Jun 5

Written By Andrea Hiott

Love & Philosophy

L&P Beyond Dichotomy (substack stream)

How Life Works Beyond Genes: a New Biology of Meaning with scientist and author Philip Ball

How Life Works Beyond Genes: a New Biology of Meaning with scientist and author Philip Ball

Philip is an award-winning science writer. He's also a chemist and physicist and served as an editor of 'Nature' for over twenty years.

LOVE AND PHILOSOPHY AND ANDREA HIOTT

JUN 03, 2026

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Philip Ball on How Life Works: Beyond Genes, Toward Context & Meaning

Andrea Hiott in conversation with British science writer Philip Ball (former Nature editor; trained chemist and physicist) to discuss his book How Life Works and why the popular idea “it’s all in the genes” is untenable. Ball argues biology is shifting beyond mechanistic, bottom-up “blueprint” metaphors toward a view of organisms as open, adaptive informational systems with complex genotype–phenotype relations, constant interaction across levels (genes to ecosystems), and robust behavior emerging from “committee-like” molecular collectives. They discuss why biology has avoided purpose, teleology, and meaning, yet living systems make contextual value judgments and goal-directed decisions, with continuity from cells to human minds and emotions, emphasizing embodiment and symbiosis. Ball links these themes to his prostate cancer diagnosis while finishing the book, reflecting on mortality, persistence of patterns and information through art and writing, and the open-endedness of life and evolution, ending with love as a real evolved capacity.
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:35 Why Biology Is Shifting

02:09 Cancer, Meaning, and Patterns

04:37 Challenging Gene Determinism

11:03 Beyond the Machine Metaphor

17:52 Purpose and Teleology in Life

23:58 Messiness and Higher-Level Causation

31:54 Meaning Making in Cells

38:10 Embodiment and the Mind-Body Link

41:20 Embodied Minds

42:23 Nested Bodies and Meaning

43:52 Molecular Caring and Committees

45:02 Physics of Collectivity

47:19 Universality From Traffic to Cells

51:11 Leaky Layers in Living Systems

53:20 Beyond E. coli to Elephants

55:49 Caring as a New Metaphor

57:44 Symbiosis Parasites and Affordances

01:03:23 Brains Agency and Emotions

01:08:10 Mortality and Whirlpools of Meaning

01:15:42 Uniqueness Open-Ended Evolution

01:18:25 Love as Evolutionary Reality

Philip Ball is a British science writer based in London. Born in 1962, he trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and earned his PhD in physics from the University of Bristol. He spent more than twenty years as an editor at Nature, and now writes as a freelance author and broadcaster, contributing regularly to publications like Nature, New Scientist, Prospect, The Guardian, and Chemistry World, and presenting Science Stories on BBC Radio 4.

Ball has written more than two dozen books spanning chemistry, physics, biology, music, art, and the history and philosophy of science. His 2004 book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another won the Aventis Prize for Science Books, and Serving the Reich was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize in 2014. Other notable titles include H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, The Book of Minds, and most recently How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2023), which argues that modern biology is moving beyond the gene-as-blueprint picture toward a richer, more contextual view of life.

He has received the Institute of Physics’ Kelvin Medal (2019), the American Chemical Society’s Grady–Stack Award (2006), and the Royal Society’s Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar Medal (2022) for contributions to the history, philosophy, and social roles of science.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and I’m glad you’re here. Today is a really special conversation, which I had quite some months ago, back in February, with a writer who is one of my favorites, Philip Ball. He is a British science writer. He used to be the editor at Nature for over 20 years. He’s trained as both a chemist and a physicist, and he’s written a lot of really good books. Critical Mass was a prize-winning book, and there’s also H2O, The Music Instinct, and the one we’re talking about here, How Life Works.

Let me tell you a little bit about this book. It comes at a moment when I think biology is really shifting. It’s a shift that’s been going on for a while, but it’s at an important moment now where this mechanistic gene-first story we’ve been telling — the one that says you are your genes, you are your DNA, the selfish gene, that whole idea — is really changing a lot. The idea of the body as a machine assembled from the bottom up, that story is coming apart.

But it’s interesting because we don’t want to just flip to the opposite, to reject all that came before. That’s what this book is doing that’s so interesting, and also this conversation. I think you’ll hear it. We’re trying to hold a certain tension because even though that story is coming apart, it’s not that everything is wrong about it. The hope is not to flip into the opposite, but rather to hold the tension and to really open up a new space about how we actually think about what life is and what we are.

We have more ways to communicate and more ways to study this that can help us get more rigorous even as we also open up. So that’s what we’re trying to do in this conversation. It gets a little bit messy — that’s a word I’m always using, but in a good way — because we’re trying to talk about a lot of very hard things here, and we’re also trying to talk about them in a way that isn’t the usual way.

You’ll hear that Philip is very articulate about this. He’s even better in the book, so I really highly recommend it. He’s also written some very beautiful essays, and one of them, which is in Nautilus, is about how at the end of writing this book he got diagnosed with cancer. We get to that by the end of this conversation because he’s come through well. He had surgery. All is good. It’s all gone. But there was a time when it was very tense for him, and he was writing this book about life, so can you imagine? He was really having these questions pressed on him directly as he had been thinking about life and trying to understand what it was.

There’s something very moving about that. What he came to through this was that we are made of this material that’s changing all the time, but what persists are these patterns that come through us, or are in the world with us, or that we create and give to the world that then go on without us. It’s not that they’re floating around in the air. It’s that I can read this book again that he wrote, and there’s an imprint to the book that changes me, and that will continue even in 100 years when people read the book. It’s the same with music. It’s the same with everything we create and do. But it’s also the same with conversations that you just have with one another, because we change each other as we do that, and those patterns continue on in further conversations that those people have.

So we end up in a place a little bit like that, and it’s very interesting that that can come from a very scientific conversation and a very scientific book. One thing about Philip is he’s really good at holding that. In the book, he talks about meaning, which is not a word you see often in a very scholarly biological book, but he does it with real rigor and grace, and I think that is such a gift at this moment. I’m very happy to bring you this conversation and to share his work with you. I’m really grateful that he spent some time with me. Thanks for being here. I hope this conversation gives you something that helps you carry on these patterns that connect in some way that’s meaningful for you today.

The Conversation

Andrea Hiott: Hi, Philip. It’s so wonderful to have you on Love and Philosophy today. Thank you so much for being here.

Philip Ball: Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: We’re going to talk about this wonderful book, How Life Works— one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. To get us started, I was thinking about this idea of “it’s all in the genes” — this common thing a lot of people still say. What do you think about that sentence: “it’s all in the genes”?

Philip Ball: Yeah, we hear it again and again. I see it almost daily — “it’s in our DNA.” It’s a cultural trope we’ve got, and it worries me, frankly, because we say it quite lightly, but underlying it is a sense that what’s in our genes or our genome somehow defines us. That’s the message that, increasingly, these mail-order companies that offer to sequence your DNA like to encourage — they will tell you all kinds of things about you, including these ancestry charts, which really have very little meaning, but play into certain cultural ideas that I think are worrying. They’ll also tell you things about your personality.

I’ve just reviewed a book, actually — a very nice book by Alison Bashford about chiromancy, analyzing the hand, reading your palm. She follows this story through from ancient practices, ideas of magic and so on, through to modern analyses that get into genetics. It makes the case very nicely that this is the kind of old idea we now want to invest in our genome — that this somehow tells us deep truths about ourselves.

I wanted to challenge that. I think if you speak to pretty much any geneticist, they will say, “Well, yeah, that’s a simplification. It’s not really like that at all.” But I think the messages that have gone out, particularly from things like the Human Genome Project, really suggested otherwise and have given rise to this tendency for people to imagine we are somehow defined by our genomes.

What I wanted to do in the book was to explain why modern biology makes that idea no longer tenable, and to try to find better ways of thinking about the relationship between our genomes — what scientists call our genotype, basically the unique sequence of chemical letters in our DNA — and our actual selves, our actual traits, what they call the phenotype. That relationship is very, very complex.

It is absolutely clear that there are aspects of people’s traits that can be correlated with particular sequences in our genome. People who have particular variants of genes might tend to show statistically certain kinds of traits that other people don’t show. So there is a relationship between the genotype and the phenotype, but it’s very hard to unravel what that relationship is. In particular, it’s hard to say exactly what our genes are doing in building us.

What I’m suggesting in the book is that when we look at the way cell biology, molecular biology, and developmental biology have progressed, particularly over the last two or three decades since the completion of the Human Genome Project, we can see that any simple one-to-one or linear relationship between genotype and phenotype has become untenable. In fact, there seems to be no privileged layer within the whole hierarchy of structures in biology — from genes to molecules to cells to tissues to organs to organisms and even beyond into the ecosystem. There is no privileged layer that determines the way an organism is. We have to think about all those processes in their context, including the context of the lives we lead from even before we were born.

I try to explain how those different levels do what they do, and how there is a constant interaction and connection between them — a flow of information. When we think about how complex organisms like us work, that is the only way we can work. Our bodies, our cells, and our selves have to be responsive and adaptive to our circumstances, to our context. We couldn’t survive otherwise. What’s interesting to me is how evolution has set up these systems to enable that to happen — to enable us to be these open informational systems that can use contextual information and feed it back down even to the level of our genome, turning on or turning off certain genes in response to environmental signals. It’s a very complex process. But what it absolutely shows is that it’s not a bottom-up process. Everything isn’t being determined by our genes.

Andrea Hiott: I think this is really hard for a lot of us to really take in, because we want this mechanistic notion of how everything works, of how life works. We want to understand it as linear — that we can find the answers, that things will keep working the way they work, that we can just see what’s happening, and then that’s what’s going to always be happening. You’re introducing what’s really the case, which is a kind of messiness — even an almost assertive tension between things like opening and closing in terms of systems, or where it matters from what position we’re looking, what we’re going to see. So how is this different from that mechanistic worldview that a lot of us still really want to believe in, but also how is it not just kind of “anything goes,” if that makes sense?

Philip Ball: Yeah — brilliant questions. That really is the key point of the book: as we come to understand this complexity in biology, it becomes more and more clear that we cannot think about it in terms of machines. That’s been our tendency, right back to early modern times when science began, or probably even before. Certainly at that time, the mechanical philosophy of people like Descartes and Newton was that everything is machine-like, and we have to understand it that way.

What I’m saying in the book is that there is no machine we have ever made that works in the way we can see we work. So the machine analogy is unhelpful. It encourages us to think in terms of components that fit together rigidly and deterministically, and that is not the way we work — and it cannot be the way we work. Because any machine with the complexity we have, if it worked that way, like clockwork, with every bit having to be in place, it simply would not function. At the level of molecules and cells, it is unavoidably messy. Everything is moving about by diffusion, it’s all shaking around. You cannot guarantee that all the molecules in one cell will be in the same position as in any other of our billions and billions of cells. So you have to have some way of making things work that isn’t sensitive to those fine details. That’s what biology has found — by not using this machine approach.

That’s really the challenge, because we’ve thought about life in these mechanistic terms for so long that it feels — and I think this is what some biologists explicitly say — if we relinquish that, how else do we make sense of it? Then it just looks messy. It just looks chaotic.

But I’m suggesting in this book that we can relinquish that and still find generic principles that work and give robustness at the level of the organism. We live all these years despite all this messiness. It makes sense that evolution would do this; biology is using that messiness.

The question really is: what metaphors are better than the machine metaphor? I would suggest there are some, and they’re usually — invariably — metaphors that come from life itself. We shouldn’t be thinking about things we make. We should be thinking about how life works.

For example, it makes sense to think of the way a cell works more in cognitive terms than in machine-like terms. By that I don’t mean that cells have consciousness or awareness, although there are people who would suggest that. But I don’t think it’s necessary to invoke that. What I mean is it’s more like the way our brains work, in the sense that cells can take in and integrate many different sources of information and out of those come up with decisions — literally decisions — that are robust and reliable, and appropriate for the context.

The way I think about that in molecular terms is that molecules work not like little cogs and machine-like components but like committees. We make committees because we know what humans are like — that not everyone is going to be there, not everyone is going to be paying attention, some people will be stuck in traffic. But nevertheless, as long as you’ve got a quorum, with enough people paying attention, and you have a good discussion, you can come up with a decision that hopefully is a good decision. To my mind, that’s exactly how cells work, and exactly how the molecular systems in cells work. It’s a collective process.

Just yesterday I got an email from a very high-powered team working on how our genes are regulated, how they’re switched on and off — a fantastically encouraging email. They’ve just published a paper in Science, and the team leader said what I’d said in my book was really anticipating what they found: in order to make sense of this incredibly complex molecular process of switching a gene on and off, which involves many different components, they found they had to relinquish the old habitual ways molecular biologists think — of machine-like components — and think of something emergent. It’s a collective process where the causation, the decision being made, is happening at that higher level. It’s really happening at the committee level rather than at the level of “this molecule speaking to this one speaking to this one.” It’s encouraging to see that this way of thinking is useful for making sense of biological complexity.

Andrea Hiott: That’s so exciting. I’d love to read that paper. I think we’ve arrived at a time where maybe we can handle this a little bit — as you say somewhere in the book, or maybe as you just hinted, a lot of scientists have known this forever, but they keep using the mechanism orientation because we can’t quite handle it, but also because a lot of biology has been trying to run away from notions of contextuality, which ends up looking like meaning and teleology when we try to talk about it in metaphors.

How do you see that connection? Maybe we could talk a little bit about why biology has been so afraid of words like meaning. When I was doing my neuroscience degree, you couldn’t really talk about purpose. That was sort of, “you’re not supposed to talk about purpose, you’re supposed to just do the science, that mechanistic kind of science.” How does that fit in with what you’re saying here and where we are now in terms of the shift we’re making toward more contextual or committee-like science?

Philip Ball: It’s a very odd situation in biology that, on the one hand, many leading biologists have always acknowledged that organisms are purposeful entities — that they have goals. This is something the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr acknowledged. He’s one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. It’s something Jacques Monod, a molecular biologist — again, one of the most influential of the late 20th century — also said: we have to recognize all living things, without exception, have goals. They’re driven by goals. This is in the nature of organisms, and it’s not incidental, it is almost definitive of what organisms are. They are entities with goals. Maybe we’ll come back to that, because I think we forget how extraordinary it is that such things have arisen in the universe.

We can see this all the time. It seems unproblematic for us and for a lot of biologists to say, “Well, of course we have goals.” Often the way that’s dealt with in biology is to say, “Well, those goals are set by evolution, so our goals are to reproduce and to survive.” But if we think about the things we do — us having this conversation now — it’s not obvious that those are the drivers. Most of what we do day to day, those ultimate goals are not forefront. We have proximate goals that we set. I want to do this. I want to make a cup of coffee because I’m thirsty. Obviously it’s related to instinctive functions, but the decision itself is a proximate one.

I think it’s absolutely clear that all complex organisms work that way. If we think of other primates, cats and dogs, birds — they’re all doing this. They’re all setting themselves proximate goals. Actually, I think we can see that tendency all the way through the living world. You can even think about plants. You can do experiments where plants are clearly responding to goals in a goal-directed way. So this is absolutely central to the nature of living things.

But biologists have been very nervous about it because when you start talking about goals, that really is teleological. There’s no getting away from that. They worry that it’s going to seem like there’s something mystical going on, and that it plays into notions — and can be very easily abused, of course — by people who want to argue for things like intelligent design and some grand design behind all this. I don’t want to dismiss that idly, because there are some very profound thinkers who have argued that way. But obviously what we tend to come across is the very superficial version, in terms of creationism and intelligent design, and understandably biologists are very nervous about that.

What that has given rise to is a reactive sense that we can’t use those words, because this is what we’re invoking. I think that’s a real shame, because if we don’t use those words, we are not talking about the nature of living systems. We have lost sight of what life is.

I’m always struck by something the molecular biologist François Jacob said in 1973. Jacob was one of the people who, along with Monod, did the crucial work in understanding gene regulation. He’s a Nobel laureate. He said in 1973: “Biologists no longer study life.” What an extraordinary thing to say. But what he meant was: life is too hard to understand, too complex a phenomenon, so the decision has been made in biology to break it down — for him, into molecules, and to understand the molecules. He also said the way biologists now work is to try to understand what biological systems do from the structure of their molecules, by looking at what were considered the components.

When you do that, you have lost sight of life itself. But it’s a pragmatic approach, because we can make progress that way, and we have made enormous progress that way. That’s what I wanted to explore in my book. But I feel we are now at a stage, because of that progress, where we can start putting the bits back together and asking those bigger questions: How do all these components, these entities, work together to create entities that have goals — and not just have them as programmed goals, but goals the entity sets in the moment, in its context, in response to what’s happening to it? That’s the question I think we’re now ready to start exploring, and it’s really the central question for living things.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow. In the spirit of messiness, there are a few things I really want to talk about. The first is this kind of ambiguity or tension we’re learning how to hold. It’s almost like we’re opening to the ambiguity so we can be more precise about what we’re actually studying — which means, as in the book, you show that proteins are floppy, strange forms, and it’s not always clear-cut what a molecule is or what they are when we’re studying them. So we’re at least acknowledging this is very messy, but there’s a precision in that: now we have to really say what we’re actually assessing.

In the book you say very clearly that evolution itself isn’t... You’re not saying evolution has a purpose, because for me that’s at the modeling level — we’ve called something evolution, and then if we say that has a purpose, we’ve gone to a different place. But when we’re assessing a goal in a particular situation, that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the same goal and always work that way. There’s a kind of computational explosion in terms of what we could study and what we could know. That’s why we go to these mechanistic models and focus on very distinct things. But as we open up and let this ambiguity come in, we have to find a new kind of precision.

Philip Ball: Yes — I think I see what you mean, and I absolutely want to reiterate that point: I see no reason to suppose evolution itself has any sort of goal or purpose. Some people have argued there may be a directionality to it. I’m agnostic about that. I see no reason to invoke it. What evolution does is produce goal-directed entities. That’s the mechanism by which we get them, and the only mechanism we know of by which we get them. We might be able to eventually do something like that ourselves, but only because we’re entities of that sort to begin with. It’s important to make that clear.

The question of messiness is the one we inevitably have to deal with, because every living entity is unique in what it’s doing at any one moment, and yet we need — because this is what science does — generic ways of understanding them. Even at the level of our cells, the state of no cell is going to be exactly the same as any other cell in terms of which molecules it contains and where they are. And yet some cells do things in particular ways: our skin cells are, in some sense, recognizably skin cells and distinct from our neurons.

The same with species. No animal is identical to any other animal. If you give a set of seemingly identical animals from the same species a particular stimulus, they won’t all respond the same way. Even individual cells won’t necessarily do that — cells that look like a clonal population, given a stimulus, some will do one thing, some another. Why is that? And how does any regularity and reliability come from something that seems so capricious?

Those are the questions we’re now looking at. We’ve got to that point because we have methods for studying individual cells, finding out exactly what molecules are in them and where, so we can really see these distinctions. It means we have to recognize there are higher-level questions that cannot depend, and clearly do not depend, on those fine details. To my mind, that means we have to start thinking about where the causation is in these systems — the causation giving rise to skin cells developing in a particular place on an embryo at a particular time. There’s an element of that that is clearly genetic, but there are other things going on. In general, those things are the high-level interactions between the components of the system. Cells are speaking to each other in a developing embryo all the time, and those conversations determine what a particular cell will become — whether to become a skin cell or whatever. It’s from its context.

This is the general question we want to understand: the contextuality of living things, and how we make systems that are able to respond in a contextual way. In the same way as we respond to our context, we cannot do it by a set of absolutely rigid rules. We have to improvise, be inventive, innovate sometimes. Those characteristics have to be built into living systems at a very deep level. We don’t have theories and concepts for really understanding the nature of entities of that sort — entities that can innovate, improvise, work by rules of thumb. Again, this is why I think it’s useful to think in cognitive terms, because we don’t really understand how our brains do that either, but clearly they do. It requires a whole new set of principles, quite different from bottom-up principles.

Andrea Hiott: I love that you bring up cognition, because a lot of scientists, philosophers, a lot of people are trying to change the way we assume that word to be something in the brain, in the head, in a human — to be more about the way we make our way through the world as bodies, how we deal with what we encounter. It’s something very basic that could manifest in many ways. You’ve written about this in a very beautiful way in terms of what we could think of as minds.

To stay with the gene — that’s usually thought of as a blueprint, and what I heard you just saying is this more flexible nature, where we’re not trying to make a blueprint but to make something flexible such that, as it moves through a landscape, whatever it encounters, it can be flexible and change. You talk about promiscuity a little bit — it has many more options than just some kind of program blueprint. We could think of this at many levels. The gene itself, while very important, isn’t the only thing — you talk about proteins and RNA, and there’s so much exciting territory we haven’t focused on. It becomes more about the regulation of all that, about a body trying to deal with what it encounters. How is that being regulated in terms of that committee?

Philip Ball: Yes, the key is the contextuality. We have to have systems — from the gene-regulation machinery upwards — that can integrate many sources of information, bring them together, and somehow come up with a decision about what action to take: whether this gene should be switched on or off, whether I should run or freeze.

With that notion comes the notion of meaning, of making meaning. As you said, this is an even more contentious word in biology than purpose. To start talking about meaning — isn’t that getting into something really mystical? But I think at some fundamental level, what living systems are is makers of meaning. Here’s what I mean: the information we’re getting all the time, and the information our cells are getting, there’s so much of it. Some will be useful, some useless. We’re necessarily making judgments about the meaning, the value, of that information — and what does it imply for what I should do in this context. It’s hard to get away from anthropomorphizing.

Andrea Hiott: Our language is kind of built around that. So it’s very hard.

Philip Ball: Some of it is taken care of by evolution. Evolution has decided, for example, that it’s not useful for us to attend to information from infrared radiation in our environment. We are sensitive to the visible spectrum — by definition we don’t attend to infrared. Some animals do; they have infrared senses because that information is useful, meaningful, to their lifestyles. Bees can see ultraviolet that we can’t. So that’s fixed by evolution. We’ve learned through evolution that some things are worth attending to and some are not.

Even given that filtering, we have to do immediate filtering ourselves. Is this thing I’m hearing a warning signal I should be aware of, or background noise I can screen out? Cells are in a similar situation. So there are judgments — judgments about the meaning of contextual information — and we have to have systems able to make those judgments.

I feel there’s a continuity between that very low-level, basal meaning-making that individual cells and bacteria are doing and the kind of meaning we talk about colloquially: is this book going to be meaningful to us? They’re not different things. We have an incredibly sophisticated elaboration of that same sense of meaning. Because we have complicated lifestyles, we have to have these nuances of meaning.

What’s really interesting is that at some point between bacteria and us — no one knows exactly when and there’s no agreement — those judgments about meaning became valenced, emotionally valenced. Meaning started to make the organism feel a certain way. It’s a very plausible idea about the development of minds and emotions that this was an adaptive response. Once you have an emotional response, it focuses your attention. “This particular thing is making me feel bad — I don’t like it — so I’m going to attend to it and make it a key component of my decision.” Or “it makes me feel great.” This is a very reasonable idea for why emotionality arose at some point in connection with meaning-making.

Andrea Hiott: This is really fascinating. You mention affordances a few times. We have all these different nested scales, and also this continuity. Even the way we’re talking, we’re still talking as if there’s some sort of ladder we’re going up and down, which is actually what you’re exploding in the book. And what a lot of us are trying to think through — multiplicities or constellations — instead of this “one or the other.”

You talk about purpose being intrinsic, sometimes even about meaning being life itself. But I wonder if you ever think of it as more radical — where in an ecological-psychology kind of way, it’s literally what’s happening in contact, with bodies and bodies — and that at some point we develop a way to become attentive to that, and even know that we’re feeling, in a panpsychist or Mark Solms kind of way. Have you thought about that more immediate level? Sometimes I feel in the book you’re actually trying to almost say “this is the action of this,” but the way we use words it ends up sounding like “this has this action.”

Philip Ball: Yeah — an interesting perspective. When we think about how this relates to embodiment, I absolutely think it’s clearly in the nature of living things that they have an embodiment, that they are embodied. They are not disembodied information. There’s a big discussion now about how central that is to the notion of minds — whether they have to be embodied minds. I think it’s unambiguous for living systems that the particular embodiment they have is an aspect of the kind of mind they have. The neuroscientist Anil Seth has talked about this: the decisions we make, our mental world, is conditioned by what we think we can do as embodied creatures. We can go round behind something and take a look, so we imagine the world from that perspective. We don’t have the kind of embodiment that allows us to imagine flying. A bird does, and will have a different mental landscape because of its embodied nature. That’s absolutely central.

Another thing emotions are doing, related to what I spoke about: it’s the body telling the brain what’s going on for the body. Emotions are embodied. The fact that it’s so deeply embedded in the way we talk about them — “I felt it in my gut, I felt it in my heart” — and you kind of do.

Andrea Hiott: Which is also part of the nervous system. Even thinking of brain and body as different — or assuming that in our language — the nervous system, as you know, is big. It goes through the body.

Philip Ball: Yes. That’s why I find it useful to remind ourselves that the brain is not the computational center of the body. The brain is an organ in the body — an organ with particular functions, amazing functions — but it’s an organ, so it’s part of the body. It seems quite likely — this is what Peter Godfrey-Smith has talked about — that central nervous systems could well have arisen from different bodily necessities. Partly they were to do with sensing — we started off being able to take in information. But we also needed central nervous systems to control these big bodies that early animals began to have. Those two are separate processes that at some stage literally connected up, and you have something like a brain that is in some sense a controlling aspect of the body but is also part of the body.

It’s very hard to talk properly about it because we have these long traditions of mind/body duality. It’s really hard to get away from. But that embodied nature of organisms is absolutely central to what they’re doing, how they’re behaving, how they’re collecting information, their tactile senses, and so forth. We have a mental sense of what our body is doing, and that’s absolutely crucial for being able to conduct ourselves in the world. I’m very keen on what seems to be happening in neuroscience now — this much more embodied notion of what minds are and how they work.

Andrea Hiott: There’s a lot of generative stuff that can come from your book — for neuroscientists reading this, for example — and also this idea of body as you just raised it. Then we start to notice there are many bodies within bodies. You talk about that nestedness. We’re talking about cells, we’re talking about human bodies in this conversation, and all of these are also nested within each other, and they’re also distinctions we’re making so as to try to understand all of this ongoing process. I’m just trying to open it back up to that contextual view that I think is so important in your work — and the idea of meaning being this regulation that’s happening at so many different levels. The cells in the body are regulating, but that’s also regulating the body.

To try to link this to meaning — or even, I don’t know if you would say “mattering,” if that word’s going too far — we’ve talked about how we can be so open and almost promiscuous in terms of possibilities. But another really important part of the book is collaboration, which already sounds like a coming together, a fidelity. I wonder how you think about that tension of committees caring. I’m using the word caring; I don’t know what you think about that. We can talk about it in a minute. But communities having the same kind of meaningful system, so they’re in a concert toward something. How does that sense of collaboration or fidelity fit for you, alongside this other sense of being flexible and open?

Philip Ball: First, the notion of thinking about these molecular or cellular committees as “caring” — I think that’s a perfectly reasonable term, because there are value judgments being made. How much do I care about this particular signal? How much should I care? That’s exactly what these committees are having to think about. There may be an emotional valence attached, or not, depending on the kind of organism. But the question of collectivity is an interesting one. Here I tend to approach it — this may be a rather clinical or technical way, but it’s the one that makes sense to me — from my background as a condensed-matter physicist.

In fact, the next book is going to be about this. It frustrates me so much that the notions we have about physics are about looking at more and more fundamental forces and particles — somehow we’re going to get to the deep questions by understanding it at this reductionist level. We need that reduction; we need to truly understand what the things that make atoms are made of, what the fundamental forces are. We absolutely need that. But so much of physics has been about collectivity, and this is not recognized.

This is the area of condensed-matter physics — basically the physics of real, tangible stuff: liquids, solids, gases, lots of things interacting with one another, because that is the nature of the universe. What’s so fascinating, and we’ve known about this in some deep sense since at least the middle of the 19th century with the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, is that there are rules to this collectivity. Regularities emerge that do not depend strongly on what the individual components are. We find the same kinds of behaviors and rules in liquids evaporating to gases, gases condensing to liquids, magnetic systems where many magnetic atoms interact. The similarities are extraordinary, even in quantitative detail — you can map one onto the other, and yet they look like totally different systems. There’s a deep universality to collective behavior.

That universality is now being recognized in many other places. For the last 20 or 30 years, urban planners have thought about traffic this way. Traffic is a many-body system, and the rules are quite simple. You don’t want to crash into the person in front, so you’ll slow down — as if there’s a force of repulsion. So traffic, above a certain density, can condense into a fluid-like flow, and further into a solid — a jam. The same principles apply.

When water freezes, there’s no meaningful way of saying it froze because of that molecule. It has to nucleate somewhere, and the ice crystal grows; on another day it would start somewhere else. It’s irrelevant where it starts — it’s going to happen as soon as you get to the freezing point. There’s emergent behavior that’s predictable, rule-bound, but not coming from what this particular thing or that particular thing does.

Principles like this are operating in biology, and we’ve come to recognize that more and more. People convincingly argue we could and should understand some aspects of evolution this way — interactions between organisms, or between genes and gene variants, with a collectivity to it. I think the collectivity we see in biology — where you get the same thing happening despite all the differences in fine details — is the same kind we’ve been familiar with in the physical sciences. It’s worth bringing these disparate fields together to understand how those collective processes operate.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that’s wonderful. It makes me think of a quote you have, something like, “from E. coli to elephants, we’re all doing the same thing.” (Maybe you can correct that.) But also the very important idea of holding the paradox, because a lot of this can seem like we’re saying it’s all regulation, but you’re also very careful to say it’s not just from the collective to the gene — it’s actually we’re opening this up to see that it can also be gene to cell. It can be in all kinds of directions. So there’s that rule-based regularity, and at the same time, depending on the situation — whether it’s E. coli or an elephant — this is all going to align differently. How do we develop models to hold all of that possibility at once?

Philip Ball: Yes. From what I’ve just said, the fact that life works using these collective principles — there’s nothing particularly special about life in that regard, because that’s how the whole universe works. It’s a collective process and you get these emergent behaviors, whether it’s freezing of water or the behavior of a cell. What is unusual about living systems is that there is this interaction between the different levels. There’s this constant exchange of information so that sometimes what happens to a particular gene — a particular mutation — really does matter to the whole organism. It can send the organism off track. But most of the time it doesn’t matter. Most mutations don’t do anything. Cells don’t even recognize them. You can even knock out genes — something biologists were doing all the time in the ‘90s. They’d think, “This gene is crucial to this organism. Let’s stop it working and see what happens.” And nothing happened as far as we could tell. The organisms were fine.

So most of the time the details don’t matter. Some of the time they really do. And the same the other way: sometimes there are particular kinds of information the organism really has to attend to, and that will feed down all the way to changing which genes are switched on or off. That’s the unusual thing — living things have this leakiness between the different layers. Sometimes it’s insensitive to the details. Occasionally it really matters. That’s what makes living things so hard to understand. If they were like the freezing of water — everything emergent — we wouldn’t fully understand it, but it would be a lot simpler. They’re not, and that’s what makes them so complicated, but also so wonderful in what they can do.

As for whether they’re all doing it in the same way: it was Jacques Monod who said, “What’s true for E. coli is true for the elephant.” He meant it in a very specific way; I don’t want to take him too much out of context. But it’s become a bit of a mantra in biology that, okay, so we can understand how gene regulation works in E. coli, and we now understand gene regulation, because that’s what Monod did. We now understand: no, we cannot. The way gene regulation works in bacteria is fundamentally different — in important ways — from the way it works in us or an elephant. We can understand why it needs to be so: it’s related to the fact that we have more complex lifestyles than E. coli. We encounter different circumstances. We encounter every day circumstances we have never encountered before, that our ancestors never encountered before, and we have to figure out what to do. That doesn’t tend to happen so much to E. coli — usually they’ll just die if they encounter something different. It applies a little bit, but the more complex an organism becomes, the more open, informationally open, it needs to be — the more agency it needs in responding to its environment. And in order to get that, you need different molecular principles.

That idea of Monod’s made sense, and sometimes it’s right. We all have DNA, we all have proteins. But there are important respects in which it doesn’t work, and sometimes that has tripped biology up. We’ve assumed, for very good reasons, that we’ll start with the simplest organisms — but we cannot always assume what we find from those will apply further up. A lot of the things I’m talking about in my book are trying to address that problem of, now that we understand things don’t work in those relatively simple ways in complex organisms like us, so how do they work? That’s where all the stuff about disordered proteins and promiscuous molecular interactions comes in. Evolution has had to find different solutions because it has different problems to address.

Andrea Hiott: This is why I was trying to bring up the immediacy. I’m not an ecological psychologist, but the idea of immediacy is what I’m trying to point to here — this Gibsonian, affordance kind of thing. Nothing is generic, as your book shows — and yet we share context. So we’re trying to hold both at once. What I was thinking about when meaning and purpose come up — and I just love your book so much for orienting through that — is that it connects a lot to caring, which is something I’m thinking about all the time. I’m thinking of caring as this immediate, primordial, needful-freedom kind of thing — not the ethics and values that become the more human version of that expression.

I wonder how that sits with you — thinking of this almost primordial tension, but also this kind of collaboration or “committee-ness” as a kind of caring. Right now we have this metaphor of competition. You talk about metaphors a lot, and I wonder what it would be like, as a thought experiment, if the metaphor were caring. To give an example: I was walking my dog before our conversation, of course thinking through your ideas. There’s something I care about, which was getting back here and making sure I was in the right space to talk to you. And there’s something she cares about — very slowly sniffing the bushes. I could orient that as competitive, but it’s also a caring; we’re caring for different things. My care for her made me sit with that tension and let her do what she needed to do, because I was ready and had time. How does that sit with you, given the work you’ve been doing?

Philip Ball: It makes me think that most life — certainly, as far as I understand it, all complex life — is symbiotic. It is a collaboration between different entities. For that reason, we don’t even have a good definition of biological individuality. There’s a really interesting discussion about that. What does it mean for me? Because I have my microbiome, and I’m totally dependent on collaborations with my environment, with other living things.

It’s really good to recognize that collaboration and finding compromises between entities has always been central to what biology does. There’s a real tension because another central aspect of living things — probably since the origin of life — has been parasitism. There are exploiters, that kind of competition. But sometimes those distinctions aren’t really clear; whether something is symbiotic or parasitic isn’t always clear, and it can change. We see this even at the level of the genome — our genomes are full of DNA we’re sure ultimately came from a viral source. Viruses have invaded us, infected us, inserted their DNA into our genome. Some of that can genuinely be regarded as selfish DNA — not really genes, but selfish DNA, because it’s very good at replicating itself. If left unchecked, it would screw up our genomes really quickly, and we have a kind of viral-DNA immune system in every one of our cells to make sure that doesn’t happen.

But by introducing this DNA into our genomes, viruses have created reservoirs of stuff with affordances — a great word. This is something key to biology, even at the level of molecules. I think of our cells, our genomes, as full of affordances. Our cells are constantly making molecules — small molecules, little peptides, little bits of RNA — that have no clear function. They’re being made, I think, because they have affordances. They might find uses in particular situations. We need this stuff, but we don’t need it for particular reasons. We need it because we need affordances. That’s the way evolution happens: a protein might arise with potential uses, and cells and evolution will find a particular use for it — or several uses.

We can see that kind of collaboration, that kind of symbiosis, and an ambiguity between what’s “good” and “bad,” parasite and symbiotic, all the way down. It seems absolutely intrinsic to the way life works. There’s a flow of information, matter, DNA, and genes between organisms all the time. This is a profound shift — certainly in the way we think about how evolution works. It is not enough to think of evolution as a whole bunch of well-defined entities trying to do their own thing and competing with all the other entities trying to do theirs. It’s much more complex — a continual exchange, an ecosystem of exchange of information and matter, what makes life interconnected in fundamental ways.

Andrea Hiott: That’s wonderful. I think about that a lot — like watching parasites, or just birds. I like to watch birds, and sometimes it’s a violent thing where a bird steals the birds of another bird. Caring can sound like it doesn’t apply to that, but I actually think if you orient through caring, you understand that caring is tense. There’s something in your book where you talk about parenting. This needful freedom is what’s bringing it up — what I’m trying to bring in by mentioning parenting is that this caring is very tense. Sometimes you don’t have a compromise. It’s not that caring means you compromise. It’s a different, primordial feeling than competition, and I see that competition could be better understood through that primordial tension. In the book you write about decentralization, and identity itself being contextual. That becomes very important once we start thinking of meaning.

Philip Ball: With the question of parenting — I think that’s in The Book of Minds where I’m thinking. I think of the brain that way, because it’s a kind of reason why we have brains. Our genes can’t do it all. Even in the old picture where our genes were calling the shots — and to some extent we could imagine they are doing that more in bacteria — they can’t tell us what to do. There is no genomic lookup table for “I’m in this situation, what do I do?” Evolution can’t provide that, even if it were a good solution, which it’s not. So it gives us brains instead, or cognitive systems more generally — which are contextual, which work on rules of thumb. “This is probably the best thing to do, but we don’t really know. Let’s try it anyway.” That’s how living organisms work, and how they have to work, because we cannot be optimizing all the time.

If you have systems like that, what I said in the book is that if you’re going to make a brain, it’s got to do more than that. It’s going to end up doing things that seem to — and this is what puzzled Richard Dawkins — why do we sometimes behave in ways that are not adaptive? It’s because that has got to be the nature of our brains: they are not going to necessarily adhere to evolutionary imperatives. They might do things that are destructive, things that mean we’re not going to pass on our genes — because they have an autonomy, because they have to have that autonomy. It’s the only way they can work.

The fact that we have brains is a kind of illustration of the agential nature of what we are. We need that agency, that freedom to make choices contextually, in the hope that maybe this is the best thing to do. That’s what agents are. They’re not machines with a lookup table for what action to take. They’re responding in the moment. What you said about immediacy — it’s exactly that. Agents are things that have to make immediate decisions in the context, hoping it will be the right decision. Any parent will be familiar with that — “I don’t know what to do here, I don’t know what the best answer is, because there isn’t a best answer. This is the best I can think to do at the moment.” It’s a good metaphor, but probably more than that. Hopefully it comes from a caring background, a caring motivation. And like I said, we can extend that to the whole notion of there being a valence, an emotional response — that being part of the decision-making process. This is pretty uncontroversial now in neurobiology: emotions are a part of what we might think of as our rational decision-making process. Without emotions we don’t make as good decisions.

Andrea Hiott: I love that you brought in basically that there are many different ways to be — that openness again, that surprise. Things might not go the way you desire. That’s the price we pay for keeping the possible destinations open. There is this entropy, this unpredictability to it all, which speaks to “meaning, not mechanism,” per your book.

You wrote a really beautiful article in Nautilus about your own experience. I wonder if this has opened up ways for you to see the world differently, and if that’s helped you with some of the things you’ve had to deal with over the past few years. You write about it in that article as having helped you. How does that connect to what we’ve been talking about?

Philip Ball: As I was coming toward the end of writing this book called How Life Works, I found my own life wasn’t quite working the way it ought to, because I had cancer. I had prostate cancer of a mildly aggressive sort, so I needed to have something done about it. I had surgery, and by every means we can see, it’s done the trick. I was lucky to have been able to do that. But during that time — certainly before knowing exactly what stage it was at and what treatment I might be facing — it was absolutely a time for thinking about mortality, what that means, the time we have here, and what our real nature is.

It focused my thinking. The way it seemed to me to think about it: clearly we’re not our material nature, because that’s changing all the time. What is it that is persisting, and what is it that disappears when we no longer persist? You can think about it as a kind of pattern of information, because in a sense, that’s what’s being imprinted on these atoms. That itself is a really weird thing to think about, because it seems disembodied — but actually it requires materiality.

Thought about that way, it made me think: given that it’s patterning, given that it’s a temporary coming-together of the material universe in this sustained pattern until it is no longer sustained, that information and that patterning doesn’t just disappear with us. We leave imprints of that information that would not have existed had this particular cluster of information not come together in this temporary little whirlwind — that’s what I thought about.

Andrea Hiott: Whirlpools of meaning. It’s such a beautiful phrase.

Philip Ball: That’s what we’re doing as living things — we’re creating meaning. It helped me make sense of how something someone has done — because they were one of these whirlpools at some point in time — has imprinted something on the universe that is still there. Like Bach’s music, Beethoven’s music. Like a book. That is in some very real sense still a part of that information, still a part of what they were. I don’t think it’s just a romantic way of thinking about it. It is literally that information exists and continues to have an effect on the world, because it came from that person as a whirlpool of meaning.

This is the thing that has always astonished me — that information can persist and can continue to have meaning. Some years ago I went to a performance of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the piano pieces he composed late in his life, played by Igor Levit. That’s almost his signature piece, so it was extraordinarily good. I knew nothing about it in advance, and I was taken by surprise halfway through just to find tears streaming down my face. I was thinking, “What is this about?” It felt to me like the meaning-making that went into that music was making meaning for me. That communication is something very real. It’s an extraordinary expression of how that whirlpool of meaning that was Beethoven somehow created in the world something that persists.

I did find some solace in that, because it’s going to happen. I was lucky it didn’t happen to me at that particular time, but it’s going to happen at some point. We need to confront the fact that this is in our nature — we’re not here forever. For me at least, as someone who doesn’t have a religious belief — perhaps has a kind of spiritual outlook, but not rooted in any religion — this felt like a useful way of thinking about our presence here, how we’ve come into being, how amazing it is, that bits of the universe have come together to do these things, to have these conversations. Atoms talking to each other. How on earth does that happen? That’s really the mystery at the bottom of trying to understand biology. If we don’t recognize that, we’re not acknowledging the true depth of the mystery of living things.

Andrea Hiott: It’s beautiful. I have to say, I’ve had a similar experience with Beethoven, and I had a similar experience reading your article, to be honest. It kind of teared me up. Two things — I want to add that it was also very intellectually stimulating to think about diseases as other ways cells are being. But more to this conversation, since we’re coming to a close: that idea we were talking about, where nothing is generic, relates to a philosophy of love kind of idea — everything is unique. Nothing can be replaced, because of context. We’re creating what’s possible, and that context continues. I think that’s in your book a lot — look at how much of your book and me and all of us are talking about people who did work, who lived so long ago, and it’s oriented us. Your work, I think, will orient other people in the future.

That feels so meaningful. We’ve danced around ideas of mysticism or wonder a few times here, as if those are words we should be ashamed of. But if you look at it through this different frame, those words almost become necessary, because that is kind of what’s happening here — this contextual continuance. How can we not be awed by that? Finding a way not to feel guilty or embarrassed about that feels like part of this project too, and something I want to thank you for. Your work is helping people deal with that, because it’s hard.

Philip Ball: Thank you. That’s lovely to hear. One thing it speaks to me is that it’s a curious thing science is trying to do, because it’s trying to make generic what is actually always unique. Every moment in the universe is unique. Science is about finding patterns and regularities that help us understand generically how things happen. But there’s still going to be that tension about the uniqueness of every moment and every part of the universe.

What’s crucial in that for me is: there has been this notion — you still hear physicists in particular say this a lot — “well, yeah, but it’s all predictable because it’s only atoms interacting. So if we knew” — an idea that goes back at least to Laplace — “if we knew where every atom was and what every interaction was, we could predict all of the future.” Increasingly, people — including some physicists — are realizing that is not the nature of the way things happen. There is a kind of computational irreducibility, as it’s sometimes called, that means you cannot know, cannot predict, until it happens. You cannot predict without actually letting everything play out in all its detail. Basically, letting history happen.

What’s more, and this is crucial to understanding living things, they become a nexus of causation in what happens — there’s an open-endedness to it. When something develops, it actually creates new possibilities for what can come afterward. This is something we see in evolution: when there is some ramping up of complexity, entirely new things become possible for what life can do — things that simply weren’t present with simpler organisms and were not predictable. Even in a technical sense, were not predictable. There’s an open-endedness to the way the universe unfolds, and certainly to the way living things unfold. So the uniqueness you were talking about — it’s not just one thing after another that we can’t predict exactly; new possibilities arise. There’s something very exciting I find in that aspect of life.

Andrea Hiott: Me too. Literally nothing is replaceable, which is just a fascinating thing to meditate on. Before we go — it’s Love and Philosophy, so I have to at least say the word love. I always ask if you have any experience of love, or if that word relates at all to any of this in any way you want to share.

Philip Ball: It’s a great question. I wish I had something more profound to say about it. I guess I feel it’s one of those words that is talking about something real. It worries me that there’s a tendency in biology to talk in “as-if” language — that we can talk as if we were conscious, as if we were agents, as if we were loving entities. It’s really important to say: no, those are aspects of reality that ultimately we might want to address. Where does that come from? Recognizing a continuity of the characteristics living things have — including the ability to feel love — recognizing an evolutionary continuity in that doesn’t diminish them. On the contrary, it forces us to recognize them as real things, with evolutionary roots we can understand and explore. By doing so, we are not explaining away those characteristics. We are recognizing them as real, valuable, and worth taking seriously.

Andrea Hiott: That’s beautiful. Thank you. That was wonderful. Thank you so much for this talk and for spending some time with me today.

Philip Ball: Oh, it was a great pleasure, Andrea. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: Have a great day there.

Philip Ball: Thank you.

Links & References

Philip Ball

Author website: philipball.co.uk
Wikipedia: Philip Ball
Chemistry World biography: Philip Ball at Chemistry World

Philip Ball’s Books (mentioned or relevant to this conversation)

How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2023) — the main book discussed
- University of Chicago Press
- Author’s page
The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens (2022)
- University of Chicago Press
- Reviews on author’s site
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2004) — winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books
- Author’s page
- Macmillan
H2O: A Biography of Water (1999)
- Author’s page
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It(2010)

Philip Ball’s Nautilus Essay

“How Life Really Works” — Ball’s essay reflecting on writing How Life Works while being diagnosed with prostate cancer
- Read on Nautilus

Other Books Mentioned

Alison Bashford — Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (the book on chiromancy/palmistry Philip mentions reviewing)
- University of Chicago Press

Scientists, Thinkers & Figures Mentioned

Ernst Mayr — evolutionary biologist (Wikipedia)
Jacques Monod — Nobel laureate, molecular biologist (Wikipedia)
François Jacob — Nobel laureate, molecular biologist; quoted line from 1973 about biologists “no longer studying life” (Wikipedia)
James Clerk Maxwell — 19th-century physicist (Wikipedia)
Ludwig Boltzmann — 19th-century physicist, founder of statistical mechanics (Wikipedia)
Anil Seth — neuroscientist, on embodied cognition and the conditioning of mental life by embodiment (anilseth.com)
Peter Godfrey-Smith — philosopher of biology, on the origins of nervous systems (petergodfreysmith.com)
Mark Solms — neuroscientist working on affect and consciousness (Wikipedia)
Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, author of The Selfish Gene(Wikipedia)
René Descartes and Isaac Newton — early-modern figures of the mechanical philosophy
Pierre-Simon Laplace — the “Laplacian demon” idea of total predictability (Wikipedia: Laplace’s demon)
Ludwig van Beethoven — and the Diabelli Variations
Igor Levit — pianist whose performance of the Diabelli Variations Philip describes (Wikipedia)
Johann Sebastian Bach — referenced alongside Beethoven as a “whirlpool of meaning”

Subjects & Concepts Referenced

The Selfish Gene — Dawkins’s framing (Wikipedia)
The Human Genome Project (Wikipedia)
Genotype vs. Phenotype (Wikipedia)
Mechanistic philosophy / mechanism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Embodied cognition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Affordances (J.J. Gibson, ecological psychology) (Wikipedia)
Symbiogenesis / symbiosis (Wikipedia)
Condensed-matter physics (Wikipedia)
Computational irreducibility (Wolfram) (Wikipedia)
Intrinsically disordered proteins (Wikipedia)
Gene regulation (Wikipedia)
Teleology in biology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Teleological Notions in Biology)
Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Cari Taylor

Life's Sacred Living System 15h

i just loved this - you know my head was going yes yes - like living systems!!

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L&P Beyond Dichotomy (substack stream)

❤️ It's reasonable to care. Unscripted conversations across traditional divides. Exploring philosophical, scientific, technological and poetic spaces beyond either/or bounds. Hosted by Andrea Hiott, Fotis Tsiroukis & Mirko Prokop and more. This L&P is from the Substack feed and linked to the community there. You can find multiple L&P threads across many platforms (we are friction-friendly even about podcast platforms). Regardless how or where you find us, they each offer the same podcast content, though Substack has lots of extras in the blog and also comes with clips.

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Love and Philosophy

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