the sky and made stories out of these beautiful lights.
And that's sort of where we begin in a way. Um, it's what I've been trying to think of through this constellation thinking. That sense I had of my, with my back against the earth and feeling how small I was and also how immense and amazing the universe was as I looked up at the stars, realizing I was part of it, holding that tension of being so small and yet part of something so amazing has really stayed with me since I was a kid and now I'm, you know, getting old and, uh, but I still think of this.
Image a lot, and it helps me to get out of linear ways of thinking. It's a pretty metaphor, but it's actually more than that too. It's, it's a shift in how we can understand reality thought, our place in the [00:03:00] world and western philosophies. Um, been very wonderful and I love Western philosophy, but we often end up thinking in terms of isolated objects or separate things that are sort of like billard balls bumping into each other, or, you know, here is the mind and there is a world out there, or here are facts.
Here are values, and everything is sort of separated and supposed to be in its place. Out of that, we've started to develop all kinds of ways of defining ourselves and thinking we're part of these different groups and separated, and there's a lot of truth in that. Of course, there's a lot of ways we overlap and share worlds with people.
But I'm trying to invite us to think a little bit differently with this idea of constellation thinking to maybe recognize we're individuals at the same time that we have our back on the Earth, which is around semi round, um, object in this constellation of [00:04:00] other stars and planets. And that's really mysterious and we don't understand that.
And there's all this space between it. And yet at the same time, how amazing that we're all part of that. We're all on the same earth. And I think that's an active perception that connects us towards meaning. If we let it, it's a little bit scary, uh, but it's not mystic, it's not mystical, or it can be mystical, but it doesn't have to be.
It's actually just. If you really notice the amazing ability of lived experience, that we can actually understand that we're in this world and that this world appears in a certain way and that we don't understand it, I think you begin to open up to understanding what it might be like to think in a consolatory way, which just means catching yourself when you're judging yourself.
You're judging others and maybe noticing that you're judging it in this kind of either or way. It's either right or it's [00:05:00] wrong, it's good or it's bad. It's, you know, that person is uh, whatever looking good today or they didn't take care of themselves. And the reality of our life is that we are all, for example, just trying our best every day to look as good as we can, I guess, or eat as healthy as we can.
Give as much as we can, work as hard as we can. Everyone's in a different place, and it's not always an easy place for any of us, wherever we are. And when we try to judge each other, especially when we try to judge ourselves through either or, or linear ways of thinking, then it's like we're turned around, faced towards the Earth.
We're not. Able to feel the earth on our back and we're not looking at this constellation that is us in a way. We're a lot of different people and we're a lot of different people in a lot of different situations, and everyone we encounter is as well. [00:06:00] And they're all trying their best, or at least we can imagine it that way from the beginning.
And try to imagine all the things that have gone into their constellation of who they are, all the different. Ways they've come to be who they are. There's a tradition in philosophy that I talk about a lot called phenomenology, and that's this lived experience which I keep bringing up. Phenomenologists ask us to sort of return to our lived experience, to just your experience right now.
You are not your thoughts. First of all, you're your presence. If you're just that for a moment, the constellation starts to open because you're not trapped in your thoughts. You're not trapped in judgment, which is always either or. There's a philosopher named Maurice Melu Ponti, who wrote about this with perception, and he didn't describe a mind as like receiving data from the world.
He described it as always immersed in a me meaningful world, so. It's engaged, it's embodied, it's present, [00:07:00] and that's how it's developing. Its ideas of itself. But you can also sort of relax into that and realize that you are that sensuality and that. You know, a door is door, like not because you measured it and you, you know, gave, put it in your mental database.
It's a door because you know what it means to grasp the handle and open it and walk through it. Portals are like that too. In other areas of life, we don't need to always understand what it is. You know, I can feel the power of the stars when I lay on the ground. At night without actually really fully understanding at all what is happening or what is going on there.
I was in Iceland recently and we saw the Northern Lights, and I still don't really understand what was going on there, even though I watched videos about how it happens in solar light and all of this, but. The feeling it gives me, just when [00:08:00] I'm sensing it and not judging it opens something for me and it doesn't need to be explained, and it doesn't need to be termed as anything unexplainable either.
And I guess what I'm trying to do by introducing this is to think about care. This word care, you know, love, I talk about love a lot, but care is also a word that philosophically and in a lot of different literature, carries a lot of. Weight and meaning. And it's also a word that holds paradox or that tries to kind of get towards this idea of beyond dichotomy, letting the dichotomies be what they are, looking at the space around it, starting to notice, oh, there's another planet over there and another over there.
And what you thought was just two is actually a constellation. And care is a little bit like that. There's this, uh, philosopher Martin Heider in the phenomenological. Tradition and his idea of care, uh, even in German, it means a word that can, means something like [00:09:00] anxiety or something like, yeah, it's concern, I guess is the better word.
Concern and care are, are sort of the same. it means care, but it also means worry, or even burden can mean burden a little bit, which I think we all understand. If you care for something, it can be work. It's not always wonderful and easy, but there's also this sense of it being meaningful when you are able to care for something and.
It can help us to care for something if we relax into our bodies and understand this different way of thinking, what I'm calling this constellation. If we realize we're one little speck on the earth, looking at the stars, and also at the same time that we're part of that amazing mystery, whatever that is, once we just let ourselves be that and relax into that, maybe we can start to understand how to care [00:10:00] in a different way.
In a way that doesn't try to say it's not hard and anxious and concerning, but also in a way that still is committed to tending to the garden or, you know, watering the plants, whatever, uh, needs to be done to try to help it thrive. Now you don't have everything in your control. It's fragile. You have to acknowledge that fragility and that temporality, but.
Care holds the attachment and the possibility of letting go. It holds the absence and the presence and it's, it's a state of noticing that it's that state that I remember as a kid of noticing that I fill the earth behind me in this dark night and I see these stars and I'm part of this. It's just noticing that.
That's a kind of step into care because then you also notice like maybe you've been talking in a way that's judgmental, even if you care. Maybe you've [00:11:00] been acting out of a mindset that sees the world as either or that you have to fight that you have to. Spark some kind of controversy in order to be seen that you have to demand, that you have to say things that will make another person angry just to get them to come back to you and notice you or, or vice versa.
A lot of us do it the other way. We say what will make people happy? So we don't get, we don't have to be seen. We, we go along with the world without causing much friction, or at least we don't acknowledge the friction that we feel. So yeah, both of those are reality. And how do we hold them both? How do we be part of the constellation, the little spec on the earth, and an individual with agency that's aware and noticing.
Because that little act of noticing is actually an act of agency of, of power. Um, the real sort of power to really notice and realize what we're part of is. Very [00:12:00] powerful. So Constellation thinking sort of takes these insights and tries to look at them in more depth, how we're embedded in our relationship, how meaning might emerge through, through those relations, through the way that we've noticed what we're part of, so to speak.
And care becomes the practice of just, of this noticing of the living, of the dying, of the changing of patterns, noticing it, and as part of it. Not to control it necessarily, but to at least start to fill into its stance and its rhythms in a way that we can maintain it, we can care for it, even if we can't fully control it.
We can care for ourselves. We can maintain ourselves in the best way possible. We can find a way to be in this difficult, challenging world and this beautiful, amazing, mysterious world. While acknowledging both, well, not even both. You see that it's also kind of [00:13:00] this dichotomous way of thinking, but while acknowledging that there's a whole multiplicity of ways of being in that world and being as that world.
And so let's think of the night sky again. And, ways that people find their way through the world and literally move through the world and constellations of stars. The stars have been one way that a lot of people do that. It's been a way we find our way, you know, the way we, it's like a map.
It's been a map for a lot of ancient civilizations. You can tell where you are by the stars and you can tell the time of the year. Which is also a way of telling where you are by the stars. But we also have, you know, had this creative aspect where we see Orian the Hunter, or uh, we see Innu in the dark spaces between the stars.
So it's not even only about the stars, the, uh, some aboriginal cultures have this beautiful way of looking at the dark spaces between the stars, and it's in that darkness that you find your way. So it's the same sky, different [00:14:00] patterns, different meanings. And that space between is actually what's. The consistent holding.
I think that's actually very beautiful too, and says something really crucial about our participation in this. And when we see the constellations, we can also see even those can become ways of seeing what isn't the constellation, which is itself another sort of constellation. So we allow it to change and we realize there's a space holding it.
this reminds me of the garden notion, again, of care is a way of practicing this, holding of the paradox, not trying to solve one side by the other. 'cause you have to be present and you have to remain open to what's becoming, and you can't judge yourself Identify yourself as any negative thought or any positive thought, really, you're just the presence of your noticing and you attend to that and you notice the relationships that are part of you and that you are part of.
And you also understand that it's temporary. [00:15:00] It's shifting. It's changing. Even though the space holding it is is always going to be the space that is holding it. So we're not isolated individuals, but we're nodes in a constellation of relationships and care isn't some kind of optional thing. It's actually, it's what holds all that.
It is that space, it's that overall ontological relation. Uh, or at least that's how we look at it. But really it's, you know, beyond all those words. We choose to tend to it or when we can't because we're just overwhelmed. All of that is the shape of our actual everyday sky, so to speak, and the crisis that we face.
The fragmentation that some people are feeling, the mental health issues, um, these are. Real and all I'm saying is that maybe we can find another way of relaxing into [00:16:00] that reality so as to be able to hold it for one another a little bit better, or to help each other hold it. Without judging it, without trying to solve it, at least for a minute.
'cause of course we do wanna help each other. We do wanna make this a better world for each other as we experience it. But part of that is realizing we are experiencing it. You know, just recognizing, noticing that lived experience and. Not just as individuals, but as all these different constellations of relationships, your family or your friends, or even just the books you read and the people that you're, the videos you're watching, or you know, the people you meet out on the street.
Those are incredibly important encounters in terms of care. If you can, if you can relax into this consolatory understanding of yourself being one part of it. And you don't have to go along with old scripts telling you how to act or you don't have to listen to the thoughts in your [00:17:00] head that are, seem so much to be you, but they're not.
They're they're scripts that you've learned and that you've been repeating, and you are the body, the lived experience, the noticing. So this means that recognizing you're not like one little star burning, you know you're not alone, you're nothing is in isolation. We can't be in isolation. We are all constellations of relationships.
That doesn't mean they're easy or that we even feel like we're part of them. Sometimes all these relationships are holding us and we don't even fill them because we've had hard life or because it's just hard to fill them. But they're there. They're important, and by those relationships, I really mean even the people you think of as strangers.
Every interaction you're having is an important one when it comes to the possibilities of care and transformation. So when you feel stuck or maybe [00:18:00] when what's needed. Is to break out of your old patterns. the first thing to do maybe is to notice the constellation, to lay on the ground with your face pointed towards all that you are part of, but that you don't understand.
Feeling the ground behind you, but also letting yourself sort of float there on this amazing planet that's. Part of this larger constellation of planets and the sky. So the question isn't really about right or wrong in those moments. It's not about judging yourself or anyone else, or it's not there's that way you can kind of let go of the anxiety and the tending to for just a moment and just be.
And that may help you with the care, with the tending and the concern that is, you know, we're gonna part of life when you get up. We can't all just lay there looking at constellations all the time, but once we are aware there's a constellation as we go about our [00:19:00] day, maybe we can keep that in mind. Sort of like I have as a, I'm an adult, I'm a, I'm a woman now, but as a kid I had that.
That feeling thanks to my teacher and it stayed with me and it's actually helped me get a little bit of perspective to remember. I'm not my thoughts to remember. I'm smaller than I might feel at times and I'm part of something larger than I might feel at times. Something is holding me. I like to think of it as love and care, and I like to also understand that that's not a easy.
Thing to be held by or to be part of. 'cause you know it's holding us, but it's infusing us as well. So the question isn't whether we are gonna see these patterns in the constellations. We're always gonna find patterns. And the patterns I see in the stars might be different from yours. And over time many different people.
All around the world have seen different things in those constellations in the same way that we see [00:20:00] different things in the constellations of relationships around us, but we, we've also had a lot of similarity and overlap and resonance together in the ways that we've beheld the stars and been the stars and the patterns that we've noticed and.
That relaxing into feeling ourselves as in relation to everything around us, not as separate from it. It's hard to do and it's, it's hard to, to really understand, but it's worth feeling it. You don't have to understand it. Just feel yourself as part of a larger constellation sometimes if you can, even if it's just looking at the stars above you.
Not being your thoughts for a moment. You know, not even being, not being anything, uh, that you've defined yourself as with words or images. Just be being present and noticing that sky. And then thinking about [00:21:00] in your daily life, what are you taking care of? What are you concerned about? What are you caring for, and how is it caring for you?
You know, the plants and the garden are also. Giving us food, the trees, the sunlight, all of this is giving to us too, and often in our relationships. That's true too. Again, even if it's just the person at the grocery store or someone walking down the street, they can give you a smile or they can move out of the way, say, or they can help you with moving a box or they can just generally try to be in a space that's not judging you.
And those are, those are huge gifts. That open up further ways for us to be constellations together. So, you know, there's the darkness between the stars, which is beautiful and rich and just as important as the light of the stars. And I guess the question is just [00:22:00] how can you realize yourself as that constellation and begin to think about it a little bit in daily life that.
You are a constellation of the things that you're relating with and what would you like to be relating with? Maybe you wanna go read a poem. Maybe you wanna find a tree that's beautiful. Maybe you wanna look at some leaves as it's becoming autumn now, and the colors and the shapes. I mean, all these things are relations and they're all making you the constellation that you are as you move through your day.
They are your, your thinking. the things you're surrounding yourself with and the patterns that you are repeating in your own languages, minds, thoughts, but also that you're reading or that you're grasping with or at all of that's becoming part of the constellation. So what, what kind of constellation would you like to have?
And maybe start bringing [00:23:00] some of those stars into your. Into your, into your world. Maybe it's instead of watching a certain kind of video that's not making you feel good, you think of something that would, even if it's a cartoon from your childhood, or maybe it's a poem or a song that your grandmother read to you, or maybe it's just going for a walk with your dog, or you knows, start to imagine these lived experiences as.
The regularities that you are interacting with as part of a constellation if you can. And if that doesn't make any sense at all, that's okay too. Just look at the sky and feel the power of it. And, um, I hope that you also feel cared for by something in the world that is larger than you. I know it's not always easy to feel it, but.
But you are cared for because you're here and you're alive. even if you're doing the caring for yourself, [00:24:00] that's a big, beautiful action that you've been doing for however long you've been doing it. It's an act of care that you're, that you're caring for yourself and a lot of potential is held in that and a lot of possibility if you've been able to do it this far, which you have.
You can keep doing it and you can find better ways to care for yourself. And a lot of the time that comes through caring for others, uh, even if it's, you know, don't, don't be hard on yourself if you can't access that feeling all the time, but a couple minutes a day at first, you know, care for something else or find something that makes you feel like.
You're part of something bigger. I always come back to poetry, and I know some people think poetry is like silly, but you know, poetry can also be a good song, an uplifting song, a song that gives you some feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself. But I, I'd love to hear what other ways you, you found to feel [00:25:00] part of a constellation to.
Understand the smallness and the largeness of life, and of your life, of our lives here nested together. All right, so that's my diary for today, and I hope that you're doing well out there. Thanks for everything you're trying to do, and thanks for putting up with this crazy world that we're in and trying to care.
If you're just doing that, you're doing a lot. All right. Be well.
Four E Cognition: Embodied Mindset Diary
[00:00:00]
Andrea: hey everyone, it's Andrea Hiott. This is my diary for October 10th, 2025. It's going to be about four E cognition. So here I am walking down the street or someone's walking down the street is not always me. These are different clips, but where is the thinking happening right now as we are walking? Is it in the brain? Is it in the body? Is it in my phone? That's guiding me? Is it in the video camera? Is it in the.
Streets themselves. Is it in the environment? Can we separate all of these things? For most of the 20th century, cognitive science told us that thinking happens inside our heads in brains that are something like computers processing information. But we actually sort of had it turned around because what we've made of computers are actually just the tip of the iceberg about what cognition really is.
We're hardly even able to handle what's really possible and what's really going on in the world.
A nested world of so many different layers that we can look at from many different angles and many different positions as we do. Uh, wherever you [00:01:00] are right now, you're experiencing all of this in a different way than me, even though we are in this shared world together, and that's incredible. There's a revolutionary shift happening and it changes everything really about how we understand mind memory, meaning. And one term that has been placed on this shift is called four E, like the number four in E. You've probably heard me talk about it in other episodes and interviews.
I even did a little intro to it in any case, four e cognition, points at this, what I've been getting at here that the brain and the body are part of whatever cognition is, which we're only just beginning to understand which computers and things like LLMs and even the internet help us understand, but.
so those things are tips of the iceberg of what these four ees are, or these mini ees and those ees stand for. Embodied, of course, which I've already mentioned. Embedded, extended and enactive, and also ecological, also exaptive, also emotional. Also, there's, you know, [00:02:00] find your e and we could discuss it.
But in this video, which is. We'll just go through the main E, the ones that sort of go with the four E or that originally went with the four E. so we're gonna explore five of them here today, and here's the beautiful part. We can understand them all. Through something you do every day, which is make your way through life, which is encounter life, which is be whoever you are. There's no stop or start to that. It's what you're doing and this is what cognition is.
It's you making your way through the world. As an embodied being that has many, many different layers and parts and dimensions and possibilities. If you try to understand it, it's all one ongoing process, one movement, but you can't understand all of that at once because first of all, you are it. You're part of it, you're inside of it.
You're also outside of it if you wanna use those kind of terms. But really it's more of a fractal thing where you're. Many different ways at once. So embodied is a good way to start because it helps us get a handle on [00:03:00] that. So watch what happens. As I approach this corner, for example, I'm leaning into the turn before I consciously decide to turn.
So I kind of noticed that as I was walking, that my body knows before my mind knows that we're gonna turn But you know, even that way that I worded it isn't really right, because body and mind aren't two different things. But mind is my awareness of my own body's movement. I'm moving, that's already cognitive.
I'm already making decisions. But when I realize that I'm doing that, when I notice that when I start to exert some kind of agency over it that has memory attached to it, or imagination or awareness in this way where I know what I'm doing, then that's mind. So thinking isn't something that happens. in your body, it's as your body, your body is your thinking.
And then also because of these wonderful brains that we have, we can become aware of that. We can like turn our own body, to understand that body as its own subject, which is just remarkable. So.
A lot of times people use their hands when they're talking as this person is doing here, and when you're trying to solve a problem, maybe you also [00:04:00] gesture with your hands. I've noticed just watching myself on video, that I do move around a lot and use my hands at times, and I'm not really thinking about that.
It's just illustrating something. that's the body. Moving as thought. So sometimes you feel nervous. You have these like butterflies in your stomach before a decision. That's not something different from your cognition. When you become aware of it, that's your mind becoming aware of it so that mind, which is part of the body, becomes aware of that body.
So when you see someone like this person navigating a crowded space, um. We can look at different parts of the body of how it moves. One part that I particularly like is in the brain. It's called the hippocampus. It's the seahorse shaped structure. And there's a lot of amazing neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computational neuroscientists, all sorts of wonderful scientists working to understand what this little part of the brain does.
There's two of them. One in each side of your brain, sort of in the middle. It's in the temporal lobe. and for decades, scientists thought [00:05:00] it was crucial for memory and it. Maybe you've heard of special cases where this area of the brain was removed because someone had seizures or epilepsy, and then, uh, they could no longer create new memories.
They couldn't, you know, they, they would meet you if you walk outta the room and come back, you know, in 15 minutes. They don't remember you anymore. So obviously this area had a lot to do with memory, but then in the seventies. People you've heard me talk about and who've been on the show, like Linda Nadel discovered that there was something else going on here.
So John O'Keefe, um, was the first to come upon and name this idea of the play cell, for example. But, and there's a whole lot of other cells that have since been named, which sometimes gets referred to as the GPS of the brain, although. Recent, more recent work shows, it's not really a GPS because again, it's happening in all sorts of dimensions at once.
But the point is the same area of the brain that was found to be essential for memory, which we would think of as, you know, mind is also essential [00:06:00] for how we just literally move through space. So for what? For? For all these images you've been seeing of us walking of different people walking, that's all.
someone finding their way, making their way with the help of the hippocampus, obviously, I mean, not only the hippocampus, but it has a very, very important role to play in that. when you're moving you're remembering something, moving through memory if you wanna put it like that.
you can kind of see how we're starting to think of space in a really different way. all this to say, your body doesn't have, have a mind. Your body is minded. It's embodied mind. Uh, I talked to Tim Ingold and he made a good point about embodied can sometimes sound like you're stuck in your body, and it's really not like that at all.
It's more of this ongoing process that is your body, which is in constant communication with the world. I mean, you're breathing, you're eating, you're. Sensory body is looping with the world in a way. navigation isn't just a metaphor for thinking, it's literally a form of navigation. Or you could think of it the other way around before you develop what you probably think of as [00:07:00] mind or cognition, which as I said, is that being aware of all of the stuff that's happening and maybe even, attaching it to certain representations linguistically and so on.
you're already cognitive just by being alive because you're making your way, you're finding your way, you're moving through the world, and this is already co a cognitive act, which, as we go, becomes something we can notice and become aware of, and then we then call mind. that's a little just tip of the iceberg of embodied mind, but if you even want a more simple definition, just understand that.
Your thinking is not only in your head, it's in your whole body, and that is actually a really beautiful revelation to have when you're moving through the world, because when you're sitting doing yoga, when you're dancing, when you're walking, when you're making love, whatever, you're involved in a really multidimensional, beautiful expression with those around you, with the world and with yourself.
So the next word is embedded and.
And this is how I think a good [00:08:00] way to think about this.
Andrea: I would, I would listen back to the episode I had with David Seaman when we talked about Christopher Alexander and pattern language. I really think of pattern language, as a kind of wonderful example of what being embedded is because. If you think about it in terms of space in place, when you walk into certain houses or rooms or cities or mountain scapes or whatever you might be in the, that space, you're embedded in it.
And it's also creating, an emotional and cognitive 'cause. Emotional is cognitive experience for you, so you, you're embedded in everything, and as you move and as the regularities around you change, so too, do the parameters of your cognition. Think about reading a map at home. On your couch versus reading it when you're lost in an unfamiliar city at night.
So the map might be the same. Your brain is, you know, more or less the same, but it's in a completely different context when you're sitting at home reading that map. You're embedded in a different context and if you're actually, you've just arrived in a city, maybe the train stops somewhere you didn't expect and you had to get out and you're trying to read your phone and [00:09:00] figure out where you are.
And it's a very different experience. even though if you just describe it, you could say, yeah, I'm looking at my phone and reading. Off a map. so wherever you are, the context in which you're embedded makes a huge difference for the parameters of what you're thinking of as co your cognition of literally what you're thinking of, of literally what you are as a thinking being.
So content isn't just where you think it shapes what you think. So you can't pull cognition out of the environ. That's what this embedded is. It's like you're meshed in your cognition and you and your body are all this beautiful dynamic weaving with the world, and you can't pull those things apart.
So different environments will have different effect. so of course I'm being very general here, but of just an easy way to understand this is that the, the environment that you're in. It kind of weaves what's possible. It gives you the threads for what's possible for your cognition on some level. Of course, many other things do too.
Like your body itself, what you ate that day, and so on and so forth. But you get the point. that's embeddedness that. Now extended [00:10:00] is, well, the GPS itself you might think of as almost like an extension of my mind or our mind. So when we're looking at the map on our phone, we can almost imagine that that is an extension of our own body in a sense, because it's literally connected to us in our hand.
It's interacting with us in a certain way. Andy Clark and Dave Chalmers wrote a great paper about this, which I'll link to with this GPS, for example, I don't need to hold the whole city's layout in my mind. I don't need to imagine it all with a paper map.
I might have to translate between the abstraction in the territory. When I just ask someone on the street, like, where do you know how to get to the, to, the museum? Then I'm navigating through a social interaction and a narrative, and maybe they're gesturing. each of these are, is extending my cognition in a different way, this is a really interesting subject to think of when you think about, Writing things down and making lists and how that becomes part of your memory. Or when we think about any form of technology, one of the classic examples, which actually comes from Gregory [00:11:00] Bateson, which you've heard me talk about, is this extension of the, of the cane. If we're. Having trouble seeing, or we're a blind person and we need a cane that can help us.
And after enough time, the cane's feedback, uh, is like our body's feedback. We fill the sidewalk through the cane, so you can think of that cane as an extension. So that's another e that's another part of this different way of thinking about cognition. It's not just in your brain. It's like even in the, the, it's even in.
The things that you're using, that you're touching, that you're help, that are helping you sense the world and all those things, literally change the parameters of your possibility as well. Just think about what happens to your thinking now that you have a smartphone, how much that changes it. I was just in Iceland and I.
I didn't, look at my phone very much and I was just in, in the world, you know, hiking around and it's so different. The kind of affordances what, what, what's possible for your cognitive, emotional being. [00:12:00] But you know, the same is true when it comes to technology that also opens up many worlds. The point is just they're different worlds.
So, uh, that's extended. And then inactive is a word you've probably heard when, um, miracle talked with Ezekiel DePalo when I talked with Hani de Jager. Evan Thompson was on, actually, there's a lot of inactive. Um, Julian Stein works with that a lot, and that's, that's sort of taking all these things we've been talking about and really understanding that what we think of as of cognition is this ongoing participatory sense making that's happening between or as our bodies and everything we're.
Encountering, including our own self in the way that we were talking about, in the way that we become aware of our own thoughts, of our own movements, of our own possibilities. So here's the thing, I don't plan my entire route and then execute it. When I go walk, I find my way. I make my way. I see what's ahead, I respond, I adjust.
The route emerges through the act of walking. [00:13:00] Even when I'm in a new place and when I'm in an old place, it could depend on my awareness, what I see. We've probably all had that experience where you, if you're in a certain state of attention, the environment, you can suddenly see things you hadn't seen before.
And this is isn't just true of navigation. You don't understand a book, for example, by passively receiving the information you're making your way through that book. So there's a similar, coupling is a word people use, but there's a sense making that's going on between you and whatever you're in, countering, whatever you're in dialogue with, whatever you're.
Part of and noticing that you're part of and putting your focus on. That can be a conversation. It's the people around us. It's the animals, it's the creatures, it can be the plants. Uh, all of that is this inactive cognition that's participatory. And it's not something we have or own. It's something we do.
It's, it's not a state, it's an activity. we're making sense. We're making way. There's this active dynamic [00:14:00] systems approach, uh, tied up in all of this. And again, this is just a tip of the iceberg, also, I think here you can really get to this idea of loving and knowing and how they're connected.
Because we start to understand this as relational, that's an important word. Relational comes really to the forefront. Once you start thinking of inaction, of cognition, mind, all these things that we think of as emotion as ourselves, really as memory. Um, as being ways we move through and navigate the world.
And that relationality is what connects us, what holds us, and that connects to many themes of love and loving that we've discussed on love and philosophy. So you don't have love or have knowledge. You make these things, you make love, you make knowledge, and you're not doing it by yourself. So even if you think you are, even if you're alone, you're actually coming out of and embedded in.
An embodied, [00:15:00] extended, ongoing life world encounter. With everything that you're taking in with the books you read, the authors who wrote them everything on social media and so forth, or just the person at the grocery store or just yourself so enactive. There would be much more to say about that.
But just as a summary, it's this ongoing relational sense making that's happening as your cognition as your. Alive as you're encountering the world. And then another E, which we're already at five now, but it's ecological. And that's another word we've talked about here with Harry Hef, for example, and through the work of JJ Gibson and, and others.
and when we say cognition is ecological, we mean that thinking doesn't belong to us in isolation. And also that it's not always something that's, Taking a lot of time. It can, it's, it's an immediate and it's also nested. It's also a lot of what we've been talking about. This is a way of getting a hold on it, of thinking of, depending on [00:16:00] where we're gonna put our focus, we can understand mind as part of all this, of, of our bodies, of ourselves, of our conversations, of our social groups, of all of these online communities of.
You know, everyone in our city, our school, our work, our family, it's this nested system. So your body's in a room, in a building, in a neighborhood. In a city, in a planet, or on a planet, part of a planet. so we can think of ecological in a lot of different ways. The usual way that that word is used is connected to ecological psychology and JJ Gibson.
But I extend it because I think Rachel Carson, for example, and Gregory Bateson and many others that have used the word ecological, open us up into a really important way also of understanding cognition as almost like a. When I, when we say it's ecological, it's, it's saying that it's ongoing at many different positions at the same time and many different dimensions as everything that is.
what's wonderful about that is when we start thinking [00:17:00] about kaleidoscopic or constellation thinking, we start to realize how at many different positions within that ongoing planetary, process that what what mind is can be very different, just as we've discussed because. Everybody will be in a different place.
Having come from a different set of regularities, a different past, you've read different books, seen different movies. So when we think of it, when we zoom out and realize like how many wonderful crazy layers there are to. The kinds of cognition that are happening, then ecological is a good word for us to understand that because it's not located in any one body and yet it's being co-created by all those bodies at the same time, much like an ecosystem.
And the health of it really, uh, depends on a lot of its parts. So I often talk about this ecological orientation, which is sort of understanding ourselves not as just isolated. You know, meat machines or something, but as living multiplicities constellations of relationships. So every thought [00:18:00] you have is of course, in some way shaped by every other thought you've ever had, and everything everyone's ever said to you.
Also, of course, your body, your biology, your language, your cultures, the technologies you use, the rhythms of the natural world that you're in. So you, again, you're not inside of an ecology, but you are that ecology and you're co-creating it. And that is a thinking process. That is a cognitive process. when we orient ecologically, we start to see that mental and environmental, which is interesting, that mental is part of environmental.
So when we see that mental and environmental health aren't separate issues, they're patterns that connect and that goes from the neuron all the way to whatever, atoms or planetary constellations in the universe, we might be looking at. I'm not saying that all of that is thinking like a human thinks or that it's cognitive like a human, definitely there would be much nuance in that.
But what I am saying is all of that, as taken as a whole, is creating what we're experiencing [00:19:00] right now as cognition. And when we think about navigability, we start to think about, okay, so if I think of that map again, you know, it depends on who I am, where I am, what I'm moving through, how all that ecological, all of those ecological relations are setting the parameters of whatever my cognition might be.
where is this thinking happening again? It's, it, it's not in my body, it's not in the phone, it's not in the street, it's not in the people. It's not in my dog. It's not in the sky. And it's in all those places. It's everywhere. And, and no one particular place. So that's this, new way of thinking, which is an old way of thinking, that we're still trying to figure out of, of how to let all of that be at once.
in the moving body, in the moving planet, in the moving everything, contact shaping tools, extending, doing the enacting ecology, ecological, relational, turning the kaleidoscope, kaleidoscopic, thinking. All of these are. Almost like poems that kind of spring out of this way of thinking that I've been describing [00:20:00] here with the ease.
It's, it's part of how we can learn to hold all these perspectives at once and not have to choose between them. You know, we don't choose between being embodied, embedded, and active or ecological. It's just different ways that we're understanding one ongoing process and we can't collapse those into each other and we don't want to, and we can't solve it.
We don't need to make one into the other. But instead we think of it as many different ways to understand this process. So each e gives us a different view of this ongoing process, and we can sort of rotate between them and, uh, notice their contradictions and, and let those contradictions be portals into new ways of understanding and sensing them.
We start to experience ourselves not as either or, but as constellations as. Many sensual possibilities, many ways of being, and we're not separate minds, but we are unique minds that have something to share with everyone we meet and connect with. [00:21:00] And each connection we make, even when they're really hard, can be understood as.
A way to increase or expand what's possible for us as cognitive beings and to even change these shared patterns that we have, that that guide us and that hold us. And that's sort of the heart of love and philosophy is starting to understand that, that whatever that is, that's holding us when we listen to it and put our attention on it, we're engaging in an act of loving, which is also a.
A particular sort of knowing, maybe the only real knowing and all, both of those are ways we make together through this infinite complexity, uh, of existence. And I don't know about you, but I find it just incredible that we can be aware that we're here, that we're part of this, and I. It's hard. It's challenging, it's overwhelming.
It's [00:22:00] wonderful. So that's my diary for today. Thank you for listening. Hope you're doing well wherever you are. And I send you another E, which is exuberance. I like that word today. Alright, bye.