Welcome
We’re a community exploring interdisciplinary paths towards a better future.
The Love & Philosophy channel reached 23,000 subscribers recently, so I wanted to introduce it and the connected websites for those interested in sharing and collaborating.
As my writing and research live at the intersection of philosophy and phenomenology, neuroscience, and studies in mobility and technology—themes that can seem very different at first glance—I wanted to briefly list each prismatic (or each cell in the honeycomb, as a generous friend recently put it) just in case someone needs to switch lists.
If you are looking for the way-making and phenomenology posts, please join Way & Lifeworld.
Love and Philosophy
This is a research channel, a podcast, and there is a Substack where you'll find the audio versions as well as extra writings.
You Tube Channel: Love & Philosophy, Beyond Dichotomy
Love & Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy, the Substack.
Beyond Dichotomy started as research conversations towards noticing the patterns that connect across traditional divides.
In all my studies, work and research, I've often found myself cautioned not to exceed the edges and limits of disciplines or fields, or seen how one philosophy or way of being is considered too serious or not serious enough by those that seem to be opposing it. . studied and worked in so many fields, those barriers no longer made sense. The same felt true relative to passions and love.
So I decided to open myself to all of it beyond traditional distinctions, towards learning and development. This podcast is where those voices gather together in one space as I try and notice the patterns that connect.
It's part of my life work and research, but it's also something I hope to share with you and to invite you to share your perspective and position. Thank you for being here.
The main goal is to have conversations across disciplines to understand how our approach to life and cognition might address some of the urgent divides we face today.
By love and philosophy, I mean the people, passions, and ideas that move us, shape the trajectories of our lives, and co-create our wider social landscapes.
Partly due to my trajectory in philosophy, technology, & the cognitive sciences, I’m hoping to better observe binary distinctions in our academic & personal lives: What positive roles have these structures played? How might rethinking these structures & their parameters open new paths & ecological potentials?
Way and Lifeworld
Way & Lifeworld Substack which explores way-making and philosophical texts.
Way & Lifeworld is a space for exploring, creating, recommending, criticising & improving a philosophy I’ve been developing (the way-making framework). Here I respond to and welcome advice and (well-meaning) criticism from others as I try to relate philosophical ideas across walks of life and disciplines. This is a place to explore whether the way-making approach can be helpful, to champion the many people who have inspired it and its ideas, and to clarify how it relates to other areas of inquiry and scholarship, as there is nothing new under the sun.
This comes in a spirit of community; the point is to grow philosophy together. Everywhere we look now there are captions telling us they have the answers. Instead of pretending there is one answer here, I am hoping we can find the answers together and let those answers grow and live and change as living systems. My goal is to listen and learn, to study and notice the patterns as best I can, and to communicate, create, and share in service to love, health, critical thinking and sensual presence. As a community of discussion, we can build better ways together, expand our senses, experience joint presence, and discover a new ecological space towards helping one another with our individual and community challenges.
What really matters in this life? How do meaningful philosophical and scientific pursuits change how we experience the world? How do the ways we frame our experience (whether consciously or not) become the ways we make in it, or the ways that make future generations?
The first writings will sketch the philosophy of way-making, a work in progress, and the sketches are meant to ask for your participation in showing me what I might have missed or what I can improve or how it would be more relevant to your own work and life. Thank you for being here, and I look forward to your perspective!
Ecological Motoring Initiative
The Ecological Motoring Intiative Substack and its related podcast, Forever Motoring, whereby we rethink what is meant by both ‘forever’ and ‘motoring’. It is also related to academic work we do regarding cities and mobility.
EMI works to initiative conversations, connections, and collaborations towards finding ways to meet the motoring needs of all within the means of the living planet (🍩). Vehicles change everything from our cities to our mindsets, but we rarely connect the dots between. Movement is sensual and ecological and we need new forms of motoring for a new earth
EMI (the ecological motoring initiative) looks at how we might transcend traditional dichotomies around machines and ecologies and bring people together around common needs towards a new notion of motoring.
We are moved at so many levels and through so many different landscapes, be those physical, emotional, mental or virtual. From city designers to coders to car manufacturers, we can work together to create a better vision for motoring.
Our minds have been channeled in part by the ways we motor--the ways we move ourselves, our materials, and our ideas. Ecological transportation begins with understanding that the vehicles and infrastructures moving us are also creating cognitive systems.
A 'motor' powers any vehicle that moves us, and our vehicles come at different scales. Whether it is in a bike, a car, computing equipment, or a piece of music, the motor is the part of that vehicle that moves us consistently and structures the ways and means of our movement.
We believe part of the work to be done is in noticing and better understanding the current cognitive systems being created by our forms of motoring, observing the ways they structure our daily lives and activities, and moving into the desirable unknown with a new vision of what motoring can be, including its means and materials.
How can we meet the motoring needs of all in a way that is ecological? What does it mean to move within the means of the living planet? How can we move in ways that inspire and motivate us and increase our potentials longterm?
Links to projects and collaborations
Personal website for Andrea Hiott
Andrea on LinkedIn
Website for Love & Philosophy
Website for Ecological Orientation
Website for the Ecological Motoring Initiative
Active Inference Institute, Sign up for Substack
Brandenburg Institute of Technology
Website for podcast Forever Motoring
Love & Philosophy on Spotify
Love & Philosophy on Apple
A list of links to L & P for many other podcast platforms
Desirable Unknown podcast and You Tube
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What is the Desirable Unknown
In our shared future, there are potentials we know are possible, but there are also unknowns, potentials we have not yet considered. The distinction between the knowable and the unknowable is at the heart of philosophy.
In Chinese philosophy, for the Taoist, the universe is fundamentally unknowable and yet, holding the paradox, we can come to know it better and glimpse the Way in experiences Japanese traditions call satori.
In more European oriented philosophy, Socrates is famous for the idea that 'all we can know is that we do not know' though his life is itself a way through the unknown.
The reason this paradox matters and is at the heart of our search for meaning, is because within the parameter of the unknown, there are unknowns which are desirable and those which are not. Here we find way towards discussing what might be the desirable unknowns for our living planet, and in so doing, ride the paradox of trying to know what is unknowable, or what is only knowable if it occurs.
