Heideggerian Robots of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science with Michael Wheeler

Join Michael Wheeler and Mirko Prokop as they dive into Heidegger’s phenomenology and its relevance for cognitive science as well as Michael’s recent work in the nascent field of the cognitive arts and humanities. Touching on philosophical and existential questions about the nature of mind and our relationship to the world and others, they explore the structure of human experience, its bodily, biological and social dimensions and discuss how artistic improvisation and creativity can lead us to see authenticity as the basic dynamic of thinking.

00:00: Introduction and guest welcome
02:26: Michael Wheeler’s journey into philosophy
04:23: What is phenomenology?
07:17: Introspection
10:57: The transcendental in the light of history
14:35: Heidegger’s Kantian side
17:17 : Heidegger vs. Descartes
21:22: Dasein: Heidegger’s conception of the subject
24:36: Being thrown into a meaningful world
26:00: "Equipment" in Heidegger
29:00: Being-in-the-world: totalities of involvement
36:55: Disturbances and skillful coping
41:00: The primacy of "online intelligence“
45:46: How often do we experience flow?
50:52: The extended mind
01:00:15: McDowell on the personal and subpersonal
01:05:00: "Orthodox" cognitive science
01:10:00: Heideggerian Robots
01:12:36: Embodiment
01:18:57: Michael’s current work on authenticity
01:21:24: Anxiety: being thrown into a social world
01:22:03: Authenticity as the basic dynamic of thinking
01:26:29: The Cognitive Arts and Humanities
01:32:30: Biology, culture, and non-human animals
01:29:21 Integrating Cognitive Science with the Humanities

Transcript

Mirko and Mike Podcast

Michael Wheeler: [00:00:00] We're also interested in stuff that in principle could never be made conscious.

this idea of equipment becoming transparent is a marker of when we're using equipment in a skilled and hitch free manner. 

when things break, we have to start concentrating them on them as independent entities, 

we first hear is the motorcycle. We don't hear a raw sound. We hear the bike. 

we don't experience the entity as an object. We don't experience ourselves as a subject either. Just as the entity disappears, so do we. 

The kind of robots that were built using the traditional view were really clunky, they were really slow, they broke down really easy.

when the violinist plays a cracking, you know, concerto, that a lot of her intelligence is not in her brain, but it's in her fingers, in the muscles.

A lot of the interesting stuff that happened in robotics was how things that look like really difficult cognitive problems are only difficult cognitive problems if you split the subject and object up and think the subject has to build a model of the world in order to do anything.

if you wanted to understand human emotions, listen to Wagner, don't listen to [00:01:00] psychologists, Hey everyone, welcome back to Love and Philosophy. Sorry if I sound a bit weird, I've had a cold, but I just have to go ahead and record this because you can't always wait For those of you who are new here, you're listening to love and philosophy. Started as a research. Podcast. Relative to a bunch of work. I'm doing both in academia and not in academia. A little unorthodox, but also Orthodox in any case. That sort of is this podcast as well, because it's hard to fit into a box. You can put it in the box of love and philosophy, but that's about it because we talk about a lot of heavy subjects relative to just life in general, but also neuroscience and philosophy and just this quest to get through life in the best way and also understand. What we are and what's going on here and. how we can better connect 

to one another. 

And [00:02:00] to this incredible world. Around us. 

Today we have this really cool discussion between Mirko Prokop and Michael Wheeler. Mike Wheeler is a philosopher. You will hear longer introduction coming up soon, but he's working as part of the Sterling philosophy unit and the research cluster of mind and knowledge. And his primary research interests are philosophy of science, especially cognitive science and artificial intelligence biology.

And Mirko is interviewing Mike. And you might remember Mirko from a conversation we had about Elizabeth Anscombe um which is relative to his PhD work. As is this conversation. So he's doing this one today. He might be doing some others in the future.

You'll hear, they talk a lot about. Heidegger here through these they talk about phenomenology and Heideggerian robots. And cognitive science authenticity. There's a lot here is very deep [00:03:00] and their conversation goes really into wonderful themes that are in part of Mike's book, which you can find. In the show notes. Uh, if you want to know even more about this, because there's a lot more than can be said in a two hour conversation., 

Andrea Hiott: so, I hope you enjoy this. Big thanks to Mirko and to Mike for this great conversation.

And, you can support Love and Philosophy all over the place if you want to. There's a lot of opportunities. It really helps. Hope you're doing well wherever you're making your way. Send you lots of love today. And I hope you don't sound as I sound. Hope you don't have any cold wherever you are today.

But I'm feeling so much better today. I'm so happy. It's amazing, like, after you have a cold, once you, or it was more than a cold, but after you've been sick, you know, when you finally start feeling better again, you just love life. It's wonderful. And I just love life, and I love this conversation, and [00:04:00] I hope you do too.

Thanks for being here.

Mirko Prokop: Well, hi, Mike. Great to have you. Thank you so much for, um, accepting coming to come on the podcast. yeah, so for the listeners, um, I'm very happy to be talking to Michael Wheeler, who's a professor of philosophy at the University of Sterling. Um, yeah, and hopefully get to talk about phenomenology and the relationship to cognitive science, uh, and some more recent things you've been working on, but maybe.

Before we get into these issues, you could tell us a little bit about how you became interested in, in philosophy in the first place and, and what you've been doing since then. 

Michael Wheeler: Yeah, sure. So, um, so I sort of self identify as a, mainly as a philosopher of cognitive science, and I guess one of the things that's associated with My work in Heidegger and phenomenology into contact with cognitive science, and we'll be talking about that as we go on.

But my, my sort of [00:05:00] first interest in philosophy was in philosophy of artificial intelligence, which is still a topic I'm interested in, obviously, intimately related with the philosophy of cognitive science. Um, and actually, just to say there's, you know, the story about how that happened, I didn't go to university until I was in my late twenties, um, had another life.

And, uh, one night I came in. And, uh, it was the old days when there weren't many TV channels. I channel hopped the three or four channels that were available, and I just came across John Searle, the philosopher, talking to Geoff Hinton, the AI programmer, about artificial intelligence and, and many, many things.

Viewers of this podcast will know John Searle is, uh, is mostly associated in many ways with his critique of whether or not we could produce a genuinely intelligent, conscious, uh, thinking machine. And I just became really interested in that, that interchange between Hinton and Searle. And I, you know, I was starting to think then about going to university and starting to think about doing philosophy, but I hadn't made the decision.

But on the back of watching that TV program, I [00:06:00] decided to do philosophy. I decided to do philosophy. That interacted with artificial intelligence. So I actually sought out where I could do a degree that was about 50 percent philosophy and about 50 percent AI. And I went to Sussex and did a degree that was about 50 percent each, a bit more philosophy than AI.

And that was the beginning of it really, and while I was there, I was, I did my degree in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences as it was then at Sussex. Um, so I was brought into contact with empirical work in psychology and linguistics and so on. And I just went on from there and after that I did my PhD at Sussex with Maggie Bowden as my supervisor.

Um, and that's where I first started work on the Heidegger and cognitive science stuff. That was my, And then went on from there to do postdocs and I ended up as Professor of Philosophy at Stirling. So that that's the sort of story. and as I say that I really sort of sourced my academic profile, my intellectual profile back to Sussex, really, because the fantastic thing about Sussex at that time was not only was there this close interaction between philosophy and artificial intelligence and [00:07:00] cognitive psychology, there was also, um, A lot of interaction between analytic and continental philosophers, and that was quite unusual on the British philosophical scene of the time.

It's, it's a bit better now. At the time, it was the philosophy in the continental tradition and the philosophy in the analytic tradition tended to be quite siloed from each other, and quite hostile sometimes, the relationship between these two. So on the one side, people like Heidegger and Merleau Ponty and Sartre, and on the other side, you know, the greats of analytic philosophy, the Putnams and the Quines and so on.

And, and it really did feel as if these were very different intellectual islands. But at Sussex, they were talking to each other. And that's how I started to get interested in, in phenomenology. And then this, that timed with the release of, uh, the embodied mind. By Varela, Thompson and Rosch, you know, iconic book in the, in the history of contemporary cognitive science, which also drew on some continental ideas, particularly Lerleau Ponty.

And, uh, and so that book became an influence on me as well. And that was really the [00:08:00] springboard for the stuff that I do now. , 

Mirko Prokop: there must have been also a really rich environment there at Sussex. And I, I still also remember from my time studying my undergraduate in, at the University of Hamburg, um, which is still, I think, a fairly analytic department that, that sort of phenomenology and Heidegger and these kinds of issues were not really regarded as worthwhile studying by many people.

Um, so it's really, I mean, in preparation for this program, I've been reading a bit through your book,, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, uh, which was published in 2005, I think, with MIT Press. and it's really nice to see how you try to sort of bridge, , these different traditions and also bring in cognitive science.

What was then cutting edge research and cognitive science, I guess things have also moved on since then a little bit. Um, yeah, so maybe we can start with um, just giving, uh, sort of trying to, to get a very [00:09:00] general idea of phenomenology, what, what this is about as a, as a tradition and maybe a kind of method.

Michael Wheeler: Sure. So I think what's quite useful in this respect is to start with how the term phenomenology gets used. Not within the continental tradition, which is where I draw from, but the, the analytic tradition.

So typically when someone talks about phenomenology in the analytic tradition, what they're focusing on is first person experience. We talk about the phenomenology of a situation, which would be the character of my experience in that situation and what it's like for me to see red, what it's like for me to hear a bell, so on and so forth.

And If someone then thought about what would be a method around that, when we'll be talking about, well, describing your first person experience. And I think that's a starting point for thinking about how the term gets used in conceptual philosophy, but it's not the end of the story. And quite regularly within the analytic tradition, and also within some of the sciences of the cognitive sciences that are connected mostly with the analytic tradition, That's when people [00:10:00] sort of stop.

They think, well, phenomenology, that's first person experience. So describing your phenomenology would be just a description of that experience. And the thing that happens then quite regularly, you see, is that people then think, well, it's useless to cognitive science, right? Because there's lots of really well established empirical psychology which questions whether or not our own introspective reports of our own experience are really reliable.

As to what's going on in our minds. There's many experiments which show that, for instance, we will describe what our reasons are for doing something. But, you know, we show that we can show via the experiment that we're actually confabulating, we're making up reasons that couldn't be right and so on. So in cognitive science, that idea of phenomenology, a kind of introspective report on one's first person experience is thought of as, often, anyway, thought of as not very practical.

Not very useful for finding out what's going on in the mind. So that's how that's that can be a kind of kind of controversial starting point. If one says one's interested [00:11:00] in phenomenology, often within mainstream psychology and so on, it's greeted with a certain amount of hostility.

Although I should say that introspection recently has had a bit of an upturn in psychology and in analytic philosophy, but that's another story. 

Mirko Prokop: I guess it was one of the main, main building blocks of William James's way of thinking about, you know, psychology as one of the fathers of, you know, of the tradition or the discipline.

No, 

Michael Wheeler: no, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, And introspection initially played a very important role in the founding of psychology as a, as a discipline. , but psychology has kind of left those roots behind historically. I mean, what is, what is important, I think, to point out is that within cognitive science, you know, we, of course, there's the conscious experiences that we have.

When we have, you know, thoughts and experience, thoughts and perceptions and so on, emotions and so on. But we're also interested, not only in the unconscious, in the sense of a, broadly speaking, Freudian style unconscious, i. e. unconscious stuff that's going on that we could bring to consciousness. If we had the [00:12:00] right techniques.

We're also interested in stuff that in principle could never be made conscious. So it doesn't matter how much, you know, meditation you do and how much psychoanalysis you have, you're not going to make available to your consciousness what's going on in really early vision, right? When the first processes happen that transmit, you know, light intensity differences on the retina into the first kind of information that we have access to when we, when we behave intelligently in the environment.

Nevertheless, that what goes on in early vision is really important in cognitive science. We're really interested in that kind of process. So it's important, I think, for people who come from philosophy to understand that in cognitive science, we're interested in the conscious, the unconscious, and the non conscious, right?

That all plays a role in cognitive science. And that's another reason for thinking that introspection is a kind of limited, um, and sometimes misleading kind of guide to what's going on. What's important though is when we turn to phenomenology in the continental tradition. So here we're thinking, you know, there are there are precursors to this, of course, but we're particularly thinking of what happened when Husserl started to work and then [00:13:00] Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and so on.

So, so people in that kind of tradition in continental philosophy, there, that idea that we start with first person experience absolutely is still the centerpiece, right? And so what we're doing when we begin is we're with Thinking about our own experience, we're trying to get an accurate, um, description of that experience, and all that's kind of shared, if you like, with phenomenology in the analytic tradition.

But, the thought, I think, and this I think for me characterizes phenomenology most generally, is that that, the way we engage with first person experience as a philosopher when we're doing consensual philosophy, A concept of phenomenology as a method, we're not stopping there. That's the beginning of a kind of, I don't know whether to call it a theoretical or a meta theoretical process, where the target, in a pretty Kantian register to start with, the target is to understand the underlying conditions, one might say the a priori conditions, that have to [00:14:00] be or are in place in To explain why the experience we have is the way that it is, right?

And, and so if we think about Kant, for instance, as a kind of precursor to this, you know, Kant tells us that the structure of space and time has this kind of a priori structures with respect to experience. All experience has to happen in space and time. 

 What's different with Heidegger, I think, is that when he's, he's got his Kantian hat, Right?

In phenomenology. So he is looking for the transcendental conditions that explain why our experience is the way it is. He's definitely doing that. But his notion of the transcendental is different. Um, in Kant, you know, space and time is, they're the, they're the kind of intuitions that structure experience for all human beings.

And for Heidegger, there's a, there's a sort of element in which that's true, right? It's still true for Heidegger, at least time in the early Heidegger, and perhaps space in later Heidegger, play these kind of roles. But. But what he thinks is that there are transcendental conditions that are historicized, right?

So the transcendental conditions are, as [00:15:00] it were, deeply, uh, held, or deeply, deeply positioned with respect to the structural experience. Features that mean that our experience is the way it is, but that can change over time, and can change from one culture to another, can change historically. So the transcendental becomes historicized, and that's a really important aspect of more contemporary phenomenology tradition.

So, the idea is that I grew up in a culture, and I grew up at a moment in history, and there's all these deep structures that structure the way my experience is, that, in a way, I've been initiated into as a result of my enculturation. So they're in place, they're a priori. With respect to, they're in advance of, in place in advance of, any experience that I as an individual might have now.

But they're not timeless. They can change over historical time. And that feature of the transcendental, the historicization of the transcendental, is an important feature of phenomenology as someone like Heidegger, 

Mirko Prokop: okay, that's very interesting. I'm just [00:16:00] sort of starting to get interested in Heidegger, but it's true that in Kant, you really noticed this kind of universalist, uh, ambition of trying to find the sort of universal structures of, of thought, and also something that I guess transfers to his moral, moral philosophy, uh, with the categorical imperative and so on.

So this idea that there are these structures that be priori common to, to all human beings in some sense, and I think a lot of what you said to regarding Heidegger about this historic story sizing aspect. Uh, probably also quite related to things I'm hoping to talk about, like authenticity and, and his idea of Dasein as being in the world 

Michael Wheeler: to note on, on, in Heidegger, I think it's, it's true that there's a tension in Heidegger that's never really resolved, at least, uh, I can't see it ever being resolved, between what, what looks like every now and then a kind of universalist statement. So he still thinks that temporality. [00:17:00] It's just that what, what counts as what goes in the dimensions of temporality can be historically different for different people.

Different epochs and so on. That, that would take a lot of explaining, but the important point is I think Heidegger gets caught between his sort of Kantian past. He was a Kantian scholar, uh, in those days. Um, which would have that universalizing kind of impetus and what he comes to believe is true, which is that there's historicization of the transcendental.

And I think he never really kind of resolves that tension. It's just there in Heidegger. And different Heideggerian scholars will, will Emphasize one side or the other of that. So some scholars get much more into the idea of it, of Heidegger as a kind of transcendental phenomenology. And others, focusing on these kind of cultural conditions, often think of Heidegger more in hermeneutic way.

And Heidegger is explicit about this, that, that, we as theorists, we as philosophers, we are caught up Inside a hermeneutic circle. So when we come to say, I'm going to now, you know, do [00:18:00] some work philosophically on understanding how experience is and what the conditions are for experience to be the way that it is, we are inside a kind of hermeneutic circle.

We bring our own structures to the table as part of the way in which we do that theoretical work. So we can't get out of that circle. We can make it more permanent. More or less profitable in the way that , , we deal with it. And as Heidegger sometimes puts it, the trick is not to get out of the circle.

It's to kind of get into it in the right way. i. e. to realize that those cultural conditions that we live in are part of the, the deep sort of philosophical structures that we bring to the table when we do theoretical work in philosophy. So the more you interpret, um, Hiding it that way, the more you get this idea that you are, you're never really gonna reach a kind of universalized fixed point in philosophy telling us the way it is.

Because the way that it is is always challengable based on different conditions or ization. And I think he never really resolves those two differences,

Mirko Prokop: I was thinking, I mean, because in Heidegger, he seems to kind of, uh, build up his position in contrast to some of the things that [00:19:00] Descartes said, and, his still very long lasting influence, , in the way in which we think about the place of human beings in the world and, and the cognitive subject , and agency and things like that.

So. Since we already started talking about Heidegger. I'm not sure if it's fair to say that all the phenomenologists see themselves as sort of, um, building a project in contrast to Descartes. And I think, for example, Heidegger criticized Husserl to, for being in some sense, Cartesian, you know.

But maybe we can, we can try to unpack that a little bit, in which sense maybe Heidegger's view of the way in which the subject is. relate to the world and already always finds itself in a meaningful relationship and in a kind of projective relationship , is maybe quite different in the way that Descartes approached, the subject.

Michael Wheeler: No, absolutely. I mean, so there's different ways in which one can talk about the, the [00:20:00] anti Cartesianism of Heidegger, depending on what one's interests are. So I'm going to say some stuff that already, I think, signals where it might go in cognitive science. So if we think about how Descartes thinks about the human subject, or let's put it this way, let's think about what the fundamentals are of our relationship with the world.

Let's put it that way. If we think about what our fundamentals are, what the fundamentals are of our relationship with the world, for Heidegger he's going to disagree with a really central aspect of Descartes work, which is that we relate to the world always as a subject to a world of objects. And for Descartes, that's just, that's just the way things are.

And, and you can see that, obviously, in, in, you know, those, everyone's going to know a bit of Descartes here. You know, we've got sort of substance dualism, which separates the mind as a substance from the world as a substance, where the world is, you know, points of pure extension and so on. Uh, the mind is essentially conscious.

And we have this, we have this deep split between mind and world. And [00:21:00] that gives us the idea of essentially the human subject. On one side and essentially a world of objects on the other now, as soon as I say that that's a caricature of Descartes right because I have to say, I mean, something that I'm I hope it comes over in Reconstructing the Cognitive World and something that I'll try to make clear in subsequent writings on Descartes.

Descartes actually has quite a subtle understanding of the relationship between mind and body. The sort of what we learn in first year undergraduate philosophy about mind body dualism. Not really Descartes view. Right? He has a very subtle understanding of, of a certain mental states, what he calls the passions of the soul that are dependent on the body in a very deep way.

And in fact, even in the meditations, the book that we tend to study first when we learn about Descartes, in the Sixth Meditation he talks about the, uh, he talks about the relationship between mind and body such that we have a kind of mind body unity as a, as a human being. All that said, and that's true, we have to be careful not to, to, to allow a caricature to run away with us.

It's still [00:22:00] true for, for Descartes that there's this essential part of human being, which is the, the conscious mind, that's separated ontologically From from the world of objects, and it still remains, whatever the complexities of that relationship, it's still true that the body for Descartes is part of the physical machine that's on the side of objects.

So there's this kind of dualism is really deeply written as we know in Descartes, even if it's more subtle than most people. And because of that, we have this fundamental idea of the relationship between mind and world as subjects against objects. What it is to know the world is as a subject to come to know a world of objects.

And what it is to be in the world is to construct a series of, for Descartes, representations of that world of objects, right, in the mind. So we've already got some really deep things going on here. We've got the idea that the world for, or the mind world relationship for Descartes, the subject world relationship is this fundamental dichotomy.

And we have the idea of how one [00:23:00] bridges that gap when one comes to know things or believe things about the world. One forms representations of the world. And Descartes is very, you know, clear about this. The notion of an idea is central to Descartes understanding of what it is to know,

so we have in Descartes these deep structures and In fact, there's more and even more that you know One could say about what's packed into the idea of the cartesian mind And as I say looking forward to something we might talk about in a moment I think when one unpacks a lot of the things Descartes thought about the mind.

Here's a really important fact you can deny substance dualism And still be a fundamentally a cartesian You can deny that there's this ontological split between mind and world, where world includes the body, but still believe that what's going on here is based on a subject object dichotomy, that we come to know the world through representations, that's how the subject accesses the world through these representations.

Um, and, and that's a fair, that, right, [00:24:00] that sort of idea. It's behind a lot of contemporary philosophy of mind, right, in the analytic tradition. Um, I mean, just to give, you know, an example of how that gets, that gets played out. Uh, you know, we think about computational theories in cognitive science. We say things like, well, it's the manipulation of representations, right?

That's what goes on. Obviously, there are other things going on here. The minds are kind of in a realm compared to an outer realm of objects. Uh, there's, there's, um, There's how this all works in terms of certain kinds of inputs coming into the mind from the world via perception, which is then, which are then processed by the mind, and then that produces guidance, as it were, to the body about what to do in the world.

Again, Descartes says some quite subtle things about that, but that's the sort of caricature. So there's all this stuff going on in how the Cartesian mind works, and more particularly in how the Cartesian mind accesses the world, that's independent of substance dualism. All of that independence also becomes a kind of independence of thinking about the mind in an explanatory way compared to the body.

It's like, if you think about how computational theories in cognitive science [00:25:00] work, then we understand the computations, the algorithms, the rules that govern the thinking. And for, in cognitive science, that was often thought to be, uh, Uh, something you could do without caring about exactly how the physical body worked.

The physical body was just a kind of implementation strata for all that algorithmic processing that was in the body. So you still get this independence of mind from body in terms of the explanatory projects of cognitive science. So putting all that on one side, but then we turn to Heidegger. And things look really different.

And this is where I think we, you know, we have to kind of cross over into some of Heidegger's technical terminology. But starting, for instance, you know, how he thinks about the human, or what it is distinctively to be human. He thinks, he uses a new term, he introduces a neologism. Dasein, their being, or being there, for, for what it is to be human.

And that's a conscious decision that he makes, introducing that kind of terminology, because he thinks we need a different language, Now there's a, there's a, in [00:26:00] Heidegger scholarship there's a, there's a certain amount of, um, what's the right word, uh, difference of opinion, say, about whether we should think of Dasein as a fundamental rewriting of the notion of a subject, or whether we should think about Dasein as a structure that, is not fundamentally a subject object structure.

I'll come back to what not fundamentally means there. I prefer the latter route. That's the route that certainly people like, you know, Dreyfus and other Heidegger scholars, uh, take. So I don't like to think about Dasein as a subject, essentially. Dasein is a way of being in the world that is not fundamentally based on a subject object dichotomy.

So immediately we have this difference with Descartes. 

Mirko Prokop: Sorry, if I can just, yeah. Yeah. I mean that one thing that I found thinking about the difference between Dekar and Heer in some sense also that Dekar is mainly interested in what you might call epistemology, right? The idea of how we gain access or knowledge of the world, and that's in some sense because he starts [00:27:00] with this idea of a subject.

being different from an objective reality, right? 

Yeah. 

Um, whereas Heidegger, as he says, is more interested in ontology or this idea of, you know, the nature of being of Sein. Um, and he just kind of starts from the idea that, that meaning, you know, we have a meaningful relationship to the world and so on.

And he wants to understand how that's possible.

Michael Wheeler: Think with one caveat, I think that's that's a useful way of looking at it. I mean, uh, the caveat is just that I think there's a there's a tendency to think of Descartes As as you know, we think about Descartes doing epistemology, right?

He's talking about what it is to have justified beliefs about the world But I don't think, I mean, Descartes is as much a metaphysician as epistemologist, and contemporary Descartes scholarship often focuses more on the metaphysics than the epistemology.

So Descartes is interested, I mean, you know, he's interested in the real distinction between mind and body, you know, and what exists, right? And the answer to that is minds, bodies, and [00:28:00] God, right? And, uh, uh, and so, so he, I think we should see Descartes doing metaphysics now. Now, metaphysics is not necessarily the same thing as ontology, as that's understood today.

Within the Heideggerian tradition. So just with that small clarification. What I would say, you're right. So Heidegger, for Descartes, getting yourself into a meaningful world is a kind of an achievement. It's something that we have to achieve somehow. Because we start with the subject object dichotomy, of a split up from the world, in order to get into the world in some way, we have to somehow achieve something.

We have to get some beliefs that match up with the world in an accurate representational way. Heidegger starts from the position where we're just in a meaningful world. We find ourselves in a meaningful world at every moment. And of course, that's what experience tells us, right? You know, if we think about what Descartes goes through, of course, Descartes would agree with this in a sense, but it's not as if we find ourselves.

in a world that's meaningless to us [00:29:00] most of the time. We find ourselves in a world that makes perfect sense to us. A world of microphones and cameras and laptops and, and, you know, whatever else is on my son's desk since I'm recording in his room. And, uh, and, uh, you know, that's the world we find ourselves in.

It's not, we don't, we don't experience being in the world as epistemic achievement. We just experience, we start with us, as Seidiger sometimes puts it, we're thrown into a world of meaning. We find ourselves, we always already find ourselves, in a phrase that Dreyfus likes, uh, in a world of meaning. And that's what phenomenology, the phenomenological experience is like.

So for Heidegger, that's where we start, right? And what happens here is, it's a bit crude to think of it as a simple reversal, but whereas for Descartes, we kind of start in a meaningless world, and we have to kind of bootstrap our way into it, somehow epistemically, for Heidegger, We start in a meaningful world, and if we find the world to be a strange, meaningless place, that's a kind of weird moment.

And it's quite those, they're actually quite important moments for Heidegger, but that's not how we normally experience things. So if we want to use our [00:30:00] experience as a guide, we have to start, according to Heidegger, from this experience of being thrown into a meaningful world.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah, great. I think this takes us really into some of the things I wanted to quiz you about a bit more. Um, I mean, you've already mentioned this term Dasein and, and as Heidegger's term for talking about maybe human existence or human agency and, um, maybe to, to try to make sense of what exactly he means by that.

Um, we can talk a bit about what he means by this idea of equipment. Um, so in the German term is Zeug, which, I think just pretty self consciously chooses that term to, to mark a difference to the idea of things or objects and the way that Descartes, for example, thought about them.

So why does he talk about, um, equipment and how does it sort of relate to this idea of. Of being in a, in a always already meaningful context. 

Michael Wheeler: So for Heidegger, when we characterize this finding ourself already in a world of meaning, [00:31:00] the way, way he starts to get a grip on that in the early pages of being in time, in what's called the existential analytic, is to think about what our experience, that experience is like, and what entities are like when they're experienced as meaningful, and that's when he introduces this term that the great Heideggerian, Heidegger translators, Macquarie and Robinson translate as equipment, and I think they choose that Carefully, because the idea is that we're in a world of things that matter to us for our projects, right?

So, to use for hiding as much overused example, which I don't mind using, even though it's kind of cliche now, you know, he's like this example of the carpenter and the carpenter's hammer. So we don't win the carpenter. experiences the world. He doesn't experience an object with certain kind of properties of a certain weight, of a certain mass, of a certain color, made of wood and nettle, and so on.

That's not how he experiences the hammer. He experiences the hammer as something to do carpentry with. I, as a piece of equipment. [00:32:00] And so, For Heidegger, that's where we start. We start with a world that's meaningful in terms of world of equipment. Now, something really important about this, this is really an essential kind of aspect of the Heideggerian position.

He also doesn't think we experience equipment. If we want to understand the significance of equipment as meaningful to us, and that's the experience of the entities with which, as he puts it, we're in most proximal contact, right? So the entities that are meaningful to us. What's important is we don't experience them as isolated, right?

So if we think about a Cartesian notion of an object, it's kind of an isolated thing. And if we want to say why this piece of pure extension, you know, is the kind of equipment it is, we start with this thing that takes up a certain amount of space, and then we introduce what Heidegger sometimes calls function predicates, or value predicates.

And that's the idea that we say, well, it's, uh, It's this object, it's this physical object, and it's for these certain things. So fundamentally, we think of its fundamental way of being as just a physical [00:33:00] object with certain properties, like size, weight, mass, made of certain materials. And then we say an object of that kind has functions such that it can fulfill this role as a hammer.

Heidegger starts with the idea that we just experience it as a hammer. And in playing out what that means, we get a really important part of Heidegger's position. He calls the sort of roles that equipment plays in our world, involvements. Okay, in the translation and an involvement is not a stand alone structure.

It's like a referential structure each piece of equipment points to other equipment. So to understand to experience something as a hammer is in part to have a grip on its relations to lots of other things. Now, immediately you're going to say, well, it's the workbench. It's the nails. It's that's the kind of world of the hammer, if you like.

But it doesn't stop there. What's really important for Heidegger is as we fill in those referential links, we find that we start to enrich our picture of what the significance of the equipment is as a piece of equipment, as an item of [00:34:00] equipment. So we, yeah, the hammer is for hammering. And in that sense, it's related to the nails and the workbench, but also the hammer is related to the projects of the human user.

So it might be, you know, building a table for one's daughter to make her bedroom better, um, so that she has a better life and can do her homework. And so you're doing it fundamentally for being a parent. 

Mirko Prokop: So 

Michael Wheeler: the significance of the hammer points to These kind of aspects of what it is to be a human being.

And fundamentally, these referential links bottom out in some deep structure of what it is to be a human being and how human beings find the world to be meaningful. So we have this very different holistic kind of meaning structure. Of course, we're not when we're using the hammer, we're not aware of all that meaning structure, right?

And, and that's also is really important for hiding it. So when we're when we're using a piece of equipment. In the most proximally kind of like appropriate why I were using a hammer to hammer and we're not experiencing any [00:35:00] problems with that. It's not like we're aware of all this significance, but somehow it's kind of sitting in the background.

It's part of what it is to be a human being is that that's what all this that's what's going on here if you like in a very sort of general loose term. So that's yeah that's why the notion of equipment is really important. And, and again, they sort of thinking about Harlequin day kind of. Simple reversal relationship.

So, when do we get, can we get to the idea of the hammer as just something that's an object with a certain weight and a certain size? Yes, of course, we can do that. We can put the hammer down and we can say, how much does it weigh, right? And we can, we can then weigh it, right? Of course we can. But then we're treating it as an object.

We, when we treat it as a piece of equipment, we're treating it as something that plays a role in our lives as human beings. And of course how one fills in those referential structures to come back to something I said about earlier about the cultural inflection here, you know, what it is for something to be a hammer might vary from culture to culture, you know, a certain entity might have different kind of meanings in different [00:36:00] structures, one structure, you might have something that we know we think of as a, um, I don't know, we might experience as a tree with a certain kind of sets of meanings, maybe it produces fruit weather, but another culture might experience it as a place of the spirits or something like that.

So how things turn out to be equipment. And of course, natural entities can play equipment or roles as well. Not every piece of equipment is something that we make might be something that we, um, we can, you get that kind of, you can see that cultural variability in how totalities of involvements get played out for different human beings at different times in different places.

Mirko Prokop: I'm actually really interested in this, this notion of, I think in your book you called it an involvement networks or something. And also, I mean, Andrea and I, we talked about, uh, Anscombe in an earlier episode and it's interesting cause I think it's. It's quite similar to lots of things that she says in her book on intention and the, the structure of practical knowledge that, you know, once you think about why am I doing this and you keep asking the question why, you kind of get to increasingly broad, [00:37:00] uh, structures of meaning until you say something like, I don't know, I'm just doing it for the sake of, you know, being a student, you know, why am I talking to you and doing this podcast and so on?

Um, and I think it's these fundamental structures that ultimately are sort of the bedrock of, of what Heidegger understands by being in the world, right? 

Michael Wheeler: Yeah, absolutely. So when you fill out the, I mean, the reason I called them involvement networks in the book is to get this idea of the referential structure.

So it's a network of And then you could think of How all those, how different sets of involvement networks might fit together to make up the life of a human being or the meaningful world of a human being. I think that's what Heidegger means by a world in one of his uses of the term world. So when we talk about being in the world, we're talking about a meaningful relationship that's fielded in terms of these involvement networks.

And I totally agree with you. There's a, there's a crossover with Anscombe. I suspect in truth, that's because both of them are influenced by Aristotle. And there's something similar going on in [00:38:00] Aristotle. 

Mirko Prokop: I think in your book you talk about these three different modes of engagement that Heidegger distinguishes in how we deal with equipment.

So first there is this kind of very intimate relationship. That he calls the, I think, the ready to hand, right, the zuhanden in, in German, um, which is for him the, the most primary mode, right, and, and maybe you could say a bit more about this and how it relates to this idea of transparency. I mean, I think you've already, um, mentioned it in a way

Michael Wheeler: yeah, I, I, I mean, I alluded to it, but I can say more about it because I think it is really important. So, If we think about the influence, again, looking slightly forward, thinking about the influence Heidegger has had in cognitive scientific thinking, it's this bit of Heidegger that's probably had the biggest influence, I think.

Uh, so in, again, in this part of Being in Time, the early part of Being in Time, when he's talking about, um, once he's set up the project of Being in Time, he then launches into what I've described here. What people call the existential analytic, which is when he tries to describe what it's like for us to be in the world [00:39:00] in, in, in ordinary, everyday context.

So I've talked a bit about that in terms of the meaning structures, and I mentioned that, uh, when we're behaving with a piece of equipment and we're using it skillfully, and it's not playing up in any way that we don't really experience that equipment, that item of equipment as a kind of independent object.

And this is really important to hide here. So it's, it's the term that often gets used here is this term transparency. When we're using equipment in a skilled manner and in a hitch free manner. And I'll say a bit about that. Then the idea is that phenomenologically in terms of our experience, that entity becomes transparent to us.

 So if I'm working on a paper or something and I'm typing away on my computer, I don't really expect, and I'm, you know, I'd say that I'm, I'm a skilled typist to a certain degree. Um, good enough anyway. I'm not really concentrating on my hand movements. I'm not really concentrating on the keys.

I'm not really concentrating on the [00:40:00] screen. It's like I, I can experience, I go through that. It's transparent to me. What I'm concentrating on is the project, right? On the, on the writing, on the, on the paper, on the ideas. And similarly, Heidegger gives the example of the carpenter. When the carpenter's, you know, building the, the, the desk, in the example I used before, they're not really concentrating on the hammer, right?

They're skilled users of the hammer. The hammer becomes transparent, and they'll be thinking about the task. So this idea of equipment becoming transparent is a marker of when we're using equipment in a, in a skilled and hitch free manner. Now, if we're not a skilled user of the equipment, then it will be, it will be a problem for us.

We'll have to concentrate on how to use the hammer. We'll have to concentrate on how to type because we're not very good at it, right? So then we are concentrating on the keyboard as well, right? At least as well. The other examples in which we start to concentrate on entities as independent of us, as not transparent, is when things break or malfunction or get in the way or are missing.

So [00:41:00] Heidegger calls these disturbances and whereas in the case where we're using equipment in a, in a hitch free manner, he calls that readiness to hand, when things break he introduces a new phonological category called unreadiness to hand. Now, when things break, we have to start concentrating them on them as independent entities, right?

We might need to, you know, I knock, I knock loads of coffee over on my keyboard. Suddenly, I'm like trishing around to find something to clean the keyboard, to clean the computer, to make sure it continues to work. Or the head flies off the hammer. I've got to go, I've got to either fix the hammer or find a new hammer or something.

Or even if the hammer's like not really working for me, it might be too heavy for the job. So there's lots of ways in which equipment can fail to become transparent. In those circumstances, we have this mode of being or mode of encounter, as I call it in the book, that Heidegger calls unreadiness to hand.

Crucial thing about unreadiness to hand is that it's still, we still make sense of what's going on within the network of involvements, right? [00:42:00] So this is a computer that's now broken. So what actually strikes me at this moment, when my computer keys start to play up because they're sticky from the coffee, right?

Well, what starts to show up to me is The laptop is something I'm using in order to write a paper, but it goes beyond that. It's now affecting my capacity to perform as an academic. So the whole of that network of links that goes from the typing, to the screen, to the paper, to me delivering the paper on time, to how, you know, to what that will mean for my career as an academic and how I make a sense of myself as an academic, all that now gets sort of lit up.

And I, and I now, now can see all that structure in place. So , when equipment fails to be transparent due to a breakdown, it's not merely , the entity that now, as it were, lights up for me, or becomes, like, present to me, not transparent any longer. It's rather that all that network of significance becomes transparent.

And we can go further than that. So in some [00:43:00] cases, this might mean just an adjustment to my behavior and I can fix it nice and quickly. But sometimes things, you know, might break to an extent where I've got to, I can just have to treat them now as a physical object. So I might have to, you know, I might have to fix the hammer, which might mean doing certain things that I, you know, might need to fix.

You know, to know what it's made of and so on, things like that. So at a certain point, an object, an entity can be so disentangled from that network of significance that it just sits there like a Cartesian object, right? But that's not our primary way of engaging with the object, of encountering the object.

That's, that's a way that happens when things aren't working. Now, you know, that, that's, that's the big, that's the final reversal, right? This idea that suddenly we can see the Cartesian objects. But they're like, they're like unusual circumstances. There's a nice bit where Heidegger says at one point in Being and Time, and I should, you know, and the reason I say this is because it's not really just the object, but sort of things that we might previously in the history of philosophy taken to be fundamental.

Turn out to be privative, or secondary, [00:44:00] or, you know, things that we experience only when things are in a weird state. So I think essentially what we first hear is the motorcycle. We don't hear a raw sound. We hear the bike. We hear the motorcycle. Of course, as a philosopher, I can sit down and get myself into a really weird state of mind where all I hear is a raw noise.

Of course I can do that. Sense data. I can experience the sense data, you know. But that for Heidegger is just, that's not our fundamental way of being in the world. And for Descartes, and Cartesian tradition, and the empiricists who come after Descartes, there's a sense in which that kind of raw piece of sense data is the building block.

of our being in the world, but for Heidegger, that's just a, just a kind of, it's a, a side effect of what happens either when things break and one has to think about things as having certain kinds of raw properties, or when one gets oneself into a certain philosophical state of mind, uh, where that's what one experiences, but that's not to describe our fundamental way of being in the world, that's to [00:45:00] describe some weird secondary state.

So that's, that's where you get the full distinction coming out. 

Mirko Prokop: That relates also to what in your book, I think you referred to as the primacy of online intelligence, right? Which is something that, that Dreyfus also, um, picks up um, but this idea for Heidegger that, that what he calls the ready to hand or what you just explained is in some way more fundamental and primary to a more detached, disengaged modes of dealing with objects in the world.

Michael Wheeler: One thing I should tell you, this primacy of online intelligence, which is, so So in, as I started to develop these ideas in relation to cognitive science, of course, as I've, as I always say, I mean, Dreyfus was the, we ended up disagreeing about something, we might come back to that later, but Dreyfus was very much a kind of inspiration in the way that he read Heidegger, and, and Dreyfus As an interpreter of Heidegger, we might think it was broadly with a kind of pragmatist tradition of interpreting Heidegger, and some Heidegger scholars really don't like that.

And so, in some ways, [00:46:00] this primacy of online intelligence, the primacy of the practical, so the fact that what we really want to understand, to understand our most Um, uh, natural, if you like, way of being in the world is this kind of skill, practical intelligence that this carpenter has, that the typist has and so on, and that when we come to reflect on things in a detached way, that only happens at kind of in these kind of weird, unusual cases.

Um, we could do it as a philosopher. Of course we can, we can reflect on the world's world objects. It's probably the way of. Engaging with the world that's the fundamentals of a lot of science. I think there's a lot to be said about a kind of Heideggerian philosophy of science. Maybe not the place to do it but, but it's not that these, it's very important I think that, Although Heidegger talks about our engagements with equipment in this skilled way, what I call online intelligence as, as our most proximal way of engaging with entities.

I think these days, I would pull myself slightly away from that strongly Dreyfusian pragmatist tradition and think that actually it's not as if the present at hand is [00:47:00] Is or went to the present hands. I've mentioned that but that's the term I do use for when we really do experience things as independent objects with sets of context independent properties like weight and mass and size and so on.

It's not I think these days I want to say that's still like a really important part of being human. Right, that we can do that. And it's the fundamentals of science fundamentals of philosophy. Okay, it might be. It might be that that. That fact that we, that we can do that has misled us in our philosophy towards a wrong picture of our relationship with the world.

But the fact that we can do it still cause really important part of what it is to be human. I think when I took the primacy of online intelligence, I think I probably overplay it a little bit in reconstructing the world to what I would do now. But I think it is definitely there.

Mirko Prokop: I think you also, it's important to mention that. that probably this ready to hand mode of engagement for Heidegger is something, that's, that's probably not that common in our everyday experience, you know. Probably, I think one [00:48:00] thing that I liked about your, your way of explaining it is that, that if you have these two extremes, the ready to hand and the Um, what's it called?

Present to hand. Um, you have this kind of spectrum in between of this third mode of engagement of the unready to hand where you're still engaged in a practical, uh, activity and trying to achieve something like, I don't know, writing a paper. Um, so you haven't really given up yet on your project. Um, but you're still in a, in a sense that if there's a gap opening between you and the object, because It's not really fully transparent in the way that, um, it would be if you were just fully skillfully coping with it.

Michael Wheeler: That's exactly right. And that brings out a nice thing actually, which is that what we can gradually see, if the, if the, in the case where the entity is transparent to us, the thought is that's not correctly described by a subject object dichotomy anymore. Because there's no separation between the subjects and the object.

You know, the, the entity here, the hammer, is just part of this ongoing activity that is, that is Dasein. So it's not [00:49:00] merely that we don't experience the entity as an object. We don't experience ourselves as a subject either. Just as the entity disappears, so do we. There's just the hammering, right?

Now, as, as things go, Start to break down or as we start to get ourselves consciously as a subject into a state of mind where we're opening up the world differently, then what we gradually do is establish a sort of subjects object dichotomy. Now, I think in that I'm ready to hand kind of zone, we start out with not much of a subject subject dichotomy.

And as we move through the spectrum of possible extreme breakdowns, we gradually establish a stronger and stronger version. Of the subject of subject dichotomy till we get a fully Cartesian kind of relationship with the world. But now that's this. This only part of the picture in the best case. It's only part of the picture and possibly, depending on how one reads Heidegger, a secondary mode of activity.

So all that's really important, I think, in understanding this. , and, and I, I think one thing I wanted to stress, which you alluded to there in debates [00:50:00] with Bert Dreyfus, is that, uh, which we, which we had after we constructed the cognitive world in a bunch of papers. I mean, one of the things I wanted to say there was that, I mean that idea that there's this fully, this way of being, where we're not aware of ourselves, and we're not aware of the entity, we're just aware of the hammering.

I think that's quite rare. You know, it links up with stuff that's gone on recently in various bits of psychology, especially in sports psychology, in like being in the zone in sport. Where, you know, you're not experiencing, you're at one with the world. With, you know, your bodily movements and your tennis racket or your squash racket or whatever it is, and that somehow that's, that's an example of this being in the zone or people call it flow sometimes or different versions of that.

And that's often characterized, drawing a bit on the phenomenology of people like Merleau Ponty and Heidegger, as this kind of lack of a subject object relationship, it's this, you're just aware of the activity. I have to say I think the only people who can believe that about sport who've never played sport against anybody else, right?

Because constantly you're [00:51:00] being disrupted, right? And you're constantly aware of having to correct. And I think that the idea that that flow state is, is that is what you aim for in sport. I think that's become less popular in sport psychology recently, um, through the work of people like John Sutton and others.

As, as we've, as we've reestablished a kind of sense that, the world presents itself as a sort of problem that we have to . So what I want to stress is that whilst I think readiness to hand is a really important phenomenon that does happen, and it still might be our most fundamental way of revealing entities as what they are as equipment, it may be quite rare in our actual day to day experience that we get into quite that zone.

Mirko Prokop: One of the things you mentioned about playing sports against someone else, I mean, is, is obviously the presence of other people in our lives, right? That, I mean, in a way that, you know, engaging with other people, they're not like just objects or means to an end, right?

 There's a different kinds of phenomenological characters as well that can be. disruptive, but maybe [00:52:00] also in other loving relationships or something is, is also more of a kind of fully engaged kind so this is something that I don't know if Heidegger talks a lot about this, this relationship between Uh, other people and disruption, um, and how it relates to our modes of being in the world.

Michael Wheeler: Not really. I mean, one of the strange things about Heidegger, I mean, there's a, there's a statement, you know, it's really important in being in time that he says that, um, being in the world is always being with, 

but we have to be careful about how he understands that. I think What he means by that is that all that is another way of putting the point that all these structures through which we interpret the world and find the world meaningful, through which the world's intelligible to us, they're all social structures, right?

Hence all the cultural stuff again comes back in. So being with is that sense of not being with in terms of being alongside other people in a loving relationship, whatever. But it's rather this idea that we start from a shared world. I mean, again, there's something [00:53:00] interesting here with Descartes.

 I mean, the whole problem of other minds Right is the problem if we relate to other people as something where we we don't really have access to their thoughts We have to infer them from their bodily movements that we can see then we get this problem about whether they are Not what in the first case can we understand what's going on in others mind in any accurate way?

But secondly whether there are minds there at all, you know, really, you know, what what what epistemic position are we in? with respect to that. And of course, De Huygen just doesn't have that problem, because everything starts from these kind of social structures. So being with is fundamental. And, um, a way in which Dreyfus sometimes puts it is, and I remember a view that I've been quite sympathetic to over the years, is that the extended mind hypothesis, where we think that minds are not, not trapped within the skull, but are rather Implemented or realized in, in structures that go beyond the skull and skins often associated with Clark and Chalmers, uh, the sort of, uh, architects, the original architects of the view.

But I remember when I wrote, you know, when I defended that view, I mean, you know, Bert [00:54:00] Dreyfuss called it trivial and contrived. The reason for that is he thinks we need a much deeper kind of externalism than the extended mind can ever give us, right? We have to start from the thought that the human being is always outside of itself, because all the structures through which we make sense in the world are social structures.

Right. So there's no starting point from the point of the individual subject, if we can, if we cut ourselves off as an individual subject, that's a cutting ourself off from our fundamental way of being, which is inherently social and essentially social. So that's quite interesting sort of way of thinking about the structure of Dasein, that it's got this radical sort of cultural externalism about it.

And I think that's the way Heidegger thinks about being with. The idea of being alongside other people in a more kind of empirical sense. I don't think he really. You know, he, he doesn't really talk about that very much. Yeah. Um, he says some things that are quite interesting, which is the idea that we can only make sense of being alone with respect to the idea that we were fundamentally social in the first place.

You know, which I think is a really nice idea.

Mirko Prokop: I'm , [00:55:00] really interested in exploring the idea in more detail. And the way that, um, we're already always in a cultural kind of world.

And maybe we can, we can come back to that when we talk about, some of the more existential themes in Heidegger, if, if we have time, um, but maybe just because you mentioned it and it connects to something we talked about, , in relation to the ready to hand, , the extended mind and this idea that, that cognition is, is distributed, um, in, in many ways and sort of spreads across the, the, the brain body and environment in many ways.

Maybe you could, you could develop that a bit more in, in terms of how you think that is sort of in line with what, what Heidegger thinks

Michael Wheeler: good. Yeah, good. Um, So what I don't think, I mean, I've defended the extent of my hypothesis for years. I still think it's, it's right, but the minds are sometimes extended.

Um, and you might think there's an easy route [00:56:00] from Heidegger to that. But I don't think there is an easy route. It's not as straightforward as one might think. And actually it comes back to some of those comments that Bert wrote in, in Christmas, so I'll get to those. So, the standard way of thinking about the extended mind hypothesis is that, um, you know, we have these brain body world systems.

And normally, we would, everybody agrees there are brain body world systems, right? Uh, you know, I write, you know, doing mathematics in, you know, before we throw ourselves into calculators and, uh, and, uh, iPhones and so on that can do the maths for us. You know, doing maths on a piece of paper. We, you know, we write things down on the paper, we move symbols around on the paper.

So doing maths, right, achieving a mathematical goal. Conclusion or doing mathematical reasoning when we do do it that way, not when we do it in our, in our head, as we might say with mental mathematics, um, in a traditional kind of way of thinking about it. When we think about how we do maths when we use symbols on the page, clearly there's a, there's [00:57:00] a system there that's distributed over brain, body and world.

Everyone's going to agree with that. The question is how much of that system counts strictly as cognitive. Now, you might think this is a kind of weird question, right? You know, there's a cognitive achievement here doing maths, and it's achieved by a brain inside a, you know, a body, and that manipulates symbols on the page, right?

Using, or writing, writing symbols using a pen. And so you might think the obvious answer is, well, the thinking, in some, you know, whatever counts as cognitive, whatever counts as mentally, it goes on inside the brain. And then there are things that support that thinking. Right, including my bodily movements and moving the symbols around on the page.

Um, and the, and the, the theorist who thinks like that is maintaining a certain kind of internalism about the nature of mind. They're maintaining the the mental stuff happens in the brain. And all the rest might be really important, but it's merely scaffolding. Now someone else, right, [00:58:00] who's got a more of a kind of extended mind view, Just thinks that that, that's not the right way to think about this. What the extended mind theorist thinks is that no, actually, the cognitive here, the mental, is itself distributed over brain, body, and world. So the symbols on the page have as much right to be To, to count as having cognitive status, whatever that means, come back to that, as what goes on in your brain.

The simplest way to think about this, in terms of cognitive status, is whatever status we usually grant the brain in thinking, the symbols on the page and the bodily movements, when you manipulate the pen, they all have the same status. So the mind, in this sense, or at least the parts of the world that realize mental processes, The realized thinking are spread out over brain, body, and world in such a way that the body and the world also count as cognitive.

So thinking happens in these distributed systems. It doesn't just happen in the brain. Alright, great. Okay, so that's the two different views. I haven't said, I haven't argued for one or the other, but it's just to get a grip on what the two different views say. [00:59:00] Now, when we go back to Heidegger on equipment, you might think, well, surely Heidegger must, you know, isn't there some direct route from Heidegger to the extended mind?

And I don't think there is, in the obvious thought. And I, and, and this comes back to things we started with about how phenomenology works, right? So, of course, when we just, if Heidegger's right about the experience of using equipment, in a hitch free way. Then when I'm using the pen and the paper and the symbols in a hitch free way, I won't be concentrating on the pen and the paper and the symbols as independent entities, right?

I'll be experiencing through them to doing the maths 

Mirko Prokop: sum. 

Michael Wheeler: So that's great, right? So they disappeared from my conscious experience, they're transparent. So it looks like the next thing you might say is, well then why don't they just count as part of the thinking? But it's not obvious that one has to make that.

It still might be that all the thinking here is happening internally. It's just that the entities externally don't show up for me in my experience. So I don't think you can just off of that. Think we we could [01:00:00] take the following view where we have that kind of transparency.

Maybe that's an indicator or the beginnings of a story. Maybe we're on the way to. So I think that's the way to think about it. It's not an obvious. Now, as I said, that's to think about the extended mind as it's usually thought about, you know, we have some. Cognitive activity, like doing mathematical reasoning, um, and we use entities in the environment to achieve that.

Under certain circumstances, haven't said what they really are, we count the entities as part of the mind rather than as just support, non cognitive supports for the mind. Now, so there's, I don't, but I don't think there's a route from transparency on its own, but Dreyfus might be right, that if we adopt the whole Heideggerian framework, then it looks like we're starting with the idea of the mind as somehow extended.

Right. That the mind itself, we can't make sense of mind as an inner realm. The only way to make sense of mind, minds in the general sense which we're using today, is as something that [01:01:00] is, is becomes, is a social entity through and through. So Dreyfus thought that was a kind of existential externalism. The idea was to make sense of minds.

We had to see minds as inherently social. Being with is an essential part of what it is to be a human. Again, that was Dreyfus's view, that that would give you a kind of radical externalism, more radical in fact than the extended mind idea, but it would give you something like it. I'm not sure that follows exactly, because it might be that the social stuff is only codifying the meanings, but doesn't tell you where those meanings are realized, but that would be something, there's an extra Heideggerian, a lovely paper on this is, It goes in this direction.

It's John Hoagland's epic early paper in the 4E cognition movement, Mind, Embody and Embedded. Where at the end of that paper he talks about equipment as meaningful. And what that means is we have to leave meaning out there in the world. Right. And that going back to what I said about equipment, it's not that we take this neutral entity, and we then we impose functions on it from inside our [01:02:00] mind, but rather we experience the entity as meaningful.

Where does that meaningful come from? It comes from the social. And I think Hoagland's thought is, Given that that's our relationship with things, we get a kind of externalism out of that that would support something like an extended mind view. But I think that that's a trickier story. So what I would say is I don't think there's a direct route from Heidegger's phenomenological observations about transparency to the extended mind.

Mirko Prokop: Maybe another reason for thinking why there isn't such a direct route from Heidegger to the extended mind idea is that in a sense, Um, maybe for hiding this question of, you know, where is the mind realized and so on coming from this interest in just being transparently involved in an activity where you have no distinction between subject and object.

 Maybe for heidegger would just be a kind of uninteresting or a misguided question to ask, you know, where 

Michael Wheeler: There's lots to be said about that um And lots of really difficult philosophical questions that come [01:03:00] up there first of all as a matter of historical bookkeeping I think you're absolutely right.

Heidegger wouldn't have seen this as a question that he was remotely interested and in some ways I don't know You I think there are indications both ways, in different bits of Heidegger's writing, whether he would have thought that even if he didn't care about, as it were, the mechanisms, where the mechanisms are that realise mental states and processes, even if he didn't care about that, whether he thought that his philosophical work had implications for that.

Right, and there, again, there are different views, I think, within Heidegger scholarship. Those people who think of themselves, I think, much more as sort of purely doing, purely thinking about Heidegger and his importance as a philosopher, perhaps think that those kind of questions are just, as you say, they're orthogonal to anything that Heidegger would think was interesting.

Heidegger's not the only philosopher in that boat. People like Ryle, I think, you might have a similar kind of view about Ryle. In the analytic tradition, you know, he talks a lot about how to think about mind in the concept of [01:04:00] mind, um, which looks like it might have some implications for how we think about things that might have an extended mindy feel.

Some philosophers have argued that. But again, you might think, right, well, I think that was a kind of category error, right, to even think that what you were saying, we had any implications for what science tells us about science and other kinds of philosophy tell us about the mechanisms of mind. So clearly that's true.

How I think about this. is via the lens of a distinction that John McDowell has introduced, which you actually alluded to part of it, this idea of, sorry, McDowell probably didn't introduce it, he introduced a version of it, the terminology was already around in people like Dennett and Hurley. Um, but, um, in, in recently McDowell started to talk in some papers about what he calls the personal sub personal distinction.

Actually, I should say that in terms of historical booking, since Susan Hurley was a grad student at MacDowell, she and I got it from him originally, but in terms of writing about it, MacDowell in a paper called, I think it's the content of perceptual experience, introduces this distinction between the personal and the sub personal.

And that distinction [01:05:00] is. At the personal level, as he calls it, what we want to understand is what it is for a creature to be in touch with its environment in a meaningful way. And he talks about that as a kind of constitutive explanation, what it is for the phenomena of mind to be as they are. What, what conditions would have to be met for that to be true.

Now you might think Heidegger, that's definitely Heidegger's project, right, in some description of that. 

And then there's the subpersonal. And there's the question of what one says about the subpersonal. McDowell thinks that's the job for cognitive science, right? Cognitive science will tell us about the mechanisms that underpin or enable, as he calls it, enabling explanation, enable the phenomena that we as philosophers get a, get a grip on.

Right.

Now then, there's a really interesting question that comes up at that point. What's the relationship between the two? 

Mirko Prokop: Right. 

Michael Wheeler: So, some philosophers, I think Dreyfus, Kelly, think this, working with a kind of Heideggerian, or at least Dreyfus working within a Heideggerian framework, Kelly within a broader [01:06:00] phonological framework.

I think they think the story goes like this. We do all this neat, smart philosophical work at the personal level, and we tell the scientists what it is to be in touch with the world via perception, and then the scientists go off and take that notion and tell us how to wire up a bit of the world, Such that, that phenomena could be true.

That could be true. And it's like all the, all the pressure comes from the personal to the sub personal. And sometimes McDowell can be read like that. So the idea would be get your philosophy straight and then go off and do your psychology and your cognitive science, right? But that doesn't strike me as like a happy place to sit, right, for lots of reasons.

So just say two things about that. I mean, one is, even within McDowell's own picture, he has a counterexample to that. And there's this example where we do, he likes the example for various reasons due to the way he develops an example. He thinks this idea of personal explanation, I mean, although it talks about persons, it's just a mode of explanation.

So you could do it for frogs, right? You could say what it is for a frog to be in [01:07:00] touch with its environment. Kind of an organismic level of explanation, And then you could talk about the mechanisms that enable the frog to be in touch with its environment in the way that it is, experiencing a world of food, you know, and so on.

And he says, look, here's the interesting thing. Uh, we could do like, we could open up the frog's head, right? Right. We could have it. Let's do it. Don't want to step back. We could have an account at the personal level that gave the frog this really rich phenomenology lives in a really rich world. Then we open up the frog's head and we find there's nothing there, but a homogenous lump of jelly.

Now we've got two possible moves at this point. We either say, isn't it amazing what a lump of modernist jelly can do? That doesn't sound plausible. What we probably say is, ah, we got our constitutive explanation wrong. We need to rethink that. But if that's right, then there are influences that run from the sub personal to the personal.

So what I think is that we need to have a kind of two-way, direction, two directions of travel here. Yes, we could do philosophical work. And we [01:08:00] can say this is the way we think things are. Then the subpersonal work gets done. There'll be clashes between the two. We'll have to sort them out. It doesn't have to be.

This is a long, complicated story about how one makes sense of naturalism in the philosophy of cognitive science. I don't think it always has to be that the philosophy gives way. But in the end, I think we've got to have a story such that those two match up in a way that we take to be satisfactory.

MacDowell himself talks about there being a relationship of intelligibility between the two. Whatever that means, he doesn't fill that in, frustratingly. Whatever that means, it has to be a lot, it's like a reflective equilibrium between the two. It has to be that these things make sense of each other. The, the constitutive and the sub personal, the enabling.

So I, I think that when we talk about, That flow of in, you know, from the personal to subpersonal, we now take it back to Heidegger. So does Heidegger's framework tell us, as it were, how the subpersonal mechanisms have to be? I don't think they, I don't think you read it off directly. You, you take that account, you look at what subpersonal [01:09:00] mechanisms we're getting at in cognitive science, we see how they match up, and we bring these things into some kind of equilibrium, ultimately.

Now this actually leads me to what the whole pitch was, in a sense, in Reconstructing the Cognitive World, because It wasn't in Reconstructing the Cognitive World that I thought we do loads of Heideggerian philosophy, that tells us how things are, and then the cognitive scientists go off and tell us how to wire up the world to make Heidegger's position true, right?

Even though I think the two have to be brought into equilibrium of some form. or some relationship intelligibility. What I thought was, actually, there was something really interesting going on. That there was, the way we'd been doing cognitive science up till the 1990s, in the, on the whole, not everyone, but on the whole, had been, had had a whole bunch of theoretical structures at its base.

Deep, deep conceptual assumptions about the way things worked. And they were, To a certain extent, by and large, with caveats, being careful. The kind of [01:10:00] assumptions that I talked about earlier coming out of Descartes. That the fundamental relationship was one of subject against object. We need to build representations of the world to understand the world is.

We needed to manipulate representations in thought, which leads you to a kind of computational story. Um, that basically we have inputs from the world, sensory input. Then we do loads of internal clanking and whirring. And that produces patterns of action, right, down the line. So a kind of sense of the world.

Sense the world, model it, plan in your models, and then act in the world framework. All these things one can find in Descartes, including the idea that we can explain cognition without essentially appealing to the body as a, as a, as a kind of important structure. The body is just a way of implementing the computational structures that we, we get at through notions like algorithm and so on.

So we get a kind of explanatory disembodiment of cognition, not a metaphysical disembodiment. There's no substance dualism here. It's a kind of explanatory dualism. And when I looked around [01:11:00] that's what I saw. Right. That was what was going on. We were doing representational computational cognitive science in a way that was kind of committed to a certain explanatory disembodiment.

I mean, just to give an example, in that school of cognitive computing sciences, they kind of made me the philosopher that I am. There was no neuroscience. Neuroscience was down in biology. It wasn't thought to be relevant, right? That was just the chemistry of stuff, the implementing base. 

Okay, so that's, we have all this Cartesian stuff going on. But then there was this new cognitive science happening in the early 90s. And this was coming out largely from the people who were building robots. Now, They were, but not all, interestingly, some of them were reading Heidegger, particularly Phil A.

Gray. But they, but by and large, these roboticists weren't reading Heidegger, right? They were just building robots. What they saw was a certain failure, as they saw it, of the representational computational view, what I called the orthodox view, which you can think of as a kind of neo Cartesian view. They saw that as, as failing to [01:12:00] explain cognition.

They were thinking that things look like this really crudely. This is much too crude. Basically, cognitive science as it was then was pretty good it seemed at explaining things like how we might play, you know, how we might solve cryptographic problems like the, you know, famous missionary and cannibals problem in psychology, or even playing drafts or chess maybe.

You know, we could get explanations of that kind of thinking. But it wasn't giving us explanations of perhaps our most basic way of engaging with the world in real time action. And in fact, the kind of robots that were built using the traditional view were really clunky, they were really slow, they broke down really easy.

And so these robots were saying, no, we have to do things differently. So they started to build robots where they minimized, not got rid of altogether usually, but they minimized notions like representation. They changed our view of what representations had to be from being something that was a kind of neutral picture of a world that we could then build a model of, but became things that were.

They were [01:13:00] already somehow linked to action, so they would encode the world in terms of actions we could perform in it. Prioritizing, as we mentioned earlier, online intelligence over the kind of offline intelligence that you might get in pure thought. So they started to build robots that, that, that moved away from that very set of assumptions that define the orthodox view.

They prioritized online intelligence, they minimized representation, they started to think of, you know, As dynamical system rather than a computational system, they didn't have a set of sort of clearly defined different functional stages in cognition where one one sensed the world, one built a model, one planned in the model, then one acted, all of that got messed up in some really quite interesting action oriented kind of mechanisms.

When I looked at that cognitive science, it was being done by people like Rod Brooks and Sussex by your husbands and him and Harvey and Dave Cliff and others. What I saw was a very different way of thinking about what cognition was. So what I did in [01:14:00] Reconstructing the Cognitive World was interpreted the fundamental structures that we would need to understand that kind of cognitive science as not Cartesian, but as a kind of Neo Heideggerian view.

So that was the movement. Right, so it was, the Heideggerianism wasn't a kind of prescriptive, top down, personal level to sub personal pressure. It was rather making sense of cognitive science as it was actually happening. 

Mirko Prokop: I think this is, this is a really strong, dialectical move you make in the book of just kind of saying, well, I mean, you know, I've described the structures of, of human action and thought and so on in terms of Heidegger, but actually, you know, a lot of the stuff that's going on is already, , Heideggerian in that broad sense.

Yeah. It's a good illustration of. Um, of what you mentioned, maybe of thinking about how also thinking about the sub personal level of explanation, if you like, constrains, , or is sort of in a mutually productive relationship with these more personal level, , kinds of explanations. One thing I was thinking about when you were talking about [01:15:00] this is that I was recently rereading, , Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, which is this sort of account of, uh, his, uh, his experience with working with Parkinson's patients.

And I think he's actually really struggling with exactly the same kind of, um, distinction applied to medicine. And just kind of saying, you know, when you talk to the patient, you're actually, you're faced with someone with, with a subjective experience and a meaningful world that is that is sort of shattered in various kinds of ways.

But then as a neurologist, you're also trying to really understand the, the neural underlying structures. And I think in the later chapters of the book, when he sort of reflects on more broadly his way of approaching this both as a doctor, but also as a human being, you know, working with these people, he's really trying to make sense of, of that kind of relationship, um, between these different modes of thinking

Michael Wheeler: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think that, I think that sounds very plausible to me. And I do think this kind of, You know what come [01:16:00] to be called Heideggerian cognitive science. Um, I mean, I think that it's, it's a, it could be valuable way beyond my particular interest in, you know, the robotics of the early 90s and so on there.

And, you know, there have been people who have developed ideas like this in relation to Um, you know, various kinds of psychopathology and things like that. So I think it's, and, and that relationship between the personal and sub personal, I think, does become. It's quite interesting that Heidegger himself, in, in the Zollikon seminars, so a much later text, which is a kind of, um, a set of reports of discussions between Heidegger and some psychiatrists, lots of these issues come up.

About personal personal not under those terms that that what the neuropsychiatrists are doing and what psychiatrists that are doing and what hiding was doing. And there's some really interesting stuff actually one of the things that comes up I haven't really mentioned is or mentioned in relation to take up and not hiding is the notion of embodiment.

And here I think just to say something briefly about it would be quite useful I mean, it's Heidegger does not talk about embodiment at all. He only mentions it [01:17:00] once. He says, the body, that's got a whole set of problems all of its own. And that's all he says. Yet, Heidegger is often thought, I mean, and it's there in my own work, that Heidegger is someone who like, has been one of the sort of influences.

Through, through, um, you know, various people, Dreyfus, as well as myself, on embodied cognition as a, as a, as a kind of way of doing things, you know, now we have this term, which I mentioned once before, didn't explain 4e cognition, which we think of mind as embodied, embedded, extended and inactive. We've talked a bit about, you know, being embedded in the world, what the extended mind is, but also mind is thought to be, you know, essentially embodied and, uh, and that we, to understand the structures of mind, we also have to understand the structures of the human body.

And this comes out in lots of different ways in embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is a very broad church, um, and it comes out in ways. Sometimes they're quite non disruptive to many aspects of the Cartesian picture. So you might think that when we have representations of the world, that the content of those representations often bear a [01:18:00] lot of the markers of embodiment.

Classic example of this, Lakoff and Johnson. Think that, for instance, set theory, you know, really abstract mathematical and logical kind of framework, is really a bunch of metaphors of embodiment. You know, you're kind of inside the set or you're outside the set. You're inside the body or you're outside the body.

Inside the skin, outside the skin. And actually a lot of our very abstract thinking are based on metaphors of embodiment. That's one kind of embodied cognition, really interesting, really important in cognitive linguistics. But, but then there's more radical forms of embodiment, where you start thinking that when the violinist plays a cracking, you know, concerto, that a lot of her intelligence is not in her brain, but it's in her fingers, in the muscles.

And then you get, again, very Hoagland y pictures of how you can't really separate that. It's like the, the signals that the brain sends are already somehow adapted and specific to the very muscles that this violinist has, such that you couldn't take the brain out of that body and put it in another body, and it would do fine.

It's all one, uh, body. You know, it's a tightly interlinked system. And you know, you get a more and more [01:19:00] radical notion. You get more and more sort of different notions of how embodied playing leads. All of that is very much part of the picture. Heidegger doesn't say anything about that. Then, there is some stuff in the later stuff in the Zolikon seminars on embodiment.

And there Heidegger makes a distinction that also Merleau Ponty goes on to make in the philology literature, between embodiment as a kind of about the physical wiring up. But then embodiment as a kind of way in which of opening up the world that a lot of the ways in which we open up the world is through our body and we interpret the world through the kind of structures that our body brings to the table.

The kind of sensory motor mechanisms that we have. So that definitely feeds into a contemporary tradition that also brings in people like Gibson, where we experience the world as a set of action possibilities. 

Mirko Prokop: And of 

Michael Wheeler: course, actual possibilities are gonna be different depending on what body you've got.

You know, this chair sits on a ball by me, but not by an elephant because it would crush it. You know, I can't track magnetic fields without this. I've got some extra tech, uh, plumbed into me, but sharks, Apparently can or [01:20:00] whatever it is, you know, whatever the stories there are. So like, you know, how one experiences the world as a set of action possibilities is dependent on one's embodiment.

And then that leads you kind of back to thinking about equipment and how the meaning of equipment gets fixed. So there's a sort of story where embodiment sort of there in Heidegger, even though he doesn't really talk about it too much later. Um, so I think that's a really important part of the process.

explanatory disembodiment that I think we see in Descartes. That definitely was challenged by the cognitive science of the early 90s that was based around robotics. A lot of the interesting stuff that happened in robotics was how things that look like really difficult cognitive problems are only difficult cognitive problems if you split the subject and object up and think the subject has to build a model of the world in order to do anything.

If you just allow an embodied subject to Right, suddenly those problems sort of go away. In the history of cognitive science, there's a fantastic paper, Chris Alton and Andy Clark, where they argue that there are these really difficult cognitive problems because we, the inputs, roughly [01:21:00] speaking, because what we get in perception is a set of kind of statistics.

And what we need are a set of statistics that are not obvious from that first set of statistics. So we need some really fancy cognitive mechanisms to pull out the second order statistics. And that's really, really hard. Um, and then like, um, uh, role five for Christian share did some great work where they showed that for some of the cases that Clark and Thornton thought were really hard.

If you just allow your, your robot to circle around the object in question, all those stats just come out in the movement. So like again, being an embodied creature can make things kind of easier from a cognitive perspective. So all this is really important to the robotics of the early nineties. , but that comes into the Heideggerian picture that I was painting in a slightly kind of more indirect sort of way.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. Especially this notion of movement, which of course is very centrally related to. The body is sort of part of this idea of making cognition something that is enacted, right? That, that perception is something that's very active in, in many ways. Yeah, there's so much to talk about there.[01:22:00] 

Yeah, that'll be all. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, one, I guess one big name to mention that you already brought up is, is Malaponte, right? Who, who, I guess, I mean, he was very influenced by Heidegger, of course, but he was probably the one that, you know, Introduce the body as this central theme in his phenomenology

Michael Wheeler: that's definitely right. What I would say there is I think, you know, Merleau Ponty's distinction between two kinds of embodiment, one of which is the kind of physical body, the natural body, and the other is this body as a way of opening up the world as meaningful. And that, you know, that's got loads of influence that has influence on Dreyfus.

He talks about Merleau Ponty a lot when he talks about embodiment. Um, so there's both Merleau, I, I, I know I'm very strongly influenced by my readings of Heidegger and so on. I, I've, you know, obviously read Merleau Ponty and I, I sometimes use Merleau Ponty in ideas as well. Um, but I guess I'm more influenced by Heidegger, but, but, um, But I also think that distinction between the two kinds of embodiment is there in the Heidegger of the Zonicon seminars.

So in some ways I think though he didn't really develop it, Merleau Ponty did and rightly should get credit for the developments he does. [01:23:00] It's not as if that isn't there in Heidegger, it is already there.

Mirko Prokop: No, I mean, obviously we could talk for, for hours and hours about this. Um, but I mean, most of the themes that we talked about, , uh, kind of based on, on your book, which was, , published I think almost 20 years ago now. So, so, and obviously you haven't sort of stalled since then.

So it'd be really nice to, to maybe hear, , some of the things you're working on at the moment and maybe how some of the things that we talked about are related to that. Um, so, , Are there some aspects in Heidegger's work that that, um, you would like to explore more and that you're currently exploring more that that are really 

Michael Wheeler: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, one of the things, um, that I'm really interested in, uh, now is, is the concept of authenticity. Uh, now this is, this goes back to something I said earlier. I said that, you know, this stuff on the ready to hand and transparency, that's been, like, one of the really big influences that Heidegger's had on cognitive science.

And that's true. I think there are other things in Heidegger that [01:24:00] might be mine for interesting discussion. Sort of ways of engaging with cognitive science. And at the moment, I'm really interested in a notion that can seem like a, um, like a deeply existential notion or a moral notion or something that only philosophers and maybe I'll come back to this literary theorist could care about the notion of authenticity.

And we, we often think about authenticity as Being who one really is. And there's all kinds of problems in that. Or expressing oneself in the way that reflects who one truly is. And there's all kinds of problems in that way of thinking about authenticity. Because, you know, it seems to be committed to this idea of some prior essential self that then gets expressed.

So that distinction between the expression and the essential self. And actually in Heidegger, there's a different notion of authenticity that falls out of his framework. And I should stress here that, uh, it's interesting because some people don't like the, the, the sort of translation that we get of authenticity is a term that Macquarie and Robinson, [01:25:00] the great hiding and translators use.

Some people think this isn't really a notion of authenticity at all. I don't think that's quite right. Um, what's a central to, to hide his notion of authenticity is still the idea of the, of a, of a self of sorts, but it's the idea of owning. Um, The structures that by which one behaves. So if one goes back into like, you know, something we didn't really talk about in Heidegger, which is as we behave ordinarily in the world, Heidegger thinks that we are subject to what he calls the dictatorship of the day.

Now, what I said earlier about being with being a fundamental way of being in the world, or one aspect of that, that we behave according to various social structures. that we inherit, into which we're thrown, and that we, we project ourselves in our activity onto various possibilities in the world that also draw on those, those structures that we inherit.

So, you know, I interpret myself as a parent. I do the sort of things that a parent does in my culture to be a good parent. And most of the time, hiding a thought is we just do that. It's just what one does. [01:26:00] Right. We don't even, in a sense, in a very, this would need a lot of cash here. We don't even think about it.

We just do what one does. 

Mirko Prokop: And 

Michael Wheeler: he calls that the dictatorship of the day. Now, on one hearing, that can become, like, seem like a very negative thing. It's like, you know, I'm just doing what other people expect of me, and somehow that's a really bad thing because I'm not, you know, I'm not owning it myself. But I don't think Heidegger most of the time, he's got some moments where he rails about the dictatorship of the day, and so he calls it levelling as well, this idea of everybody being forced down to the same level because they all behave, all of us behave the same, and you can tell a story where that like, you know, sounds a very negative thing, and Heidegger does sometimes tell that story, there's some passages in Beingsome where he does, but a lot of the time it's not that it's a kind of negative thing morally or politically or socially, it's just what, it's just our default way of being.

Right? We just do what one does. However, there are moments where that smooth behaving as one does gets disrupted in various, in various ways. And there are various ways. And it's hard to cause these [01:27:00] moments of anxiety where the world's actually a kind of strange place to us where we have to decide whether to continue to behave in the way that we do.

It's being, you know, conditioned, we're being conditioned by our culture and not. And these are hiding as moments of authenticity. It's the moment where we're not, we're not cut off from the social structures. We have to kind of, we have to somehow, we decide might be too strong. We have to find a way of getting back into the world.

And we, and there's ways of doing that. One is to just go back to doing as one does without, without explicitly kind of endorsing those ways because it's easier. But another way of doing it might be to explicitly endorse those structures. Right? To decide that these are the structures by which I want to live.

And I've just got a whole story about this, that, that he calls retrieval. I, well actually I translate the term as retrieval, others don't. Others would translate as repetition, which I think is misleading. But retrieval is this process where one picks on models from the past, or ways of behaving that are available from one's culture, and uses them as models for how to go on.

Now, this could all [01:28:00] still sound like, you know, really big, big picture, the sort of thing that philosophers care about, and literary theorists care about. But actually, whilst I think that's true, I think this is, now, I begin to think this is part of our basic dynamic of thinking. Right. The thinking itself is a process by which we bring structures from the past to bear on the moment.

And there are different ways in which we might do that. And in that very process of doing that, there's a moment of creativity in thinking. And this is just what it is to think. It's this moment of creativity where we decide how to apply the norms of the past to the present. And so I'm thinking that this notion of authenticity is actually something we need to understand to understand what thinking is.

Right, as we go on. Now I should say there are some other people who are saying very similar things, although not in the language of authenticity, but in a different kind of language. Some of the Pedro, who's an act contemporary and activist written fantastic piece in frontiers and psychology or called something like [01:29:00] levels and norm development something like that not sure if that's exactly right but you'll find it where he talks about the You know, moments of going on in the world of these moments where one brings the norms that one has, one has got, as it were, available to one to bear in the moment.

But one has to, as it were, interpret those and apply them and decide how to go on at every moment. In a kind of, you know, fluid, dynamic kind of way. Going back in the history of philosophy, Gilbert Ryle wrote a fantastic paper called Improvisation in his latter years after he'd actually retired from Maldon as a former philosopher.

Improvisation is my current go to piece. Right, thinking about thinking where he argues that all thinking is a form of improvisation. And in fact, what I'm doing in some of my contemporary work is actually thinking about how understanding musical improvisation better. might become a model for thought.

 That's a, that's a very brief story about how I'm beginning to think about thinking in a different way. Um, not much of this stuff published yet, but you know, so you [01:30:00] heard it here first as it were, but, um, and that's fine, uh, but it will be coming out gradually, so I'm now, I now want to think about, I want to rethink what thinking is using the machinery of Authenticity of improvisation of creativity as basic to thought.

And I think that's, that's going to be, you know, it'll link up with the stuff that Sepulveda Pedra is doing, certainly link up with the stuff that Ryle did, um, and that's going to be the new story. And this for me is part of a broader picture where I'm kind of in, I've become more and more interested in creativity.

So I'm interested in explaining musical creativity, aesthetic creativity, and so on. But I'm also interested in learning from that, how that might be part of the basic structure of thought itself. What I call the creativity first sort of understanding of thinking. And that leads me, actually has led me to think about my work really differently to how I have done in the past.

I now think of myself as a philosopher who's [01:31:00] engaged with a, I mean, we might pretentiously call it a movement, which is typically these days being called either the cognitive humanities or the cognitive arts and humanities. I know I've said a lot, which you might want to ask about, but just to give you a quick sort of tie up to the story.

Um, some years ago. I just got an email from a guy called Peter Garrett, who's a fantastic literary theorist of the Victorian era in particular, Peter had just won this network grant to develop this idea of the network on what he called the Cognitive humanities or cognitive futures in the humanities.

This was something that got a grip in the US a bit, but hadn't really got a grip in the UK. And Peter asked me to join this network as the kind of representative of embodied, embedded, extended cognition, and in that network, I interacted, I was the only sort of philosopher in the central group.

So I was interacting mostly with literary theorists of one sort or another. And the idea was to develop a network of That reflected this idea of the cognitive humanities where the idea was that the kind of literature [01:32:00] but also more broadly, the humanities could be brought into contact in a productive way with cognitive science, such that the traffic didn't all go in.

It wasn't just as it were, we can tell you what's going on in literature, let's do an fMRI scan of a reader, which Kind of was being done, or we can understand what aesthetic appreciation with we'll just FMR a few brains that people while they look at Caravaggio's, which was being done in neuro aesthetics.

I'm being obviously unfair here, but rather to see literature and cognitive science and and the arts humanities more generally. So now it's expanded out into choreography and dance and all kinds of things to see them in a mutually productive relationships, such that not only Yeah. Can we learn more about what's going on in things like literature and, and art through doing cognitive science, but equally, we can get a better grip on what's going on, you know, cognitive science, and what cognitive science should be saying by understanding what's going on.

Here's my big go to thing about this. Jerry Fodor, right? One of my heroes, [01:33:00] right? One of the greatest philosophers of cognitive science, if not the greatest. I admire Fodor all the way through, and I admired him even more when after, unfortunately after he died, I think before, he could have done so much more great stuff.

But there was an obituary written of Fodor. In which an anecdote was reported about Fodor, and basically the anecdote was that Fodor took the view that there was more good sense written about the human mind in, as he put it, Henry James rather than William James. Much preferred Henry James to his psychologist brother.

Also, you know, if you wanted to understand human emotions, listen to Wagner, don't listen to psychologists, right? And the idea, I think Fodor, I want to sign up for that, that in fact is going to be the opening of my new book. On this stuff, right? Because the idea is that, you know, if we want to understand what it is to be a human being, I think, you know, we, we, we probably would reach for the literature and the art rather than the psychology.

That doesn't say that psychology [01:34:00] is somehow, , not worth doing. It's very important. And it might feed into this idea of the personal and sub personal distinction about different ways we might engage with that distinction through literature and art in terms of the personal side, psychology on the sub personal side, but bringing them into a, I see that, as it were, the Cognitive Humanities is doing that.

And, you know, there's a Cognitive Futures in the Humanities conference every year, and that came out of that network that I helped set up, well, sorry, Peter set up, I helped develop with Peter, so I don't want to claim ownership of the network, that was Peter's, but, um, that I, that I worked on with Peter, and other people, Karen Cookin and others, and, um, And so out of that, that idea comes, came the Cognitive Futures and Humanities conferences that happen every year now.

And, uh, that's where this kind of work is going on. And in many ways I think of myself as a kind of theoretical cognitive humanist, if you like, these days. I mean, you know, and so sometimes when I'm talking about authenticity, I'll spend some time giving you a reading of [01:35:00] Kerouac's On The Road, which I think is a novel about authenticity.

And I don't do that as a skilled literary theorist. I do it as a philosopher reading literature. But nevertheless, I'm quite happy to use literature. I talk about Samuel Beckett's work a lot. I'm quite happy to use literature, to use theater, to use art, as it was part of the argument, as much as I am willing to use science.

or straight philosophical reflection. I think I always thought of cognitive science as a kind of interdisciplinary sort of movement and now I think of it more broadly as the cognitive humanities as an interdisciplinary movement. I see myself as engaging as a kind of theoretical, if you like, cognitive humanist using my philosophical skills.

So that's how I self conceive myself now. So I said at the start I self identified as a philosopher of cognitive science. I now self identify a little bit differently. I 

Mirko Prokop: mean in a way I was just thinking that that ties in really nicely with Some of the big thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, right, because one, one of the, the nice features as well for many people also sort of more in the [01:36:00] public sphere, there are not so much in academic philosophy for about people like Sartre, for example, and Simone de Beauvoir and so on, is that they were both sort of writers, right, and philosophers as well.

And, and, and I guess Merleau Ponty's work in his engagement with impressionist painting as a way of understanding. vision and how we actually see is also, I think, , maybe a good example of, of that idea, right? Of really engaging with, obviously the arts and humanities and trying to understand , the structures of experience that, that matter to us and that make, make, um, yeah, that shape our experience of the world.

Um, I mean, one, one thing I was thinking, one thing that I'm personally very interested in is the way in which, , , when we start thinking about the human mind as an object, as already, , always encultured in some way and sort of part of a broader socio cultural material horizon, right?

Of, of things that, that have become, come [01:37:00] before us and that in, in hiding is what we're sort of thrown into and that we have to deal with. But in that process of, of, uh, social learning and so on and adopting these various kinds of roles and norms, we also sort of, I guess. are forced to, to make them our own.

And I guess maybe this is, this is the way in which authenticity or, or I guess Heidegger's term is actually Eigentlichkeit, which is just kind of a weird, I mean, for me as a native German speaker, it's not really a word that you encounter in the German language, but it has this connotation of making something your own, right?

Of sort of, in some sense, , incorporating it or making a part of who you are, , comes in. So, so one, one question, , that came up is, Whether, do you think, I mean, from what you've just said is that your approach to, to the human mind and intelligence can we make sense of that without sort of the social environment?

Because in some sense, a lot of the, the stuff that also maybe, happens in [01:38:00] what you described as orthodox cognitive science. It's very individualist, right, that they focus on sort of one agent in a particular environmental setting, , whereas on this broader idea of, you know, thinking maybe about thinking on the lines of authenticity, you have to bring in the kind of sociocultural background that , shapes us always.

Michael Wheeler: Yes, so I, I think that's right. Um, I think there are some very difficult issues that come up here. So where I think this this can become really important. And I think that's really important. Um, is how one thinks about the culture and the social in relation to us as also biological beings.

And this is really important. So back in Reconstruction of the Cognitive World, I, I took a line then, which I now wish I hadn't, because I don't think it was the right line. Oh, well, I wish I hadn't. That's too strong. It was, you know, I explored, I explored an idea. I thought I kind of made it sell, but maybe not now.

I don't think it's quite right. So I had this [01:39:00] idea then that we have all these cultural. Um, domains of meaning, the totalities of involvements and so on, equipment networks, but also I wanted to say that that kind of holistic network framework also could make sense of some of our own behavior that wasn't culturally infected, that was kind of somehow driven by us as biological beings, but also, therefore, the reason that was important was because it would allow the framework to apply to non human animals, and I think the reason that was important Okay.

I think was partly because a lot of the cognitive science that was going on in the robotics literature was about, you know, a lot of activities we might think of as, as the animals did or even insects did. And we might do them too. And, and, but somehow was it was stuff that we shared with the, with the insects and the non human animals.

So the picture I had then was a kind of, and I never really resolved this in Reconstructing Cognitive, I'll say something about it at one point about what the relationship between the biologic and [01:40:00] the cultural here is. Yeah. So the way I think I had it then, roughly speaking, was that, you know, there's some kind of complex interaction where there's these biological structures, they can be reinterpreted in the cultural world of human beings.

But in some sense, there's these biological structures that have the same kind of network structure, where the normativity is set by evolution, by what's the adaptive thing to do, or adaptations, and so on, depending on how one understands that part of the picture. Whereas the cultural stuff, you know, initialization into a culture rather than evolution.

And I just think it was too clunky now. I'm much more, I'm much more now thinking, and I'm not sure about this still, I still haven't really settled this, but I think there is a real issue here about how to understand this. So I like to contrast that picture with like something like the picture that John McDowell has, whereas what he thinks is that once you become a cultural being, roughly speaking, This is a kind of free interpretation of it now.

Once you become a cultural being, in the sense of a human culture, it's not as it were, there's all this biological stuff that's still around, [01:41:00] doing this, you know, in terms of meaning, that's doing the same thing it did before, and then there's a cultural layer on top. Rather, the cultural stuff reaches down and changes, The lower level so that that's all now part of the same kind of cultural thing.

So, so when you go, when you, you know, when humans develop and become cultural creatures, the meaning is all somehow cultural. It's conceptual and I'm not adding in the notion of the cultural here. And whereas, you know, in the animal sense, you, you, it's not as if there's a sort of animal core of us that sort of, I mean, of course, we're still historically animals, and we're still animals, we're just cultural animals, but it's not as if there's all these biological meanings, as it were, that are hanging around that haven't been brought into that cultural framework.

And now I'm a bit more sensitive towards, you know, I'm thinking that's the right way to go. So I think there's some very difficult questions about how to think of us at cultural animals in a way that does justice to the sort of Heideggerian picture, perhaps picks up on some of MacDowell's stuff. But, but, but keeps that idea in view that, you know, in studying [01:42:00] animals and in studying robots that behave like animals, we're still doing something important, we're understanding various mechanisms.

But it's not as it were as if all those mechanisms, they're in us, right, in some way, but not in an unchanged way. 

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. 

Michael Wheeler: . I don't think that's the clearest thing I've said today. That's kind of quite messed up. No, no, 

Mirko Prokop: I think it's 

Michael Wheeler: because I think it's a really difficult issue and I'm not sure how to think about it, I have to say.

Mirko Prokop: Yeah. I mean, that's something that I'm really, really interested in, in trying to understand it. And it always has sort of two directions of difficulty, right? So the one is sort of how you think about the behavior and actions of other animals that are not humans, without, without already sort of projecting our structures of culture and meanings onto them.

Um, and the other is to try and understand how in the human case, , this kind of entanglement of, of our, let's say, cultural nature and, and biological nature, um, actually happens. 

Michael Wheeler: This brings us all the way back to Heidegger in a way, because one of the things that's really interesting about Heidegger is he struggled At different points in his [01:43:00] career, but always struggled. Struggled in different ways, but always struggled to make sense of animals.

So every now and then he mentions non human animals. Sometimes he says animals have no world. I, animals live in meaningful, meaningless worlds. Right? There's no world, there's no, there's no meaning. They don't live in the world at all because worlds are only worlds of meaning and, you know, there is no meaning.

And that just, and then he like, he's got an extended sentence, uh, section where he thinks about a lizard basking on a rock in the sun. And he, and he just can't make, he just doesn't, won't fly for him, that, for that. There's some way in which that's a meaningful behavior. So then he starts talking about animals as poor in world.

So they have worlds but they're poor. But then that doesn't really line up nicely against the idea that the only source of meaning is, is cultural. Right. So he struggles. Hmm. By his framework in a way that, you know, on the one hand, he could just legislate, right, and go, no, animals, it's all meaningless.

Whatever they do, it's all meaningless. But he's a great phenomenologist, right? So he can't bring himself really [01:44:00] to say that. Because he knows that doesn't fit the phenomena. So he struggles to get that right. And there's no account of what it would mean for an animal to be poor in world. I mean, do they have a network of meaning, but it's only a little one?

Are there big gaps in it? And what does it mean? And where does that meaning come from? If culture being with is central to meaning, right?

Mirko Prokop: Also a problem that not even only it would apply to animals, but maybe even, you know, infants and small children. Don't have yet the Dasein and sort of the full sense of being in the world, being part of a culture and so on. No, 

Michael Wheeler: it's a perfectly reasonable criticism of Heidegger, I think, which is one that, um, Sean Gallagher and a colleague of his, Jacobson, have made in a paper that's in a volume called Heidegger and Cognitive Science that I co edited with Julian Killerstein.

Where they make the point that, you know, all of Heidegger's explanations start from the point where Dasein's up and running. But we know, we want to ask the question, well, how does that happen? How do we get to be Dasein? And it, it does seem that it's a, it's a sort of, it's a bit of a kind of paradox of the hippie [01:45:00] type thing.

I mean, presumably there must be developmental structures where kids, not, you know, non adult human beings are gradually enculturated, where they don't really have, they're not really Dasein yet. They don't have all these big networks in place. But what does it mean to have, to be partly Dasein, or on the way to Dasein?

Do we have bits of the network? You know, how does that work? And it looks like that's a very similar problem, as you say, to the one of what one says about animals. Now usually one kind of gets away with it with, with kids by saying, well they're on the way to being Dasein. You know, so they're gradually, at some point, indeterminate where that point is.

You know, over here, When they're just born, they're definitely not Dasein, then loads of stuff happens with intersubjectivity, and triangulation, and, you know, caregiving, and all that stuff happens, and then over here, they're Dasein. In between, not really sure what to say. But I think, you know, as Sean Gallagher and Cole Jackson have made the point, I think, you know, we do need a story about them, and Heidegger just, partly, I think, because he's not interested in the mechanisms, just never tells us that story, just says, no, there's Dasein, that set up human [01:46:00] being, and if you're not Dasein, You know, we can't, we can't use this framework to understand you, but it looks like that's inadequate.

We need to understand the processes that lead to that son. And indeed, I would say, as part of the influence of the subpersonal on the personal, as we understand those developmental mechanisms, that will change what we think that sign is

Mirko Prokop: , fascinating. Yeah, I guess. I mean, there's so much to, to still, uh, talk about and explore and, and, uh, and a great, um, yeah, thing maybe to, because we've talked for quite a while now to end the podcast 

um, so is there any, anything final thing you wanted to say or mentioned that, um, It's close to your heart. 

Michael Wheeler: Oh, that's, that's a nice final question. Um, yeah, I, I don't know about close to heart. I do, this is more like self report, but it's something that I kind of think it's worth saying. It picks up on some of the things I said earlier.

I mean, I, I would, I went to university at 28 as, [01:47:00] you know, to do philosophy and artificial intelligence. If I'd have gone to university at 18, I would have become a Samuel Beckett scholar. And I kind of think that that, and I didn't because I had other things to do, uh, uh, you know, another life before I went to university.

And, um, uh, But I think that stayed with me. That love of it, particularly Beckett, and Joyce and other things like that. So I think what's really happening with my current work, although I talked about it as an, as this kind of, you know, interesting intellectual development, is the thing I've just, I've found a way to integrate all those initial interests in literature into being a philosopher of cognitive science.

And I think that's, that's, uh, in, you know, As I freely admit, you know, coming into my final running before I retire, I think, you know, I think that's, I'm glad to have found a way to, to like, finally get to write about Beckett and Joyce and, and Kerouac and others. Um, and yet still make people who care about cognitive science listen.

Mirko Prokop: I mean, it sounds very much like you're in the process of. It's becoming very authentic. I mean, you're [01:48:00] always

, going back to your roots of your, but now exciting. , can't wait to, to read the book when it comes out and, and, uh, yeah, thank you so much , for the very rich conversation. Oh, thank you. It's really interesting. And yeah, I hope people listening found it interesting.​But on the back of watching that TV program, I decided to do philosophy. I decided to do philosophy. That interacted with artificial intelligence.