How to see the Blind Spot with philosopher Evan Thompson
Join us on the Substack at Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy
TRANSCRIPT
Evan Thompson on Love and Philosophy audio edit
Evan Thompson: [00:00:00] It's not a crisis for the planet as such. The planet can keep right on going with life, uh, probably perfectly fine through this human perturbation, but it is a crisis for us and for other species, uh, as well. We don't see that we have a blind spot. We don't see there. And we don't see that we don't see the blind spot arises when we miss stake the idealized and abstracted models that we've created for the concrete reality of nature, including ourselves in it.
We're substituting a tool for the phenomena and it's surreptitious because it's hidden. We think that time fundamentally is what a clock measures rather than our experience of the now and duration and becoming. There's nothing in the project of science itself. Using mathematical abstraction that has to be pinned to this idea of a kind of metaphysical hierarchy where human experiences is not on the same [00:01:00] level as other phenomena.
Whitehead called that the bifurcation of nature, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. They saw that there's a hidden experiential depth to our relationship with nature that we easily lose sight of when we become fascinated with our scientific achievements. If you reduce the diversity of species, you get rid of the arts and humanities and you emphasize just STEM discipline.
It's actually undermining the culture that creates innovation, that creates scientific advance.
I think the challenge in maybe general abstract terms Is to move from familiar dichotomous modes of thought that show up in all sorts of ways, mind, body, subject, object, inside, outside subjective objectives, to move from those kinds of frameworks to frameworks that emphasize a kind of irreducible relationality. Irreducible complexity. So by the end of the book, we, we talk about the emergence of complex system science of networks science. [00:02:00] And what we see as very rich in those developments is tools for actually thinking in terms of relations and networks in which we can include ourselves as necessary nodes in the network and participants in them.
I like heterodox thinkers, I like underdogs, I like alternative viewpoints, I find orthodoxy boring.
We constantly run up against the fact that the way nature is disclosed to us. depends fundamentally on how we are investigating it, how we are interrogating it on the tools we have on the cultural infrastructure of science. So on the one hand, you could say we're absolutely central to what science is telling us.
But on the other hand, We're peripheral or we're tiny and contingent. And so that's not like, strictly speaking, a logical paradox, but it's, it's like a conundrum. It's a sort of tangled up knot. So how do we untangle that?
Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to love and philosophy.[00:03:00]
It's New Year's day, 2025. Happy New Year's. It's very windy outside. I'm near the sea and it's a wild day outside. You might hear the wind, but hopefully this still comes through. Today's episode is with Evan Thompson, who is a philosopher, one of my favorite philosophers, because he writes with such precision and honesty.
and clarity, and he's been doing it for such a long time. I have to admit, I've also been writing a book about Evan, not only Evan, also Evan's father, and this time period when Evan was a child and teenager growing up, when a lot of groups of scientists were coming together in different ways to try and find what I think of as a complex system.
Rather than a linear approach to the problems of the world. For example, [00:04:00] with Evan's father, William Irwin Thompson, there was a group called Lindisfarne. And some of my favorite writers, people you've definitely heard me mention, like Gregory Bateson, The Pattern That Connects comes from him. Also, Francisco Varela.
Len Margulis. To be honest, the list goes on and on, but Evan's father got these people together. Also, some Native American leaders, Buddhist thinkers, and this was in the 70s, so it was before anyone took Len Margulis seriously. For example, Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela. These were more French people at that time.
Now, we I think of them as founders of earth system science and founders of certain kinds of neuroscience studies. However, at this time, when Evan was growing up, his dad was getting all these people together, thinking of new ways to exist, to think, to move. And that relates to this whole idea of beyond dichotomy for me, love and [00:05:00] philosophy, holding paradox, all this to say, I'm very pleased to bring you Evan Thompson on New Year's Day.
We talk about his newest book, he's written a lot of great books, but he and the astrophysicist, Adam Frank and the theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser have written a wonderful book called The Blind Spot. We talk about that title, what it means, how it relates to these other themes that I've just mentioned.
We talk about some of these people like Bateson and Varela. who have been important to continuing this tradition. We talk about what it might mean to do, have some sort of a practice or what Pierre Hadot called spiritual exercises towards being able to think differently about the patterns that connect Us all, across disciplines, and taking our own individual subjective experience seriously.
We talk about how, in the wellspring of science and technology, what we're really missing is this idea of subjectivity. We pretend like it's not there in our science, [00:06:00] but we actually can't get away from it. We also talk about crisis. This word is used a lot in meta crisis, meaning crisis, and ecological crisis.
There's a lot of talk of the crisis right now. We talk about how that's and What we might do to change that. Some of you might know Evan from his book, Embodied Mind, that he wrote with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch. One of the founding books of embodied cognition, of actually thinking of cognition and mind as something that is embodied.
It's an embodied act. So, Evan has been trying to hold the paradox for as long as he's been writing, as far as I'm concerned. Writing about the continuity of mind and life, for example. Writing about the continuity of action and cognition. Here, writing about this in terms of subjectivity and objectivity.
Particle and wave, you might say. He gives the example of temperature, which is, it's almost hard to even understand the example, because we take temperature to be a number that we read with a tool. But of [00:07:00] course, without lived experience, without the subjective experience, this makes no sense at all. But, In this way, it can be very hard to understand that all of our tools and science and math actually does have an embodied subjective wellspring at its core, and we get a bit confused when we think that, a technology might develop that, because the technology is part of this continuity out of that.
So, that's not an easy thing to hold and understand, but we do try to talk about that here and look at it. He also wrote a really wonderful article, which I'll link to, about time and Einstein and Bergson, also trying to hold this idea of subjectivity and objectivity together. I hope that you had a good end of the year for 2024 and that everything is refreshing for you today, for New Year's, in a way that brings you love, clarity.
I hope [00:08:00] that wherever you are, you hear something in this conversation that helps you in the New Year. I've now listened to this conversation, I think, at least five times as I've been trying to edit it, and every time I listen to it, I hear, Evan says something that I hadn't really heard well the first time.
And of course I had this conversation with Evan, so I think that really tells you something about the depth of his scholarship and how when he's talking he's already making a lot of connections because he's really put the time in and studied this. And thought about it deeply and takes responsibility for what he says and the associations.
Thanks also for your support. Thank you for joining the Substack. Thank you for your comments. Thank you for joining the YouTube. Thank you for your emails. Thank you for just being here and thinking about these ideas and trying to find the patterns that connect and move forward in a new way together.
Hi, [00:09:00] Evan. It's so wonderful to see you today. Thanks for being here. Thanks for inviting me. I want to talk to you about this book, Blindspot, today. And there's two words that kept coming up in the book, but also that, you know, I really focus on right now. One is urgency and the other is paradox. And the very beginning sentence, I know it's kind of annoying to read your first sentence to you, but it's, it's really serious, right?
The first sentence is, we write this book with a sense of urgency because we believe our collective future and human project of civilization are at stake. You're not playing around here.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, that's right. We, we feel that. We are in a kind of cultural crisis that you could describe in a number of different ways.
I think maybe most fundamentally, you could say it's a kind of crisis of meaning, but it has its most tangible manifestation, perhaps in the climate crisis, which is a planetary crisis for humanity. It's not a crisis for the planet as [00:10:00] such. The planet can keep right on going with life, uh, probably perfectly fine through this human perturbation, but it is a crisis for us.
And for our, and for other species, uh, as well, not just us, but particularly for us. And we feel that that crisis is a manifestation of a certain worldview that is not the same as science, but has come to be grafted onto or embedded within science since the rise of modern science and, and the industrial worldview.
And so we're trying to target the ways of thinking really that have to do with meaning and the understanding of nature and human experience and the relationship between the human form of life and the rest of the rest of nature and the rest of the cosmos. We're trying to under, we're trying to identify the sources that have their most tangible manifestation in, in these crises.
Andrea Hiott: Crisis is a word I hear a lot from a lot of different people, different areas, different fields of study. Where does meaning [00:11:00] crisis come from for you? Um, I
Evan Thompson: would say that, so if we were going to describe maybe some of the philosophical sources for this way of thinking, or you could say this diagnosis, um, one of the very influential works for us, which we talk about in the beginning of the book, is a work that also had crisis in the title.
So this was the work by the German philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl. He wrote a work at the very end of his life. It was really a series of lectures that he gave called The Crisis of European Sciences. And that was 1938 he was writing, and he died really just before the outbreak of World War II.
And the crisis that he identified was, it was, it was really a meaning crisis in the sense that We had come to acquire a very powerful method for investigating and manipulating things, and this is the method of modern [00:12:00] experimental science, which involves abstracting away from certain aspects of our experience, idealizing and quantifying others, rendering them in a mathematical language that we use as a tool to gain insight into and to gain control and prediction over phenomena within certain ranges of our ability.
And what we do, according to Hirschfeld's diagnosis, is we mistake the method, which is basically like a tool of knowledge. We mistake the tool for the nature of the thing itself that we're investigating. And in that way, we think of nature as if it's entirely objective or objectifiable. As intrinsically mathematical in a way that doesn't fundamentally involve how we encounter it, how we interact with it, how we perceive it.
And what's wrong calls this the surreptitious substitution that we substitute a tool or a method or the [00:13:00] phenomena, and that's really in his way of thinking, that's where the crisis really has its root because it's a, it's a way of rendering the meaning of our experience in an objectified language and forgetting.
That it's a, that its status as a language is, is that of a tool, not that as a thing itself.
Andrea Hiott: Can
Evan Thompson: you tell me what
Andrea Hiott: that word means? I kept meaning to look it up the whole time I was reading the book, surreptitious. Of course, you know, it's one of those words, you know what it means, but I don't really know how to put it into words just for,
Evan Thompson: Yeah, so you could say it's actually, it's, it's not quite what the German word Husserl is using.
I think Husserl's words is something more like, um, like a displacement. The translator rendered it, I think in a way that's quite ingenious as surreptitious substitution. So surreptitious is the idea that something is happening behind the scenes that it's covert, that it's not out in the open and substitution [00:14:00] is you're replacing one thing with another thing.
And. You're not because it's surreptitious. You're not either. You're not aware of it or you're not calling attention to it. Um, you're, you're letting it pass by without any further thinking or critical reflection. So in his case, what it means is substituting a method for being. That's actually how he puts it or substituting a tool for the phenomena and it's surreptitious.
Because it's, it's hidden, it's, it's, we, we describe so classically, you know, Galileo describes nature using geometry and, you know, Descartes comes along and gives us the algebraic version of that. And then it's sort of up and running as the project of modern mathematical physics. And the surreptitious substitution is you, you substitute for the phenomena, the mathematical description of them.
Which is abstract and idealized and the phenomena are concrete and sensuous. So that's the [00:15:00] substitution and you do it in a way where you're not saying, look, this is a useful tool. You're saying this is actually how nature is. Galileo famously says, if I just imagine all the minds gone, all the sentient beings gone, what's left?
Nature in itself, which is matter in motion. understood in terms of its, you know, geometrizable properties.
Andrea Hiott: And it's so, this book by Herschel, which I just had here, but I took it downstairs cause we're going away for my husband's birthday and I wanted to bring it with me, but the one that you, the mention, it's such an important book and it, I really was hoping you'd bring that up when I asked about the meaning crisis.
Cause it feels really connected to what you're doing here too. What you just described kind of is the blind spot in a way, isn't it? It's this, we don't see. That we've mistaken the models or the science for the process that the science is studying, so to speak. And he saw that and he was trying to bring this to the attention, um, in an urgent way.
But let's think about this [00:16:00] blind spot because that is the name of the book and you've already described it in a way, but we haven't really talked about it sort of directly. So what would you like to unpack about blind spot?
Evan Thompson: The term blind spot, of course, is a, is a metaphor it's taken from the fact that we actually all mammals have a blind spot in our visual field.
So the visual field blind spot is where the optic nerve leaves, the eye leaves the retina. And in that area, we don't have any photoreceptors, so there's no visual sensitivity there. So it's an area in our visual field that's, uh, that's not receiving sensory stimulation. But it makes seeing possible in the way that our eyes happen to be organized because you need the optic nerve to conduct the impulses to the brain.
So it makes seeing possible. But it's a gap or an emptiness or a spot in the visual field where we're blind, [00:17:00] but we don't see that we have a blind spot. We don't, you know, we don't see there and we don't see that we don't see. I have
Andrea Hiott: to say when I was studying neuroscience, the first time I realized it, the professor drew something on the board and then we kind of moved through the room to the point where our blind spot was and I literally couldn't see the thing on the board and it was really, it's really kind of creepy, right?
To realize you can't see it at all when it's in your blind spot. That's right.
Evan Thompson: That's right. That's right. It just, uh, disappears from view. So there's something that disappears from view and we don't see that it disappears from view unless we undertake these particular movements and exercises that will bring our blind spot, you know, into, into our awareness.
So we use that as a metaphor for the idea that there's something that's fundamental to our, to the way science works, but that our scientific worldview has occluded, has. Has, um, hidden and it has not been able to see. So [00:18:00] it's the scientific blind spot, you could say, and that's the source of science and lived experience.
The, the primacy of the, the primacy of human experience for the whole project that is science, which is, uh, you know, a cultural human activity. And so the blind spot is that idea. It's, um, it's that we've, we become so taken up with the models and theories And technologies, which are all incredibly powerful and valuable.
We become so taken up with them that we forget that there is this underlying source or wellspring for them that it is human experience. And that's the blind spot.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. And this is. I would ask you like, how did this happen, but that's what the book is about because it's a long, complicated story happening at many nested levels.
So I'm just kind of kidding when I say, how did this happen? But in a kind of sense, can I just paint it like you come [00:19:00] to awareness in the world or we do of each other and then we start studying how this is happening. And We start developing sort of tools to study that and then at some point we've become so good with our tools that we can predict things or we can build things that help us.
And, of course, again, I'm cartooning a whole book, we become almost obsessed with that, or it becomes something that we think that's the only way to find the answer, right? And through a blind spot, in a way, it's just almost through awe and wonder, um, but then wanting to have, be able to trust in that and have some kind of concrete, uh, thing to hold on to, which of course science just becomes that in a way.
Evan Thompson: Yeah. So that's, yeah. Really what we cover in the second chapter of the book, we give a, we give a kind of very abbreviated history of how it's going back to the Greeks and then up through, um, medieval natural philosophy and into the early modern period. [00:20:00] And then, you know, down into the 19th and 20th centuries, there is this, um, what we call the sending spiral of abstraction.
So there's this. Really, you know, fundamental insight into the role that, that mathematics can play in giving us cognitive insight into nature. And we progressively refine that, refine that, refine that. And in and of itself, that's a marvelous thing. But the blind spot arises when we mistake the idealized and abstracted models that we've Concrete the concrete reality of nature, including ourselves in it.
So this is to use the term from another sort of hero of our book, Alfred North Whitehead, who was writing around the same time as Husserl, this is what he called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It's that the [00:21:00] abstractions have a very powerful cognitive role to play and they do latch onto aspects of nature, but then we read them back into what nature fundamentally is in a way that.
Involves denigrating human experience. So we create a kind of hierarchy of being, we say that, well, um, you know, particles in motion are more fundamental than human experience. And when we do that, we've created a hierarchy where we've in a way, cut ourselves out from what nature is fundamentally, where a human experience is one way that, you know, nature produces, uh, you know, life.
You know, cognitive beings with a particular relationship to a particular environment. So it's a kind of hierarchical, uh, it's a metaphysical hierarchy. So there's nothing in the project of science itself using mathematical abstraction that has to be, uh, pinned to this idea of a kind of metaphysical hierarchy where human experiences is [00:22:00] not on the same level as other phenomena.
So Whitehead called that the bifurcation of nature. He called it the fallacy of misplaced
Andrea Hiott: concreteness.
Evan Thompson: Um, this bifurcation, let's
Andrea Hiott: hang on that word for a minute because I mentioned paradox at the beginning and I kind of want to get to that way that it's sort of created this, I almost want to call it a habit or.
a way of seeing the world that's bifurcated. Do you want to talk a little bit about bifurcation or maybe we could also talk about the parable of temperature. Is it temperature? Yeah. Yeah. Because that kind of goes through the book and I think that's a really easy way to understand how our lived experience, our direct experience, we want to understand it and it then becomes abstracted in the way you've been describing.
Evan Thompson: Yeah. So the parable of temperature is an example we introduced at the very beginning to illustrate all of these ideas. And it's the idea that With the creation initially of thermometry of the, you know, the science of the measuring of temperature, the science and technology of the measuring of temperature.
We had to start with our concrete [00:23:00] lived experiences of hot and cold in and through our bodies. So we start with our bodily experience and then we realize that there are certain, uh, regularities that. Happened in the experience of caught in cold, despite variations across, you know, individual sensation.
We can fix on those. We can actually stabilize them in controlled setting. We can discover that there are fixed points, you know, where water boils, where water freezes. We can use those to create thermometers. We discover those are context dependent, you know, whether you're up high in the mountains, whether you're at sea level.
So we, we sort of progressively explore in and through our body, the very ability and variations and experience looking for the invariance that then we can fix and then, uh, really control through technological, uh, means and out of that, we create, uh, [00:24:00] The science of temperature. Then we come along with thermodynamics and we give a theory of what's actually going on initially, uh, a theory that you could say, uh, observational, and then that gets underpinned by statistical mechanics and they, and we redefine temperature as opposed to the sensation of hot and cold as the average, you know, kinetic energy of, of particles.
And then this, so all of that is fine. There's no, I mean, that's all wonderful. But the, the blind spot would arise if we say that, that the average kinetic energy of molecules is metaphysically more fundamental than the experience of hot and cold. And we forget that the intelligibility, the meaningfulness of a construct like average molecular kinetic energy actually depends on our experience.
Or it's, or it's underpinning or it's, or it's [00:25:00] source. So we call that the parable of temperature. That's kind of an illustration of, of the ascending spiral of abstraction, the surreptitious substitution. The bifurcation of nature is the idea that nature is divided into what is subjective and exists only in the mind and what's objective and exists outside the mind and is really fundamentally a matter of mathematizable properties.
Andrea Hiott: It's almost like with the temperature now, instead of understanding it's this bodily, sensual, ongoing thing that isn't actually monetized and data tied, it doesn't have numbers on it. We actually think of it through the temperature of numbers.
Evan Thompson: Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And that's something that we do in all sorts of ways.
So we think that time fundamentally is, is what a clock measures rather than our experience of. The now and duration and becoming. So that's an example. Another example would be say in the neuroscience of consciousness, where the idea is, [00:26:00] you know, how could you investigate something like consciousness except from within your own consciousness, the entire activity of investigating the brain is happening in and through the conscious experience of the neuroscientist.
But then there's an attempt to redefine what consciousness fundamentally is, as opposed to. How we encounter it subjectively in terms of something like neuronal computations or integrated information, or, you know, one or another construct in cognitive neuroscience. So that's another example where we take ideas that have their proper home in models, and then we read them back into nature in a way that, um, you could say undercuts the source of the model, which is the lived experience itself, which is never something that you can exhaustively capture in a model.
Andrea Hiott: That's just
Evan Thompson: not the nature of a model.
Andrea Hiott: And, uh, you were getting to what the bifurcation was and that's, I'm great, I'm glad you went there because I want to get into that, that not only consciousness but what you were saying about [00:27:00] somehow we've sort of, like, lived experience and subjectivity has almost become something we don't take seriously, which is very weird since it's the source.
But maybe just that Whitehead was trying to bring out with that. And I think it also connects to Husserl. What was like the real kind of, the thing that really hurt there
Evan Thompson: for him? Right. So the, so the bifurcation, the idea is you have nature and you're trying to understand nature as let's call it a system of relations among, you know, different processes, different phenomena.
And then you introduce a cut and you say, On the one hand, there's what's objective, and on the other hand, there's what exists only in the mind. And so an example of this would be to say, well, colors don't really exist. There's really only electromagnetic radiation. And the problem with that is that you still have to account [00:28:00] for color as a phenomenon because it is, after all, part of nature.
We see color. Birds see colors richer than we do. Fish see colors richer than we do. So color is part of the phenomenology of nature. And if you kick it outside of nature into the mind, and moreover, you don't have a way of explaining the mind because. Nature has been set up as mind removed. Galileo says, let's remove all the creatures and describe nature as it is without all the creatures.
So then you try to put the creatures back in and you use the same method to try to describe them that you use to remove them. You're immediately in a, in a very problematic situation. And so that's really the bifurcation of nature is that you've made this cut that you have to stitch back together somehow.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly. This dichotomy. This is very important because. Even the way we have to talk about it, the way you just described it, mind has been cut from nature. We, our language is built on it already, thinking that mind is something [00:29:00] separate from nature. And of course, in your work, going all the way back, you've been dealing with how to show that that's not a dichotomy, in fact.
But isn't, isn't it hard to even present the problem clearly? I'm trying to get to what you kind of call that we're like stuck in an impossible contradiction, because Even just then, the way you have to explain it, you have to use these words that are already setting things against other things. It becomes very hard to clearly see that we don't actually need to have that dichotomy because our language uses
Evan Thompson: it.
That's right. I mean, the dichotomy, I think, is deeply entrenched in our ways of thinking historically and, and linguistically and in the, you know, in the languages that we use as you're, as you're saying. And the paradox or the contradiction is one that we point to, I think, at the very beginning of the book, we say that, well, on the one hand, the, the scientific narrative that we have, you know, the narrative of evolution, biological evolution, the narrative of cosmology, that [00:30:00] how do we figure into that?
Well, we figure into that as, as a kind of very tiny contingent phenomenon, you know, on one planet as a result of. An evolutionary and cosmic history that very well could have gone otherwise. So we're, uh, we're on the one hand, we're kind of a tiny contingent accident, you might say in the grand stories that science is telling us.
But we are also the authors of the stories and in all of the areas that we discuss in the books, cosmology and quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience, we, we constantly run up against the fact that the way nature is disclosed to us. Depends fundamentally on how we are investigating it, how we are interrogating it on the tools we have on the cultural infrastructure of science.
So on the one hand, you could say we're absolutely central to what science is [00:31:00] telling us. But on the other hand, We're peripheral or we're tiny and contingent. And so that's not like strictly speaking a logical paradox, but it's a, in the sense of a self contradiction, but it's a, it's like a conundrums it's, it's a sort of tangled up knot.
So how do we untangle that? Well, you know, our argument is we untangle that by seeing that science is a human activity. That the way that nature is understood in and through models fundamentally depends on human cognition, on human interaction, so that we can't take ourselves out of the story. There's no way to, to take ourselves out of the story.
Andrea Hiott: Which is what we've been doing and why this urgency to bring that word has come about because there's this disconnect. It was almost like we had one leg on each side of this for a while and now we've just, everyone's had to jump to one side because the parts have moved apart. Conceptually. So now you have to choose sides in almost everything.
Maybe we should talk a little bit about this paradox because [00:32:00] for me the whole book is set up through many different kinds of paradoxes, which what that really means in life right now is that we all feel like we have to choose sides. Either mind is this or mind is that. Either everything is physical or everything is not physical.
It's always an either or kind of thing. When you talk about time and cosmos, matter, observer, nature, consciousness. Reduction, objectivity, we can do go on and on and the book sets it up really well in different ways. But this dichotomy of slicing things is different than those things being different poles or different ways of looking at an ongoing shared process, right?
How can you help me unpack that a little bit? Because Transcribed by https: otter. ai And as you say multiple times in the book too, it's not that it's wrong to bifurcate, but it's that the bifurcation is a measurement or a method or some kind of way in which we're trying to understand that which can't be bifurcated because it's ongoing.
It's it's a process.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, no, definitely. So I'm, I [00:33:00] mean, I think the challenge in very, you know, maybe general abstract terms Is to move from, from familiar dichotomous modes of thought that show up in all sorts of ways, you know, mind, body, subject, object, inside, outside subjective objectives, um, to move from those kinds of, of frameworks to frameworks that emphasize a kind of irreducible relational, uh, irreducible relationality.
Um, irreducible complexity. So by the end of the book, we, we talk about the emergence of complex system science of networks science. And what we see as very rich in those developments is tools for actually thinking in terms of relations and networks in which we can include ourselves as necessary nodes in the network and participants in them.
So that whenever we are, let's say, trying to characterize, you know, A network or [00:34:00] web of interrelated phenomena. We can also take account of the fact that we are included in how that network is going to get characterized in terms of how we're able to observe it, how we're able to measure it, how we're able to, you know, perturb it.
And for, you know, nonlinear systems, the ways that one intervenes and perturbs them Has huge, has potentially huge influences downstream for the network, including for the one who's engaged in perturbing it. So that whole kind of relational way of thinking, I mean, Whitehead was sort of a proto philosopher, not a proto.
He was a philosopher of this because he emphasized, you know, relationality and process rather than substance and, uh, dichotomies. So that's, I think the challenge and that's not something that, I mean, that's like an ongoing work in progress and [00:35:00] it has to be done in and through science. You know, we're absolutely committed to science.
Our book is not a science critic, it's not a book criticizing science. It's a book criticizing certain philosophy that's got attached to science. So the challenge is to find our way to that.
Andrea Hiott: Do you think it means that developing a kind of different stance, I don't know even how to put this into words again, because everything is so stuck, but I know you're not a Buddhist and you wrote a whole book about why you're not, but you do have, you have studied widely what consciousness and mind are from many different perspectives, right?
Like the embodied mind. I mean, even that title embodied mind, you had to say that and show people that the mind and the body are connected because of this weird. split that kind of came through science, but what I'm getting at is, is there some kind of practice that we have to do to be able to understand what you just said, that we're part of it and we can also study it very rigorously and robustly through science that These things don't cancel each other out, lived experience and sensuality [00:36:00] and phenomenology is part of it and you can still be scientific.
It is there, is there a practice to it? Do you think to under really being able to understand this?
Evan Thompson: I mean, I think there are practices. I wouldn't say there is, you know, one practice. I think, um, I think things like. Learning how to tolerate uncertainty, uh, learning a certain kind of, you could call it cognitive humility.
Um, learning how to remember that anything said is said by somebody in a particular context, uh, and that that has to reflexively be taken into account. I think there are various kinds of practices that, um, or let's say traditions. That, uh, inculcate that kind of attitude. I mean, Buddhism, the Buddhist tradition for me is an important one, even though I'm not a Buddhist, because I do think in certain, [00:37:00] uh, in certain areas of that tradition, those kinds of skills you could say are very much inculcated, um, in the embodied mind, that's really what we focused on.
Uh, was the idea of certain kinds of practices of, of in that book, we called it mindful awareness. This was long before the mindfulness buzzword, but, um, we, we called it mindful, the mindful awareness. Um, I think, I think those practices are much more evident in philosophy in the way that it was done in the ancient world, whether you're talking about Buddhism.
Or, or Greek philosophy, Platonism, Stoicism, uh, Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, because very much the idea was that of. Philosophy or knowledge in general, cultivating a whole. Being of character and attitude and way of life. And with modern philosophy, we really lost that. We came to think of philosophy as really a kind of critical project about knowledge [00:38:00] and the paradigm of knowledge is science.
And we learned a lot of things from, from doing philosophy in that way, but we need to recover something that was lost and that included what one scholar would call spiritual exercises. So this is Pierre Hadot. He was a scholar of, um, ancient Greek philosophy mainly. And he wrote about how in the ancient world, philosophy fundamentally involved various kinds of spiritual exercises, exercises for, for cultivating and training one's spiritual being, one's, you know, one's being as a, as a, as a person in the world and those kinds of things.
I, I think actually some of the, you know, the very best, uh, or most Exemplary scientists, you know, they embody these things, even if they don't necessarily talk about them in that way. And I, you know, I've been privileged to meet a lot of scientists over the years of my life who very much embodied that kind of way of being.
And that's, I [00:39:00] think, something that, um, we don't teach when we teach science either in, you know, elementary school, high school, university, uh, you might meet a professor who embodies it and might be a role model for you, but. It's not presented as part of the scientific worldview, that these things are also important.
And, and that I, I think is, uh, is a loss that we need to work on. Yeah, I
Andrea Hiott: have trouble with loss, the word loss, because it's almost that we've gotten too busy or too. focused on other things to realize that it's there or something, but I wonder who you're thinking about because you've got so many people in your past that actually practiced this and long before it was cool.
In a way it's starting to become cool, being able to hold two contradictions, seeming contradictions in mind at once. This connects to something like Buddhism or even like a Zen Kone in this wider sense, but also there's a lot of science. You talk about quantum physics a lot in the book, and there's a lot of scientists or anthropologists or, you know, Pick your field [00:40:00] that when you go so deeply into the subject, you almost end up having to practice this unless you're going to develop, cling to an, a certain one of those sides that we were talking about in the dichotomy.
There's some kind of practice to it that infiltrates those who are going really deeply. For example, Bergson, you bring up and you've written about Whitehead. These people, they had a lot of success, but they were also, It wasn't easy for them to hold and present this, and most people dismissed it as naive and only later did it, was it like, Oh, actually I see what you're saying.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, that's right. I mean, these people in some ways, I mean, they are successful in one sense, you know, like Bergson, Husserl, Whitehead, and that there's, you know, canonical figures in the history of philosophy. So you could say that they have, they have a kind of success, but they're also, they're also underdogs in a way.
And I, I always root for the underdog. They, you know, they really [00:41:00] tried to call attention to things that went against the kind of emerging sensibility of the time. And I think that, um, you know, in, in large measure they have enduring value and we keep rediscovering them because they, they call the attention to things.
That we, we really need to pay more attention to, um, so in, you know, in, in those cases, and they were all exceptionally, uh, scientifically literate philosophers. I mean, Bergson actually was adept at mathematics. His first publication was in mathematics. Whitehead and Husserl were not trained as philosophers.
They were trained as mathematicians, and then they entered into philosophy from mathematics. So these were extremely, you know, scientifically knowledgeable people, but they, what they all shared in common is that they saw that there's a hidden experiential depth. to our relationship with nature that we easily lose sight of when we become [00:42:00] fascinated with our scientific achievements.
Andrea Hiott: I think that's part of this crisis too, or this meaning crisis starting out, or you kind of think you're going to go into neuroscience, for example, and that's going to tell you the answers different from your lived experience. And then you do kind of develop a crisis at some point because you realize kind of what I think all those thinkers realize, right?
They went so deeply into the science or the math or whatever that, that you bump up against the fact that you have to understand that it starts with lived experience and you're not going to be able to get anywhere. away from that, right? Um, and I think that for young people it can be a crisis, right?
Because the society is still set up where science is supposed to have all the answers rather than science is a very rigorous way in which we model and try to understand an ongoing process in the sense that we were talking about before. Have you seen that or felt that? Is that part of like the meaning crisis too for you?
Evan Thompson: Yeah, I think, um, and this is one [00:43:00] of the things in a way we call attention to in the very beginning of the book that there's this very, um, You could say divided or schizoid relationship to science and our cultures. You know, we have science triumphalist who, who sort of proclaim from the mountaintop that science is the greatest thing ever.
And philosophy is really irrelevant. Um, then we have, you know, science deniers who think that, um, that, uh, there are, there are, well, science denial takes different forms, but, but who, who get sucked into systems of thought. Like conspiracy theories, for example, that involve counter narratives or, or denying, um, denying scientific activity, or you get sort of, you know, new age fringe science, like there's all, all these, you know, all these ways that our relationship to science is kind of broken up and not integrated in a [00:44:00] culturally holistic way.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and that feels like you have to make a choice, doesn't it? I mean, I love that you set that up. There's triumphalism, science triumphalism, which I never really thought of it like that, but that describes that mood. And then scientific denialism, which is what it says. And then you also kind of put new age postmodernism.
I'm not really sure where, how to locate all of that, but in any case, it does. This is what I was talking about at the beginning, where it feels like you have to choose a side. You have to go with science or you have to be against science completely. Or you have to, to cling to some particular guru or perhaps like very strange.
deconstructive kind of stance in the world or something. And I feel like what you're showing with the book is here's how we got here. Let's open up the space and hold all this stuff together because we're at a crisis in, in terms of individuals and also in terms of the earth. But yeah, you could go [00:45:00] ahead, but
Evan Thompson: yeah, no, exactly.
Uh, I mean, that's, that's, that's exactly the situation. I think, I think part of it also has to do with, um, well, particularly in North America, but not exclusively that we have created educational situations that for the most part, strongly emphasize, you know, so called STEM disciplines in a way that severs them.
From connections to things like art and the humanities. I mean, I think of it in ecological terms. If you have a, if you have a healthy, robust, resilient ecosystem, it has an incredible diversity of species in it. So if you reduce the diversity of species, you, you get rid of the arts and humanities and you emphasize just STEM discipline, it's actually undermining the culture that creates innovation, that creates scientific advance.
And that's, um, I mean, there's many reasons why that's come [00:46:00] about, but in terms of education, that's a very tangible manifestation of it.
Andrea Hiott: That speaks to another thing that's could be very problematic right now, which is this fascination with, and of course, also advancement in an amazing delight of technology and AI and stuff like this.
Just to try to link it to scientific triumphalism and denialism. Maybe we could talk about something like the atom or the electron, because this features in the book in a way that I think helps unpack some of this. This might be messy, but you can help me because I have some trouble here. So in a way, there's no atom in terms of process and life ongoing.
We've reduced things through the models, like the maps, the models, the science, and it's a very helpful way to think about all this ongoing stuff in order to understand it. We think of it in terms of atoms or we model it. All these different ways through, through our tools. So we do have all this technology and it does seem like we can look closer and closer at things, or we can get better and better at [00:47:00] something with large language models or whatever.
And there's a point where it almost feels like it's, it's doing it better than us, so we should trust it. And, and we really forget that it got set in motion by our orientation. And this becomes very hard, I think, to understand and to hold like the atoms and electrons thing. Can, can't we really see atoms and electrons with our tools and technology and can't we just then, can't we just now just kind of give our authority over to that technology since it can see it better than us?
How would you unpack that?
Evan Thompson: Yeah. So there's no argument in our book that atoms and electrons aren't real. Um, I mean, we say that, uh, That we have all sorts of reasons to believe that they're real because we can, uh, create technologies where we can track phenomena that are correlated with them. We can, we can image, we can image things microscopically and observe the effects.
We can create technologies that, that use atoms and [00:48:00] electrons to do things. So we can causally, you know, causally, uh, make use of them. So as, as entities, they are part of the fabric of reality. Uh, that is something that, um, that we definitely, that would actually, that we explicitly say in the book. So the.
Andrea Hiott: I know you do say that directly in the book, and that's why I'm trying to bring it up, because, again, with this thing with language, right?
That we could have called them something else, or sometimes it's a particle, sometimes it's a wave. A lot of it depends on where we're coming from, what we're measuring. It's not that they're not real. But it gets really confusing of where's the map and where's the territory, right? Because you almost just then you're kind of having to defend and say, no, no, atoms are real.
Electrons are, I'm not saying they're not, of course, the real life is real. Everything is real. And in terms of when we're studying it, it's real, but. Like, that becomes a very hard thing to talk about and hold on to, that from some perspective you could be [00:49:00] studying the particle, and from another it's going to be the wave.
And that doesn't mean either of those, there's the paradox again, don't exist. Of course they exist, they're real. And yet, There are different lived perspectival experiences of coming to study them. Am I, I told you this would be messy, but I
Evan Thompson: think that's, that's right. So, so, um, whether something shows up in, in a particle mode of behavior, whether it shows up in a Wade move, Wade move, Wade move of behavior, um, that definitely depends on, um, on a whole bunch of things.
In the cognitive circumstances of the interaction with it. So there is, in that sense, you could say a perspectival or agent based like cognitive agent based, uh, factor that has to be, that has to be taken account of for sure, for sure. So part of the argument of the book is to try to push us to see [00:50:00] science in that more participatory, interactional way.
Then as if it's just nature out there, the way it is in itself. And then we show up and we just are able to uncover to one or another extent or degree how nature is in itself. That's like too simplistic a story, especially when how nature shows up for us in and through our interactions is then described in a way where we take our interactions out of the picture and we treat them as in some sense, derivative or secondary.
Uh, and not essential to understanding that phenomenon. Yeah. In the case of, well, I was going to say in the case of language, uh, if we're talking about large language models and artificial intelligence, now there, I think the situation is rather different because I think, uh, large language models are, they are models.
They, they, They are statistical prediction [00:51:00] models that from the outside, in terms of how we view them, have to do with predicting, you know, sequences of words in statistically likely reliable ways, but the models themselves, they have no access to anything. They have no access even to what, to, you know, what's getting, what is getting predicted is the next token.
In a data structure, but there's no understanding in the model that the token is a word in a language that's used for purposes of semantic understanding and communication. Like those are all things that exist for us because we built them and we train them. With pre digested data, but the model is just a model.
A model has no, has no knowledge, has no agency, has no action at all. So that's a different kind of situation.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, but do, it fits in terms of just the habitual kind of putting things into [00:52:00] boxes. It seems to fit into the science box of, Which is the kind of the dangerous thing, right? Because they're trained on perspectives, so to speak.
And the language itself is already kind of a model in the way we were talking at before, I know that was kind of controversial to say that, but words are not the process that the words are describing. So there's all these kinds of meta levels of which this becomes more of an urgency. That we take a step back and understand the difference between modeling the process and the process itself, so to speak.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, definitely. And I think in the case of large language models. People forget their models and they think that they raise questions like, well, to what degree does the large language model understand or to what do I mean, they raise hyperbolic questions about, you know, could these models be sentient? I mean, that's, I think just a completely confused question because it's, It's a, it's an abstract statistical model and it has no access to anything having to do with relevance or semantics.
It [00:53:00] doesn't care about anything. There's no way it could care about anything. So it's, it's rather that through incredibly powerful computing capacity in terms of memory and speed and statistical prediction algorithms, it is able to produce remarkably, uh, readable text by our lights, but it has no lights at all.
So that I think is a very extreme example of the surreptitious substitution.
Andrea Hiott: But it's, people are so fascinated now that it can, that, that I think for me, and I, maybe you disagree with this, but the fact that we don't understand that language and that's the way we communicate, that speaking itself is a kind of way of modeling or of representing this process to one another.
Then we. We take it so literally that language is us almost. Because of the split in a sense, we've associated ourselves with images and words because we haven't [00:54:00] learned this way of holding the paradox. And so when we, when a machine is able to do that, which is literally, as you just said, it's being trained on a lot of literal words.
Just, it doesn't matter that it's a word for that, it's just able to recognize the pattern and sprout it back out. From just an everyday point of view, if something is using language in that way, we just have the direct phenomenal experience of as if something is speaking to us because we don't understand that it's been, um, It's part of all this process of creating models in order to understand a process that's bigger than, than that thing.
Does, do you see what I'm saying? There's some kind of weird collapse almost in a different direction there that happens that's equally as dangerous or urgent in terms of the blind spot.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, I think so. I think we externalize in technological form, computational technological form. We externalize aspects of human language, [00:55:00] but then we forget that.
They were abstracted out of a context that involves people in the world with cares, with bodies who can act on the world, observe the consequences of their actions and that language really sits in, in that home. So that if you abstract out one aspect of it, which is statistical regularity for the tokens that, that, that make up a way of codifying language.
If you abstract that out and then think. That a system that's able to manipulate that is doing what we're doing, then that's just, I think, a kind of confusion that comes about through a, through a fascination with the power of the technology and the computation and the resource extraction. I mean, the amount of energy it takes to run these things is, is ridiculous.
Yeah. We don't realize
Andrea Hiott: that either. Yeah. I mean, the amount of
Evan Thompson: [00:56:00] energy it takes to run one of those things compared to the, to the metabolic energy budget of the human brain. I mean. We forget the, you know, the materiality of the thing.
Andrea Hiott: So
Evan Thompson: I think it's a kind of like, I don't. You know, I would call it technological animism, but I actually have a lot of respect for animism, so I don't really want to call it that.
No, don't call it that. That's, but that's, that's shorter. Don't, don't link those. Even though that is kind of the paradox,
Andrea Hiott: right? That's, yeah. Well, maybe this can, maybe this can link us to this idea of computationalism, or we can move towards understanding consciousness and mind and experience in a philosophical way.
Because I wonder. If what we've been talking about is, it's almost like we, we wanted control, right? Of we we're in this blooming buzzing confusion with all this experience. We started to try to wanna figure it out and then we become more and more aware of it. And, and so as we sort of put that into a academic set towards almost like the scientific mindset, we got [00:57:00] to a point where we started to think of that as a machine or as.
A computer or as computing, just in trying to understand mind, let's say, we, we've got a lot of energy and resources went into thinking about mind as a computer, say, how would you relate that to this blind spot, so to speak? I know that's a lot to try to tie together, but you can,
Evan Thompson: well, I think if you look at the, at the history and evolution of cognitive science, it's kind of an interesting case study for the blind spot, because.
For some thinkers very early on, uh, particularly in say the era of cybernetics in the forties and fifties, I think there were researchers who were actually quite attuned to what we are calling the blind spot. So if you read pioneering figures like, you know, Warren McCulloch, uh, uh, who's really the sort of father of neural networks, computational neural networks.
Or you read, um, some of the later cybernetic thinkers, like Heinz von [00:58:00] Forster or Gregory Bateson, you see that there's a fair amount of sensitivity to this peculiar situation we're in reflexively, where we're using the mind to study the mind, where we can't sort of step outside of our, of our cognitive domain, our cognitive framework in the effort to characterize cognition.
So there's actually a fair bit of sensitivity to that. But then, With the rise of especially, um, the computer model of the mind and the idea that we can, um, really understand the mind as a computational system modeled paradigmatically on the, on the digital computer, we see those aspects of sensitivity, uh, receding and the emergence of, of, uh, what I would call the kind of, you know, blind spot surreptitious substitution, where.
The fact that we can model certain kinds of mental or cognitive processes when kind of controlled [00:59:00] within a certain frame that we can model them in computational terms to then thinking, Oh, well, what the mind must fundamentally be is a computational system. Then we, then we're back in the, you know, the blind spot on the surreptitious substitution.
And with then a bit later, the rise of, you know, you, you could call it in general terms, embodied cognitive science. There is a. Sensitivity, again, to the issues of abstraction and trying to remove the body when it turns out that so much of cognition, human cognition, animal cognition, really fundamentally involves the body beyond the brain.
Um, so cognitive science is kind of, um, oscillating back and forth. Modest?
Andrea Hiott: Is that the word? Modest? Because weren't you sort of part of, of bringing that into Yeah.
Evan Thompson: Yeah. Into all
Andrea Hiott: this. When was that? In the late 80s when you and Oceanville were working on that book? Yeah. It came out in 90 or so? [01:00:00] Yeah.
Evan Thompson: 91. Yeah.
So late 80s. We, we published that book in 91, so we were writing it in the late 80s, and we were part of a kind of Emerging trend in embodied cognitive science. And then we introduced the idea of a particular way of thinking about that that we call the inactive approach, um, which emphasizes the idea that cognition is, uh, bodily sense making in and through action.
Rather than the representation of a of a pre given world by a pre given mind. That was how we phrased it in the embodied mind. So so I very much see an active cognitive science as having centrally in view, uh, the kind of situation we're in when we try to study the mind that can lead us into various kinds of blind spots.
That's sort of the distinctive feature of the inactive approach. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: And you were bringing up Gregory Bateson and you named a few other people and that, I won't go into all your personal detail, but I know you came out of background with your dad and with Lindisfarne and so on, where there [01:01:00] were a lot of people trying to think about these things and then not succumb to the blind spot, so to speak, at that time when you were growing up.
Gregory Bateson was around, Varela, who you wrote the book with, there's lots of others, Margulis, who we can now sort of come to the earth part at the end, and Gaia, um, Lovelock was there, so I guess, I mean, we don't have a whole lot of time, so I don't want to get into like what inaction is and all these different kinds of ways of thinking about consciousness and cognition, so forgive me, I'm just going to be like broad here, but I feel like with that book that you wrote with Varela and Raj.
And also a lot of other work you've done. You have been trying to hold this paradox between something like mind and life, mind in life, or the body and the mind, or, you know, a lot of the things that are in this new book that you're trying to also open the space around. So I want to connect this to the urgency again of the planet, of our own individual self, and that's why I'm going back into your past a little bit, because I feel like those people were trying to do that, and not that they did [01:02:00] it perfectly, and not that they were perfect people.
Did you already feel that way of holding the paradox in that environment in terms of That you didn't have to choose these sides and they weren't choosing the sides.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I mean, that's partly what I meant earlier when I said that I was fortunate to meet a lot of scientists who had a very different kind of sensibility in how they thought about science and how they thought about human experience.
So, exactly, people like Francisco Varela and Gregory Bateson, and then, what was it about them? What
Andrea Hiott: was it about them? Like, what? Because we need it, right? And I see it in you. But, like, what is it? They
Evan Thompson: were, they were all, I mean, one of the things that's interesting is they were all heterodox. They were, in a way, they were rebels.
I mean, so that was also part of the spirit of the times, of course, right? The 1960s, 1970s, into the 1980s. Um, [01:03:00] but. You know, they all argued for, er, for perspectives, for ways of thinking that had against the kind of mainstream of at that time, what we would have called kind of technocratic industrial science.
And they had a different kind of vision and they, they, they were very, uh, I think prescient in seeing the looming ecological crisis. So, I mean, I, like, I grew up. Already from the late 60s, early 70s with this consciousness that, that our behavior as a species on the planet was driving the planet in relation to us into a, into a, uh, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, a crisis situation.
So that, that was already part of their way of thinking. And did you get that from your
Andrea Hiott: dad and from that environment, or was it?
Evan Thompson: Yeah. Definitely. I, I got it, you know, from him, from, from, from the [01:04:00] scientists, from the environment of all of them talking together, uh, from, from the artists that they talked to, the, you know, the poets, the, the environmental activists, I mean, it was a very, um, kind of broad range.
It was a complex system. I mean, I say hold the paradox as if there's
Andrea Hiott: either or, you know, as if it's dualistic, but actually part of this practice or this, what the book is doing is, Opening up so that we realize there's all these others, like from any one point, you could see a polarity, but there's actually this nested, complex, ongoing thing, and I feel like that environment you were growing up in, all these things were represented in a way that was almost too much, like, for the times, to have all those different forms of science trying to come together and see from so many perspectives, I wonder if it was overwhelming for you to Be in that environment or if it just naturally helped you develop that space to hold it all together.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Evan Thompson: Yeah. Um, I didn't find it [01:05:00] overwhelming, at least not in that respect. Um, it was kind of, you know, it's just what I emerged into from the time I was very young. Um, so you could say it also gave me the biases that I have, that I have now. Um, I think, well, I mean, like I. I like heterodox thinkers, I like underdogs, um, I like alternative viewpoints, I, I find orthodoxy boring, um, so things like that, you know, like that's a, that's a way of looking at the world that could very well lead you to, you know, misjudge things under certain circumstances.
Right. It's a set of, it's a set of biases.
Andrea Hiott: But I feel like there's something very hard about being able to embrace something like science in a really rigorous way, and really do this very hard work that is critical thinking, where you really do have to do the hard work to try to see this process clearly, which is ongoing, right?
You can never stop that. And also being able to hold these other sides, which get lumped. The [01:06:00] reason Whitehead or Berkson or someone is dismissed, right? Because it seems mystical or because it seems sentimental or this is a hard thing to hold, especially in. Academia.
Evan Thompson: Yeah. No, I agree completely. It is a hard thing to hold.
And, um, um, there's no. How have you done it? It's what they've asked. Well, there's no, yeah, there's no recipe really for doing it. I mean, I suppose in my own case, because I was always very drawn to philosophical thinking, I got drawn into that way of approaching it and thinking about it. Um, if I had been, you know, an artist, I would have had a different way of relating to it.
Um, if philosophy was. Kind of the path that opened up for me as my way of trying to navigate and negotiate those things.
Andrea Hiott: And what about, uh, all this input seeing people who are doing it? Because I think, I mean, maybe it's like too personal, but It's not like it's been easy, [01:07:00] right? Like I don't think it was easy for your dad to do what he did, because he kind of was definitely a rebel and that wasn't easy, even though it was exciting and he did a lot of amazing things and there's a lot of good stuff in there, I'm not saying that, but in the way we were talking about Whitehead or Berkson, it's, these are not easy things.
If we talk about, yeah, like, How did seeing those people go through that? Your dad or Bateson? I don't know if it was hard for Bateson. I, maybe I imagine that it was and it wasn't. Or Varela, who was also kind of one of these people. It feels like to me, it, you watch them go through something. I just wonder what it's like from your perspective, like what was motivating that and if, was it hard, yeah, to witness?
Evan Thompson: I mean, there were definitely, you know, there were, there were hardships for all of them. There were, there were, you know, the successes and there were the hardships, definitely. You know, kinds of hardships that you don't get if you just kind of like have a, uh, a more, let's call it for lack of a better word, conventional life path or career path, you know, these were people who [01:08:00] worked at the intersection of different kinds of institutions, different kinds of groups of people.
So there's turbulence and hardship that happens in a situation like that. Absolutely. Um, I think that. It's an, I mean, it's an interesting question because I've never quite thought of it in exactly the terms that you're describing just because I've sort of was so immersed in it. Um, but so in a, yeah, in a way, I'm not sure what to, what to say about that other than to say it's, it was always challenging in various ways, but the culture then, so maybe it, maybe a important point is that the culture then was more open and fluid for these kinds of things in ways that.
At least it seems to me it isn't now, maybe it is now and I just am not attuned to the right places where it's happening. But it seems to me there was a [01:09:00] kind of openness to these kinds of cultural discussions let's call them, cultural activities, that's harder now and because of the blind
Andrea Hiott: spot, because you have to choose a side or, I mean, that's part of it.
But I also think,
Evan Thompson: you know, what, what happened in like the late seventies, early eighties was a kind of. Conservative retrenchment, like a rise of, of neo of a kind of neoliberal conservative worldview, the election of Reagan, Thatcher, um, the, the, the longterm implications of that politically, socially, that really changed a lot of the cultural sensibility away from these more open experimental kinds of discussions.
So there, there may very well be a lot of that happening now in pockets all over the place that I'm less attuned to than I was then. [01:10:00] But it seems to me that it's more difficult now. I mean, the internet has made some things more open and possible. That's like a game changer in some ways. Um, but the cultural activity of creating an alternative institute.
That was also like a residential community that emphasized science and let's call it spirituality and art. Um, it seems people are as hungry for that now as they ever were, but it's harder to, it's harder to bring about.
Andrea Hiott: I think people are really hungry for it and, and it's there. And gosh, there's, when you're talking, I'm thinking, okay, but like all those, a lot of those people like Margulis, Lovelock, your dad, Bateson, Varela, you.
Even though you're a kid, but you grew up in it. You're all now figures, you know, influencing from whichever field we want to choose. People like Margolis and Lovelock, just to go to earth, they're really, you know, laughed at and kind of [01:11:00] not taken seriously. And now it's like, Oh yeah, actually, that's probably how we should be doing science.
Evan Thompson: That is true. And that's an interesting, that's an interesting case where the same for Varela actually, where um, uh, Lovelock and Margulis are like acknowledged as like pioneers of earth system science now and at the time they were so dismissed. Similarly, Varela had a vision of the brain working in the 70s and 80s as a complex self organizing system that was highly non linear where the, you know, any incoming stimulus had the significance it had because of the ongoing endogenous activity of the brain.
This is like textbook neuroscience today, but it wasn't then. Absolutely it wasn't. So yes, in some ways things do change.
Andrea Hiott: And his kind of way of just living it out, you know, fully, going to Trungpa and all the stuff that just seemed kind of crazy at the time in terms of how can you be a neuroscientist and you're going to go work with a Buddhist monk and now it's, [01:12:00] that's cool and normal.
And so there's that side, but I guess what I'm trying to get at as we wrap up is. This stuff matters, right? We started with urgency, we've understood paradox as kind of maybe a way or a practice, but also a really concrete, um, history to this, that everyone's just gonna have to read the book to really get to all that, but this stuff matters.
And I feel like all those people understood that in a way. And I guess what I'm trying to understand is how do we help each other? See our blind spot. I don't know if we get rid of it so much as hold it. I know in the book you do say we need to move on beyond the blind spot, but there'll probably be another blind spot.
So we're trying to learn how to help each other, like how I imagine your dad was trying to do in his best moments. Bring everybody together and you're all going to see something different about each other and that's going to help you notice your blind spots, right? I mean, I'm speaking very colloquially in a way, but.
Evan Thompson: This matters
Andrea Hiott: is what I
Evan Thompson: mean. I think it, I think it matters [01:13:00] hugely. I think it's, um, it's about really working to bring about a different kind of value framework, you might say. Um, The climate crisis is a manifestation of, of, of a value framework that's embedded in an industrialized view of nature, capitalism, where the fundamental value that motivates us is castle that's tied to resource extraction.
So the idea that there needs to be a, a change in values that includes in a sort of ecological network sense, you know, art and science and spirituality. I think that's, that's what I've been, that's what motivates me fundamentally in terms of the different kinds of work that I do. And I think it's, um, it's, it's not anything that comes out of any one person thinking in a particular place.
It's a [01:14:00] conversation. It's, it's a community effort. It, it, it really needs to involve a lot of different kinds of voices. I mean, one of the limitations of the 1970s conversation was it was still very, You could say dominated by certain lines of voices. Certainly gender. I mean, most of the people involved that conversation with some exceptions like Lynn Margulis, of course, um, you know, we're mostly men, you know, mostly people from Western societies, Northern, you know, societies as we would call them day.
Andrea Hiott: Although your dad brought in a lot of, uh, more Native Americans, right? Yeah. Or tried. He
Evan Thompson: did. Yeah. And also, um, Tibetan refugees. And, you know, he did bring in, um, Japanese people. He brought, he brought in different voices for sure. Uh, so it's not, that's an ongoing, that's an ongoing effort and, and project of, you know.
If we were to use the old term, consciousness raising, and yeah,
Andrea Hiott: [01:15:00] yeah, well, I mean, I have to bring up the word love because this is love and philosophy. And I think when I look at this and at your work and stuff, I kind of wonder if it motivates you, you know, of course, like love of your dad and growing up as a boy in this way, but you are very close to Varela.
I don't know if you're that close to the Bates and then the others, but does it connect to it? Yeah. Did you see them doing it out of a place that you would describe as that, or is there any kind of thread there that we can
Evan Thompson: tie together? Oh, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I would say that, that all of those people in their best moments manifested their, their knowledge out of, or their, let's call it their way of knowing, out of a place of love.
Like this for me, like one of the most vivid examples of this for me. Was actually watching, and I've written a little bit about this in different places, was watching Lynn Margulis show a film of this, of the microbial [01:16:00] world and this very complicated interdependency of different, um, symbiotic organisms.
So it was that, you know, the, the termite and how it's able to digest wood through, um, I couldn't recapitulate it all, but you know, the, the, the, the Endosymbiont bacteria and protists. And it was just like incredible vision of, of the interdependency of, of life. And she just talked about it in a way that just manifested love for nature.
I mean, it was just absolutely evident in the way that she presented it. And those are the things that are memorable and striking more than anything else. Similarly for Bateson, similarly for Varela, my dad too, you know, in his, absolutely in his best moments. It's a kind of way where Um, this is something that the philosopher Hannah Jaeger has written about.
Um, she'd be a great person for you to interview, by the way, she's written about loving and knowing and how there's this deep inner [01:17:00] tie between the two and that we need to, to return to a way of thinking in which that's kind of evident and manifest to us this deep interconnection between loving and knowing.
So these people, these people embodied in. Manifested that, and that's, especially when you're young, that's an extremely powerful thing to, you know, to have as a, as an influence. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I think it's what gets transmitted to in a weird way through all of the philosophy and science, even though we have to put it into all these other terms to be able to, you know, test it and see it.
But often that's the, it's the thread that really motivates us to, to do the work that needs to be done. It is the lived experience, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, well, I don't want to keep you anymore because we had our time, but I really appreciate you talking to me and I really appreciate the book and also all the other books that you've written.
I do wonder what's the difference between The Avenue Road, this one, [01:18:00] Embodied Mind, and Blindspot. Does it feel like it's been, how many years has it been? 91? Ah. Adam, a while.
Evan Thompson: Yeah, a while. 91 to 20, uh, 24, I guess. That is a bit of time. It's a little bit of time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, yeah, there's underlying connections.
There's differences too, I suppose. I, um, yeah, I, I, I think there's from my perspective anyway, there's like a, there's a constant motivation and you might say like vision, though that's a bit of a pretentious word that I think runs through pretty much everything that I do, that's, that's common. That's common, even if I articulate things in different ways, or even if I sort of change my mind about something, um, it's still always sourced in that for me, at least subjectively, that's how it seems to me.
Andrea Hiott: There's always a sincerity, it feels like, to it, and um, [01:19:00] like you're, I guess that's what I was trying to get at a bit too, love is a strong word, but there's a, you know, none of us are perfect, but you can kind of feel that you're trying to really be, get to the. The heart of it in a sincere way and be clear about it and not, you know, be a denialist or a triumphalist or anything.
So, uh, it's, I just am telling you that I appreciate it because I know it's not easy to do. Yeah. Thank you
Evan Thompson: very much. I, I, I appreciate hearing that. Yeah. All
Andrea Hiott: right. Thanks again. I hope you have a nice, your day is just beginning there. My, my day, it's already night here, so.
Evan Thompson: You're in, uh,
Andrea Hiott: Utrecht. Is that right?
Yeah.