Start here: Navigational approach, Andrea, hippocampus, inspirations, friction-friendly

“Hey, everyone.

You’re listening to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott. I’m a philosopher. I’m a professor. A student. I’m a walker. Every now and then, I’m even still a poet.

I’m trained in neuroscience, and I love the hippocampus — that little seahorse-shaped area of your brain known for memory and movement. For over a decade, I’ve been working on a navigational approach to the philosophy of mind. In a nutshell, it means minds are ecological, they are bodily, and they are actions. They’re dynamic. They exist beyond brains, even though brains are definitely important.

That might sound kind of wild to some of you, but it’s actually becoming more popular and prevalent in the cognitive sciences. And there are so many people who have been working on ideas that inspire this — that are actually the very basis of this — and that a lot of people still don’t know about. Ideas relative to embodied cognition, to participatory sense-making, to all kinds of wonderful things, and we explore those here.

It’s about the way-making of everyday life. You can find a way in no matter who you are, no matter what you like — whether it’s art, music, theater, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, or brain science. It’s all here.

There’s a little bit of friction. We’re friction-friendly here. There might be some things that are hard to understand for some people, and easy to understand for others. It always shifts. And by hard, it might just mean that it challenges your ideas a little bit. That’s part of what happens here. It happens to me too, as the host.

The only rule we have is that you care. It’s all about caring here. We really care about these subjects, about trying to understand the world, and about getting away from all the nonsense that tries to grab our attention and direct it in places that aren’t healthy for us.

Come to it with care. Come to it with an open heart and mind. We look forward to meeting you here, to helping you find the right path in, and to learning from you as well.

Wishing you lots of love and philosophy.”

the Navigational Approach to Mind

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Links & further reading:

• the Navigational Approach to Embodied Science

• Andrea’s list of inspirations and bibliography for the navigational approach: https://www.andreahiott.com/inspirations

• Love & Philosophy links: https://loveandphilosophy.com/

• Waymaking Substack: https://communityphilosophy.substack.com/

• YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@waymaking23

Photo by Abdul Rehman Khalid on Unsplash

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash