Learning
I have degrees in neuroscience, philosophy, and world heritage, and I’m currently doing a PhD at Universität Heidelberg, but the greatest education for me comes through living and learning from others. I’m interested in the paths we make together, and how we might better understand one another and our way-making. There are many rich traditions in many disciplines that have inspired this work. For a partial list of all those I am indebted to, please see here: INSPIRATIONS.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been asking: What are minds, and how do they connect to movement? More recently, that question has take new forms such as: How can we better understand ourselves in the context of our interactions within our environments? What sorts of philosophies guide us as we build our cities and technologies, especially in transportation? How might we enter a new way of thinking that can hold the space for what now seem like dichotomies and contrasts?
I hope to share ways of studying the mind at various levels and across different species using the idea of Navigability—which is a term for coming to awareness of the regularities that create our thoughts and movements, and an awareness that thinking is movement.
This champions many approaches of the past that understand mind as a form of movement, either literally or metaphorically. I mean it literally, though not in the sense of the body moving from A to B, but rather of ‘thinking’ and ‘remembering’ as being actions that can be noticed as movements, traced through the regularities of its ongoing encounter. Why does that matter? Because at the moment, we still consider our thinking as though it were in our heads rather than taking responsibility for it as the action co-creating the regularities and parameters of what is possible in our lives and the lives of other living beings. Movement is a way of knowing and knowing is a way of moving.
There is nothing new under the sun, so this is not to be taken as revolutionary but rather as part of living lines of the past. Some of these lines come from philosophy, some from neuroscience, some from sports, some from anthropology, some from psychology—I’ve talked to many of the people who inspire me through these fields (and through their everyday life) for Love and Philosophy.
A term I use often to discuss all this movement is way-making. Way-making is a term inspired by Taoism that can be understood as the movement of the body as well as the movement of the mind: “Way-making blunts the sharp edges and untangles the knots; it softens the glare and brings things together on the same track.” (Ames and Hall, 2003 in Boulton, 2024). This framing seeks to link the work of many who are rethinking the dualistic views that influence our actions, relationships, and fields of study.
While the ideas of way-making and navigability may seem complex or esoteric at first, they have clear effects on:
how we treat and study mental health
what is meaningful for us and the quality of our experience
our relationship to the environment
the strength of science and spirituality, and why they sometimes appear incompatible
the choices we make about the design of our cities, business, and forms of transportation
how we use and build our technology, and what those technologies mean in our everyday lives
how we create and change our habits and path-dependencies
Way-making and Navigability
In a nutshell, I’m working to highlight the commons of a framework for embodied cognition that can be used across scales and species and opens non-dual perspectives of life and mind. This is possible due to navigability patterns that appear in studies of intelligence, namely, that what is being assessed can always be assessed as some movement through some statistically regular space, be that tangible landscapes like parks and cities or intangible landscapes such as literature, the internet, or a relationship.
Way-making is a term inspired by Taoism, and can be understood as the movement of the body as well as the movement of the mind: “Way-making blunts the sharp edges and untangles the knots; it softens the glare and brings things together on the same track.” (Ames and Hall, 2003 in Bouton, 2024).
Way-making is the larger term I use at times for this process when it is not modelled. Way-making expresses that beings make their way through all they encounter, all day long, for as long as they are living—this term does not imply division, beginnings or ends. It is thinking at all skills, and of all beings—any body in its movement is its own form of intelligence. This might seem a simple start for those of us who are hard-nosed philosophers, but it is actually quite radical and precise: It means any living being that makes its way through any measurable space is intelligent.
Way-making refers to our movements through all these spaces in our lives. The practice of Navigability is, in a phrase, the practice of holding the paradox, though each of us will learn to do this in very different ways according to the particular positions we are in and the paths we have taken. Coming into awareness of this is the practice, and doing so is about learning to hold what seems irreconcilable in a shared space. It might sound simple but it is among the most challenging and most transformative actions any person or group can do.
My life and the many ways I come these themes itself elucidates the practice of holding the paradox. My life is this developing of a philosophy of mind in practice, and through that, I hope to give words to some patterns that might help others. I discuss this through the framework of Way-making and the practice of Navigability, and with ideas such as Threshold Visioning, but the practice is on-going for me, too, and there are many others doing work that is similar and that inspires and enlivens these ideas from different paths. Researching these and related ideas is the basis of the shows I host on Love and Philosophy. It started as research, and continues to be research now.
There and elsewhere, I've been working to highlight a framework for embodied cognition and its phenomenology that can be used across scales and species. I am currently a researcher with Heidelberg Universität (Germany), and collaborate with the Techn-oscience Chair at the Brandenburg Institute of Technology and the MBAIN lab (Ottawa). I founded Making Ways and also work with the Ecological Motoring Initiative. I host Love and Philosophy, Future Motoring & Desirable Unknown.
Holding Paradox
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Holding Paradox *
Two phrases I use often are holding the paradox and moving beyond dichotomy. These are meant to open the possibility of holding what seems irreconcilable or divided within a shared space. Way-making is the term opening to that space without trying to reconcile how it appears from every position.
We often define our world and ourselves by contrasting things. This has been useful, but it has also led us to divide ourselves and our worlds into what we see as irreconcilable divisions. In philosophy, the idea of mental and physical, or mind and body, as different substances or properties is an example of this.
This either/or thinking appears everywhere—on social media, for example, where you can choose between thumbs up or down, like or unlike, follow or unfollow. This shows how philosophy connects to technology, and how my work involves developing both.
Across all these fields, however, a fresh perspective is emerging. It focuses on a way of thinking that avoids rigid categories and judgments. Rather than answering questions that assume the same viewpoint, we recognize everyone has different stories and perspectives, so no single answer can satisfy everyone. This increases complexity, but it also offers an expansive understanding of what it means to be aware and alive.
Hippocampus
My drive for better understanding mind beyond traditional dichotomy comes from my own personal witness of struggles with mental and physical health in those closest to me and in my self, and from a deep feeling of dis-ease about the ways we use and exist with other beings, what is often referred to as the ‘natural world’ as if we were outside of it, and with our technologies.
Inspiration for the particular framing of this philosophy came from my studies in neuroscience and specifically from a long line of research relative to an area of the brain known as the hippocampus. This area of the brain is known for two actions that once seemed irreconcilable or contradictory but are now being understood as different paths towards understanding the same process.
No need to go into all the details here—those interested can find more here to start—but the main idea is that the hippocampus research is a means beyond dichotomy and both a metaphor and an emerging science towards the Navigability framework.
The fascinating, rich research that has gone into this area of the brain, and in understanding its connections to the neocortex, when understood through embodiment, forms a narrative that I imagine can lead us beyond traditional notions of mental and physical in the ways we approach the study of mind. This also leads into a new understanding of mind itself.
You can listen to some of my research conversations on this topic at Love and Philosophy, Hippocampus History.
If you are interested in how a similar pattern (holding the paradox so as to make way) shows up across other areas of life, you can have a look at further playlists such as: Philosophy, Wellness, Poetry & Literature, Math in Life, and Computing and A.I. For richer texts, please subscribe to Way and Lifeworld on Substack below.
Unorthodox Paths
Ramblings while trying to accept my trajectory.
Once while discussing the success of my book Thinking Small, a fellow philosopher slipped out the following— Oh Andrea, I’m so surprised it went like that.
I understood the sentiment. I imagined other friends in our little group were feeling it when they looked at me. I’d set out to write a philosophical text about ecological dialectics and ended up writing a book about history and cars (the long, strange trip of the Volkswagen Beetle). It was hard to see how it all fit, but I had no regrets.
I’d fallen in love with the Bug and its story, unabashedly. To me, the story was a narrative of the idea of holding paradox, and of thinking as movement. Writing that book, and working with the people I collaborated with on it, was a true gift. It was also a path I had not expected to take. After co-creating and sustaining an interdisciplinary journal, I had visions of Camus, de Beauvoir and Arendt. Now I’d been named a cultural historian and automotive journalist— wonderful titles, but ones that caught me off guard.
All those days scribbling out stories while working in independent bookshops in Seattle and NYC; all those nights drinking wine in European cafes while writing, studying, and discussing philosophy—it was hard to see how writing about transportation fit to my life. My friend’s “surprise” was a way of acknowledging my discomfort. Even before the book was published, I’d packed up for Mongolia and signed on to work for the Peace Corps, restless to push further at expectations and find another way of seeing the world.
After the Peace Corps and some years wandering, completing a project for the U.S. Embassy, working for artists and collectors, and continuing as an editor, writer and translator—the connections between all these divergent desires slowly began to become clear. Through all my exploration, a few themes and questions kept recurring:
How do we find our way? And how does our way find us?
In my early university years, I’d written a thesis (Hegel, Rorty, Bohm) towards a dynamical definition of mind. In it, I’d explored mind as an active process. I began to imagine cognition as though it were another form of navigation, a way we move and are moved by the world.
The intimacy of our thoughts and memories can often make it feel as if we are shut off from the relationships and ecologies that sustain and create us. I began to wonder—Is there a way to shift perspective and sense that same mind as ecological? Are there sensory motifs and thought patterns threading through our ecology and linking us with all we encounter? If so, how might our awareness of those paths & patterns lead to healthier communal action & agency?
With those questions in mind, I settled in Berlin to supplement my philosophy degree with a degree in neuroscience. I started studying and working in labs that focused on navigation, computation and cognition, and I continued developing a philosophy around ecological orientation and waymaking, exploring how our sensory relations come together in a common atmosphere.
Exploring the continuity of memory, thinking and action, my forthcoming work is connected by the desire to understand the dynamic spatiotemporal connections between ecology and mind, and to do so beyond traditional dichotomies. Looking back now, I can see that my first book was moving towards something similar—the history of transportation is about new ways of experiencing space and time, both socially and technologically.
The New York Times recently asked the legendary comedian and creator Jerry Seinfeld to name his literary guilty pleasure, and he named my book Thinking Small. This was a great gift, for more reasons than one, as he starts by saying: “I don’t feel guilt to begin with.” The way he turns the question on its head parallels the movement of my own evolution these days as I’ve accepted the strange path of my life, and no longer much care if what I do satisfies niche-based proprieties. This path may not fit expectations of normalcy, but what path does?
My former discomfort about being part of so many seemingly contradictory worlds no longer makes much sense. Rather I understand that the more perspective we can handle, the more the contradictions become compliments. The strange topography of my life is authentic, evidence of my hunger to explore space, to cover as much emotional and mental terrain as possible, to widen into other points of view and experiment with ways of expanding “I” through the “we” of ecology; asking what it means to be here, and how we come to know that we are.
Rethinking technology and ecology.
On a metaphorical level, we have long understood life is a journey, but research relative to navigation and orientation across the biological and cognitive sciences is currently coming together to help us address urgent issues of mental and environmental health. A large part of this change requires a reorientation in our understanding of technology and its relation to mind.
Even more crucial, however, is a reorientation in how we understand the human position and what it means to be part of an ecology. In other words, it requires shifting through an individualistic perspective towards discovering an ecological one.
This is a primary concern of my work and research. Together with my colleagues, I hope to offer and illuminate an ecological orientation, a shift in our stance to self and landscape that helps us better understand what mind is, how it develops, and what this means for the paths we choose as individuals and as a living planet.
My writings and work are focused on this emerging reorientation at the intersection of science and the humanities. I am also developing technology towards deepening our everyday awareness of this connection in ways that will ease our minds and reconnect our sensualities.
