Moving Beyond Binaries in Education Tim Logan & Andrea Hiott on Future Learning Design

Moving Beyond Binaries in Education - with Tim Logan

This bonus episode features a conversation with Tim Logan from his podcast The Future Learning Design. In this episode, Tim and Andrea are discussing advancements and challenges in education. They explore themes such as the limitations of traditional education frameworks, the emerging insights from 4E cognitive science, and the importance of embodied, relational and ecological approaches to cognition. They also discuss the disorienting yet exciting potential of understanding education as a living, dynamic process. Through it all, the conversation emphasizes the importance of love, attention, and awareness in reshaping educational paradigms. Check out Tim Logan's work with Good Impact Labs and connect with him on LinkedIn.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Overview
01:49 Starting the Podcast Episode
02:43 Exploring Cognitive Science
05:16 The Role of Education
08:52 Challenges in Education Systems
13:19 The Future of Learning and Technology
22:38 Navigating Educational Metrics
30:54 Exploring the Teacher-Student Dynamic
32:13 Implicit vs Explicit Learning
35:33 The Importance of Context in Education
36:32 The Third Entity in Education
40:56 Sensing and Cognition
48:49 The Relational Process of Educating
53:47 Concluding Thoughts on Education and Love

Tim Logan is an education leader, connector and facilitator. Tim moves projects from innovative learning design to effectively executing ideas on the ground, swiftly. Bringing his extensive learnings and insights from a global career in youth work, teaching, school leadership and consultancy, Tim has worked with prominent clients around the world to develop new and innovative approaches to learning, well-being and youth engagement. He has most recently worked with International Baccalaureate, Nordic Bildung and Nora Bateson’s team at International Bateson Institute. Tim is also host/producer of the Future Learning Design podcast.

Tim on LinkedIn

Transcript:

Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, this is Andrea. Today is another bonus episode, which is a conversation that I had on another podcast with Tim Logan, and the podcast is called The Future Learning Design Podcast. It's a wonderful podcast. I hope you check it out. Tim is a really amazing person.

He's always making wonderful connections between ideas and people, and he's an education leader, a connector, a facilitator. He's a partner at the Good Impacts lab, Tim moves projects from innovative learning design to effectively executing ideas on the ground, and he has all sorts of insight and learning about youth work, teaching, school leadership, consultancies.

He's lived all over the world. I imagine. You know Nora Bateson, he's worked with her at the International Bateson Institute. And he's also the host and producer of the Future Learning Design podcast, which is what I'm bringing to you here. This, uh, already published on his podcast, but, um, he sent it to me to publish here too, just to share, [00:01:00] share it with you as a bonus.

So that's delightful and big thanks to Tim for having me on his show. And for all the wonderful conversations that we've already had and that I hope we continue to have in the future. I hope you enjoy this discussion. It is about moving beyond binaries and learning, loving and in life, so that's a common theme.

It's mostly centered on education. But we actually talk about many of the same themes that are part of this podcast of Beyond Dichotomy love and philosophy. So I hope you enjoy it and have a look at the Future Learning Design podcast and check out some more episodes with Nora Bateson, for example, Andy Johar.

many other very interesting people. Okay, I hope you're doing well, and as usual, I send you a lot of love. Bye.

Tim Logan: Welcome to the Future Learning Design podcast.

Andrea Hiott: Your thinking is just like the tip edge of your [00:02:00] cognition. Your cognition is how you're moving through the world. It's how you're interacting with everyone. It's the gestures, it's the way you're treating yourself because we are also multiplicities within ourself. So if you start to really understand cognition in that way, you're literally changing what's possible for you in the world.

Tim Logan: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. After a much needed summer break, I hope you've also managed to enjoy a bit of relaxing time with loved ones, and if you're in the northern hemis. Your transition back into the academic year is going well. If you're not a regular listener to the podcast, my name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs.

I've been so looking forward to sharing this conversation as it's an area that I'm particularly passionate about. I feel really strongly that the way that we think and talk about learning, teaching, and education, it's still so rooted in the dominant language of things like training, mechanistic metaphors of the brain as a computer coming from behaviorism and cognitivism.

And there is still a widespread [00:03:00] lack of awareness of the emerging insights of cognitive science, often called four e cognitive science, referring to embodied, embedded, extended and inactive cognition. This is the idea that our understanding, thinking and learning in the world happen in our relationships with each other, with our environments, the tools we use and our bodies, and not just as abstract representations in our brains.

And there's no one better to be talking about this with than Andrea Hyatt, who I met recently, who runs an amazing channel called Love and Philosophy, which I really recommend checking out. As she says, for her, all of her life has been motivated towards the same goal of finding ways for us to move beyond either raw mindsets and to explore our multiplicity.

Andrea is a philosopher, cognitive scientist. Than writer and is currently a researcher at numerous universities. She's also the author of various books, including Thinking Small and Her New book, coming out in 2026, holding Paradox, the Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness. Andrea and I dived right into the conversation.

I had told her that I [00:04:00] mentioned four E Cognitive science to people who are actively working to bring cognitive science into schools. And who had never heard of it. So I started by asking Andrea if four e cognitive science was still a fringe area that few people were aware of.

Andrea Hiott: I think it's becoming less so.

But I mean, cognitive science itself is a little bit of a niche world, and what you call cognitive science is also a big question even for people who call themselves cognitive scientists. Okay. Because it can encompass so much. I mean, you can be doing robotics or you can be doing. More psychological, psychology based kind of things.

You could be doing computer programming, right? You know, all of that informs cognitive science. So it's a wide field, and I think even when I did my degree, 2018, 19 in neuroscience, four e cognition was definitely fringe then. And it's much less so now. But I remember I wanted to talk about these things and it was not easy.

Of course, I was in a more analytic department in Berlin, but there were no, you know, embodied cognition departments [00:05:00] necessarily. Right. Even available around there. So it's changed a lot in the past five years, I would say, but I'm not surprised that he hasn't heard of it because. Once you hear of it, you see it everywhere.

But if you haven't, he's probably heard of embodied cognition. You know, it's, it's just the four e kind of way of talking about it.

Tim Logan: No, fair enough. Yeah. But the, I mean, that's one of the other things I really like about cognitive science as a frame, is that it is, as I understand it, inherently interdisciplinary.

Mm-hmm. Rather than. I think the way a lot of educators see cognitive science is as cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience maybe, but it's like, it's, it's cogs in its brains as machines and it's, it's cognitive architecture and memory and cognitive load theory and all of these things, which are really, they're really commonly understood now.

Education, which is fascinating to me because that then colonizes the conversation about what learning is and what, what education needs to be doing. Very much around all of these narratives of recall [00:06:00] retrieval, just memory, basically. Short-term, long-term memory. Mm-hmm. As though that's the thing we are doing in education, and that's the thing that I get so I can feel myself now.

I get so annoyed by that. Yeah, because it feels so, it feels such an impoverished version of, it's like, as Indie Joha says, it's like teaching humans to be bad robots. Mm. It's so impoverished and superficial. It's like the depth of what education could and should be.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Tim Logan: It's like,

Andrea Hiott: yeah. I wonder is that because we, you know, this has been sort of an age of neuroscience and.

That we've become so fascinated with the brain and that somehow the, the idea of the brain as a computer has been the dominating metaphor,

Tim Logan: right?

Andrea Hiott: And so it's a lot, I think a lot of what you're saying is almost like an assumed orientation that no one's thought about too much in the excitement of realizing we can study the brain in certain ways, having better tools for it.

And this unfortunate metaphor. I mean, it's been [00:07:00] very helpful, the computer metaphor, but it's thinking that our brain is a computer and thinking that thinking itself and all cognition is, is in that, is, is I think, assumed in a weird way across, you know, most areas of society. So. A lot of that feels like assumed for me.

You have to notice that you're even assuming all of that, that cognition is in the brain, that cognition works like a computer and so on, because it's just, it's been built up through what neuroscience is in a way. And memory, I mean, memory is almost the beginning of neuroscience. If you look at McGill University and a lot of the famous people of neuroscience like Donald Hebb and Penfield and everyone, they were really trying to understand what we call memory now.

And that's when all those categories of memory started to become. Builds up and you know, just kind of taking a word from William James memory and saying, we're gonna look for it and now we can look for it in the brain, so it must be in the brain. A lot of that was just assumed and in good spirit, because it was exciting.

We were trying to understand. Memory and thought are so [00:08:00] connected. So it feels like we're trying to really get at the heart of what are we, who are we? And these famous cases where people lose their memory and then we try to figure out what happened because it's as if they've lost who they are. So that was the beginning of neuroscience and all of that became understood as, you know, what you just described as the cogs and looking for this in the head.

Even these ideas of memory and what memory is they're not. Very, I mean, they, they're very helpful, but it's not like there's actually such a thing as declarative memory and associative memory and semantic memory, you know, separated in our body, but how to understand all of that because we developed it looking for those things and we started calling what the patterns that we recognized those things.

So I think the hard part is understanding that we're assuming that mentality that you said and not just rejecting it because. A lot of good stuff has come from that cognitive approach, I mean, right. Yeah.

Tim Logan: Right. I don't

Andrea Hiott: think it's, is it bad that in your, in education people are thinking about that? Would you say

Tim Logan: It's a really good reminder to me, you know, [00:09:00] to not fall into the binary trap of valorizing one side of it and, and criticizing the other side because.

Because I agree with you. I think a lot of really good stuff has come from that and it's still really relevant and important. My issue with it, I think, is that that's been seen as the whole of what it means to be a learning growing human. Yeah. Like it's like this, that has overtaken the full story of who am I in the world?

How do I show up in this space? How do I learn to do things better, to be better, to, you know, to learn about the world. So that's really important. But the broader picture of who am I and how am I showing up and what is going on in this space together as we learn, gets at the best, secondarily treated right.

It's like it's, that's the afterthought of the reason why we're here is to lay down. Strong memories of propositional knowledge. That's, and procedural knowing skills. You know, it's a really instrumental view of [00:10:00] why kids go to school, like, why schools exist. And I think it's clearly, it has real value, but it's so far from the full story that that's why I struggle with it.

And I think that the rebalancing the counter narrative. I feel passionate that that's part of my role is to bring back in, bring back the body in, bring back the, mm-hmm. The context in bring back all these other things which have just been kind of ignored by teachers because they, as you say, enamored by neuroscience or whatever.

We have kind of assumed that that thing is the whole thing that we're doing of the project of education.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think about that quote or that poem, TSLA and you know, coming back to where you started and knowing it for the first time. Because you kept saying bring it back and that we've forgotten it, but I'm not sure we ever knew it because the way that we've gotten to like a lot of what you, you just described with the propositional knowledge and stuff and what education is doing is a kind of attention.

Or awareness of our, what we're doing together. You know, [00:11:00] you can look at that in whatever subject you wanna look at it as. It's a kind of way of like sharing what we've been doing together in ways that can help us orient towards futures. But we didn't think of it like that. We thought of it in the way you described it.

So it's about learning facts that are important that then get you to the next step on the ladder. Maybe like we kind of had to structure it that way. In order to take it seriously and make it what it was. Do you know what I mean? It's like that was kind of the first step of the awareness of what I just said that, that you and I are talking about now, but I'm not sure we could have started there.

We almost had to, okay, we need, we created these systems for how, how is the society, how am I gonna have a good life? How's my kid gonna have like a good life? And we've created these systems, these educational systems. And it's like a ladder. We've thought of it as like, you first, you do this. It's, there's a step by step process, and that fits very well with that older mentality that we're talking about.

Where you have categories, you have facts, you have things you learn that never change. We [00:12:00] almost couldn't have started in flux, in dynamism. It would've been too stressful. We needed to believe all of that stuff, right? To create those systems. And we created the systems and they've done a lot of good. But through that creation, we've now come maybe, hopefully to a place where we can understand, oh, okay.

Actually all of these things that we've been doing are right and good and true for a time, but it's this process itself that we've been trying to become aware of. Yeah. It's this process of how we inter subjectively communicate. Yeah. And how we co-create our world, which is what we're doing with education, with colleges, with the jobs, with all of that, right?

It's that action, that process, that co-creation that we're only now, I think, just barely getting to understand as the actual reality of all of that. Not that we get a degree and do, which. I mean, you've talked about this, I think some on your podcast. That's a, it's an amazing, like we're realizing how amazing we are as part of life.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: And we're also, it's also really scary and [00:13:00] hard. That's that whole relational view. I mean, that's a, it's hard to realize that there are. Not particular definite categories and things and facts that will always, always, always be exactly like they are that you can just learn, you know? Yeah. I think that's a scary, hard thing to realize.

I don't know if that relates to it.

Tim Logan: So there's a, yeah, there's a kind of a disorientation in the acknowledgement of constant flux. Mm-hmm. And so there's a kind of a convenience in stasis, right? There's a convenient fiction of imagining that things stay the same. In order to orient ourselves somehow as we move through the world.

Right. But the thing that struck me, as you were saying there is like that I've learned a lot with you, from you in on your channel and in other, in other ways throughout that whole history you've just described. There were always voices. Saying, hold on a minute, we're missing something. Hold on a minute.

You know, and there's like a, there's an attractiveness to the [00:14:00] control and the power of being able to leverage the scientific method and, and all of these abstractions to do stuff in the world. Like that's really addictive and powerful, right. And all the time. You know, from your conversation with Evan Hussel or Heiddeger or Alfred North Whitehead, or all these people, even just in the European tradition, in the, you know, as the things were emerging in terms of science.

There were also voices constantly saying maybe we're substituting the method for the being, or you know, the, what is it, surreptitious substitution that Evan talks about the blind spot. It's like maybe we are missing something and we're mistaking the whole for the parts. And that's kind of what I'm saying about education.

It feels like that's the thing we've mistaken. It's not that there's no value in the. Propositional and I, I completely agree with you. I think it allows us to extend our cognition in a way, right? Mm-hmm. Like when we, when we can externalize stuff, ideas [00:15:00] into tokens that we can share and point to and like into algebra or into a map, or into a, you know, a concept that we can say, Hey, look at this, or I can teach someone else about it.

I can show them that thing, right? Mm-hmm. Even though it's not a thing, but it kind of pretends to be a thing for a minute while I'm talking about it. 'cause it helps a young person orient themselves in the world or something.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's always been there. Yeah.

Tim Logan: That's all great, but we've missed, but, but we've mistaken that as life.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I mean, it's funny that I'm sort of defending and not even, because the whole point of, you know, what I'm doing is this participatory since making and this understanding the process, but. It's also holding all these things together, which is a really, really hard thing to do. Yeah. And um, also, of course what I'm talking about in terms of education is a very specific kind of education.

I'm talking about the kind of education I had in my very specific way where you go to school and you learn in certain, there's many other, I mean, education is not about only the school as. Talked about in, but I guess [00:16:00] what I'm trying to hold here is that what happens and maybe cognitive science and elsewhere, the reason these what seem like actually the most true thing, that life is a process.

That we are participatory together. That the cognition's not only in the head, it's in the body, it's in our interaction with one another. If those things, if you think about them, seem you know them, you know, it's your experience. It can almost seem trivial if you let yourself reimagine what this word cognition means.

'cause you know that word people often just put it in the head. But if you start to think of cognition as the ways we make through the world, or how we interact with our encounter every day, if you think of it like that, then all of this stuff seems very normal. Yes, it's our whole body. It's our sensory body.

It's different according to what kind of being you are. You're. The teacher and the student are, that's an interaction that's changing. That is the education. It's not just this like stuff in books that are facts. All of that can seem, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's good. But I guess what I'm saying is it often feels like all those, if you, if you introduce it in a certain way, which I've [00:17:00] seen it introduced.

It's as if it's against all this that's already been done. And that's not only in the way we teach kids. It's like I see it in science. You know, you have this whole world that many people depend upon that's built on what can seem like for e cognition or embodied ecological and active, or processual or transformative.

There's all kinds of different ways relational. It can seem as if. You're saying, oh, you've gotten it wrong the whole time, and everyone's been trying to tell you, and you've built this whole system and wasted all this money and done all this research, and you've even built your experiments in the wrong way.

I don't think that's helpful or true, and I don't even think that's what people in this discipline are trying to say. But because you get sucked into the system, you start taking on those patterns and that's just exactly what we don't wanna do. Yes. You know, we don't want to mirror the very patterns we're trying to discuss here.

Exactly. So that's why I bring this up because it's good to have some tension and some dissonance about it [00:18:00] because. As important as it is for me, I mean, participatory sensemaking and I, I feel like this can really help us. It's one of my, a philosopher and friend Hannah Dier talks about it is constantly determining what matters.

You know, that is what we're doing in education, but that is a process that takes so much care and so much community and so much patience. And if we just are putting that against everything that already was, I just see that we've somehow gotten back into the, the system of it. Do you see what I mean? So what we're trying to do here is even get out of that way of talking about it.

It's very hard. Right.

Tim Logan: I completely see what you mean because that, again, that's something I've really appreciated about your work is that you are calling out the paradoxes where we have to. Acknowledge that that is a patterning that we don't want to just keep falling back into the either or because, so I, I'm very, I, I totally hear you and I [00:19:00] really agree.

And not to disagree, but I'm saying I think there's something about what is valued. That's the thing that's coming up for me. It's like the thing that we, you talk about dissonance, right? Like I hear this a lot from young people and from teachers and there's like this felt dissonance in formal schooling that shows up in all sorts of ways, right?

In in school refusal or mental health issues or all sorts of ways. That the felt dissonance is between like all the things you just said about I am participating, I'm in relation, I'm doing all these things. I am an embodied organism, making my way through the world, finding out what matters. In every moment I'm doing all these things, and yet I'm being, I'm sitting in this space being told to ignore a lot of that data.

Mm-hmm. And only value the, the like, the things that are being put up on the pedestal of the things that matter, which are the. The more abstracted, the more decontextualized, the more conceptual, not always, but often. Yeah. And so I think there's something around [00:20:00] challenging that. There is just more going on and how can we bring that, again, bring that back in.

Like if, you know, in the sense that maybe it's not a remembering that we've forgotten, but, but it is definitely something we feel. But are not given always given permission to bring into the space. It's

Andrea Hiott: life. It's, it's what we care about, right? It's the, it's the reason for doing all, all of this work. And yet it's also like we have to soften a little bit and sort of, you know, let the knots untangle just a little bit.

I mean, and. Because it is heartbreaking actually, that we judge each other by something like an SAT score. Yeah. You know, we all have these numerical things that are basically just about memorizing certain facts. A lot of, some of it's critical thinking, but it's a kind of critical thinking like that's divorced from your actual embodied, ongoing interaction.

You know, and it's actually, it's, it's heartbreaking when I think I, I don't know about you, but when I think about my own life and how alienating and strange it feels to be in that [00:21:00] system. And how I think most people feel that way. Even when you're really good at it. Like even when you do really well.

'cause there's no end. You have to just like, you know, I was told, oh, you're so smart when you're a young kid and then you feel so pressured. Like, what does that mean? I have to keep doing that or something. I'm supposed to be some kind of. And it never really makes sense with all the tests and everything because, because they're all not seeing what we're talking about here.

It's, it's not taking context into consideration. It's not understanding that every time you take a test, you're gonna be in a different space. It's not even understanding that all of those little facts that we're learning aren't really a sign of what we're going to be able to best give in the world.

And it's also not understanding that best giving in the world isn't about an individual like cutoff from that world. It's about you have a unique position in place in this world and we're all in it together. And like it's that whole re-understanding of what a self is, that we are inter beings. None of that is in SAT scores, for example, or something.

And it's heartbreaking, you know? And so, yeah,

Tim Logan: it is, it is really heartbreaking. And that, to [00:22:00] me, the, the meta communication of the system, and this is where I, the meta communication is, that's what matters. The SAT score is what matters and all the things you've just said, yeah, they can exist, but they're not the real thing that matters.

And that's the, that's the alienation for me. And that's the thing that I, you know, again, I can feel it right now. Like I get passionate about. At that point because I feel, yes, it's not a binary that we've just got it all wrong. There is something that we've just, we've allowed the map to be ultimately, you know, valued over the territory or the, you know, all of those ways of thinking about it.

Yeah. That Evan was talking about. Why have we done

Andrea Hiott: that? Tim, what do you think? Because I was thinking about this, right? Like, why, why do we have all those kinds of tests and metrics and like, what has that been about? Because we're at a really crazy moment of transformation right now. And do we really know what we've been doing and what we want?

Because this happened and we all did it and we were responsible for it. This is what we've created.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: We've created a metric system whereby we [00:23:00] decide how worthy individuals are in certain ways based on weird numbers and things, right? Like this is what we've done and like we can leave you aside all the good stuff in that.

But it's where we are right now, but we're also at a moment where we're having to really confront that. Due to what everyone talks about is ai, the, you know, LLMs and all this that suddenly is showing us maybe all those facts aren't what we thought, and maybe knowing them in this old memory way of just knowing them as facts, not living them, taking them as the word or the map or whatever is the territory.

That seems okay. First of all, we have technology that can do that for us now. So what does that mean? What, who are we, so why did we do that in the first place? And I guess like that question is, is hard, and that's why I'm trying to bring it up that I think we did it to become capable of knowing where we are to develop our attention.

Tim Logan: Completely agree. And,

Andrea Hiott: and the fact that we can now begin to understand ourselves as inner being. So it's a, we're in a really beautiful like tip, like we're on this wave. And if we can understand, oh, [00:24:00] like, oh, that's what we were doing. Oh my God. Like think of what we can now do together, but we had, that has to be a space that's shared and safe and.

There's care involved because if, it's just like if we go into this school system, I, I know you know it well, where basically you just have to make your career on some ideas and theories and so on. So you need, you're, you're fighting the other. That's a, feels like a very dead, difficult, sad, lonely space, you know, for everyone.

But it's so easy to just go into that and to make this, what I'm saying, into a theory which I then need to like prove to everyone else. So how do I, how do we sit together right here and like, look at this, like, what, what do you think? Why have we done this? Why have we, you know, why have we created these kind of metrics?

Tim Logan: I love that. But the, just quickly, the reason, I think part of the reason why we continue that, and I, I have this conversation all the time. With different people as parents or as teachers or whatever, is that the ladder is still there. Like people still want their children to be successful on the ladder.

Of course. So the ladder still exists, right? So it's like mm-hmm. While at the same time many of us are [00:25:00] looking at the ladder saying this is radically insufficient and alienating and all these things, but it's still there. Yeah. And it's a kind of the,

Andrea Hiott: we're still doing it, like we're still doing it. It's still

Tim Logan: the steps to success.

So part part of it is in. I think this long now of the great turning or, you know, Joanna Macy or whatever you want to call it, it's like, it's a long process of acknowledging, but I loved, I totally loved the way you just said that because I think the, the big piece of why, I mean, I, I'm nowhere near smart enough to be able to articulate it, but there's something around, for example, it makes me think of Daniel Stenberg and the way he talks about technology.

Mm-hmm. Then this is probably like Heger and other things, but somehow we used the affordances of the technology that was available to us at the time to do stuff in the world, right? To try and figure, figure, problem solve, figure stuff out, be in the world together. And like he talks about coordination technologies and.

You know, artifactual technologies like, so a spear and the human coordination was what allowed humans to be able to [00:26:00] kill the wooly mammoth to survive and to stop threats to get food, et cetera, et cetera. So it wasn't one or the other. It was the ability to do the coordination technology and the, the physical technology.

And somehow those two things have been like interacting. And I, in a way, I, so language maths, all of those things I see as somehow, or this one way of viewing them as. Technologies that we have used to afford further exploring of the world. Right? And some people will like die on that hill of mathematics as the ground of being or whatever.

Like ARD guy, whatever his name is, you know, it's mathematics is like the ground of being almost Wolfram. Sorry, Wolfram, right. There you go. And, and so it's like. In a way that's just, that's just another technology that, that humans have invented to talk about or explore the world in different ways. And, and I, in a way, I see education as a coordination technology that we have used to bring groups of people together [00:27:00] to distribute, participate in knowing the world, sharing these technologies amongst each other.

There's, you know, multiple ways that we've used different coordination technologies to continue. Life in some way. Continue exploring, continuing, figuring out what matters. And so somehow been this emergent story of just trying to figure out how we can enact our will in the world or, or, you know, minimize free energy or, you know, maybe like it's, it's like however you describe the thing that we're doing and that's why I love your work.

I think part of what we're doing is just way making together and using the affordances of the landscape that we find ourselves in. And you can only do that from the point you are, you know, when you find yourself born into the late 20th century, early 21st century, you are given a bunch of affordances that are existing there.

And then suddenly, like when AI comes and it brings this whole nother layer of affordances into the space that it's just blowing, you know, it's blowing [00:28:00] people's minds. It's scaring the hell out of other people. It's like, and we're trying to navigate using suddenly this new piece of technology new to many.

Mm-hmm. Which brings new affordances and then makes us question other technologies. And like I'm saying, all this aware of the fact that technology as a frame is one way of talking about it. Yeah. There's something very emergent and complex about the ecology of the thing that's brought us to now.

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm.

Tim Logan: In that way, right?

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I think part of that awareness or attention or. Appreciation for rumination, which sounds like very weird that we could develop that right now when we're, we have a tension economy and all of this, but. I think that's allow giving us a way to hold a very difficult understanding that there's not either or and there's not.

There's always many possible paths. First of all, the landscape itself is not flat. It's multidimensional, it's kaleidoscopic. Even the landscape itself is changing with every [00:29:00] sensory change of view, and that's a really strange way to think, right? We have to think in constellations instead of in lines. How do we do that?

Some of all of this we've been talking about and all of the stuff that we've gotten stuck in and rutted in and that's become rigid now and that's constraining us in bad ways, you know, or that we're appreciating as constraints sort of instead of interacting with. But a lot of that is, has been ways that we can start to get to know that constellation, that start to understand how we're changing the kaleidoscope all the time.

Start to understand how you and I have had really different paths and even though we're meeting in a space here together and this is the landscape we're, we're both. Overlapping in a lot of ways and as we turn our kaleidoscope, but there's so many, there's so much richness and, and stuff there that of your path that I'm trying to sense, you know, that's what we're doing in this conversation and that interaction.

If we really, are we at a space now where we can start to notice the beauty of that and how. That isn't always good and easy and clear and so on. But starting with that again, now that we've kind of [00:30:00] mapped the territory in such so many ways that there's so much power in there now that maybe we can begin to understand and hold a little bit better.

So way making sounds like it's, oh, it's so easy or something, you're just moving through a landscape and there's affordances and affordances. You know, like everyone has different wands. Everyone's on a different path. Yes. Okay. But actually what I'm really saying is pretty radical because you have to start with a scaffolding that's not binary.

And you have to distinguish the representation from the relation. So the way that we're using language or the way that we're using whatever, isn't the relation itself. So I think it's, what it really comes down to is being really present with where you are, how you got there, how you are the people, and the places that you've been, and how that's always.

You didn't leave them behind. The constellation is ongoing. It's all of this, everything all at once, right? Yeah. And even in, in terms of education in a really traditional way. When we think of ourselves as kids being [00:31:00] educated, we tend to think now we're adults, you know? But we're, we are, but we're still kids too.

And what does it mean to always be the kid and to be the teacher, and to be like, to be our soul who takes on different roles as we turn the kaleidoscope in awareness that we're taking on roles. You know what is that Like the kid, the kids teach us too, and Yeah. Yeah. You know. Absolutely. Not even kids Kids, but adult kid.

Adult students. I mean,

Tim Logan: yeah.

Andrea Hiott: You know, there's that old thing where you, you learn what you teach. It's so true. So how do we, like, that's the space I'm thinking attention and all the stuff allows us to sort of start to explore that we are the teacher and the student. And the landscape and the material we're teaching, you know?

Yeah. We are all of those things, and it's not of a crazy, messy blur, and it's not anything goes, and it's not, there's no truth and nothing is right and wrong. That's not it at all. It's that in every moment we're gonna express and experience those things differently. They're, they're there, they're real, they're traceable, they're legitimate.[00:32:00]

They're changing all the time and how we express them, how we communicate them, where you and I are gonna connect, we're gonna have to dance a little and, and, you know Yeah. It's, it's constantly going with ourselves too.

Tim Logan: Mm-hmm. You

Andrea Hiott: know, with our own Absolutely. Ownselves.

Tim Logan: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And the thing that also comes up for me when you're saying that is something about implicit and explicit, because there's a lot going on implicitly mm-hmm. In all of the things you've just described. And I think, again, that's one of the other little traps that we get locked into. In education is that there is again a valuing of the explicit Absolutely.

'cause it's the thing you can talk about. It's the thing you can write on the exam paper or it's the thing that you can show that you can do.

Andrea Hiott: Exactly. And that's not either or thing too, because I hear what I hear you saying. What I've heard in your other podcast, maybe even with Nora Bateson, is that it's the implications and the, it's all the stuff we can't put into those external representations.

Those yes no answers. Even right now that you and I can't like actually say that's all. That's [00:33:00] actually the orienting.

Tim Logan: Yeah. Right. Of all of

Andrea Hiott: this, you know. And that's part of that cultivation of being able to sit in presence and not judge each other, but also to be rigorous and to believe in, you know, what we believe in.

We're not just like being passive as if everything goes. Yeah. To notice that what you're saying. Yeah. So it's not the implicit or the explicit, it's what those are generating as all that's implied and can't actually be pointed to as implicit or explicit.

Tim Logan: Yeah. But there's also something of maybe about trust.

That, that is all going on though. Mm-hmm. Like, because I think there's, sometimes in order to acknowledge it or notice it, it has to come up into attention or awareness and

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's what I was trying to say at the beginning. Yeah. And it feels like a lot,

Tim Logan: a lot of stuff is going on, not in that zone.

Right? We, and so there's something about trusting. I dunno whether that's the right word, but like being okay with all of that happening without necessarily being in our conscious awareness. [00:34:00]

Andrea Hiott: That's where the care comes in and creating, yeah. Nice spaces where we can actually explore this stuff together.

And that's the kind of education that. I think as what we're maybe talking about orienting towards the kind of relational interaction where you're coming together towards understanding something and it's gonna be a process that you're gonna do together and you're gonna bring in all the ways. Other paths that people have been on that have understood this in a certain way, but you're looking at as a constellation.

So there's gonna be a lot of different ways to get there. And the only way you can even have any of this is if, if the space is safe enough and if everyone agrees that this exploration can take place, which means you don't necessarily have the expert who's gonna give you. The answers, and then you're gonna get a good grade on the test.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: It's a different, you know, way of thinking about what that is.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: I think it relates more to like homeschooling or to having some kind of, I mean, traditionally the way those things go, [00:35:00] because when you are homeschooled, you have a one-on-one interaction with somebody who cares about you. Or when you do something like a cognitive apprenticeship in a, I don't mean that in a strict way, but just when you're like working with someone who cares about you, who's been through a lot of experience, who's gonna share that experience with you and also learn from you in that, what is it like that zone of proximal development, the via that, that area where nobody really quite has the answer, but.

You're bringing stuff together, so that feels like a good way to orient education.

Tim Logan: Totally. It really reminds me of, I had a conversation with Helen Street about, she calls it contextual wellbeing rather than care, but I, I really like idea that, you know, often that the idea of wellbeing has been situated in the individual. But actually she's, you know, talking about what the context, how well is the context or, you know, how flourishing or, or how enabling or thriving is the context that we are situated in.

And in a way that's what you're talking about. Yeah. The, in the ideal situation, if you've got someone, a family [00:36:00] doing homeschooling. You would ideally hope that that's happening in, in a holding of care. Right. In a, a context that is rich with love and care in order to Yeah. Do the things you've just been talking about.

Andrea Hiott: I like that a lot. And also the, the context, just understanding context, how important it is Yeah. Is part of this. Right. That is a kind of care in the way I mean it, and understanding we're not just calculating or memorizing, we're elucidating for one another. And yeah, that kind of opening of, of space feels important, difficult.

But yeah. Let me just say this too. In, in all these talks I have, we, we mentioned four e cognition, participatory sensemaking and processual. And really what that is, is a way of noticing that there's a third entity or kind of another thing, right? Like you and I right now interacting, we are autonomous beings who have paths and.

That are very important and haven't gone away and that matter. But also within us, we've created a third thing here. Yeah. Which is that is what we're doing all the time with one another in education [00:37:00] and somehow recognizing that that's the process of education. It's not too separated. Brains, you know, computational machines in heads coming together to like give each other some information or some data, or maybe it's warm data, I don't know, but you know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's, it's this, this third entity is where it's exciting and where education really is, and we don't know actually what's possible until we engage in that, and that opens up further possibilities for further worlds and landscapes that we can

Tim Logan: explore.

Andrea Hiott: That feels really motivating to me in, in ways that we need.

A

Tim Logan: hundred percent. No, I totally agree. And it makes me think like, are we creating third entities in all directions as well? Because we, you know, yeah, you and I are creating a third entity between us, but we're also creating third entities in a way with the context we are in and that you are in.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

Tim Logan: So there's something multidimensional going on there.

Thank you for

Andrea Hiott: saying that. Yeah. Because the third bothers me a bit because the third people tend to rest there. And actually in this book I wrote, which is a like poly [00:38:00] philosophy. Hippocampus inspired book holding paradox that comes out next year. I actually talk about that space of the third. It's a really important idea, and we use it all the time.

I mean, I studied Hagel in my first degree, and it's the synthesis, right? Right. You can find this trend in ev, like all kind of religions and philosophies and psychologies, where you have the third, and it helps because you can step to that space.

Tim Logan: Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott: And then see that you've been in a binary and it's so important.

But we don't stop in the third, you know? Yeah. The third's not even really there you, it's a portal into exactly what you just expressed, which is also what's so hard to hold is that constellation that we are multiplicities, that we are inter beings, that there are truths and paths that are traced, but that there's a lot of 'em.

Yeah, it's not just one line. So thank you for saying that. 'cause that's a really important point. Yeah,

Tim Logan: no, no. And that's the disorientation in a way that we kind of put in the beginning. Yeah, that's, it's hard, right? It's like so hard. So hard, but maybe, and

Andrea Hiott: even a little bit dangerous, you know, it's, it's hard.

I mean, I think we should pause on that a minute because people talk about, oh, just [00:39:00] adopt a relational view and just think about it as all relations in all ways. And there's no boundaries and everything's fluent and that is incredibly. Disturbing and I don't think we actually pause enough to realize how disturbing that is.

I see it, you know, with people who are really trying to understand it, who we, we assume everyone's been on our path, but if you haven't had this like kind of very gentle lifetime, you know, years and years of leading into what that means and you just suddenly encounter it, it can be very scary and dangerous.

So I think that's something we also. Sometimes forget.

Tim Logan: But I, I love that because, I mean, it came up in my conversation with Indy Joha and it also, it was like one of the first things I wanted to ask Nora Bateson when I met her in person. Oh, wow. I remember like we met in Switzerland and I was like, I'm so

Andrea Hiott: glad to hear that you thought of that.

It's

Tim Logan: like niggling issue of like, boundaries are important because they make people feel safe. Right. And yes, they, they limit and they do violence and all these things, but they also make people feel safe. And there's like, there's a really tricky holding of this thing. I [00:40:00] completely agree with you. 'cause I think if you say, oh no, just, just step, I mean it's like, as we, before we started recording, it's like just shift your ontology.

Just like step into this relational space. It seems so

Andrea Hiott: easy once you've seen it. I mean, it's not easy actually, but it's not. Yeah.

Tim Logan: But it seems obvious.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I had a conversation with Jessica Boma, who's a Oh yeah. An engineer who's, a lot of people are starting to try to do philosophy right in, in whatever field they're in as a way of life.

Whereas there's all these ways to think about it, but just, just thinking critically. Right. And she also talks about how she was kind of happy in her little engineering world and then she discovered relational philosophy and it, yes, it opens up a whole new universe. And it's almost like for these times.

We're gonna, we're being forced to deal with it at this, but at the same time how disturbing it was, you know? And just like, I think that's part of why there's a lot of resistance too, in all, from all, all points. So I'm really glad that's a important part of what you say. And I do remember you bringing that up with Indie, I think.

Yeah.

Tim Logan: Can I, I just, I, 'cause I'm really curious about this point, [00:41:00] about sensing and like how we sense into that landscape that we're talking about. So we're ta you know, we've been. Talking a lot about all of that, but it feels like a lot. That's come up a lot for me in the conversations you've had. Mm-hmm.

Like Mike Levin, for example. Mm-hmm. This idea, and, and with Eric recently about like CHUs Gable. Yeah. The tree and the, you know, like the, and I use the word, but like the affordances of the body of that thing. Thing. Mm-hmm. Like the thing, that's not a thing, but like Yeah. You know, the affordances enable a certain type of sensing.

And as Mike said in your conversation with him, like if we had, it's just such a visceral example, if we had tongues that faced inwards. Maybe we'd be better at sensing our own inner organs and movement inside our bodies, our interception. Right, like just what an image. Yeah, exactly. But also just makes the point so strongly to me that our ability to sense into the landscape to navigate all these like third entities that you are talking [00:42:00] about, are really contingent on our sensual apparatus that we have, right?

Mm-hmm. In a way that's part of what four e cognitive science is doing, right? It's like mm-hmm. Bring the body back in, in activism, et cetera. It's our cognition is happening through our limbs, through our bodies, through our, you know, gut biomes and all these different aspects. Do you feel like, do we have an ability.

To shift that, augment that without changing our own bodies. Or like, there's something for me about, I dunno quite what the question is, but like how, if we're talking about sensing into a, a more multi multiplicities, constellations, universe, et cetera, a multiverse, it feels like we need different sensing apparatus to help us with that.

And can we get better at those things? And Nora talks about sensitizing, like, I dunno, it just feels like there's something there for me about like an ability or a different kind of tool or apparatus or something.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. I think this brings out a lot of the points we've been [00:43:00] talking about because we are sensitizing ourselves into another existence of literally, you know, whatever scale you wanna look at it as individuals, but as communities, as countries, as.

Ecologies. There's a level in which you could understand. That's what, that's what we're doing with this way, making this as we encounter and as we adjust, we're creating new calibrations with the world of, which is a sensing. I think what's so important about understanding this thing that we began with where cognition's not a computer in your brain.

Rather, your brain is part of your body. You actually have a central and peripheral nervous system that extends in through your body. You have neurons all over your body that if you understand literally that your body is a, a sensing being and that that is cognitive, that's very hard, right? 'cause we've separated it all in the same way we've been talking about.

If you just take start to fill into that, that your whole body is what you thought of as cognitive, as the brain and computer in your head, [00:44:00] but actually know you're this incredible cognitive being. Like all that stuff you thought was a computer in your head is your body, and it's your interaction with all that you encounter, everything you read, everything you watch, every conversation you have.

Every walk you take, all of that actually is contributing and giving you the material of how you are going to continue your thinking. But your thinking is just like the tip edge of your cognition. Your cognition is how you're moving through the world. It's how you're interacting with everyone. It's the gestures.

It's the way you're treating yourself because we are also multiplicities within ourself. So if you start to really understand. Cognition in that way. It's not that, I mean, of course our bodies are changing and we have all this technology and we could go, you know, into crazy ideas about that like Mike does and it's all very interesting and I explore a lot of it.

But I think just on a basic level, if you think of your attention as something that's changing. You're literally changing what's possible for you in the [00:45:00] world when you begin to be able to hold that sensory body as your cognition, I mean this word cognition, but as the way that you're making through the world and as something very unique to you that you can share with others because we're all in a different space and time.

And that cognitive process or that bodily process, that living, that sensing is so unique and shared at the same time. And if you realize that interface is what's so meaningful. And you start to become aware of it and, and not judge yourself and accept it. Wow. You know? Yes. I mean, we, we start to change into different sensory beings and not as this old self that we thought was stuck in our head, but as a participating, being in the world that can, I can look at other beings like trees and understand them as part of me even feel into them without it being kind of mystical or crazy.

Just literally, you can start to understand that you're respirating with each other. And giving each other the ability to be, I mean probably the tree, more us than us, the tree. But you know, we are here, we can take care of [00:46:00] the tree. So, and that actually isn't mystical and crazy. It becomes incredibly motivating and a walk through your neighborhood can be a very different thing.

So can a conversation with anyone so can like just the way you interact at the shop. I find that incredibly exciting and like to think of what kind of beings we would be in that space is very exciting. To think of the way we would do science.

Tim Logan: Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Even the way we would structure technology, the way we would do education becomes very exciting for me.

And there's people trying to do it. Um, you know, right now a lot of our scientific experiments, as I know, you know, are, are set up where you have this linear observer, there's the observer, there's the subject. You know, we talk about it in a lot of the conversations on love and philosophy, but that everything's separate.

There are people who are trying to create new ways of, you know, how do we have a participatory kind of experiment where you and I might do an experiment together instead of, and the scientists might like be there or watch or record it, but that is the experiment. There's a thing called prisma that's built on the Feldenkrais thing, but goes in a [00:47:00] totally different direction from that.

Where they actually try to do that. You know, they, they create experiments that actually the experimenters co-create as they do them. And then you have data, but it's not data that's been dictated in that linear way, or there's perceptual crossing experiments, there's hyper scanning. Like we're starting to understand ways that we can understand ourselves as beings beyond what we've decided is the computer in our head.

I find in education and technology and science and just everyday conversation. That's, that's the thing that I think I would answer your question with as what's possible in terms of creating new capabilities or new bodies. You know, they're already there. It's more becoming aware that, that they are.

Tim Logan: No, absolutely no.

And it makes me think it, it's almost like you can, some of it you can see in the language. There's a, I was doing some work with Ray Ison and you, they've got this great paper, him and some other authors called the Praxis of co, like Coen. Oh. In the sense that like you can almost see it in the language that words like co-creating, right?

Which you just [00:48:00] used. I. Coming up more and more like there was. Mm-hmm. I would say X number of years ago, 10 years, 20 years ago, people weren't using the word co-creating as anywhere near as much as they are now. That's interesting. There's something, there's something that you can notice in the way that we use language.

I think that indicates us sensing into that thing that you've just described. Absolutely.

Andrea Hiott: I think that's a really good point. Yeah. Even a lot of the people on your show are the people I talk to. They're using those kind of terms and that kind of wave of speaking, which, which is

Tim Logan: why it's sometimes.

Uncomfortable for people or slightly disorienting, or it's a new set of language. Some people will dismiss it as jargon, but there's some really interesting responses to the way this stuff gets talked about. Mm-hmm. Which I, yeah, which I find fascinating, but also just maybe to end one of the things that I keep with me all the time, so I, as I said to you, I fair, I do some work with Nora Bateson and this like.

It's kind of a motivating question to me, to your point about what does it mean to educate if all of those things were true? The, the question that I sit with all the time is, what does it mean to educate if information is [00:49:00] alive? If communication is an ecology, if cognition is everywhere, and if the individual island itself is a myth.

So like, to me that's like, that is the motivating question. Mm-hmm. Is like, what does education mean? If we take all those things to be more true than we've given credence in the last, you know, 200 years maybe ever.

Andrea Hiott: It almost isn't. Yeah. It almost isn't a noun anymore. Right. It's almost like, as you were saying that I was thinking education sounds, or maybe it is just, it's this somehow living process of,

Tim Logan: right.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's, I actually used to educate rather than education, because I agree. I think that's like the mis, what is it, the misplaced concreteness. Yeah. Thing. Yeah. It's like it is a process. Mm-hmm. Like educating is a process. It'll,

Andrea Hiott: yeah.

Tim Logan: Relational process. It always has been whatever we're teaching in whatever space you're in.

Mm-hmm. But again, back to some of the things we've talked about, I think it's partly about allowing. The value to be given to the things which are implicit or you know, all the things [00:50:00] we've said rather than just the things that are concrete and the things, the thing things that we can manipulate or just noticing

Andrea Hiott: the value you not, don't necessarily have to allow.

And also, I mean, who are we to allow? I think that that comes up too. And I, to you That's, that's good point. And there's to educate as if that, that still implies there's one locked in kind of brain or body that's gonna give, that's gonna educate. Another, whether it's, and that's, that's, so, yeah. I'm sure you've that before.

That's a, but it just came to mind. It's, that's also, yeah.

Tim Logan: No, I, I, that's part of the learning issue, so, and calls it ification, like people Okay. Gravitated towards the word learning in order to circumvent exactly the thing you've just described. It's like, it's all about learning.

Andrea Hiott: Hmm. But now that's become symbol oriented, hasn't it?

Tim Logan: Well, a little bit, but there's, but there's something interesting to me, like I haven't, you know, it will be a lifelong inquiry, but there is something in the educational relationship or the educational act I've played with, and it's like there's [00:51:00] something in that relating, which is not just about two people learning together.

It is about that, but it's also something there is a. Relationship that is saying mm-hmm. I have something like herpes that talks about like, I have something I want to show you, or I have something about the world I'd like you to notice. Right. Oh, I love that,

Andrea Hiott: that, that, that joy and that. Right.

Tim Logan: Exactly. And that there is some thing where you just can't

Andrea Hiott: wait to share it with someone.

Is is in that. Right.

Tim Logan: So there's something powerful, I think, in that idea that it's not a power imbalance. No, I'm not meaning it in this, in that sense of like the master and the student. It's not like I'm here and you'll be here one day. No, no. There's something about, I'm passionate about the world, I'm passionate about this thing and I wanna show you.

And you know, I've maybe done a bit more thinking about this thing or some exploring of this thing. Mm-hmm. Than you have. And that's given me a richer understanding, Richard. Kind of appreciation and wonder for this thing. And I'd love to show you that feels Im, that feels like an important relationality in the mix of all the things we've just talked about.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 'cause and that only makes sense and works if we've kind of [00:52:00] stepped back enough to understand that we all have unique paths within this kaleidoscopic, constellation, nested, multi being placed. And all of those paths are necessarily going to offer. The being that's been on them, something different to give, which doesn't mean we need to compete like Right.

But would, but does mean we can still be very, very motivated to find ways of doing that. Right. So that we don't lose the motivation. But because often it, it would come, oh, I know this and I wanna tell you because I've had this credible life. Exactly. And it's like, okay, yeah. All of us have. So how do we, all of us, no matter who we are, how educated we are, I absolutely believe it.

And I, I am sure you've seen it too, have something to give that others can't give. Exactly. I've just seen it. It's, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Logan: Totally. And that was your point about learning from the young people as well, you know, or the, the older. Kids, you know, as you said earlier, it's like the person doing the educating can be anybody, because as you say, they've had this rich experience and they want to share it.

It doesn't mean that you have to be, [00:53:00] it's not a position as such. Yeah. Or a role as such. It's like a state

Andrea Hiott: we're in educating or something. Like, let, let's do some educating, I don't even know what the word is, but you almost get into kind of a, like a little, little spirit together, right? Yeah. But it does, I think it is easy to forget that it doesn't have to be degrees and all this.

I mean, sometimes it's very hard for me to hear, 'cause I know my channel. It's like very heady. All these scientists and philosophers and technology and it's all these words as you were talking about. And if someone just comes to that without, maybe I didn't go to college, and they know completely different kind of knowledge.

I don't want it to seem like that's a better knowledge. You know, I still struggle with how to hold all that. 'cause once you've gone through all these paths, you tend to group in people who've also been on those paths. So how do we really like connect those different parts of the constellation? That feels important too.

Sure. And I know you're doing it with your podcast.

Tim Logan: No, no, I agree. And it's, it's a trap for everyone, I think. But, and I think, I think you do it really well by bringing love back in. And I'd love, you know, if we can explore that separately Yeah. In a future group conversation maybe. Sure. I would, because I do think you bring people.

[00:54:00] You ground your conversations in the kind of relational with the idea of love as the frame, so I

Andrea Hiott: mm-hmm. Because loving is knowing as

Tim Logan: Yeah. Right.

Andrea Hiott: Hannah Deger has wrote about it. I, I really think that's kind of like a way of knowing that we all share even no matter, you know, what, what you love or who you love or, you know, there's, that is a knowing, right?

That is a. Something relative to the education that we've been talking about that we have to give, I guess, and receive.

Tim Logan: Amazing.

Andrea Hiott: We'd talk about that another day.

Tim Logan: Thank you. Oh, this is amazing. No, I so appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you, and thanks for all the work you're doing.

Tim Logan: Same. Same.

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