Inspirations

Some of the work that inspires my own:

In nature nothing exists alone. —Rachel Carson

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. — bell hooks

It takes two to know one. —Gregory Bateson

All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing. —Maturana & Varela

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).

In addition to the Daoist tradition and the wide literature relative to studies in ‘complexity’, some other references for the history from which my own ideas have developed are the following:

I have been especially influenced by Rachel Carson, Herbert Mead, W.E.B. Du Bois, William James, Lynn Margulis, Rodney Brooks, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ingeborg Bachmann, Richard Rorty, Hegel, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Elias Cannetti, J.J. Gibson, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Gregory Bateson.

Some more specific books and papers:

Phenomenology of Perception by M. Merleau-Ponty

The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map by O’Keefe and Nadal

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

Phenomenology of Spirt by G.W.F. Hegel

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems by J.J. Gibson

Perspectival Realism by Michela Massimi

Making by Tim Ingold

Ecology of the Brain by Thomas Fuchs

Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin

The Tangled Tree by David Quammen

The Life of Lines by Tim Ingold

Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men by Edward Tolman

Mind in Life by Evan Thompson

I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Ideas by Edmund Husserl

The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle.

There is more than one kind of learning by Edward Tolman

Le visible et l’invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson

Gentle Bridges by Hayward & Varela

The Big Sea by Langston Huges

On Love by bel hooks

Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition by Hanne De Jaegher & Ezequiel Di Paolo

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Anthony P. Chemero

The Old Ways by Robert McFarlane

The Music of Life by Denis Noble

The Embodied Mind by Rosch, Thompson, Varela

Voice of the Poet by Wallace Stevens

The Grey Album by Kevin Young

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall

Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett

Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

Kurze Einführung in die Neue Phänomenologie by Hermann Schmitz

On Trails by Robert Moor

Ethics by Benedict Spinoza

Conceptual Spaces by Peter Gärdenfors

The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin

Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm

Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow

Barlow, H. (2001a). Redundancy reduction revisited. Network: Computation in Neural

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Barlow, H. (2001). The exploitation of regularities in the environment by the brain.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(4), 602–607.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01000024

Behrens, T. E. J., Muller, T. H., Whittington, J. C. R., Mark, S., Baram, A. B., Stachenfeld,

K. L., & Kurth-Nelson, Z. (2018). What Is a Cognitive Map? Organizing Knowledge for

Flexible Behavior. Neuron, 100(2), 490–509. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.10.002

Bellmund, J. L. S., Gärdenfors, P., Moser, E. I., & Doeller, C. F. (2018b). Navigating

cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking. Science, 362(6415), Article 6415.

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat6766

Uri Hasson: The Way Evolution Does It | Brain Inspired. (2021, September 30).

https://braininspired.co/podcast/63/

Bickhard, M. H. (2009). The interactivist model. Synthese, 166(3), 547–591.

Birch, J., Ginsburg, S., & Jablonka, E. (2020). Unlimited Associative Learning and the

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09772-0

Brette, R. (2018). Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? BioRxiv, 168237.

https://doi.org/10.1101/168237

Brette, R. (2019). Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? Behavioral and Brain

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Buzsáki, G. (2006). Rhythms of the brain (pp. xv, 448). Oxford University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195301069.001.0001

Buzsáki, G. (2019). The Brain from Inside Out. Oxford University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190905385.001.0001

Buzsáki, G. (2020). The Brain–Cognitive Behavior Problem: A Retrospective. ENeuro, 7(4),

Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0069-20.2020

Buzsáki, G., & Llinás, R. (2017). Space and time in the brain. Science, 358(6362), 482.

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan8869

Buzsáki, G., Logothetis, N., & Singer, W. (2013). Scaling Brain Size, Keeping Timing:

Evolutionary Preservation of Brain Rhythms. Neuron, 80(3), 751–764.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.10.002

Buzsáki, G., & Moser, E. I. (2013). Memory, navigation and theta rhythm in the

hippocampal-entorhinal system. Nature Neuroscience, 16(2), 130–138.

https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3304

Clark, A. (1992). Sensory Qualities. Clarendon Press.

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477

Constant, A., Clark, A., & Friston, K. J. (2021). Representation Wars: Enacting an Armistice Through Active Inference. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 3798. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.598733

Constantinescu, A. O., O’Reilly, J. X., & Behrens, T. E. J. (2016). Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code. Science, 352(6292), 1464. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf0941

Dennett, D. C. (Daniel Clement). (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, Mass. :MIT

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DiSalle, R. (2002). Newton’s philosophical analysis of space and time. In I. B. Cohen & G.

E. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Newton (pp. 33--56). Cambridge University

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From Newton to Einstein. Cambridge University Press.

Ebbinghaus, H. (2013). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. Annals of

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Eichenbaum, H. (2004). Hippocampus: Cognitive processes and neural representations that

underlie declarative memory. Neuron, 44(1), 109–120.

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Massimi, M. (2018). Four Kinds of Perspectival Truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological

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Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (2017). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience.